Hive

by Tim Curran

  “What do you make of that?” Hayes asked.

  Sharkey kept staring at the set. She shook her head. “Nikolai is a man who likes to talk, Jimmy. But he was very abrupt about all this. Any other time I would have been on here an hour hearing about his take on that business. It’s not like him.”

  “I got the feeling that maybe he was talking about something he wasn’t supposed to be saying.”

  “Me, too.”

  “But you saw the familiar pattern there, I take it?”

  She nodded. “It’s like what we have . . . but worse.” She was looking in his eyes now and Hayes saw something like fear in them. “Is this what’s going to happen here, Jimmy? Are we all going to go mad and kill each other?”

  “I don’t know, but I think we better do something here before this gets out of hand.”

  “Like what?”

  He smiled thinly. “Oh, I was thinking about asking you to take a little Sunday drive with me. Up to a place called Vradaz.”

  PART THREE

  THE WINGED DEVILS

  “That ultimate, nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.”

  — H.P. Lovecraft

  21

  Zero hour.

  Gundry and his people weren’t calling it that, but that’s how Hayes was seeing it. The cryobot had been launched some twelve hours before. It took nearly eight of those for it to melt through the remaining 100 feet of the ice dome over Lake Vordog and then it dropped to the misty, black waters of the lake far below. Gundry and his people had not slept for over twenty-four hours now and Hayes didn’t see that happening anytime soon.

  They were all wired.

  Hayes had gotten up at like four a.m. because he, too, was excited. Excited and, yes, apprehensive as to what might be found down in that ancient lake. He went about his work, checking in at the drill tower from time to time to see how things were proceeding. Apparently, Gundry and Parks, the project’s geophysicist, had been concerned about the possibility of there being some massive methane ice bubble trapped down below the cap. Most permafrost regions have quantities of methane beneath them, they explained to him.

  “You see, Jimmy,” Gundry explained to him. “There was some anxiety about what we’re doing down here. Environmental groups were worried that we would pollute that pristine lake below and among the scientific community, there was some grave concern that we might tap into a dangerous quantity of methane gas . . . which, if released, could prove disastrous to world climate.”

  When Hayes heard that, his mouth maybe dropped open. “You mean . . . Jesus, Doc, you saying you guys could’ve wiped us out just to explore that goddamn lake?”

  “That was something of a concern, so to speak,” Gundry admitted. “But we took every precaution and all our tests and coring confirmed that, while there certainly were quantities of methane, there was also helium, nitrogen, trace amounts of exotic gases such as xenon . . . but nothing that could affect our atmosphere.”

  So, Project Deep Drill went ahead.

  And now the cryobot had melted its way through the ice cap and dropped into the lake itself. It had been there some three hours now, sending back a wealth of information on the lake’s temperature, chemistry, and biology. It had already detected vast quantities of organic molecules and even varieties of archaebacteria, eubacteria, and eukaryotes. So the lake was definitely alive just as they thought and not only alive, but organically rich.

  This really got everyone excited and particularly Campbell, the team’s microbiologist. He got so excited, in fact, he forgot that Hayes was the guy who ran the generators and boilers and not a brother scientist. In the control booth, as all that wonderful info came up from the cryobot and began appearing on the computer screens, Campbell grabbed Hayes by the arm and started babbling on like a kid talking about presents under the Christmas tree. Except what he was talking about were molecular biology studies, forensic biology, and ancient DNA protein analysis. Hayes acted like he knew all about that stuff, smiling and nodding happily as Campbell filled his head with the specifics of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) using gene-specific and random primers, PCR amplification of evolutionary conservative genes and microbial metabolic activity, and, of course, the wonders of cyanobacteria and paleo-indicators.

  An hour after the cryobot had entered the lake, it released the secondary cryobot on a cable which then descended to the bottom, some 900 feet below. Gundry and the others had chosen this location because the lake was over 2000 feet deep in some spots and it was near to that perplexing magnetic anomaly. When Hayes got back to the drill tower again, the secondary cryobot was on the bottom and had been for the past thirty minutes.

