Ice Station Death

by Gustavo Bondoni

  It came as little surprise that the attack hadn’t caught the American off guard. Breen was directing traffic. He had a FAL in one hand and a bulky bag hanging from his shoulder. Javier gave it a hard look and wondered what weaponry the American was holding back.

  But there was little time to think. The men were organizing into three groups, one that would hit the creature on each flank and a third that would try to hold the center and keep it from hitting the Irizar again.

  If he’d been in command, Javier would definitely have sent someone to attack from the rear… an animal should be easy to confuse if it didn’t know where the pain was coming from, but attempting to change the order of battle now would only delay the defense. Any plan would be better than milling around trying to figure out new orders on the fly.

  Javier was assigned to the group on the right. There wasn’t much staging, they just stood in a nervous clump for an eternal minute, hoping the overscale nothosaur wouldn’t decide to strike while they waited. Once everyone was in position they charged over the ice, guns blazing.

  For a few seconds there, at the very beginning, Javier was convinced that the charge was actually going to work. The nothosaur roared and reared back. Only its two front legs were out of the water, and these, as it flinched, struggled to get purchase against the colossal weight pulling the creature back.

  It scrabbled madly and slipped nearly five meters.

  Emboldened by this unexpected success, the mixed group of sailors and soldiers redoubled their advance, closing to within just a few armlengths, emptying magazines into the monster’s flanks and head.

  The nothosaur suddenly appeared to realize where it was, and the nature of the terrain beneath its forepaws. Claws suddenly drove deep into the ice and its backwards motion was arrested. Its apparently unstoppable slide into the dark water halted and the mountainous animal teetered for a moment, balanced between two colossal forces: gravity and the strength of its own claws.

  The claws won.

  Inch by inch at first, and then meter by meter, the grey body emerged from the hole in the ice. The entire process took only a few seconds and it looked like a mountain was moving in front of them. The effect stunned the men who, instead of running for cover, stood gaping.

  “Retreat!” Javier shouted, but his words—and those of some others also trying to get the men to run back towards the Irizar—were lost in the howling wind. No one moved.

  Then the nothosaur’s rear legs were out and it stood horse-like on the ice with its tail the only member still underwater. Men still stared in awe.

  It roared and reared up on its hind legs as it had when attacking the ship earlier. The men nearest, the group on the left across from Javier’s position, appeared to realize their danger and attempted to escape, but it was too late. Like a cat pouncing on a favorite toy, the nothosaur jumped onto them.

  The world shook. Javier was certain that the crushing weight had to have broken through the ice. But when he looked over again, the monster was still above the surface and the group of men had… vanished. A couple of isolated figures, faster or luckier than the rest were disappearing into the distance, but the majority—once Javier managed to understand what he was looking at—had been corralled by the front legs and crushed to a pulp by the falling weight. In that cluster of uniforms and blood, nothing moved. Thirty people, wiped out in a flash.

  The soldiers and sailors stationed in the central formation retreated and the nothosaur attacked them. The pitched battle became a race back to the Irizar, with the men barely ahead of the thing from their nightmares.

  The rope ladders were their undoing. As men and women milled about under the bow of the icebreaker, the distance closed and then, seconds later, disappeared.

  A lucky few of the central group managed to disappear over the railing and into the ship before death reached them but most suffered a fate similar to the first bunch. Javier watched the carnage and wondered how many of the ship’s complement were being massacred. Forty? Fifty?

  The view was obstructed, but one image stayed with him. The nothosaur’s front paw swept the ground and two small rag dolls flew into the air, describing beautiful parabolic arcs dozens of meters high before disappearing behind an ice ridge. Two more men dead, he realized; there was no way a human body could survive the impact at the far end of such a flight.

  Javier’s own group had scattered. Some ran towards the ship. Others away from the monster out into the wild white wastes. Only two had remained with him, standing together to his right he turned to them.

  A young woman looked back at him. The two sailors with FALs were both female.

  “What do we do, Colonel?”

  She sounded calm and collected in spite of everything they’d just witnessed. Both of the women were dark-haired and dark-skinned with slight builds of medium height. They could very easily have been sisters.

  Javier found himself hoping that they weren’t, that no set of siblings other than Ingrid and Anna had sailed with them. Losing two sons or daughters was too much for any family to bear… and it looked increasingly likely that anyone who’d embarked with the Irizar would be dead before too long.

  “Try to find cover. Hopefully someone on board will think to use the 40mm guns. If they do, they might be able to stop it. But for now, all we can do is hope to stay out of sight.”

  They looked around. The woman who’d spoken climbed onto a low ice block displaced by the big monster’s emergence. She looked for a likely spot. “I think there’s some kind of cave, a loop in the ice, just over there, maybe fifty meters away. We might be able to hide there.”

