Protocol 7 (35 page)

The treads began moving together.

The Spector started to vibrate, to shudder like a derailing train. The rattling was so violent

Simon was sure the vessel was going to come apart at the seams.

“Heat it up, Max!” Simon demanded. “Retract the right blade, let the rear slalom to the right!”

Immediately, Max adjusted the controls. The Spector was slowing but still not enough, still going far too fast, and now it was turning as it slid, not quite broadside to the downhill slope but close enough to scare the living daylight out of him. If they hit a pothole or a crack at this angle, and it caught the edge of the tread, they would roll over and over, tumbling downhill like a rolling pin totally out of control.

He ticked up the heating elements as they slid. He heard the thundering grumble through the screech of the ice as the treads started digging deeper, leaving an eight-inch groove behind them as they careened downhill.

The entrance to the alcove was a narrow, gray rectangle in a raddled field of white now…sliding into view from the left, to the center, to—

Simon was staring at the screen, trying to calculate the speed. Think like you’re skiing, he thought. Timing is everything. “Ready?” he said.

“And waiting,” Max said tightly, his hands still deep in the controls.

“When I tell you, just tap the accelerator—jump us forward, fast and hard, but not too much.”

“Got it.” Max said tightly. Come on, then. They were sliding, sliding, goddamn it.

“Ready?”

“YES!”

“NOW!”

Max pounded on the thrusters, bashed them forward with a leap of thrust that shot them straight toward the opposite wall at a vicious angle-straight toward the endless white vertical barrier that grew closer and closer and—

—the gray gap of the alcove slipped into view, right in front of them, just a few feet before they hit the vertical ice. In that instant they shot through it, and Max stood on the brakes, purposely swaying them to the right and up, riding halfway up the curved wall of the alcove itself. He could feel the treads, still pointing into a “V,” dig deep into new glass-like ice, dragging them down, lowering their speed, more and more, until the Spector slid sideways one last time, back to the level floor of the alcove as the forward momentum bled away. It wallowed for a beat, rolling back and forth on its treads like a fat man on a swing, and then finally stopped. “Not dead yet,” Andrew said as he watched Samantha and Nastasia, white as ghosts, still gripping the armrests on their chairs.

“Thank god,” Samantha said.

Nope, Max thought from the front of the vessel, not yet. He eased back in his chair, lifted his arms from the console and stretched. “Take a rest, everyone. We’ll get out and explore in a bit.” He did his best not to sound completely relieved and breathless.

Not dead yet, he repeated. And I am absolutely amazed at that.

Roland ordered the DITV to halt at the end of Tunnel 3, just a few hundred feet before it opened into the dome. His hand gripped the sides of his seat until the plastic cracked like dry paper; he was that angry, that frustrated.

The goddamn Spiders had beaten him there. The DITV crew had received the CS-23s locational beacon signals just thirty seconds before, and the coordinates were unmistakable—they were waiting at the shore of the dome’s basin, deciding what to do next.

“I can’t believe they’re already here,” he spat out. “What the hell happened?”

“They move quickly,” the tactical officer said very quietly. “Even more quickly than we thought they could, I suppose.”

“Never mind,” he said. “Let’s go. I want to see this.”

The DITV tumbled forward and entered the dimly lit dome. Flare fire and the remnants of the bullets penetrating the ice shelf gave it a ghostly level of illumination, not like most of the tunnels and chambers at this depth and below. As they entered, Roland strode to the surveillance officer’s console and hovered over him. “Show me how far they’ve gone,” he said. “They’ll reach the extraction tunnel if they continue like this down Tunnel 3. We can’t have them discover what’s down there.”

The display showed the Unknown Intruder icon slipping rapidly down a feeder shaft, far ahead of the larger, slower-moving blue diamonds of the first CS-23s.

“Get me the fuck down there,” he demanded.

The soldier shook in fear as he responded, “Sir, we can’t enter Tunnel 3. The Vehicle will automatically abort the command because of the angle of descent—it’s past our ratings. And it’s caved in between Shelf 2 and 3. We can’t handle that grade of terra—”

“DAMN it!” he said and pounded the back of the chair. It made the tactical officer duck away, fully expecting to take a blow to the back of his head.

