“And what about you working with Sophia?” Chase continued, as if picking up her thoughts. “For fuck’s sake, you want each other dead.”
“I don’t like it either. But we need her, and I gave her my word.”
“You think she cares about that?”
“Probably not. But I do. With her help we’ve got a better chance of figuring out what the Covenant’s doing—and if we do that, it gives us the advantage. We can expose them to the world and get our lives back.”
“From what Sophia said, these people are basically religious fundamentalists,” Chase said grimly. “I’ve been in a war against one lot of ’em, and they’re not exactly good losers. So three of them, working together? Even if we do beat them to this lost city, I don’t think they’ll leave it at that.”
“And what would you rather do?” Nina countered, growing angry. “Nothing? We can’t hide from them for the rest of our lives. And I wouldn’t want to even if we could.”
“I’m not saying we should. I’m just saying that maybe you’re running into this so fast, you’re not thinking about the consequences. For other people, as well as us.”
Her expression softened slightly. “You’re thinking about Mitzi, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” said Chase, jaw clenching at the memory of a dead friend. “She got killed because I rushed her into a situation without thinking it through. I don’t want that to happen again. And I don’t want you having to learn the same way I did.”
She took his hand. “Eddie, you know I don’t want anyone to get hurt. Not Matt, not anybody. Hell, I don’t even actively want anything bad to happen to Sophia.” The small joke prompted the very slightest upward twitch of Chase’s mouth. “But if we don’t do something about the Covenant, then there’re only three things we’ll ever be able to do: we run, we hide … or we die. And I don’t like any of those options. Especially the third one. That really sucks.”
Again, Chase’s mouth curled into a near smile. “You’ve got a point.” He gently squeezed her fingers. “But I want to make sure you know what kind of risk you’re taking. We don’t have any backup this time: no IHA, no rich guys. If anything goes wrong, we’re on our own.” He looked at the map of Antarctica on the computer. “And in about the worst possible place to get in trouble on the entire bloody planet.”
“Then we’ll just have to make sure that nothing does happen.”
“Right, like that’s ever worked for us.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” said Nina. She smiled, then took his other hand. “We can do this, Eddie. The city’s there, I’m certain of it.”
“Hope you’re right.”
“I am. I promise.”
“Can I get that in writing?” The threatened smile finally broke through. “All right. If you think freezing our arses off with Pingu is the only way we can beat these wankers, then we’ll have to do it. But you just be really careful.”
“I will. Good job you’ll be there to pull me out of any crevasses.”
“I meant of Sophia.” Chase’s expression became serious again. “If she gets the chance, she’ll try to escape. Or kill us.”
“So let’s not give her any chances.”
Chase nodded, then looked down at his black leather jacket. “Think I’ll need something a bit thicker than this, then.”
TWENTY
Antarctica
The sea rushing below the Bell BA609 tilt-rotor was a serene, perfect blue under the stark sunlight. But the day’s brightness was deceptive; even at the height of the Antarctic summer, the temperature was barely above freezing.
Huddled inside a thick parka, Nina peered over the pilot’s shoulder to watch the approaching coastline with awe. The land ahead was dazzling, a wall of ice rising practically vertically out of the sparkling ocean. Ice floes whipped past, tiny dots huddled on one. “Oh, wow, Eddie!” she said. “I just saw my first penguins!”
Chase grinned. “Maybe we can p-p-p-pick one up on the way back.”
“This is not a sightseeing tour,” growled the man beside the pilot. Dr. Rohit Bandra, Nina had quickly discovered after landing on the RV Southern Sun following the long flight in the tilt-rotor from Tasmania the previous day, was not someone who responded well to the unexpected. He had immediately launched into a huge argument with Trulli about the unscheduled arrival of his “assistants,” and it had taken all of Nina’s persuasive powers—and fame—to mollify him even slightly. Apparently, news of her suspension hadn’t reached the South Pole.
