Hive

by Tim Curran

But Hayes stepped in and clicked on the lights and the others came in with him, Cutchen shutting the door behind them. They pulled off their mittens and goggles, smelling that room right away. After the ultra-fresh air on the walk over, the stench in the hut was offensive and roiling. It was a thick and vaporous green odor of rotting marshes and sun-bloated fish.

  “God . . . what a smell,” Cutchen said. “Why in the hell would Gates let these things decay like this? They’re priceless.”

  “Look,” Sharkey said.

  Neither Hayes nor Cutchen had seen it, the angle of the wall blocking most of the lab except for that decaying, meaty mass on the table. But now they got a look.

  “Meiner,” Cutchen said.

  Yeah, it was Meiner, all right, missing no more. They would never know exactly what got into his head or what he’d been thinking and that was probably a good thing. For Meiner had decided to pull himself up a chair about four feet away from the thawed—and decaying—specimen and stare at it in the dark. Hayes had some ideas as to why, but he did not voice them. He just looked down at Meiner as the wind blew and the shack trembled and an uneasy silence hung thickly in the air.

  “What . . . Jesus, what in the hell happened to him?” Cutchen wondered out loud, the color drained from his face.

  Sharkey didn’t need to get very close to make her diagnosis. “Dead,” she said. “Probably four or five hours, I’d guess.”

  “Dead,” Cutchen said as if it were some surprise. “Oh, Christ, he’s dead.”

  And he was.

  Just sitting there in that chair, reclined back in his parka, mittens still on. His big white boots were crossed over each other and his mittened hands laid primly in his lap. He looked rather peaceful until you saw his face, saw the way his mouth was contorted in a silent scream, dried blood running from his lips and nostrils like old wine stains. And his eyes . . . just hollow purple cavities with clots of trailing gelatinous pulp splashed down his cheeks like slimy egg whites.

  “Holy fuck,” Cutchen said as if he was just now getting it. “That snot . . . those are his eyes.”

  He turned away and Hayes followed suit.

  Sharkey didn’t care much for what she was seeing either, but medical curiosity and the upcoming post she would have to perform made it mandatory that she belly up to the bar and drink her fill.

  Cutchen looked like he was going to be sick, but had changed his mind. He was looking at the mummy on the table, scowling, not liking it very much. Those glaring red eyes at the ends of the fleshy yellow stalks were still extended and wide open.

  “I wouldn’t stare at it too long,” Hayes warned him. “Give you bad dreams.”

  Cutchen barked a short laugh and looked away. “Crazy goddamn thing. Looks like it was thrown together by some Hollywood special effects people, you know? Reminds me of those bug-eyed monsters Gary Larson draws.”

  Hayes was thinking more along the lines of Bernie Wrightson, but he kept that to himself. He was getting good at keeping things to himself. While Sharkey gave Meiner the once over, he stood there trying to fill his head with nonsense so the thing would not try and get at his mind again. Finally, he gave up, opened himself up, but there was nothing. The thing was dead and he had to wonder if he wasn’t going insane. There was nothing in his head but the neutral humming of his neurons at low ebb. Nothing else, praise God.

  The door opened and LaHune came in with St. Ours and a couple of contractors. He looked from the mummy to Hayes, wrinkled his nose at the stink and stripped his goggles off. As yet, he hadn’t seen the body.

  He shook a finger at Hayes, casting him a feral look. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing out here? This hut was locked and chained, it’s off-limits to anyone but myself and Dr. Gates’ team. You don’t have the authorization to be out here.”

  St. Ours flashed Hayes a little smile as if saying, yeah, good old La-Hune, ain’t he just the King Shit himself?

  Sharkey looked like she was about to say something, but Hayes stepped forward, something in him beginning to boil, to seethe. “I made my own fucking authorization, LaHune. They’re called boltcutters. But I’m glad you showed up, because I want your high and mighty white ass to see something.”

  “Jimmy . . . “ Sharkey began.

  But Hayes wasn’t listening. His eyes were locked with those of La-Hune and neither man was breaking the staring contest. They faced off like a couple male rattlesnakes ready to go at it over a juicy female.

