The helmet swung in his direction. The suit began to move. It thumped its way ever forward. No, it was not smart. It was a predator, a monster, a murdering beast that saw only his death. It moved closer and closer. Though Orr should have been shivering down beneath the glacier, he was sweating. His eyes were wide, his mouth trembling as he waited for the Exosuit to get within range. What he was about to do was like playing one of those claw games at the fair, except what he hoped to catch was not a stuffed Mario or a Minion.

The Exosuit got closer.

His hand shook on the toggle.

It was bearing down.

Five feet.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

He turned on the winch spots and stopped the Exosuit momentarily with an explosion of brilliance. He dropped the clamp. It fell right on the suit and he closed it just as quick. The Exosuit flailed its arms, making hissing and popping and clicking noises. Orr, grinning now, activated the toggle and the winch lifted the suit five feet in the air where it dangled helplessly. It kept trying to cut itself free with the saw, but its aim was too far off.

Orr saw lights coming from above.

The cable car.

As it descended, it looked like a spacecraft from a movie, lighting up everything below it. It dropped finally all the way into its cradle and he made his way over there, climbing into the car. As he got into it, he saw the acrylic bubble of the Exosuit shatter and long, white, coiling tendrils emerge.

39
ESCAPE

The cable car was rising.

Inside the cage, Orr clung to the handrails. He was shaking, beyond tense, maybe close to a complete nervous breakdown. Below, he could see the decks of the LSB. The equipment. The buoy. The umbilical that reached down from the drill tower high above. All that ultra-expensive technology on the surface of the lake and on the bottom, abandoned now. As were the divers themselves.

Jesus.

The lights from the car illuminated the LSB as he was pulled up slowly away from it. He was nearly a hundred feet up now, the borehole through the icecap far above him yet. There was an arched ice-dome over the lake that was half a mile above its surface. It seemed like it would take years to get even that far, let alone through the borehole itself which ran for something like a mile through the glacier up to the drill tower above. The journey would take roughly an hour. And Orr knew it would be the longest hour of his life.

There wasn’t much to be thankful for.