seeing as we’d just saved their lives, so that was the end of that. If I hadn’t, Bluey’d still be in some shithole Afghan prison right now.’
‘How very noble of you,’ said Sophia, equally sarcastic.
‘What the fuck would you know about being noble?’ Chase snapped. ‘Kill a bad guy to protect an innocent, I’d do it again in a second. Remember that.’ The last was delivered with a clear undertone of threat. Sophia took the hint and remained silent.
The shouting stopped and the door opened again. Bluey entered, red-faced. Behind him, Hien’s expression was black with anger, her arms folded tightly across her chest. ‘All right, mate,’ said Bluey with exaggerated heartiness, ‘we’ve, ah, reached an agreement. We’ll help you out.’ Hien muttered something through clenched lips. ‘So long as this means we’re all square. Sorry, Eddie, but, well . . .’
‘That’s okay. I understand.’ Chase extended his hand, and Bluey shook it. Hien’s scowl deepened, but she said nothing more.
‘So, what do you need?’ asked Bluey. He indicated the machines around him. ‘You name it, we can do it.’
‘Passports?’
‘Just tell us the country! Got Australian, American, British, Canadian, Russian . . . even rustle you up a North Korean one if you fancy.’
‘British’ll do us,’ Chase said. ‘What about the biometrics?’
Hien snorted derisively, pride in her work momentarily overcoming her displeasure. ‘Biometrics? Hah! Cracked them before they even came into use.’
‘Wonders of the Internet, mate,’ said Bluey. ‘We’ve got friends all over the world who share this stuff around. Takes governments ages to change anything, but every time they do, somebody’ll bust it open in less than twenty- four hours.’
‘And how long’ll it take to make new passports?’
‘Less than twenty-four hours,’ Bluey told him with a half-hearted grin. ‘Just need to take some pictures, pick a name, get your biometrics, all that. Anything else?’
‘Credit cards’d be useful.’
‘No worries.’ He reached into a drawer and took out a stack of different ones, fanning them out like a pack of colourful playing cards.
‘That’ll do nicely.’ This time, it was Chase’s turn to grin. ‘They’re not stolen, are they? Don’t want to be racking up a fortune on some little old lady’s card.’
‘Nah. Got a load of dummy accounts set up, so you just pick a name you like. Don’t use it too often, though. First unpaid bill, and alarms go off.’
‘Won’t need to, hopefully. Either we find what we’re looking for, or . . .’ He let the unsaid alternative hang in the air.
‘Got you, mate,’ said Bluey, briefly downcast. ‘Hey, what about your fiancee? Will she need a passport as well?’
‘Probably, but she’s got something else to sort out first.’
‘No probs. Just bring her in. All right, then - time to take some snaps!’
19
‘Okay,’ said Trulli, ‘where do you want to start?’ ‘Good question,’ Nina replied. Now at the engineer’s apartment, she was using his computer to run the GLUG program, cycling between it and UNARA’s survey of Antarctica, the rocky landmass hidden beneath the desolate ice cap laid bare by the probing radar beams. ‘It must be somewhere in eastern Antarctica - it’s the nearest place to make landfall from their settlement in Australia.’
Trulli zoomed in on the appropriate section of the radar map, the edge of the Ross Sea on the left side of the screen, the Shackleton Ice Shelf on the right. ‘Still a bloody big area to cover. The coastline’s two thousand kilometres long!’
‘Let’s see if we can narrow it down, huh? You got the sea level data from a hundred and thirty thousand years ago?’
‘Give me a sec,’ said Trulli, calling it up. A few clicks, and a yellow line was overlaid on the map, inland of the current icy coastline. ‘There.’
‘Okay, so we need to find any underground lakes within . . . the inscription translated as just “near” the sea, so let’s say five miles. Eight kilometres.’
Trulli zoomed in further, adjusting the program’s settings so that underground lakes showed up in a vivid false-colour magenta, impossible to miss against the dull grey shades of the buried rock. ‘You do realise that the lake might not even be there any more?’ he asked as he scrolled along the coast. ‘If a glacier moved over it, it’d erase anything that was underneath.’
‘If it has, then I’m wasting my time and the Covenant’s already won,’ said Nina. ‘But if it’s still there, we’ve got to find it.’
‘And if you do, then what? It’ll be buried under God knows how many metres of ice.’
‘We’ll have to drill down to it somehow. Maybe we could borrow your equipment once you’re finished.’
Trulli chuckled. ‘Yeah, I’m sure Bandra’d be happy to do that.’
‘Bandra?’
‘Dr Bandra. The expedition leader.’
‘I thought you were the expedition leader?’
‘I’m the technical leader,’ he explained. ‘Bandra’s the scientific leader. As long as the project’s still officially in a test phase, I’m in charge. Soon as Cambot’s good to go, he takes over.’
‘Cambot?’
He smiled. ‘My latest gizmo. Combination ice borer, mini-sub and semi-autonomous robot. Just what you need for poking about under kilometres of ice - and he’s environmentally friendly, too. No need to fill the drill shaft with thousands of litres of freon and avgas to stop it from freezing up. Really cool, if you’ll pardon the pun.’ His attention snapped back to the screen. ‘Oh, hey. Got a lake here, about four clicks from the old coastline.’ He switched from an overhead view to a three-dimensional topographic map, the magenta blob of the lake now seeming to hang some distance above the bedrock.
‘That’s not it,’ said Nina as he rotated the map to view it from other angles. ‘The city was in a valley, which they flooded - so the lake has to be on rock rather than ice. We’re looking for something that’s surrounded on at least three sides by the terrain.’
‘That’s not the fella, then.’ Trulli returned the image to an overhead view and continued searching. ‘But yeah, Cambot still needs a final test before we can let him loose on a proper scientific survey, so we’re going to drill into a lake that’s not of any scientific interest. So if anything goes wrong we don’t accidentally screw up a million-year-old ecosystem. If everything works, then we move on to Lake Vostok. Four kilometres of ice to drill through - should give Cambot a real workout!’
‘The only downside is that you have to live in Antarctica for weeks to do it.’
‘Well, it’ll be an experience, won’t it? And at least there I won’t be snacking all the time.’ He patted his stomach. ‘I could stand to lose a few kilos, don’t you think?’
She smiled. ‘Not my place to say. Oh, is that another lake?’
Trulli switched back to the 3-D view. ‘Yep. Less than half a kilometre from the old coastline, and on the rock to boot. Fits your bill so far.’ He rotated the image. ‘Definitely in a valley . . . and the seaward end looks a bit crook, if you ask me.’
‘Could it be a dam?’
‘Maybe, but I can’t say for sure, not at this resolution.’
‘How deep is the lake?’
Trulli checked. ‘Not very. Maybe twenty metres at the deep end.’ He adjusted another setting, revealing the shape of the ice above it in translucent, glass-like form. ‘Some weird shapes, though. The ice on top of the lake’s mostly flat, but there’re these indentations in the ceiling. Wonder what . . . ah, I know!’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Volcanic vents, that’s it. They warm the water and it rises up and melts the ice above them. Not enough to reach the surface, though - the lake’s about forty metres down.’