  “I want you out of here,” LaHune said. “Now.”

  “Kiss my ass, chief,” Hayes told him and before anyone could stop him or really even think of doing so, Hayes took two quick steps and grabbed LaHune by the arm. And hard enough to almost yank that arm right off. He took hold of him and yanked him further into the hut until he could see Meiner plain as day.

  LaHune shook himself free . . . or tried to. “Meiner . . . good God.”

  Hayes let out a tortured laugh, pulling LaHune over closer to the corpse and its empty eye sockets. “No, God don’t have shit to do with this party, LaHune. See, this is what Gates’ pets have done. This is what happens when they get inside your head and overload you. You like it? You like how that looks?” he said, shaking the man. “Maybe what we need to do is lock you in here in the dark for a few hours, see if you suffer any ill fucking effects from close proximity to the remains. You want that, LaHune? That what you want? Feel that fucking monster getting inside your mind and bleeding you dry, your fucking brains running out your ears?”

  LaHune did get away now. “I want everyone out of here and right goddamn now.”

  But St. Ours and the other boys were too busy looking from the putrefying husk on the table to Meiner, a guy they’d lived with and drank with, played cards with and laughed with. This was one of their own and when the shock started fading, they put their eyes on LaHune.

  “Fuck you gonna do about this, boss?” St. Ours said. “Or should I fucking well guess?”

  “Nothing,” another said. “He won’t do a goddamn thing.”

  St. Ours was big and he could’ve smeared a guy like LaHune all over the walls, used what was left to wipe his ass with. “Tell you what, boss. I’ll give you a day or two to take care of this business here. You don’t get rid of these butt-ugly motherfuckers, we’ll dump about two-hundred gallons of hi-test in here and have ourselves a fucking wienie roast.”

  He meant it and there was no doubt about it.

  Hayes and Cutchen followed St. Ours and the others out, leaving Sharkey looking helpess and LaHune trying to find his balls, trying to figure out how he was going to crunch this one on his laptop.

  17

  It was the dinner hour and the scientists and contractors began to arrive at the community room in twos and threes, bringing with them the smell of machine oil and sweat and exhaustion. A smell that mixed in with the stink of old beer and older cooking odors, smoke and garbage and musty tarps drying along the wall. It was a hermetic, contained sort of stink that was purely Antarctica.

  The room wasn’t too big to begin with and it quickly filled, people grumbling and complaining, joking and laughing, dragging in snow and ice that melted into dirty pools on the floor.

  “You got any good ideas, Doc, on what can boil a man’s eyes right out of his head?” Cutchen was saying, watching the room fill.

  Sharkey shrugged. She’d completed the post on Meiner and had listed his death, far as she could tell, due to a massive cerebral hemorrhage. What that had to do with the man’s eyes going to jelly and exploding out of their sockets was anyone’s guess.

  Hayes was watching St. Ours, Rutkowski, and the boys at their usual table near the north wall. They were a grim lot with set faces and weary eyes, in mourning of a sort for Meiner. Other contractors threaded past them, said a word or two and kept right on going.

  They looked, Hayes decided, like a bunch of roughnecks looking for a fight.

  You could almost smell it building over there, that raw stink of hatred and fear that w
as smoldering and consuming. It was a big odor that rose above everything else, feeding upon itself and growing geometrically out of control. And if something didn’t give at the station pretty goddamn soon, it was going to vent itself and Hayes didn’t think he wanted to see that.

  But it had to happen, sooner or later.

  It had been a bullshit winter so far and it showed no signs of getting any better. The entire place had lost its sense of camaraderie and brotherhood that you usually got from living practically on top of each other, depending on each other and knowing there was no one to turn to but the guy or girl sitting next to you. That was all fading fast and in another week or two, you could probably bury it proper and throw dirt in its face. The entire station was starting to feel like some sort of immense dry cell battery storing up fear and negativity, all that potential energy just looking for a catalyst to set it free. And when that happened, when it finally arced out of control, it was going to have claws and teeth and dark intent.

  “It’s going to be trouble, Doc,” Hayes said, “when that happens.”

  “When what happens?”

