Armen Gharabegian - Protocol 7

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?