Armen Gharabegian - Protocol 7

Andrew’s head popped out of the maintenance hatch so suddenly it made Samantha jump back in surprise. “Use the standby mode! That should work!” He lifted his arms, and Ryan and Samantha helped pull him free of the tunnel and close the hatch, while Hayden struggled to reconnect the passive sensor functions to the displays.

It happened all at once. The display in front of Max flickered and burst into brilliant full-color life, showing the view in front of the ship as clearly as a well-cleaned picture window. Three different hologram displays-one complete sphere of the space around the ship out to three hundred feet, one deep scan aft, and one deep scan forward-blossomed to life in an almost blinding rainbow of color, filling the entire forward section of the bridge.

And all of them showed exactly the same thing: they were drifting nose-first into a solid wall of ice.

“Brace yourselves!” Max bellowed and lunged at the command console. Before the team had a chance to react, he reversed the thrusters and tilted the submersible violently upward, throwing everyone off balance.

“Collision alert!” the voice of the Spector called. “Collision alert!”

“Sir, we just lost a drone,” the Surveillance Officer said, sitting in front of a holo-display.

Roland spun on him. “What the hell are you talking about?” he shouted. Before the officer had a chance to respond, the commander continued. “How could you lose a drone? You’re sitting right there navigating it.”

“I think I hit something, sir.”

“You hit something?” Roland bent over his shoulder and peered at the display. “Get the rest of the drones on its tail. What were your coordinates?”

He reeled them off without taking his eyes from the screen. “At 1,032 feet, sir,” he said.

Roland turned to the digital holograph of Fissure 9, thinking it still displayed the beacon of the intruder. But the tiny blinking light had disappeared.

“God damn it,” he hissed. The vessel it represented could be almost anywhere in the labyrinth by now, but given its last known location, its direction and speed, he knew exactly where it was going. “Whatever the hell this is, it’s made its way to the loading station,” he said. Then he turned to his team. “We’ve got to get there as soon as possible.”

He tapped his shoulder again, trying to connect to Central Command. After relaying his password he asked, “What’s the status on Dragger Pass?”

Mathias came on immediately this time. He didn’t sound happy. “We’ve dispatched four units, fully armed. They’re on their way to you now. ETA is twenty-eight minutes.”

Too damn long, Roland said only to himself, then tapped his shoulder and disconnected. Once again, he turned to his team. “We don’t have a goddamn half an hour,” he said. “Load up the DITVs. We’re going to take care of this ourselves.”

The officer in charge of special operations stood up suddenly. “Sir,” he said, crisp and cool, “if I may, it will take us more than twenty-five minutes to reach the loading station ourselves with the DITV. Only the third tunnel up to the Dragger Pass is available. Tunnel Two has caved in.”

Roland was furious. “Damn it!” he said again, and smashed his fist against the console. Then he spun away and stalked from the room, throwing his last command over his shoulder with venomous contempt. “I’m getting the goddamn flares!” he snapped.

* * *

Three thousand feet below them, four CS-23s, the dreaded Crevasse Spiders dispatched from Central Command, crawled through a pitch-black opening to Dragger Pass. They were marvelous machines: 160-foot wide, eight-legged robotic transport and weapons platforms, designed to travel everywhere and anywhere through the deep ice. Each robotic craft housed a crew of eight special operations soldiers in the main cabin; that spherical cabin rotated 360 degrees, keeping the crew level while the main body of the Spider violently twisted and turned on its sixty-foot expandable legs, rotating and extending for extreme flexibility and speed. This CS-23 could climb any icy terrain by compressing against the walls or stretching across wide crevices; it could travel vertically with ease or streak like lightning along a flat horizontal surface at more than thirty miles an hour. The tips of the retractable legs even had specialized heated anchor joints that could penetrate the ice and lock the leg into place, allowing the robot to hang from no more than three of its eight legs if necessary.

Only the cockpits were illuminated as the Spiders pressed against the walls of ice and crawled upward at tremendous speed. Below them, the dark fissure of Dragger Pass dropped another several thousand feet straight down to the ice-locked bedrock below. The Spiders looked like apparitions coming up from the depths of Hell itself; even their mechanical sound was no more than a whisper; a subtle mechanical hissing made by the constant rotation of their arms.

They were closing in. Fast.

* * *

Roland wasted no time. He made his way to the armament room and pulled down a crate of the special rifles that Vector5 had nicknamed “flares.” The long-barreled weapons, stored in racks of twenty with thirty-cartridge magazines, were designed for illumination more than offense; they actually shot luminescent bullets that, once in the ice, could be turned on remotely to make the translucent walls glow with a penetrating, bluish light. Although these were not used as standard rifles, they had powerful destructive potential as well; the shells could easily pierce the armor of any sub-ice vehicle.

Roland wanted a full rack of flares in his DITV, along with two extra crates of ammunition. He was certain of his goal: he needed to stop whatever had entered Fissure 9 before whoever was inside got a look at the loading cranes above the dome. He knew that the fate of the planet rested on the secrecy of the operation. He knew there could be no half measures.

He didn’t like it, but Roland was prepared to take lives if he had to. There was no other solution.

Six Vector5 soldiers under Roland’s command followed him silently onto the Deep Ice Transport Vehicle. The transport looked like something out of a science-fiction movie: three gigantic tires, bigger than a jumbo jet’s-two in front, one in back. The two front tires extended outward through a complex structure protruding from the central part of the body like a cat ready to lunge forward. Below the main cabin that hovered eight feet above the ice was a ramp that lowered to make an entrance into the vehicle. But what made the DITV unique was its fragmented surface, as if it had been covered with the shards of a shattered mirror. It was stealth technology-a variation on the same stealth-tech that every Vector5 vehicle employed.

Although the depth of their operation was too great for satellites to detect, Vector5’s engineers were taking no chances: the surfaces of all its vehicles were broken up into polygons, making radar detection almost impossible, and they were covered with non-reflective, sound-absorptive coatings to make them even harder to scan. What’s more, they were silent, powered by tremendously efficient batteries that allowed them to generate great power and speed. A sophisticated AI unit ran the entire vehicle without any help. It was almost entirely self-guided, requiring only audio commands but rarely needed physical manipulation of certain components.

As the Vector5 team entered the vehicle, the commander took the central seat. It offered a 360-degree view of his surroundings through digital displays. The DIT Vehicle had no windows; they were unnecessary. The crew had better visibility with the advanced camera systems on board.

Roland shifted restlessly as the crew ran through the standard systems check. There was no time to waste; he knew that. It would take them more than twenty-five minutes to ascend the thirty-degree incline, up through Tunnel 3 to the loading station at Fissure 9-where the mysterious visitor would be waiting, he was sure.