  “You’ve come just in time,” Gundry told him. “We’re about to release the hydrobot. Keep your fingers crossed.”

  Hayes did. He was keeping a lot of things crossed. He was glad they were finding what they had hoped for . . . more, even . . . but there was still that worming tension in his belly, that almost superstitious dread at probing around down here at something that had been sealed away from the world for almost forty-million years . . . like they were picking the scab off a sore and there was a danger of some infection running rampant as a result. Now and again Gundry would look over at him and something would pass between them, some sense that they were on the verge of big things, things that might crush them.

  At least, that’s how Hayes was reading it.

  When the hydrobot was released successfully, there was just Gundry, Campbell, Hayes, and Parks, the geophysicist, in the booth. People had been coming in all day long to see what was going on, but it was a long process and most left soon after they arrived.

  But Hayes, in-between his rounds of the power station and boilers, hung on like a tick and now here it was, the moment they’d all been waiting for. When the hydrobot was released and started to send back data everyone cheered. This was going to work, all those millions of dollars were going to pay off. Today Lake Vordog and tomorrow, Mars and the moons of Jupiter. It really was an incredible moment and Hayes was almost wishing Lind could have been there. He would have appreciated the historical significance of it all . . . and his part in it, too.

  Campbell and Parks sat before monitors, gathering data, and Gundry and Hayes stood behind them. There was a video screen above, but as yet there had been no video feed. The screen flickered a few times, but nothing. Hayes could sense the heavy hearts of the scientists over that.

  “I’m reading water temperatures of sixty degrees, with currents up over a hundred. Wait now . . . okay, okay,” Parks was saying as the numbers came in from the hydrobot. “Yeah, picking up chemical signals . . . magnesium and iron smoke . . . manganese, zinc . . . copper sulfides, sulfur dioxides . . . carried on the warm currents. Okay, got a hot plume here . . . almost 200 degrees. We’ve definitely got ourselves a smoker down here, gentlemen. Hydrothermal vents . . . gotta be . . . yeah, more than one. Several sites, I’m guessing.”

  Campbell was equally as happy for his bio-sensors were picking up all kinds of goodies from both the secondary cryobot on the bottom and the hydrobot. Analysis of water and sediment were showing bacteria, yeasts, archaea, algae, even grains of pollen.

  “Diatoms . . . shit, I’m getting indicators of rich plankton fields here.”

  “Outstanding,” Gundry said.

  Parks was nodding his head. “Come to papa . . . oh yeah . . . chemical enrichment of water almost two million times that of normal seawater or fresh water.”

  “Meaning what?” Hayes asked.

  “Meaning,” Gundry said, “is that the buffet is surely open. You’ve got smoker vents down here, Jimmy, spewing chemical nutrients into the water that heat-loving bacteria feast upon. The buffet is open.”

  Parks started fooling around with the uplink to the hydrobot and the video screen flickered, flickered again, rolled and went black. Then it came on and they were seeing . . . well, huge clots of sediment drifting up from the muddy bottom in the powerful halogen lamps of the hydrobot. Th
ey were now seeing what it was seeing.

  “Incredible,” Hayes said without being aware of it.

  It was like some alien world and, in effect, that’s exactly what it was. A sunken, ancient plain of murky waters and sediment drifting about like motes of dust. It was thick and grainy on the screen.

  Hayes swallowed, struck somehow by the eerie stillness of that place. He was seeing flitting shadows at the edges of the light and it could have been the motion of that suspended sediment or something else entirely.

  The hydrobot descended again, closer to the lake bottom and Campbell started getting really excited. “Look there, do you see it?” he said, squinting through the ooze and sediment as if it were his eyes seeing this and not the hydrobot’s forward camera. “Right there . . . those marks in the mud, those snaking ruts . . . those are the marks of deep crawlers — maybe shrimp or brittle stars, sea spiders. Hard to tell this deep, could have happened yesterday or two hundred years ago. Really hard to say.”

  The hydrobot roamed ever forward, the screen almost black at times as it pushed on through clouds of silt.

