by Jonah Buck
For the first time, Denise managed to get a clear look at part of the thing’s body, and she could tell that it was organic rather than a spaceship. She couldn’t see very much of the creature, but she could tell that it had large, powerful rear legs and a body completely encased in some sort of black carapace. Its head was somewhere up above her, where she couldn’t see due to the tractor’s partially collapsed roof.
A long, spindly leg shot down from above and grasped at them. Thick, greasy-looking bristles stuck off the leg at irregular intervals. Some of the hairs were almost two feet long. One of them whipped past Denise and struck her face as the leg probed the inside of the vehicle. She felt blood trickle down her cheek where the razor-sharp bristle had sliced her.
Two gigantic tarsal claws grasped from the end of the leg. The claws were the size of Gurkha swords, and they were just as sharp. Everyone screamed and tried to avoid the massive claws as they explored the snow tractor’s interior.
Denise and Benoit both fired their weapons at the gigantic creature attacking them. The muzzle flashes lit up the vehicle’s interior in staccato bursts of light and fury. Despite everything, the bullets didn’t even seem to affect the creature attacking them. It didn’t flinch or back down. Denise didn’t see anywhere that their bullets had actually penetrated its armor. To the behemoth attacking them, the bullets were probably nothing more than noise and an annoying tapping on its carapace.
Sitting at the snow tractor’s controls, Moreau had less room to try to avoid the huge claws. The monster’s leg wedged itself further inside and tried to grasp anyone it could. They shot past Denise and latched onto Moreau, tearing through his jacket and slicing into his arm.
Moreau screamed as blood burst out in every direction. He struggled with the huge leg as the entire snow tractor rocked from side to side like a child’s toy. Denise saw a brief glimpse of torn flesh and raw bone as Moreau tried to free himself from the giant beast’s clutches.
It was too late, though. The claws hooked more firmly into Moreau’s flesh. Securing their crushing grip, the claws tried to wrench Moreau out of the tractor, banging him around the inside of the vehicle in the process. Blood sprayed everywhere as if from an overhead sprinkler system.
The claw ripped Moreau out of the snow tractor and tossed him on the ground nearby. The researcher tried to claw his way back to the vehicle, but he didn’t make it more than a few inches before a huge globule of ichor sprayed down and splashed over him.
Moreau’s parka sizzled and puckered, the material seemingly melting wherever the strange goop touched. An awful smell assaulted Denise’s nostrils. It was similar to the odor around the seal remains they’d found earlier, but it was much stronger and all the worse because she knew it was human flesh she was smelling this time.
After only a couple of seconds, Moreau was completely unrecognizable. His face was just a dribbling red slurry, and that boiling vomit smell was almost overwhelming. Moreau’s flesh and clothing were both sloughing off his form like hot tallow. The monster had sprayed him with some sort of acid, and it was chewing through flesh and cloth alike.
The same claw that had scooped Moreau out of the snow tractor reached down again and plucked the man’s dribbling form up off the ice. A second later, the creature had lifted off again, flying in the same direction that it took Ferrand.
Denise let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Her revolver was hot in her hands. She reached into her pocket with her bloody gloves and fished out more ammo for it, opening the cylinder and shoving each bullet inside. The gun hadn’t done them a damn bit of good, but she still wanted it loaded and ready. It at least made her feel like she was something other than prey. She dropped a couple of bullets on the floor of the snow tractor as she gave a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold.
Benoit slid across the blood-soaked front seat and took over the vehicle’s controls. They shuddered forward, still not moving half as fast as Denise would have liked.
She looked back in the direction the creature had flown off to. It seemed fair to assume that it had a nest or some other kind of home base in that direction. That was also the direction where Denise had encountered Villiers by the overturned motor sledge. And it was the same direction as whatever Merovée was.
Looking in the opposite direction, she could see activity around Delambre Station. People were moving about outside. They must have seen the creature attack the snow tractor and carry Moreau away. A group of people were moving toward the docks. That was probably whatever members of the Sulaco’s crew had been ashore at the time.
As far as Denise was concerned, they all had the right idea. The thing that attacked the snow tractor and carried the two Frenchmen away was the size of a damn dinosaur. At least to some extent, it was built somewhat like one too, maybe a tyrannosaurus or one of the other big carnivores. When it attacked the tractor, it had balanced itself on two girthy rear legs and its tail. She’d never gotten a good look at the head, but it seemed safe to assume that it was something gruesome and toothy.
Of course, a tyrannosaurus couldn’t fly. This thing was more like some sort of dragon, with its wings and thick armor. Maybe it couldn’t breathe fire, but the ability to spray acid was just as bad.
They managed to reach the edge of the station without being attacked again. Maybe the creature was full. Denise hopped out of the beaten snow tractor and headed for the relative safety of the main building. It was fortified, and she could get her Nitro Express.
One of the researchers who’d stayed behind pushed the door closed and shouted at them in French. Benoit trotted past Denise and Metrodora. A short but agitated conversation in French commenced.
Denise tried to push past them to get inside. She was cold and wanted to put some concrete walls between herself and everything else out here. Giant monsters. Ravenous dead men with slugs in their skulls. No thank you. She was checking out. Time to blow this popsicle stand for good.
