Frozen Fire

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  Cyn was frozen physically and emotionally, hearing but not absorbing the sailor’s almost frantic attempts to start the inflatable’s motor and the security guards’ orders to stop. Cyn kept staring—not at her clearly dead friends but beyond them at the surface of the water.

  From where she sat one hundred yards away looking through binoculars, the ocean’s surface looked like fine white foam. It wasn’t churning as furiously as the other patch had been. It was effervescing smoothly, like much dish soap in a rapidly filling sink.

  Cyn watched in mute horror as the patch continued to widen. It edged closer to the clipper, which kept moving toward it despite Günter’s visible heroics as he wrestled with the wheel and bellowed orders at the terrified surviving passengers and feverishly working crew.

  The creeping foam met the clipper’s bow. The ornately carved prow of the ship tilted into the foam and the stern rose out of the water in defiance of logic. The screams of the people on deck reached her ears as she saw them pitch forward, soaring parallel to the upended deck until they, and the boat, disappeared from view.

  Letting loose a primeval shriek, the Dutch sailor gunned the engine and the inflatable lurched forward, bow completely out of the water. Cyn fell backward, grabbing at the sides for security. She realized in a stark, panic-filled moment that the little vessel was heading straight for the deadly foam.

  Without making any conscious decision to move, Cyn flung herself over the side, landing on water as hard as concrete and bouncing violently before sinking into the wet coolness. Between the inflatable’s wake and the slight wind, churning water swamped her. Choking, gasping, she sought to brush the seawater out of her eyes, retch it out of her throat.

  A large hand gripped her upper arm and pulled. Pain ripped a scream from her; pinpoints of blackness swam into the edges of her vision. Instantly the hand released her and then she felt it slide around her other arm. This time there was no pain.

  Another hand slid into her armpit and she felt herself being hauled out of the water and onto the saddle of a Jet Ski. One arm hung uselessly at her side at an unnatural angle. Blood streamed from her leg on the same side of her body.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?”

  The security guard’s face floated before her, frightening and fantastical with the pushed-up goggles looking like bulging, insect eyes emerging from his forehead. She nodded, still choking, and then felt herself drift forward, blackness claiming her mind.

  The two additional security guards who’d been dispatched from the crash site to deal with the trespassers rounded a small point on the south end of the island. Seconds later they brought their Jet Skis to a stop with a pair of hard banking half-turns a few hundred yards short of where their colleagues bobbed. Both shoved their goggles onto their foreheads and pulled off the hoods of their wetsuits before slowly turning to stare at each other. Despite their experience and training, both were wide-eyed and breathing heavily.

  “What the fuck is that?” the first officer asked, turning back to the bizarre scene unfolding before him. A former Navy SEAL, he figured he’d seen just about everything there was to see, but this had beat all. Like something out of a brain-bending horror flick, whatever was out there causing the sea to foam up had just swallowed an eighty-foot clipper ship and a small inflatable without hesitation.

  “No fuckin’ idea, but I’m not goin’ anywhere near it,” his colleague drawled, her voice revealing every bit of twisted, unbelieving wonder that he was also feeling.

  He looked at her again. They’d known each other for a decade, and she’d been his commanding officer on a few SEAL missions before they both opted to work in the private sector.

  “Chicken?”

  “You want me to start cluckin’, sailor? God-damned right I’m chicken,” she snorted, her Texas attitude resurfacing. “I don’t know what’s goin’ on over there, but I never seen seawater looks like shavin’ cream.”

  “What should we do?”

  “You do what you like, son. I know where your next of kin live. But I say we get Barker and Timmons and that civilian and head back to port on the double. Then I’ll write a report and send it up the line, and the eggheads can figure it out. If this isn’t what you call a Situation FUBAR, I don’t know what is,” she drawled, then pulled her hood over her head again and secured her goggles.

  Revving her engine, she made the Jet Ski leap forward toward the area where their colleagues sat in, no doubt, stunned disbelief. Her partner shook his head one more time at the white patch of water in an otherwise blue sea, then followed her lead.

