by Tim Curran
Butler hovered harmlessly in the storm like a moth before a lit window.
But she was no longer Butler or anything like Butler: she was a wraith, a corpse-hag, a rawboned mummy that had clawed its way from a sandy tomb. Tiny lines like cracks in fine porcelain had fanned over her face, connecting into a maze of wrinkles and ruts and deep-hewn seams. Strips of flesh blew around like loose bandages. Her black lips split open, shearing away from her mouth to expose pitted gums. A series of tiny blood blisters erupted over her body and swelled to the size of hen’s eggs, each bursting with a spray of black bile.
Her voice pierced the wall of noise, a scraping of dry metal: “Named! Thee have all been named since before thy birth! Before the birth of thy race! Old, old, old beyond time! God will not be the one that calls of thee! For thee is thrice named by the devils of old! Gather in their name and give unto them that which is theirs . . . and theirs alone! Gather, children, gather for ye harvest! Flesh and blood and soul and spirit! Taken aloft, shall ye be, into the hollow places and the dark spaces in-between!”
And Coyle knew he had been named as they all had been named.
Named by those who had brought forth life and substance upon the barren face of primordial Earth. Something in him raged against the idea, but something much older accepted it and he lowered his head and waited to be harvested, lain low by an intellect that was omnipotent and ancient and unspeakably malignant.
He looked in Butler’s direction and saw her left eye expand like a helium balloon, shattering the orbit around it, distending until it was the size of a softball. Then it exploded with a spray of tissue, the right eye following suit. And what was left were blackened, empty sockets from which tendrils of blood floated like red lucid wires, held in stasis by the airless pocket cycling around her. But deep back in those sockets, there was a cold scarlet glow . . . and he knew it, recognized it. It was the red river of communal sacrifice and he felt the draw of its bitter shadowy waters where he would drown and twist as the light in him, the drive and purity and soul, was leeched from his skull and he was extinguished.
Then . . . the goons from Colony showed.
Coyle, like the others, was pretty much out of it by then. The roaring wind and storm of debris and cycling energy had not dissipated in the least. In fact, it was still rising and expanding like the storm waters of the alien hive itself which would soon drown the world.
The lights overhead did not go out.
They simply dimmed as they were drained dry of electricity and vanquished, exploding in showers of sparks and glass. Flashlight beams cut through the howling murk. Dayton had arrived with three troopers to pick up Butler and all of them were knocked instantly on their asses. His men went down firing their MP5 machine guns from the hip, bullets ripping into the walls and ricocheting wildly. Dayton himself struggled against the tempest, shouting out orders that were never heard.
The Butler-thing drifted towards him, an absolute mummy now, eroding and flaking into a great whirlwind of debris that swarmed over her skeleton like a hive of angry bees. “Die!” said her broken, wavering voice that seemed to come from distant, echoing leagues. “All die! Give up that which is asked! A burnt offering–”
How he did it, even he did not know. But as she bore down on him and flattened him with a barrage of cold energy, the 9mm Beretta Model 92 in his gloved hands went off and three bullets drilled into her skull, blowing it into fragments.
The wall nearest her was blown out, vaporized into a billowing steam and a great final wind tore down the corridor . . . and then it ended. There was nothing but debris and ruins and scattered bodies. The icy cold vanished and there was the sound of dripping water.
And the moaning of voices in the dusty darkness.
29
WHEN THEY PULLED THEMSELVES from the wreckage, they were banged-up, bruised, sore, and more than a little in shock. But they were all alive. Dayton’s men helped them into the Community Room and slowly everyone came to their senses.
C-corridor was literally gutted.
The walls were collapsed, the sheet metal behind them mangled and twisted. The ceilings were ripped open, broken pipes and wiring hanging down like fractured bones and severed arteries. The good thing was, the integrity of the dome structure itself was undamaged. The bitter cold and wind had not gotten in.
