The Spawning

by Tim Curran

  Something buried in the wind. A single melancholy voice that was calling to her and had been calling to her now for days.

  Quietly, she slipped out of her bunk and into the common room. She hastily pulled on her thermals and ECWs, then looked out the window into the shifting blackness of the polar night.

  She saw a shape beckon to her as it pulled away into the shadows.

  “I’m coming,” she said. “I’m coming.”

  Listening to the wind and knowing now that it owned her, she popped the airlock and stepped outside to whatever waited for her.

  17

  POLAR CLIME STATION

  THE SILENCE THAT DESCENDED on the Community Room was immense.

  It was thick and almost suffocating in its dire enormity. No one moved. No one touched their drinks or food or even seemed to breathe. You could practically hear fingernails growing and cells dividing.

  Then somebody gasped.

  The static on the screen went blue with assorted transmission fields of rolling numbers coming from NASA. Then it flickered and an image swam into view. A brownish-orange sphere that was set with darker reddish areas and speckled by white and yellow splotches that were the scars of ancient impact craters. The voice-over said this was Callisto as seen from five-million miles out by Cassini 3. The image had been enhanced, but in no way doctored.

  Callisto.

  The second largest moon of Jupiter as photographed by Cassini 3 nearly four-hundred million miles from Earth. The voice-over explained that this photograph was several days old. That since it was taken, Cassini 3 had fallen into a parabolic orbit around the moon itself and had descended to send out its probe. And that any moment, the live feed would be coming in, traveling across the reaches of space at the speed of light.

  The image flickered.

  And then flickered again.

  There were a series of pinging sounds and beeps, scratchy-sounding telemetry coming in. Lots of background noise like static and blowing wind and rushing water. A low, unnerving hum that rose and fell, but never went completely away.

  The voice-over said the feed was coming in now.

  The picture rolled, went blurry, sharpened . . . then they were seeing what the probe was seeing as it descended down towards that ancient moon. It wasn’t much at first. Except for the coloring, it could have been Earth’s moon. Yet, looking upon it, you knew it most certainly was not. Because everyone that saw the image knew that they were looking at something no human eyes had ever seen and that was something that no man or woman could take lightly.

  The image spun as the trajectory took the probe down, down, down until the voice-over said it was now twenty-five miles above the surface, moving east to west. It kept descending and soon enough, everyone in the room was looking at the surface of Callisto which was oddly featureless—no mountains or hills—just a weathered and scarred crust cut by deep fissures and huge impact craters with concentric stress rings fractured around them. Not much else really.

  It was empty, dead, barren.

  Like clay waiting to be formed, sculpted into something . . . anything.

  Nobody said a word.

  Everybody in that room was tense as if they were waiting for something to happen, only they didn’t know what.

  Coyle sat there, a strange crawling sensation at his spine.

  Gwen’s hand gripped his own in a hot, sweaty embrace.

  It was ridiculous, but he did not like what he was seeing.

  The surface was just too old, too ugly, too something. He couldn’t quite put a finger on it. The human mind, he knew, looked for signs of life, of motion, of activity. And right then even a couple little green men flitting about would have been welcome. Because Callisto was empty, dead, motionless. Like something suspended and waiting. An insect in amber. It was not simply lifeless and sterile like the moon or some barren asteroid. You got the feeling that something was there. Something was hiding in the shadows and craters.

  The probe had dropped to 20,000 feet now.

  It was firing its rockets.

  The images were lost until it landed.

  Then they came back.

  The probe had touched down just due south of the Valhalla impact basin, in a curious trench that was several miles wide and was believed to be cut down to the icy crust covering the ocean itself. The probe panned its searchlights around and there was little to see but an empty plain of something like pack ice and black, blasted rocks. The voice-over came on and said that the probe was operating perfectly. Telemetry told them that it was drilling into the ice to sample for organic molecules and paleo-indicators.

  Then the image began to tremble.

  Everyone tensed.

  Something was happening.

