by Joshi, S. T
He stretched his arms out to her in a pleading gesture as he sank even further down. “Please. Help me!”
She moved toward him as the mud sucked him even further under. Now just one arm was still free. He strained his fingers in her direction as she seemed to sink slowly toward him.
She was within a few yards of him now, and it was plain to Patrick that she was not human. Or not wholly human. But she was his only chance now. Again he pleaded with her. “Please, Elin.”
She moved still closer to him. “Now do you understand?” she asked. Then she reached out and touched his face with hands that were not hands at all.
The stones began to whisper, and he turned to them as Elin guided him. Moving closer, his lips pressed against the ancient stone and his mind turned black, burning inside.
He collapsed on his back in the water, plunging below the surface. In his head the stones continued to whisper and he could hear Elin’s voice joining them. “Now do you understand?” And he did. Now he knew that not just his mother’s blood flowed through his veins but that of something far, far older. It was only a trace, but it was enough. And it was becoming a tide, surging through him, changing him.
As he sank, his lungs stretched to bursting, he could feel his limbs cramping, transforming. Itching chunks of frail flesh fell away in a bloody soup, revealing a new and different body beneath.
He had been Patrick, but now he was a new creature, perfect and strong, one that could breathe in a huge gulp of water and not drown. Now he was ready.
He had answered the call of the ancient stones. And he sensed they were far older than they seemed. Merely brought here by one of his messengers, waiting half-submerged for century after century, calling quietly but insistently in the dark and in dreams, to those who would hear, to men and the things that were more than men. A whispered clarion from the fathomless ocean of time, calling them home.
He, and the others left in Narmouth, were among the last ones. They were all gathering now, from across the water-girt globe, at a place he could see in his mind; at the deepest part of the ocean, far deeper than man’s nets or his poisons could reach, a dark blue flame burned, summoning them.
The time was nearly here, said the voice of the stones. He would soon rise and they would be needed. Vast dark legions of them.
He turned in the direction of the pit of blue fire and, with the creature that had been Elin at his side, began the long swim homeward.
A FOOTNOTE IN THE BLACK BUDGET
A JOE LEDGER ADVENTURE
JONATHAN MABERRY
1
FOR THE RECORD, I DON’T BELIEVE IN THIS STUFF.
No goddamn way.
There’s possible, there’s improbable, there’s weird, and there’s no-fucking-way. This is a mile or two past that. So, no, I don’t believe in it.
What pisses me off is that it seems to believe in me.
2
I WAS FOUR MINUTES AWAY FROM CALLING IT A DAY AND CUTTING out early to catch an Orioles-Yankees game at Camden Yards. Hot dogs, beer in big red cups, and the opportunity to spend a few hours yelling at a bunch of young millionaires try to hit a little ball with a big stick. Baseball, baby. The American pastime.
The phone began ringing while I was tidying my desk. If you work in a bank, an insurance company, or pretty much most jobs you can pretend you don’t hear that call. I know cops at the ragged end of a long shift who swear their radios were malfunctioning.
But when you do what I do, you have to drop everything else—your time off, your family, your friends, even baseball—and you take the call. Kind of like the Bat Signal. You can’t just blow it off.
So I answered the call.
It was my boss, Mr. Church.
“Captain Ledger,” he said, “I need you on the next thing smoking.”
3
“WHAT’S THE OP, BOSS?” ASKED BUNNY, THE BIG KID FROM ORANGE County who looked like a plowboy from Iowa.
We were aboard an LC-130 Hercules, a big military transport plane fitted out with skis. None of us liked the fact that our plane had to have skis.
I had a third of Echo Team with me. Two shooters—Top and Bunny.
“I’ll give it to you the way I got it,” I said. “The mission has two layers. On the surface it’s a surprise inspection to evaluate the status of a new research facility designated Proteus Nine.”
“There were eight other Proteus facilities?” asked Bunny.