  CHAPTER

  20

  9:00 A.M., Sunday, October 26, Taino

  Dennis stood absolutely still, adrenaline roaring through his body for the second time that day as he stared at the bank of monitors that framed his desk. Most of them were blank, as they had been for the last few hours. They should have been providing him with a shark’s-eye view of the habitat and the mining operation or, with the tap of a keystroke, showing him exactly what was going on in the habitat’s control room, at the surface docks, on his beach, or in the pilot house of any one of his research ships. The monitors should have been displaying real-time readings of the systems and operations of the habitat—its air quality, its power consumption, its personnel roster. Instead, they were dark.

  He looked at Micki, who had arrived in his office seconds after the tremor. She’d convinced him to stay put while she made a quick trip to the comms hut to see what she could find out. Now that she’d returned, he could see that her face had gone ashy beneath her golden-girl tan. Her eyes were huge and she was trembling visibly.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Dennis had intended to shout, but instead his words were muted and his voice hoarse. It was as if every muscle in his body had gone rigid. Even breathing seemed difficult.

  “Initial reports indicate that an underwater landslide occurred at roughly two thousand feet.” Micki’s voice was raspy with emotion and her hands were flexing and clutching at air as they hung at her sides.

  “An earthquake? Hardly anything up here moved—”

  “No quake. No epicenter. Just a landslide,” she whispered.

  “With no warning?”

  I’m in a daze. Dennis blinked and tried to shake off the numbness. I’m conscious but inert, with no synapses firing and no will left to summon. I can’t do a fucking thing except fight to breathe. It’s madness.

  He couldn’t pull his gaze from Micki’s face. Something was wrong. Not just with him. With her. Her face. Her expression. There was shock there and something else he couldn’t quite identify, but it scared the hell out of him.

  There were thirty-six people down there. They may be dead. And she’s . . . studying me.

  “Where did it happen?” he asked.

  “On the western slope, about two thousand feet directly above Atlantis,” she whispered. “Some people were able to evacuate. The emergency signals from three submersibles came through. Just three. We lost the signals from two of them within twelve minutes. We lost the signal from the third—Marie’s—about two minutes later. None of the other subs managed to—” Micki stopped and closed her eyes as a shudder ran through her body.

  Swallowing hard was a deliberate, labored motion. Then she pulled in a slow, deep breath. “We have a few minutes of video footage from the external cameras. We lost the signal around the same time the turbidity got bad. The footage shows boulders hitting the habitat. You can see one pod of the habitat implode just before the signal goes dead.”

  Horror crashed into Dennis’s gut with the power of a brass-knuckled roundhouse and he bent over, clutching the corner of his desk and wondering if he was going to puke.

  “God Almighty.” He sank, practically fell into his chair. The crew—his people, his pioneers—gone. Gone. Horribly dead, their bodies unrecoverable, their lives and dreams irreplaceable.

  “God Almighty, Micki,” he said again, his voice a harsh rasp in his throat. “Are you sure we don�
��t have any Maydays? Something weak? Are you sure that none of the—”

  “There’s no audio to speak of.” She waved a hand abruptly, distractedly. “A few seconds, a few interchanges relating position and head count, that’s about it. They were too deep, too far away to pick up much and what’s there is hardly intelligible over the background noise. Then the signals crashed. All we can confirm is that only three subs detached, Dennis. Their sonar was pinging as expected, and those signals were picked up by the guys at the dock. Then they went dark.”

  Dennis blinked to clear his vision, then lifted his hand to his face when that didn’t work. To his surprise, it came away wet. “That wall was stable. We had it assayed. We checked it with everything—ground-penetrating radar.” He shook his head in disbelief. “It was stable, Micki.”

  “Was it?”