He was still fuming, however, and had made it clear that the moment Trulli’s tests were successfully completed—and the expedition switched from a technical to a scientific exercise—the unwelcome guests would be sent packing, accompanied by a sternly worded complaint to the IHA. Although Trulli had downplayed it with his usual casualness, Nina could tell he was actually very worried about what it would mean to his career, and now she felt horribly guilty for having involved him.
But her concerns faded as they approached the coastline. The sea was full of drifting ice; the Southern Sun was anchored more than eighty miles offshore to keep clear of the floes calving off the ice cap that stretched away to the horizon, a slice of blinding white sandwiched between the deep blues of the ocean and the sky. More ice floes below, densely packed like crazy paving; then the cliff rolled past to reveal nothing but solid whiteness ahead.
They had arrived in Antarctica.
“Feet dry at oh-eight seventeen,” said the pilot, a Norwegian named Larsson. “Rough air ahead. We’re in for some chop.”
“You’re not joking,” Chase said as the Bell lurched, hit by the winds sweeping across the endless plains. He tightened his seat belt. The other occupants of the cabin—Nina, Sophia, Trulli, Bandra, and a pair of Trulli’s engineering assistants, David Baker and Rachel Tamm—quickly did the same.
Larsson checked the GPS, adjusting their course. The newly selected test site was seven miles from the coast, the ice sheet having expanded hugely over the millennia. The terrain became more rugged, the flat plain rising up into mountains of pure ice, jagged chasms splitting the surface between them. The walls of the ravines changed color as they got deeper, turning from white to startling, almost unreal shades of cyan and turquoise. “That’s beautiful,” said Nina, amazed. “Why’s it that color?”
“Compression, Dr. Wilde,” said Bandra, his voice filled with don’t-you-know-anything condescension. “The weight of the snow and ice above it squeezes out all the trapped air and turns it solid, so it absorbs red wavelengths of light. Hence, blue ice.”
“Yeah?” said Chase. “And I thought blue ice was the stuff that falls out of the bogs on planes. Cheers, Doc, you learn something every day.” Bandra looked more annoyed than ever, though Nina and Trulli both smiled at his deflation.
Something else below caught Nina’s attention: a column of what looked like smoke rising in the wind. She found its source: a strangely elongated and angular cone of ice protruding from the surface like a stalagmite. “Volcanic vents—we must be in the right place,” she said, seeing more of the formations in the distance.
“How far to the site?” Trulli asked.
Larsson checked the GPS again. “About a mile and a quarter.” He pointed ahead. “Past that crevasse.”
Nina craned forward for a better look. She saw it was a blank expanse of snow, not even broken by a volcanic vent, a deep ravine at its edge angling away toward the coast. The lack of landmarks made it difficult to judge scale, but the plain seemed at least a couple of miles across. The lake hidden beneath it, according to the radar survey, was considerably smaller.
“I still want to make it perfectly clear that I object in the strongest possible terms to changing the test site,” said Bandra as the tilt-rotor began to descend. “I will be complaining to the U.N. about the IHA’s appropriation of UNARA’s resources.”
“Yeah, we got that, Dr. Bandra,” said Nina wearily.
“But surely, Dr. Bandra,” said Sophia with
mischievous innocence, “it doesn’t matter where the test takes place? After all, ice is ice.”
“Ice is most certainly not ice!” Bandra huffed. “Do you have any kind of scientific background at all, Miss Fox, or are you just another freeloading tourist like Mr. Chase?”
She smiled. “Actually, I have some experience in the nuclear field.” Trulli coughed at that, and Nina and Chase both gave Sophia—Fox was the name on her fake passport—warning looks. Fortunately, none of the others picked up on her black joke.
The tilt-rotor dropped toward the center of the ice plain, Larsson zeroing in on the precise GPS coordinates Trulli had provided and transitioning the aircraft from flight to hover mode, the engine nacelles on the wingtips pivoting to turn the oversized propellers into rotors. The Bell hung hesitantly above the center of the vortex of blowing snow and ice crystals before landing with a bump.
Larsson peered out, leaving the engines running at just under takeoff speed. “Okay, the ice seems stable. But take a thickness reading before you unload any of the gear. I’d want at least thirty feet under us to be safe.”
