The creature was as tall as Bunny—six and a half feet or more—with a grotesquely fat body and eyes that were nothing more than useless slits in its hideous face.
I heard a sound. A short, humorless laugh of surprise and disgust. Could have been Top, or Bunny. Or me.
“It’s a goddamn penguin…” said Bunny, his voice filled with surprise and wonder.
A penguin?
Sure it was.
In a way.
The problem is that it was too big. Way too goddamn big. Massive. Twice the size of the Emperor penguins and bigger than the prehistoric penguins I saw in a diorama at the Smithsonian. The wings were stubby and useless as if it no longer flew even through the water. The beak was pale and translucent; the body was blubbery and awkward. It waddled toward us and we gave ground, though we kept our guns on the thing. Crazy as it sounds, I was scared of it. The sight of it was triggering reactions that were way down in my lizard brain—miles from where rational thought could laugh off instinctive reactions.
The penguin shambled past us through the airlock but then it suddenly stopped at the exterior door. The sunlight was almost gone but what little there was touched its face. The creature turned toward the warmth for a single moment, and then it reeled backward from the light and uttered a terrible sound. It was the kind of strangled shriek of terror you hear only from animals whose throats are not constructed for sound—like rabbits and deer. A scream that is torn from the chest and dragged through the vocal cords in a way so violent and wet that you know it has damaged everything it touched. The penguin careened into the wall as it fled backward from the touch of the dying sunlight. Its screams were terrible.
Even after the blind animal crashed backward into the airlock it continued to scream and scream. I could see black beads of moisture flying from its beak and with sick dread I knew that they were drops of bloody spit from its ruined throat.
“Boss…,” said Bunny, his voice urgent with concern and horror.
“Push it back inside,” yelled Top.
Bunny let his rifle hang from its strap and with a wince of distaste he placed his hands on the animal’s back and gave it a short, sharp push toward the airlock, away from the sunlight. The penguin paused, though, at the mouth of the airlock, and immediately began fighting its way backward, screaming into the darkness it had come out of. Bunny shoved again, throwing his massive upper-body strength against the creature’s resistance. It lurched forward, but then it turned and stabbed at Bunny with its pale beak. Bunny howled in pain as the razor-sharp beak tore through the knitted wool of his balaclava. Black blood erupted in a line from the corner of Bunny’s mouth to his ear.
“Shoot the fucking thing!” bellowed Bunny as he backpedaled, shielding his eyes from another peck.
Top shoved him out of the way and raised his Glock. There was a single, sharp crack! A black hole appeared between the slitted, useless eyes of the penguin and the entire back of its head exploded outward to spray the line of stacked crates. The sheer bulk of the thing kept it upright for a moment, giving the weird impression that the bullet hadn’t killed it. Then it leaned slowly sideways and collapsed.
We stood there in a loose circle staring at it.
Bunny said, “What…?”
Just the one word and he let it trail off because clearly we had no more answers than he did.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE FIRST PULSE
NASCAR SPRINT CUP CHASE GRID
FIVE MONTHS AGO
Sixteen cars roared around the track.
In the stands tens of thousands of fans leapt to their feet in groups as the cars swept around. The race was five minutes old. Every car was still in the game; all of the drama and potential was still ahead. Anything could still happen. And this was the start of the NASCAR Spring Cup series. With each race more of the drivers would be eliminated until that last grueling challenge between the top four. All of that was to come.
This was the first race.
Everyone was wired. The announcer and color commentator were already yelling, calling the moves, talking about the drivers and their cars, their histories, their crashes, their lucky escapes, their courage. Pit crews were in position, each of them ready, and even the most jaded among them filled with nervous energy as they watched the cars accelerate to breakneck speeds.
Even though it was early, vendors were selling beer by the hundred gallon. Hot dogs and chicken wings, chips and pretzels were being devoured by the ton.
It had all started. The race season was on.
Danny Perry, the rising star of the NASCAR world who’d come out of nowhere two years ago to win a record number of races, was there, third back on the inside, driving a Ford Fusion with the decal of a sports drink on the hood and half a dozen other advertisers crowding the doors and roof. The car had a sky blue body, and images from the interior cameras inside the car flashed the masked and helmeted face of the four-wheeled hero onto the screens. The hot money was on him to come in no lower than fourth, and maybe even second place. High enough to insure his place in the rest of the series. Some of the sports reporters were saying that he had the chops to make it all the way to the winning flag at the end of the season. He had more under the hood, they said. He had tricks he hadn’t yet used, they said. He had things to prove, they said.
A lot of fans in the stands wore his colors. One group of three hundred people who had bussed in from his hometown of Greenwood had little fans with cutouts of his face on them, and each time his car roared past they waved his own image at him, and then chased him with their screams.
The cars ripped around the track, changing places, fighting each other for position, taking calculated risks, going too fast for mistakes. The interior cameras flashed one face, then another and another, onto the screens. The helmets and fireproof masks showed nothing, but the commentators made those masked faces human with anecdotes and predictions. The crowds knew the faces of their heroes anyway.
