Frozen Fire Read Free Page B

trip to this pristine undersea paradise. She felt no regret about what she was intending to do. She’d been granted an opportunity to right some of humanity’s wrongs, and the vista before her was her early reward.
    Coral and anemones and brightly colored fish, doing what they’d done for millennia, displayed no curiosity toward the noisy monster that moved past them in the watery dusk. Micki slowed further, gliding just above the smooth seafloor.
    Octopi slithered away. Eels and their clueless prey watched her from their crevices among the rocks and maddening human debris that littered the bottom. Curiosity got the best of a pair of shy hammerhead sharks and they swam toward her, arcing up and away seconds before they would have made impact. Moving at a speed that barely registered, Micki steered the submersible to the stark, jagged line where the seafloor gave way to the abyss and hovered there, pointing downward, for a few seconds.
    Then, with an abrupt burst of acceleration, she sent the dive tube surging forward past the edge. The deepest dark appeared beneath her, replacing the half-light reflected by the pale, sandy bottom now behind her. Her body braced itself against the sensation of falling that her intuition insisted was taking place, though the tube was stable in the water.
    Embraced by the primordial darkness of the abyss, Micki closed her eyes as something close to an orgasmic rush tightened every muscle, electrified every nerve. Her gasp echoed in the tight space and it took more than a moment for her to catch her breath, to bring her mind back to the task at hand.
    Hands shaking from both excitement and a sliver of fear, she set the controls to pick up speed as she resumed her dark descent, moving past the craggy outcropping of the abyssal walls. Turning on the external flood-lights was an option that she refused to exercise. Part of the thrill, part ofthe delicious risk was slicing through the silent, lethal, dimensionless darkness guided only by the ghostly glow of the head-up display in front of her.
    As she approached a depth of eighteen hundred feet, the small sonar screen at the left of her field of view showed her first destination coming into range. Now she flipped on the vessel’s powerful outside lights and the stark, forbidding face wall became clearly visible as she continued to descend parallel to it.
    Moments later, she brought the vehicle to a stop opposite a small cave two thousand vertical feet above the habitat and approximately two hundred feet north of it. Setting the auto station keeping thrusters to stabilize her position and maintain pitch and attitude, Micki began initiating the sequences needed to extend the small robotic arm from its sheltered tube at the front of the pod.
    Carefully, she maneuvered the arm to allow one of its pincers to open and slide beneath the handle at the top of the first ceramic box. The pincer firmly locked in place, Micki released the clamps that had held the box secure for the descent, and delicately negotiated the box out of its “nest” on the platform. Once the box was clear of the diving unit’s structure, she gently rotated the arm holding the deadly, precious cargo and extended its reach deep into the stygian depths beyond the cave’s narrow opening.
    Her gaze glued to the real-time video playing on the other small screen on the dashboard, Micki worked as hard at keeping her breathing even and her hands dry and steady on the controls as she did at maneuvering the bomb past the random outcroppings and occasional creatures in the cave. She was operating practically blind. Her only guidance came from the small but powerful light mounted on the end of the arm and the live video feed from the even smaller camera next to it. She moved the box forward at a painstakingly slow pace.
    Fully extended, the mechanical arm had a range of twelve feet. When it had reached that distance into the cave, Micki set the ceramic box carefully onto a clear space on the