It wasn’t a serious question, so I ignored it. “Proteus Nine was built at the foot of Vinson Massif, the tallest mountain in Antarctica. The Russians and Chinese both have research stations in the same region.”
“The neighbors getting cranky?” asked Top—First Sergeant Bradley Sims, my number two.
“Not exactly,” I said. “Our intelligence says that in the last twenty-eight hours the Russian and Chinese bases have gone dark. No radio, no communication of any kind. Nineteen hours ago our facility also went dark. We’re about six hours ahead of the Russian and Chinese investigative teams.”
Bunny grunted. “You think the base has been taken?”
“Unknown, but on the list of possibilities,” I said.
Top made a show of looking up and down the otherwise empty hull of the transport. Except for our gear and a modified snowcat we were all alone. “Small team for a hostage rescue,” he said mildly.
I nodded. “There’s some concern that a strong military presence might send the wrong message. However, SEAL Team Six is five hours behind us. But they want us to go in first, quick and quiet. No one’s supposed to know we’re here.”
Top snorted. “The Chinese and Russians probably have every eye in the sky they own looking at this, and everyone who spies on them will have heard about it through back channels, so they’ll be looking, too. This whole area’ll probably be featured on Google Earth before we’re wheels down.”
“Got to love the concept of ‘secrecy’ in the digital age,” said Bunny. “Ten bucks says that Julian Assange will be there to meet our plane.”
It was almost true, and that was somewhere between sad and scary. With the vertical spike in digital technology, anyone with a smartphone had greater capabilities of discovering and sharing sensitive information with the world than the combined professional world media of ten years ago. Social media could be used for a lot of good things, but it’s turned everyone into a potential spy or source. And, yeah, I really do know how paranoid and right-wing that sounds, but it is what it is. I’m a cheerleader for the First Amendment except when I’m in the field, at which point I have occasional Big Brother moments. My shrink is never going to go broke.
Bunny said, “I’m going to throw this idea out there and call me crazy, call me a nut, but how about an avalanche? If the satellites are only seeing snow, then who’s looking under the snow?”
“Thermal scans,” I said. “And so far they haven’t found much.”
“So?” said Top. “Knock all the power out and heat signatures are for shit. This is Antarctica. This is what the North Pole wants to be when it grows up.”
“Fair enough. And it’s the right question. I asked it before we left and they’re retasking a satellite to give us ground-penetrating radar. Same stuff NASA used to map the land under the ice caps.”
Top sat back and folded his arms. He had dark brown skin crisscrossed with pink scars. Most of them earned since he’s been working for me. “Seems like they’re throwing us into a situation about which we have shit for intel.”
“Pretty much,” I said.
“The day must end with a ‘Y,’” muttered Bunny.
“Do we at least know anything about our own facility?” Top asked. “What are they doing there, and don’t tell me they’re making another fucking penguin documentary.”
“That,” I said, “is a good news, bad news sort of answer.”
He studied me, dark eyes flat and weary. “Of course it is.”
I opened my laptop and called up a series of images of Proteus Nine, t
hen toggled through them. “The facility was prefabbed and brought in by Chinooks. Labs, drilling gear, six generators—two active, two emergency, two offline in case—and all the other stuff necessary for establishing a moderately self-sufficient base. Staff of seventy. Ten on the science team, twenty support staff that includes cook, medical officer, site administrator, and some engineers. The rest are military, but we don’t know what branch, so I asked Bug to run a MindReader deep search to find out.”
The whole DMS was built around the MindReader computer system. Without it we’d be just another SpecOps team. MindReader had a super-intrusion software package that allowed it to do a couple of spiffy things. One thing it did was look for patterns by drawing on information from an enormous number of sources, many of which it was not officially allowed to access. Which was the second thing … MindReader could intrude into any known computer system, poke around as much as it wanted, and withdraw without a trace. Most systems leave some kind of scar on the target computer’s memory, but MindReader rewrote the target’s software to completely erase all traces of its presence. Bug was the uber-geek who ran MindReader for the DMS. I sometimes think Bug believes that MindReader is God and he’s the Pope.
