by Joshi, S. T
“Don’t get trigger-happy, old man,” said Bunny.
“Don’t get in my way if I do, farm boy,” said Top.
We got out. The sun was a cold and distant speck of light that seemed poised to drop off the edge of the world. Winds cut across the open plain with the ferocity of knives. The ’Skinz kept us from freezing, but the cold seemed to find every devious opening in our facemasks and goggles.
I stopped and raised my head to listen to the wind. It blew across so many jagged peaks that it picked up all sorts of whistles and howls. I wasn’t experienced enough with this part of the world and its sounds, but it seemed to me that there was more to that wind than the natural vagaries of aerodynamic acoustics. It actually seemed as if the wind was shrieking at us.
Bunny caught it, too.
“The fuck is that?” he muttered.
I had no answers and didn’t want to give into any kind of discussion on the topic.
“Time to clock in,” I said. “Bug, where are we with thermal scans?”
“They’re online but I’m getting zero reading.”
“Shit,” said Bunny.
“Don’t panic yet, Green Giant,” Bug told him. “Site schematics for Proteus show that the main facility is built into the mountain, and that part of the range isn’t all ice. It’s granite with a lot of iron and nickel and other stuff in there, and you have half a mile of dense ice on top of that. My own scans are bouncing back.”
“So we got nothing on the facility?” asked Bunny.
“You’ll need to put eyes on it, I’m afraid,” said Bug.
Bunny swore softly as he faded to the left side of the main door; I took the right side.
I reached out a hand and knocked on the door.
Even when you know it’s a waste of time, you go through the motions in case you’re wrong. And sometimes you do the expected thing in order to provoke a reaction.
We got no reaction at all.
I reached for the handle. It turned easily and the lock clicked open.
Bunny mouthed the words, “Secure facility.”
But he could have saved the sarcasm. We entered fast, covering each other with … and then stopped. Just inside the metal doorway was a small vestibule, and the back wall of it was one mother of a steel airlock.
“Bug,” I said. “Tell me why I’m looking at an airlock.”
“I don’t know, it’s not on the schematics. Nothing in the materials purchases or requisitions.”
“Balls.”
“Whoever put it there was able to hide the purchase,” he said. “That means he knows how to futz with the black budget process.”
“I thought MindReader could hack that stuff.”
“It can,” he insisted. “But we have to tell it to look for it. It’s—”
“—just a computer. Right, got it,” I said.
“Give me a starting point, Cowboy. Are there are maker’s marks on the component pieces?”
Top ran his hand over the smooth steel. “Ten bucks says it’s a Huntsman,” he said.
I nodded. In our trade we get to see every kind of airlock they make. And, unfortunately, we get to deal with what’s behind most of those airlocks. Fun times.
“There’s a geometry hand scanner, too,” said Bunny. “Pretty sure it’s a Synergy Software Systems model. The new one that came out last December.”
“Good,” said Bug, “that gives me a starting point. Sergeant Rock, put on a glove and run the scanner.”
Top took a polyethylene glove from a pocket and pulled it onto his right hand. It looked like the blue gloves worn by cops and airport security, but this one was veined with wires and sensors that uplinked it via satellite to MindReader. He placed his hand on the geometry scanner and let the lasers do their work. Normally they create a 3D map of the exact terrain of the whole hand, but the sensors hijacked that process and fed the scan signature into MindReader. The computer fed its own intrusion program into the scanner and essentially told it to recognize the hand. Sure, I’m oversimplifying it, but I’m a shooter, not a geek. I’m always appropriately amazed and I make the right oooh-ing and ahhh-ing sounds when Bug shows me this stuff, but at the end of the day I just want the damn door open.
The damn door opened.
“You da man,” Bunny said to Bug.
We stepped back from the airlock door as it swung out on nearly silent hydraulics. Our guns were up and out. We expected a flood of fluorescent light and a warm rush of air.
Instead we saw only darkness and felt a cold wind blow out at us like the exhalation of a sleeping giant. It was fetid air. It stank of oil and smoke and chemicals. But it was more than that. Worse than that.
It was a meat smell.
Burst meat. Raw meat.
Like the inside of a butcher’s freezer.
I heard Bunny’s sharp intake of breath.
I heard Top softly murmur, “God in heaven.”
Then something moved in the darkness. We crouched, weapons ready, barrels following line-of-sight, fingers lying nervously along the curves of our trigger guards.
Inside the chamber, a dozen yards away, we could hear something. It wasn’t footsteps. Not exactly. This was a soft, almost furtive sound. A shift and scrape as if whatever moved in there did not move well. Or was unable to move well.
“NV,” I said very quietly, and we all flipped down the night vision devices on our helmets. The world of snow white and midnight black instantly transformed to an infinitely stranger world of greens and grays.
The thing in the darkness was at the very outside range of total clarity. It moved and swayed with a broken rhythm, obscured by rows of stacked supplies.
“What the fuck … ?” breathed Bunny.
The thing moved toward us, a huge, weird shape that was in no way human. Pale and strange, it shuffled steadily toward the open door, but we only caught glimpses of it as it passed behind one stack of crates and then another. The abattoir stink of the place was awful, and it seemed to intensify as this creature advanced on us.
