Tempest Outpost

by Brad harmer-barnes

  ***

  Roger and Betty didn’t go to bed that night. Instead, between the movie services and Betty’s stash of DVDs, they had a movie night in her rooms, with Roger being introduced to all sort of horror movies he’d never seen before: The Gate, Mimic and Them!, which was a particular favourite of Betty’s.

  “I had a copy I taped off the TV when I was a kid,” she told him. “I went through a phase of watching it every day for a whole summer. I’ve probably seen it more than I’ve seen any other.”

  “Yeah, I think every kid goes through that with a movie. Mine was Return of the Jedi.”

  “Every kid loves Star Wars. Every adult, too.”

  ***

  Anna and Claire shut down their offices at around six in the evening, and grabbed a microwave dinner together. It turned out to be pretty unimpressive, but that was not a surprise.

  “How are things with Stephen?” asked Anna. “You two had just moved in together last time I saw you.”

  “Oh, Steve? Yeah, things are really good.”

  “How’s he coping with six weeks without you?”

  “I imagine he’ll be filling it with Xbox, pizza and football. How about you? Are you seeing anyone?”

  Anna stirred her cottage pie around on her plate. “Not really. The shifts I pull here make it hard to make long relationships work.”

  “You never been tempted to hook up with some of the crew here?”

  “Tempted, sure. But I’d never act on it. It’d just make things too awkward. You want to have a massive bust up with a boyfriend, and still have to live in the middle of fucking nowhere together for another six months?”

  “Yeah, that’d be awkward as hell; especially as you’d be their boss. I think Cameron is sweet on Jazmin.”

  “She’s cute, and he’s probably still a virgin. He’s tried it on with every girl we’ve ever had aboard, myself included.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. It’s nice to have the attention, but…no way. Not enough beer in the world.”

  Claire laughed. “It’s good to see you again. I really wish we could make this happen more often, you know?”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  They then went back to their own rooms, read for a while, and both fell asleep around the same time. Claire set an alarm for six o’clock in the morning, and Captain Anna didn’t bother, because work started when she decided it started – that was a perk of the job she was most grateful for.

  ***

  Kurt and Bobby were the last to stop work for the day, having sealed all of the geodes in small, plastic containers with pop on lids, like the kind pet shops sold crickets and locusts in. It had been a long day and their feet ached and their eyes stung.

  “Any final conclusions?” asked Bobby, pulling the door closed.

  “No. Nothing final. We broke geology, Bobby. If what we’ve discovered all rings true, then that throws everything out. Prehistory may as well go back to the drawing board. Invertebrate life forms at a time when the planet hadn’t even finished cooling? What the hell does that mean? How did they survive? No life could survive at that temperature…”

  “And four of them all together?”

  “Oh, come on, Bobby. We only found four. There could be hundreds of them down there. Thousands. There could be spiders, millipedes, cockroaches, unicycling dachshunds for all we know. It just…God damn it, it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “In a way it has to.”

  Kurt was confused. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if it’s proven to be true, then it has to make sense. The rest of knowledge will have to fall in line with what we’ve discovered here today. The rest of the world will make sense around what we’ve discovered.”

  “Yes. Yes, I suppose it will. Strange to think, isn’t it?”

  Bobby clapped him on the arm, and they headed to their rooms. “Don’t worry. It’s not going to affect the price of a pint, is it? It’s just old rocks.”

  ***

  The geodes sat in the darkness of the laboratory as – around them – Tempest Outpost drifted off to sleep. The extracted spider lay in its plastic container, on a shelf, padded with a little kitchen towel. It had spent untold millennia at the bottom of the coldest body of water known to humanity, imprisoned in its cocoon within a cocoon. Now, it was feeling warmth for the first time in an eternity. The two fan heaters were running twenty-four hours a day to maintain the laboratory at a comfortable room temperature. Compared to four billion years at the bottom of the Antarctic Ocean, it was a veritable sauna.

