what he was seeing through the scopes.
Then it hit him. He suddenly understood why the glow at the center of the explosion had vanished. It was blocked from his view — by a wall of ice rolling toward him, as wide as the horizon.
As he stared, the cresting wave spread out from ground zero, like a boulder dropped into a still lake.
A tidal wave of ice.
His heart leaped to his throat as he ran for the idling helicopter. “Go!” he screamed as the world continued to rumble ominously. Instead of the explosion fading and echoing away, it was growing louder.
He fled to the Seahawk’s door.
One of his men pushed the door open. “What’s happening?”
Wilson dove in. “Get this bird in the air! Now!”
The pilot heard him. The rotors immediately began to kick up, spinning faster, rotating toward lift off.
Wilson dove to the copilot’s seat.
The blast wave of ice raced toward them.
He stared upward, praying. Overhead, the rotors spun to a blur. The Seahawk lifted from its skids, bobbling a bit as the rotors dug at the frigid air, trying to find purchase.
“C’mon!” Wilson urged.
He stared as the horizon closed in on them.
Then the bird took to the air, shooting straight up.
Wilson judged the distance of the surging ice-tsunami.
It seemed to be.
It was!
They were going to make it.
Then a half mile away, something blew under the ice. The entire cap slammed up at them, striking the skids of the helicopter. It tilted savagely.
Wilson screamed.
The amplified wave struck the helicopter, swatting it out of the sky.
Amanda stared at the screen of the DeepEye. A moment ago, the monitor’s resolution had fogged from a deep sonar pulse, wiping out detail. Then worse — the screen went suddenly
Only one effect registered that hue on a sonar device.
A nuclear explosion.
John Aratuk stood beside her. The elderly Inuit maintained his vigil in the Cyclops room. He stared up through the dome of Lexan glass. The seas lay dark around them. They were nearly at crush depth. Here the world was eternally sunless.
John pointed.
A star bloomed in the darkness. Off to the south, high above.
Ground zero.
The old man turned to Amanda. He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. His grief was plain in every line of his face. He had aged decades in a single moment.
Amanda spoke. “I’m so sorry.”
He closed his eyes and turned away, inconsolable.
Amanda turned back to the DeepEye. The man’s daughter, all the others, they had sacrificed everything in an attempt to save the world.
But had they wasted their lives?
The Polaris trigger had blown. That was plain on the DeepEye monitor. But what of Amanda’s attempt to block the two amplifiers?
She stared at the blued-out screen. Her idea had been a simple one, employed rapidly. She had ordered the
As the submarine had plummeted into the Arctic depths, she had rapidly punched in the coordinates and aligned the DeepEye toward the locations of the two nearest amplifiers in the array. Once it was deep enough, she had pointed the DeepEye and widened the breadth of the sonar cone to encompass both devices, needing the distance and depth to accomplish this. Then she had turned the full strength of the DeepEye upon the pair of amplifiers and prayed.
For Polaris to work, the array had to propagate a perfect harmonic wave, just the right frequency to generate an ice-shattering effect. But if the DeepEye was transmitting across the wave front, it could alter the harmonics just enough to disrupt and perhaps jangle the wave front from igniting the two amplifiers within the DeepEye’s cone.
Amanda stared over at the monitor, waiting for it to clear.
Had her plan worked?
Burrowed between two mattresses, Jenny clung to Matt. The world cartwheeled around them both, not smoothly, but jarringly, like a paint shaker. Even with the cushioning, she felt battered and bruised. Her head rang from the concussion of the explosion.
But she was still alive.
They both were.
Matt hugged her tight, his legs and arms wrapped around her. “We’re heading down,” he yelled in her ears.
She also felt the increasing pressure.
After a long minute, the world slowed its spin, settling out into a crooked angle.
“I think we’ve stabilized.” Matt slid an arm from her and peeled away one edge of the mattress to peek out.
Jenny joined him.
In a berth across from them, Kowalski had already poked his head out. He waved a field flashlight up and down the crew quarters. The floor was tilted down and canted to the side, still rolling slightly. “Is everyone okay?” he called out.
Like butterflies leaving cocoons, the rest of the party emerged. Muffled barking confirmed Bane’s status.
Magdalene cried from farther back. “Zane…he fell out…!”
Zane answered faintly from the other direction, “No, I’m okay. Broke my wrist.”
Everyone slowly crawled free, checking their own limbs. Washburn carried Maki. She sang softly to the child, soothing him.
Tom worked his way up the narrow passage between the stacked bunks. His eyes were on the walls and ceilings. Jenny knew why. She heard the creak of seams, the pop of strained joints. “We’re deep,” he muttered. “The explosion must have thrust us straight down.”
“But at least we
“It was the ice around the sub,” Tom said dully. “It shielded us. The hollow sea cave was a structural weak point of the station. It simply shattered away, carrying us with it.”
“Are we going to sink to the bottom?” Magdalene asked.
“We’ve positive buoyancy,” Tom answered. “We should eventually surface like a cork. But…”
“But what?” Zane asked, cradling his arm.
All of the Navy crew stared at the walls as they continued to groan and scrape. Kowalski answered, “Pray we don’t reach crush depth first.”
With a start, Craig woke in darkness, upside down. He tasted blood on his tongue, his head ached, and his shoulder flared with a white-hot fire.
