by Nick Thacker
He crouched, kneeling on the cold snow to look into the hole. Shining his light down the shaft, he saw the that the way was still unimpeded and the rectangular metal space was much larger than the heating shaft one above. He would have no trouble getting through this duct and into Level 10 like the group had before.
Ben put the backpack on and started crawling forward into the shaft.
A humming sound grew behind him, and the hairs on the back of his neck rose. He recognized the sound immediately.
The drones descended into the valley and found Ben immediately, his prone body halfway inside the shaft. He froze, unsure of the best move.
Two drones hovered outside above the snow drift, locking on to his position.
Then opened fire.
CHAPTER FORTY-seven
Julie was worried about Ben. Worried was an understatement, but it was all she could afford at the moment. If there was time, her attention could turn fully to the man she loved and she would lose all semblance of resolve, fraying at the seams until she was beside herself with fear, anxiety, and anger.
Anger at herself for allowing this to happen, and for being so cavalier about their adventures together. It was almost as if she had assumed that since they had made it through the Yellowstone and Amazon situations in one piece, mostly unharmed, they were now somehow invincible. She was angry for her logical brain taking over her emotional protective instinct, allowing Reggie to talk them into a visit to Colorado to meet with Mr. and Mrs. E.
But if she had the time and focus to process it correctly, she would realize that she was also angry at Ben for the same reasons. He was equally to blame for their presence here, deep beneath an ice shelf in a hostile research station. He was to blame for getting her involved in the first place, choosing to put both their lives on hold while they chased an elusive organization to an end she wasn’t quite sure of.
In some ways she was thankful that she didn’t have the bandwidth to process those emotions now, because she knew she would lose hold of reality in seconds if she did. Instead, she was focused on the unfolding scene in front of the table she was currently crouched behind, waiting for the inevitable crack of gunfire that would tell them the two hostile armies marching toward each other had finally met in no-man’s-land.
The security team that had entered seconds ago was undoubtedly in the room, standing in the very spot Julie’s group had evacuated from moments before, looking for them. They would see the tables, and the clutter in front of them, and know immediately what had become of the group, then they would start shooting.
Julie was sure this was the order of events to come, but she was unsure of how long it would take them. She felt like hours had ticked by, but she knew it had been less than a minute since the enemy had entered.
The Chinese soldiers still hiding behind the doorway in the stairwell would soon pop their heads in to see what had changed. They would grow curious of the silence in the room, and would check to see that their American civilian enemy was still in the large hall. When they saw the security force instead, they would attack.
That was the battle Julie and the others were waiting for, and she found herself growing weary with anxiety as they waited. She looked to Reggie, crouching at her side, to gauge the others’ reactions.
“Hanging in there?” he whispered.
She nodded. “Sure. I guess.”
“It’ll be over soon.”
She smirked. “How do you know that?”
“Everything ends. In the whole scheme of things, this won’t last long.”
She thought about this response for a few too many seconds. “It’s an odd time to be cryptic, Reggie. Besides, you’ve never really struck me as the ‘deep’ type.”
He shrugged, and she looked away for a moment. “Everyone’s deep,” he answered. “Some people just don’t know how to express it.”
Julie was actually surprised by the man’s candor. She moved her gaze back to Reggie and saw him grinning his characteristic huge smile. Whatever intensity had existed in his voice a moment ago was now gone, replaced by the goofy and quirky nonchalance she knew well.
“Are you hanging in there?” Julie asked.
Reggie’s eyes flicked outward, then back at her. “Yeah, why?”
He steeled, focused on her and nothing else. But it was too late. She had seen the hesitation, the weariness. She started to ask another question but her attention was drawn to the front of the room. She couldn’t see anything useful, as they were all crouched on the floor, hiding behind the overturned tables, but her ears told her what she needed to know.
The security team was nearly on them. Men’s voices grunted to each other as they traversed the large hall and swept it for anyone hiding. Her hiding spot was the last place to check, and Julie could almost feel their expectation and anticipation building as they planned their move.
Reggie grabbed her arm, silently motioning some instructions. She assumed he intended for them to jump up and take the team by surprise. Joshua was nodding along in agreement, and she looked around at the rest of the group. Ryan Kyle was slowly and silently preparing his weapon, and Mrs. E was checking her pack for more ammunition.
A round of gunfire erupted from the stairwell, and Julie knew it had begun.
“Now!” Reggie yelled.
He jumped up first, followed by Kyle and Mrs. E. Joshua and Julie popped their heads above their cover next, and Julie caught sight of Colson pushing himself up off the floor, Joshua’s pistol in his hand.
The first of Reggie’s shots took down the security guard standing farthest away from them, but the only one of the soldiers facing them. They had turned back to gauge the threat coming from the stairwell and were caught off guard by Reggie’s attack from behind. The other men quickly whirled around, scrambling. Julie was able to hit one of the men nearest to her, and he fell, holding his side.