After Dayton had inspected everyone for damage, he ordered his men to pick through the debris and gather up what they could find of Butler. Her bones, blackened and pitted and entirely fleshless, were scattered the length of the corridor. They put what they found in a vinyl body bag. Some of the bones were still smoldering.
Finally, Dayton pulled Coyle aside, said, “These are, for all intents and purposes, your people now, Coyle. Watch them. Guard them. Things are going to start happening now. Things worse than you’ve seen so far. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
Coyle swallowed. “Yes.”
“The world as we understand it will now begin to dissolve and you have to be ready. What was laid down and planned out long ago will begin in earnest. Are you ready for that?”
“I guess I don’t have a choice.”
“No, you don’t. None of us do.”
They stood there, looking at each other, and maybe even understanding each other. Finally, Coyle said, “Butler showed up here two months after she disappeared at Mount Hobb. Why? Did she come from Colony? Was she sent here on purpose?”
Dayton sighed. “Listen to me, Coyle. When I met you out at that crash site you didn’t like me. Correct?”
“Correct.”
“You thought I was some gung-ho, flag-waving asshole. Maybe I am. But what your boys saw in the wreckage . . . that carcass was dangerous. I had to contain it immediately. It caused the crash, it killed the pilot. I had to get your asses out of there pronto so you didn’t all suffer the same fate.” Dayton shook his head. “I’ve always followed orders. I never questioned those orders . . . but lately . . . well, things have changed. To answer your question, there are two groups at Colony actively opposing one another—one faction that is partially responsible for many things going on down here and many things that have happened in the past and another faction that actively opposes the first in any way they can. By any means. Do you understand?”
Coyle did. He was trying to tell him many things without actually saying them. “And your loyalties have shifted? You throw in with that second faction?”
“Yes. Absolutely. We’re attempting some damage control but it might be too damn late. It was this second faction that sent us out to contain the crash site . . . the first faction wanted your crew to retrieve the carcass and if you had, it would have been Kharkov all over again. Those same people were responsible for Butler showing up here and for another entity you took care of, I understand.”
“That thing . . . it killed several people. It wiped out NOAA Polaris.”
“It’s doing what it was designed to do—thin any opposing force and spread fear and paranoia.”
“What the hell was that thing?”
“We call it a Creeper, the beakers at Colony call them Proto-Spawn. They were engineered by the aliens from a much older life form, the oldest life form on the planet save the aliens themselves.”
“Shoggoth?” Coyle asked.
Dayton ignored that. “Now . . . I told you some things I shouldn’t have. I want your trust and I want your help. Tomorrow we’re going up to the Emperor Cave. Nobody’s heard from them in days. Somebody’s got to go up there. That somebody is me. We’re going to sort out the menace up there. You think you can spare yourself and a couple more of your crew to come along?”
Coyle’s first reaction was to decline because his people had already been through so much, yet he was starting to like Dayton. And the idea of striking back against the alien dominance was very satisfying.
“All right,” he finally said. “How we getting up there? It’s quite a pull.”
“Chopper. A specially-rigged Icewolf that can han
dle the conditions down here. Ten-hundred hours we pick you up.”
“We’ll be ready.”
“It’s gonna be rugged,” Dayton warned him. “Pick the right people. You want to see what the Creeper was developed from? Tomorrow you’ll get a chance.”
Dayton and his men left then, making for the Sno-Cat outside that had brought them. For a long time, Coyle stood around wondering if he had just made a terrible mistake.
What was laid down and planned out long ago will begin in earnest. Are you ready for that?
He figured he was ready.
As ready as anyone could be for the end of the world.
But before any of that came down, they had to put the station back in order and that was priority one. And the amazing thing was, everyone chipped in. No cliques. No bullshit. That was all done now. Butler had broken that all up and now they were working together. It took a few hours to set things as right as they were going to be that night.
Nobody questioned what had to be done even when Hansen’s remains were swept up.
30
EMPEROR CAVE,
BEARDMORE GLACIER
MARCH 18
DESOLATION TROUGH WAS LIKE the Grand Canyon drowned in ice.
