Armen Gharabegian - Protocol 7

Screw Central, he told himself. Screw everybody. Fissure 9 is my responsibility. It has been for nine fucking years, and I will be goddamned if anyone, anyone enters this place without my permission!

The gyroscopes that were designed to keep the transport’s cockpit steady despite its speed and attitudinal changes were whining with stress. In a normal vehicle, the passengers would have been plastered against the walls and quite likely injured already. In the DITV, pushed to the limit as it was, Roland and his men were safe enough, but they found it impossible to stand without help as they traveled at a truly insane speed. Still, Roland made it to his feet using the back of his seat and the edge of the console to stagger across the chamber to the surveillance officer’s side.

There were six different screens and three-dimensional displays arrayed across the forward half of the transport. Five of them showed the churning gray static of interference or a rock-solid, entirely believable representation of the Shipping Dome, their destination.

The Dome looked completely quiet, silent, undisturbed.

The last console, a three-dimensional hologram as large as a steamer trunk, showed something entirely different: the glowing, shimmering, oil-on-water rainbow reconstruction of an amphibious vehicle that was half-beetle, half-tank.

“What the hell is that?” he asked, both shocked and angry about what he was looking at.

“I have no idea,” the officer said. “It’s entirely invisible to every one of our imaging scans, except this new one, this gravimetric mass detector. We just installed it last month and even that is only getting partial data. This…this thing is almost entirely undetectable. I’m not even sure you could see it unless you were standing right in front of it.”

“It has to be one of ours,” Roland muttered, still having trouble believing his eyes. “No one else on the planet could do this.”

“Of course, sir,” the officer said, then swallowed nervously. “But…”

“I know,” Roland said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it, either.”

The vehicle’s tapering bow was almost insectile. It swelled back in long, sinister curves, its iridescent skin almost convulsing with colors that seemed to flicker in and out of the visible spectrum. It had no windows, no visible means of propulsion, and no hatches-none that he could see, at any rate. And the mechanical arms at its side, the treads below it, made it more than just menacing: it made it an undeniable, and probably unstoppable, weapon of war.

“I don’t care what you have to do,” the commander said to his crew. “I don’t care how hard you have to push this piece of shit or what chances you have to take. Just get me up there NOW!”

They were less than six minutes from the basin. One of the soldiers made the mistake of quoting the ETA to his commander, and Roland turned on him quick as a snake.

“NO!” he bellowed. “Not fast enough!”

“Sir,” the navigator said hating the sound of his own voice, “the Spiders are trailing behind us by eight minutes but making headway.”

“Of course they are,” he said. “They’re bigger, more sophisticated, and more mobile than we are.”

He stepped forward, hoping against hope that he was really seeing what he thought he was. “My guess? Whatever that thing is, we’re going to need some heavy armament to stop it.”

The members of the team braced themselves as the Spector VI lifted up toward a shallow edge of the submerged ice. Max had already scanned the shoreline for a thousand feet in either direction, and this was by far the most gradual and gentle slope in the visible terrain.

The treads of the amphibious vehicle were completely extended and made a slight grinding sound just beneath their feet. It was a little hard for Simon to fully visualize, but it was true nonetheless: what had been a submarine just minutes ago was now fully capable of carrying them into the open-air tunnels that lay in front of them.

Hayden, meanwhile, was studying the increasingly detailed schematic of the tunnels that his microburst deepscans were creating and updating every ten seconds. He had already succeeded in mapping the maze for miles into the deep ice, but he knew the vast network of tunnels he could see-or rather, that the Spector could see-went on for many miles more. “Maybe across the entire damn continent,” he muttered, more to himself than his companions.

“Contact now,” Max said with an almost gentle tone, and the Spector jumped and leaped as the treads grabbed at the icy terrain. This time everyone was as prepared as they could be; they were all seated, strapped in, poised. They gripped their armrests, braced their legs as the vessel grabbed at the ancient ice beneath its treads and surged forward with an awesome, rumbling skirrrl of rubber against ice.

The Spector pushed upward and forward with enormous force. Simon peered at the forward-facing holo-screen, watching the white-on-gray-on-white shoreline grow closer and more differentiated. Max, meanwhile, realized for the first time that if the Spector had been as originally described-just a souped-up submarine-they wouldn’t have had a chance of survival now. He thought about how incredible the vessel actually was as it pushed its way out of the water with no effort at all; his heart started pounding at the thought of finally being here-here, on solid ground in Antarctica, though he had never imagined he would be a thousand feet below its frozen surface.

“Where next?” Andrew said, his voice betraying the level of tension they were all feeling.

“I vote for this tunnel here,” Hayden said, pointing to a specific opening in his holographic display. “It’s wide and it’s deep, and if this imaging system is even half right, it can get us far away from here faster than anything else.”

“How so?” Simon said, frowning at the display.

“Because it’s a nearly seventy percent down slope. We can downhill ski out of the danger zone if we do it right, and leave our pursuers in the dust.”

“Or frost, as it were,” Andrew said, smiling at his own comment.

Simon had to admit, he liked the elegance of the solution: using the ice to help with the getaway. But his eye captured the pulsing red blob as it approached. “Do you think we are being detected by them? By whatever we’re looking at?” he asked. “I thought we were functionally invisible.”

“We are!” Hayden insisted. “It’s just better safe than sorry.” It sounded weak, even to him. He had built stealth systems and shields to fuddle every scanning technology and detection system known to man, but technology was always changing, always evolving-that was its very nature. There was always some smart kid with another invention and if one of them had come up with something entirely new, something different…

“Safe?” Samantha echoed bleakly. “I don’t think we’ll ever be safe again. Not in this place.”

Amen, Hayden answered silently.

Simon stuck his finger into the hologram right at the point where the down sloping tunnel opened into the dome. “Do we know how far it goes?” According to the note Leon gave, it’s better to go farther down, he thought to himself.

“I can’t tell,” Hayden confessed. “But deep, and the farther the better as far as I’m concerned.”

“What about the angle of descent? Can the Spector handle it?” Max asked, glancing with mounting concern at the red blob. It was approaching with ever-increasing speed.

“In theory it can, but it’s never been tested,” Andrew said. Then he looked thoughtful. “Of course, we’ve never tested much of anything on the Spector, at least until now.”

Hayden looked impatient. “It will be fine. The dedicated AIs will automatically adjust the handle and grab-strength of the treads while it configures the correct tolerance necessary to maximize friction.”