either,” Grant added, scowling.
Peering in the direction that Brigid was indicating, they saw a continuing expanse of whiteness. Out here, the sky was white, a thick blanket of clouds reflecting the ice and snow below them. Snow flurries continued to fall across their vision, a dappling of white across the whiteness of the background. Kane relaxed his eyes, surveying the wash of white that stretched before him. As he did so, he noticed the shadow. It seemed almost incongruous as it stretched across the snow, pouring out across the white blanket in a gray, indistinct pattern that was easy to miss. The sun was ahead of them, Kane noted, pushing the shadow of the structure toward them so that its apex almost touched their booted feet. They had landed the Mantas barely one hundred yards from it, and yet it had remained utterly invisible, disguised in the harsh, white landscape.
Kane raised his arm, drawing its shape in the air with an outstretched finger. “There,” he said. “You see it?”
Grant squinted, trying to cut down the dazzling effect of the sun on the white snow as he sought the thing that Kane could see. Beside him, Brigid checked the readout of her palm-sized tracker device before peering again into the swirling whiteness.
A sudden lull in the wind brought with it a break in the dance of the falling snowflakes, and for a few seconds the majestic structure stood revealed.
It was white, like the ground and sky around it, so white that it seemed to exist only in the shadows it cast. Its leading edge stood just twenty-five yards from the three Cerberus warriors, and it stretched far back into the snow-packed ground. It was difficult to estimate its actual size, for it was clear that the structure had been mostly buried by the snow. Yet the evidence of it was there, a rough circle of struts and spines that dominated the land for almost a quarter mile, becoming more crowded near to what was presumably the center.
There were other parts, too, they now realized as they gazed all around them. Struts stuck up here and there, like shoots from a hopeful plant. Kane looked behind him at the path they had just trod. Their footprints were already losing their shape as the swirling snow filled them in, and in another few minutes they would be gone completely as nature painted over them, obliterating any trace that they had ever existed. And over there, just a few feet from where they had walked but a minute before, another strut poked from the ground, rising up in a point that towered to twelve feet above them, twice the height of himself or Grant. As remarkable as it seemed, they had walked right past it, taking it for a natural feature of the snow-laden environment, a stalagmite striving up to the skies. Kane’s eyes flicked upward, and he smiled as he saw that there was nothing above the strut, nothing to drip down and create the beautiful stalagmite that twinkled in the frosty sunlight.
Brigid released the breath she hadn’t realized that she had been holding. “It’s colossal,” she gasped.
“See,” Kane said, “I’d have gone for big and maybe samey.”
“It’s so beautiful,” Brigid continued, ignoring Kane’s remark.
Still shielding his eyes, Grant stepped closer to Brigid, peeking at the display screen of the tracking device she held. “You think this is it, then?”
“Oh, this is it, all right,” Brigid assured him, never turning her attention from the magnificent spires that jutted from the white landscape. “The secret laboratory of Abraham Flag.”
Chapter 3
The wind picked up again, and snow swirled around them as they stood there, admiring what little they could see of the fantastical structure. After a few seconds, Kane turned to Brigid, who still stood with her mouth agape as she admired the magnificent spires of the buried building.
“I think we’d better find a way inside, Baptiste,” he told her, “before my, er, frozen assets fall off.”
“What?” She turned to him, mystified. “Sorry, Kane, I was just…”
“It is beautiful,” Kane agreed. “But let’s not wait to see what it looks like inside. That’s why we came here, isn’t it?”
Brigid nodded. “It is going to be very exciting seeing what’s inside there,” she said as she jogged forward, leading the way. “I can feel it.”
Kane followed the red-haired woman, while Grant brought up the rear, as she compared the electronic readout she held to the structure around her. Brigid’s instrument held a portable sonar device, as well as a computer memory containing the plans that they had found for Flag’s so-called Laboratory of the Incredible. The plans had been discovered among other sensitive information that had been held as encrypted files on a computer drive that Kane, Brigid and Grant had found on a mission in North Dakota a few months previously. The computer had contained a wealth of military information dating back over two hundred years to the final days of the twentieth century, before the nukecaust of 2001 had changed everything. Decrypting the files was proving to be a laborious process, teasing out the information one tiny thread at a time. The first useful file to be decrypted from the North Dakota hard drive had contained information relating to a secret weapons project near the Russian-Georgian border. The weapon, code named the Death Cry, promised to be of devastating use against a race of alien invaders called the Annunaki, who had been manipulating the human race since their earliest days. However, a confluence of events upon finding the Death Cry had resulted in the device going off in a level of the quantum plane generally reserved for matter transfer, though thankfully not a plane that the Cerberus team accessed.
The scientists working at Cerberus had continued in their endeavors to decrypt further files from the database in the hopes of finding something else that might be of use against the Annunaki. Their latest discovery had been the incomplete schematics to a fabled research laboratory from the 1920s. The Laboratory of the Incredible had been the rumored workplace of Abraham Flag, an adventurer and explorer of some renown, whose exploits had abruptly halted on All Saints’ Day, 1931. A master of many scientific fields, Flag had been conducting research that was years—decades even—beyond that of his contemporaries. However, he had chosen to keep many of his remarkable discoveries to himself and, upon his disappearance, a persistent rumor had it that the man’s fortresslike laboratory contained numerous treasures, from nuclear reactors to a functioning cell phone that required no broadcasting network for its operability. The truth of these rumors had, to Brigid’s knowledge, never been proved, but clearly Flag’s hidden Antarctic retreat had been a matter of some concern to the U.S. military.
Guided by the information from the North Dakota data base, the Cerberus field team had traveled to the Antarctic and pinpointed the Laboratory of the Incredible as best they could. Only here, on the ground, was the enormity of the structure becoming apparent.
Kane, Grant and Brigid spent almost an hour searching the immediate area, looking for a point of entry into the strange construction, but other than the spires and bumps, there seemed to be nothing but deep snow.
“I think it got buried,” Brigid announced after they had spent a full twenty minutes just trekking around the perimeter of upthrust spires.
Kane looked at her, his brow furrowed.
In reply, Brigid shrugged. “It’s been here a long time,” she said. “The natural weather patterns cover everything with snow over time.” As she said it, she unconsciously shook her head, and settling snow fell from her ponytail of bright red hair.
“Guess we’re making our own entrance,” Kane decided, producing a compact tool kit from inside his Arctic jacket. The tool kit was roughly the length of Kane’s forearm, and it featured a weatherproof pouch of soft leather that snapped together so that it could