Benoit grabbed her by the arm as she tried to slip past him. “I’m going to need you to come with me,” he said.
“I don’t think so. I’m leaving.” Denise didn’t consider herself a coward. She’d been in some tough spots in the past, and she’d pushed through. She’d opened a business that specialized in hunting man-eaters and things that lurked in the darkness. However, she didn’t have the equipment to deal with something like this. They needed tanks and flamethrowers for a problem of this magnitude, and those weren’t available here. Not even her trusty elephant gun could guarantee a quick takedown. Time to cut her losses and head back to Cape Town.
“Unfortunately, you will not be leaving yet.” Benoit said something to the other man. The second man pulled out a pistol as Benoit reached over and fished Denise’s revolver out of her pocket. “You are not who you say you are. You are certainly not here simply as a tourist. Colonel Dagenais will be here soon. He will decide what to do with you. Until then, you and your associates are being detained.”
“Wait, you can’t do this.”
“I can and I will.”
“We should be leaving on the Sulaco. We all should. You too.”
“Colonel Dagenais will decide that. We’re in radio contact with him now. Until then, we should all be safe here at Delambre Station. Dagenais and his men will be able to secure the area. The Sulaco will be impounded temporarily until this matter is resolved, though.”
“It looks like they have different ideas about that notion.” Denise nodded in the direction of the shore. The Sulaco had pulled up its skiff and was churning away from the station, picking up steam. A couple of sailors stood on the docks, frantically waving after the departing ship. Evidently, the captain saw what happened on shore and decided, quite reasonably, that he didn’t want anything to do with that heinous fuckery.
The Squires had chartered the ship without mentioning that there might be monsters involved. Denise was starting to think that this cloak and dagger business was just going to come back and bite them all on the
ass more often than not. Now she was marooned here, probably the single worst location to be marooned on the entire planet right now.
“Dagenais will convince them to come back,” Benoit said. The tone was certain enough that Denise knew that he had something up his sleeve. She hadn’t met this Dagenais. She had no idea where he would be travelling in from that he could get here with any reasonable speed. She just knew that if she were the captain of the Sulaco, it would take one heck of an offer to get her to turn around and come straight back to this godforsaken stretch of ice and rock.
“You’ll be staying in here until the colonel arrives,” Benoit said, gesturing to the storage shed. “There’s food on the shelves and heating. You’ll be fine for the amount of time you’ll have to be in there. We don’t want you wandering around the facility until then.”
“And just how long will we be in here? What about bathrooms and the like?”
“It won’t be long.” Benoit shuffled them into the storage room and shut the door behind them.
Denise looked at Metrodora. Metrodora looked at Denise. “Well, this is bad,” Metrodora said.
“Yes. Yes, it is,” Denise agreed. She was inclined to add something snippy to Metrodora about it being her boss’s fault for sending them down here in the first place, but she held her tongue. The last thing either of them needed right now was a protracted hissy fit.
A few minutes later, Cornelia, Fletch, and the remaining crew of the Sulaco who hadn’t been lucky enough to make it on board were tossed into the makeshift brig, too. Poole was there along with a Filipino engine room worker named Valdez and an engineer called Hobart.
There was a window on the far side of the storage room. It wasn’t big enough to bash open and crawl through, though. That would only let the cold inside. Denise could see a little bit, though. Most of the view was obscured by a shed that sheltered a small fleet of motor sledges.
However, she also had a view of a corner of the coastline. The Sulaco was picking up speed as it made for open water. Navigating around the large chunks of ice near the shore meant it hadn’t gotten terribly far yet, but Denise hoped they’d be able to open up the throttle soon. Hopefully, they were already transmitting out to anything in the Southern Sea and asking for backup of some sort. With a little luck, the Squires would hear that their team was stranded down here and send in the diplomatic cavalry. And then maybe some real cavalry to deal with the gigantic beast that apparently lived somewhere around the inland mountains.
“You two had the best look at it. What was that thing that attacked the snow tractor?” Cornelia asked.
“Honestly, I don’t know,” Denise said.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in our records,” Metrodora said.
“We came down here because of a meteorite, originally. Do you think it was, you know, alien?” Cornelia glanced between Denise and Metrodora.
“Wait, what?” Poole asked.
Denise quickly filled Poole and everyone else on what they’d seen, including the slug slithering its way into Louvain’s body, which was news to Cornelia, too. Fletch had already known the real reason for this whole expedition. The other crew members didn’t look happy about this revelation. For that matter, Fletch looked unhappy all over again.
Denise felt a pang of conscience over dragging everyone out here again. At the time, it seemed to make the most sense. The French wouldn’t have let them stay here if they knew that her team just wanted to poke around and see what they were studying, and it seemed unlikely that anyone from the ship would need to know about any of that. Now, people like Poole, Valdez, and Hobart were stuck here and only just finding out the full story why. That wasn’t how Denise wanted to operate.
Things had just gotten out of hand. Neither she nor the Squires had expected a problem quite so voracious. That was her fault as much as theirs, though. She’d started her business with Cornelia because she wanted to use her skills to help people in need. Now, she’d only helped put people in danger. She and Cornelia had known the risks. They hadn’t.