  The spider felt the warmth permeate its exoskeleton and its forelegs began to uncurl and stretch, the joints clicking as the chitin worked out its cramp. Its pedipalps twitched, and its teeth stretched out. At this, it was exhausted, and was forced to rest for an hour or so. Finally, it felt some primal instinct motivating it to movement. With a series of snapping pops, the spider stretched out its full, six-inch leg span, and began to patrol the borders of its cage.

  It didn’t take the thing long to work out that the roof was incredibly flimsy and, with a few hard nudges of its abdomen, the lid popped off and onto the foot with a tiny clatter. The spider, now exhausted again, rested, gently twitching its pedipalps and spinnerets.

  At firstly awkwardly, but with growing ease and rapidity, the spider crawled up and over the side of its container, and scuttled along the shelf, sensing the nearness of the other geodes. Reaching the next in line, it squashed itself against the wall behind it, and then stretched out its legs. The container slid forward on the shelf before dropping the five feet to the floor. The lid popped open and the geode rolled out, striking the leg of a desk, and cracking neatly down the middle. The first spider crept to the edge of the shelf and watched as two legs, then four, unfolded steadily from the cracked geode and the new spider emerged from its chrysalis.

  The second spider embraced the warmth in the room rapidly, and scurried upto the first spider. Pedipalps and teeth twitched as if in some bizarre sign language, and the two of them worked together to quickly free the others.

  The four impossibly old spiders searched for a means of escape, and – finding no windows, and the only door too heavy for them to move – stopped to rest once more. The second spider – the largest of them so far – concentrated on its surroundings, and noticed that a current of air was coming from a vent high up in the wall behind the shelving. Leading its three compatriots, the lead spider climbed up the shelving unit, leaving a trail of webbing for its weaker and smaller brothers and sisters to follow.

  The grill covering the airflow stymied the tarantula for a moment, but its powerful jaws made short work of the cheap metal, bending and stretching a hole large enough for them all to squeeze through.

  As the crew of Tempest Outpost slept, the four spiders crawled down the air ducting in search of somewhere warm to hide up for the night, while their strength returned.

  EIGHT

  Bobby was the first to enter the laboratory the following morning. With his coffee in one hand, he used the other to unlock the door and shove it clumsily open with his shoulder. Stopping to wipe his stinging eyes, he fumbled on the light switch. As the strip lighting flickered into life, he instantly knew that something was up. When he noticed the shattered rocks and containers on the floor he felt sick to his stomach. Had one of the shelves collapsed? No, they were all still there, and all structurally sound. He dropped to his knees on the floor, and squinted under the desks and machines. The fragments of the geode shells were still there, but the spiders were gone.

  Adrenaline flooded through him, and he dashed to the intercom. He hurriedly keyed in the code for Cameron’s room, and it buzzed for a few seconds before being answered. “It’s seven in the morning, dudes.”

  “Cam, it’s Bobby. Can you come to the laboratory, like, right away? Shit is fucked up and I need you. I’m going to call Kurt, too, okay?”

  “Uh, sure, man. What’s happened? Are the spiders okay?”

  “They’re g
one.”

  “What? What the hell do you mean ‘gone’?”

  “They’ve busted out. They’ve escaped. They’ve just disappeared. Get the fuck up here, man.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

  ***

  In less than five minutes, both Kurt and Cameron had joined Bobby in the laboratory. “This is just insane,” whispered Kurt. “Fossils don’t get up and walk away.”

  Cameron could feel his gooseflesh rising. “Maybe they weren’t fossils, Kurt. Maybe they were just…hibernating.”

  “You seriously believe that?”

  “Kurt, what we learned yesterday turned everything on its head. If these things are alive and running around this room somewhere, then that seems a perfectly reasonable hypothesis to me. At this point I wouldn’t blink an eyelid if they had strutted across the floor singing Dolly Parton hits.”

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “We have evidence. You need to get your head around that.”