“What happens if we knock on their door and some goon from the People’s Liberation Army Special Operations Forces answers?”
“Then we all become a footnote in next year’s black budget report,” I said.
Bunny sighed. “Like I said … this only happens to us on days ending in a ‘Y.’”
I wish I could call him a liar.
4
THE LC-130 DID A PASS SO WE COULD ALL TAKE A GOOD LOOK AT the terrain. Proteus was built hard against the foot of the mountains, and from this distance the scattering of buildings looked like tiny cardboard boxes, the kind Christmas ornaments come in. Small and fragile. As we swept up and around for the approach to the icy landing strip, I had a panoramic view of Antarctica. I’ve been in a lot of Mother Earth’s terrains—deserts, rain forests, caverns, grassy plains, and congested cities—but nothing ever gave me the feeling of absolute desolation that I got from the landscape below. There was white and white and white, but mixed into that were a thousand shades of gray and blue. The total absence of the warmer colors made me feel cold even in the pressurized and heated cabin of the plane. I could already feel the bite of that wind.
Suddenly Bug was in our ears. “Got some stuff and I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
“We’re in Antarctica, Bug,” I said. “Our expectations are already pretty low.”
“Yeah, even so,” he said. “As you might expect, there’s a couple of layers to this thing. They tried to keep the whole thing totally off the public radar, but with the ice caps melting there are too many people looking at the poles. So they have a cover story for when they need it.”
“Which is?”
“Studying the Antarctic Big Bang. Before you ask, I had to look that up, too,” said Bug. “Apparently a few years ago planetary scientists found evidence of a meteor impact that was earlier and a lot bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs. They say it caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth’s history, the Permian-Triassic. We’re talking two hundred and fifty million years ago. There’s a crater on the eastern side of the continent that’s something like three hundred miles wide. The impact was so massive that it might have caused the break-up of the supercontinent of Gondwana. They’ve taken a lot of samples from meteor debris, and it looks like the meteor was actually a chunk of rock knocked out of the surface of Mars by an asteroid that smacked it during the Permian Age.”
“You’re saying Proteus was set up to study Martian rock?” I asked.
“Well … on paper, yeah,” said Bug. “But that’s only the cover story. And it’s the same cover story the Russians and Chinese used when they set up.”
“If that’s a smokescreen, then what’s the real deal? Why’d we build Proteus? What are we looking for?”
“That’s the part you won’t like. Everything is on a budget report somewhere. Even black bag stuff has to be paid for, and somebody somewhere is keeping track. The deeper I dig for information the more obscure the code-names are for this project. I got as far as this description of funds allotted for something called ENRIX. MindReader had to creep through a lot of back channels to find out what that acronym means, and it came up as Extra-domestic Nonphysical Research and Implementation of Exo-cultural Artifacts.”
“What in the wide blue fuck is that?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “The file is marked VBO.”
“Shit,” I said.
VBO means “verbal briefing only.” All pertinent information is to be relayed in person. Nothing written.
Ever since some skittish types in the DoD and Congress got wind of MindReader there are more and more VBO files popping up. It’s making me cranky.
“Tell me how a meteor from a quarter of a billion years ago ties in to a black-budgeted op down in a place that is the geographical equivalent of the asshole of the world?”
“No idea, Joe,” admitted Bug.
“Not good enough,” I fired back. “Go find an idea. Find out who is writing checks for this thing and tell Mr. Church that I want interrogators making life unpleasant for them until I know why I’m about to freeze my nuts off.”
“Copy that,” he said and disconnected.
I looked at my guys.
“Well,” sighed Top, “isn’t this the shit?”
The pilot put us down with no trouble and informed us that the twilight temperature outside was a balmy forty-two below. He told us that, temperature-wise, we caught a break.
Let’s pause on that for a moment.
Forty-two below.
And that is miles from what’s considered cold down here. Pretty well into my own estimation, however.
We bundled.
