Protocol 7 (26 page)

Samantha, who had regained at least some of her old warmth, stepped forward and put her hands on Nastasia’s. “I’m Samantha,” she said. “And quite frankly, it’s rather nice to have another woman along for the trip.”

“Thank you,” Nastasia said warmly.

“Calibrated and ready,” the holo-display said politely.

“Good,” Simon said. “Let’s take that tour you promised, then, shall we, Andrew?”

Simon looked to one side and then the other, taking them all in as he leaned forward and placed his hands on the table. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Spector VI, Hayden’s invention and our ticket to Antarctica.”

Andrew stroked a panel on the holo-display, and a three-dimensional model of the Spector blossomed on the tabletop, as big as a rain barrel and exquisitely detailed. Still standing off to one side, Hayden regarded his creation with an undisguised look of self-satisfaction.

At first sight, the Spector resembled a huge metal insect, studded with electronics and covered with multiple layers of glittering, electrically active skins, like a hybrid of a robotic armadillo and a praying mantis.

“Look here,” Hayden said. He approached the table and gently thrust his hands through the 3D hologram, manipulating the image, opening it to reveal various sections.

“Propulsion is here,” he said, “in the aft compartments. Engineering and environmental tech here, along the left sides. Living quarters for eight without squeezing—here, here, and here. A nice, big ready room between the sleeping quarters and the ops bridge. And this port on top opens to an airlock that links to the bridge—that’s the shielded blister here, forward and high on the beauty’s back. That’s where we’ll do the watching and steering.” He moved sections and layers as if he was peeling away the scales of a fish, showing them all what was hiding inside his remarkable vehicle. The amazement in everyone’s eyes was apparent as Hayden described the functions of each section. As he spoke his accent faded, his speech accelerated; he was entirely in his element, entirely absorbed by his amazing design for the first time in months.

Max concentrated on every word the inventor said, and knew almost immediately that he would have to spend hours more with the man just to get the slightest hint of what was to come. He pointed at the two long graceful blisters near the bottom of the Spector’s hull, one on each side. “What are those nacelles?” he asked.

“Ah,” Hayden said. “Those. Well, in point of fact, friends, we’ve been mis-labeling Spector from the beginning. It’s not really a submersible.”

“What?” Ryan said. “I thought—”

“It’s more than that,” Hayden said, plowing through. “Much more. It’s actually an amphibious vehicle. It can move almost as well on land as it can on water. And those—” He swept his fingertip down the length of the nacelles, left and right, “—those are its treads. They can be deployed any time there’s solid terrain under the hull—at the bottom of the ocean, at the shoreline, or anywhere else.”

The others goggled as he used his fingers to expand the bridge into fine detail: the status panels, the navigation station, and the command chair. He looked at Max and gave him a sidelong grin. “This,” he said, flicking a finger at the padded seat sitting in the middle of it all, “is the pilot’s seat.”

“And I presume that would be you?” Hayden said sarcastically, looking at Max with a smug grin.

Max ignored him and looked at Simon, as the others tried to comprehend the recent development, and the surprise inclusion of Max as their guide and pilot.

Simon had seen it all before of course, but once again he was amazed at how everything on the bridge looked bare, almost as if there was no serious instrumentation at all. He looked at Max with a confident stare. “You’re the man,” he said.

“It’s not enough,” Max said, arriving at the same conclusion. “Look at the complexity of this thing. The propulsion units alone require a three-man crew of nuclear engineers; environmental controls for a ship going this deep is a two-person job at minimum. And the sensor matrix, the attitudinal controls, the communications linkages—this is ridiculous. Where is everything?”

“Run almost completely by a cooperative team of AIs,” Hayden said proudly. “Dedicated to the ship and to following human guidance.”

“But we can’t use them,” Ryan said suddenly. They turned to look at him. He was pale as a ghost, bloodless with sudden realization.

“What?” Samantha said. This was making less and less sense to her.

“RAI,” he said looking from face to face. “Remote Access Intervention, remember? Whoever seized control of Hayden’s robot and destroyed the other two Spectors will sense their activation immediately and seize control again. Sink the ship. Kill us all.”

