The room fell silent for a few seconds. Simon threw his half-filled duffel over his shoulder and said, “It’s time.”
He walked over to Samantha and kissed her. He tried not to notice how she was fighting to hold back tears. “Sammy,” he said gently, “I’m coming back. With my father.”
She couldn’t contain her emotions as he let her go; she turned from him, weeping as he stepped away and tapped Hayden on the chest.
“I’m counting on you.”
Hayden’s nod was almost too delayed, but Simon pretended not to notice. He had already moved on before Hayden had any time to respond.
Samantha turned back to look at Simon one more time. Instead, she caught a glimpse of Nastasia’s slim figure following Max and Simon toward the fleet of MagCycles at the far end of the dark tunnel, the silhouettes of their bodies growing smaller and smaller as they walked away, until she could no longer see them.
Max took only a moment to squeeze into the pilot’s seat. He was already adjusting his helmet as Simon climbed into the passenger seat, and Nastasia pressed in front of him in a space not truly meant for a third party. Seconds later, the cycle’s powerful engine fired up and an electric blue light began to glow from the sides of the magnetic wheel. Before they even had a chance to feel the vibration building beneath them, the cycle tore up the ice below its wheels and exploded into the dark tunnel at lightning speed.
Nastasia’s body pressed tightly into Simon. All Simon could think of was Oliver.
* * *
Samantha turned back to see Hayden and the men already hard at work. Exhaustion and starvation didn’t matter to them; they had been given a job: fix the Spector, find a way out, and they were going to do it. They had little time to reach the Spector before the CS23s reached it. They had to move fast. She approached and heard the tail end of an odd conversation.
“…there is more than one network of tunnels down here?”
“Precisely,” replied a German scientist named Rolfe-once rotund, now hollow-cheeked and flabby from malnutrition and stress. “High-speed tunnels, not meant for human transport. They are using special pods that travel hundreds of miles across the continent suspended magnetically from structures embedded into the ice tunnels for transport of resources from one end of the continent to the other. There are only a few vehicles fast enough to travel in these high-speed shafts, and sometimes Vector5 uses them. They are known as Ice Raptors.”
“Well, people wouldn’t need to use them for the most part, would they?” Ryan asked. “Moving resources and supplies I understand, but surely with the cameras and communication systems, it doesn’t make sense for Vector5 to have humans travel these distances at these speeds.”
Rolfe shrugged. “I agree, but sometimes Vector5 has to transport personnel. Using the Raptor is very dangerous, however. There have been more than a few catastrophes where pods have slammed into the receptors and sliced through them. We’ve heard of a few openings on the other side that are easier to escape with, but I definitely do not suggest traveling through the transport tunnels to get there!”
Hayden looked bitter-another alternative eliminated. Samantha watched the men converse for a moment longer, then turned to walk along to the makeshift kitchen area where their meager food supplies had been laid out, scattered over random cases sitting on the icy floor.
She started to pick up an unopened MRE and noticed Nastasia’s nutrition pack slumped against the back of a crate, half-buried in discarded wrappers. It almost looked hidden.
Samantha pulled it from the trash and walked over to Hayden with a confused look on her face. Hayden was still in deep concentration over the plan to restart the damaged Spector, even though it was stuck in an icy tunnel miles away. She plopped it down on the floor next to Hayden.
“She left her med-bag here.”
Hayden looked up, completely distracted. “Who left what?”
It caught Andrew’s attention. “That’s odd,” he said. “She held onto that thing as if her life depended on it.”
Samantha nodded thoughtfully, then turned the pack over, letting the contents spill onto the worktable next to Hayden’s plans.
“Hey!” he protested, but she ignored him.
She pushed her fingers through the debris that had been in the bag. Nothing important, really: scraps of papers, a pen, a bottle of headache pills. “The inhaler is gone,” she said, more to herself than anyone else. “She must have taken it with her.”
“No she didn’t,” Andrew said. “She left it on the Spector.”
Samantha frowned. “But I saw her with it, just a few minutes ago-just before they left.”
“I’m sure,” he said and squinted as he recalled the last few minutes aboard the amphibious vehicle. “She was using it for whatever was bothering her. Then she shoved it into her nutrition pack and left it in the ready room. I’m positive.”
Samantha shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would she do that? And why would she have two of them?”
“Back-up?”
She shook her head one more time. “Have you seen these new inhalers? A year’s supply or more. And stilclass="underline" why put it in with a med-pack of vitamins and protein powders of all things?
“Maybe she took the other one with her,” replied Ryan. “She-”
“No,” Lucas said shortly, still out of sorts from his earlier disagreement with Simon. “I helped her buckle in. She was carrying nothing-certainly not an inhaler or…or any kind of small bag. “
Samantha began to lose herself in thought.
Lucas mistook her confusion and concern for weariness-though he wasn’t far wrong.
“Here,” he said, “let me show you a place you can rest for a little while.”
She wanted to say “no”-she wanted to resist with all her strength, but she realized resting would be the smart thing to do. She was going to need her strength.
“Thank you,” she said quietly and followed him to an insulated sleeping tent.
THE NETWORK
7:05 AM
Nastasia used all her strength to grip the armrests of the chair beneath her, steeling herself against the tremendous pressure of the MagCycle’s acceleration. She gritted her teeth as the unrelenting weight pushed and pushed against every square inch of her body.
The MC-7 was an ergonomically designed little cockpit connected to a massive ice-tire by a magnetic field, and that huge wheel carried its passengers down the cored tunnels of the Vector5 network at speeds that were beyond comprehension. It felt as fast as a bullet shot from the barrel of a rifle because of the narrow tunnels. Max struggled to control their headlong flight through a console that closely resembled the yoke of a small fixed-wing plane with foot-pedals and slide-buttons that dictated speed, attitude, and acceleration. He wore a flat-faced HUD navigation helmet that gave him a supernaturally clear view of the tunnel ahead, complete with luminous annotations on cracks, irregularities, and potential hazards. Max had used similar rigs in supersonic fighter planes over the years, but he had never seen one on a land vehicle before-and certainly never on a magnetically constructed unicycle that traveled over a hundred miles an hour.
All Nastasia could see outside the cockpit windscreen was a blur of black shadows flowing past in an endless torrent, illuminated only by the fitful flicker of the MagCycle’s own headlights. Her body swayed to one side, then the other, then back again as they careened forward through a darkness as thick as ink. And still the pressure made it almost impossible to breathe.
Max concentrated on his HUD diagram. In no time at all, he knew, they would reach the end of the tunnel, where it had been sliced open, sharp as a knife-cut from the great earthquake a dozen years ago. They would actually have to leap across that gap to the tunnel opening on the far side, if they hoped to reach Dragger Pass and below onto deeper tunnels and the elevator shaft that would take them to Oliver Fitzpatrick. He knew leaping across that Gorge almost meant suicide and they needed to accelerate full speed to even have a chance.