  Kurt hesitated for a moment, before putting his hands up in surrender and sinking into a chair. “So, what do we do? Just go hunting for them with a tumbler and a coaster?”

  Bobby had grabbed a couple of empty storage tubs. “Pretty much. When I was at college one of my housemates had a tarantula that escaped. What she did was to make sure that every room had a Tupperware container in it, so that if you saw it, you had to trap it under it.”

  Cameron suppressed a shiver. “Man, that’d have killed me. Did you find it?”

  “Yeah, I caught it. I was having a shower when I saw it up on the ceiling. I managed to coax it into the Tupperware and left it for her to take care of when she got home.”

  “Jesus. I don’t know I could have done that.”

  Bobby handed him one of the plastic containers. “Well, I guess we’re going to find out. Come on, guys, they’ve got to be in this room somewhere.”

  “How many do you think we’re dealing with?” asked Kurt.

  “All four geodes are smashed…hatched…so I think it’s safe to assume we’re looking for four.”

  “Or one big, fat one,” suggested Cameron.

  The room fell silent as the three men began their search. Bobby mentioned that they didn’t know if the spiders were terrestrial or arboreal, and so would have to search both low and high. He squatted to check the floors, Kurt – as the tallest among them – checked the ceilings, and Cameron took it upon himself to search the shelving that the spiders had originally been stored on. He reasoned that they could just be squatting behind any of the containers on the shelving, waiting for prey, or perhaps to molt after their long hibernation.

  One by one, he pulled the containers out, expecting at any moment to be treated to the scurrying of long legs moving further into the darkness or – much worse – the flash of teeth and a hideous screeching, hissing sound. With the bottom two shelves cleared, he stood up to stretch and take a breather. As he leaned backwards, easing out his aching spine, his eyes fell upon the ventilation grill near the ceiling. He felt cold adrenaline flood his body as he saw the way the bars had been bent out of shape into a tarantula sized tunnel.

  “Fuck.”

  ***

  The entire crew sat around a fold-out dining table in the canteen, listening to Kurt, Bobby and Cameron relate the news of their discovery, and also of its escape. Captain Anna leaned her head in her hands and groaned loudly. “I did not sign up for this shit.”

  Jazmin played with her fingers nervously, not sure what to say. Claire shivered. “I hate spiders.”

  Anna thumped the table noisily with her fist. “Why the fuck didn’t you guys tell me this sooner?”

  “In fairness Captain, until this morning there was nothing to report,” offered Jazmin.

  “Nothing to report? You don’t talk. You’re a fucking work experience kid. Kurt, why the fuck didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  Kurt shrugged. “It’s as Jazmin says – there was nothing to report. You knew we were analysing the rock samples that the Prospero had brought up, and that’s exactly what we had been doing. We were acting under the belief that the…invertebrates we’d discovered were fossils. The Prospero has dredged up fossils before and, frankly, you were never that interested in them.”

  Bobby cut in. “Captain, these fossils were such an unexpected discovery that we wanted to be doubly sure that they were what we thought they were. At the stage we left them last night, we still weren’t sure. Now, we know that they’re…well…something else.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” muttered Roger, lighting a cigarette.

  “So, what do we do now?” asked Anna.

  The room fell silent. Claire was the one to break the silence. “Well, we have to catch those things, right? I’m not going to sleep well at night knowing that a dinosaur tarantula could be creeping into my bed. If you didn’t sign up for this, Anna, imagine how I feel.”

  Anna rubbed her eyes. “Okay, but how in the hell do we go about finding four tarantula sized creatures in a fucking drilling rig? Do you guys have any idea how many ducts and cables and crawlspaces and bolt holes there are aboard this thing? A needle in a haystack would be a piece of piss in comparison.”

  “There is an alternative,” suggested Cameron.

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Bobby, how long did it take you to find your housemate’s missing tarantula?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think it was more than a day or two. She said if they didn’t find it by the end of the week it’d probably be dead anyway.”

