The Spawning

by Tim Curran

  The thing hissed again and sank its teeth into her face, peeling it from the skull beneath with a horribly moist and juicy sound.

  Borden crawled from the airlock.

  He ran drunkenly from the habitat, only vaguely aware that he had pissed himself. He didn’t bother with the guide ropes. He ran until he tripped on the ice and then he crawled, a mad and yammering scream coming from his mouth.

  Lost in the storm, hiding in its folds, he curled up on the ice, his heart hammering and his breath coming in ragged gasps. The storm died out incrementally and by then it was clear and cold, auroras flashing blue and vibrant yellow-green high overhead.

  And it was then that he became aware that he was no longer alone.

  He lifted his head and looked upon what stood there.

  Through squinting eyes he saw something tall and shadowy with a chambered oblong barrel-like body and night-black wings fanning out to either side like sails filled with wind. It stood upon a system of thick muscular tentacles. Its head was like a fleshy, puckering starfish, each one of the five arms lying at a horizontal plane to the head itself and each ending in a globular red eye that was translucent.

  Despite the state of his mind, Borden knew exactly what it was.

  It was one of those things from Kharkov Station.

  The creatures the NSF said did not exist.

  It was looking at him with an intensity that made his skull ache.

  “Oh . . . God,” he uttered.

  And the thing stepped forward with a slick, rubbery sound as Borden’s mind went first black then entirely blank as a wave of agony sheared his thoughts, hot and cutting.

  TWO

  BLACK AS THE PIT FROM POLE TO POLE

  I believe they have seeded hundreds of worlds

  in the galaxy with life and directed the evolution

  of that life. They have an agenda and I believe it is the

  subjugation of the races they developed.

  —Dr. Robert Gates

  1

  POLAR CLIME STATION

  MARCH 3

  HIS FIRST WINTER-OVER ON the Ice, Coyle watched a heavy equipment mechanic named Creed go slowly mad because he claimed there was a ghost in his room. The ghost was a female and Creed said she had fallen through sea ice and drowned. He knew this because his bed was wet every night from the ghost woman laying in it. At night she would climb on top of Creed and try to suck his breath away like a cat licking the milk from a baby’s mouth. Creed refused to sleep in that bed after this went on a couple weeks. And when the station manager refused to assign him a different room Creed stabbed him with a fork.

  Creed was crazy, of course.

  Everybody knew that.

  Somewhere along the line he had developed something of a volatile and unsavory co-dependency with a rubber love doll named Maddie. What they did behind closed doors nobody really wanted to know, because what they did out in the open was bad enough.

  Creed would bring Maddie into the dining area for supper and sit her at his table. During the meal, they would argue and Creed would get crazy mad and jealous, accusing his doll of flirting with other men. In a final dramatic climax to their relationship, Creed stabbed her with a steak knife and then surrendered himself to the NSF rep, saying that he was a murderer.

  So when he stuck the fork in the station manager, there was no doubt that Creed was insane. Killing a love doll was bad enough, but stabbing the manager was something else again.

  But sometimes things got a little weird during the long winters.

  Minds that were not exactly balanced to begin with swung far to the right or left and sometimes, they just fell right off the beam and shattered into a million pieces. Maybe it was the solitude and isolation and the knowledge that you were trapped in that cold white cage for months and there was no key to be had. Because once the planes stopped flying in March, you were there to stay.

  Antarctica had a long history of madness.

  And that stretched right back to the days of the early explorers when men just lost their minds and wandered out onto the ice never to be seen again and continued on in an unbroken lineage to the days of Byrd and Little America when overindulgence in medicinal alcohol turned parties to violent purges. And maybe all of that could have been attributed to the hardships of the early days, for death was always knocking on the door. Maybe this and the stress of living with it day in and day out. Maybe pent-up hostilities boiling over or simple manic despondency. A lot of things, really.

  Except for the fact that it continued right to the present day, unabated.