Roland didn’t want to hear any of it. “Stop here,” he said shortly. “Wait.”

He heard the CS-23s coming up from deep inside Dragger Pass. The ground itself shook with their approach. He knew that the Spiders would take care of whoever was down there, and that knowledge frustrated him terribly. “Get me a closed visual,” he snapped. “They’re only a thousand feet away now, just over the edge.”

His central view screen showed the Spiders in excruciating detail as they climbed the last three hundred yards. Their bulbous central bodies churned with dimly visible personnel inside; the long multi-jointed legs flexed and stretched for the best possible purchase, the greatest possible speed. They moved with an eerie combination of human intelligence and machine efficiency. Roland knew they could easily navigate the tunnel the intruders had just entered, just as easily as they could clamber up a mile of nearly vertical cliff face.

The massive size of the CS-23’s legs extending out of their bodies made them even more than menacing, and the sheer power and weight of the Spiders caused the ground to vibrate as they pulled themselves higher and higher.

They reached the edge of the precipice of Dragger Pass, a night-black cliff that fell straight down for more than five thousand feet. Roland watched with an outraged fascination as the first of them pushed upward over the edge, its huge arm digging into the ice twenty feet away from the commander’s vehicle, then pulled its metal body upward out of the fissure, limbs hissing and clanking.

The gigantic machine crawled over the commander’s vehicle, coiling in on itself to a smaller size just for a moment, then pushing forward into Tunnel 3 behind the intruders.

The two CS-23s that followed also reached over the commander’s vehicle, disappearing into the dark tunnel in a matter of seconds. The communications console inside the commander’s vehicle beeped in acknowledgment of the Spiders’ arrival, but he barely heard it. He was almost hypnotized by their passage; it took an effort of will to force himself to turn to his communications officer and ask a question.

“What’s your ETA for rendezvous with the intruders?” he asked. “For the Spiders, I mean?”

“Sir, the computer’s telling us eighteen minutes and counting, but we estimate the intruder will have to stop at Shelf 2, and we will immobilize it if it stays put. We are reading zero armament present on the vessel.”

Zero armament, he repeated to himself. So it’s not a military vehicle. It’s a spy ship. A fucking ghost.

And now it’s haunting my labyrinth.

Trapped in the ice. Trapped in the dark. Utterly, completely lost. But glad they were not dead.

Still alive, each of them thought—almost in unison, barely aware of it, feeling the identical bloom of relief and dread. Still alive…but now what?

Simon realized they needed to regroup and make decisions quickly. “You think we’re still being followed?” he asked Max, who scowled at the thought, and then nodded.

“What the fuck have we gotten ourselves into?” Hayden said, his voice trembling on the edge of hysteria. “This wasn’t supposed to be like this. Underground? In tunnels, for Christ’s sake? And being chased by I don’t know what!”

“Relax,” said Max, strong but reassuring.

“But—”

“Relax,” Max said again—and this time it was more an order than a bit of advice.

Hayden started to argue again. He opened his mouth; brought up an accusing finger, and suddenly Max was out of his seat and hovering over the inventor, almost nose to nose with him. The rest of the crew watched them in fascination and horror.

“Hayden!” he hissed. “We agreed to do this, all of us, together, no matter what. You

remember that?”

“But—”

“No fucking ‘buts.’ None of us knew what we were getting into at the time—how could we? But this is what it is. Now. Here. And if you can’t handle it properly, okay. Then get your gear and get the fuck out of the Spector.”

Hayden gaped at him in disbelief.

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“No, Hayden. I’m not. Get on board or get out.”

Hayden lifted his chin, still defiant, but his tone had changed. The hysteria was gone; the anger tightly controlled. He looked at the others now, talking to all of them. They listened in rigid silence. “We need to decide what to do quickly,” he told them. “That’s all I’m saying. We’re descending farther and farther into this hell, and if we don’t have a plan for escape, we will all freeze to death, stuck thousands of feet below the ice.”

Simon was in deep thought, listening with one ear as he contemplated their next move. These are ordinary people, he realized. Extraordinary brains maybe, but ordinary people. None were equipped for the danger that was confronting them. He was asking far too much, and he knew it, and there was nothing he could do about it now.