  “Any chance it’ll get stuck in all that?” Hayes said.

  “No, it has a seriously advanced AI package on board, same sort of stuff we use on space probes and the Martian rover, except better. It’s doing most of its own thinking right now. It has sonar to avoid large objects and infrared to hone in on living things, an on-board lab to analyze just about anything.”

  “Why does it keep pausing?”

  “It’s using its robotic arms to take samples. It sucks them up, analyzes them and feeds the results to Dr. Campbell here.”

  Gundry told him the hydrobot worked much like an ROV with a prop at the rear to pull it or push it or turn it around and in any direction. It could rise or hover, do whatever its software package demanded of it.

  “Magnometer’s picking up some strong fluxes,” Parks said. “Jumping a thousand, now two-thousand nanoteslas. Five-thousand. Jesus. Strong and steady.”

  Gundry explained that a nanotesla was the standard measure of magnetism. That the norm here at the Pole was in the vicinity of 60,000 and now they were getting nearly seventy. The hydrobot was reading it and gradually honing in on its source. If it lost it, it would go back to tracking the hydrothermal vents.

  The hydrobot climbed and the silt thinned considerably. It went from a blizzard of flakes the size of quarters to a flurry with flakes the size of beads. The light penetrated better now. Suddenly, there was a storm of bubbles coming at the camera and then the hydrobot was buried in them . . . pulsing membranous bubbles that were purple and blue, sometimes orange and red, indigo and neon green.

  “Jellies,” Campbell said. “Will you look at that! Like comb jellies . . . ovoid with frilled plates to propel themselves. But I’ve never seen any like this . . . we seem to be in a massive colony.”

  “Can they hurt the hydrobot?” Hayes asked.

  “No . . . see, the hydrobot has slowed down now. It’s concerned about hurting them so its passing through their ranks very slowy.”

  It was a world of jellyfish, thousands of them like champagne bubbles. But pulsing and rippling, veined with brilliant bursts of ever changing color like fibre optic lamps. You could see right through them. It was hard to say how big they were, but maybe the size of softballs with lots of little ones, some no bigger than marbles. They seemed unconcerned about the hydrobot. After about ten minutes the colony passed away and the hydrobot dove down into the sediment again, detecting something interesting.

  Hayes saw what looked like a gigantic albino crab picking its way through the mud. Its body was jagged and thorny, about the size of a wash tub — Campbell said — with spidery limbs reaching out three or four feet beyond. It had something like black eyes on two-foot stalks and Hayes pointed it out.

  “No, not eyes,” Campbell said. “Receptors of some sort. It would be totally blind like everything else down here. A new species, though, without a doubt.”

  The hydrobot passed over it, deciding wisely not to tangle with it, and darted down into a chasm filled with sea grasses and then up again, scanning the bottom and finding the shells of dead mussels and crustaceans, hundreds of them tangled in a bony carpet. Then a gully spread out, dropping maybe five feet below the level of the lake bottom. It was filled not with grasses, but white bloated things that had to be ten or fifteen feet in length, coiling and writhing. To Hayes they looked like thousands of blunt and fleshy hoses with pink suckers at the end that expanded and deflated.

  “Tube worms and like none I’ve ever seen before,” Campbell said.

  The hydrobot was interested. It inverted itself above them and slowly passed over them, panning them and giving what information it could on them such as their temperature and what the chemical composition of the water around them was. Hayes had seen tube worms on the Discovery Channel, but not like these . . . not moving and undulating, reacting to maybe both the hydrobot and its light. These didn’t look like harmless filter-feeding animals, but things that were hungry and predacious.

  “This is simply amazing,” Gundry said.

  Hayes was speechless. What he was seeing . . . no man had seen before and the impact of it all had quieted that feeling in his belly that there was something terribly wrong about this ancient lake.

  “Shit!” Parks cried out. “Did you see that?”

