with it, and the passengers felt the force of its thrust all over again.
“Stop the exterior visuals,” Samantha said as she clutched at her seat for support. “Turn it off.”
“Ah,” Max said and dialed down the transparency feed. The walls faded back into place. Now the view was restricted to the front screen, and the movement was more tolerable.
The tunnel mouth was approaching fast.
Everyone hunkered down in the seats. Belts were fastened. Armrests were gripped. Samantha ducked her head down and held her breath as the black hole of the tunnel mouth grew larger and larger.
“Hold on!” Max shouted as the amphibious vessel took a dive into the descending tunnel. They yelped in unison as the front of the vehicle tipped down, hard, and they found themselves zooming downhill at a fifty-degree angle.
The acceleration pushed every member of the crew back into the seats. Max had to redouble the effort to lean forward, fighting the pressure to keep his hands up and steady over the holographic command console. The severe pitch felt much stronger than any of them had imagined it would. They could hear the treads below the Spector recalibrating themselves over and over, struggling to navigate despite the severe angle and shifting slickness of the ice like glass below.
New sequences of tunnels revealed themselves through Hayden’s deepscan, showing an ever-increasing complexity that stretched for miles in every direction.
“Good Lord,” he whispered. “What the hell is this place?”
The Spector suddenly sloughed to the right, then bit down again and steadied.
“Too fast for the treads,” Max said between clenched teeth. “We’re starting to slide.”
“For what it’s worth,” Ryan said, “I’m actually starting to believe these read-outs now. They tell me we’re more than five hundred feet below sea level and under more than 1,500 feet of ice.”
Max’s head was pounding. “Any chance this angle’s going to level out?” he asked Hayden.
“Not that I can see,” Hayden said.
They slipped violently to the left, lifted up almost forty-five degrees on one side…and then slammed back down to level, though they were still pointed downward to an even greater degree. It was like being trapped inside a windowless toboggan that was slaloming down an impossibly difficult track.
We have to get off this roller coaster, Simon told himself.
Max glared at the front-screen, then flicked an eye at the deep scan. “You see what I see? An alcove, off to the right? About three thousand feet ahead.”
Simon shifted his view to the right, downrange…and found it. Little more than a vertical shadow in the harsh spotlights of the Spector.
The back end of the sliding ship wagged like the tail of an angry cat. They could all hear the ice rushing under the treads now—not catching, not holding, just screeching as the whirring treads spun helplessly over the frigid surface. Max checked his speedometer readout. 60…70…80…
“Shoot for it,” Simon screamed.
“Then I’ll have to lose velocity,” Max told him as the shadow of the alcove grew closer and sharper. “If I try to turn into it at this speed, we’ll disintegrate into the far wall.”
“One hundred twenty miles inland,” Ryan shouted. “Depth is 1,782 feet below the ice sheet and increasing.”
“Hayden!” Max called. “Standard braking isn’t working for shit here! I can’t slow her down!”
Hayden frowned. “The blades—”
“I’ve reached maximum extension on the blades! We’re sliding, goddamn it!”
“That’s not possible.” Hayden pulled up the diagram of the extended tread, searching for a solution.
Max checked his velocity again: 85…90…
The surface flattened a bit, lost at least ten degrees of descent as they slipped at ridiculous speed—but it was too little and too late.
Simon didn’t allow fear to take hold. Rescuing Oliver is my only mission in life, he told himself…and was suddenly struck with a mad inspiration.
“Max!” he screamed. “Heat the treads and bend their front points toward each other! Make a ‘V!’”
“That’s not possible!” Hayden snapped. “This isn’t a goddamn set of skis! You’ll destroy the integrity of the entire mechanism! Hell, at this speed, they might snap and destroy the whole vessel! You want that?”
“Beats slamming into a wall head on,” Max said. He cocked his wrists over the tread controls and rotated his thumbs inward, as if turning down two enormous dials. The tread icons above the controls shuddered for a second and then moved, slowly at first, from two parallel lines to an upside-down “V” shape.