  Hayes looked at her and Cutchen. “When these people feel like their necks have been strung as tight as they can go and they decide they’ve had enough. Because you know it’s going to happen, you can feel it in the air.”

  “They’re afraid,” Sharkey said.

  “I am, too. But I’m thinking at least so far, I can see reason . . . but some of them? I don’t know. You keep an eye on St. Ours. He’s dangerous. There’s murder in his eyes and if I was LaHune I’d be sleeping real lightly.”

  “You think it’ll go that far?” Cutchen said.

  “Yeah, I do. Look at them over there. They’re all having crazy fucking nightmares and they’re scared and they’re not thinking right. It’s coming off of them like poison.”

  And maybe it was.

  Because already it seemed like the crew was forming along class lines . . . the scientists were keeping to themselves, the contractors staying with their own. There was no mixing up like you generally saw most winters. Maybe it was a temporary thing, but maybe it hinted at worse things waiting. Waiting to spring.

  “LaHune could stop it or slow it down at least,” Hayes said. “Give these people their Internet, radio, and satellite back, let them reach outside of this place to the real world. It would work wonders.”

  “I don’t see that happening anytime soon,” Sharkey said.

  “No, neither do I. And that’s what’s so fucked up about all of this. Morale has gone right into the pisser and LaHune doesn’t seem to give a shit. He’s clamping down, playing it close to the vest and spooky and that isn’t helping a thing.”

  “He’s the cloak-and-dagger type,” Cutchen added, something behind his eyes pretty much saying that he could elaborate on that, but wasn’t about to.

  Sharkey sighed. “He . . . well, he just doesn’t understand people, I’m afraid. What they need and what they want and what makes them happy.”

  “See, that’s what bugs me about the guy, the fact that he could care less, that he doesn’t give a shit about the state of mind at his own goddamn station, the one he’s supposed to be running. That just rubs me wrong. But, then again, LaHune has been rubbing me wrong since I got here. He has no business running a place like this.” Hayes paused, studying a few contractors leaning against the wall and smoking cigarettes, looking bitter, their eyes dead. “Most of the people down here are vets, they’ve wintered through before. I know all three of us have and many times. Normally, the NSF picks an administrator with people skills, not a fucking mannequin like LaHune. A guy who’s equally at home with the techies and the support personnel. A guy who can talk ice cores and sedimentation, turn around and talk beer and baseball and overhauling a Hemi. The sort of guy who can play both ends, keep people happy and keep the place running, make sure the work gets done and people have what they need, when they need it. That’s why I don’t get LaHune. He has no business down here.”

  “Well, somebody thought he did,” Sharkey said.

  “Yeah, and I’m starting to wonder who that might be.”

  Nobody bit on that one and Hayes was okay with that. He’d already reeled off his conspiracy theories for Sharkey and she had warned him to be careful talking like that. That such things would just feed the blaze that was already smoldering at Kharkhov.

  Cutchen wasn’t stupid, though. He could read between the lines and the way he looked over at Hayes told him that he was doing just that.

  “What I don’t get,” he said after a time, “is why Gates would leave his mummies in there to decay like that. It just doesn’t wash with me. If they’re what he’s saying . . . or not saying . . . then I can’t see this opportunity coming his way again.”

  Sharkey tensed a bit because she knew what Hayes was going to say.

  “Maybe he didn’t realize what he was doing,” Hayes said, true to form. “Maybe he wasn’t in his right mind anymore than Meiner was in his when he decided to keep those things company in the dark. Yeah, maybe, like Meiner, Gates didn’t have a choice. Maybe he was doing what those things wanted him to do . . . letting them thaw, letting their minds wake up all the way.”

  Cutchen just sat there. He grinned at first thinking it was a gag, but the grin disappeared quickly enough. He looked over at Sharkey, his eyes seeming to say, what in the hell is this guy talking about?

  18

  “What we’re doing here,” Dr. Gundry was saying to Hayes inside the drilling tower the next morning, “is to drill down nearly a mile to Lake Vordog. We’ll stop drilling about a hundred feet above it and let the cryobot melt its way down the rest of the way. Why? Why not just drill all the way through? Simple. We don’t want to contaminate that lake in any way, shape, or form. Remember, Mr. Hayes -”

  “Jimmy’s fine, just Jimmy.”

