Hive

by Tim Curran

  Hayes lit a cigarette. “Which is?”

  “Gates is a little vague on that.”

  “So they don’t really want all our minds, just certain ones?”

  “Yes. They will infect us all, then purge off those that are what they might consider mutants . . . defiant wills, individualistic minds. They cannot allow such disease germs in the greater whole. But even those that are purged, killed off . . . their psychic energies will be reaped.”

  “Jesus,” Hayes said. “They develop us only to harvest. Like farmers. We’re nothing but a crop for them.”

  Hayes was remembering what Gates had said when they chatted with him. He could see it in his mind now: I believe they have seeded hundreds of worlds in the galaxy with life and directed the evolution of that life they have an agenda and I believe it is the subjugation of the races they developed . . .

  Sure, the great cosmic farmers spreading out star by star, selecting suitable worlds to be colonized and seeded. Waiting millions of years means nothing to them. For in the end, they always possess the races they engineer and the limitless power of their intellects.

  “Gates believed that in every population there were what he refers to as Type-A personalities . . . dutiful, methodical, more machine than man. Minds much like their own. People who place duty and allegiance to a higher cause above all else. And particularly such trifling, human things as love, family, individuality -”

  “LaHune,” Hayes said, his heart sinking like a brick.

  “Yes, exactly. Minds like his may be accidental, but probably not. A small minority the Old Ones engineered in advance to be used like viruses with which to contaminate us all. The end result will be . . . well, I think you can guess.”

  “A world filled with LaHunes.” Hayes looked like he needed to be sick. He pulled off his cigarette, feeling angry and nauseated. “None of us human . . . just cold and brainwashed. Worker ants, drones.”

  Sharkey nodded. “Yes, but far, far worse, Jimmy. LaHune times ten, LaHune squared. LaHune sucked dry of even his most basal human characteristics . . . automatons with a single directed mind that those aliens can lord over.” She paused, slapping the notebook against her knee. “But to what end? I don’t know.”

  But Hayes thought he did.

  At least one or two of the reasons, though he suspected there were many of them. They had set a blueprint into motion on this planet as they had probably done on hundreds of others. They sent out colonists that would drift from star to star, planet to planet, seeding them for future harvest just as Gates thought. This would take billions of years but, ultimately, that wouldn’t matter to creatures like them that were potentially immortal anyway. And the end result was to establish thousands of outposts, a network of dominance. Using those minds they had engineered, they would have unlimited psychic energy to wield. The sort of energy that was far beyond such simple things as nuclear fusion, it was the very electricity and milk of creation itself.

  Oh, it was very simple when you thought about it.

  They had known it would work because they had been doing it for trillions of years. They knew how it would happen. All along, they’d known the human race would multiply and spread over the earth. That our engineered neurophysiology would make that quite simple, that we would reason our way out of darkness just as they had. They knew we would over-populate into the billions and that when our numbers reached critical mass we would find them again and they would be waiting, waiting to harness what we had . . . the limitless, pure kinetic psychic force of the human mind. They would harvest it. They would unite us into a single devastating mind. A new mind, a fresh hive, not ancient and jaded like theirs, but fresh and unborn and indestructible, eternal and infinite and immortal. They would direct the cosmic purity of our thoughts and those thoughts would be energy and matter and focus. They would punch a hole through the dark spaces between the stars and bring their race here, the legions, the swarms that would fill the seas and cover the lands and darken the skies and in doing so, would suck humanity dry.

  Organic technology. A pure and unmechanistic science.

  Yes, we were the ultimate tool, the technology that would summon them and destroy us. And that’s what it was all about. Those colonists spreading out, seeding and manipulating, bringing forth a great intelligence that could be absorbed and directed to open doorways between distant gulfs of space. When their plan reached fruition, there would be no million-year migrations, but a simple jump through wormholes tunneled with pure psychic force. They would have the universe, star by star.

  It would take forever, but they were patient.

  But when they brought the real swarm through, they would also bring that cremating atomic pestilence, the Color Out of Space. That extradimensional horror which curved space and dissolved matter as it slithered along, subverting time and reality and suckling the blood of the cosmos itself. Hayes couldn’t pretend to know what it really was, but if the Old Ones could conceivably have a devil, then this was it.

  And they were devil-worshippers.

  Hayes told Sharkey about this and she agreed with him.

  “Doesn’t this fucking thing go any faster?” she finally said.

  44

  Kharkhov Station.

  It came at you out of the whipping, black polar night like some football stadium in the dead center of that glacial white nothingness . . . a sudden oasis of lights and machinery and civilization. Targa House and the meteorology dome. The power station and the drilling tower. Observatories and storage garages. Most of it connected by a webbing of conduits and flagged pathways and security lights. All of it capped by antennas and wind turbines and radar dishes. Outbuildings and huts scattered in all directions. And, off to the far left, the drifted-over runway that would bring the planes come spring. A self-contained community locked down in this eternal deep freeze. And as far as outside help went, it might as well have been sitting dead center of the Martian desert. Because if you were thinking evacuation or rescue, you’d get it about as fast as you would have on the red planet.

