The Apocalypse Club

by McLay, Craig

  “Older than the known universe, correct,” Tristan said.

  “But…” I tried to think of something meaningful to say. Nothing came to mind. “How many of these did you find?”

  “Nine of them in all.”

  “Any idea what the symbol means?”

  “I spent a great deal of time on that question,” Tristan said. “Interestingly, I did find some similarities in some of the symbols and letters that were incorporated in ancient glyphs and runes. Of course, that isn’t my area of expertise, so it’s strictly amateur guesswork.”

  “And what did your best amateur guesswork come up with?”

  “The closest thing I could find was one that means approximately the same thing as ‘beginning’,” Tristan said. “In our language, though, we would refer to it another way.”

  “And what way would that be?”

  He smiled. “Apocalypse.”

  -26-

  We returned to the anteroom because Tristan didn’t want to leave the lights on in the terrarium for longer than necessary and standing there knowing what was lurking in the darkness on the other side of the glass kind of gave me the creeps.

  “Okay,” I said. “So you found some very old blue bowling balls in Greenland and then came home to live in a cave with whatever that was. How does that connect to tornadoes coming out of the sky on command?”

  “Hudson wants what’s under that ice sheet,” Tristan said. “He can’t blow it up and he can’t risk drilling through it, so he’s taking a different approach.”

  “Which is?” I asked.

  “He’s melting it.”

  “Say again?”

  “I don’t think he settled on that approach immediately, of course. He did try several other expeditions, but they yielded no more than the first. Several of his expeditionary partners died, although it’s just as likely that he had them killed when they discovered what he was really up to. Ghenzhai. Cabosta. Others.”

  “Are you saying that your former expedition partner is creating global warming so he can dig up the world’s oldest balls in Greenland?” I asked.

  “You just saw what a tiny fragment of one of those rocks can do in a controlled environment,” Tristan said. “Imagine what you could do with eight of them in nineteen twenty-three. Not only do they have apparently unlimited biogenerative capacity, they are also an unlimited energy source. And, like all energy sources, can be used for almost any purpose. One side effect of even extremely limited exposure is that they prolong biological life. I have not aged a day or had so much as a mild cough in the last 90 years. I don’t know what is under all that – rapidly shrinking – ice. But keep one thing in mind, Mister Simms. These do not appear to be naturally occurring objects. They are not fragments of a meteorite.”

  “So what are you saying?” I asked. “They’re…”

  “Cargo,” he said. “And whatever brought them here is still there.”

  “But that still doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Imagine a power source like that in the hands of a man like Hudson,” Tristan said. “Unscrupulous, yes, but also brilliant. And fearless. I saw him scramble up rock faces and into cracks in the earth that left professional alpinists trembling. Every advance in technology achieved in the last century has his name on it somewhere. Most of it still hasn’t seen the light of day because he keeps it for himself. But he’s always there. Hiding in the background. The owner of the company that owns the blind trust that owns the company that owns the patents and trademarks.”

  “I met him.”

  “Not in the flesh, I imagine.”

  “No. It was a teleconference. How did you know?”

  “His body is somewhere, but he has little use for it at the moment. Terrified that it might become damaged, you see. Exposure to the rocks extends life, but it doesn’t make you immune from being hit by a truck while crossing the street. Or killed by a political undesirable who happens to sneak through your security controls.”

  “Then where is he?” I asked. “In suspended animation somewhere?”

  Tristan laughed. “No! His body may be. He probably retains a certain affection for it. He always did have a vain streak. But Hudson would never sleep through something like this. Particularly when his plan is moving into its final stages. But his mind is everywhere. He transferred his consciousness into a machine, you see. One that is powered by a fragment of one of his rocks, so he never has to worry that he will be extinguished by a blackout or an electromagnetic discharge.”

  “Is it at the Firmamental head office?”

  “I very much doubt it. I’m sure the original is in a bunker somewhere untouchable by anyone else. But he gets around. Any machine connected to any other machine anywhere in the world is open to him. Phones, computers, you name it. Anything with a network connection or that draws power from an outside source. He is omnipresent.”

  I tried to fathom this. “But that would mean he…”

  “I suppose you could say he has become the closest thing to a god that humans have been able to imagine,” Tristan said. “As the world has become more interconnected, his power has only grown. And his fear.”

  “Fear?” I almost shouted it. Words need propulsion when the chasm between speaking and comprehending is as wide as that. “What in the hell could somebody – or something, if that’s what he is now – possibly be afraid of?”

  “The same thing that all living things fear,” Tristan said. “Death. His rocks may lose their power. All of his machines may be destroyed or deactivated. He has taken steps, of course, but nothing is entirely foolproof. Eventually, even if he outlasts all that, he knows, this world itself will die. Through cataclysm or the inevitable collapse of our sun, he cannot stay here forever. And forever is very much on his mind. Immortality, Mister Simms. We dream of it before we even know what it is. And believe me, none of us truly know what it is. Do you know that there are small cults scattered throughout the world who know of his existence and worship him as a god?”

