The Arctic Incident Read Online Free Page A

to skip down the access tunnel. The monorail ran the length of the scorched rock to the massive chute. The chutes were natural vents that riddled the earth’s mantle and crust. Magma streams from the planet’s molten core blasted toward the surface at irregular intervals. If it wasn’t for these pressure releases, the earth would have shaken itself to fragments aeons since. The LEP had harnessed this natural power for express surface shots. Recon officers rode the flares in titanium eggs in times of emergency. For a more leisurely trip, shuttles ascended to the various terminals around the world.
    Holly slowed her pace. There was nowhere for the goblin to go. Not unless he was going to fly into the chute itself, and nobody was that crazy. Anything that got caught up in a magma flare got fried right down to the subatomic level.
    The chute’s entrance loomed ahead. Massive and ringed by charred rock.
    Holly switched on the helmet’s microphone.
    “That’s far enough,” she shouted over the howl of core wind. “Give it up. You’re not going into the chute without science.”
    Science was LEP-speak for technical information. In this case, science would be flare-prediction times. Accurate to within a tenth of a second. Generally.
    The goblin raised a strange rifle, this time taking careful aim. The firing pin dropped, but whatever this weapon was firing, there wasn’t any left.
    “That’s the problem with nonnuclear weapons, you run out of charge,” quipped Holly, fulfilling the age-old tradition of firefight banter, even though her knees were threatening to fold.
    In response, the goblin heaved the rifle in Holly’s direction. It was a terrible throw, landing fifteen feet short. But it served its purpose as a distraction. The B’wa Kell triad member used the moment to fire up his wings. They were old models: rotary motor and a broken muffler. The roar of the engine filled the tunnel.
    There was another roar, behind the wings. A roar that Holly knew well from a thousand logged flight hours in the chutes. There was a flare coming.
    Holly’s mind raced. If the goblins had somehow managed to hook up the terminal to a power source, then all the safety features would have been activated. Including . . .
    Captain Short whirled, but the blast doors were already closing. The fireproof barriers were automatically triggered by a thermo sensor in the chute. When a flare passed by below, six-foot-thick steel doors shut the access tunnel off from the rest of the terminal. They were trapped in here, with a column of magma on the way. Not that the magma would kill them, there wasn’t much overspill from the flares. The superheated air would bake them drier than autumn leaves.
    The goblin was standing on the tunnel’s edge, oblivious to the impending eruption. Holly realized that it wasn’t a question of the fugitive being crazy enough to fly into the chute. He was just plain stupid.
    With a jaunty wave the goblin hopped into the chute, rising rapidly from view. Not rapidly enough. A twenty-foot-thick jet of roiling lava pounced on him like a waiting snake, consuming him completely.
    Holly did not waste time grieving. She had problems of her own. LEP jumpsuits had thermal coils to disperse excess heat, but it wouldn’t be enough. In seconds a wall of dry heat would roll in here, and raise the temperature enough to crack the walls.
    Holly glanced upward. A reinforced line of ancient coolant tanks were still bolted to the tunnel roof. She slid her blaster to maximum power and began sinking charges into the bellies of the tanks. This was no time for subtlety.
    The tanks buckled and split, belching out rancid air and coolant traces. Useless. They must have bled out over the centuries, and the goblins had never bothered replacing them. But there was one. A black oblong, out of place among the standard green LEP models. Holly positioned herself directly underneath and fired.
    Three thousand gallons of coolant-enhanced water crashed