  “Right. Anyway, Jimmy, Vordog is a pristine body of water, un-contaminated by microorganisms from above and has been for nearly forty-million years. Last thing we want is for some of our bugs to get into that water. The ecosystem down there may be radically different from any other on earth and we can’t take the chance of contaminating something like that.”

  Gundry was pretty excited about the entire thing and particularly since he and his team had high hopes of getting down to the lake by the end of the day. They were damn close now. Hayes was trying to share the enthusiasm, but he was getting that bad feeling in his gut again that was telling him maybe that lake should be left alone.

  But there would be no leaving it alone.

  These guys would not stop until the lid was kicked off Pandora’s Box and all the badness had seeped out. Because it was more than the biology, geology, and chemistry of Lake Vordog these guys were interested in. There was something else, something inexplicable and therefore intriguing: a magnetic anomaly. Using magnetic imaging, the anomaly was discovered by a SOAR (Support Office for Aerogeophysical Research) fly-over the year before. Although at the South Geomagnetic pole, of course, there was a manifested flux in the earth’s electromagnetic field and from time to time small, temporary magnetic anomalies were detected, none of it explained what they were seeing roughly dead center of the lake: a self-perpetuating source of intense magnetic energy.

  And there simply was no explanation for it.

  At least, none that the scientists were ready to share.

  Gundry, a CalTech glaciologist, was the project manager. He had six people working under him and the lot of them barely left the drilling tower. Usually sleeping and taking their meals there as well. Gundry had laid it all out for Hayes, best he could. The project was underwritten by NASA as part of the groundwork for the Europa Ice Clipper and Mars cryobot missions. Known as the ATP, the Active Thermal Probe, the cryobot would melt down through the northern ice cap of Mars . . . and eventually, through the frozen crust of Europa. The cryobot being used for the Lake Vordog probe, Project Deep Drill, would be similar to the ones they’d use on Mars and Jupiter’s frozen moo
ns. Basically, it was something of a robotic submersible, a cylindrical probe about ten feet long and six inches in diameter with a heated nose cone designed to melt frozen ground and drill hyperthermally.

  “It’s, essentially, like a high-tech . . . very high-tech . . . self-propelled drill, Jimmy,” Gundry explained. “Melting its way through the ice and passing down through the resulting liquid takes a lot less power than conventional augering. The nose cone melts the ice to liquid and the cryobot is drawn downward via gravity.”

  Hayes nodded. “But on Mars or Europa, you’re not going to have a big drill like you have here to get the cryobot started.”

  “No, good point. But the cryobot doesn’t need any pre-drilling, we’ve just done that to speed things along, you see. In our latest test — and trust me, Jimmy, there have been lots of tests — the cryobot melted its way though two-hundred feet of ice without any problem.”

  Gundry explained that from the back of the probe there was a self-unspooling umbilical connecting it to the surface carrying power and fibre-optic video and data cables. What would happen was, after the cryobot began melting its way through the cap above Vordog, the hole would freeze up behind it and that would be perfectly fine in that it would seal Vordog from the outside world.

  “So, the probe will melt through the cap and then drop down to the lake itself. It’s not solid ice above the lake. There’s an arched dome up to half a mile high above it,” Gundry said. “So the cryobot will have a splash-down of sorts and then go under where it then will split in two. The mother portion will stay just under the surface, analyzing the water and searching for signs of life. The other portion will descend to the bottom on a cable where it, too, will search for life and examine currents and temperatures, which will then give us a good idea what’s keeping that lake warm . . . we’re guessing hydrothermal vents, smoker vents.”

  Hayes just shook his head. “The level of technology you guys come up with is amazing.”

  “Oh, but we’re not done yet,” Campbell, the microbiologist, said, looking up from his monitor. “Once the lower portion hits the sediment, it will release the hydrobot . . . a tiny submarine of sorts equipped with sonar and a camera. It’ll bounce around down there like a soap bubble, showing us what’s above and below.”