Ice Station Death

by Gustavo Bondoni

  “This way.”

  He dragged her through a dark passage which echoed with the sound of the ship being demolished. It led to a stairwell with only one option: up.

  They climbed, and he felt like a character in a bad teenage slasher flick. One of the ones that, instead of running like hell out the open front door ran up the stairs instead, presumably on the assumption that being trapped and massacred was preferable to having to run all the way to the police station.

  Another passage greeted them on the next floor. This one opened into a small lounge with three sofas and a TV set. It had also once held a window.

  That was gone, a jagged tear in its place. Cold air washed into the room.

  Suddenly, the belly disappeared and an eye looked in on them.

  “Shit, it’s seen us. Get back!”

  Even as he said it, he knew there was no chance they’d make it. A huge claw flew at them. He tried to shield Natasha from the brunt of the impact and took a deep breath. He’d imagined his death many, many times… but never thought it would come at the claws of a mutated dinosaur.

  Something exploded all around them, a deafening, concussive crash that repeated a thousand, a million times. Breen’s overloaded senses took a moment to realize the sound was perfectly familiar, and that the metal walls had caused it to become overwhelming: automatic gunfire.

  The claw drew back like a human pulling away from a wasp sting.

  Breen ignored the ringing in his ears and risked a look. One of the sailors stood in the doorway they’d just entered, a FAL braced against his hip like Rambo. It was a terrible idea because the recoil on that gun was more than enough to cause some serious injuries if it happened to slip… especially if it got him in the nuts.

  “Thank you,” Breen said, but he could barely hear his own voice.

  The sailor just smiled and pointed at his ears. The man—not much more than a boy, really, an impression made stronger by his baby blue eyes—appeared to be happy as a bedbug, with a smile that spread from ear to ear. Breen had seen this happen—not often, but he’d seen it—to men who entered real combat for the first time: that sudden sense that this was what they’d been born to do, and that they would never again be happy unless they were fighting for their lives.

  Their savior strode towards where the windows had been to inspect his handiwork. After a few seconds, he turned back to them, satisfied with a job well done.

  That was his last mistake. A sharp nail the size of a rhinoceros’ horn suddenly burst through his stomach. He looked down on it, the blue eyes confused, his smile gone. Of course, he couldn’t turn his head to see that the nail was attached to a claw which had just thundered back into the room.

  The boy opened his mouth to scream, but a gush of blood preceded the sound. Then, when he saw that, he began to shriek in earnest, loud enough that it made it past the ringing in Breen’s ears.

  He was pulled back, as if by a string. He struggled to avoid it, but his feet could get no purchase on the blood-slick ground.

  The monster removed the sailor from the room, gashing him against the jagged edges where the window once stood.

  The boy writhed in pain, still screaming, and the monster appeared to realize he was there. The rest of the clawed paw closed around him and… squeezed.

  Blood sprayed in every direction as something inside the kid’s body exploded with an audible pop. Breen felt the droplets hit, felt the warm liquid begin to run down his face.

  Suddenly, the other side of combat came back to him with a thud: how quickly a human could go from a smiling laughing person, a person you could sit down and play cards with, to a pile of mangled flesh and gross goo.

  Natasha screamed.

  That brought him back to life. “Don’t go catatonic on me,” he said. “I need you alert.”

  They ran out of the room and tried to make it towards the stairs on the other side of the cube at the center of the ship, but that way was blocked by pipes and wiring that had been pushed into the hall in front of them.

  “Dammit,” Breen growled. “This is stupid, but what choice do we have? Up it is, then.”

  They went up a flight of stairs, but the corridor they reached was full of smoke. They went up another. Breen knew the ruined bridge had to be on either the next level or the one after that, so, even though this floor had a certain amount of smoke as well, he decided to risk it. Natasha came after him zombie-like, but at least he didn’t have to drag her.

  They were in luck. The way was clear and they made it to the stairwell on the far side without getting shredded or crushed by any of the tremendous blows that landed on the ship while they were in the corridor. The stairwell, despite being right on the outer skin of the ship’s superstructure, was still, miraculously, intact.

  It wasn’t quiet, though. Every sound—the beast’s roars, the machine guns and the yells of frightened defenders—echoed. It sounded like there was a large war in there with them.

  Finally, they reached the ground floor and were back out on deck.

  There was no way they were going to make it aft past the creature on deck. Breen looked for one of the stairwells that led beneath, and saw that they had to cross nearly ten meters of open deck to get there. He turned to Natasha.

  “Do you see that door over there?”

  She nodded, tears making tracks down the spatters of the sailor’s blood.

  “Good. We need to run there. Can you do that?”

  Another nod. Less certain this time.

  “All right. On my signal.”

  He knew he had to time it right. At the moment, they stood in a small oasis of peace in the middle of hell itself, but nothing guaranteed that the monster wouldn’t spot them and pounce as soon as they left their dubious cover. On the other hand, he suspected that it was only a matter of time before this little patch of ship was torn apart, too. So the question became one of choosing exactly the right moment to run: when the creature’s attention was elsewhere, but without waiting too long.

