Armen Gharabegian - Protocol 7

And he had been there on the day that The Discovery took place, and the entire world changed without knowing it.

Half a lifetime, he thought again. And tomorrow…still unknown.

Blackburn heard a discrete cough at his back, but he did not turn away from the floor-to-ceiling window that comprised one wall of Command Central’s main conference room. He knew what was waiting behind him: his commanders and advisors, arranged around the conference table, watching him, assessing him, judging his every move.

Tension permeated the briefing room. They were all in jeopardy. The world they knew was in jeopardy. They needed to find the intruders and recapture the missing scientists before they could escape and tell the world.

Blackburn still did not turn to them when the coughing officer stood up to address the others.

“We have a report from Dragger Pass,” he said. “The CS-23s have the exact coordinates of the intruder that has penetrated the network, and have confirmed reports of reconstructed MagCycles that rendezvoused with the intruder.”

Oh, excellent, Blackburn thought, burning. The invaders and the renegades have found each other. Perfect.

“Because of debris in the connecting passages,” the officer continued, “the Spiders were unable to acquire confirming visual imagery associated with the MagCycle operators, but we have a strongly held con-”

“Stop,” Blackburn said, too weary of it all to turn and confront them. “It’s the scientists. We all know it’s the scientists. Now move on.”

“But where did they find the MC-7s?” asked one of the commanders.

“The wrecks were buried above Shelf 1 in utility tunnels,” Blackburn said. He remembered the day they had abandoned the MagCycle technology in favor of the more powerful, swifter MC-9s. “Fourteen years ago. Is that not correct?”

“Affirmative, sir.”

“Clever little men,” he said, almost admiring. “They’re using the old utility passages and air shafts to travel the network. No wonder we haven’t been able to locate them.”

Blackburn finally turned but not to address his followers. Instead, he looked past them at the black wall of the hologram deck that filled the opposite end of the room, beyond the conference table. He lifted his head to address the AI that ran the conference room. “Calliope,” he said, “open the old construction maps.”

Instantly, an elaborate holographic diagram appeared above the table, coruscating greens and blues.

“No,” he said, “This is too current. Go farther back, to 2021.”

The display instantly changed and a large 3-D map of the continent’s utility tunnels around Dragger Pass appeared, as they existed a decade and a half in the past.

“Go to Shelf 1 utility tunnels frame at ten cubic kilometers.” Blackburn said, concentrating fiercely. “Focus specifically around Dragger Pass and prepare digital logs showing the coring activities. I want to know exactly where these bastards can hide.”

The men in the room stood up almost simultaneously when the map displayed in great detail the old tunnels around Dragger Pass. Many of the officers had never seen these tunnels.

Blackburn rounded the table and stalked to the hologram display. He didn’t waste an instant looking at his staff; they didn’t deserve the attention. He stood in front of the enhanced diagram and held up one hand, making a circle that covered a specific section of the grid.

“Jim,” Blackburn said, “how much ammo would you need to cave in this ten-kilometer area? To dump it into the Gorge?”

The commander code-named “Jim” went bone-white. “Sir, do you mean create an internal avalanche?”

“Yes. Take the whole fucking area-intruders, rebels, MC-7s, the lot of them-and drop it into the Gorge.”

All heads turned to Blackburn and stared in absolute shock. Jim was the head of explosives and coring activities; he had thirty years of experience in demolition and two advanced degrees in geology and structural engineering. He could barely contain his horror.

“Sir, with all due respect, the vibration would almost certainly cause the full length of the shelf to crack and cave in. That would destroy the entire…the entire, um, complex.” Now Jim was starting to sweat. He pulled a handkerchief from his ice suit and mopped his gleaming brow. “It could kill us all, sir. And-and even if, somehow, it didn’t, the seismic activity would alert every listening post and geo-satellite in the southern hemisphere.”

Blackburn waved that away. “Not an issue. We can scramble that information before they receive it.”

“Are you sure about that, sir?” the surveillance commander asked, his voice shaking with fear. “Seismic waves, too? We’ve never…”

The look the commander received from Blackburn was enough to kill. The commander stopped in mid-sentence and wilted. “All right, then. Sir,” he said meekly and sat back.

The Gorge was a horizontal fissure caused by a massive quake that had shaken the continent in 2018, creating a tremendous crack more than five hundred feet wide and four thousand feet deep. It went down to the continental bedrock-and perhaps even lower. None of the scans or camera descents had actually established its lowest point.

“You’re sure about that?” Blackburn asked sharply. “About the danger to the entire project?”

“I’m not sure about anything,” the commander said in a rare unguarded moment. “No one has ever operated in subterranean ice environments like this before. We learn something new every day, and it’s not always-or often-very good news. But the explosive release of trillions and trillions of tons of ice? The excess heat alone could generate enough melted water and steam to cook every living thing in the network-the entire network, sir.”

“So you’re not sure,” Blackburn said skeptically. It was just as he’d suspected-another coward.

Blackburn spun to the Ops commander, opened his mouth, and froze. For one horrible moment, every officer in the room was sure he was going to do it-to order a small tactical nuke into that ten-kilometer region where he thought the escapees and the intruders were hiding, just to stop the threat.

But…

“Jim,” he said, “Use whatever is necessary to cap the old network of utility tunnels. Make sure these bastards have nowhere to hide. In the meantime, Philip, start drilling toward the last known location of the intruder-vessel from Dragger Pass. I want to be able to haul the big guns up there if we need to.”

The relief in the room was like a cool breeze. Half of the officers sat back, relaxed, as if they had just been reprieved.

Not quite yet, Blackburn thought, and he swiveled to confront one of his most powerful executive officers. “Hollinger,” he said, “What’s the status of the operation at Ground Zero?”

The room chilled a second time. Most of the advisors knew little about The Nest, and wanted to know even less. It was unusual-and dangerous-for Blackburn to mention it in open session.

“Sir, we have identified more, but we cannot effectively close in to investigate. Machinery seems to shut down instantly.”

Blackburn scowled, clearly suppressing his rage. “I want an answer within forty-eight hours,” he said. “We need to get our hands on one of those fucking things and pull it up.”

“Sir,” replied Hollinger, nodding in tight acknowledgement. He was a tall, skinny fellow in his late forties who looked like a cross between a mad scientist and a vicious special-ops soldier-an anomaly in many ways. His weathered skin and white hair, cut long and rarely combed, was unusual enough, but in recent months he had also developed strange lesions on his hands and neck that no one spoke of.

Hollinger was the king of the spooks, as far as the rest of Vector5 was concerned. He was responsible for The Discovery, the most secretive mission the enterprise had ever undertaken-the one established at a depth so low it was scarcely 350 feet above the continental bedrock. No one in the room knew exactly what the Nest’s mission was, or what Blackburn was referring to when he said “those things,” and most of them were glad to be in the dark.