Max wasted no time. With lightning speed, he placed the tip of his own handgun against the man’s clean-shaven cheek. He saw the gun steam slightly at the tip, still hot from firing moments before, and burn a mark in the soldier’s face. He still held his ground.
Simon couldn’t stand it. He shifted the placement of his weapon ever so slightly and fired. The sound was impossibly loud, almost deafening in the tiny space, but he did not blink. He watched the bullet enter the man’s shoulder from the back and blow a ragged bloody hole in the flesh as it exited. The pilot screamed and jerked forward, but he didn’t raise his hands.
“That was to show you I’m serious,” Simon told him. “Now turn on the fucking vehicle or the next bullet goes into your brain.” He repositioned the pistol so it pressed quite firmly against the back of the man’s head, pointing forward and not trembling in the slightest.
The pilot closed his eyes against the pain. He clenched his jaw and took a deep breath, straining it between his teeth and gathering his will.
“Lazarus-9905 VSO requesting ignition,” he said.
The AI’s bland voice spoke from the console without hesitation: “Copy, 9905. Preparing initial system diagnostics.” The onboard computer was now analyzing the chip embedded in the soldier’s suit to verify authenticity. Two seconds later, the cockpit lights flared to reveal an array of sophisticated instruments and multiple monitors streaming a wide range of sensor-data. Both Simon and Max were startled at the technology; the instrument cluster in front of the pilot was seamless and rivaled that of the Spector, but it was more robust and clearly engineered to withstand heavy military use.
The pilot lifted his head a fraction. “Where to?”
Max looked closely at Simon. Simon didn’t look back as he recited the coordinates he had been given in Corsica-including the last line that Leon had written: -10,022 feet. They had been burned into his memory on that day. He didn’t need to think about it.
But the numbers were the first thing that actually made the pilot flinch. He tried to turn his head, struggled against the pressure of the pistol pressed against his neck.
“The computer will not recognize those coordinates.”
“What the fuck do you mean?” said Simon.
“I mean it won’t respond. No one is allowed to travel there, to that depth, to that place. No one but the commander and a few special teams.” He paused for a moment to catch his breath. The pain from his shoulder was more than excruciating. “Not even us.”
And I know why, Nastasia told herself. She looked at her watch and carefully calculated the remaining time: five hours and seventeen minutes.
“Simon,” Max said clearly puzzled. “What are those numbers? Where did you-”
Simon shoved the pistol against the pilot’s skull. “That’s bullshit,” he grated. “You know where it is. Just…do whatever you have to do. Go to manual, override the AI’s security, whatever it takes. I don’t care. You’re taking us down there.”
“It won’t work,” the pilot said. “It’s not that simple. Look: ‘Lazarus-9905 VSO: proceed to coordinates nine point three point seven, negative four-fifty.’”
“Those are unauthorized coordinates,” the AI said very calmly. “Please revise.”
“You see?”
“Try something else.”
“Lazarus-9905 VSO: proceed to the Nest.”
“What the hell is the ‘Nest?’” Max said. “Simon-”
“9905, those are unauthorized coordinates. Please revise.”
Max thought he heard Nastasia make a sound. He glanced at her and saw her staring at Simon, almost in a trance. She knows something too, he realized. Those coordinates mean something.
“Then take us somewhere near there,” Simon said. “Somewhere that isn’t locked out.”
The pilot swallowed, his throat dry. The pain in his shoulder was obviously affecting him; he was starting to tremble from shock. “I…”
Simon shoved the pistol against his skull again “Do it!” he whispered.
“Lazarus-9905 VSO!” the pilot blurted out. “Proceed to Central Command, north quadrant!”
“Affirmative,” the AI said, sounding almost pleased. “Shall I proceed?”
The pilot sighed deeply. “Proceed,” he mumbled.
In an instant, the huge vehicle rotated 180 degrees and began a smooth and steady retreat across the slippery terrain. In a few moments they would be back at the bridge, back at Dragger Station.
