“Yeah.”
“What does it mean?” Natasha asked. “There’s blood everywhere, why focus on this?”
“These marks show that someone was still alive, they were trying to stop themselves from being dragged onto… whatever that is over there.” Breen gestured to the piled bodies with his head. “I’m not going to follow the marks to see where he ended up. Alive. Can you imagine what that must have been like?”
Natasha looked confused. “Of course he was.”
“What?”
“That structure over there is meant to keep something warm. I’d guess eggs. So it makes sense to grab something warm-blooded and pile it up around whatever you want to warm up. That is likely an instinctive behavior. The problem, of course, is how, if you’re a dinosaur with the intelligence of a brick wall, you keep the warm bodies alive long enough to do you any good. And I think we already have our answer to that.”
Javier was confused, or at least he hoped he was. The only explanation for her words that he could think of was bad... really bad. “I’m sorry. I don’t follow.”
“Their warmers—the humans they took—kept dying on them. Most of them were probably dead by the time they arrived, which meant they were no use for incubating anything. If this was the middle of the Triassic era, that wouldn’t be such a problem for a number of reasons. In the first place, the higher temperatures that reigned then would have meant that there was little problem with organisms freezing to death, but even if they did die, the bacteria that would decompose them also generated heat. So, dragging them underwater, like they did to my Russian shipmates wouldn’t be as self-defeating as it seems at first glance.” She pointed to a grouping of pale, bloated bodies, and Javier reflected that she certainly didn’t seem all that horrified to learn their fates. He supposed he wouldn’t be too happy with a bunch of spies who press-ganged him into an unexpected expedition, either. “Also, the amount of heat needed would be much less.”
“That still doesn’t explain how you know the answer.”
“Oh, that part’s easy. If you don’t have the warmth you need… you go look for more warm bodies. That’s what’s been happening. In fact, the repeated attacks by the smaller nothosaurs are the only thing that has made sense since we got here. Well, that and the guys in black.”
Breen looked at her sharply. “Do you know anything about that?”
“Not really… except that, judging by the fact that they got here without anyone’s help, it’s obvious they knew where to look for the bodies…”
Breen slapped his head. “They chipped everyone on that ship.”
“Yep.” She held up the forearm of her uninjured hand and pulled back her jacket and sweater. A small, puckered white dot could be seen on her pale skin. “Everyone. It wasn’t optional.”
Breen took a step towards Natasha. “We need to pull that out.”
Javier stopped him. “Are you crazy? We’re not pulling anything out. Not here, anyway. The doctor should look at her.”
“They’ll come after her.”
“Why? Unless they put in some really advanced diagnostics, all they have is a little thing that tells them she’s here. They’ve been here, they know what people in here look like.” He gestured at the corpses all around her. “Do you really think they’ll come back for that?”
“They’ve got to have some pretty powerful transceivers to track them globally without amplification. So the implant is probably sizable. Why not add in biometrics? She might lead them straight back to us.”
“Who cares?”
“They don’t want witnesses, Javier. You know what that means as well as I do.”
An image of men in black balaclavas gunning down the survivors of the Irizar flashed before his eyes.
“Maybe. But I’m willing to risk it if that means we can avoid cutting into Natasha’s arm without her permission.”
“Damn it,” Breen said. But he backed off.
Natasha pressed closer to Javier and whispered the words: “Thank you,” softly enough that only he could hear them.
“Now that that’s settled,” Breen said, “how about explaining a little more about what’s going on here?”
“You’ve heard most of it.”
“Go over it again in case I missed something.”
Javier listened as Natasha went through a wild tale of cold war biological weapons made out of weaponized anthrax, surviving dinosaurs that no one had ever noticed and a Russian program to study what happened when you combined both of them.
“Jesus. And these things are the result?” Javier said.