“Got to be a polar bear,” whispered Bunny.
“Wrong continent,” said Top.
Their voices were hushed. They were talking because they were scared, and that was weird. These guys were pros, recruited to the DMS from the top SpecOps teams in the country. They don’t run off at the mouth to relieve stress. Not them.
Except they were.
“Cut the chatter,” I snapped, and from the way they stiffened I knew that it wasn’t my rebuke that hit them, but the realization that they were breaking their own training. Each of them would have fried a junior team member for making that kind of error.
So … why had they?
The thing in the darkness was behind the closest set of crates now. In a few seconds it would shuffle into view. I could feel fear dumping about a pink of adrenaline into my bloodstream.
And then the creature moved into our line of sight.
In the glow of the night vision it was green and unnatural, though I knew that it was really white. Not the vital white of an Alaskan polar bear, or the pure white of a gull’s breast. No, this was a sickly hue, and I knew that even with the NV goggles. This was a pallor that had never been touched by sunlight, even the cold light here at the frozen bottom of the world. This was a mushroom white, a sickly and abandoned paleness that could only have acquired that shade in a place of total darkness. It provoked in me an antagonism born of repugnance, and I nearly shot it right there and then.
The creature was as tall as Bunny—six and a half feet or more—with a grotesquely fat body and eyes that were nothing more than useless slits in their hideous faces.
I heard a sound. A short humorless laugh of surprise and disgust. Could have been Top, or Bunny. Or me.
“It’s a penguin …” said Bunny.
A penguin. Sure. In a way.
But it was massive. Twice the size of the Emperor penguins and bigger than the prehistoric penguins I saw in a diorama at the Smithsonian. The wings were
stubby and useless as if it no longer flew even through the water. The beak was pale and translucent; and the body was blubbery and awkward.
It waddled toward us, and we gave ground, though we kept our guns on the thing. Crazy as it sounds, I was scared of it. The sight of it was triggering reactions that were way down in my lizard brain—miles from where rational thought could laugh off instinctive reactions.
The penguin shambled past us through the airlock, but then it suddenly stopped at the exterior door. The sunlight was almost gone, but what little there was touched its face.
The creature tilted its face toward the warmth for a single moment, and then it reeled backward from the light and uttered a terrible sound. It was the kind of strangled shriek of terror you hear only from animals whose throats are not constructed for sound—like rabbits and deer. A scream that is torn from the chest and dragged through the vocal chords in a way so violent and wet that you know it has damaged everything it touched. The penguin careened into the wall as it fled backward from the touch of the dying sunlight. Its screams were terrible.
Even after the blind animal crashed backward into the airlock it continued to scream and scream. I could see black beads of moisture flying from its beak and with sick dread I knew that they were drops of bloody spit from its ruined throat.
“Boss …” said Bunny, his voice urgent with concern and horror.
“Push it back inside,” yelled Top.
Bunny let his rifle hang from its strap and with a wince of distaste placed his hands on the animal’s back and gave it a short, sharp push toward the airlock, away from the sunlight.
The penguin paused at the mouth of the airlock and immediately began fighting its way backward, screaming into the darkness it had come out of.
Bunny shoved again, throwing his massive upper body strength against the creature’s resistance. It lurched forward, but then it turned and stabbed at Bunny with its pale beak. Bunny howled in pain as the razor-sharp beak tore through the knitted wool of his balaclava. Black blood erupted in a line from the corner of Bunny’s mouth to his ear.
“Shoot the fucking thing!” bellowed Bunny as he backpedaled, shielding his eyes from another peck.
Top shoved him out of the way and raised his Glock. There was a single, sharp crack!
A black hole appeared between the slitted, useless eyes of the penguin, and the entire back of its head exploded outward to spray the line of stacked crates. The sheer bulk of the thing kept it upright for a moment, giving the weird impression that the bullet hadn’t killed it. Then it leaned slowly sideways and collapsed.
We stood there in a loose circle staring at it.
Bunny said, “What … ?”
He spoke just that one word and let it trail off, because clearly we had no more answers than he did.
6
WE CHECKED THE REST OF THE STOREROOM, BUT IT WAS EMPTY.
Almost empty.
There were no more penguins and there were no people, but all along the back wall there was blood. Pools of it. Drops of it. Arterial sprays of it on the wall.
Against the wall was a stack of crates that was ten boxes high and went all the way to the ceiling, the wooden boxes pressed closed. Somebody had written across the face of the stack.
THEY ARE ALWAYS WHAT WE WANT.
Top leaned close to the writing, then winced.
He didn’t have to tell us what had been used to write those words.
The floor was covered with bloody footprints. In shoes, in military-style combat books, and in bare feet.
“Looks like a parade’s been through here,” said Top.
We followed the prints out of the storeroom and down a corridor lined with closed doors. These opened into offices, bedrooms, small labs, an infirmary, and other functional rooms. No one was in any of them and there was no sign of disturbance. No blood, no damage, no shell casings. The bloody footprints had long since faded to paleness and then vanished.
Despite the coldness of the storage room, the temperature was up in all the other rooms. Very high. The thermostat read 82.
