The Genesis Plague (2010)

camera’s night vision automatically compensated for the darkness. On the command unit’s viewing screen, the live feeds transformed to green-tinted monochrome. The glowing airborne dust swirling in the camera made it seem like the bot was trapped inside a snow globe.
    ‘It’s quiet in there,’ the engineer said. She adjusted the volume slide control upwards. The only sounds coming over the audio feed were the bot’s low-humming gears and the crunching of gravel beneath its rotary tracks.
    ‘Too quiet,’ Crawford added.
    ‘God, that looks creepy,’ Jam muttered, craning his head to get a better view.
    While Crawford was preoccupied with the screen, Jason glanced down at the cell phone clipped to the colonel’s belt. Why was he talking with Randall Stokes? For moral support and spiritual guidance? Highly unlikely, thought Jason. Maybe Crawford was soliciting tactical advice. Whatever the case, he was anxious for Flaherty to report back on Stokes’s shady involvement.
    ‘The air quality in there is surprisingly good,’ the engineer reported, after glancing at the data readings coming back from the bot’s onboard sensors. ‘Plenty of oxygen for—’
    ‘Wait,’ Jason interrupted. ‘Back it up a bit.’
    The engineer did.
    Eyes narrowed to slits, Jason attempted to discern something in the image. ‘Can you shine some light in there?’
    ‘Hey, hey,’ Crawford protested, throwing up his hands. ‘What about the element of surprise, Yaeger? If they see the light—’
    ‘It’s important, Colonel,’ Jason insisted firmly.
    Crawford’s jaw jutted out. Circling his eyes at those assembled around him, he realized that his opinion was vastly outnumbered. He relented by throwing up a hand. ‘Fine. Give it some light.’
    The engineer pressed a button that shut off the infrared. The screen went black for a split second before the bot’s floodlight snapped on. The refreshed image showed crisply the tunnel’s raw features.
    ‘There,’ Jason said, pointing to an unnatural form partially hidden along the ceiling. ‘Can you get a better shot of that?’
    ‘Sure.’ The engineer worked the controls to angle the camera up and zoomed in on the compact object fitting snugly into a hole in the rocky ceiling. It had an angular body and a circular eye.
    There was no doubt as to what they were now looking at. ‘A camera?’ Jason gasped. ‘What the hell is that doing in there?’
    Staring dumbfounded at the image, Crawford was speechless.
    ‘What … like a surveillance camera?’ Meat said, coming over for a better look.
    ‘Yeah,’ Jason said.
    Meat stated the obvious: ‘That’s not good.’
    Clearing his throat, Crawford finally spoke up. ‘First the metal door. Now this? It has to be a bunker.’
    ‘Could be.’ Jason studied him. For the first time, Crawford’s unwavering confidence showed signs of cracking. Oddly, Crawford seemed to be feigning surprise. Why?
    ‘Let’s kill the light and keep moving,’ Crawford suggested.
    Jason concurred.
    The engineer adjusted the camera and flipped back to night vision. Before she got the bot moving again, she warned, ‘We’re about thirty-five metres in, and we only have a fifty-metre cable.’
    For another five minutes, they all watched in silence as the robot wound through the mountain’s stark bowels. Twice, the engineer needed to swivel the camera sideways to study openings in the wall. But both times, the floodlight revealed dead ends. Along the way, they’d spotted two more surveillance cameras.
    Deeper the bot went, until the fibre-optic cable spool nearly emptied.
    Then the passage’s repetitive structure changed abruptly. The jagged walls, glowing emerald in night vision, widened before falling away. Only the ground was discernible at the bottom of the screen.
    ‘What do we have here?’ Jason said, squaring his shoulders.
    ‘Looks like … a cave?’ The engineer paused the bot and its audio feed went eerily silent. Pushing another button, she said, ‘Let’s try sonar.’
    Crawford was locked in constipated silence.
    A small panel popped up in the monitor’s lower right corner. Within seconds, the sonar data-capture was complete and a three-dimensional image representing the interior space flashed on the screen.
    ‘Wow. It’s pretty big,’ the engineer said, interpreting the data.
    To Jason, the sonar image resembled a translucent blob. ‘How big?’
    It took her a second to put it to scale. ‘Like the inside of a movie