Simon frowned. “I know we’ll have to cut off some of the systems,” he said. “We’ve talked about that. The ones that link up to the satellites will have to be muted somehow—that’s your job, right—but others can surely stay in—”

“No,” Ryan said. “You don’t understand. All AIs talk to other AIs. That worldwide noospheric matrix is what makes them intelligent, and not just old-fashioned programmed response robots. Their judgment, their language skills, their fuzzy-logic reasoning abilities, those are all grouped effects. So all of them—all of them—have to go offline or we’re dead before we start. At best, they’ll be simple servomechanisms—programmable modules, like your home computer or pad.”

“I understand,” Simon said patiently. “But we can make it work. Max won’t be alone. We have you for sensor administration, Andrew. Ryan, you’re the data coordinator; you can query the AIs independently, without fully activating them—and Andrew’s scrambler won’t allow them to do it on their own. Hayden knows everything about the Spector; he’s an AI himself—”

“—without the ‘A’ part,” the inventor grumbled.

“—and Samantha can oversee the environmental and life support functions.”

“It’s not quite that simple,” Hayden said.

“No,” Simon allowed, “but it’s not impossible. We are not going to give up before we even try.”

“Even if we die in the attempt?” Ryan said.

No one had an answer to that.

“The biggest problem I see,” Max said, “is the sensor array, without the aid of the visual information that it provides and translates digitally, how am I supposed to see where the hell I’m going?”

Hayden leaned into his holo-display and frowned. “How so?” he said.

“Because there are no damn windows in this thing,” he said. “All of your sensor input— even visual—is digitized, channeled through and interpreted by fully functional AIs before it gets to whoever is piloting this monster.”

Hayden nodded. “We had to do it that way. The intelligent surface—the cloak of invisibility, so to speak—can’t be interrupted by windows or ports. We had a hell of time even working out the wiring shafts and hatches.”

“I have to be able to see,” Max said. “I trust my eyes; they have never failed me. But holo-displays and wireframes only? No. Can’t work.”

Nastasia stepped forward. “The underworld of Antarctica can be quite dark,” she said. “Very deceiving. Even when there is light, the depth recognition is impossible. It fools the eye.”

Max interjected, “Well, it’s not the first time I’ve had to trust my instincts in blind operations.”

“To hell with that, Maximilian,” Hayden said. “I’m not letting a man take twelve years of my life and destroy it simply because he doesn’t trust the equipment.”

“And I’m not putting thirty-seven years of my life away in a prison cell if this operation blows up because some fucking AI has been taken over by long-distance hypnotists!” Max snapped back.

Hayden made an angry gesture. “Don’t be daft! I—”

“No, I am not driving this thing into the hands of the authorities!”

“Then maybe you’re not driving it at all!”

Simon cut in. “Hayden, please!” he said. “Max—hold on.”

Andrew cleared his throat. “We can always calibrate the front console to display holographic readouts without AI signature or assisted connectivity,” he said.

Max turned on him. “What?”

“There is a straight digital feed coming from the external sensors. I can plug in a nice, dumb interpreter to throw that up on a display right in front of you. It’ll be just like an open window. And meanwhile Ryan and I can decouple the AIs, dumb them down enough to get their readouts, too, without even a whisper to the satellites.”

Hayden rolled his eyes, “Fine. Rebuild the whole damn ship, why don’t you?”

Simon sighed. “Hayden. Is it possible?”

He gave Simon a withering look. “Probable,” he admitted with great reluctance. “But I’ll tell you one thing: it’s impossible to do without being inside the Spector.” He tossed back the rest of his heavily laced coffee. “I suppose Andrew and I could start on some preliminary programming,” he muttered, “but…goddamn it.”

Max almost sneered. “And I gather you won’t have to fire up any of your AI buddies to do that,” he said. “One little signal and—”

“You don’t need to explain my work to me,” he snapped. “I designed them. I know what they are capable of.”

Samantha shifted in her chair. “Excuse me,” she said. “If the AIs can’t be used, how can I read the data from the bio-devices feeding info into the main frame medical console?”