  He raised his head to look at her. Her tone—

  “This is a volcanic island sitting at the edge of a trench at the end of one of the most seismically volatile regions in the Caribbean,” she pointed out in a voice gone a little high and breathless. “The stability of that wall and everything else down there is relative. In some ways, this accident should come as no surprise. You were drilling into sediment you knew was riddled with fault lines. You were disrupting—” She stopped, and he watched in growing horror as her color deepened, her breathing became tighter.

  Before he could speak, before she could continue, the door to his office was flung open with a crash and Andi, the daytime supervisor of the topside monitoring station, burst into the room, her eyes wild and streaming.

  “The mining operation.” Her voice broke in a breathy shriek. “The pipeline’s been hit. It’s discharging,” she panted, nearing hyperventilation. “The hydrate is vaporizing in the water column. It’s broken the surface. Atmospheric sensors are going wild.”

  Her first words had brought Dennis to his feet. Her last words enabled him to find his voice.

  “It’s what?” he demanded.

  “Vaporizing,” she repeated. “Loss of pressure is forcing the clathrate out of the cavity, shooting it to the surface. It’s breaking down as it rises—” She stopped and sagged against the doorjamb, fighting for each breath. “The wind. Is blowing. Onshore.”

  Galvanized by the news, Micki dragged Andi, now swaying on her feet, to the nearest chair and pushed her into it, then made her cover her mouth and nose with her hands and breathe deeply. Over the now-sobbing woman’s head, Micki’s eyes met Dennis’s.

  “Look what man hath wrought,” she said softly. “From the depths of the Earth, you shall reap both your material reward and your eternal fate.”

  She’s lost it.

  Dennis stared into her eyes, watching the shock he’d seen in them earlier dissipate, and be replaced by a furious heat.

  “What the hell are you talking about? Snap out of it, Micki. I need you to keep it together. We’ve got a crisis—”

  Her attractive face split by a cold, terrifying smile, Micki took her hands off Andi’s shoulders and walked toward him with the feral grace of a jaguar closing in for the kill. Without realizing he did so, Dennis backed up a step.

  “That’s right, Dennis. You be afraid of me. You should be. Because the party is over.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Her expression grew more intense, and anger seemed to seethe around her. “You know perfectly well what I’m talking about, Dennis. But if you insist on playing dumb, I’ll enlighten you. You got greedy, Dennis. You had to tamper with Nature just like those other people did, the ones you were bringing here. Your executive audience. Y’all got greedy, and they died because of it. You will, too, and so will a lot of people. People who don’t even know they deserve it.”

  “What people? What are you talking about, Micki?”

  She gave a tight, jagged shrug. “Swimmers, people on boats and who live near the shore. Oh, and not just people, Dennis. You’re going to kill innocent creatures, too. Whales. Dolphins.” Micki’s demented gaze bored into his eyes, her expression sending a river of ice down his spine. “Ships are going to drop like stones into the sea. Aircraft will fall out of the sky like your big jet did yesterday, but with much less fuss and drama. No flames, just here one minute, gone the next.” She snapped her fingers and the sharp crack of it seemed to shatter the very air in the room.

  Dennis stared at her, his bloodstream running hot and full of adrenaline. “You’re sick.”

  “And you would know all about that kind of sickness, wouldn’t you, Dennis? Oh, don’t move, precious. Stay right where you are. I have so much more to tell you,” she said as he started to cross the room toward her. “The winds are calm right now, Dennis, and coming from the west. They’re blowing inshore from the site of your little mishap. That means your precious, invisible cloud of poison will reach land very soon. But that will change in a little while. The wind will change and then your deadly cloud will move into the west, to the U.S.” Her mouth twisted into a frown, as if she’d suddenly tasted something bad.

  “All the pretty parasites on the beaches of the Florida Keys, all the people on sidewalks, in cars, in the buildings will die. They’ll be fast but ugly deaths. I wish they would be the only creatures to die but, unfortunately, everything will die, Dennis. The birds, the animals, and the insects. Anything that needs oxygen to breathe will die. And then the plants will die, because there won’t be anything left to produce the carbon dioxide they need,” she continued in a slow voice that was hypnotic with insanity.

