Beyond the Ice Limit

67

GIDEON COULD SEE that John was on a kamikaze mission, AI obviously turned off or overridden, the mini sub intending to ram him. He ramped up the propulsion and brought Pete around to face John while at the same time ascending as quickly as possible. But being tethered to the nuke made his DSV sluggish and difficult to maneuver. He realized that what he had to do, above all, was to protect the six propellers in the rear from damage.

Slowly, agonizingly, his propellers humming, the DSV rose, the tethered nuke dangling. John came on fast but erratically, and through either misjudgment or mishandling it missed ramming Pete, passing just to one side; as it swept past, Gideon glimpsed Antonella Sax working the controls, struggling to bring the DSV back around without the help of the autopilot. It was incredible: the senior exobiologist, in thrall to the alien life-form. What in hell was she thinking?

Now Pete was ascending faster, while below him he watched Sax’s DSV make a loop, coming back around and heading for him once again. Gideon realized she was on a trajectory to hit his stern—aiming, rightly so, for the propulsion system.

There was nothing he could do, he realized, to avoid an impact. Quickly moving his joystick around, he rotated the DSV so as to put the propellers behind and watched, helplessly, as John came straight at him. Sax’s calm, bland face could be seen illuminated through the forward viewport, staring at him as she closed in.

There was a terrific crash and Gideon was thrown forward, arrested by the safety straps, his DSV recoiling from the blow. A monitor cracked and a shower of sparks fell inside the personnel module. But the titanium sphere was built to withstand immense pressure, far higher than any ramming would accomplish. She couldn’t sink him by ramming him—but she could make it impossible for him to deliver the weapon to the proper altitude.

Sixteen minutes.

As his ascending sub cleared the upper edge of the Rolvaag, the Baobab loomed into view. Gideon was shocked: it was now glowing from some sort of internal phosphorescence, a gigantic, pale, greenish-yellow thing that no longer looked like a tree but rather a vast polyp, swelling and subsiding as it drew in and expelled water.

He wondered if Sax could be reached on the UQC; if there was any chance of talking her out of this crazy defense of the Baobab. He switched it on.

“Antonella!” he cried. “Can you hear me?”

John was coming around for another swipe at him. To his surprise, her voice came back, calm and steady. “I hear you loud and clear.”

“What the hell are you doing?”

“The question is, what are you doing?”

“I’m trying to kill that thing—which intends to destroy the earth. Don’t you understand that you’ve been infected? You’re being manipulated!”

At this, Sax gave a low laugh. “So you, too, Gideon, have drunk the Kool-Aid. This splendid and intelligent life-form comes to earth, and our response is to try to kill it? How sad.”

“Yes: because it’s a parasite, and it’s going to kill us if we don’t kill it first.”

Another mild laugh of amusement. “You know nothing about it. I’ve been communicating with it, Gideon. What an extraordinary experience. I know what it wants, what it thinks, what it feels. It’s come here in peace and goodwill—and it can’t understand why you want to exterminate it.”

This was nuts. And he saw that something else was coming in besides her voice transmission; some sort of data dump into the UQC. Was she trying to hack into his DSV? But even as he was getting ready to shut it down, her DSV was bearing down on him. He rotated Pete, once again trying to shield his propulsion. But this time he could see that Sax was coming in low.

She’s going to ram the ROV containing the nuke.

He reversed the joystick and slowed his ascent so she wouldn’t hit the ROV. But to Gideon’s absolute horror, his maneuver only caused her to miss the ROV and come in just above it—the mech arm of the John slicing right through his tow cable. It snapped with a violent jerk, and, through the downward viewport, he saw the ROV plummet toward the wreck of the Rolvaag and disappear into the big gash in the hull.

Suddenly—untethered from the weight of the bomb—Pete shot up like an air bubble, rushing faster and faster, leaving John a rapidly dwindling cluster of lights in the blackness below. Out the side viewport, he had an extraordinary view of the gigantic glowing creature as he rushed upward past it, its vile orifice swelling and pumping; it writhed its branches threateningly toward him, but he was now moving so fast that he caromed right through their grasp, and a few minutes later the DSV popped up on the surface of the ocean, the mini sub tumbling about like a billiard ball before finally righting itself.

In pure astonishment, Gideon looked out the forward viewport. Pete was bobbing like a cork on the surface of the ocean. A few miles away, he could see the receding silhouette of the Batavia.

He glanced at the countdown. Twelve minutes to go.

What the hell, Gideon thought; his mission had failed but he might as well try to save his own ass. He jammed the joystick forward and headed the DSV for the ship.

Nine minutes to detonation.

He kept the joystick pushed to the maximum, but the DSV moved slowly at the surface, impeded by the heavy seas of the approaching storm. He was eking out a few knots at best. For whatever reason, the Batavia clearly wasn’t going at top speed, either, but nevertheless it was still going faster than he was…and he was never going to catch up.

Eight minutes.

So the bomb had dropped into the Rolvaag itself. The quick-and-dirty simulation he’d managed to do in the short time available showed that the bomb, detonated on or inside the Rolvaag, would probably be insufficient: the steel of the hulk would absorb too much of the blast. He could only hope his calculations were off.

Six minutes.

He knew that the Batavia itself had to be at least six miles from the point of detonation, or the shock wave would rupture its hull. There was no way Pete was going to clear the danger zone, and as he saw the Batavia limping along, he realized it would not make it, either.

Four minutes.

At his current speed of two knots, he would be three surface miles from the Rolvaag when the bomb went off. Two squared plus three squared…what was the God-damned square root of thirteen? Three and a half miles—that would be his straight-line distance from the blast.

Two minutes.

He had to stop thinking about the blast. Instead, he thought of Alex. He pictured her face. He thought of her, freed from that monster. That was better.

One minute.

The light arrived first—a dull flash in the bottom viewport. And then, three seconds later, the shock wave hit and it was like being punched by a gigantic fist and all went black.