“On it,” said Trulli. He and Baker climbed out with a radar measuring device and circled the aircraft, hunched in their parkas as they took readings. Finally, Trulli gave Larsson a thumbs-up. The pilot returned it and powered down the engines.
“We’re over the lake,” Trulli told Nina as he reentered the cabin. “The ice is about a hundred and thirty feet thick, like we thought.”
“How long will it take to drill through?”
“Don’t jump the gun! We’ve got to get Cambot set up first; that’ll take a couple of hours. But a hundred and thirty feet …” He stroked his chin, thinking. “I don’t want to push too hard, not on a first test run, so maybe half an hour. Unless you want to find one of the thinner patches of ice above the volcanic vents and drill through there.”
“How thick were they?”
“Seventy, eighty feet.”
“So it halves the amount of time we have to stand around in the Antarctic. Sounds good to me.”
Bandra frowned at them. “And do you really think that is a proper test of the drill? It has to get through two and half miles of ice, not seventy feet!”
“Cambot’s got to crawl before he can walk, eh?” said Trulli, picking up more equipment. “All right, everybody, let’s kick some ice!” Even Chase groaned at the pun.
Nina climbed out, immediately glad of her layers of clothing as she stepped onto the plain, the spiked crampons on her boots biting into the frozen surface. She put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses to shield her eyes from the glare of the sunlit snow. Apart from the tilt-rotor, there was no shelter from the constant, cutting wind. The landscape seemed completely flat, not so much as a rock breaking up the hard-packed surface snow. Despite having visited several barren deserts, she had never seen anywhere so utterly empty and lifeless.
Trulli and Baker took about twenty minutes with their radar device to find an area of thinner ice. After they marked the position with a red flag on a pole, the preparations for the test began.
Cambot, Trulli’s robot submarine, was a segmented metal cylinder some nine feet long and three feet in diameter, one end capped with a menacing array of interlocking drill heads and the other with pump-jet nozzles and folded fins surrounding a complex spool mechanism. Assisted by Rachel, Trulli and Baker carefully lowered it onto a sled. Chase, Nina, and Larsson joined in to help them slide the heavy machine to the flag. Sophia elected to watch from the cabin, while Bandra made a show of “supervising” without actually applying any physical effort.
Leaving Cambot at the flag, the engineers returned to the helicopter to bring over a generator, then set about erecting a winch system to lift Cambot by its tail, suspending the drill heads just above the ice. Since this would take a while, the others returned to the BA609 for hot coffee. Disconcertingly for Nina, the sun barely moved in the sky for the whole time: at this point of summer, so close to the Antarctic Circle, daylight lasted almost twenty-three hours.
Once the submarine was hanging like some huge cybernetic fish on display as a catch, everyone examined it; even Sophia’s interest was piqued. “So how does it work?” Chase asked.
Trulli was on a ladder, connecting one end of what looked like a long length of rubber hose to the robot’s stern. “Most of it’s pretty straightforward. We lower it, it drills down into the ice—but it’s heated as well, so it’ll go through faster. The drills get up to a hundred and forty, even one-sixty Fahrenheit once they’re at full speed, and the body’s at almost ninety degrees, so the meltwater keeps it lubricated while it’s going down.”
“So where does the truly Trulli stuff come in?” Nina asked.
He grinned. “‘Truly Trulli,’ never heard that before. Nah, the clever business is all here at the back.” He patted the spool. “See, usually when people do deep ice drilling, they fill the drill shaft with antifreeze; otherwise it ices over in no time. But that’s not really an option here, ’Cause as soon as we broke through into the lake, it’d pollute the ecosystem and kill what Dr. Bandra’s trying to find.” He held up the hose. “This is the clever bit. It’s basically a length of flexible pipe, but folded back on itself—like when you turn a pair of trousers inside out by reaching down the leg. Only here, the trousers can be however long we want—miles, even.”
“Bloody big trousers,” said Chase.
