Protocol 7 (37 page)

“Nil, sir,” replied the specialist. He was sitting across the room, behind some of the officers. “Thanks to your efforts, the continent is clear of significant sensor arrays. UNED is constantly monitoring the total quarantine, but their ears are nothing compared to ours.”

“Excellent,” Blackburn replied. Then he gave a gentle smile—almost merry. “So let’s not waste the opportunity. Let’s try explosives on the defectors.”

A sense of panic filled the room as many of the officers cleared their throats. It almost made Blackburn laugh—all the shifting and throat—clearing, all the sudden tiny beads of sweat. The foolish defense officer raised his hand again. Fool, Blackburn told himself. You’re next.

“Sir, if I may, we have never used explosives in the network before. We have no idea what its impact will be. At this point, it’s all theoretical.”

Blackburn stood up suddenly and turned his back on his men. He couldn’t stand looking at them anymore. Instead he stared at the silver-blue hologram of the entire Antarctica complex that filled the black well near the end of the room. It was a beautiful thing. Beautiful and strange.

“So you’re telling me,” he said without turning around, “that after ten full years, millions of man-hours, and billions of dollars spent on investigation and development…we still can’t put this stuff to use?”

“Not yet, sir,” one of the I&D advisors said. “It’s too…unpredictable. Just last week, some of our vehicles started to levitate, and we still cannot understand how this is possible.”

Blackburn closed his eyes and tried to will the man away. It didn’t quite work.

“Our estimate still holds, sir. Eighteen months until we can safely build a prototype.”

“Safely,” Blackburn said acidly. “Maybe that’s the problem—too goddamn many people concerned with their safety rather than changing history.”

He gave it up. Maybe it wasn’t the time, but at least he’d made his point: keep moving or get run over. Now, back to the crisis at hand…

“All right then,” he said as he turned around. “Let’s just blast the fuckers out of their hidey-holes with the biggest conventional weapons we’ve got. How does that sound?”

The grinning and back-slapping was unseemly, but they were all so relieved Blackburn allowed it. No one wanted to tell him about the other part of the problem, about the oxygen depletion effect that literally sucked the air out of a man’s lungs if he even came near the new fusion tech.

What they don’t know, Blackburn told himself, is that I’m already aware of it. Have been from the beginning.

What they fail to understand, he thought as he looked at his craven “team” of advisors and mercenaries, is that I just don’t care.

Max pushed on.

The narrow passageway opened up a little more than a hundred yards from the opening. It was by no means wide enough or straight, but at least they weren’t surrounded by walls on all sides.

Max had never thought of twenty miles an hour as a dangerous speed. But now, guiding the Spector on its massive, swiveling treads, dodging pieces of ice as big as houses, veering past deep arroyos and avoiding patches of blackness that indicated yet another feeder tunnel, running off in yet another direction…now, twenty miles an hour seemed insanely fast.

The massive robotic Spiders hadn’t given up. Their arms, it turned out, were not just endlessly flexible; they were as strong as wrecking cranes. The others had watched through the transparent aft section and reported as the robots pulled away key patches of ice and outcroppings, pounding at the accumulated ice of the narrow entrance until, all too soon, it gave away, and they gave chase.

It was slow going for them, but they were relentless. Max could see that; he watched their progress on the holo-display of the rear scan as they moved forward, paused, pounded or pried another obstacle out of the way, then moved forward again. He could see that they were still a thousand yards behind them, and not gaining—but not falling back, either.

Focus, damn you, he told himself. There was no room for error here. He could take a wrong path, make a bad choice, and they would crash, fall, turn over, be crushed; he’d run out of grim alternatives. Only one thing left to do, he told himself. Succeed.

Simon sat in the co-pilot’s seat next to him, silent and determined. Max had known the man his whole life, and when Simon had said he would leave them behind and go on foot to find his father, Max had believed him completely. It was the kind of man he was—just like Max himself. Now Simon was focused entirely on the task at hand—getting the hell away from the CS23 and finding a place to hide, until they could figure out what to do next.

