Roland was furious. “Damn it!” he said again, and smashed his fist against the console. Then he spun away and stalked from the room, throwing his last command over his shoulder with venomous contempt. “I’m getting the goddamn flares!” he snapped.
* * *
Three thousand feet below them, four CS-23s, the dreaded Crevasse Spiders dispatched from Central Command, crawled through a pitch-black opening to Dragger Pass. They were marvelous machines: 160-foot wide, eight-legged robotic transport and weapons platforms, designed to travel everywhere and anywhere through the deep ice. Each robotic craft housed a crew of eight special operations soldiers in the main cabin; that spherical cabin rotated 360 degrees, keeping the crew level while the main body of the Spider violently twisted and turned on its sixty-foot expandable legs, rotating and extending for extreme flexibility and speed. This CS-23 could climb any icy terrain by compressing against the walls or stretching across wide crevices; it could travel vertically with ease or streak like lightning along a flat horizontal surface at more than thirty miles an hour. The tips of the retractable legs even had specialized heated anchor joints that could penetrate the ice and lock the leg into place, allowing the robot to hang from no more than three of its eight legs if necessary.
Only the cockpits were illuminated as the Spiders pressed against the walls of ice and crawled upward at tremendous speed. Below them, the dark fissure of Dragger Pass dropped another several thousand feet straight down to the ice-locked bedrock below. The Spiders looked like apparitions coming up from the depths of Hell itself; even their mechanical sound was no more than a whisper; a subtle mechanical hissing made by the constant rotation of their arms.
They were closing in. Fast.
* * *
Roland wasted no time. He made his way to the armament room and pulled down a crate of the special rifles that Vector5 had nicknamed “flares.” The long-barreled weapons, stored in racks of twenty with thirty-cartridge magazines, were designed for illumination more than offense; they actually shot luminescent bullets that, once in the ice, could be turned on remotely to make the translucent walls glow with a penetrating, bluish light. Although these were not used as standard rifles, they had powerful destructive potential as well; the shells could easily pierce the armor of any sub-ice vehicle.
Roland wanted a full rack of flares in his DITV, along with two extra crates of ammunition. He was certain of his goaclass="underline" he needed to stop whatever had entered Fissure 9 before whoever was inside got a look at the loading cranes above the dome. He knew that the fate of the planet rested on the secrecy of the operation. He knew there could be no half measures.
He didn’t like it, but Roland was prepared to take lives if he had to. There was no other solution.
Six Vector5 soldiers under Roland’s command followed him silently onto the Deep Ice Transport Vehicle. The transport looked like something out of a science-fiction movie: three gigantic tires, bigger than a jumbo jet’s-two in front, one in back. The two front tires extended outward through a complex structure protruding from the central part of the body like a cat ready to lunge forward. Below the main cabin that hovered eight feet above the ice was a ramp that lowered to make an entrance into the vehicle. But what made the DITV unique was its fragmented surface, as if it had been covered with the shards of a shattered mirror. It was stealth technology-a variation on the same stealth-tech that every Vector5 vehicle employed.
Although the depth of their operation was too great for satellites to detect, Vector5’s engineers were taking no chances: the surfaces of all its vehicles were broken up into polygons, making radar detection almost impossible, and they were covered with non-reflective, sound-absorptive coatings to make them even harder to scan. What’s more, they were silent, powered by tremendously efficient batteries that allowed them to generate great power and speed. A sophisticated AI unit ran the entire vehicle without any help. It was almost entirely self-guided, requiring only audio commands but rarely needed physical manipulation of certain components.
As the Vector5 team entered the vehicle, the commander took the central seat. It offered a 360-degree view of his surroundings through digital displays. The DIT Vehicle had no windows; they were unnecessary. The crew had better visibility with the advanced camera systems on board.
Roland shifted restlessly as the crew ran through the standard systems check. There was no time to waste; he knew that. It would take them more than twenty-five minutes to ascend the thirty-degree incline, up through Tunnel 3 to the loading station at Fissure 9-where the mysterious visitor would be waiting, he was sure.
The vehicle’s door closed with a hissss, compressing the atmosphere in the airtight cabin even before the soldiers had taken their positions. The pilot, his eyes fixed on his guidance console, spoke the words: “Destination: Loading station. Via: Tunnel 3.”
In less than three seconds, the DIT Vehicle adjusted its wheels and rotated toward the direction of the specified tunnel. The movements were so fluid the crew could barely feel the turn of the wheel from inside the compartment; the first clue was the sudden, serious push of the invisible hand of momentum on Roland’s chest as the DIT accelerated swiftly and smoothly, like a rocket-powered tank, moving with eerie silence into Tunnel 3 without hesitation.
“Let’s have the readout of the drones,” Roland said, still restless. The DITV’s AI instantly connected him to the recon station they had just left.
One of the soldiers on board, deep-scanning their destination, raised his head. “Sir, I’m spotting an unusual type of submersible, in Fissure 9, not far from the loading station,” he said.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Roland shouted. “Are you sure it’s not one of ours?”
“Sir, the computers have cross-referenced all possible embedded codes given off by our subs. Nothing is showing up.”
Slanting forward and adjusting the handgun on his side, Roland said, “This better not be the Chinese! If it is, their goddamn military satellites have already followed the entry.”
“Sir, the submersible gave off no signals, not even to our own satellites,” the surveillance officer said. “If they did, we would have picked up the incision ourselves.”
“Nothing can be that stealth,” Roland said flatly. “Check for anomalies in the Southern Sea within the past month. Look for sighting, undocumented arrivals, unexplained sinkings-anything.” Something would give away the source of the intruder. It had to.
“Sir.” It was one of the soldiers, working on a handheld device the size of a lighter. “Central Command has given us three anomalies. The strategic AIs give low significance scores to two of them. The third is a freighter called the Munro; it foundered and sank at the sixtieth parallel at approximately 1100 hours yesterday. There are no codes assigned to it, but standard satellite surveillance logged a rendezvous with the Chilean Coast Guard just a few hours before it sank.”
“Sank?” the commander repeated, analyzing the situation. “Interesting. Send me the data.”
The tactical officer who had started the discussion touched his device in the corner, and Roland’s own handheld buzzed and showed him the Munro’s stats: length, draft, age, registration. “Sir,” the tactical officer said, “the boat has been traced back for two months. Origin seems to be a port in Portugal-Tavira-and seems to have docked several times, disappearing for a month in Argentina at San Sebastian, before making its way through the Straits of Magellan.”