Soon, Simon told himself, and forced the hand that was holding the gun to stay steady and not to tremble. Soon.
ELEVATOR ONE
Blackburn stood in the express elevator and calculated the time it would take him to reach the Nest. Twenty-four minutes, thirty-two seconds, he decided. Then he would put an end to this, once and for all.
The five-man security team that surrounded him did not move or speak. Their faces were invisible behind flat black helmets; the polished obsidian edges glistening in the overheads. Blackburn felt the weight of his body shift upward, almost lifting him off his feet as they plunged down the endless shaft toward the Nest. He suddenly felt aware of the immeasurable tons of ice all around him, pressing in from all sides…and still he felt immensely strong, in control.
It’d been too long since he’d seen Oliver Fitzpatrick face-to-face. It was time to see him again. And he had never actually seen the discovery itself-in person, just photographs, flat-screen images, and extrapolated holographs. The scientists he had debriefed said what they had discovered was very different when experienced in person, but even in the imagery, they looked ominous and powerful. Up close, he was told, machinery malfunctioned and light itself seemed to twist and buckle…
They certainly have changed Oliver, he thought.
“Is Dr. Fitzpatrick prepared?”
“And waiting,” his second said.
“Good. And no further news on the intruders?”
“No, sir.”
“The Black Ops?”
“No, sir.”
He allowed himself a small frown. Silence was not what he wanted.
Twelve minutes and thirty-one seconds more.
He could feel it: an ending, of a sort, was on its way.
He was ready.
SPECTOR VI
“I don’t remember it being this far,” Hayden grumbled as they climbed the slow, steady incline toward the Spector. He felt as if they had been walking for days.
Lucas was close behind him, his breath labored but steady. “The MagCycles are fast,” he said. “You lose your sense of space down here.”
“You’re not kidding,” Andrew said and slipped on the ice for a moment before regaining his footing.
It was cold, so cold the word itself had lost meaning. It reached into each of them with claws as sharp as broken glass.
“There she is,” Andrew said. He lifted a weary arm and pointed, and they all saw it: the magnificent curve and sweep of the Spector, surrounded by the glowing halo of its emergency lights.
“Stay back for a minute,” Lucas said, sounding strangely tense. “We’ll check it out.”
Hayden was more than happy to oblige. He stopped to rest, and his three colleagues stopped with him while Lucas and his two friends stumped across the frozen ground for the last two hundred yards, their bodies little more than silhouettes against the light from their helmets now reflecting on the Spector.
The scientists circled the vehicle, checked the feeder tunnels, and looked into the distance. Everything seemed quiet, undisturbed. It seemed suspicious that the CS23s had simply vanished-abandoned the Spector, disappeared. He knew something was wrong, but they had little time, and Lucas simply didn’t care. He turned to face Hayden and the others, and waved an arm: come on.
Ryan and Andrew didn’t hesitate. They rushed forward, focused on what they needed to do. Hayden and Samantha followed close behind, moving as quickly as they could. Everyone knew they didn’t have much time.
It was all about battery life, Ha
yden had explained on the trip back to the submersible. When they had shut down the dying Spector, a series of batteries automatically kicked in to keep any of the liquid or temperature-sensitive components from freezing or breaking down. It was just a little power, barely a trickle, but he was gambling it was enough to keep the twenty-below temperatures from killing the Spector forever. But the batteries, even at their lowest setting, wouldn’t last indefinitely. Now the job was to get the amphibious vehicle repaired as quickly as possible and get the central power plant up and running.
Hayden was through the hatch and inside the Spector within minutes. The bridge was exactly as they had left it-half-ruined and chaotic-and now it was dark and bitterly cold as well.
Ryan and Andrew crowded in close behind him and wasted no time; they began pulling off the few maintenance panels that weren’t already detached and hooking battery-powered diagnostic units into the circuitry. The urgency of their movements spoke the same message over and over: no time, no time.