“I… I don’t think so. I think most of them, the small ones, were probably just created by evolution itself. All but that big one… That certainly isn’t natural. It would take some really unusual evolutionary conditions for an amphibian creature to grow to that size and still keep its legs. The bones need to be reinforced to take weight that grows proportionally to the cube of the length and width. My conclusion is that the sea floor is littered with the bones of creatures that also got dosed with anthrax, but whose mutations didn’t flourish. It was only our bad luck that one of them survived. As for the rest… I think the small ones would have been here anyway.”
“You’re seriously trying to tell us that we’re being attacked by lizards bigger than a car, and that’s fine and natural?”
“Of course. From what I can tell, from everything the intelligence people back home managed to piece together, they’re just nothosaurs.”
“Nothosaurs?”
“Triassic reptiles.”
“Dinosaurs?”
“Not quite. But close enough that it doesn’t matter all that much. The thing is that they appear to be perfectly natural. The only unusual things I was able to discover from the material I was allowed to see is that in the first place, they survived until the present day, which, I’ll admit, is pretty unusual in itself. They’re also a bit larger than anything we’ve seen from this species before, which might be a question of evolving to have more fat and consequently more bone and muscle mass to adapt to colder climates… or it might just be due to gaps in the fossil record.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Breen growled. “Can you tell us why no one saw them before if they’ve been here all along? It would have been kind of hard to miss these things when humans first explored Antarctica. We’ve been here for a hundred years and more, after all. Dark grey things the size of whales walking around aren’t exactly difficult to spot over ice cover, are they?”
“Nothosaurs were amphibious. They live and hunt in the water, like sea turtles, and they come up to land only occasionally. I think this place is a nest, and if I’m right there are probably eggs behind those bodies.”
She strode over to the ghastly wall and walked around the arms and legs and dead, gaping eyes until she came to a gap. No sign remained of the frightened woman who’d been throwing her guts up out on the ice just moments before. Javier had seen it happen to specialists in high-stress situations before. They focused on the problem at hand to the exclusion of everything else, no matter how appalling the circumstances.
Javier himself had to look away from the faces frozen not in the peaceful expressions of someone dead in their sleep, but in horrified—and horrifying—expressions of pain and bewilderment. Faces of people who’d been torn, kicking and screaming, from the horrible nightmare that had been the final moments of their lives.
“Bingo!” Natasha exclaimed. Javier couldn’t believe her eyes when she actually clapped her hands. “I told you it was a nest. This makes sense at least.”
Javier walked up behind her. He’d expected to see something leathery and slimy, like the eggs in the movie Alien. Instead, these almost looked like bird’s eggs—slightly larger than that of an ostrich and pale brown in the light that filtered in from the entrance.
“Well, I’m glad something makes sense to somebody,” Breen said.
Natasha peered at him. “Actually, most of it does. If you accept t
he fact that nothosaurs somehow survived for hundreds of millions of years without anyone noticing, and that they adapted to live in cold-water environments, most of this is perfectly rational. But not the eggs in the ice. That’s weird.”
“That’s weird? What about the huge thing that tore up an entire icebreaker?”
Natasha shrugged. “I suppose that’s what you get when you cross an ancient reptile with a specifically selected and purified strain of anthrax. It’s a special case, like the two-headed snakes one sees in museums. Mutations can happen, but they’re normally something physical. Weird behaviors like this? That is something to take note of.”
“How is this strange? Don’t penguins lay eggs in cold weather?”
“Penguins are birds.”
“Birds are dinosaurs,” Javier said. He was proud of being able to say that, but it came with the territory: he had a four-year-old nephew who knew more about dinosaurs than anyone on the planet.
Instead of praising him, Natasha gave him a put-upon look. “Birds are dinosaurs, but nothosaurs aren’t. Dinosaurs were high-metabolism animals, like birds or mammals. Nothosaurus are just reptiles.” She held up a hand. “Yes. I know what the name says, but trust me on this one. They’re reptiles, and that means that their eggs shouldn’t really be laid in ice. Not even knowing they’ve been collecting bodies to try to keep them warm. Nature is never stupid, and it always makes sense once you understand it. It’s possible that the anthrax might have messed with the brains of all of them. This may be a complete brood that got exposed. One mutated into that huge abomination, and the rest became addled enough to lay eggs in a snow mound.” She suddenly blanched. “What in the world are you doing?”
