A small, sudden movement made him turn to look at Nastasia. That mark on the back of her neck, he thought. What does it mean? What does it have to do with my father-with Nastasia herself, and her reason for being here? Does she know I saw it? Why would she have that symbol on her neck?
Her remarkable sapphire eyes revealed nothing. Her small, enigmatic smile offered even less.
Max’s voice broke the silence and brought Simon back into the moment. “Ready to surface,” he said to Simon. “Shall we?”
“Won’t we look like a big dent in the water?” Samantha said. “I mean, just because the Spector is invisible, it doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
Hayden shook his head. “No, the smartskin samples the terrain and builds a multi-spectrum camouflage. We just look like another piece of the sea, with the right color and wave action.”
She shook her head. “Amazing.”
“Yes,” he admitted.
In the brief seconds that remained, Simon tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together. He wondered if there was a connection between UNED and what was happening in Antarctica. Did they know what was going on, or was this somehow beyond them as well? Oliver himself may have been played for a fool. He was requested by UNED for the Antarctica project, but soon he was working for some “department” that had no real name, and not long after that he had “died”-or, rather, disappeared.
And then there were the rumors of all the other scientists who had mysteriously vanished in recent months and years.
Max let the Spector hover just below the surface and put his full attention on the blobs of light-the whatever-they-were who were approaching from the side tunnels. They would be arriving in ten minutes or less.
“Invisible or not,” he said, “I think we’d be much better off confronting these…people…from land. I’m going up.”
Simon turned back to Max with a new look of resolve. “Yes,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
Max grinned. “Thought so.”
He put his hands out, spread his fingers and lifted them both very slowly, and Spector VI rose to breach the frigid water, like some vast supernatural creature of the sea, invisible to mortals but larger than any whale. Water streamed down its glittering sides. Flukes on the left and right side opened, breathing out foul carbon dioxide and replenishing the breathable air.
They were just a few hundred feet from the edge of the icebound shoreline. The cavernous space was lit by some sort of dull illumination that seemed to come from within the ice itself. It was no brighter than the outside world would have been a few moments after sunset, but it was enough to see by. More than enough.
“Let’s get her to shore,” Max said. He snapped his fingers together, locking the console for a moment, then pulled his hands back and turned to his best friends. “So,” he said, “you want to help me engage the treads on this monster?” referring to the tracks that would convert the Spector to an amphibian transport vehicle.
Simon grinned. “What do you need?” he asked.
It took the consent of two pilots, one at either side, to convert the vessel from full submarine capacity to amphibious form. They both palmed the sensor plates at the same time, touched the approval panels when they turned green, and looked down at the floor as the faint rrrrrrrr sound grew louder. The exterior plates were pulling back and locking. The tread compartment was flooding as it was supposed to. The treads were extending downward, covering the curved underside of the vessel, then locking into place. Test lights flashed. Ready lights illuminated as the treads extended fully.
Max slipped back into the command chair and grinned. “We’re good,” he said. He looked at Simon almost triumphantly. He could barely believe what they had accomplished. “We’re going to the surface of the ice.”
For a moment Simon stood silently looking at the holo-screen in front of them. Then he said without needing acknowledgment, “Let’s go get my father.”
TUNNEL 3
“Commander,” the surveillance officer said, “I think you should see this.”
The DITV was making record speed, careening down the slick, smooth walls of Tunnel 3 at twice the recommended speed. But Roland was determined to get there first and do what needed to be done.
Screw Central, he told himself. Screw everybody. Fissure 9 is my responsibility. It has been for nine fucking years, and I will be goddamned if anyone, anyone enters this place without my permission!
The gyroscopes that were designed to keep the transport’s cockpit steady despite its speed and attitudinal changes were whining with stress. In a normal vehicle, the passengers would have been plastered against the walls and quite likely injured already. In the DITV, pushed to the limit as it was, Roland and his men were safe enough, but they found it impossible to stand without help as they traveled at a truly insane speed. Still, Roland made it to his feet using the back of his seat and the edge of the console to stagger across the chamber to the surveillance officer’s side.
There were six different screens and three-dimensional displays arrayed across the forward half of the transport. Five of them showed the churning gray static of interference or a rock-solid, entirely believable representation of the Shipping Dome, their destination.
The Dome looked completely quiet, silent, undisturbed.
The last console, a three-dimensional hologram as large as a steamer trunk, showed something entirely different: the glowing, shimmering, oil-on-water rainbow reconstruction of an amphibious vehicle that was half-beetle, half-tank.
“What the hell is that?” he asked, both shocked and angry about what he was looking at.
“I have no idea,” the officer said. “It’s entirely invisible to every one of our imaging scans, except this new one, this gravimetric mass detector. We just installed it last month and even that is only getting partial data. This…this thing is almost entirely undetectable. I’m not even sure you could see it unless you were standing right in front of it.”
“It has to be one of ours,” Roland muttered, still having trouble believing his eyes. “No one else on the planet could do this.”
“Of course, sir,” the officer said, then swallowed nervously. “But…”
“I know,” Roland said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it, either.”
The vehicle’s tapering bow was almost insectile. It swelled back in long, sinister curves, its iridescent skin almost convulsing with colors that seemed to flicker in and out of the visible spectrum. It had no windows, no visible means of propulsion, and no hatches-none that he could see, at any rate. And the mechanical arms at its side, the treads below it, made it more than just menacing: it made it an undeniable, and probably unstoppable, weapon of war.
“I don’t care what you have to do,” the commander said to his crew. “I don’t care how hard you have to push this piece of shit or what chances you have to take. Just get me up there NOW!”
They were less than six minutes from the basin. One of the soldiers made the mistake of quoting the ETA to his commander, and Roland turned on him quick as a snake.
“NO!” he bellowed. “Not fast enough!”
“Sir,” the navigator said hating the sound of his own voice, “the Spiders are trailing behind us by eight minutes but making headway.”
“Of course they are,” he said. “They’re bigger, more sophisticated, and more mobile than we are.”
He stepped forward, hoping against hope that he was really seeing what he thought he was. “My guess? Whatever that thing is, we’re going to need some heavy armament to stop it.”
SPECTOR VI
The members of the team braced themselves as the Spector VI lifted up toward a shallow edge of the submerged ice. Max had already scanned the shoreline for a thousand feet in either direction, and this was by far the most gradual and gentle slope in the visible terrain.