Armen Gharabegian - Protocol 7

Samantha and Nastasia watched the forward-facing screen as the light grew brighter. The water broke over the cameras, and suddenly they were out of the basin, looking at the icy shore as the Spector hauled itself out of the water like some huge aquatic beetle climbing onto dry land. The gigantic dome above them, they realized, was large enough to contain a ten-story building and wide enough to house several submarines with space to spare for maneuvers.

“Want to see something amazing?” Hayden said. “Now that the full array of sensors is working, we can do this…” He stroked a long rectangle to the right of his console and the walls faded away. The Spector’s exterior sensors were now in full operation, and the interior panels all around them were charged with the digital data streaming into the smartskin. As amazing as it was, it looked as if the ceiling and the walls of Spector VI had disappeared, and the entire team was standing on a flat metal plate in the middle of the wide-open ice cavern. The image was only broken up in a few areas where the panel connected.

“Oh. My. God,” Samantha whispered. “This is bizarre.”

“Not exactly,” Hayden said. “It just looks that way.” He stood up and looked around at the icy ground, stretching off in all directions. “And look, just double-tap the wall anywhere you like, and a foot-wide segment will zoom forward, up to thirty-to-one.”

Nastasia was standing next to him, head thrown back, looking straight up. “Then zoom in on that, please,” she said, and pointed up. There was a complicated structure of arms and beams hanging from the center point of the dome, but it was impossible to see it clearly from so far away.

Hayden reached over his head and double-tapped the ceiling. A good-sized section suddenly zoomed forward with a nauseating suddenness; now they were staring at the mysterious technology from a viewpoint that looked no more than ten or fifteen feet away, with a crisp clarity that adjusted for atmospheric distortion.

“What the hell is that?” Andrew asked.

“I admit,” Hayden said, “I can’t fathom it.”

“There is a whole new world down here,” Andrew said, sounding awestruck and delighted at the same time. “A whole world, deep within the Antarctic ice.”

Simon didn’t care. Yes, it was amazing. No, he had no idea how deep and wide the conspiracy was-any more than he knew how deep and wide these tunnels were. And it didn’t matter. He simply felt that his father was down here, and he was going to find him. He was sure of that now: he was going to find him.

“We’ve got about four minutes until our unknown visitors arrive,” Max said with a sudden urgency in his voice. “Simon?”

“Go,” Simon said without pause. “The downslope tunnel you wanted-take it. Now.”

The Spector lunged forward, twirling on its treads, and rocketed toward the tunnel mouth Max had chosen. It moved with such speed and grace the whole internal world spun with it, and the passengers felt the force of its thrust all over again.

“Stop the exterior visuals,” Samantha said as she clutched at her seat for support. “Turn it off.”

“Ah,” Max said and dialed down the transparency feed. The walls faded back into place. Now the view was restricted to the front screen, and the movement was more tolerable.

The tunnel mouth was approaching fast.

Everyone hunkered down in the seats. Belts were fastened. Armrests were gripped. Samantha ducked her head down and held her breath as the black hole of the tunnel mouth grew larger and larger.

“Hold on!” Max shouted as the amphibious vessel took a dive into the descending tunnel. They yelped in unison as the front of the vehicle tipped down, hard, and they found themselves zooming downhill at a fifty-degree angle.

The acceleration pushed every member of the crew back into the seats. Max had to redouble the effort to lean forward, fighting the pressure to keep his hands up and steady over the holographic command console. The severe pitch felt much stronger than any of them had imagined it would. They could hear the treads below the Spector recalibrating themselves over and over, struggling to navigate despite the severe angle and shifting slickness of the ice like glass below.

New sequences of tunnels revealed themselves through Hayden’s deepscan, showing an ever-increasing complexity that stretched for miles in every direction.

“Good Lord,” he whispered. “What the hell is this place?”

The Spector suddenly sloughed to the right, then bit down again and steadied.

“Too fast for the treads,” Max said between clenched teeth. “We’re starting to slide.”

“For what it’s worth,” Ryan said, “I’m actually starting to believe these read-outs now. They tell me we’re more than five hundred feet below sea level and under more than 1,500 feet of ice.”

Max’s head was pounding. “Any chance this angle’s going to level out?” he asked Hayden.

“Not that I can see,” Hayden said.

They slipped violently to the left, lifted up almost forty-five degrees on one side…and then slammed back down to level, though they were still pointed downward to an even greater degree. It was like being trapped inside a windowless toboggan that was slaloming down an impossibly difficult track.

We have to get off this roller coaster, Simon told himself.

Max glared at the front-screen, then flicked an eye at the deep scan. “You see what I see? An alcove, off to the right? About three thousand feet ahead.”

Simon shifted his view to the right, downrange…and found it. Little more than a vertical shadow in the harsh spotlights of the Spector.

The back end of the sliding ship wagged like the tail of an angry cat. They could all hear the ice rushing under the treads now-not catching, not holding, just screeching as the whirring treads spun helplessly over the frigid surface. Max checked his speedometer readout. 60…70…80…

“Shoot for it,” Simon screamed.

“Then I’ll have to lose velocity,” Max told him as the shadow of the alcove grew closer and sharper. “If I try to turn into it at this speed, we’ll disintegrate into the far wall.”

“One hundred twenty miles inland,” Ryan shouted. “Depth is 1,782 feet below the ice sheet and increasing.”

“Hayden!” Max called. “Standard braking isn’t working for shit here! I can’t slow her down!”

Hayden frowned. “The blades-”

“I’ve reached maximum extension on the blades! We’re sliding, goddamn it!”

“That’s not possible.” Hayden pulled up the diagram of the extended tread, searching for a solution.

Max checked his velocity again: 85…90…

The surface flattened a bit, lost at least ten degrees of descent as they slipped at ridiculous speed-but it was too little and too late.

“You know what, Max?” Hayden shouted to Max, sounding somewhat terrified. “You’re right. We’re losing traction.”

“What’s next?”

Simon didn’t allow fear to take hold. Rescuing Oliver is my only mission in life, he told himself…and was suddenly struck with a mad inspiration.

“Max!” he screamed. “Heat the treads and bend their front points toward each other! Make a ‘V!’”

“That’s not possible!” Hayden snapped. “This isn’t a goddamn set of skis! You’ll destroy the integrity of the entire mechanism! Hell, at this speed, they might snap and destroy the whole vessel! You want that?”

“Beats slamming into a wall head on,” Max said. He cocked his wrists over the tread controls and rotated his thumbs inward, as if turning down two enormous dials. The tread icons above the controls shuddered for a second and then moved, slowly at first, from two parallel lines to an upside-down “V” shape.