  They had. Something gigantic and fluttering that looked roughly like a pond hydra, but grown to nightmare proportions. It had to be twenty or thirty feet in length, looking much like an upended tree with a massive root system . . . a forest of clown-white writhing tentacles. It darted away from the light quickly enough and they only got the briefest glimpse of it. But what they had seen made them pretty sure they wouldn’t be taking any dips in Lake Vordog in the near future.

  “Incredible . . . a mollusk maybe. Certainly squid-like,” Campbell said with a dry voice as if the thing hadn’t scared the hell out of him.

  But it had. Without really thinking, all the men in the booth had pulled away from the screen involuntarily. Something like that . . . white and ghostly and alien . . . roaming in the darkness, well, it did something to you. Made you think bad thoughts, the kind that could keep you awake at night.

  The hydrobot did not go after it, which was a good thing. But Gundry explained that it was programmed to study slow-moving creatures when it could, but not to burn unnecessary energy in any hot pursuits. And that hydra . . . or whatever in the Christ it was . . . had been damned fast. Damned fast and damned spooky.

  Another bottom-dweller came onto the screen and Hayes had never seen anything like it, either. It looked sort of like a horseshoe crab, but narrowed and lengthened so that it was maybe ten feet long. It was covered in a chitinous exoskeketon that was fish-belly white like most things down there. There were two pairs of spiny walking legs to either side like those of a lobster and a set of hooked chelicerae, pincers, poised out front like they were looking for something to crush. Its plated tail ended in something like a stinger. Overall, it looked like some kind of massive scorpion, but eyeless with no less than four waving antennae.

  “My God,” Campbell said. “I don’t believe it. Do you know what that is? A Eurypterid . . . a sea scorpion. Obviously an evolved form, but a Eurypterid all the same.”

  “A new species?” Hayes said.

  Campbell laughed. “The Eurypterids are an extinct subclass of arthropods, Jimmy. They died out roughly 200 million years ago . . . or so we thought. Goddamn!”

  The hydrobot passed beyond the reach of the sea scorpion. Everyone in the booth kept watching the screen, seeing more exotic aquatic plants, colonies of tube worms, bizarre giant clams, some inching worms, and what might have been a squid that ducked away quickly. Then the terrain began to grow more rugged, slashed by chasms that dropped hundreds of feet and capped with rolling submarine hills that were set with something like pale yellow kelp. The magnometer on the hydrobot was picking up higher levels of magnetism and honin
g in on them.

  For a time it was pretty much business as usual save for a school of transparent fish . . . or what looked like fish . . . and then, Campbell saw something.

  “Did you . . . what the hell was that?”

  Hayes had seen something like it before.

  A murky oblong shape that darted away from the light. Maybe it was nothing and maybe it was everything. Whatever they were seeing, catching glimpses of, there were more than one of them and they were quick, stealthy. That feeling was back on Hayes again and he couldn’t shake it this time. Because he was thinking things that he didn’t dare say . . . not out loud. For whatever was out there, he had the feeling it or they were following the hydrobot, but hiding away from the light. The hydrobot was picking up lots of blips, but that in itself meant nothing except that the sea was very alive . . . which it certainly was.

  “I’d like to know what those are,” Parks said. “They remind me of . . . “

  “What?” Gundry asked him.

  He shook his head. “Nothing, nothing. Thinking out loud.”

  But Hayes knew what he was thinking and he wondered if they all weren’t thinking the same damn thing, seeing those flitting shapes and remembering them from somewhere else and not liking them one bit.

  And then -

  And then Gundry gasped. “Did you see that? Looked like . . . well, almost like an arch.”

  Parks fumbled over his words, relaxed and tried again. “Some weird volcanic structure. Can’t be an arch down here, not down here.”

  But it was gone too quickly before any real guesses could be made. All they could say for sure was that it had looked like an arch jutting from the roiling sediment below. And a big one at that . . . the hydrobot had passed through it.

  Parks, almost nervously, started rambling on about volcanism and how it could shape ordinary rock into the most peculiar shapes. And particularly underwater where the lava flow would cool quite quickly, twisting into the oddest forms that very often appeared man-made . . . or, in this case, manufactured by an intelligence. For there was no possible way anything down here had ever been touched by man.