The terrain began to slope downward—not the steep fifty-degree grade of the first tunnel, but a relentless fifteen-degree angle of descent that took them deeper and deeper. And the deeper they went, the greater the tension they felt. It was as if they could feel the weight of the ice and stone growing above them, pressing down, worse with every inch they moved forward. Everyone’s eyes were locked on the transparent section behind them, showing every detail of the robots as they followed close on: their flexing arms, the bulbous, roiling central body, the grasping claws and the blinding spears of light that passed back and forth over the Spector, piercing it again and again like swords.

Without warning Max shouted, “Get down! We’ve got company!”

As if on cue, the entire crew whirled around to look at the front-facing screen, their window on the world that lay ahead.

The screen was a flat black shadow, given texture only by the reflected lights from the robots, the Spector’s own shadows, and a thousand tiny points of green light. Like fireflies out of the swamp, like luminous birds no bigger than a sparrow, they were swarming just outside the vehicle—straight in front, off to the left, off to the right.

They paused. They seemed to focus, to aim.

Then they streaked through the blackness and smashed against the Spector like gunshots.

Phit! Phit! Phit-phit-phit! Hundreds of lights were striking the Spector, slamming against the shielded surface, sounding like a barrage of stones. Everyone ducked as Max stopped the Spector instantly and spun his chair away from the line of fire.

The front-facing camera that had served them so well sizzled and went black. Tiny bumps, reverse dimples, appeared in sudden lines stitching across the cabin as the bullets dented the smartskin but did not penetrate.

Not yet, anyway, Max thought.

Max knew the sound of gunfire all too well. He rotated his seat to face the crew, cowering all across the bridge, and started to move the Spector in reverse, backing away from the gunfire, moving toward the approaching Spiders. For a moment the transparent aft walls stayed transparent, and he saw the gleaming arms of the CS-23 sway and grip one more time, and then the transparency flickered away, and he was staring at a blank interior wall.

Phit! PHIT phit PH-ph-PHIT!

Samantha clapped her hands over her ears and screamed. Max could see that Andrew and Ryan were only a step behind her.

It felt like an ambush—foot soldiers to the front, heavy artillery at the rear. But why waste men? Max wondered. They could just set off a couple of grenades and block us in without exposure.

Phit PHIT PHITPHITPHITPHIT—

The deepscan holos sizzled and disappeared under the continuing assault. The bridge was little more than a hollow shell now—and one that was starting to crack under the relentless hail of bullets.

“What’s going on?” screamed Samantha as Simon threw himself from his seat and jumped half the length of the cabin to throw his arms around her. He had never felt so helpless: caught between the menacing machines in one direction, a barrage of gunfire in another, a thousand feet below the killing ice.

Death—the real, imminent, tangible specter of Death—flashed before his eyes as he tried to comfort her. Hayden, doubled over in the tiny space below the tech console, bellowed through the noise of the thunderous bullets as the last of the Spector’s emergency lights blinked out. “They hit the main electric panel!”

But the Spector kept moving. Just as Max had directed, it staggered in reverse, away from the gunfire, back toward the robots, foot after stubborn foot—

—until it smashed into something huge, immovable, and utterly invisible, just beyond the buckling metal hull.

The team was thrown across the darkened cabin as the vehicle shuddered to an instant halt. The pounding bullets didn’t even pause; if anything, the rattling tattoo of the attack grew even louder, more angry, as the soldiers approached and redoubled their fire.

The next few seconds felt like an eternity as Max scrambled to find his pistol. Simon asked Samantha in a quiet whisper, “You all right?”

“I’m not dead yet,” she whispered fiercely. “At least I don’t think I am.”

“Down, guys!” Max shouted from the floor. “Unbuckle, get down!” He frog-marched to Andrew and helped him with the complex arrangement of belts. The left side of the bridge exploded in a shower of sparks. A new vibration, deep and almost subsonic, rumbled through the vessel. It seemed as though it was coming from the outside and getting stronger with every second. It was accompanied by a low hissing noise that sounded like an approaching eighteen-wheeler.