  A burst of machine-gun fire opened up on the opposite side of the ship.

  “Now! Come on.” He half-dragged Natasha across the open space.

  Breen had always had a sixth sense about when someone was watching him, whether it be a person standing behind him in an office setting or a sniper on a hillside a thousand yards away in the mountains of Pakistan.

  Perhaps it was a change in the quality of the air or perhaps he saw a flicker of shadow out of the corner of his eye, but something made him stop, turn back and throw himself on top of Natasha just as the enormous set of claws flew over them. Apparently, his uncanny ability also worked with reptiles. It was something to think about later.

  The creature had overbalanced when it tried to decapitate the two and that gave them the opening they needed to scramble to their feet and reach the relative safety of the lower deck.

  Suddenly, peace reigned. If Breen hadn’t known what was going on above decks, he would have thought the ship was sailing in reasonably calm water—or, more likely, he would have guessed that it was in port and that workers were carrying out repairs. The cacophony had been reduced in scale to a series of intermittent clangs and thumps.

  Natasha relaxed visibly. Her shoulders straightened and she began breathing normally.

  “You okay?” he asked. It wasn’t the right time to talk about it, but he was impressed. Natasha had followed without missing a beat. Injured and untrained, she’d still held up much better than some soldiers he’d known.

  “I think so.”

  “Good. Let’s see how far we can get.”

  The first thing he did was to find a corridor which took them another level down. The paint on the upper level was a welcoming white shade, while the one below had been painted green, with exposed piping and wiring replacing the more human amenities of the floor above. The message was clear: this was a place for machinery and the men who worshipped it.

  The corridor extended all the way to the back of the ship and emerged in
the far rear below the heliport. It was nearly perfect, except for one detail.

  “Let me check where the monster is.”

  He climbed a ladder far enough to stick his head above the heliport deck. The nothosaur was still ahead, ravaging the bridge. Other than a few swatting movements, it appeared to be ignoring the men around it… in fact, it reminded Breen of horses swatting at flies with their tails as the rest of the animal did something else.

  “All clear, come on.” He headed for the port-side rail and looked down. There were no ladders, but the stern was low enough at that point that they could jump onto the ice below.

  Natasha stopped dead. “We’re leaving the ship?”

  “Of course. I don’t think there’s going to be a ship much longer.”

  “Wait. Are you sure about this? I prefer to stay on board. The crew will drive it back.”

  “With what?”

  “I don’t know. Doesn’t this ship have guns? Now that they know what they’re up against, they shouldn’t have trouble. It’s just an animal.”

  “It’s a big animal.”

  She said nothing.

  “Even you said it shouldn’t exist. Come on. The crew can’t get this under control. You’d need an armored battalion, not just a barely armed ship’s crew.” He decided not to tell her about the 40 mm guns. Those could probably deal with the creature… but his orders were to take her with him, they said nothing about having to tell her the truth. “Besides, I have a snowmobile with spiked treads down there.” He pointed to the crate that he’d finished unloading a few minutes before the monster hit them again. “We won’t have to walk.”

  “All right. You go first, though.”

  There was a narrow fringe of water between the Irizar and the ice, and the fall was a little over a meter and a half. He wanted to be certain that Natasha didn’t feel threatened and decide not to try it after all—the height and the jump over the open water would make climbing back on board to get her a risky proposition.

  He jumped, and the ship lurched, launching him out onto the ice in a much higher trajectory than he’d intended. He landed on his feet, but they slid out under him and that meant that, an instant later, he was on his ass. It hurt like hell.

  Damn. Now he’d have to convince Natasha that she would be safe. He turned back to the ship, half-expecting to see her heading back belowdecks as fast as her feet would carry her.

  Instead, he found her laughing. His face must have shown his surprise because she stifled it immediately.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that I was expecting you to land like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.”

  He chuckled. “Man, I hate those movies. They never get anything right. What I just showed you is how real secret agents land.”

  “So you admit it now?”

  “You were going to realize it as soon as you saw the equipment I have over there anyway. Do you think you can land better than I did, or would you prefer for me to catch you?”

  Natasha jumped and landed on her feet, though it was a close thing. She swayed a couple of times and waved her uninjured arm in circles, but stayed upright. Then, after walking about twenty meters away, slowly, deliberately, she turned back to the ship and watched the monster.

  “Come on, what are you waiting for? When it finishes them, it’s going to come for us.”

  “I… I’m not so sure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It looks like it’s attacking the ship, not the people.”

  “Could have fooled me, it’s killed a lot of guys.”

  “That’s just incidental damage. I think the ship is what it’s after. I think it sees the ship as a threat. Something big swimming around in its territory and making a lot of noise. It’s defending its turf.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “No. I mean it. As long as the ship stays here, it’s going to keep attacking until one or the other is dead.”

  He shook his head. The woman was right. It was obvious once she pointed it out. Of course, it also helped that they were no longer in the line of fire: it was one thing to be cool and collected when you were watching the conflict from a reasonable distance, quite another to try to analyze what was going on from within.