  He brought the SnoCat in slow, happy to have made it back and, yet, haunted by what he was seeing before him as if it wasn’t an Antarctic research station, but some forbidden burial ground, a glacial cemetery that had risen from the ancient ice field, gates swung wide open. Just the sight of it made dread rise in him like flood waters, drowning him in his own sweet-hot fear. By that point in the game he wasn’t bothering to talk himself out of such feelings. His guts were telling him that he was going into something bad here and he did not doubt, he accepted that prophecy.

  Hayes brought the ‘Cat to a stop before Targa House and did not move, feeling the station and letting it tell him things. He couldn’t get past the idea that Kharkhov Station had the same atmosphere shrouded over it as the ruined city of the Old Ones now . . . toxic and spiritually rancid.

  Sharkey and Hayes stepped from the ‘Cat and, although they did not admit it to one another, they could sense the fear and agony and paranoia of the place gathering up into a single venting primal scream that they could hear only in their minds.

  But it was real. It was raw. It was palpable.

  They could hear it on the wind and feel it in their souls. So they were prepared for the worst when they entered Targa House. What came first was the stink . . . of blood and meat and voided bowels. Death. A stench of death so thick and so complete it nearly emptied their minds just smelling it.

  “No,” Sharkey said. “Oh, dear God no . . . “

  But there was no god at the South Pole. Only the cold and the wind and the whiteness, a ravening ancient intelligence that was always hungry, whose belly was never full.

  And here, in the community room, it had feasted.

  Everyone was sitting at tables like they’d been called in for a group meeting. And maybe they had been. All of them had their eyes blown from their sockets, their brains boiled to stew. Their white faces were spattered with blood and fluid, carved into shrieking masks of pain and terro
r. All of them. Like a single diabolic mind had seized them at once and drained their minds in one communal swoop. They were all there in that morgue lit by electric lights: Rutkowski and Koricki, Sodermark and Stotts, even Parks and Campbell from the drilling tower, a dozen others, scientists and contractors alike.

  Yes, everyone was there but LaHune.

  “We . . . we have to find him,” Sharkey said, swallowing, then swallowing again. “We have to get him before he gets out of here. He’ll make for another station . . . maybe Vostok or Amundsen. He won’t stop until he does and they won’t let him.”

  She came into Hayes’ arms and he came into hers and they joined together there in that stinking, ghastly mortuary. Needing to touch and be held, needing to remind one another that they were still alive and still human. There was strength in that. Strength in who and what they were, not in what those fucking Old Ones wanted them to be. They had each other and they had feelings and those feelings were real and strong, had greased their skids and fed their engines and got them through all this badness up until now. They figured they could squeeze a few more hours out of them.

  “LaHune sent us away on purpose, Elaine,” Hayes said. “He wanted us out of the way when he did this, when he made his run. He may have been contaminated for days or a week or who in the hell knows?”

  “He didn’t think we’d come out of the city alive.” She looked around, studying the night pressing up against the windows and frosting the panes with its subzero breath. “They haven’t been dead long . . . he might still be here.”

  Hayes was counting on it.

  If LaHune had already made his run, it would mean they would have to go after him. Out onto the polar plateau, racing after him, trying to catch him before he reached the Amundsen-Scott Station or Vostok, the Russian camp. Both were hundreds and hundreds of miles distant. If they caught him, it would be dangerous and if they didn’t catch him? Even worse. A break down out there in temperatures dipping down towards a hundred below meant death in two hours regardless of how you were dressed or how hot your little hands were.

  It was a simple fact.

  So they either stopped him now or let the race begin. Hayes had this mental image of them arriving just behind him at Amundsen, shooting at him, trying to kill him like those Norwegians in The Thing, trying to kill that infected dog. He had a pretty good idea that what had happened to the supposed attackers in the movie would play out pretty much the same in real life: LaHune would be rescued and Hayes and Sharkey would be cut down like mad dogs.

  So they started searching the station and until you did, you forgot just how big and how spread out Kharkhov was. How many of those orange-striped buildings there were. How many goddamn places there were to hide. You just didn’t have your main buildings like the power station or Targa House or the meteorology dome, you had dozens and dozens of little fish huts and storage sheds and warm-up shacks. You had the fuel depo and the garage and the service Quonsets, the man-sized conduits that connected them like arteries beneath the ice. In the summer with twenty men you could have done it in an hour. In the middle of that endless polar night, it would have taken all day.

  Particularly if your quarry didn’t want to be found.

  So they checked the most obvious places first. They went through Targa House top to bottom, even looking in closets and under beds, in showers and even cupboards in the kitchen. They took no chances. They checked the power station and even the drilling tower. Only good thing they found there was that the hole leading down to Lake Vordog had frozen back up. Hayes made sure of that by turning off the heat and breaking open the windows. Then he opened the drill reservoirs and flooded the hole. Wouldn’t take long before it was an ice rink. They also found Gundry...he’d blown his brains out.

  He had balls, Hayes got to thinking, covering him with a parka and a tarp. He wasn’t going to let them fucking things have his mind. He went to his grave, middle-finger extended to the Old Ones. God bless you, Gundry. You were the real thing.

