She looked over her shoulder and saw that the wall behind her was still rock. This elevator system had been built into a vertical rockface. Zahra looked up and saw that the floor of the hangar was, indeed, stone. She could even see the tangle of cables that had been fed beneath the control center platform. They then snaked over to the exposed rock wall and descended beside the elevator shaft, attached to it with heavy-duty clamps and bolts.
The elevator came to a stop on an abyssal precipice. Zahra carefully stepped out, glad that there was still twenty feet between it and her boots.
“What the hell is that?” Yana asked.
Zahra didn’t know either. One hundred feet across from them was a dark shape beneath the ice. At the center of it was another door, but this one didn’t have a hatch wheel or a distinguishable handle of any kind. It was also quite large. Zahra estimated that it was over eight feet tall and four feet wide.
The chasm stretched five hundred feet to the left and right, where each side ended with more ice. The door had been constructed in the exact middle of the ice wall. While the massive wall seemed huge to her, Zahra knew there could be hundreds more just like it elsewhere on the continent.
A stout bridge made entirely of steel beams and stretched out over the yawning expanse. It connected directly to the ice-locked anomaly. Zahra took in the construction and deduced that it should be able to hold their combined weight. Dietrich Krause’s designs had been flawless so far, so why not now?
On each side, reinforced handrails and vertical supports ran along the entire length of the bridge. Zahra looked back to the rock wall and followed cables as they touched down next to the elevator platform. Then, they turned and followed the bridge across the abyss. Zahra leaned right and noticed that they’d been attached to the bridge itself, much like they had been attached to the wall behind her.
“The floor,” Hammet said, kneeling and inspecting the bridge, “it’s not metal.”
Zahra carefully touched it with the bottom of her right foot and found it to be constructed of a type of nonslip rubber. She applied more pressure. It held without issue.
She glanced at her partners, closed her eyes, and stepped onto the bridge.
It accepted her weight just fine.
Zahra let out a long breath. She took her attention off the bridge and applied it back on the newest door.
“This is it,” Zahra said quietly. “This is the source of the Underworld’s power.”
“Is it a giant generator?” Hammet asked.
“Or perhaps it’s a nuclear option?” Yana suggested.
Zahra couldn’t give them an answer. Its location interested her just as much as what it was.
“Whatever it is,” she replied, “I think the ice is meant to cool it.”
“You think that’s why they dug so deep?” Hammet asked.
She shrugged. “Could be.”
The bridge was wide enough to accommodate the three of them walking side by side. Zahra started off first, keeping to the middle. She wasn’t going to test that theory; none of them were. Yana and Hammet were right behind her, also keeping to the middle.
As they neared, Zahra stopped, edged to the right, and looked down. There was no bottom. She returned to the center of the bridge and brought her eyes back up to the door. She noticed that the only section free of the ice was the door and a two-foot-wide border around it. This was where the cables were attached to the outer wall of the facility’s power supply.
When they were six feet from their destination, the three explorers stopped and stared.
“Project Fleshgod…” Zahra said to no one in particular.
“Yeah, and?” Yana asked.
“I think this might be Mengele’s lab, where the experiments listed in his journal were conducted.”
Yana scratched her head. “Makes sense, I guess.”
“How do we open it?” Hammet asked.
“How else?” Zahr replied. “‘Speak friend and enter.’” Hammet gave her a sideways look. “You know, Gandalf the Grey?”
“Is that from Harry Potter?” Hammet asked, showing no signs of humor.
Zahra dipped her head and shook it. She stepped closer to the door. “Yeah, sure.” Then she held up the Vulcan sign. “Live long and prosper.”
“Look at this,” Yana said. She pulled out a flashlight and clicked it on. When the artificial beam struck the anomaly’s dark surface, it vanished. “It’s the same technology that was used on the bombers.”
“Think this is the source of it?” Hammet asked.
“Has to be,” Zahra replied, though she didn’t know for sure. Then it hit her. “Is it a server room?”
Yana pointed at the door. “This is a server room?”
“Could be,” Zahra replied. “The temperature makes perfect sense when you think about it. Whatever experiments were being conducted down here probably used a lot of machinery. Machinery equals power. They would need to be cooled, like a room full of heat-emitting servers.”
“But that still doesn’t explain what this thing is,” Yana said. “I still don’t see a way in, either.”
“I do.”