From above, during the summer when there was light to see by, it looked as if the Beardmore had cracked open like an eggshell right to its glacial core. But in the winter, in the darkness and cold, it looked more like a vault, a great jagged burial pit that had no bottom.
And down there, in that polar void, was a howling devastation beyond imagination. The frozen winds of the Queen Alexandra Range were funneled downward by the conical peaks of Mount Wild where they rushed through the Trough, turned back upon themselves by the titanic barrier of the Cerberus Icefalls which was like a cork in a bottle. This created a frightful vortex of blowing drift, enshrouding ice fog, and a howling subzero wind that roared and rumbled, cutting right through anything living like frozen knifeblades.
The Icewolf barely made it down into the Trough without crashing into the walls of the glacier itself, savage headwinds tearing at it and trying to slap it from midair. When it set down, it bounced, shook wildly, then bounced again before coming to rest with a resounding thud that nearly knocked everyone out of their seats.
Then the door was open and Coyle and the others pushed out into a rushing whirlpool of white nothingness. The wind was screaming at nearly fifty miles an hour, flashlight beams revealing a gutted, pitted ice-scape of ridges, yawning hollows, and jagged escarpments of blue ice. It looked like the dark side of the moon, remote and desolate and eerie with lashing sheets of drift and jumping shadows, that wind moaning like a banshee the whole time.
Fucking hell on Earth, is what Coyle thought.
It made the plateau almost look cozy.
Emperor Cave was some two-hundred feet ahead, but in that weather it might as well have been ten miles. Dayton formed them into a chain with himself out front, his troopers—Long, Reja, McKerr, Norrys, and Barnes—in the back, Coyle and Gwen and Horn in the middle. They were roped together as they pushed over the seamed, craggy ice and that was so that if anyone went into a crevasse, the others could yank him or her out. But truth be told, in that wind and darkness, if one went in, they were all going in.
The temperature was sixty below and they all wore goggles against the constant onslaught of snow and ice particles scraped from the glacier itself. Even with their ECWs on, parka hoods zipped tight, balaclavas pulled down, the wind was unbearably frigid.
You could lose yourself in ten paces in this, Coyle thought, and freeze up tight in fifteen minutes. Whose goddamn idea was this in the first place?
But he knew the answer to that one, all right. He’d volunteered just as Horn and Gwen had. Frye and Locke had wanted to come, too, but they drew the short straws.
They pushed on through wind and ice fog and then Dayton stopped, called out as loud as he could: “There! There it is!”
Coyle couldn’t see it at first.
Even their flashlight beams only made it five or ten feet before being reflected back by the storm. He followed behind Dayton and then, rising out of that turbulent murk . . . a circle of light above them, the mouth of Emperor Cave. From their position out in the storm, they could see that the power was still on because inside the cave it was glowing with a blue-green phosphorescence. That meant the generator was still chugging along and it also meant somebody might still be alive in there.
There had been eight. Three scientists—Dryden, Stone, and Kenneger—two contract workers, Warren and Biggs, and a couple of engineers, Reese and Paxton. The eighth man was a Navy lieutenant-commander named Beeman.
Steel poles had been driven into the ice with bright red nylon rope threaded through them as a guyline. They led from the bottom of the sheer ice slope which canted at a mean sixty degrees all the way up to the mouth of the cave which was about a hundred feet above. Not an endearing prospect in the weather.
Dayton started up and his daisy chain followed.
The wind was vicious all the way and it was a matter of pulling themselves up hand over hand and it was painfully slow. And as they climbed, their Stabilicer cleats digging into the smooth face of the glacier, the entrance of the Emperor got nearer and nearer and larger and larger until it loomed above like some yawning blue mouth. Coyle estimated that mouth to be sixty feet across and at least fifty from floor to roof. Amazing.