  People lost it on the Ice frequently and there was just no way around that. The NSF tried to sweep that kind of thing under the rug, but they could never make it go away. Whatever psychological aberrations people brought down there with them seemed to get amplified to a disturbing degree. And maybe that was because the Ice itself was like some great mirror that reflected the very dark truth of who and what you really were.

  You had to look yourself in the face.

  No more bullshit.

  No more trifling civilization with its twelve-step programs, infantile support groups, or its I’m-okay-you’re-okay half-assed Dr. Phil cult of self-denial, read my book and write me a check, honey, you’ll be just fine. Down on the Ice, your strengths and weaknesses were on full display. And particularly during the winter when people didn’t really have much else to do but scrutinize one another. They saw what you were about and, worse, so did you.

  The blinders were off.

  And sometimes when that happened, people just went crazy when they got a good look at the crawly things inside them while others simply accepted what they were and felt liberated finally, ultimately. Both workers and scientists. That’s why you’d get doctors down there that would get addicted to their own painkillers and relaxants or turn some cash trafficking the same. That’s why women either spread their legs for free or turned a profit at it. That’s why you’d get workers who developed complex, self-destructive dependencies with rubber love dolls or administrators that suffered persecution disorders and thought their rooms were bugged and the workers were united in their downfall. And that’s why you got scientists that became inexplicably frightened of the dark or of Antarctica itself, convinced that there were disembodied intelligences out there trying to steal their minds.

  Winter at the stations was a recipe for compulsion and obsession and plain old mental degeneration. When you packed people together in a box for five months in the utter blackness of the world’s most unforgiving environment, you were asking for trouble.

  Coyle had seen it before firsthand and he knew he was about to see it again.

  Too many weird things were piling up. From the disappearances at Mount Hobb to the chopper crash to the megaliths in Beacon Valley and the others on Callisto. After the Callisto Party and what the crew saw on that NASA feed, anxiety levels went right through the roof and there was no going back.

  Which was too bad, because Coyle had been hoping that this winter would be a smooth one. Oh, he had strong feelings to the contrary, but he had still hoped. Sure, Mount Hobb and the chopper crash and Slim’s wild tales of something under that tarp and those damned megaliths in Beacon Valley . . . all of that was bad enough. But when the ice of Callisto vomited out those alien structures, there was no turning back. That little episode was a catalyst that got everything going.

  The morning after, it was all people were talking about.

  By afternoon, they refused to even mention it.

  Maybe they needed to pretend that it hadn’t happened or it had absolutely no significance for them. That there could possibly be no connection between the structures on Jupiter’s moon and those in Beacon Valley. But there was a connection and you would have had to have been pretty much blind or mindless not to see it or feel it and know that this was revelation unlike any the human race had thus far known. The connections were strung so tight and solid you could have tripped over them and broken you leg.

&n
bsp; They were that real and that physical.

  But, by that evening, just about everyone at Clime was pretending those connections were not there, carefully stepping over and around them.

  Slim wasn’t helping anything by telling anybody that would listen about what had been under that tarp. Horn was wisely silent about it, but not Slim. He’d been blabbing to Locke and Locke, of course, had woven it all together in the finest conspiratorial fashion and called for an emergency meeting of his little UFO study group which he called the PUFON, the Polar UFO Network. Something Frye referred to as Poop-on. Everyone seemed to have conflicting thoughts about the Callisto feed which really wasn’t surprising. The most amusing was that of Harvey Smith, their communications tech. Harv thought it was all bullshit. Just movie FX stuff that the Freemasons had thrown together to frighten everyone.

  Like he told Coyle: “I don’t believe in little green men, Nicky, and especially if it turns out they’re Masons.”

  Coyle didn’t really know what Hopper or Special Ed thought about any of it and they weren’t really saying.

  So things were tense.

  Then Cassie Malone turned up missing.

  2

  POLAR CLIME WASN’T THAT big.

  Not as big as McMurdo, certainly, or even Pole Station. But it was easy to forget just how much of it there was until you had to cover it on foot.

