His divers were dead now, somewhere beneath the lake. The memory of them pained him a great deal because they meant a lot more to him than nameless casualty figures in an aborted operation. But the mission protocol was quite specific in every way: if contact was lost with the divers for forty-eight hours, they were not to go down after them, they were to abandon the LSB and return to the surface. It was all quite explicit.

Yet, there was guilt.

Orr knew they were all dead; he could feel it in his stomach like something he could not digest. Yet, the idea of not descending in a search-and-rescue op made him bleed inside. What if one of them, maybe, was still down there?

Stow it, he told himself. You know the risks and you know the rules. So did they. It’s over with. Mission scrubbed. And that’s it. That’s all there is to it.

Yes, that’s all there was to it. The mission was a failure. Four top-notch DSU divers were dead. A billion-dollars worth of equipment was abandoned. That’s it. Orr felt the guilt, but he felt more than that. He was thankful that the automated winch/cable car system was still operational. That was something.

But what waited up there?

It wasn’t only the Neptune and divers that had fallen silent for forty-eight hours now, but the drill team above.

The LSB was shrinking away into the shadows beneath the car, but it wasn’t shrinking away fast enough to hide what was happening down there from his eyes. Orr looked down, his belly tightening, his nerves ringing out like the strings of a plucked lute.

He saw not only the Exosuit swinging back and forth from the clamp like a toy…but the bogies.

They were everywhere. Some were on the deck of the LSB, others perched on the cabin superstructure and the buoy tower itself. Still others were rising from the lake, fanning out their wings, droning and circling like moths.

Then the LSB was swallowed by the blackness.

But in the echoing void of the ice-dome, he could still hear them down there, buzzing and trilling. Smell that stench of ammonium that always heralded their presence.

“This damn thing go any faster?” he said under his breath.

But he knew it didn’t. It was rising as fast as the winch was programmed to operate, within acceptable safety margins. No, the car was rising and it would reach the drill tower eventually. He just hoped there would be people up there when it did.

For below, the sound of those buzzing wings was getting louder.

40
REGRESSION

She was released.

She was free.