About thirty feet up, Gwen lost her footing and slid into Horn who stumbled into the troopers behind him. Coyle’s first indication of that was when the rope tying him to her snapped tight. For a moment there, the wind punching into them with what seemed typhoon force, it seemed that they were all going to go tumbling down in a merry heap. And they would have had it not been for the superior conditioning of Dayton and his men who dug in and held the line while Gwen and the others finally found their feet and got their cleats into the ice again.
Gripping the rope above with one hand and putting his flashlight right in their faces, Dayton cried out: “Watch what the fuck you’re doing back there!”
Coyle heard Gwen call out, “What?” because the wind was so loud you couldn’t hear much unless you were right on top of someone.
Up they went, the wind blasting into them, the guyline snapping wildly, ice-covered and slippery. Finally they made it up to the mouth, one after the other appearing out of the snow-clotted murk.
“Okay,” Dayton called out. “Get ready for the shit.”
And maybe the others hadn’t heard him, but Coyle heard him just fine.
31
EMPEROR ONE
THE MAIN SHAFT LEADING into the mouth turned off to the right and opened into a sheltered grotto of shimmering blue ice that was enormous, a worm hole cut right into the belly of the glacier itself. The walls were made of carven flows, runnels, and rivers of ice that looked like melted candle wax, the arched ceiling above a jagged expanse of thousands of icicles like spears waiting to fall. All of it was sparkling with a refracted blue-green light that was at once dazzling and spectral.
“It’s almost . . . beautiful,” Gwen said.
Horn grunted. “Yeah, lovely.”
Coyle listened for signs of life but heard only a gravelike silence that was broken by the hum of the generator and the cracking of the glacier itself.
The security lights made everything glow, created crawling shadows and pockets of night. Just ahead were four Hypertats lined up like coffins. Only one was lit up. As Dayton’s men went to check out the generator and the numerous storage sheds and shacks, Dayton led Coyle and the others towards the Hypertats over the rippling ice.
“Let’s see what this clusterfuck is all about,” he said.
Coyle only knew what he had heard and what Dayton had told him. The Emperor Cave site was occupied that winter by a Navy-sanctioned scientific team studying the guts of the glacier. They had reported finding some sort of specimen in the ice and then nothing . . . just a garbled Mayday from one of the team members
that everyone was dead.
That’s all Coyle knew, or at least all Dayton was telling him, but he figured it was enough. A specimen in the ice. Well, that spoke volumes. It brought to mind the Kharkov Tragedy and the macabre events that had transpired since and long before. They chopped something from the ice, only it probably wasn’t as dead as it should have been. He followed behind Dayton, their flashlight beams filled with suspended ice crystals, everyone’s breath coming out in frosty clouds that dissipated very slowly.
As they moved forward through the unreal, sepulchral silence, Coyle felt it begin to take hold of him: the fear. It flooded through him and settled in his belly in a solid, shifting mass. An atavistical terror that was labyrinth and deep-set, an ancient network of alarm.
Gwen gripped his arm suddenly and he jumped.
“You feel it, too, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said.
The menace was almost electric, agitated and cycling to life as if their coming here had flipped some switch and turned on some ancient machine of phobic dread and malignity. The atmosphere was noxious and shivering.
But at least they were out of the wind and it wasn’t quite as cold in here. And they were armed. That was a good thing. Dayton’s men had flamethrowers, grenades, submachine guns and sidearms. He had given Coyle and Horn military-issue SPAS-12 assault shotguns and Gwen a Beretta 9mm handgun, the Model 92 automatic. But down here, in this awful place, Coyle had to wonder if it was enough.
Ahead, he saw a row of Skidoos hooked up to block heaters. He wondered what they were for just as he wondered, really, what all this was about. A winter deep-field project like this. Glaciology? Yeah, right.
Long came running up, crunching over the ice. “Generator is running fine,” he said. “Plenty of fuel. But she’s auto-feed, could run for weeks on her own until the tanks dry-up.”
Only one of the Hypertats was lit up and this is where they went. As they came around the side, Reja called out: “Captain . . . over here.”