Twenty-six minutes in, just as the pack began to stretch out and lose its bee-swarm shape, Danny Perry made his move. He was known for waiting to see how the other drivers were playing it, getting the pulse of the players on the field, and then he’d make a move to take the lead. So far he’d made that play sixteen times, and each time he got the lead early he kept it. As soon as he cut through a gap that didn’t look wide enough for a bicycle and shot out in front with an acceleration that lived up to the hype, the crowd went absolutely mad. Even the fans who weren’t rooting for Danny leapt to their feet because this was a history-book moment. Danny wasn’t racing against anyone who lived on the second or third tier of the sport. He was jousting with kings, and he’d just taken the lead in a move that made a bold damn statement.
Catch me if you can.
If you can.
The whole pace—already insane—rose up as the hunt began in earnest. It was going to be brutal. Everyone knew it.
Which is when it all went to hell.
There was no warning. No bomb. Nothing that indicated an attack. Nothing sinister.
On one side of a scalding moment of raw high-speed entertainment, sixteen stock cars raced at more than 185 miles an hour. Danny Perry had bulled his way to 190.3.
On the other side of that moment the engines of every car on the track stopped.
There were no explosions. Not at first.
The electrical conduction within the transmissions ceased. Gone. Just as the video feeds from the cameras and the big screens mounted around the track went dark. Bang. The commentators’ voices were silenced. Just like that.
Only the sound of the crowd pushed its way past the moment. They were screaming, cheering, yelling. And then when the first cars spun out of control and the next wave struck them, it was only the screams that lingered.
Lingered, grew, rose, detonated into shrill blasts of horror as every car crunched together. The drivers had no chance. There was no power at all. No steering, nothing. Only the bull muscle of feet on brakes and desperate hands on
dying steering wheels gave the cars any chance.
It was too small a chance, though. The speeds were too great. The shock was too much.
Engines exploded. Electricity was not flowing and there were no sparks from damaged wires. No, the sparks that touched off the fuel were from metal hitting metal. Not many sparks.
Enough.
Enough was too much.
A fireball punched upward from amid the crunched fist of the collision. The screams of the crowd changed in pitch, rising higher, sounding like a great flock of birds in pain.
CHAPTER NINE
THE VINSON MASSIF
THE SENTINEL RANGE OF THE ELLSWORTH MOUNTAINS
ANTARCTICA
AUGUST 19, 10:39 P.M.
Top pulled off his helmet and balaclava so he could see better as he applied a quick field dressing to Bunny’s face. I stood guard. Nobody talked about the penguin. We probably should have, but we didn’t.
Instead Bunny asked the only question that mattered. “What the hell is going on down here?”
Good question, but none of us had even a clue how to answer it.
Once Bunny’s wound was dressed we began moving again. I checked the BAMS unit and got the same steady green, so I tugged down the edge of my own balaclava and sniffed the air. It smelled of machine oil, ozone, ice, and sulfur. Nothing more mysterious than that. Even the rotted meat smell seemed less evident the deeper we went into the complex.
We checked the rest of the storeroom, but it was empty.
Almost empty.
There were no more penguins and there were no people, but all along the back wall there was blood. Pools of it. Drops of it. Arterial sprays of it on the wall.
“Oh … shit,” breathed Bunny.
Against the wall was a stack of crates that was ten boxes high and went all the way to the ceiling, the wooden boxes pressed closed. Somebody had written across the face of the stack.
THE SEQUENCE IS WRITTEN IN THE STARS
“The hell’s that supposed to mean?” asked Bunny.
Instead of answering, Top leaned close to the writing, then he winced and recoiled. He didn’t have to tell us what had been used to write those words. The floor was covered with bloody footprints. In shoes, in military-style combat boots, and in bare feet.
“Looks like a parade’s been through here,” said Top.
“Whoa, whoa,” said Bunny, kneeling by one set of boot prints, “look at this. That’s not American.”
He was right. The tread marks of those boots were different from any of the patterns used on the boots and shoes of American military. In our line of work you learn these things. Just as you learn the tread marks of shoes worn by allies and others. This was an “other.”
“Russian,” said Top. “No doubt about it. Standard-issue combat boots.”
We spread out and checked the rest of the prints and found two other sets of Russian boots and five different sets of Chinese boots.
“So,” said Bunny, looking around, “this was an invasion? Does that mean this was an act of war or—?”
Instead of answering I called it in and told Bug, Aunt Sallie, and Church what we’d found. Bloody footprints. No bodies, no shell casings. No answers.
“That base is U.S. military property,” said Aunt Sallie. “That makes it de facto U.S. soil. If you encounter enemy combatants anywhere in Gateway and if they do not surrender their weapons, you will respond appropriately to protect yourself, your team, the Gateway staff, and the physical assets on site. In that order.”
“Copy that,” I said.
Church added, “Get us some answers, Cowboy.”
I promised that I would. Answers would be nice. Kicking some ass would be nice, too.