  “No, but I see where they’re coming from.”

  “He allows many of them to survive. Vanity. Except for one group in Nevada who applied for tax-free status, of course. Them he was forced to wipe out with a flash flood. The others survive in isolated pockets of perceived conspiracy nonsense. Many of them pray to him for fame, wealth, curses for various diseases, good weather. The usual things. I wouldn’t be surprised if he answers them from time to time, the old fraud.”

  “But if he’s everywhere, he must be here!” I said, panicked.

  Tristan raised a calming hand. “This facility is completely off the grid. All power is supplied by that blue rock you saw in the other room. I don’t actually need food or water.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “I was in there, too. Does that now mean I’m now going to live to be two hundred years old?”

  “No. The storage unit is totally sealed.”

  “Hmm. You wouldn’t be able to just maybe crack it open a little for me, would you?” I asked. “An extra fifty years or so might not be a bad thing.”

  Tristan took a deep breath. “I have lived a long time. Long enough to see my wife, my child and most of my family die. When Hudson and I went our separate ways, he knew that I knew far too much to just let me walk away, so he has been hunting me ever since. When he couldn’t get me, he went after my family. I tried to save them. Tried and failed. It’s not me he really wants, anyway. It’s that damn rock. He has tried everything to get it back.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked. “Blow up all the Weather Stations to stop them from melting the ice sheet?”

  Tristan looked grim. “No, I’m afraid we passed that tipping point many years ago. The sheet is almost gone. And there are thousands of Weather Stations all over the world. Most of them quite well guarded. Even if you did manage to take one of them down, he would have it back up again in moments.”

  “Did we talk about this already and I missed it? What e
xactly is his plan?”

  “As I said before, he believes – and I happen to agree – that those rocks are not just random space debris. They were shipped here. He believes that whatever brought them here is still sitting under the ice.”

  “An alien spaceship?”

  “If you consider that we as a species evolved from rocks that travelled here on that ship, it’s a bit of a stretch to call it an alien craft,” Tristan said. “It would be more accurate to call it our mother ship.”

  “Right. And what exactly is Hudson planning to do with it?”

  Tristan looked at me like I was a particularly dull student. “All things being equal, I think he means to fly it out of here, my boy.”

  “To where?”

  Tristan shrugged. “I would assume, to back to wherever it came from.”

  “And we’re going to…”

  “Try to stop him, naturally.”

  “Right,” I nodded. “Of course. And, uh…”

  “Yes?”

  “Why would we try to do that, exactly?”

  “You of all people have seen firsthand the damage that Hudson has done to this planet with only a fraction of the power that may be available to him if he succeeds,” Tristan said. “Imagine the havoc he would wreak with unlimited resources and entire galaxies at his mercy.”

  “I am trying.” The most I could conjure up was an image of the Mars Curiosity rover being sucked up by a giant black funnel cloud. Nope. E.T. being sucked up by a giant funnel cloud? Not really doing it, either. Never really liked that alien with his glowing finger, big bug eyes and squealing voice.

  “We know absolutely nothing about this alien intelligence other than the fact that it is, most likely, responsible for the creation of all life on this planet,” Tristan said. “It would be extremely unfortunate if the first contact we made with them was through a power-crazed electronic presence bent on universal domination.”

  “Right. I am beginning to see your point. So, um, how exactly do we stop him, then?”

  “You were right about one thing,” Max said.

  “I was?”

  “We can’t use the Weather Station to stop him from melting the ice sheet.”

  “I don’t think I was right about that,” I said. “I think I actually suggested the opposite.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Okay.”

  “But that doesn’t mean we might not be able to use the Weather Station to our advantage, anyway,” Max said.

  “How?”

  Tristan began pacing back and forth. “The ice sheet is on the verge of breaking up within weeks. Possibly even days. His plan has been in the works for many years and its successful completion is almost within his grasp. This is not something he is going to trust to anyone else. He is going to want to be there firsthand.”

  “But how can he do that if he doesn’t actually have hands?” I asked. “Or any other actual body parts, for that matter?”

  “My guess is that he’ll use a C-Mech,” Max said.

  “Of course!” I said, smacking my forehead. “That makes perfect sense. Can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself.”

  “Would you like me to explain what a C-Mech is?” Max asked.

  “Yes, please do.”

  “It’s basically a cyborg,” Max said. “Titanium endoskeleton covered with genetically engineered flesh on the outside.”

  “Sounds kind of like a terminator,” I observed.

  “There’s one major difference,” Max said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Terminators work, at least in the movies. The C-Mechs were originally supposed to replace the GDI. Why have living soldiers when you can just manufacture them on an assembly line and pump them out by the thousands? You download a human consciousness into the brain-box and the idea is that you get all of the advantages of a human – instinct, training, etcetera – and none of the disadvantages. It gets injured or killed, then you just order new parts and it’s ready to go again in a couple of weeks.”