  “Earthquake,” somebody said.

  But Eicke was quick to point out that there was no seismic activity on Callisto. That it was a geologically dead world. No volcanoes, no earth tremors, no nothing. It didn’t even have wind or weather or anything that you would call an atmosphere.

  The trembling continued.

  The voiceover was gone.

  Seconds before it happened, Coyle felt it.

  Four-hundred million miles away, he actually felt it. About sixty or seventy feet from the probe, the crust fanned out with a series of cracks and broke apart as something struck it from below, pushing aside the ice in great plates. Whatever it was, it was rising up and up, a gigantic black mass of vertical shafts and pipe-like structures. Rising, rising. The external mics of the probe recorded the thundering and booming that sounded oddly like an airstrike.

  “Oh my God,” somebody said. “Oh my fucking God.”

  And, yeah, that about covered it. For what had risen up now from that primordial crust, towering high above the probe itself, was exactly what had been melted out of Beacon Valley: a series of interconnected megaliths. An exact duplicate of what was at that moment in a valley of the Sentinel Mountains. The shafts and crossbars, slabs and pillars and piping. It rose up, water and sheets of ice dropping from it, some primal alien machine that was black and corroded and skeletal as it reached up to the sky with those spiky protrusions.

  God, Coyle thought, like some rawboned spider with a million legs breaking free of an egg.

  It was Locke who broke the silence.

  He was beside himself as if every crazy theory and half-baked hypothesis of his had been confirmed beyond his wildest expectations. No, this wasn’t a flying saucer or a pod of little grays saying, take me to your leader, but at the same time, it was exactly that. For the structure had risen seconds after the probe had landed. And it was no naturally-occurring phenomena. It was something engineered.

  Maybe not alive exactly.

  But sentient, aware, ready to make contact.

  He ran up to the screen, hooting and hollering, gesticulating madly and talking so fast no one could understand a word he said. At least, not until the end: “Do you see? Do all of you see? It’s been out there waiting for us all this time! Wanting to make contact with us! Whoever built it left us a calling card in Beacon Valley and now here’s the real thing! It sees us! It knows we’re here!”

  And then the picture went out.

  It did not come back.

  Locke just froze up like somebody had unplugged him.

  He teetered this way, then that, looked like he might fall right over. But he didn’t. He just started hopping up and down, shouting and screaming, knocking over tables and kicking the wall.

  “THEY HAVE NO RIGHT!” he cried out. “THEY HAVE NO RIGHT TO CENSOR THOSE IMAGES! THOSE IMAGES BELONG TO US! ALL OF US!”

  Special Ed and Hopper and Doc Flagg took hold of him as he ranted and raved, just completely hysterical at what he had seen and what he thought those fuckwigs at NASA or the NSF were keeping from him. It took all three of them to get him out of the room and when he was gone, nobody said a goddamn thing for the longest time.

  They sat there in shocked silence.

  Then someone, maybe Zoot, started titt
ering deep in her throat with a sound that could have become either laughter or tears, but decided on the former. A rusty, creaking sort of laugh and pretty soon half of the room had joined in. But there was no humor in that laughter. It was more of a delayed reaction to revelation and fear, confusion and absurdity—brittle and braying and sharp. The sort of uncomfortable, unexpected laughter that breaks out at funerals. A psychological safety valve that has to be vented, one way or another.

  Coyle did not join in.

  The sound of it was almost frightening. The sound of oncoming dementia, of madness and impending nervous breakdowns. He just squeezed his eyes shut and wished to God it would stop.

  Finally, it did.

  The laughter screeched to a halt and everyone just looked at each other, the floor and the walls and those silly movie alien pictures everywhere. But mostly, they looked at the images of the Beacon Valley megaliths. A lot of them tried to say something, but many didn’t even bother. Then one by one, they filtered from the room.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Shin finally said. “Do you know what this means?”

  Coyle sighed. “Yeah.”

  But honestly, he didn’t. Nobody really did.