Two of the security guards had split off from the central group and found some cover close to the side of the room, where they each took up a position focusing on one of the two enemies converging on them from opposite sides. Julie watched as three more security guards ran for the elevator once more, trying to retreat to the relative safety of the car’s interior. Joshua picked off one of these men as they ran, and the Chinese soldiers hit another.
“Okay,” Joshua yelled, “back to square one. We’ve got the Chinese straight ahead, two security guards to our right, and one in the elevator to the left. Any ideas?”
“We can’t wait them out anymore,” Kyle said. “We need to push up, maybe even see if we can get down the middle without getting flanked.”
“Right,” Reggie added. “They’ll expect us to stay along the walls, but if we’re able to move quickly enough, we can keep pushing these tables forward while the rest of us cover. They’re holding back their shots so far.”
Julie aimed down the long room, waiting for movement. “But then what? They’re not going to back off.”
“They won’t need to,” Joshua said. “We’re a better shot than the Chinese from this distance, but the security guards are well-trained, so they’ll just pick us off if we stay here. If we keep them on their toes, we can focus on the security team first and then get back to an offensive position to work on the Chinese.”
“Good a plan as any,” Reggie said. Julie didn’t agree, but she didn’t argue. They would need much more than a mediocre plan to get them through this next phase.
“Do we have enough ammunition?” Julie heard Mrs. E ask over the rapid gunshots.
She looked at the older woman and waited for any of the men to answer the question.
Joshua shook his head, and Reggie shrugged.
“I have two magazines,” Kyle said. “But that’s it. Not enough to share, especially with the ten or so guys we’ve got to get through.”
With the deflated plan failing before it even began, Julie’s heart sank. She struggled to focus on something positive, no longer believing that there was any hope for them. She c
ouldn’t even talk to Reggie, now that all their guns were trained on the opposing forces on the sides and in front of them.
This is it, she thought for the tenth time that day. She was now out of options, out of time, and without Ben by her side. Two enemy forces, both well-trained and well-armed, were bearing down on them from the opposite side of a room much too small to hide in, and their surprise attack had only earned them another minute or two of life.
She felt tears coming on, which made her angry. She wasn’t a cryer, and hated when her emotions commandeered her otherwise logically driven mind. Julie tried to ignore the stinging heat from the corners of her eyes, but focusing on the tears only made them fall faster.
You can get through this. You’ve been through worse.
She said the words over and over in her head, but a nagging suspicion remained.
Have I been through worse?
CHAPTER FORTY-eight
“So… any other ideas?”
No one spoke, but Julie heard footsteps to her left and dared a peek over her shoulder. Jonathan Colson was making his way toward an overturned janitor’s cart, the rolling kind Julie had seen used in office buildings to hold mop buckets and cleaning supplies. There was no janitor in sight, but Colson was focused on something else.
He reached the cart after a half-shuffle type of walk that kept him crouched low enough to avoid bullet arcs, and reached down to grab a small tablet. He gripped the tablet in his right hand as he made his way back to the group.
“What’s that?” Julie asked when Colson collapsed by her side. He pushed the button to turn on the device’s display and the screen flickered to life.
“Almost a full charge,” Colson said, ignoring her question. “Good.”
Julie watched him poke around on the screen, finally pulling up an application that displayed what looked like a metrics dashboard. She recognized the style; back at the CDC her IT department had screens like this running constantly, monitoring everything from server loads to CPU temperature and network bandwidth. She didn’t see any of these particular figures listed at first, and looked to Colson for explanation.
“It’s our internal monitoring station,” he said. “A dashboard for keeping an eye on key statistics across the base.”
He was whispering, as if the two enemy forces didn’t already know they were hiding there, and Julie motioned for him to hurry up.
“It’s got a basic alert system, and it’ll tell us where there are alarms going off around the station.”
“Why is that useful?” Joshua asked.
“It’s not perfect, but it should tell us where there has been fighting, as the alarms will trip an indicator light on here if there has been infrastructure damage.”
“Damage like… what?”
“Like if a stray bullet pops one of those little climate-control balloons on the walls, or hits something else important enough to have a sensor built into it.”
“So we can effectively see where the enemy has been.”
“Right, and if we’re lucky, they haven’t been all the way downstairs yet.” He continued moving things around on the dashboard, adding and configuring different colored boxes until he was satisfied.
“That won’t be accurate enough,” Reggie said. “They could have moved through the level without tripping any sensors.”
“That’s what I’m working on,” he said. “The company would have loved to implant trackers into each of us, I’m sure, but they couldn’t have really pulled that off. So instead they track our ID badges. It’s a safety feature, they said, so that we’d always have access to where the closest security team member is.”
“And you think these new guys have trackable badges?”
