“Now,” he said, running a hand through his white crewcut, “let’s talk about this. You’ve probably heard the bullshit about ancient cities down here and who supposedly built them. Well, that much is true. They are here. As to who built them…I don’t know. I was not briefed on that and if I hear one of you people say the word alien in my presence or amongst your selves, you’ll need a surgeon to remove my size eleven from your assholes. Got it?”

Everyone nodded.

“Okay. Good. Now, the city below us isn’t the only one. Same time Gundry was launching his cryo down here five years back, a paleobiologist by the name of Dr. Robert Gates was operating out of this same facility and running a field camp up in the Dominions. He drilled into a subterranean shaft and, lo and behold, he found the ruins of another city. You maybe heard about that. He was supposed to have found the mummies or remains of the…individuals that built the city. Is that true? I don’t have the faintest.” Orr packed his pipe and lit it. “Okay, now Gundry thought that our city below and the one in the mountains might have been part of a common whole at one time and still might be connected by passages beneath the ice cap itself.

“But that’s neither here nor there. We’re not here as scientists or archaeologists. We’re not here to figure out who built that wreck below. We’re not concerned about little green men or flying fucking saucers. Our target is that city, plain and simple.”

Javonivic raised her hand. “Sir, are we to explore it?”

“No.”

“To retrieve something?”

“No.”

“Then…”

Orr puffed on his pipe, clouds of smoke rising above his head. “Some six years ago, a magnetic imaging fly-over picked up something that has had the heavy-thinkers scratching their heads ever since: an anomaly. A self-perpetuating magnetic field of incredible intensity and it’s centered down there in that city. Background magnetism is, of course, strong down here at the Pole, roughly seventy-thousand nanoteslas in the area of Kharkov, but what’s coming out of that city is putting out anything from eighty up to one-fifty with random spikes of two-hundred plus. The field down there fluctuates, but the intensity has been gradually increasing these past five, six years. Currently, it’s right off the scale.”

The divers looked at each other.

Finally, Bell just went ahead and asked what they were all wondering. “Sir…what the hell could put out that sort of juice? I’m guessing it can’t be of natural origin.”

“No way. Whatever’s down there is artificial and it’s getting stronger and stronger. Not much less than a massive electromagnetic power plant could produce the signals we’ve been picking up.”