  Back on the trail, Hayes and Sharkey huffed it out to the observatory and meteorology dome. Both were empty. The garage was pretty much snowed shut, so they went in the back way and checked everything out, every dark corner and vestibule. They made sure no vehicles were absent. There weren’t. They checked the cabs of the Spryte and D-6 Cat, a few four-wheel drive trucks with balloon tires that were used mainly in the summer. Nothing.

  “I wonder if he’s here at all,” Sharkey said, thinking out loud. “I know it’s wishful thinking, Jimmy, but what if his mind went, too, and he just wandered out into the night. Got covered by the blizzard.”

  “If that’s true, then sooner or later the wind will dig him back out,” Hayes said, knowing the old Antarctic saying was true: Nothing stays buried forever at the pole.

  “Do you think it’s possible?”

  “Sure, Doc, just not probable. For all we know, that crazy fuck is dogging us, staying behind us all the time or ahead of us, just out of sight. We could play tag like this for weeks.”

  Sharkey brushed a strand of red hair from her forehead. “Is he here, Jimmy? Can you feel him?”

  Hayes stood there, leaning up against the Cat dozer and pulling from his cigarette. He thought over her question and when he answered it was not his mind talking, but his heart. “Yeah, he’s here. I can feel that bastard out there . . . “

  The fuel depo.

  If there was any place on the station you could hide, it was here. It was basically a reinforced sheet metal tunnel with tanks of fuel to each side, predominately diesel which ran most of the vehicles and the generators which fired the boilers and kept the lights lit and the systems working and the people warm and fed and the wheels on the bus go ‘round and ‘round. Even though it was lit by a string of lights, it was shadowy and dank, stinking of oil and diesel fuel.

  Carefully then, the Remington pump in his hands, Hayes led the way down the steel catwalk that ran the length of the building. Their footsteps echoed off the steel drums and their hearts pounded, that ominous feeling of expectancy was almost physically sickening. It would have been so easy to hide behind one of the giant drums, springing out and taking them by surprise. But they walked the entire length, peered behind every drum and there was nothing. They walked back towards the doorway.

  Hayes suddenly froze.

  “What?” Sharkey whispered, sounding like a petrified little girl.

  “Well,” Hayes said in a blatantly loud voice. “He ain’t here.” Then he dragged her over near the doorway. “I know where he is. He’s down under our feet. He’s hiding in the conduit that runs from here to the garage.”

  Sharkey did not argue with him.

  She could see that almost electric look of certainty in his eyes and knew it was fed not by a hunch, but by a deeper knowledge that was inescapably right. If Hayes said he was down there, then LaHune was down there, all right. Hiding like a rat snake in a rabbit hole. And somebody was going to have to flush him out.

  He racked the pump on the Remington and put it in Sharkey’s hands. “Run over to the garage. Just behind the dozer there’s an access panel, a grating set into the floor. He’ll try and come up through it when I flush him out. When he comes up . . . blast him. You’ve got three rounds in there.”

  “And you?”

  Hayes took her ice-axe. He stepped outside with her. “Go, Elaine. Run over there. I won’t go down until I see that you made it.”

  She shook her head, sighed, then ran off into the night, her bunny boots crunching through the crust of snow. The garage was about a hundred feet away. He saw her pause near the back door to it, standing under the light and waving. He waved back.

  As quiet as could be, Hayes tip-toed back in . . . if you could realistically tip-toe in those big, cumbersome boots. But he did it quietly. As quietly as he could. By the time he got to the grating, his heart was hammering so hard his fingertips were throbbing. He crouched near the grating.

  Elaine should be in place now, let’s do the dir
ty deed and get this done with.

  There was no way to be quiet lifting off the metal grating, so he didn’t bother. He flipped it off there, letting it clang onto the catwalk. He made a big show of it, talking out loud like he was carrying on a conversation with someone so that LaHune would think he wasn’t coming down alone.

  Then he dropped down into the conduit.

  It was like an escape tunnel from some old war movie, except it was cut through the ice and squared-off perfectly. You could stand upright in there if you were an elf or a pixie, but other than that you had to stoop. Hayes tucked his flashlight into his parka and popped an emergency flare. It threw just as much light if not more and unlike a flashlight, somebody came at you, you could always jam the burning end into their face.

  Okay.

  Hayes started creeping his way down the length of the conduit.

  Fuel lines ran overhead and to either side. The flare was hissing and the smoke was gagging, but bright. Great, slinking shadows mocked his movements. He could hear the flare hissing and just about everything else . . . ice cracking, water dripping as the flare heated the ice overhead, his bones growing, his eyes watering. Yeah, he could hear just about everything, but what might be lurking just ahead of him. His gloved hand was gripping the ice-axe so tightly, he thought he might snap the metal shaft.

  C’mon, you asshole, show yourself, daddy wants to cut your fucking head open.

  But LaHune did not show himself and Hayes was already half way down the conduit. He was starting to get nervous. Real nervous that LaHune had led him on a merry chase, trapping him down here, getting him out of the way so he could get Sharkey. Yet . . . he still had that feeling itching at the back of his brain that LaHune was down here. Somewhere.