Mr. Church always makes sure we have the best toys, and one of the goodies we had were Therma-skinz, a pre-market kind of long-johns that had micro-fine heating elements woven into the fabric of the new generation of spider-silk Kevlar. We’d stay warm and moderately bullet-proof. The ’Skinz were ultra-lightweight and designed for combat troops who need to move and fight. Then we put on modified Hammer BH-class biohazard suits because we were all Boy Scouts once and you know their motto.
“You ready, farm boy?” asked Top.
Bunny looked out the window. “Nope,” he said.
5
THE LC-130’S NOSE LIFTED ON POWERFUL HYDRAULICS TO ALLOW us to drive the snowcat, and the inrush of frigid air was like a punch in the face. I tugged the balaclava into place as I walked down the ramp with Bunny. Top drove the cat, and the flight crew waved him down and guided him onto the access road. The crew was instructed to button up the plane and remain aboard. A team from Proteus was supposed to refuel the bird, but so far no one had come to meet us. That was troubling for all the obvious reasons.
The closest buildings were utility sheds, all of which were dark and probably locked. The main building was a quarter mile away. A two-story central structure with single-story wings stretching off as if embracing the foot of the mountain.
“Lights are on,” said Bunny.
“Doesn’t mean anyone’s home,” murmured Top. Then to me he said, “What do you think this ENRIX thing is? You think it’s tied to that bacterium they thought they found in those Martian rocks?”
I shook my head. “But we each take a portable BAMS unit.”
The BAMS units were man-portable bio-aerosol mass spectrometers that were used for real-time detection and identification of biological aerosols. They have a vacuum function that draws in ambient air and hits it with continuous wave lasers to fluoresce individual particles. Key molecules like bacillus spores, dangerous viruses, and certain vegetative cells are identified and assigned color codes. Thanks to Mr. Church we had the latest models, which were about the size of a walkie-talkie. We clipped them to our belts. As long as the little lights were green we were all ha
ppy. Orange made us sweat. If they turned red we’d be running like hell.
Bunny nodded to the base, which was clearly designed to look nondescript and utilitarian. “This is lot of James Bond shit to find alien space bugs.”
“You say that now, farm boy,” said Top, “but what if they’re seven-foot-tall alien space bugs? Ain’t you ever watched The Thing?”
“That was a giant walking carrot.”
“The remake. The shape-shifting monster that bit that guy’s arms off. John Carpenter and shit.”
Bunny shook his head. “Sorry … must have been out getting laid when that was on.”
I smiled. The banter was always a work in progress with them, but right now it rang a little false. Nerves, I suppose. We’d come a long way and Bug was right about the information—we didn’t like it.
We climbed onto the cat and did a last-minute weapons check. It wasn’t really necessary, but each of us did it automatically. An unspoken acknowledgment that we each believed something was hinky. When you lived at the bottom of the world, visitors were rare. You came out to greet them. Every door on the station remained closed.
We drove in silence to the main building, and Top parked us at an angle that would allow the cat to offer his protection if this turned into an ambush. He idled there for a full minute.
Nothing.
“Maybe they’re putting their mittens on,” suggested Bunny.
“Uh-huh,” grunted Top. “And maybe they’re baking us some cookies.”
“Let’s get to work,” I said. “Combat callsigns only.”
I screwed a bud into my ear and tapped it. “Cowboy to Bug. Talk to me.”
“Welcome to the winter wonderland, Cowboy.” The fidelity of the speaker was superb, and Bug sounded as if he was right next to me instead of at the tactical operations center at the Hangar, the main DMS facility in Brooklyn. “We are mission active and all telemetry is in the green.”
“Okay, we’re on the ground and about to leave the cat,” I said. “Bunny, let’s go knock. Top, watch our backs.”
Top nodded and clicked the switches that made a pair of 30-mm chain guns rise from concealed pods. A second set of switches folded down a pair of stubby wings on which were mountain Hellfire missiles, six per side. As I said, Mr. Church always makes sure we have the best toys.