Breen looked up. He’d emptied most of the contents of his backpack—miraculously still with him and whole—onto the ice, and was gingerly taking an egg from the ground and laying it inside. “What does it look like? I’m getting a sample.” He pointed at empty spots in the clutch of eggs. “The Russians who just left took a bunch of them, and that tells me they’re important.”
“We need to leave them here. Do you have any idea how valuable this nest is to the scientific community?”
“Nope. All I know is what I saw. I work for a government which will want to know what the hell we have here without waiting for the whole question to go through the United Nations.”
Natasha’s eyes burned, but she simply stamped her foot and turned away. She knew perfectly well that the world worked exactly the way Breen had said.
As Javier turned to follow, something caught his eye. “We might just have a way out of here,” he said. “Look.”
A deep fissure ran into the back wall of the cave, not an inviting hole, but apparently big enough for a man to crawl into. Javier strode over and bent to look. It was about ten, maybe fifteen meters long. Sunlight, the pale light of the Antarctic summer could be seen at the far end. As far as Javier was concerned, no yellow glow on a tropical beach had ever looked more inviting.
“Ugh,” Natasha said. “I don’t want to go in there.”
“The only other way to get back is the way the creatures left. I’m assuming you don’t want to run into them, either,” Breen said. He’d finished packing the egg, using cloth cut from the clothes of the frozen bodies around them as damping material. Javier had looked away.
Natasha looked glum. “I hate small spaces. I can’t even get an MRI without panicking.”
“I’ll be right behind you.”
Her wan smile told him she wasn’t convinced.
Something roared.
“Oh, God,” Natasha said. “They’re here.” She dove into the hole before Javier could react, leaving him behind. He grinned—clearly some phobias were stronger than others.
“Go now,” Breen told Javier. “I’ll hold them here. Unless the big one comes, I should be all right. But hurry.” He held out his hand and Javier placed the FAL in it with a nod of respect.
Javier jumped into the hole behind Natasha, only to find her collapsed a couple of meters in. “Move it,” he whispered. “They’re coming.”
From behind them, voices could be heard. “You’re next, Smith.”
Clark finally spoke. “Wait. Look. That’s Anna!”
“No, it’s not. Anna’s dead.”
“She’s right there. That thing has her in its mouth. She’s alive. We have to do something.” Even from deep inside a hole in the ice, Javier could hear the desperation in his voice.
“There’s nothing we can do now. Come on.”
Gunfire erupted behind them, echoing in the closed confines of their escape route. Javier redoubled his efforts, pushing against Natasha’s behind. He abandoned modesty for a moment and pressed her forward, pushing her along the ice. The shooting had reactivated her somewhat, and it appeared that she’d left her claustrophobia aside, but she was still having problems: it was difficult to crawl with only one arm. “I’m sorry, but we need to move,” he shouted.
“Keep pushing,” she screamed.
Behind them, the argument raged. “She’s alive, you bastard, we need to get her back!”
“Shut up and get in there, or I’ll shoot you myself.”
Javier turned back to see Clark, his face a mask of fury, enter the tunnel. Behind them, three more shots exploded in the cavern before Breen himself darkened the entrance.
By then, Natasha had made it to the exit and, not waiting for Javier to push her, she scrambled out, balancing herself on her good hand. Javier exited as well and helped Clark to his feet when he arrived. Breen was last and, as soon as he was on his feet, the big Australian took a swing at him.
It should have been a massacre. Clark was nearly a head taller than the American and thirty kilos heavier. Javier, an ex-rugby player himself, saw the telltale bulk along the chest, legs and shoulders of someone who’d once been part of a pack of forwards.