We followed the Russian prints out of the storeroom and down a corridor lined with closed doors. These opened into offices, bedrooms, small labs, an infirmary, and other functional rooms. No one was in any of them and there was no sign of disturbance. No blood, no damage, no shell casings. The bloody footprints had long since faded to paleness and then vanished.
Despite the coldness of the storage room, the temperature was up in all of the other rooms. Very high. The thermostat read 82.
I reached out to turn it down but found that the dial was broken. Someone had jammed a screwdriver into the gear. There were bloody fingerprints all around.
“Our bad guys don’t like the cold,” said Top.
We pressed on and eventually cleared the whole floor.
“Nobody’s home,” said Bunny. “Sort of feel happy about that.”
“You know what they say about assumptions, Farm Boy,” Top said quietly.
Suddenly Bug was in my ear. “Cowboy,” he said, “I’ve been digging up more stuff on this. It’s all hidden behind black budget code and—”
I held up my fist and the three of us formed a triangle facing outward.
“We’re kind of in the middle of something here, Bug,” I said, “so give it to us fast.”
“Okay, I’m checking the profiles of everyone on the team and it’s really strange. Not the individual members, but what they do. The team leader is Dr. Marcus Erskine, a particle physicist from Cal Tech. His second in command is a quantum physicist named Rinkowski, and you have four top electrical engineers, a structural engineer, an astrophysicist, a geologist, an archaeologist, a professor of comparative anatomy, a psychologist, and—get this—three people with PhDs in parapsychology.”
“That’s a weird damn posse for studying meteor craters or building EMP cannons,” said Top.
Bunny said, “Oh, man…”
“Anything on the BAMS units?” asked Bug.
I checked. “Everything’s in the green.”
“Well, that’s good, right? No Martian bacteria.”
Top made a disgusted noise. “Now what makes you think our BAMS units would pick up some kind of alien space virus—?”
“Bacteria,” corrected Bug.
“I’ll hurt you, boy,” said Top. “I can fix your mouth so it won’t hold soup.”
Bug gave a quick, uncertain laugh.
“Top’s right,” said Bunny. “I do not want to catch something that’s going to make me grow a third eye or turn my dick into a cactus.”
“Let’s not lose our shit,” I said. “You have anything else for us, Bug?”
“Just equipment manifests. Hundreds of tons of building materials. And they brought down every kind of drilling and excavating equipment in the catalog. Big stuff, too. Earth movers and a hundred-ton crane.”
“For what?” demanded Bunny.
“Documents don’t say,” said Bug, “but there’s something else. We tried to hack the Russian team’s mainframe. Their system is offline, but I was able to grab some stuff that had been uploaded to their satellite. They have two separate operations going on. Cowboy … it looks like the Russians are building a hadron collider down there.”
A hadron collider is a very large particle accelerator that’s used to test all kinds of extreme theories in particle physics and high-energy physics. I didn’t know a lot about them other than what I learned when I took Trident Team to keep an apocalypse cult from taking over the Large Hadron Collider in the Jura Mountains near the Franco-Swiss border. They believed that if it was ramped up to overload it would create a black hole that would destroy the entire solar system. Or something. I didn’t delve too deeply into their rationale. We shot a bunch of them and freed the hostages they’d taken.
“Why in the wide blue fuck would the Russians be building a collider here?” I demanded.
Bug grunted. “You tell me, Cowboy. I just look stuff up. But, from the materials and equipment Erskine brought down with him, there’s a chance he was building one, too.”
“How’s a hadron collider tie into renewable energy research?”
“Not sure it does,” Bug said. “It’s all weird, because from what we can tell, the EMP project, the crater excavation thing, and the hadron collider all seem to be parts of the same project. Don’t
ask me how.”
I didn’t, and since he had nothing else, I ended the call. We stood for a moment, facing out, weapons in our hands, heads filled with questions.
“Anyone else feel like bugging the fuck out of here?” asked Bunny hopefully. “This place is freaking me out and we don’t have enough boots on the ground to do this right.”
“It’s not a job,” said Top, “it’s an adventure.”
We moved off. There was a tunnel that connected the main building to an oversized equipment shed. But when we got there it was empty. No cranes, no drills. The BAMS units kept reading in the green, which was comforting. What we found was not.
What we found instead was a big goddamn hole in the ground.
It was in one corner, but it took up nearly a quarter of the floor space—maybe forty yards across. Like I said, a big hole. It dropped down into shadows.
“Look here,” said Top as he squatted down on the far edge. “See this? This isn’t a sinkhole, not a proper one. They started digging right here, and from the drill marks on the edge, they got down to a certain point and then something happened. Looks to me like a big-ass chunk of the floor fell in.”
Top shone his light down. There was a rough ice slope angling down, steep but walkable. His light swept back and forth, then stopped on a pool of blood. Bunny touched the edge of the pool with his boot.
“Boss,” he said quietly, “this hasn’t even had time to freeze. Whatever’s happening here is still happening.”
They looked at me, and I nodded. “Rules of engagement are as follows. Pick your targets, good muzzle discipline. Let’s not cap any friendlies … but gentlemen, I don’t intend to bleed for this thing, whatever it is.”
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