  “Right. So, it’s reasonable to suppose that these things will similarly suffer in a foreign environment. Two, maybe three days, and these things will just be desiccating in an air duct somewhere. Or in Claire’s bed.”

  “Not funny.”

  “It was a little bit funny.”

  Jazmin shook her head. “That doesn’t hold up. We don’t know anything about these spiders. For all we know this is the ideal environment for them. They could positively thrive.”

  Anna nodded. “Jazmin’s right. We’ve got to at least try to find them. If we can’t find them in a week, I’ll be happy to call off the search, but I want us at least trying. For the moment though, I want radio silence on this. I don’t need Icecap knowing that we made and then lost a scientific discovery. I’m not talking to them until I’ve got good news to share. You with me?”

  The crew murmured their assent. “Okay. For today, everyone go with your gut and just go looking. We’ll draw up a more detailed plan tomorrow if we need to. Anything else?”

  “Yes, Captain,” said Cameron. “I’m pretty sure that these things will be dead in a day or two. Frankly, I consider searching for them to be a total waste of time and resources. I’d like to just write these ones off and fire up the Prospero again. We’ll pick up some more geodes – or eggs, or cocoons, or whatever they are – and this time we can be much more careful with them. We’ll keep them in locked boxes to prevent escape.”

  “No way. Uh-uh,” cut in Claire. “You want to bring in more dinospiders, while these ones are still skittering and scuttling around? Fuck that. You want to do that, you can wait until I’m back home.”

  “I’m with Claire,” said Betty. “We fix one problem before compounding it.”

  “You’re outvoted and overruled, Cam,” said Anna, pulling on an Icecap Industries baseball cap. “We fix these bugs first. Let’s get to it. Claire, you can hide on your own, or you can search with someone. Your choice.”

  “Fine. I’ll come with.”

  NINE

  Bobby and Kurt, perhaps somewhat obviously, took it upon themselves to investigate the laboratory, along with its surrounding rooms and corridors. Bobby stood atop a chair and nervously unwound the screws holding the damaged vent in place. Passing the screws down to Kurt, he very gingerly pulled it away for a better look inside. Kurt passed him up a small torch and he swung the beam this way and that through the dark tunnel.

  “Anything?” a
sked Kurt.

  “Not even a web. These guys have to be long gone from here, right?”

  “I assume so purely on the grounds that would make it a pain in the ass for all of us – and I know never to expect anything to be easy.”

  “Hey, don’t be so negative. A scientific discovery pretty much fell into our laps.”

  “Right. And then it fucked off again.”

  ***

  Anna and Jazmin had the office block, consisting of the Captain’s office, several archive rooms, and a large stationery cupboard. Anna was laying on the floor with a torch, trying to get a look under desks and furniture, hopeful for even a glimpse of something that might indicate the spiders had been this way.

  “Goddamn it, I knew this would be hard, but this is a needle in a haystack.”

  Jazmin was going slow, easing lids off of archive boxes as if she expected one of the tarantulas to leap up and onto her face in a flash of legs and teeth. “You really think they could be up here?”

  “It’s one of the more consistently warm areas, plus it’s up near the top where heat rises. On a good day I can work in here in a t-shirt, rather than wrapped up in coats and blankets. So, going on what we know both about invertebrates and creatures from days of yore, they’re going to seek out the heat.”

  Jazmin hefted the archive box she’d been working on top of a shelf, and grabbed another. “So, where are the most likely places for them to hide? On Tempest Outpost, I mean.”

  “Here, of course. Cameron and Roger are searching around the control room.”

  “The control room for the Prospero?”

  “Yeah. It’s exposed, so it can get cold, but Cameron spends so much time there that the heat is nearly always on. Sometimes you go in there and it’s like a sauna, so I figured they could be attracted there. Claire and Betty are down in the boiler rooms. If they’ll be anywhere, they’ll be there. So Claire can find them.”