  The dome itself was laid out pretty much like a wagon wheel with the Community Room forming the hub. The spokes were the various corridors running off of it. A-corridor housed Medical, the offices of the station manager, HR and Safety, Emergency Supplies, firefighting gear closet. There were unsheltered walkways leading out from it across the compound to the Heavy Shop, garage, and Fuel Depot. B-corridor was mainly living quarters for the staff and crew. Coyle and Frye’s rooms were in B. As were Hopper’s and Special Ed’s and the scientists. A walkway led from it to the main road that led to the warehouse and runway. C-corridor was the same. Crew’s quarters. Gwen was here. As well as the other ladies. A long tunnel led from it out to the Atmospherics Lab. D-corridor housed the labs—Bio, Geo, Coring etc. There was also a hydroponics garden there where The Beav grew tomatoes, carrots, and beans. A tunnel led from it out to the CosRay Lab. E-corridor was mostly crew’s quarters. Slim had had his there. Harvey was over there. As were Horn and Cryderman and the FEMC crew. The rest was storage. A tunnel led from it out to T-Shack, the Transmission Shack, where Harvey worked. This was the hub of radio transmissions at Clime. The lower level of the dome held more storage and the back-up generator, electrical substation, water recycling plant, and was also the where all the man-sized conduits that led to the outbuildings terminated.

  There were plenty of places to hide when you came down to it.

  And in the search for Cassie Malone none were overlooked.

  Gwen, Zoot, Danny Shin, and Locke had already been over the dome once and now they were going over it again. Special Ed, Gut, and Hopper went room to room to room. Coyle and Frye handled the lower level. They knew all the hiding places and conduits. Horn and a couple guys from the FEMC crew, Stokes and Koch, checked the outbuildings.

  When they were done with the lower level and Frye had gone off to other pursuits, Coyle bundled up tight in his ECWs and checked the compound even though he knew it had already been checked. He looked for Cassie in the warehouse and Power Station. He nosed into all the little warm-up shacks and Jamesway huts and Hypertats of which there were a dozen spread over the perimeter of the dome. He even nosed around out at the Skua Pile, where people dumped anything they could not use or store, everything from chairs to bookshelves. Not garbage, just things that someone else might want to scavenge. He didn’t know what he hoped to find, maybe Cassie’s frozen corpse sprawled amongst abandoned bean bag chairs, picture frames, and laundry baskets.

  Flashlight in hand, he circled the compound in the wind and icy blackness.

  The only place he didn’t check was Icebox Two, the old abandoned Navy weather station out on the plateau. But it was like a mile distant and hadn’t been used since the 1970’s. It was buried under a mountain of snow and ice. He didn’t figure Cassie would have gone out there. At least not without a bulldozer.

  Finally, putting it off long as he could, he went into T-Shack, passing the vast array of transmitters and forest of antennas that were enclosed behind a chainlink fence so some idiot didn’t accidentally run a dozer into them. Taking the outer door, he came in out of the cold, puffing frost, his beard threaded with ice.

  Harvey was at the console. When he saw Coyle come in, he jumped like a monster was stopping by for dinner.

  “What . . . what were you doing out there, Nicky?”

  Coyle breathed in and out, working the stiffness from his face. He set his long-barreled flashlight on the table near the door, studying the banks of communications gear, the walls and ceiling which were hung with wiring and cables. “I’m looking for something, Harv. You seem a little surprised to see me. Why is that?”

  Harvey just sat there, eyeing him suspiciously. His face was flushed red. Even more so than usual. “Um . . . I . . . I guess you just surprised me. People usually take the tunnel out here. They don’t come in from the outside.”

  “I dare to be different,” Coyle said. He pulled off his mittens and then the insulated gloves beneath. He rubbed his hands together, getting some warmth back into them. “You seen Cassie around?”

  “No. She’s missing.”

  “Yeah, I know she’s missing, Harv. That’s the point of searching for her.”