Max grabbed Simon’s shoulder and said, “It’s zero time.” He saw Simon struggle with the words for a second; then a look of realization dawned on him. It was a bit of slang from their childhood, back when they only played at being spies and adventurers. It meant “now or never,” “do or die.” But it meant something more, too. It was a phrase only they used, and only with each other. It was part of a secret language that had made them more than friends from an early age.

It meant, “Brothers forever.” It meant, “I will always have your back.”

He grinned in spite of everything, and was surprised to feel burning tears in his eyes. “Zero time,” he said.

Phit-PHIT! Ph-ph-ph-ph-PHIT!

The subterranean vibration grew deeper, stronger. They could feel something approaching, like an army of horses stampeding straight for them.

PHITPHITPHITPHITPHIT

“We’re trapped!” screamed Hayden. “We can’t open the airlock without power!” And without power, they all knew, the heaters had stopped working, too. With every passing second, the temperature of the vessel was dropping, and with the seals still locked in place, the air was growing thin as well.

The end? Simon asked himself. Cowering under a metal console, suffocating as he started to freeze? Not yet, he prayed, thinking of the people who had trusted him, thinking of his father. Not yet…

And the gunfire stopped.

In an instant; all at once. It didn’t trail off, or sputter to a halt, or simply pause and begin again. It stopped.

The five-second silence that followed was absolutely deafening.

Then, suddenly, inexplicably, a bank of harsh lights in the Spector’s ceiling blinked on, died, then blinked again and stayed on. The first thing Simon’s eyes fell on was an astonished Hayden, gaping at the ceiling from his hiding place.

“Son of a bitch,” the inventor said into the cavernous silence. “Emergency back-ups. Completely forgot about those.”

Even the smartskin flickered back to life, but only in bits and pieces. Simon found himself peering through transparent foot-square patches randomly scattered across at the front and side of the ships, into a craggy darkness illuminated by the skittering beams of the approaching robotic Spiders and the blue-green luminosity of the foot soldiers’ weapons, still glowing even as they approached the Spector.

The rumbling grew louder. The vibration from below them shook the entire crippled vessel like a toy.

Then a giant cycle-like vehicle with a large single wheel roared down the passageway, behind the foot soldiers. They ignored it as they moved forward, weapons still raised, but the bullets had stopped flying.

The front lights of the large cycle were blinding; it made it hard to estimate distance or size. Andrew turned away momentarily from the brilliant light and saw Nastasia bent over almost doubled, sifting through her nutrition case again.

She looked up at Simon, and he saw she was holding her inhaler in one hand and what seemed to be a pre-packed powder in the other. “I just…because of my condition I can’t live without this.” As he watched she pushed the inhaler into the kit, forced the lid shut and snapped it tight, then put it aside.

They both turned and stood as the huge cycles accelerated toward them, skidding to a halt in unison almost a hundred yards away.

Several figures, dressed in heavy gear to protect themselves from the bitter cold, started running toward the Spector. They were holding rifles, coming at the crippled vehicle like a SWAT team with laser-guided instrumentation. It was hard for Max to see them; the light source from the rifles themselves was shooting straight toward the Spector.

Simon and Max had already moved to the door, prepared to protect the others if they had to. Max gestured with his pistol, waving toward the ready room and shouting at the rest of the crew. “Move toward the back.”

Simon stood with his back pressed firmly against one side of the door, opposite Max. He looked across the bridge to Andrew, who was sitting in the crooked, half-broken pilot’s seat.

“Shut her down,” he whispered.

Max watched the approaching figures with every ounce of his concentration, calculating, gambling. His gut told him these men were somehow not connected to the menacing robots. He knew all too well how trained mercenaries would move, and these men with the rifles clearly did not move that way at all. They weren’t professional soldiers; he would bet his life on that.

One man, face fully covered by a cloth and plastic mask, was ten steps ahead of the others. He was holding an unusual weapon, a rifle unlike any Max had ever seen, its stock pressed tightly against his chin. He was using the light on the weapon as a flashlight, trying to study the unusual surface of the Spector.

More men started approaching the vehicle, and Simon tried to count them. It looked as though there were eight or ten—it was hard to tell in the blinding, dancing lights.