Subhuman

by Michael McBride

  Jade closed her laptop and rose to join the others. One screen played the video captured from the camera on Evans’s diving helmet as he passed through a veritable statuary of monsters, which emerged from the shadows before vanishing back into them. The camera focused on Kelly as she crawled into a small orifice and Evans followed. The image shook so badly it made her stomach queasy.

  “This is it,” Evans said. “Right . . . here.”

  On the screen, he emerged from the tunnel into a larger room where details were lost to the shadows until he looked down at the ground and a green design that spiraled away from an oxidized metal column.

  “What did you say was on top of the column again?” Rubley asked.

  “A big silver ring. Aluminum, I think.”

  “Like a donut?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Then isn’t it obvious?”

  “If it were, Mr. Rubley,” Richards said, “we wouldn’t be taking up your valuable time.”

  “It’s a Tesla coil,” Rubley said. “What you have there is one great big source of electrical energy.”

  “What purpose could it possibly serve?” Evans asked.

  Rubley leaned closer to his webcam and smiled.

  “What do you say we find out?”

  31

  ROCHE

  “The symbol is called an Irminsul,” Roche said, turning the stickpin over and over in his hands. “It’s essentially a pillar with wings, not a broadsword, although I’d imagine that in this context it has a similar meaning.”

  “And what would that be?” Evans asked.

  Roche tossed him the pin and hopped down from the platform. The rocks made clattering sounds underfoot as he walked toward the lake, from the edge of which he could see the flashes of light in the depths as the engineering crew installed a pressurized seal over the door of the pyramid that would allow them to open and close it like the diver lock-out chamber of a submarine. The flowing water of the subterranean river underneath the structure would then serve to drain the lower level and restore a state of equilibrium. From there they could figure out not only how to make the ancient machine work, but what it was designed to do.

  “It was a sacred symbol to the earliest Germanic tribes. It means ‘great strength.’ The Nazis later appropriated it, among other esoteric symbols, as sort of a rallying cry to the larger population. The people of the time were angry, disenfranchised. Not only had they just lost the First World War and countless fathers and brothers, their country had been broken up and its people saddled with crippling financial reparations. It was as if the whole country was in a funk, one from which it was rescued by a renewed sense of national pride. People wholeheartedly bought into something called the Völkisch movement, which promoted the idea that the German people were the descendants of a superior race of Aryans—the survivors of the sunken city of Atlantis—and were never meant to be subject to anyone, let alone the vindictive French and British. Absurd as it might sound, it was this very notion, of the descent from Atlanteans, that created the conditions that gave rise to the Nazi party.”

  “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

  “Dumber than a society ruled by inbreeders who worshipped cats?”

  “Ouch.”

  “My point is that there is nothing more powerful than belief, especially in a climate where people were basically willing to subscribe to any theory that placed them above their circumstances, but faith could only be stretched so far before people demanded an element of proof, which was exactly why Hitler commissioned Heinrich Himmler to form the scientific arm of the Nazi Party, the Ahnenerbe, which was dedicated to researching the archeological and historical roots of the Aryan race.”

  “The blond-haired, blue-eyed survivors of Atlantis?”

  “That’s something of a bastardization perpetuated by Western propaganda, but it makes a whole lot more sense than the truth, which is that they truly believed the Atlanteans fled their sinking continent into the Himalayas, from which they made their way into the Nordic countries—hence the blond-haired, blue-eyed thing—before ultimately taking refuge in a place called Agartha in the center of the Hollow Earth.”

  “People actually bought into that nonsense?”

  “You tell me. You’re the one holding the lapel pin of an officer in the Ahnenerbe.”

  Evans stared down at the pin for several seconds before he spoke.

  “You’re so full of crap.”

  “The Nazis set out to find the lost city of Atlantis, and here you stand at the edge of a lake at the bottom of which lies the ruins of a civilization that by all rights shouldn’t exist, holding the proof of their success in your hand.”

  “Suddenly you’re an expert on the Nazis. Let me guess, they were big into the whole UFO thing, too.”

  “Actually, they were, but that’s beside the point. My grandfather served in intelligence during World War II. He taught me that the secret to beating your enemy is destroying not his country, but his motivation. Cities can be rebuilt, societies will rise from their own ashes, as long as the defeated can stoke the fires of their hatred to fuel their ideologies. If you take away their beliefs, eliminate their cause, you rob them of their will to fight.”

  “Wasn’t their motivation to kill all of the Jews?”

  “No one even found out about the concentration camps until after Germany fell. The hatred of Jews was a symptom of a larger disease, not the cause. The Jews represented the bankers and lawyers who imposed the punitive reparations. They were of Middle Eastern origin, not Aryan. Had the Nazis been able to find incontestable proof of their Aryan heritage, even in the final days of the Reich with Russia closing from one side and the Americans from the other, they would have been able to cling to that belief and rebuild with that same sense of entitlement, comfortable in the knowledge that the world belonged to them as the descendants of the mystical Atlanteans.”

