Jia considered her for a moment, then turned back to Kong.
Your family might be down there, she signed.
Kong looked toward the entrance to the Vortex again, then back at Jia, who nodded incrementally. Kong held her gaze for a moment. He finally vented a loud huff .
Then he turned and strode toward the entrance.
Nathan stared after him, looking a little stunned. Then, as if suddenly remembering there was more to all of this, he sprang into action, grabbing the radio transmitter.
“He’s going right now!” he announced. “Prepare to launch! Everyone to your stations, we need to go now!”
And then everyone started moving at once.
Techs led them downstairs to the hangar where the HEAVs were waiting. Nathan had seen photographs of them, but this was the first time he’d seen them in person. They were compact, blunt-nosed craft, a bit on the boxy side. Not nearly as aerodynamic or sleek as a jet.
“Where are the wings?” Ilene asked.
“Oh,” Nathan said. “No, they don’t have those.”
Instead of wings they each had four stubby projections that resembled ramjets, one forward and one aft on each side. When the craft were at rest, the cylinders were vertical, and would act as hover jets to lift the craft from the ground. Once they achieved airspeed, they would rotate back to act as thrusters. Despite appearances, however, the engines were not ramjets, or jets of any kind, but were instead drives that manipulated gravity to create propulsion.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll vouch for them. You and Jia ride in that one. Simmons and I will take this one. See you down there.”
“Kong’s got such a big head start,” she said.
“We’ll catch him,” Nathan said, fervently hoping he was right. He had not expected Kong to just bolt like that. It seemed that when the Titan made a decision, he didn’t hesitate.
Maybe he could learn a thing or two from Kong.
* * *
After she helped Jia strap into the HEAV and secured herself, Ilene nervously listened as the pilots went through their checklists. Jia alternated between watching the pilots flip switches and looking off after Kong, or rather, where he had gone, for he was now nowhere in sight.
The three HEAVs kicked off in unison, turning to enter the rift.
Ilene had studied diagrams of the Antarctic entrance on the ship coming over and had been trying to get its measure when they had touched down, but there really wasn’t much to see beyond a hole in the ice. As they entered it, though, it looked pretty much like a tunnel, reinforced with some sort of bands. It looked as regular and symmetrical as a subway tube, and for a moment that was reassuring. Then she understood why: the tunnel had been drilled through the ice pack to reach the caves beyond, which—as they drew within sight—she saw were much more unruly. In an instant the regular, predictable shaft was behind them, and they entered a sprawling natural cavern far wider than it was tall, branching off in all sort of directions. Steel I-beams had been placed into the stone like braces in an old-fashioned mine, presumably to increase the stability of the caverns. She remembered Nathan’s tunnel-in-the-sand analogy and was not reassured.
The HEAVs flew through this nightmare at a ridiculous clip, and studying the craft in front of hers Ilene could now see a pearlescent energy wrapped around what she presumed were the engines, spinning like mad on the side projections and emerging as something like exhaust from the rear jets. It did not look like any form of combustion, and she half remembered Maia jabbering on about a gravity drive or something and wished she had paid more attention.
Not that it really mattered. The engines were clearly working, and right now the how of it didn’t matter.
“There he is,” she heard Simmons say, over the intercom connecting the three craft.
And indeed, there was Kong, up ahead of them, brachiating, swinging from one steel brace to the other as if the whole thing was a set of monkey bars built to the scale of a god. She thought once again about Nathan’s analogy of a tunnel through sand and suppressed a shudder. Kong weighed … a lot. What if the tunnel couldn’t withstand the force he was subjecting it to? They were right behind him, moving far too quickly to slow down, much less stop if the passage collapsed.
She noticed the tunnel was tending decidedly downward now, growing steeper and steeper as they went.
* * *
Nathan glanced at the diagram, showing the tunnel cutting through the Earth’s mantle into the hollow core.
“You’re sure he’ll survive this?” Simmons asked. He looked back over his shoulder to the back seat where Maia was strapped in.
“You mean the monkey?” he said. “The one you wanted to dump?”
“Hey, if we need him, we need him,” she said. “Is he going to make it to the bottom in one piece?”
“Oh,” Nathan assured her, “he’ll be fine. It’s us I’d worry about. We’re about to be launched a thousand miles in two seconds.”
He cracked an antacid tablet from its packet and plunked it into his water bottle. “Until gravity inverts itself and spits us into free fall.” He tipped the water bottle so she could see the pill fizzing and bubbling like crazy. “It’ll be the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen.” He handed Simmons the paper bag tucked in front of his seat.
“Here,” he said. “For the vomit.”
“What?” she said.
Ahead, Nathan saw Kong lose control as a steel beam snapped under the force of his swing. He landed on his backside on the bottom of the tunnel and began to flail about, slipping on his butt as if going down the largest waterslide on the planet. As the slide became a cliff, the Titan managed to turn over and claw at the cliff to no avail—there was absolutely nothing to afford purchase for something of his mass.
As they, too tipped over the edge, Nathan saw Kong
