pounding was regular but fast.
She eased up a bit more when Conrad motioned with a gloved hand. “Down there,” he said. “See it?”
Serena peered into the mist below. A hole parted and she could see a grid of lights, like a landing pad. “I see.”
“No, do you see it?”
Suddenly Serena could see that the landing pad was in fact the flattened summit of a gleaming white pyramid rising sharply through the floor of the abyss. She had to shade her eyes from the glare of the lights off the pyramid’s surface.
“P4,” she heard herself saying under her breath.
“Don’t ask me how it got here,” Conrad said, now sporting his sunglasses. “I can’t explain it yet. But I will.”
The conviction in his voice inspired confidence. His excitement was pure, unadulterated, and moving. Not a trace of fear, she thought with envy, just genuine curiosity and enthusiasm. She had almost forgotten what that felt like.
She slipped on her sunglasses. The flat summit, brighter than the whitest snow, was blinding. So this was why the pope had sent her down, she realized. She had suspected something spectacular, but she was completely unprepared for the sight or dimension of this monument. It was gigantic.
She was staring at it in wonder when she heard her line creak.
“Just some slack,” Conrad assured her. “No worries.”
She heard a sharp crack and the ping of metal. The piton holding her line in the ice popped out, and she thought she was falling.
“Conrad!” she shouted as she buried her ice ax into the wall and hung on.
But Conrad said nothing. She looked to her side. He was gone. It was his piton that had popped out.
She looked down in time to see Conrad fall into the mist.
“Conrad!” she screamed.
Yeats rappeled down beside her.
“You couldn’t wait until afterward to bury him?” he asked, scanning the billowing mist below. Yeats flicked Conrad’s line with the back of a gloved finger. “He’s still floating.”
She heard a crack and looked up to see the ice screw on her own line start to slip. She instinctively pulled out her ice ax and swung it at Yeats, who put up a defensive arm. “Hold this,” she said and suddenly felt herself plunging into space.
She fell through the cloud a few seconds later, hurtling toward the lights below when her line snapped tight and she stopped with a jolt. For a moment she feared she had shattered her pelvis. But her harness had done its job.
She caught her breath and could hear her windproof parka squeaking against the nylon rope as she swung back and forth.
“Conrad?” she called.
“Over here,” he replied. “I found something.”
She swung her head in the direction of his voice, and her head torch found him swinging ten feet from the wall, unable to get a hold.
“Hang on,” she said as she swung over.
It took three tries before her arc was wide enough to reach him. As she swung toward him, she held out her hand, and he gripped it tight, holding her next to him. They swung together in space for a few seconds, clinging to each other.
“Finished bungee jumping, Conrad?” she asked, trying to mask her anxiety with sarcasm.
“Look!” he said.
She turned in the darkness and her head torch bathed the wall with light. There was something in the ice. Then her eyes focused and Serena found herself face-to-face with a little girl, frozen in time.
“Dear Jesus,” she whispered.
“Remember when you told me the only way we’d get together again was when hell freezes over?” he told her. “Well, here we are.”
The mist lifted and the light from below flooded the entire wall. In an instant Serena could see hundreds of human beings, their faces frozen in fear. All of them seemed to shout out at once. Serena covered her ears, only to realize that she was the one screaming.
12
An hour later ,inside the warm P4 habitat module, Conrad was concerned as he looked at Serena on the fold-out surgical table. Her eyes blinked rapidly beneath the high-intensity lights, an oxygen mask over her mouth and several EKG electrodes attached to her chest. Her hair was brushed back from her face and the belt around her cargo pants loosened.
Conrad pointed out the fogged-up porthole at the American flag Yeats had planted atop the pyramid summit.
“Focus on the flag and breathe deeply,” he told her as he administered the oxygen from a heavy yellow canister.
Her parka and outerwear were gone, and he tried not to gaze at her full breasts rising and falling beneath her wool undershirt. She had been hyperventilating since they reached the bottom of the ice gorge, spooked, it seemed, by the frozen graveyard that entombed them. Conrad glanced at the EKG monitor. Only now was her heart rate returning to the upper register of the normal range.
“Better?” he asked her after a minute.
She looked at him like he was a lunatic for asking.
Conrad looked around the cramped habitat perched atop P4’s flat summit at the bottom of the gorge. It was a single module, fifty-five feet long and fourteen feet in diameter. Yeats was huddled with the three technicians by the monitors. One was Lopez, a female officer Conrad recognized from Ice Base Orion. The other two were fair- haired steroid freaks who answered to the names of Kreigel and Marcus. They were clearly Yeats’s muscle down here.
Conrad turned to Yeats. “Was there any particular reason why you forgot to mention the frozen bodies?”
“Yeah,” said Yeats. “I wanted to see your reaction.”
Conrad gestured at Serena and glared at Yeats. “Satisfied?”
“Quit whining.” Yeats stood up, a hypodermic in hand. He flicked the syringe with his finger, and a clear liquid squirted into the air. Serena squirmed.
Conrad watched in alarm as Yeats grabbed hold of Serena’s arm. “What are you doing to her?” he demanded.
“Giving her a shot of the stimulant eleutherococcus,” said Yeats, injecting it into Serena’s arm before Conrad could stop him. “It’s a plant extract of the ginseng family. Deep-sea divers, mountain rescuers, and cosmonauts take it to resist stress while working under inhospitable conditions. About the only damn usable thing the Russians ever contributed to our space program.”
The drug seemed to be working. Conrad looked at Serena, who was breathing more evenly now, although there was anger in her eyes. Clearly this wasn’t a woman who was used to being taken care of.
“She’ll be fine,” said Yeats. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got to check my drill team’s search for that mythical shaft of yours.”
“As mythical as P4,” Conrad called out as Yeats opened the hatch and stepped outside. Subzero polar air whooshed inside.
“You seem to be holding up just fine, Conrad,” Serena said, catching him off guard. She had removed her