  “Instead, they sacrificed an entire generation for that bizarre ideology.”

  “Exactly, although it’s rumored that in their dying days, the Nazis built a fortress in Antarctica where they could bide their time until the world was again ripe for the taking.”

  “Do you buy that?” Evans asked.

  “Every lie has an element of truth, doesn’t it?” Roche said. “They obviously found this place before we did.”

  “So if the Nazis were here, what happened to them?”

  “That’s a good question,” Roche said, and walked away down the shoreline.

  It was more than a good question; it was a question for which the answer was of critical importance. They’d been surrounded by all of the evidence they would have ever needed to inspire the German people to fight to the extinction of the very last man, and yet none of that proof ever made it back to the Fatherland. The only feasible explanation was that they never left the Antarctic. Or perhaps this was the origin of the Fuhrer’s Convoy that mysteriously arrived in Argentina in 1945. Maybe whatever secret they discovered here was so frightening that even surrender was preferable to facing it, a secret so terrible they’d taken it to their graves with them.

  Now here Roche and the others were, more than three-quarters of a century later, discovering this civilization with its otherworldly symbols and alien-looking remains as though for the first time.

  The engineering crew breached the surface and loaded their welding gear back into the Zodiac, where even more equipment was stacked in watertight cases, which they commenced unloading with practiced speed.

  “You ever see such a well-oiled machine?” Connor asked.

  Roche had been so lost in thought that he hadn’t heard the other man approach.

  “Military?”

  “CEC.”

  “Civil engineering corps. You guys really didn’t spare any expense.”

  “You want something done right, you call an engineer. You want it done fast, you call the Navy.”

  “Makes sense, you being a former SEAL and all.”

  “You’ve done
your homework.”

  “What can I say? I’ve always done well in school.”

  “So well, in fact, that the NSA plucked you right out of the DoD’s pocket.”

  “They needed a second baseman for their softball team.”

  “Is that why they drafted you right after you deciphered the code the Taliban used to secretly coordinate the movement of troops?”

  “Which led to the deaths of more than three hundred men, women, and children.”

  “And saved the lives of countless American troops.”

  Roche sighed.

  “What do you want, Mr. Connor?”

  “I just want to know what we can expect this machine to do.”

  “How should I know?”

  “You were one of the best cryptanalysts in the business.”

  “And here I thought you brought me all this way because of my singing voice.”

  “You left the NSA to pursue the symbology of crop circles. Don’t tell me that you’ve wasted so many years and accomplished nothing.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

  “So it’s just coincidence that these crop circles happened to match the standing waves of the frequencies that unlocked the pyramid. That they just happened to stimulate the inner workings of a fifteen-thousand-year-old machine, inside of which we found a Nazi relic, all within a stone’s throw of a temple where three alien-like creatures with extra chromosomes were barricaded with the bodies of their victims.”

  “I think you have a very vivid imagination.”

  “So I’m not right to be concerned?”

  Roche looked away and watched the SCUBA-clad engineers unload the last of the cases from the Zodiac.

  “I didn’t say that,” Roche finally said.

  “You haven’t said anything.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I already told you.”

  “And I already told you that I don’t have the slightest idea what this thing is supposed to do.”

  “Then maybe you’re not the right person for the job, after all.”

  “I never claimed to be. I helped you figure out how to get inside. The way I see it, I’ve done my part.”

  “Inside that pyramid is a primitive Tesla coil designed to supply power to Lord only knows what. We need to know what to expect when we turn it on.”

  “What are you really asking me? If this is some sort of alien technology and we’re about to trigger an invasion?”

  “Is it?”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “Which is probably what those people down there thought before they were slaughtered and dragged into that temple to be consumed.”

  “That’s quite a theory.”

  “If I’m wrong, perhaps you’d care to tell me what happened to the German forces that beat us here.”

  Roche glanced away. He was wondering the exact same thing.

  “We’re powering this thing up in a matter of hours,” Connor said. “If there’s anything we need to know first, you’d better figure it out.”

  He turned and crunched back down the shore toward where Richards had been watching their conversation from the pier.

  Roche again looked out across the lake toward the tip of the pyramid and for the first time wondered if maybe, like the Germans, he was about to find the proof that he’d been seeking for so many years.

  32

  EVANS

  The airlock had worked just as planned, and by the time they’d ridden the elevator back to the surface the water had been completely drained from the pyramid, laying bare tunnels that exposed the inner workings of the machine. Evans supervised the exploration via the camera mounted to the side of Dreger’s tactical helmet. It was the drilling engineer’s job to ensure the stability of the structure and make sure the inadvertent flooding hadn’t compromised its integrity, which seemed highly unlikely considering its age and the fact that it was a veritable mountain of fitted granite, but they couldn’t afford to take any chances.