He stood up suddenly, nodding at his father’s oldest friend.

“Hayden, you’re absolutely right. None of us want to perish in this hell.” He looked at Max, who watched him closely, eyes narrowed. “So let’s assess what our options are and decide what we should do together, all right?”

“Maybe we need to contact the authorities, guys,” Samantha said, quiet but steady. “This is out of our scope. This is out of anybody’s scope.”

“Who is it that you want to contact?” Max said, frustrated at the sheer naiveté of the comment. “Do you realize that we are violating international law by even being here?”

“You want to try and go back, then go,” Simon said with a weary finality. “Me, I’m ready to pack my gear and go searching for Oliver on foot if I have to. These very tunnels are evidence that something crazy is happening down here, and we’re part of it now, all of us, whether we like it or not.”

“And the longer we sit here,” Andrew said, his eyes still on the deepscan console, “the closer our pursuers get.”

“Still on our tail?” Max said, already knowing the answer.

“Tight as a tick on a dog’s ass, I’m afraid. Someone—three someones actually, though I have no idea what they are or what they look like—is heading our way this very moment. I’m gathering we don’t want to confront them quite yet.”

“Exactly,” Max said, but he couldn’t suppress the glint in his eye. “Not yet.”

While the others had been talking, Ryan had been scanning the walls of the alcove, looking for options. “I do believe I’ve found a possibility,” he said, and they all turned to see. “Max,” he said, “can you make just this section of the hull transparent? Right here?” He pointed to a large blank patch to his right.

“Sure,” Max said. He manipulated the console, and a portion of the wall as big as a bathroom mirror faded away, revealing the rocky floor and the cracked and not-so-distant wall of the alcove.

“This looks just large enough for us to go into,” Ryan said, walking to the transparent image and double-tapping on one particular portion of a crack in the ice wall—little more than a gap in the ice. But as the image zoomed forward at his command, they could all see it: a vertical crevice just a bit wider than the Spector itself that seemed to go far back into the wall, revealing an open, lighted area beyond.

“Good work, Ryan,” Simon said and clapped him on the shoulder.

Then Simon turned to Max. “You think we can fit in there?”

“Well, there’s only one way to find out,” replied Max, as he slid his hands over the holographic controls. The Spector turned on its slowly churning treads and trundled toward the opening. As they approached, Max noticed the sharpening image on the forward deepscan display: the crevice was indeed a passageway through the ice wall—a very long and twisted path that descended gradually to another dome, hundreds of feet below.

As they accelerated toward the new opening, Hayden made a disgusted sound in this throat. “So that’s the plan? Just keep running until…when? We run out of power, food, or luck? Or just whichever comes first?”

Simon was the one who rose to the bait this time. “Hayden,” he said, seething. “If you would like to wait here for whoever is on our tail, then be my guest. But we are moving on. You want to complain, fine, but right now is not the time. We’re going to be discovered any second.”

Just as the nose of the Spector entered the small passage, Andrew stiffened at his display and said, “I think we already are.”

Suddenly, a huge mechanical tentacle, a flexing arm, curled around the corner of the alcove wall at the edge of Tunnel 3 and flailed, searching for a hold. It banged into the ice, anchored itself, and pulled. An eight-legged creature made of unusual materials, three stories tall, dragged itself into view.

“Mother of god,” Samantha whispered. “What in the world?”

Max accelerated before Samantha spoke another word. The Spector cut through the ice, treads spinning, and penetrated the narrow passageway, turning slightly to the left to keep to the widest portion.

Don’t get much smaller, Simon prayed. Ten feet narrower, fifteen feet at the most, and we’ll be stuck like a plug in a pipe.

There was a deep mechanical thoom at their back. Simon didn’t have to look to know what that sound meant—the mechanical Spider, like an angry dragon from hell, was approaching. He felt a rush of adrenaline as they pushed forward.

“What are your thoughts now?” Simon asked Hayden, dripping sarcasm. The effect was dampened a bit by the sudden high, screaming contact of the Spector’s smartskin with an upthrust outcropping of ice. It sounded far too much like a human scream.