  For this was the worst possible thing . . . the idea that there was an intelligence out there in the cosmos. One that had visited Earth millions of years before and was still active even now. Maybe people pretended that they wanted to make contact, but the truth was that they did not.

  It was scary.

  It threw you on your ass.

  It made your culture and your religion and your idiosyncratic belief system pale and wither, gave all of it the importance of the Sunday funnies. Amusing, but hardly significant in the greater cosmic whole of which you were now, sadly, only a minor player. Because whatever was intelligent enough to visit Earth twenty- or thirty-million years ago, had to have been practically gods by this point.

  It made Coyle feel like a microbe on a slide, some huge and alien eye watching him. More so, it made him think of the entire human race as ants racing on a hillside, some giant foot waiting to come down and squash them flat.

  He felt many things like everyone else and none of them were remotely comforting.

  But it was Frye who summed up what they were all feeling and what they would all be feeling through that long, dark winter: “You know what? That thing scared the shit out of me.”

  And that was it.

  For maybe those megaliths that had come out of the ice were four-hundred million miles away, but the ones up in the Sentinels were much closer. And whoever had built them and whatever their purpose was, everyone at Clime was trapped down there with them until spring.

  18

  NOAA FIELD LAB POLARIS

  IT WAS KIM PENNYCOOK who heard the scream.

  It was shrill and screeching and filled with agony and cut through her sleep like razors, laying something inside her bare.

  She bolted upright in bed, clicked the light.

  Andrea was gone just as she knew she would be.

  Kim jumped out of bed, pulling her boots on, and stumbled out into the hallway. Dr. Bob was already scrambling down the corridor. Borden and Starnes were both disoriented from sleep.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Borden asked.

  “It’s Andrea,” Kim told him. “She’s not in her bed. That scream . . . she must be outside.”

  Borden cocked an ear, listening to the blow out there that sounded black and deadly. “In that?”

  “Jesus,” Starnes said.

  They all made it to the common room at the same time, feeling the habitat trembling. Dr. Bob was breaking flashlights out from the emergency gear cabinet. Kim went to the window and clicked on the perimeter lights. She thought for an instant she saw Andrea out there, just standing there in the wind, staring at her, grinning like a skull. Then a gust of snow obscured everything and when it passed there was nothing.

  Kim gasped. “I thought . . .”

  “What?” Borden said, his eyes pinched from sleep, but steely with anxiety. “I thought . . . I thought I saw someone.”

  “Okay. We have to go after her. She won’t last out in that,” Starnes said, checking the computer screen with its constant feed from MacWeather, McMurdo. “It’s ten below out there, wind chill pushing to down to minus twenty-five. Wind gusting at thirty miles an hour. It’ll suck the heat from her.”

  Dr. Bob was already in his ECWs: wind pants and bunny boots, red parka, gaiter, Balaclava, and snow goggles. He pulled on Thermax gloves and wool mittens over them. “I’ll take one person with me,” he said. “The other two better stay here in case we get in trouble.”

  Starnes started pulling on his ECWs, but he saw the look in Dr. Bob’s eye. If we don’t come back there has to be someone experienced here. We can’t leave these people alone.

  “I’ll go,” Borden said.

  No objections. He pulled on his gear. They each took a fifty-foot coil of rope, emergency radios, and ice-axes. They strapped yellow miner’s helmets to their heads with fixed LED lights on them that kept the hands free. They went to the airlock.

  “Try to stay to the flagged path if you can,” Starnes told them. “Call in every fifteen minutes without fail. We’ll keep the lights burning bright as a beacon.” They stepped out into the cold and night.

  Something crawling inside her, Kim wondered if she’d ever see any of them again.

  19

  THE AURORAS WERE FLASHING green and blue in the sky as they moved over the ice, leaning into the fierce drift-wind that threw snow around in a wild, raging tempest.

  “Andrea!” Dr. Bob called out. “Andrea!”

  Borden echoed him.