Denise barely knew Valdez and Hobart apart from seeing them around the ship a couple of times. Poole seemed like an alright sort from the little she’d talked to him. She liked Fletch, though. He’d acquitted himself well when they were investigating that overturned motor sledge earlier. Now they were in trouble right alongside her. The buck needed to stop somewhere. It was cold comfort, but she got them all up to date with what she knew. If nothing else, they deserved to know what was happening and why.
“The group that sent us calls themselves St. George’s Squires. They’re responsible for investigating—” She got as far as explaining who had sent them when Metrodora interrupted her.
“They don’t need to know that.”
“Maybe they don’t need to, but we owe it to them at this point.”
“The details aren’t important on that part,” Metrodora said. “Just know that we’re a group that seeks to investigate and secure unusually dangerous biological specimens for the public good.”
“I don’t really care if you’re elves working for Santa Claus,” Fletch said. “Just fill us in on what you know about that thing that attacked you and the slugs. I’ll worry about who you work for once our butts are out of the fire. So, you said you came here because of a meteorite. Are these things alien, or what?”
“Hard to say,” Denise said. “I don’t see how the big beast can be. It seems like it would burn up if it tried to ride through the atmosphere with the meteor. The slugs, maybe. They could ride inside the heart of the meteorite and possibly survive. Maybe. It’s all speculation at this point.”
“So, if the big critter isn’t some sort of space monster, where did it come from then? You bozos are supposed to be the experts,” Hobart said. “It looks like a damn alien to me.”
“It could be some sort of throwback. Something prehistoric that was locked in the ice for eons and only thawed out because of the meteor impact. The same for the slugs. We just don’t know,” Denise said. That answer clearly satisfied no one. What else could she say, though? Maybe giant monsters just lived in Antarctica all the time, and no one had met them before because there were so few expeditions to down here. She had no idea. Maybe the French researchers new some things she didn’t, but even Benoit seemed surprised by the arrival of the space-dragon or whatever it was.
She was saved from further questions when the station’s PA system blared to life and a stream of French spilled out. Denise went to the tiny window and looked around just to make sure that the flying monster wasn’t attacking again. There was no sign of it, though. All she could see was the Sulaco growing smaller in the distance.
Then she looked a little closer. There was something else in the distance, out past the Sulaco. It was another ship. The second ship was still too far away to see clearly, but it seemed to be rapidly approaching.
Denise remembered that there was supposed to be a whaling ship somewhere in the area. The Sulaco had been in radio contact with it a couple of times, even if they’d never actually run across each other. Someone must have sent out a distress signal. This must be the whaling ship coming to answer.
The litany of French ceased. A moment later, the voice switched to English. “Good day. This is Colonel Ozias Dagenais. I understand there are several of you there who do not speak French. I will be brief, but I owe you a brief explanation for what is about to happen.”
As Denise watched, Benoit and the other remaining researchers charged out of the main building and ran to the parked motor sledges. They leapt on and started the motors. Each one of them was in an almighty hurry.
Denise felt her mouth grow suddenly dry. The researchers weren’t just in a hurry. They looked absolutely terrified. Colonel Dagenais had also just said that he owed them an explanation for what was coming. She’d just used the same reasoning for explaining to Fletch and the crew how they’d found themselves so suddenly screwed.
“Unfortunately, the reports from Delambre Station tell
me that the situation has gotten out of control. I have made a decision. It has become apparent that further research cannot be conducted safely, even after new safety measures were put in place. The mission has thus shifted from one of research to one of containment. It is of utmost importance for the people of France and the world at large that this be transferred from civilian control to a matter for the military. As such, and under the authority granted to me by my command, I have made a decision. My apologies.”
Outside, Denise saw several bursts of light from the second ship that was approaching. For a second, she thought that maybe they were signaling lights, trying to communicate with the Sulaco. Then she realized what they really were.
That was the ship the Sulaco had been in radio contact with earlier, alright. The problem was, it wasn’t a whaling ship. It was a military cruiser.
The first shell the military ship had fired crashed down next to the Sulaco, sending a geyser of water up into the air. The next shell hit a nearby sheet of ice, sending flames and massive hailstones careening through the air. They had the range.
The next shell landed squarely on the Sulaco. The ice-breaker wasn’t a warship. All its armor was dedicated to protecting it from ice beneath the waterline. It didn’t have any armor at all on its upper decks. The shell plunged right through, like it was punching through tissue paper. A massive explosion shook the ship, sending parts of its superstructure tumbling down to the deck.
A second later, the ship started to crunch inward on itself, creating a gigantic “V” shape like a giant pair of scissors closing. The explosion had broken the vessel’s spine. Even if it had been fast enough to escape before, now it was crippled. From the shore, Denise couldn’t hear the metal grinding against itself, but she knew the ice-breaker wasn’t structurally stable anymore. It wasn’t built to take weapons fire.
With a final shriek, the ship lost all structural stability and snapped completely in half. Pieces of equipment, burning metal, and human beings all tumbled into the freezing water as the French cruiser steamed closer.