Free Kill Switch by Jonathan Maberry

it was over we swapped out our magazines and waited for the next wave. Waited for more.
    Waited.
    Amid the echoes of thunder and the billowing smoke, we waited.
    The silence that fell was strange and ugly and wrong in more ways than I can possibly describe.
    No one else came running up the slope at us.

 
    CHAPTER ELEVEN
    THE VINSON MASSIF
    THE SENTINEL RANGE OF THE ELLSWORTH MOUNTAINS
    ANTARCTICA
    AUGUST 19, 10:44 P.M.
    We needed to understand this. I wanted to check these men, to see if there was something about them that would explain this.
    The moment wouldn’t allow it. Whatever was happening … it was down there. Down the slope, inside those deep shadows.
    I gave my men a quick, meaningful look and got very tight nods. They were clearly as terrified and confused as I was. This mission had started out wrong and it was slipping sideways, losing whatever tenuous shape it had.
    I nodded toward the shadows, then removed a flash-bang from my rig, pulled the pin. I didn’t need to call “frag out.” We all moved back, looked away, covered our ears.
    The flash-bang bounced on the dense ice, then settled into a roll, vanishing into the unknown.
    Then it went off.
    The bang was huge, magnified by the stone walls and the vastness of the cavern. We ran down the slope, guns ready, barrels tracking everywhere we turned our eyes, ready to fire, ready to continue this surreal fight.
    The slope was littered with chunks of ancient ice that was veined with discoloration as if polluted water had been frozen here over the centuries. We saw bloody footprints, going down and coming up. We saw pools of blood and fallen equipment. We passed through the ice layer and entered the rock hardness of the mountain. As the ice gave way we realized that we were on a stone slope, and one that was far too regular to have been anything natural. And far too old to be anything our own drills and engineers had cut.
    â€œLooks clear,” said Bunny, though he stood braced to fight.
    I put my high-intensity flashlight on the widest beam setting and shone it down. I heard Bunny gasp in the same instant my heart jumped inside my chest.
    â€œCap’n,” breathed Top.
    â€œI know,” I said, my throat dry.
    â€œI don’t think Erskine’s team was looking for no damn meteors,” said Top.
    â€œI know.”
    Bunny just said, “No.”
    The slope was some kind of rampart that angled downward for at least a thousand yards. It was cracked in places, and in other places byways led off from it to form slopes both angled and flat. It became clear that this was a cavern of unbelievable size. The ceiling soared above us and, except for titanic support pillars of natural rock, the cavern stretched for miles. We could see some of it, just a hint, because of weird bioluminescence—probably some species of mold—that clung to every surface. All around, on the slope, built into the walls, and tumbled ahead of us, were gigantic stone blocks. They were stacked like prefab building units and intercut with other structures—cones, tubes, pyramids, each of fantastic size, some of them taller than the Great Pyramid in Egypt. I know how that sounds, but we were all seeing it.
    The flashlight had a quarter-mile reach and it barely brushed the outer perimeters of what could only be a vast city of stone.

 
    INTERLUDE FOUR
    OFFICE OF DR. MICHAEL GREENE
    EAST HAMPTON, NEW YORK
    WHEN PROSPERO WAS TWELVE
    The boy was being cooperative for a change. Even expansive. He’d recently had a new series of vivid dreams since their last session and clearly wanted to talk about them, and of course Dr. Greene wanted to hear every detail. Not because these sessions were billed at four hundred an hour, though that was a factor; no, it was because the boy genuinely fascinated Greene. In his entire professional career, including all of his clinical work, he’d never encountered anyone like Prospero Bell. No one as