  “Well, with the bridge gone, I’m not sure the Irizar can leave,” Breen said. “But we can, and we should get the hell out of here. My stuff is over there.”

  The snowmobile was black, which made him suspect that it had come out of one of Langley’s skunkworks. The boys from the CIA loved black things. Black helicopters, black cars, black glasses. Apparently, no one gave a thought to the fact that a black snowmobile on a continent-sized patch of ice would stick out… well, like something black on a white background. They went ahead and painted it black anyway.

  He’d also piled up some more stuff they’d sent with him. Most of his equipment was still on the ship, including his weapons, which were mostly small arms. The one thing he’d brought with him was a Matador portable missile launcher, on the off chance that he would run into the big creature again. He stifled a small pang of guilt at not having offered its use to the men defending the ship, but for one thing, he didn’t know the monster would attack the Irizar again… and for another, they weren’t his responsibility. If they couldn’t take care of their own toys, they didn’t deserve to keep them.

  The rest of the weapons had been left behind because, in all honesty, nothing in the arsenal he’d brought along felt as satisfying as the FAL rifle, so he decided to keep that one and had brought a number of ammo clips. He hoped the Russians wouldn’t be prepared to be attacked with a big infantryman’s rifle.

  Of course, he didn’t know what to expect from them, either. Probably well-trained special forces types, and those guys didn’t fool around. Unless he received a direct order to the contrary, he would watch them from a safe distance.

  “Is that a missile launcher?” Natasha asked as he discarded the bulky packing case for the Matador unit.

  “Yes.”

  She nodded. “Good idea. But I don’t think it will be much help.”

  “We’ll see. That thing might be big, but it’s covered in flesh, not armor.”

  “Oh. If we run into the big one again, you’ll be all right, I suppose. But that’s not the one you need to worry about.”

  “What? Did you see what it did to that boat back there?”

  “Yes. But did you see that it wasn’t eating any of the men? It has no interest in humans, I tell you. The little ones, on the other hand… Well, I think they eat people, as many people as they can.”

  “And the missile won’t work on them?”

  “Of course it will. But they’re pretty fast, and there’s a whole bunch of them,” she said as she mounted the heavily-laden snowmobile behind him. “How quickly can you reload?”

  Chapter 11

  Javier stood, slack-jawed, watching the carnage. The thing on the Irizar, the thing demolishing the Irizar, was not something his mind could wrap itself around. It was just too big. For a split second, his mind told him that the creature wasn’t trying to destroy the ship but involved in some bizarre and disgusting mating sequence. But then it slashed again and he saw a largish chunk of metal fly off.

  “All right. Change of plans. We’re going back to the base. Maybe we can get the generator started and use the radio.”

  His companions just nodded. They looked as dazed as he felt. Anna asked: “But what about the lizard? The small one, I mean.”

  “We’ll have to deal with it. I scared it away last time. Maybe I can do it again. It’s the only hope I see right now.”

  Carl and the Swedish scientist nodded glumly, and they began to trudge back.

  Javier shook his head and wondered if time passed differently there. How long had it been since he slept last? Had it been a couple of hours? A couple of days? The sun appeared to be circling around above them, not moving across the sky the way it should have. His watch said four o’clock… but four o’clock i
n the afternoon or four o’clock in the morning? His cell phone might have told him, but he hadn’t bothered to charge it after its battery ran down on the last night on the Irizar. There were no cell towers in Antarctica, and the whole reason they’d come was that base had no internet connection.

  He might have asked one of the others, but he preferred to remain silent. The scientists tended to be smug, all-knowing. Better not to have them believe that he was losing his mind.

  His body seemed as tired as his brain. He was amazed at just how hard it was to put one foot in front of the other. His stomach growled with hunger, and he was glad to have been trained by the Argentine army, where cadets never really had enough to eat. He knew hunger was just a distraction and could ignore it.

  A few minutes passed. A thin mechanical noise which he realized had been going on for a few minutes forced itself onto his notice. He automatically looked up, expecting to find that the guys in black had sent a drone up, but there was nothing in the air.

  Within moments the buzz was loud enough to be a distraction. It reminded him of a motorcycle for some reason. Hope surged: maybe someone from the base had survived and was now coming to rescue them in a vehicle?

  He quickly realized that would have been ridiculous. No one would be riding a motorcycle over the ice.

  He was right. Moments later, a black snowmobile whisked into view and stopped beside them. It was towing a kind of trailer on skis, also black, carrying what appeared to be a missile launcher.

  Remembering what had happened to the pilot, Javier reached for his pistol, but the driver said. “No need for that.” And pulled down his hood. It was Breen.

  The passenger, likewise, uncovered her head. She had some difficulty because one of her arms was still in a sling. Natasha smiled at him. “Hello, again,” she said. “I don’t think I ever thanked you for saving my life. In the long run, it looks like we’re all going to die anyway, but at least you gave me a few more days.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Javier said, thinking that the people who called Russians morose might be on to something. “If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else.”