  They pushed forward listening to the black flags flapping madly.

  Great night for a fucking walk, Andrea, Dr. Bob thought, then immediately chided himself for such petty, selfish thoughts. Andrea Mack was young, inexperienced, naïve and probably more than a little impressionable. And this combined with an active imagination led to the entire crisis.

  She shouldn’t have been down here.

  Despite all the psychological evaluations and profiling, half of the people that came down to the Ice did not belong there. This was something Dr. Bob knew all too well.

  One year at Siple Station, a meteorologist named Cousins had become obsessed with the idea that extraterrestrials were coming. It got more than a little scary. He ranted and raved, actually began foaming at the mouth, saying, “They’re here! They’re here!” No one sensed them but him. He claimed they were in his head and they wanted him to purge every last member of the crew. As the winter wore on, he seemed to be able to talk about nothing but the upcoming first contact. He began displaying acute paranoia and obsession. Then he actually became dangerous. He had to be sedated and locked down until he could be flown out in the spring.

  When spring came, he was worse, not better.

  He was put on a gurney and strapped down for the flight. Dr. Bob had been one of the crew that loaded him onto an ANG C-130. And for the life of him, he would never forget what Cousins said. “You people can pretend all you want, Bob, but they’re here as they’ve always been here. You go ahead and laugh, but you won’t be laughing when they come for you. And they will, God yes, they will.”

  The thing was, Dr. Bob hadn’t been laughing.

  It was hard to laugh at something that scared the shit out of you.

  “Which way?” Borden said.

  There was an absolute maze of flagged pathways running to and from the habitat. They led to coring sites and automated weather stations, places where Andrea herself had been studying the ice sheet.

  “She’d probably go out to the divide,” Dr. Bob said, nearly having to shout above the wind at times. “That’s where she’s been working.”

  Borden looked around, scanning the polar wastes in all directions with his helmet light. “Okay.”

  Dr. Bob led on, pulling himself forward with the guide ropes, leaning into the wind and following the pathway
out to the ice divide where Andrea had been doing some cryospheric sampling. The divide marked a boundary on the ice sheet where opposing flows of ice were separated, rather like currents in a lake.

  The weather was getting worse and if they didn’t find her soon, both men knew, they wouldn’t find her at all.

  Dr. Bob kept going, calling out Andrea’s name, feeling the cold all too well by that point despite his ECWs. The cold was always bad enough in and of itself, but when it was driven by the wind it was devastating.

  He paused now and again, panning his light around with a twist of his neck.

  Nothing.

  The flat, seamless expanse of the plateau was repetitious and unchanging. Flakes of drift filled the beam of his light.

  “Andrea!” Borden called out.

  The wind was moaning and his voice was swallowed by it. Even if she were twenty feet away, she probably would not have heard it.

  The divide was just ahead.

  Dr. Bob paused and pointed in that direction with his ice-axe.

  They moved on, heads bowed, for maybe five minutes before they both stopped.

  “What?” Borden said.

  Dr. Bob played his light over the snow. In that unbroken whiteness, anything with color stood out drastically and particularly something as vibrant as the color red.

  “Blood?” Borden said.

  Dr. Bob nodded, turning his face from the wind. “Quite a bit of it . . . it leads off.”

  “But we’ll have to leave the pathway to follow it.”

  “We don’t have a choice.”

  But Borden was not convinced of that. He looked around, shouting Andrea’s name. Then he looked back in what he assumed to be the direction of the habitat. It was lost in the storm. Now and then the drift would stop blowing and they could see the lights. If it had been a clear night, you could have seen them for miles.

  “I don’t know,” Borden said. “I don’t like this.”

  “It’ll be fine. I’ve done this before,” Dr. Bob told him.

  He unspooled his coil of rope and tied a loop around his waist and then tied the end to Borden’s rope. That gave him a hundred feet which would be plenty, he figured. The end of Borden’s rope was tied to one of the pathway flagpoles in case Borden dropped it and the wind decided to take it away.