Samantha stood outside near the hatch and looked into the darkness of the utility caves behind them. She wondered what had become of those huge Spider robots, the ones that had been chasing them. Why would they leave? She thought. If they knew we were gone, why didn’t they destroy the Spector?
Hayden turned his escape plan over and over in his head. The Spector was designed for extreme situations just like this. It was built to dig itself out of almost any situation, but he had to admit it: melting through fifty feet of ancient, compressed ice had never been part of the plan.
Suddenly Lucas and his two cohorts were crowding into the bridge, getting in the way.
“You know,” Hayden said, losing what little patience he had, “There’s an economy section in the back for tourists.”
“What?”
“Can you move your guys to the ready room? There’s not a lot of space up here.”
Lucas stared at him for a moment…then broke away with a shrug, and motioned his men to move back into the other cabin. Lucas didn’t follow them. He simply retreated to the far corner of the bridge and stood quietly, clutching his rifle more firmly than ever as he watched Hayden and his team bring the Spector back to life.
Andrew was surprised at how easy it was. He had thought the bullets had done far more damage-the outer shields certainly looked like hell, and the entire structure had lurched slightly to the left where the ice beneath the treads had cracked and fallen a foot or two, but still…they had the boosters back on line in less than five minutes, and the external shields cycling up three minutes after that.
Samantha wanted to start looking for the inhaler the moment she entered the vessel, but she took a moment to resume her old chair at the science station as the consoles started to blink back to life, one after another. She quickly ran through the environmental protocols. “Life support is solid,” she said. “We still have oxygen; the recyclers are green, amazingly enough.”
Hayden himself was at the Ops station. Two of the AIs had been badly fried, but their processing load was easily assumed by the remaining units. Most of the external sensors came back online with full power as well; all they really lost was one of the external cameras for the forward-facing screens. It had been shattered by one of the scientist’s bullets.
Andrew pulled himself out of the maintenance corridor under the bridge. “Treads look five-by-five,” he said. “I don’t think any of the bullets got down there at all.”
Samantha stood up and left the science station, still looking for the inhaler or the med pack. Andrew had insisted Nastasia had put the nebulizer inside the pack, which didn’t make any sense at all. She had already checked every cabinet in the ready room, under the oddly watchful eyes of Lucas’ scientists.
“Nav’s up,” Ryan said from the co-pilot’s seat. Then he checked a second, different indicator. “Another three minutes, and power will be at one hundred.”
Suddenly Hayden pulled himself to his feet, still staring at the Ops console. “Okay!” he said. “I overrode the security and safety protocols, set up instructions to channel the entire power output to the shields. All we have to do is give it the command from this little tab here,” he held up a dedicated transmitter, no larger than a key chain fob, “and she’ll heat up and start melting ice ‘til we tell her to stop.”
Andrew touched one last glowing panel and stood up as well. “Ready,” he said.
Ryan was already on his feet and packing his tools. “Ready here,” he said.
“There you are!” Samantha said.
The little black insulated med pack was wedged in a tiny space by the security console-the one nobody used. She leaned forward, twisted her torso, and curled her fingers around the edge, right as Lucas said, “Good,” and raised his rifle.
There was something in his voice. Hayden turned to him and suddenly stopped moving. Samantha straightened very slowly, black bag in hand.
Hayden was gaping at the rifle. It was aimed squarely at Ryan’s chest. “Lucas,” he said, “Are you out of your mind? What the hell are you thinking?”
One of Lucas’ other men was filling the door to the ready room, blocking escape. The third was standing directly in front of the exit hatch.
“Shut up and get out of the vessel before I blow his brains out,” Lucas said.
“Lucas,” Hayden shouted, “Whatever the hell your problem is, once we’re out-”
“No,” Lucas said, “There’s no we, Hayden. There never was. You’ve been in hell for hours-a day at most. I-my men-we’ve been here for months. For years. I’m not staying a minute longer.”
