Armen Gharabegian - Protocol 7

The vehicle whirled on its axis and started back toward Fissure 9 at a reasonable clip. The ice beneath the DITV’s wheels, frozen in place thousands of years ago, cracked like shattered glass.

Roland sat in the darkened cockpit and watched the screens around him. There was nothing more to do…but wait.

* * *

Simon, Max, and Nastasia walked for a long time and spoke barely spoke a word. Conversation had been difficult to begin with; soon it became entirely too much trouble. Even listening itself was an effort; they seemed to drift in private, frozen worlds of their own where even the grinding of their boots against the icy ground no longer registered.

They just walked. And walked. And walked.

They took a final, gradual curve to the right and realized that they no longer needed the guttering illumination of their shoulder lamps. The ground beneath their feet sloped up slightly and then, quite simply, ended. It dropped off at an almost perfect ninety degrees, as if a giant’s guillotine had split the earth and pulled out a slice.

They stopped more out of surprise than caution and found themselves standing in the shadows less than fifty feet from an unusual suspension bridge that spanned the Gorge. The bridge was wide enough to carry vehicles and machinery across the vast opening. At the far side of the bridge, rising above its span for more than a mile, plunging below it to an even greater depth, was the elusive vertical fortress built into a wall of ice as smooth as glass.

Draggar Station.

To Simon it looked as if the massive structure was stuck to the wall of ice like a parasite, alien to the environment but blending in perfectly. It cast a faint glow on the surrounding ice, creating an eerie image, a lighthouse in a dark ocean that was not simply below it, but all around it, forever.

Behind the massive facade there were cavities in the ice: expansive living quarters. Immediately behind that four-story structure swelled a spherical cavity the size of a small stadium. Half a hundred small tunnels opened into that half-dome, each leading in a different direction, all of them surrounding three huge vertical shafts that carried vehicles, equipment, and soldiers thousands of feet below to Central Command. This, clearly, was the hub, the point from which a Vector5 soldier or captives could begin the journey outwards to any corner of the continent, or descend to its lowest, most powerful point: Central Command and the dark secrets below.

At last, Simon said to himself. At the crossroads. And he couldn’t deny it: there was a magnetic attraction here, the pull of gravity itself, drawing him toward Dragger Station, drawing him deeper into the mystery…and closer to his father.

Max was the first to hear the distant rumbling. He mistook it for the deep-throated roar of the icy breeze in the Gorge, and ignored it for the moment.

He didn’t know what was coming their way…and the Black Ops, half a mile from that same bridge, still not in sight of the Gorge, had no idea what awaited them either.

Samantha had to keep moving. What little heat the makeshift “campfire” yielded wasn’t nearly enough; more and more of the twenty-below temperature was creeping past the exo-suits; even fresh batteries from the scientist’s dwindling supply didn’t help.

So she paced. She walked from one end of the camp to the other while Hayden and the others huddled over their worktable and solidified their plan to revive the Spector.

She didn’t care. She couldn’t. All she could think about was the inhalers.

Those inhalers. Why did they bother her so? Why had Nastasia dragged two of them halfway around the world, and then left without them?

She had to get back to the Spector. She had to see if Andrew was right, if there were duplicates of these silly little items there.

“That’s it!”

It was Hayden. She turned to him in surprise.

“That’s it!” he shouted again. He was beaming like a child who had discovered something.

Lucas hadn’t been at the table. He stumped over, his fists thrust in the deep pockets of his ice-suit. “What am I missing?” he said.

Hayden ignored him. He was focused on Andrew instead. “Can we rewire the Spector’s boosters to power up the exterior shields?”

Andrew looked shocked. “You mean the propulsion generators? Convert them to put power into the shields? What in the world for?” He thought about it a moment longer and shook his head emphatically. “No, Hayden. Do you know how much heat that would produce? It would…”

And it hit him, so hard Andrew took a step back and plopped down on an ammo box that threatened to collapse under him. “Oh,” he said, as the idea took hold.

“So what do you think?” Hayden said, crossing his arms, waiting for the answer he knew was coming. “Would it work?”

Andrew was nodding again, but it was an entirely different kind of agreement. “Yeah, he said. “Yes, I do believe it would.”

“I knew it!” Hayden crowed. Only then did he turn and cock his head at Lucas, who was standing five feet away, shifting impatiently from foot to foot.

“What’s exactly below the Spector?” Hayden asked.

“Ice, of course,” Lucas replied, sighing with exasperation.

“Oh, come along, Lucas, don’t be an ass. Is there a tunnel, a fissure, a feeder channel, anything crossing under the Spector that might lead us out of this hellhole?”

“I’m…not sure,” Lucas said, thinking about it seriously for the first time. He turned to look at Rolfe who was more familiar with the network of tunnels. “Rolfe? Thoughts?”

“Here, let me help,” Ryan said and called up the best of the three-dimensional digital maps they had loaded into their cobbled-together holo-platform. They huddled around the display and tried to puzzle through the complex web of tunnels and shafts.

Rolfe immediately pointed toward a specific location deep in the midst of the chaos. “Here,” he said, no hesitation in his voice. “Approximately 260 feet below the Spector there is a tractor vein that leads directly into Fissure 9.”

Lucas still didn’t quite understand. “So you want to dig down, through 260 feet of ice that has the density of glass?” He shook his head.

Hayden almost snorted in derision. “Listen man, if we heat the treads and exterior shields using all the electricity the boosters can produce, the Spector could actually melt the ice it’s sitting on, and drop into the tunnel below.”

Lucas stopped shaking his head and thought about it. Hayden was right: there was no rock between them, no natural or manmade barrier. And if the figures they’d shown him about the booster’s output were real, then they really could do what Hayden suggested.

But Andrew wasn’t so sure. “Hayden,” he said, “If we do this, we’ll melt everything. We might even melt interior components, no matter how good the insulation is.”

Hayden scowled at him. “I know that,” he said derisively. “I built the damn thing, didn’t I? And it’s not like we’re going to ride it down. We’ll just wire it up, trigger the meltdown from a distance, and then rendezvous with the Spector when it comes to rest in the new tunnel.”

“Oh, yeah,” Andrew said. “Nothing to it.” He stared blindly at the holo-display a moment longer, calculating. “But you know, much as I hate to admit it, it just might work.”

Even Samantha had moved toward the table, sensing the excitement.

“I’ll need to get into the Spector,” Hayden said. “When I do, I can try to circumvent the original power grid and redirect the booster’s power plant to the exterior body. If I’m right, the exterior metallic alloy will heat up like a burning coal, and we’ll sink right down.”