Colson looked up from the screen and stared at Reggie. “Honestly, no. They aren’t typical base security — they’re something else entirely. Private security would be my guess. I doubt they follow the same rules as the rent-a-cops we ran into earlier.”
“But it’s worth a shot,” Joshua said.
Colson nodded as he dropped his head back down to continue working the screen. “But it’s worth a shot.”
He flicked through a few screens, eventually coming to a map of all the levels, superimposed on top of one another. He used the tablet’s multitouch screen features to manipulate the image with his fingers, turning the levels around as the three-dimensional image on the screen rotated on its three axes. He pointed with his other hand. “That’s the elevator,” he said, showing her a vertical rectangular shaft that poked through all of the base’s levels on one corner of the map.
“It’s moving,” she said.
“Yes, it’s going up to the top, it seems.” A blinking light signified where the elevator was on its course upwards, and Julie and Colson stared at the screen for a moment.
“That’s strange,” Colson said.
“What?” Julie hadn’t noticed anything change, but she scrutinized the map even more.
“The top level. There’s a small maintenance shaft door to the outside, but the only other way in and out of the base is the main entrance door. It’s a huge concrete garage door, one that flips up and slides on mechanical wheels to open.”
“What about it?”
“Well, it’s opening.” He pointed to the top level, and opened his fingers to zoom in. The top level of the base flew toward them, and Julie could see a small wireframe depiction of what looked like a large garage door system, slowly opening.
“That is massive,” she said. “Why so big? That seems inefficient if it’s the only way in and out.”
“It’s not,” Colson answered. “Because no one really goes in and out. At least not more than twice a year. We aren’t studying the environment we’re in, so there’s no reason to go outside. All of the base’s functionality is completely accessible below ground, so we don’t need small doors. This door is large enough to drive a plane through.”
Julie’s eyes widened slightly. “So, does it mean there’s a plane driving through?”
Colson nodded. “That’s what it would mean under normal circumstances, though I can’t imagine why it is now. I’ve only seen that door opened twice — once when I arrived and once when the additional security teams got here. Maybe they’re sending in more soldiers.”
Julie hated the thought of that, but she couldn’t think of any other reason the main entrance hatch would just open. Plus, the elevator was rising to the top level, possibly to receive the new visitors. She looked at the screen again, and noticed a similar shaft running through the levels on the opposite side of the room from the elevator.
“What’s that?” she asked.
She looked up, staring at the spot on the wall that she thought corresponded with the shaft on the screen.
He shrugged. “It’s larger than the elevator. Maintenance elevator shaft — though I’ve never seen it used, and I’ve never heard anyone mention it. Looks like they walled over it for some reason.”
“Okay,” she said, “what else? We can’t do anything about it right now, so what else are we looking for?”
Colson didn’t respond, but he closed the map view and returned to the main dashboard screen. Julie watched him work, finally understanding the layout of the screen. Colson was far faster than she would be at navigating the system, but she could now make out what most of the boxes on the dashboard referred to.
She pointed at one of them. “Is that outside weather?”
Colson nodded, not really engaging.
“Colson?”
He stopped, snapping out of his zone to wait for Julie’s question. When he realized that she had already asked it, he seemed to wake up fully and come alive. “Yes, right. It is — there’s a small weather tower about a mile from here, hidden at the base of the mountain range. It sends in data at an impressive rate, considering —”
“Colson,” Julie said, forcing his attention. “Why is the weather outside dropping? You said it was around minus ten earlier.”
Colson check
ed the data and frowned, moving his finger around on the tiny box to manipulate the range of data he was given. “Yes, it does seem that…”
Reggie and Joshua caught Julie’s eye, for a moment the pair uninterested in the battle raging on at the side of the room. She knew what they were thinking.
“Colson, what’s going on out there?” She whispered, already feeling her voice beginning to shake.
Ben…
Colson cleared his throat and double-tapped on a section of the screen. An enlarged satellite image of the area above the base came into full-sized view on the tablet, and then he pressed another button on the screen that overlaid moving radar image on top.
“We also follow a public feed from the weather stations at McMurdo, so we can be fairly certain they’re accurate. But it does seem —”
Julie’s jaw dropped, and she started breathing faster. Oh my God.
“What is it, Jules?” Reggie asked, sliding closer.
She took the tablet from Colson’s lap and stared at it as the image moved, over and over again as the data updated in near-real time. She watched the temperature gauge click downward, hitting unbelievable levels.
-16.
-17.
She shook her head, then flipped it around so Joshua and Reggie could see.
Outside the station, nearly directly above their current location, was an absolutely massive storm.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Francis Valére was shaken from their rough landing through the building storm, but his pilot had successfully gotten them grounded and rolled into the long, sloping hangar on the first level. A few minutes later, the pilot had said upon landing, and they wouldn’t have made it at all. He took another pill, the last dose he had on his person, and stepped out onto the ice.