Max gave her a sidelong look. “What did you do when you didn’t have the assistance of bio-devices,” he asked her, “years ago? I presume everything was just fine back then.”

She blinked at him in surprise, started to say something, and then stopped herself. A moment later she leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. Her mouth was an angry line.

Simon tried to bring them all back together. “Guys,” he said. “We have to operate with minimal AI intervention. That’s all there is to it. We have to operate with our gut and do things as we used to when we were kids. We have gotten used to AI-assisted devices, but the threat to the whole operation and to ourselves is too great if we’re discovered.”

“Simon is correct,” Nastasia said, her accent broad and exotic. “You remember, the quarantine deadline was extended by two weeks? ‘Logistical problems,’ UNED told us.” She shook her head. “No. The truth is, fourteen different teams of scientists and explorers broke away and tried to hide in the ice after the quarantine was announced—some of them under the ice, in the tunnels and caverns they created. They were all caught—as far as we know. But the South American team was the last to be detected. They had managed to stay free for three weeks longer than anyone else, because they used no AIs—none at all.”

Hayden humphed again. “They also didn’t have an amphibious vehicle with no windows, trying to navigate from ocean to ice three hundred feet below the surface,” he said. “But…we’ll manage. Somehow.”

And that’s as close to unanimity as we’re going to get today, Simon told himself. Better end this on as good a note as I can. He stood up and said, “All right, then. Let’s talk about the days ahead.”

Ryan took that as his cue to stand up and pass out yet another set of forged documents and fake passports. “As you all know, we have to get to Valdivia. From there, the journey will be a little rough. According to the data Simon gave me, the Munro is currently entering the Straits of Magellan, so once we make it to Valdivia, we will have to take a short flight to Puerto Williams.”

Max frowned at that. “That route is very carefully monitored by the Chilean military,” he said. “Trust me, I speak from firsthand experience. Nothing flies, floats, or swims in or out of Puerto Williams that the local military doesn’t see and approve of. But then,” he allowed himself a very small smile. “Luckily, I have some—let’s call it experience with these fellows; we’ll be fine—if we’re careful.”

“It’s not this route that I’m worried about,” Ryan said looking at the holographic image of the vessel.

“It’s the entry into Antarctica.” Max already knew where he was going with that.

“Precisely.”

“Are we sure there is no other was to enter the continent besides this Station 35?” Hayden asked.

For a moment Max was caught by surprise, as Simon had not elaborated beyond what they discussed before.

Simon tried to explain the situation so that the whole team was in sync, including Max. “Our first point of entry will be a location known as Station 35, which Nastasia knows intimately and will describe it to us. Our coordinates are deeper into the continent, and we will need to enter from inside the water to avoid detection. Station 35 is our only option for a stealth entry during this quarantine.”

Nastasia nodded to Simon in recognition and began to describe their entry point in further detail. Station 35 was an experimental program by a special German scientific team that had dug tunnels from the top of the ice shelf to approximately three hundred feet below. Their mission had been to study possible habitation and logistics for future expeditions, and so they had developed an extensive underground network dug into the ice. During the process they had hit a fissure that had later flooded from the melting of ice, and thus the project had been evacuated. This entry through the channels of water was where Nastasia would lead them toward their coordinates with the Spector.

Simon looked at his group with a mixture of amusement and concern as they listened to Nastasia. They still handled the papers like they were alien objects. They had become so used to their electronic helpmates, their holograms, and pads that they were visibly uncomfortable with paper and the printed word.

“Guys,” he said, trying to sound gentle. “We have to get used to this. The way things were done in the past.” He weighted the envelope in his hand and smiled sadly. “This is the way it will be for us from now on.”

“Welcome to the Stone Age,” Hayden muttered.

“Or the age of tissue, anyway,” Andrew said, trying to make a joke.

No one laughed.

The evening fog that filled Puerto Williams to the brim made it impossible to see more than ten feet in any direction. Which is not a bad thing, Simon told himself. There’s not a chance of being seen by anyone…or anything. They would each be able to approach the harbor without being noticed, and the frigid air was an eerie reminder that they were getting very close to the icy continent of Antarctica.