  “So what was the problem?”

  “The problem was they never worked properly,” Max said. “They were buggy. They blew up the wrong shit. They lost connectivity. The flesh reacted with the metal in some pretty spectacularly horrible ways. The first batch got such bad gangrene that they loaded them all into a canister and set the controls for the heart of the sun. But that wasn’t the worst of it.”

  I swallowed. “What was the worst?”

  “The worst was that grunts downloaded their brains into the things and then they couldn’t get them back out. Imagine being trapped in a malfunctioning robot. How do you think you’d react? Especially if it’s down to four hours of remaining battery life and you have access to high explosives and artillery.”

  “Fuck me.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “So why in the hell would Hudson ever trust himself to something like that?” I asked. “Why not just download himself back into his own body?”

  “He’s been out of that body for quite some time,” Tristan said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it hadn’t deteriorated significantly in that time, despite their best efforts to the contrary. The rocks only seem to work on living, animate things in that respect. No, his body is probably no longer an option for him.”

  “The C-Mechs are also pretty much indestructible,” Max said. “They tested them up to G-zero four megaton blasts and they walked away. All the flesh was gone, of course, but the frame was intact.”

  “They have also made some improvements to the prototypes in that time,” Tristan said.

  “How do you know this?” I asked.

  “We have sources on the inside,” Max said cryptically.

  I thought about asking, but decided against it. “And you think they’ve made enough improvements that Hudson would trust his life to one of these things?”

  “Yes,” Tristan said. “He won’t risk his life setting foot aboard a potentially hostile or dangerous alien ship in an ordinary body. That part of the country is more than dangerous enough all by itself. All it would take is one relatively small ice wall to give way and he could suddenly find himself trapped under two hundred thousand tons of rock that won’t melt for another fifty years.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So where does the Weather Station come into it?”

  “The largest Weather Station in the world is located on the Förssagen ice sheet, less than a mile from the site. It’s reachable through a narrow passage in the Handleer Crevasse, which is, thanks in part to Hudson’s efforts, now accessible from the sea. If we can cut the comlink connection to Hudson’s C-Mech and hack into the Station, we can use it to create a storm that will drop the remaining ice sheet on Hudson’s head, trapping him in there for good.”

  I tried to swallow, but my throat was dry. “I think there were a lot more ifs in that sentence than you actually used.”

  “I looked at the site and it’s technically doable,” Max said. “Like most plans, it depends on a lot of things not going wrong.”

  “This may not be the time to bring it up,” I said. “But we weren’t the ones who hacked into the Weather Station the last time. About the only thing we did was cut the lock off the door.”

  “And that’s about all we’ll have to do this time, too,” Max said. He smiled and reached into his pocket, pulling out what looked like a USB stick. “Recognize this?”

  It took me a moment, but I did. “That’s not –”

  “Oh, but it is.”

  “But I thought we dropped it on the ground at the site! I thought it got blown away in the storm!”

  “If experience has taught me anything,” Max said. “It’s to never leave useful gear behind on the field of battle. Particularly if that gear might be used against you as evidence at some point in the future.”

  “Do you think it’ll work?”

  “It worked the first time.”

  “I guess that depends on how you define worked. We did get arrested and spend two months in the JD. I h
ave a feeling we wouldn’t get off so lightly this time. And we are a little further away from our objective. This isn’t just a bike ride to the park.”

  Max gave me a disappointed look. “Oh Mark. How quickly you forget. If there’s one thing we know how to do other than attacking Weather Stations, it’s stealing transportation.”

  “How quickly I forget? We drove it through the front of a convenience store.”

  “Well,” Max said, “considering what we’re going to steal, I would say that our chances of doing that a second time are extremely remote.”

  “I don’t think I like the sound of this.”

  “You will when I explain the details.”

  “I’ve never been a big fan of implied consent. What if I don’t like the details?”

  “Many years ago,” Tristan said, interrupting. “I was on an expedition in the Bolan Pass in what is now called Pakistan. We were excavating the site of an Indus Valley settlement at Mehrgarh dating back almost ten thousand years. We had all the necessary permits and permissions, of course. The dig had taken many years and no small outlay of funds to organize.”

  “Yes?” I said, asking more what this had to do with our immediate discussion than what happened next.

  “We had been on site for almost a week when a group of about a hundred horsemen rode out from the Hindu Kush and told us we were digging up the graves of their ancestors. They were armed quite fiercely. Not many rifles, but the leader and many of his men were carrying great scimitars that looked like they could take the head off a rhino with only a casual flick of the wrist. We were supposed to have a small garrison of troops to help us in the event that we ran into issues with any of the local tribes, but they had been called away on the second day to suppress an uprising to the south. Not that they would have helped us much. We had certainly paid for them, but they were only five men, three of whom were perpetually drunk. I don’t think any of them knew from which end of the rifle the bullet came out. In any event, they were going to be of no help to us. The horsemen told us that, as defilers, we would all be put to the sword.”