The boat was code namedProject 09852 Belgorod.
But to all, it was known by a more fitting name.
The Doomsday Sub.
Sixth
38
May 14, 11:32A.M. ANAT
Aboard thePolar King, East Siberian Sea
Huddled in a bright-red coat and woolen sweater, Gray stood at the bow of the icebreaker. A heavy fog smothered the ship, slowing their speed to a crawl. It was so thick that wisps hung in the air like cloudy veils. He waved his fingers through one.
“Never seen anything like it,” Jason said next to him.
Gray lowered his arm. “Wish we weren’t seeing it now. This fog will make our search nearly impossible.” He stared at the wan glow of the morning sun through the mist. “And now that it’s daylight, we don’t have the borealis guiding us any longer.”
Gray pictured the swirling, brilliant cauldron of light that had led them to these waters. That had been more than seven hours ago. It had been their beacon through most of the night. Anna had posited that if the lightshow was indeed the whirlpool described in the old texts, that perhaps thefour riverssaid to lead into it might represent the cardinal points of a compass—east, west, north, and south—all merging into one at the North Pole.
Still, by morning, they had pushed into this fogbank sitting atop the ice, and the mystery vanished away. Though they had lost sight of the whirlpool in the sky, Byron had gotten a relative fix on its location during the night.
The ship continued to ply painstakingly toward those coordinates. But it wasn’t just the lack of visibility that confounded them.
Gray braced himself as the bow lifted, ramming high over the ice below, driven by the force of its twin nuclear-powered engines. A thunderous cracking erupted as the ballasted weight of thePolar Kingcrushed two stories of ice under it. The entire ship quaked as it fell. Air-bubbling bow thrusters to either side pushed the displaced ice away from the hull, allowing the ship to slide forward.
They had entered this heavy ice three hours ago, riding through it like a thirty-thousand-ton porpoise across frozen seas. Captain Kelly had expressed his doubts about how much farther they could travel if the ice grew any thicker, especially when it was this stubborn, compacted over a span of two centuries.
“We must be close,” Gray muttered.
The radio in his hand crackled with static. He lifted it to his ear. Even this close, transmissions remained garbled. Still, he made out Seichan’s voice. “Get back... the bridge. You’re... to want to see this.”
He pressed the transmitter. “What is it?”
“Just get your asses... here.”
Gray frowned and lowered the radio. “They want us back at the bridge,” he told Jason.
“Good. I can barely feel my toes and fingers any longer.”
The two of them crossed into the towering superstructure and took an elevator to its tenth level. Men and a few women bustled along the hallways, part of the hundred-and-twenty-person crew aboard theKing.
Gray and Jason reached the bridge. Seichan noted their arrival and waved them to the navigation station. They had to push through a group gathered around it, including Sister Anna, who had changed into a borrowed set of crew coveralls.
“What’s got everyone stirred up?” Gray asked.
Anna pointed. “What do you make of that?”
Gray stared down at the face of the ship’s compass. Its needle jittered right and left, then swung full around several times before returning to its dancing pattern, as if confused where to point.
“Definitely picking up some strong magnetic interference,” Byron reported as he leaned on his fists atop his station.
Gray pictured the churning lights in the sky. “Could the compass be reacting to the solar storm? Like the borealis had?”
Byron shook his head. “Not likely. Something more localized is fouling the reading.”
With his words, the needle spun once more, shivered a moment, then settled into a fixed position. No one spoke for a few breaths, waiting to confirm that the strangeness had passed.