  “Is that what you were doing out there? Looking for her?”

  Coyle shrugged. “Maybe. And maybe I felt like a little walk.”

  Usually, he handled Harvey with kid’s gloves. But not today. They had some seriously ugly shit about to bury them alive down here and still the petty nonsense went on unchecked. He just wasn’t in the mood for Harvey’s conspiracies about goddamn Freemasons.

  He knew Harvey suspected him, so he went right over to him. Got in real close, enjoying how the man practically cringed. “You got much chatter out there today?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What the hell you think I mean? C’mon, Harv, get a grip for godsake. What’s going on out there?”

  Harvey swallowed. “Not too much. Pretty quiet out of McMurdo and Scott Base. They had some big winter carnival doings there last night. The lot of ‘em are probably hung-over. Pole Station had a power outage for two hours last night. They fixed it, though.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing else . . . except . . . well something’s going on out at that NOAA station. Not sure what and nobody’s saying.”

  Coyle pretended it meant nothing to him.

  The transmission room of T-Shack with all its assorted equipment only took up part of the building. The rest was made up by spacious living quarters because somebody always had to be on site to monitor the radio. Harvey and Cryderman, who absolutely despised each other, spent alternating shifts out here. Harvey would only stay in his own room at the dorm, but Cryderman often lived in the spacious quarters of T-Shack for days on end. And why not? T-Shack had a full bar, pool table and pinball machines, an awesome DVD library and video game set-up. A fully stocked kitchen with every sort of convenience food known to man and the microwave ovens to cook them with. It was a nice set-up.

  Coyle stepped out of the radio room, nosing around in the lounge and game room, the bedroom in the back, the kitchen. Found nothing but Cryderman’s pyramids of beer cans, his collection of skin magazines and X-Box games. That was about it.

  When he came back into the radio room, Harvey was watching him more intently than ever.

  “What are you looking for?” he wanted to know. “Cassie never comes here.”

  “Maybe I’m not looking for her now. Maybe I’m looking for something else.”

  Harvey swallowed. “What might that be?”

  Coyle just stared at him. “That’s a secret, Harv. A big, scary sec
ret.”

  With that he took the tunnel back to the dome, bundled up again, shoved some more Vaseline in his nose to combat the dry, cold air, and braved the icy darkness yet again.

  The wind had subsided somewhat, but the temperature was still dipping at forty below. Outside the dome on the walkway leading to the garage and Heavy Shop, he just paused, looking around and even he wasn’t sure exactly for what. He didn’t honestly believe by that point that they would find Cassie.

  So he stood there, studying the shadowy hulk of the dome behind him, T-Shack, and the garage in the distance. The security lights bathed them in pale orange light. A few flakes of snow danced in the illumination. No one was out and about. The sky over Clime was a black canvas speckled with the stars of the Milky Way and lit by shimmering bands of green, red, and yellow auroral light captured by Earth’s magnetosphere in an impressive display. The colors winked off the dome and the roofs of the various buildings. It was beautiful, but its stark beauty only illustrated how very isolated they were at the bottom of the world.

  A place where people just disappeared into thin air.

  3

  MACRELAY, BUILDING 165,

  MCMURDO STATION,

  ROSS ISLAND

  FOR DAYS NOW, SHIFT after shift at MacRelay, it was the same: Make contact with NOAA Field Station Polaris. They had dropped completely out of sight—or hearing—and the word had it that a Search and Rescue operation would be initiated. But before a SAR was launched, they gave it every chance.

  Radio signals were notoriously FUBAR on the Ice. Magnetic interference. Atmospheric interference. Storms. Even solar flares played havoc with two-way communications. About the only thing that was reliable was SATCOM and then sometimes that hit the skids, too.

  When he came on shift that night, Carl Royes, the radio tech, got on SATCOM and HF right away. “Polaris-one, Polaris-one, this is MacOps MacMurdo. Do you copy? Repeat: Do you copy? Please respond Polaris-one. Over.”