  The twin blurs Evans had seen through the hole in the sublevel were actually waterwheels built into the narrowing of a subterranean river. The flowing water caused them to turn and drive a series of cogs, which in turn rotated a ring of magnetite around a rusted iron column wound with copper wire, the same column that continued all the way up through the chambers directly overhead. According to Dreger, it was a fairly simplistic electrical generator, although one phenomenally advanced for its time. He suspected there had to be a series of capacitors elsewhere in the pyramid to store the residual charge and a means of dissipating the excess, which was undoubtedly the source of the hum they’d been monitoring since their arrival. Based on the electrical potential of the system, he speculated that whatever the primitive machine did must have been pretty spectacular.

  The room with the well terminated in a blind cul-de-sac, forcing Dreger to turn around and head back toward the upper levels. He was able to walk in a crouch through the corridors, which had looked a whole lot smaller while Evans had been swimming through them. Dreger’s voice echoed from the confines in such a way as to make it nearly unintelligible. He talked nonstop, presumably as a way of dissipating his own nervous energy.

  “The whole concept is based upon Faraday’s law of induction.” His camera jerked from side to side as he spoke. “The magnetite is essentially a big, permanently charged magnet. When it spins, it creates a changing magnetic field and induces an electrical current in the copper wire, which is wound so tightly that it looks like solid metal. The voltage generated is proportional to the number of windings, meaning it not only amplifies what already has to be an impressive charge based on how fast the water’s making the wheel turn, but continues to do so for three vertical stories. Now maybe it loses some of that charge to the surrounding rock. . . .”

  Evans tuned out Dreger’s voice and scrutinized the live feed. The way the lights reflected from the damp walls and remaining puddles caused the aperture of the camera to constantly adjust the focus, yet he could still tell that there were no hieroglyphics or writing on the walls, which suggested that while the corridor served a purpose, it wasn’t meant to be seen, unlike the gallery with its elaborate statuary. That implied the upper passages were ceremonial in nature and designed to impress upon a large number of people the might of the gods. So what kind of might had this theoretical audience been gathered there to witness?

  He hated the idea that he was separated from the exploration by two miles of ice, but he understood the need to proceed with caution. He’d still get his chance to study the interior in person once the engineering team confirmed the safety of both the structure and the ancient machine. Once they figured out what it did, anyway. The fact that he was looped into Dreger’s feed at least made it bearable, especially considering the engineer’s willingness to take direction.

  “. . . those specific sounds were used to create just enough energy to lower those stone slabs,” Dreger said. “Or maybe I should say the precise amount of energy. I mean, really, you’ve got to give credit where credit is due. All of this is way ahead of its time. For all of our technological advancements, we didn’t figure out how to generate hydroelectric power until the nineteenth century. It’s things like this that make me think those people who believe in all of that ancient alien stuff aren’t so crazy after all. Shoot, how else do you explain someplace like this?”

  “You should be coming up on the vertical branch any second now,” Evans said.

  Dreger glanced up at the ceiling every few steps as he watched for the mouth of the passage Evans had seen earlier.

  “Don’t you ever wonder how any number of people could build these pyramids to such exacting architectural standards using quarried rocks so large it would take dozens of men to lift, seat, and form to fit so perfectly?”

  “All the time,” Evans said.

  “Do you buy into the theory that there were ancient astronauts who gave our ancestors the technology to make thing
s like this?”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  The shaft opened above Dreger, who craned his neck and used the light mounted to his helmet to trace the contours of the square walls. He stood to his full height and turned in a circle until he was facing directly into another corridor that angled upward and away from the descending corridor.

  “There had better be a raise in my future,” Dreger said. He grabbed the ledge and pulled himself up, but not before Evans caught a glimpse of the deep scratches and grooves in the stone between Dreger’s hands.

  “What do you see?” Evans asked.

  “A whole lot of the same.”

  “No designs on the walls.”

  “They aren’t as smooth as the others, like they’ve been deliberately left unfinished.”

  “Because they didn’t expect anyone to see them.”

  “Someone must have. These grooves in the floor almost look like someone dragged or pushed something heavy through here.”

  “Like a sarcophagus?”

  “You think this is a tomb? That would certainly explain the smell.”

  “What smell?”

  “Like something crawled in here and died. Not recently, though. It’s not like the stench you get when a mouse dies inside your wall. More like . . . I don’t know. Have you ever come across an animal that’s been dead for so long that all that’s left is bones?”

  Evans recalled crawling into the hidden, bone-filled tomb in Egypt.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think I know what you mean.”

  Dreger’s light focused on a stone barrier and constricted into a smaller and smaller circle as he neared.