But Breen stepped nimbly out of reach and grabbed Clark’s hand. He moved quickly, and twisted the hand backwards, while, at the same time, getting behind the bigger man’s back. “Now, just calm down. Breathe.”
“You utter shit,” Clark gasped between clenched teeth. “That was Anna back there. How can you just leave her like that?”
Natasha put a hand on his arm and Javier felt a pang of jealousy. “Anna’s dead. I’m sorry, but I saw her myself.”
Javier nodded. “She’s right. She was definitely dead.”
“Then who’s that back there? She saw us. She even talked to us. She needs our help. Breen, you saw her.”
“I didn’t hear her talking.”
“But you saw her. You saw her moving.”
“She was moving around, but that was probably just the way the creature was holding her. Besides, I couldn’t see her face through all that hair.”
Javier suddenly understood, and his heart broke. “It must have been Ingrid,” he said. “The creatures must have gotten into the bunker.”
Natasha nodded. “That makes sense. Now that all the humans they had are dead and cold, they must be hunting for more to heat their eggs. I wonder if the eggs might develop in spurts when they’re warm and then go dormant while they’re cold. It would be an amazing adaptation, don’t you think?”
They stared at her like she was crazy. Breen let go of Clark’s arm and grunted. “Well, at least they’re not eating them.”
“Of course not. It’s much easier to eat fish around here. Hunting prey on land would consume a lot more energy just to keep the creatures warm. It’s totally inefficient. The air out here is colder than the sea for most of the year.”
Clark wasn’t listening. He half-turned to face Breen and then appeared to think better of it. He walked off, ten paces from the others and, ignoring the bitter cold, sat down on the ice. “That was Anna. I don’t care what you say. And she was alive.”
***
Breen wanted them to get moving. His vote was to attempt to make their way back to the Irizar. He’d done what he needed to do, and now he wanted some kind of metal
plating between himself and the dinosaurs or reptiles or whatever the hell they were. He knew the ship wouldn’t be much defense against the big one—that had been proven over and over again, but it was better than nothing, and would make a nice landmark to send the rescue choppers. If it didn’t sink first, of course.
He was sure that somewhere in The Pentagon, someone had hit some alarm bells, and that somewhere in the ocean, a Navy ship with helicopters would conveniently appear just in the right place to offer the Argentine government assistance on the inevitable rescue operation that they would have to mount. It was probably already close enough to rescue them… but no one would move unless the Argentines allowed them to. Breen, for all anyone knew, was just a scientist, another civilian sadly stranded in a fluid situation. Overreacting would blow his cover miles high. He wondered if that mattered anymore.
Breen’s satellite phone was still up and running, and he had three fully charged batteries in the pack for when that stopped being the case, so he took advantage of the lull and checked his orders.
Hold on to the woman. We’ve already told the Argentines she’s an American citizen and that we want her back because we believe she was involved in illegal activities in Russia.
Breen chuckled. He wondered how the US would handle the fact that it would be their word against that of an Argentine colonel with a spotless record? If he knew the State Department, it would be smoothed over. A couple of Coast Guard cutters, obsolete in the U.S. but better than anything in the Argentine Prefectua, would change hands and the incident would simply never have happened.
Have secured a sample of nothosaurus egg, he sent back. Confirmed that landing force was Russian. I’m trying to confirm whether they have taken off again. They’re not currently in my line of sight. I’m pretty sure that the Russians also have egg samples, probably more than one. I could really, really use a pickup team right about now, and I suggest they come loaded for elephant. Or nothosaur.
Fort Belvoir was going to be furious about the openness of the communication, but he was too tired and too angry to care. As far as Breen was concerned, if someone cracked the encryption, they’d earned the right to read it. He suspected that, by the time anyone could manage that, the news of what had happened in Antarctica would have traveled across the globe.
Ice Station Death Page 14