“We run all the control and power cables down inside both layers of the hose—they’ve got a nonstick coating so they slide over the inside of the umbilicus. This way, it doesn’t matter if the top of the drill shaft ices up. But as Cambot goes down, he unrolls more and more of the hose out behind him from this drum here.” Trulli nodded at it. “Once he breaks through into the lake, we disconnect him from the umbilicus so he can swim free. But because we’re still feeding the power cable through to him, he can explore for as long as we want; then we recover him by drilling back up through the ice. In theory.”
“Let’s hope it works,” said Bandra, as cold as the surrounding landscape. “It would be a horrible waste of everyone’s time and money if something went wrong.”
“Only one way to find out,” Nina said. “How much longer to get ready, Matt?”
“Not long. Just got to finish the hookups, run all the system checks, then we’re set.”
It took him another twenty minutes, using a laptop inside a battery-heated bag to carry out the final checks. “All right!” the Australian finally announced, sitting on a folding canvas chair. “Let’s give it a whirl.”
As well as the laptop, the bag contained a control unit bearing twin joysticks and several dials. “Stand back,” he warned as he turned one of the latter. The drill heads rotated reluctantly at first before warming up and spinning more smoothly. He increased the revolutions, checking figures on the laptop’s screen before raising his head in satisfaction. “Everything looks good. Nina? You want to give the word?”
“I think it’d be better if Dr. Bandra had that honor,” she said. “Dr. Bandra?”
He accepted with poor grace. “Go on, then, Trulli, get on with it.”
Trulli shrugged and operated the controls. The winch lowered the submarine until the whirling drill heads touched the ice. There was a loud rasp, the sub’s nose instantly obscured by spray as it dug into the hardened surface. Nina looked up at the winch frame. The outer layer of the umbilicus was indeed staying still, the slick, shiny inner layer slowly slithering into its open end. The sight was vaguely unsettling, reminding her for some reason of guts.
Cambot was in no particular rush to descend; it took over two minutes before the robot’s cylindrical body completely disappeared from view. Churning water spewed up behind it. But the shaft was already freezing, the exposed surface taking on a glutinous quality with surprising speed.
“All right,” said Trulli, checking the readings. “Cambot’s cutting through the ice at forty-seven inches per minute. So he’ll take, uh …”
“About
fifteen minutes to reach the lake,” Nina told him. “Since he’s already covered the depth of his own length.”
“Thanks. Wish I could do sums in my head like that—it’d save me a fortune in calculator batteries!”
Another round of coffees in the tilt-rotor followed, Trulli waving everyone back to the shaft almost fifteen minutes later. “Okay, he’s getting close,” he announced. “The ice is a bit thinner than I thought—must be irregular. Oh, and I wouldn’t stand there, mate,” he told Chase, who was investigating the now-frozen opening. “All the weight of the ice on top of it means the lake water’ll be under pressure. Soon as Cambot breaks through, it’ll come fizzing up like a can of Foster’s on a bumpy ride!”
Chase retreated, Trulli also moving back. Everyone stood in a line, anticipation rising. Even Bandra seemed excited. “Less than three feet,” Trulli said, watching the screen intently. “But the ice could break any time, so watch out. Two feet—whoa, there it goes!”
The expedition members tensed, but nothing happened for a few seconds—then the cap of ice over the shaft suddenly exploded upward as a geyser burst through the surface. It reached more than thirty feet in the air, dropping back down in a cloud of spray. The fountain continued to gush for several seconds before finally subsiding.
“And … he’s through!” Trulli said triumphantly. He checked some more readings. “Okay, time for stage two. Capping off the umbilicus, deploying fins, and releasing Cambot for free operation … now.”
He operated more controls, seemed satisfied. “Okay, let’s see what’s down there.”
Nina watched the screen as the Australian worked the controls. Trulli had configured one window to transmit a live video feed, which at the moment showed little but a cyan fog, but the display next to it was more revealing. It was a lidar display, similar to the scanning system used on some of Trulli’s previous submarines; a blue-green laser beam of a wavelength that could easily penetrate water swept back and forth. The resulting image was only monochromatic, but she could clearly make out the “roof” of ice covering the ancient lake.
The Covenant of Genesis_A Novel Page 23