Blackburn shrugged it off. The intruders are not the only ones who keep digging themselves in deeper, he thought. “Fine,” he said, dismissing it. “I couldn’t care less. Where the hell do they think they’re going to get the hydro-fuel?”
“They are the scientists who created the machines,” the advisor said. “If anybody can-”
“But nobody can,” Blackburn said. He looked closely at the advisor, his dark eyes drilling deep. Well, at least this one has some balls, he thought. Throw him a bone.
“All right,” Blackburn said. “I’ll go out on a limb for you. I’ll authorize the use of special armament to find and deal with the renegades, as long as it doesn’t raise our profile.” He cast a glance at one of the tech officers. “What’s the probability of vibration being picked up above ground by UNED or civilians if we unleash the hounds?”
“Nil, sir,” replied the specialist. He was sitting across the room, behind some of the officers. “Thanks to your efforts, the continent is clear of significant sensor arrays. UNED is constantly monitoring the total quarantine, but their ears are nothing compared to ours.”
“Excellent,” Blackburn replied. Then he gave a gentle smile-almost merry. “So let’s not waste the opportunity. Let’s try explosives on the defectors.”
A sense of panic filled the room as many of the officers cleared their throats. It almost made Blackburn laugh-all the shifting and throat-clearing, all the sudden tiny beads of sweat. The foolish defense officer raised his hand again. Fool, Blackburn told himself. You’re next.
“Sir, if I may, we have never used explosives in the network before. We have no idea what its impact will be. At this point, it’s all theoretical.”
Blackburn stood up suddenly and turned his back on his men. He couldn’t stand looking at them anymore. Instead he stared at the silver-blue hologram of the entire Antarctica complex that filled the black well near the end of the room. It was a beautiful thing. Beautiful and strange.
“So you’re telling me,” he said without turning around, “that after ten full years, millions of man-hours, and billions of dollars spent on investigation and development…we still can’t put this stuff to use?”
“Not yet, sir,” one of the I amp;D advisors said. “It’s too…unpredictable. Just last week, some of our vehicles started to levitate, and we still cannot understand how this is possible.”
Blackburn closed his eyes and tried to will the man away. It didn’t quite work.
“Our estimate still holds, sir. Eighteen months until we can safely build a prototype.”
“Safely,” Blackburn said acidly. “Maybe that’s the problem-too goddamn many people concerned with their safety rather than changing history.”
He gave it up. Maybe it wasn’t the time, but at least he’d made his point: keep moving or get run over. Now, back to the crisis at hand…
“All right then,” he said as he turned around. “Let’s just blast the fuckers out of their hidey-holes with the biggest conventional weapons we’ve got. How does that sound?”
The grinning and back-slapping was unseemly, but they were all so relieved Blackburn allowed it. No one wanted to tell him about the other part of the problem, about the oxygen depletion effect that literally sucked the air out of a man’s lungs if he even came near the new fusion tech.
What they don’t know, Blackburn told himself, is that I’m already aware of it. Have been from the beginning.
What they fail to understand, he thought as he looked at his craven “team” of advisors and mercenaries, is that I just don’t care.
TUNNEL 3
Max pushed on.
The narrow passageway opened up a little more than a hundred yards from the opening. It was by no means wide enough or straight, but at least they weren’t surrounded by walls on all sides.
Max had never thought of twenty miles an hour as a dangerous speed. But now, guiding the Spector on its massive, swiveling treads, dodging pieces of ice as big as houses, veering past deep arroyos and avoiding patches of blackness that indicated yet another feeder tunnel, running off in yet another direction…now, twenty miles an hour seemed insanely fast.
The massive robotic Spiders hadn’t given up. Their arms, it turned out, were not just endlessly flexible; they were as strong as wrecking cranes. The others had watched through the transparent aft section and reported as the robots pulled away key patches of ice and outcroppings, pounding at the accumulated ice of the narrow entrance until, all too soon, it gave away, and they gave chase.
It was slow going for them, but they were relentless. Max could see that; he watched their progress on the holo-display of the rear scan as they moved forward, paused, pounded or pried another obstacle out of the way, then moved forward again. He could see that they were still a thousand yards behind them, and not gaining-but not falling back, either.
Focus, damn you, he told himself. There was no room for error here. He could take a wrong path, make a bad choice, and they would crash, fall, turn over, be crushed; he’d run out of grim alternatives. Only one thing left to do, he told himself. Succeed.
Simon sat in the co-pilot’s seat next to him, silent and determined. Max had known the man his whole life, and when Simon had said he would leave them behind and go on foot to find his father, Max had believed him completely. It was the kind of man he was-just like Max himself. Now Simon was focused entirely on the task at hand-getting the hell away from the CS23 and finding a place to hide, until they could figure out what to do next.
The terrain began to slope downward-not the steep fifty-degree grade of the first tunnel, but a relentless fifteen-degree angle of descent that took them deeper and deeper. And the deeper they went, the greater the tension they felt. It was as if they could feel the weight of the ice and stone growing above them, pressing down, worse with every inch they moved forward. Everyone’s eyes were locked on the transparent section behind them, showing every detail of the robots as they followed close on: their flexing arms, the bulbous, roiling central body, the grasping claws and the blinding spears of light that passed back and forth over the Spector, piercing it again and again like swords.
Without warning Max shouted, “Get down! We’ve got company!”
As if on cue, the entire crew whirled around to look at the front-facing screen, their window on the world that lay ahead.
The screen was a flat black shadow, given texture only by the reflected lights from the robots, the Spector’s own shadows, and a thousand tiny points of green light. Like fireflies out of the swamp, like luminous birds no bigger than a sparrow, they were swarming just outside the vehicle-straight in front, off to the left, off to the right.
They paused. They seemed to focus, to aim.
Then they streaked through the blackness and smashed against the Spector like gunshots.
Phit! Phit! Phit-phit-phit! Hundreds of lights were striking the Spector, slamming against the shielded surface, sounding like a barrage of stones. Everyone ducked as Max stopped the Spector instantly and spun his chair away from the line of fire.
The front-facing camera that had served them so well sizzled and went black. Tiny bumps, reverse dimples, appeared in sudden lines stitching across the cabin as the bullets dented the smartskin but did not penetrate.
Not yet, anyway, Max thought.
Max knew the sound of gunfire all too well. He rotated his seat to face the crew, cowering all across the bridge, and started to move the Spector in reverse, backing away from the gunfire, moving toward the approaching Spiders. For a moment the transparent aft walls stayed transparent, and he saw the gleaming arms of the CS-23 sway and grip one more time, and then the transparency flickered away, and he was staring at a blank interior wall.