“But-”
“Shut up! Get out!”
The third man who was not blocking the exit grabbed Samantha by the arm and shoved her toward the hatch. She snatched her arm away as the man pulled the small black case from her hand and pushed her out of the vessel. Ryan followed close behind her.
Still inside the Spector, Andrew wouldn’t cooperate. “Lucas,” he said. “You are fucking crazy. You can’t pilot this thing. You don’t even know how to turn it on. And if you think any one of us is going to help you steal it and-”
Lucas hit him on the side of the head-one sweeping, vicious blow-and Andrew fell unconscious before he hit the floor of the cabin. Then he too was thrown from the vessel like a rag doll, hitting the icy floor right outside the exit hatch. Samantha rushed toward Andrew.
“He’ll die there,” Samantha screamed.
Lucas ignored her scream outside the Spector. Still pointing the gun directly at Hayden, he said, “You’re next. Get the fuck out before I kill you.”
Hayden simply refused, “Without me the Spector won’t go anywhere,” he said.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Lucas snapped.
Hayden held up the tiny command unit. “It’s keyed to my thumbprint, Lucas. Only I can trigger the melt.”
Lucas just shook his head. “God damn it, Hayden,” he said, sounding almost sad. He lashed out again, this time with the butt of his rifle, and put Hayden down with a single blow.
The Hatch was still open, and Samantha could sense what was about to happen next. She screamed as Lucas bent over and stripped the glove from Hayden’s right hand.
“Lucas please!” Samantha begged. But it was too late.
Ryan seized her shoulder. “Sam! We’ve got to get them out of here! We’re too close to the Spector!”
Holding Andrew’s unconscious body, she couldn’t look away from what was happening inside the vessel.
Lucas had the command tab in his hand. He was wedging it between Hayden’s limp, unmoving fingers.
“If they trigger the melt from this close, we’ll all die,” Ryan said.
Hayden’s body was thrown out of the vessel as the Spector’s outer hatch closed shut with Raymond and his two men inside. The massive vessel’s treads retracted within its body as the entire submersible lowered itself, now sitting on the icy floor completely watertight. Its surface began to heat up less than five feet from Andrew
and Hayden’s body.
Ryan rushed forward and dragged Hayden’s body back as Samantha struggled with Andrew.
The outer shields of the Spector exploded in a bright flash of light. The heat followed an instant later, searing Samantha and Ryan’s face, driving them back.
Now less than twenty feet from the burning Spector, Ryan continued to pull Hayden’s body away from the burning heat. He struggled to shield his face from the inferno. Samantha screamed, “Andrew! No!” She turned back, into the impossible heat, threw herself toward Andrew’s body, and grabbed onto the shoulders of his suit. She dug in and pulled back.
He was so heavy, and the floor of ice was already starting to soften, to melt.
Struggling with the weight of Hayden’s body, Ryan had reached an alcove fifty feet from the Spector-a spot that afforded the protection of a crack in the large ice wall and hid them from the worst of the heat. He had managed to drag Hayden, still unconscious, to the shelter with him. They were as safe as they could possibly be.
But Samantha wouldn’t leave Andrew. She faintly heard Ryan’s voice over the sizzling roar of the burning shields as her face burned from the heat. “Sam! Leave him!”
“No!” The ice under Andrew’s body had already fallen away by at least a foot, leaving him in a deepening pool of steaming water.
Everything was melting.
Samantha braced her feet against the slush and pulled at him as hard as she could.
“Sam, you can’t do it!” Ryan called. “Get out of there!”
No, she thought. Not this time. She hauled at him with all her strength, and he moved six inches closer to her, but no more than that.
The ice beneath her boots gave way. She fell, losing her grip on his suit. She looked up at the Spector, barely ten feet away, and watched in horrified fascination as it started to sink into the tunnel floor. It created an eerie glow in the surrounding pool of water-the pool that, as she watched, grew wider and deeper, swallowing Andrew’s body completely.
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