  She was describing the worst-case scenario. How did she even know about it? He hadn’t told her everything.

  “No, Micki,” he said, trying to keep his own voice calm. “No one on land will die. No animals. Methane is lighter than air. It will rise—”

  “Shut up,” she shouted. “Just shut up. Do you think I’m a fool, Dennis? I know all about your additive, Dennis, your precious dennisium—”

  His gut puckered, then lurched, at her use of the term.

  The chemical composition, even the name of his creation, was a heavily guarded secret. Only he and Victoria and a handful of people—most of them now dead—knew about it.

  Micki wasn’t one of them.

  At Victoria’s insistence, he’d kept Micki out of the inner loop.

  Victoria. He stared at Micki as if at a ghost, a monster.

  Mother of God, what have I done?

  A harsh, ugly laugh burst out of her. “Surprised, aren’t you? You might as well understand now that you have no secrets from me, Dennis. Neither does the lovely Victoria.” She shook her head. “I know all about the precious secret that was going to make you king of the world. You know, for all your intelligence, you’re so predictable. You couldn’t resist naming it after yourself, could you? How trite.”

  “There is no—”

  “Oh, shut up, Dennis,” she snapped. “I just told you I know about it. I know what it is and what it does. How you’ve pumped tons of it into the Earth. How it’s supposed to stabilize the methane hydrate and allow it to remain solid at higher than normal temperatures. And I know that the one little drawback to using it is that when those crystals eventually vaporize, the adulterated methane is heavier than air.”

  He said nothing, just watched her preen.

  “Your whole revolutionary idea, the one that was going to change the world, depended on keeping the temperature and pressure stable until you had all your lovely methane crystals safely topside, didn’t it? Poor Dennis. All that equipment, destroyed. All that time and effort, all that brain power, gone. Your grand experiment is dead beyond all reason. It’s completely out of control.” She grinned, and gave another short laugh before she continued.

  “Your precious methane, your ‘clean’ fuel, is being injected into the atmosphere under pressure. Hundreds of millions of cubic feet of it, remember? In its natural state, it’s dangerous, but it’s also lighter than air, so it would have just drifted up into the atmosphere,” she said in a singsong voice and let
her words fade away. Then Micki paused and stared at him, her gaze hard, in contrast to her tone. “And it would have collected at the poles, trapping more and more heat, exacerbating the environmental damage the rest of your criminally arrogant predecessors started.

  “Of course, Mr. President,” she said, her voice seeming to scorch the air with its acid, “even if you had left all that lovely methane hydrate pure and tried to bring it up in its natural state, the accident still would have happened. The world still would want to crucify you for bringing the Earth to an early death. The people still would want to hang you high for all to see, to watch you die for the crime of filling the atmosphere with cataclysmic quantities of a deadly greenhouse gas.”

  Micki paused again. “But leaving those crystals alone wasn’t grand enough for you, was it? You had to ‘improve’ them. So all of it is coming up on its own now, Dennis. Pumped full of your precious dennisium and vaporizing on its way to the surface. And once it reaches the surface, the methane won’t rise as quickly through the oxygen and accumulate, will it? It will hug the water and diffuse the oxygen, pushing it up and out of the way. It’s coming up so fast, Dennis, that the lovely easterly Caribbean breezes will just keep spreading it toward the west.” She shrugged nonchalantly before continuing. “And we both know that anything that moves into that methane-enriched, oxygen-deficient area will die instantly, won’t it, President Cavendish?”

  Dennis stared at her in horrified fascination.

  “Well, you always said you wanted to change the world.” Micki sighed. “Of course, eventually the additive will dissipate and then the pure methane will rise, and collect at the poles, and start superheating the world.” She paused and her normal, beautiful smile lit up her face, extending to her mad, sparkling eyes. “The world will become a wasteland. Earth’s devastation will be on your hands, Dennis. Just think of it. Your legacy will be the death of the world as we know it.”