I reached for the dial to turn it down, but found that the dial was broken. Someone had jammed a screwdriver into the gear. There were bloody fingerprints all around.
“Our bad guys don’t like the cold,” said Top.
We pressed on and eventually cleared the whole floor.
“Nobody’s home,” said Bunny. “Sort of feel happy about that.”
“You know what they say about assumptions, farm boy,” Top said quietly.
Suddenly Bug was in my ear. “Cowboy,” he said, “I’ve been digging up more stuff on this. It’s all hidden behind black budget code and—”
“We’re kind of in the middle here, Bug,” I said, “so cut right to it.”
“Okay, I’m checking the profiles of everyone on the team, and it’s really strange. Not the individual members, but what they do.”
“Hit me.”
“The team leader is Dr. Erskine, a molecular biologist from Johns Hopkins. His second in command is a marine biologist, and you have an astrophysicist, a geologist, an archaeologist, a professor of comparative anatomy, a psychologist, and—get this—three people with Ph.D.s in parapsychology.”
“To study a meteor crater?” I asked.
Bunny said, “Oh, man …”
“There’s more,” said Bug. “The support team includes several civil engineers, and at least half of the military are from the Army Corps of Engineers. They’re digging for something mighty weird down there, Cowboy.”
I told him what we had found so far. He started to laugh at the description of the penguin, but the laugh was fragile and it collapsed when I got to the part about the blood.
“Anything on the BAMS units?” he asked.
I checked. The green lights were still glowing.
“Boss,” said Bunny, “how do we know these things would pick up bacteria from another planet?”
“One step at a time,” I said. “No one’s proved that there is such a thing as Martian bacteria. And even if there was, it’s going to be mighty old and mighty damn dead.”
“You totally sure about that, Cap’n?” asked Top.
I didn’t answer him. Instead I said, “Anything else, Bug?”
“Just equipment manifests. They brought down every kind of drilling and excavating equipment in the catalog. Big stuff, too. Earth movers and a hundred-ton crane.”
“For what?” demanded Bunny.
“Documents don’t say. But here are the really twitchy parts …”
“Don’t even finish a sentence that starts that way,” said Bunny.
Bug said, “The first is that the other military assets down there are from the Back Room.”
“Christ on a stick,” said Top.
The Back Room was a very vanilla name for a group that, in an era of genuine political transparency, would have been called an advanced bioweapons R & D shop.
“What’s the rest?” I asked.
Bug said, “There is a budget allotment for six reinforced hyperbaric chambers with holding chambers, complete with biological atmosphere preservation systems. Big units, and by big I mean you could put two elephants in each one. Cost twelve-point-two million dollars each. Now, can anyone tell me why they need what amounts to steel cells for animals bigger than elephants?”
I didn’t answer and I didn’t want to turn this into a debate. Bug had nothing else except unanswerable questions. I signed off, and we went looking for all that big hardware.
There was a heated tunnel that connected the main building with an oversized equipment shed. But when we got there it was empty. No cranes, no drills.
What we found instead was a big goddamn hole in the ground.
It was in one corner, but it took up nearly a quarter of the floor space—maybe forty yards across. As I said, big hole. It dropped down into shadows.
“Look here,” said Top as he squatted down on the far edge. “See this? This isn’t a sinkhole, not a pro
per one. They started digging right here and from the drill marks on the edge, they got down to a certain point and then something happened. A big-ass chunk of the floor fell in.”
He shone his light down. There was a rough slope angling down, steep but walkable. His light swept back and forth, then stopped on a pool of blood. Guns out and eyes open, we crept down the slope.
Bunny touched the edge of the pool with his boot.
“Boss, this hasn’t even had time to freeze. Whatever’s happening here is still happening.”
They looked at me, and I nodded. “Rules of engagement,” I said. “Pick your targets—let’s not cap any friendlies … but gentlemen, I don’t intend to bleed for this thing, whatever it is.”
They nodded, and I could see their inner hardness rising to the surface to supplant their fear. Some of their fear. I turned my face away, not wanting them to read whatever expression was there.
We continued down the slope. It was littered with chunks of ancient ice that was veined with discoloration as if polluted water had been frozen here in layers. A hundred feet down we passed through the ice layer and entered the rock hardness of the mountain. As the ice gave way we realized that we were on a stone slope, and one that was far too regular to have been anything natural.
And far too old to have been anything our own drills and engineers had cut. I put my high-intensity flashlight on the widest beam setting and shone it down.
“Cap’n,” breathed Top.
“I know,” I said, my throat dry.
Bunny just said, “No.”
The slope was some kind of rampart that angled downward for at least a thousand yards. It was cracked in places, and in other places byways led off from it to form slopes both angled and flat. All around, on the slope, built into the walls and tumbled ahead of us were gigantic stone blocks. They were stacked like prefab building units and intercut with other structures—cones, tubes, pyramids, each of fantastic size, some of them taller than the Great Pyramid in Egypt. I know how that sounds, but we were all seeing it. The flashlight had a quarter-mile reach and it barely brushed the outer perimeters of what could only be a vast city of stone.