  Javier turned to look in the direction she was pointing and missed what happened next. The first clue he had that anything was amiss came when the side of his face was sprayed with warm liquid.

  He absently reached up to wipe his face, still looking for the cave, and only when he realized that the liquid was too thick to be water did he look at his fingers. They were covered with blood and bits of flesh.

  He turned stupidly to see a nothosaur, one of the small ones, savaging one of the women. The other girl, the one who’d been pointing, already lay dead, torn to pieces in the initial onslaught.

  Javier didn’t react consciously. Whatever shred of basic training still survived in him took over and he pressed the trigger and held steady against the recoil. Once again, an entire magazine was spent and one of the small nothosaurs lay dead at his feet.

  Full consciousness returned slowly. When he realized what was happening, he was halfway towards the cave, watching three more of the smaller creatures—he was almost certain they were the final survivors of that clutch—advancing into the fray behind him.

  He didn’t care. As long as the creatures were distracted, they wouldn’t bother him.

  ***

  Breen watched the massacre from a slight ridge. He’d been trying to arm one of his two RPGs, but hadn’t been quick enough. The stupid gloves had slowed him down, and then he’d had to run to find a better position. By the time he was ready to fire, two of the groups from the ship consisted mostly of mangled bone and torn cloth.

  He felt sick. While the Argentine and American governments might have different objectives on this mission, he’d marched to war with these men and the color of their uniforms made no difference. They were fighting the same enemy, and that meant they were brothers in arms… even if the foe was a little unusual.

  He’d wanted to save them, thought he could help out. Now, most of them were dead.

  But there was still a chance to help the people still on board.

  Breen put the launcher on his shoulder and took aim. A trail of smoke showed him the path of the tiny missile. He scored a direct hit on the nothosaur’s shoulder.

  A large crater appeared in the mottled grey flesh and the creature screamed. This wasn’t the deep-throated roar of its rage, this was a shriek of pure animal pain. Blood poured down its side in a cataract.

  But, though it reared and bucked, th
e monster showed no signs of having been mortally wounded. It landed on all fours again with another bellow of pain and turned towards Breen.

  The American smiled. Even though, in theory, he was supposed to remain undetected and fight from the shadows, he was used to looking death in the face. He’d smiled in the face of impossible odds in dusty battlefields from Pakistan to South Sudan and in the humid jungles of Nicaragua. This was the way it was supposed to be.

  And, unlike most times when operational security broke down and left him face to face with angry enemies bristling with weapons, he had the advantage. The enemy he was fighting could only react instinctively. Its intelligence might be that of a bright dog… but was likely much less. Yes, it had been bred to be a hunter, but it had been bred to hunt underwater. On land, that advantage disappeared.

  The main thing—the only thing—the ugly bastard had going for it was its sheer size. That was the only reason it was hard to stop. The small ones were easy targets, falling over after a few well-placed bursts from the FALs. This one would be the same… if it wasn’t so fucking big.

  Nevertheless, Breen knew he held all the cards. He’d already established to his satisfaction that he could hurt it badly. Now it was just a question of hitting it where it did more damage.

  He had the ultimate advantage: nothosaurs had never invented rocket propelled grenades.

  The creature’s eyes locked on his position, so Breen sprinted up a rise to his right. He had a few seconds before the thing reached the spot where he’d been, and he wanted to be on the highest ground possible to take his shot.

  He settled the RPG on his shoulder and was satisfied to see that the nothosaur limped, favoring the place he’d shot it. Any well-prepared fighting force would make mincemeat out of one of these if they caught it.

  Hell, if anyone had suspected what they’d be walking into, the Argentines could have made a fortune. They could have sold the ultimate hunt to some billionaire nutjob. They would probably have had to listen to the ecologists forever after that, but it would have been worth it.

  Also, this evil thing deserved to die a thousand deaths.

  He nearly pressed the activation stud, but held back. It was still too far away… If he missed, or failed to hurt it badly enough, he was dead and so was everyone on the ship.

  Steady… Steady.

  At thirty meters, he felt his heart racing like a train, and the butterflies were partying in his stomach. But he let it get closer. It was leading with its head. There was no reason to hurry the shot. Nothing could fall on him until it got there, and stung once already, it was moving cautiously.

  Twenty meters.

  It roared. He smiled and shot it in the mouth.

  The grenade flew true, right between the two rows of man-sized teeth. The smoke trail disappeared into the dark throat.

  There was an explosion and, half a second later, a shower of foul-smelling gore.

  Breen’s smile widened. He’d definitely done mortal damage. All that remained now was to hold his ground as the creature fell.

  There was no scream. Whatever he’d hit had apparently not been connected to pain-sensitive nerves, but horrendous internal bleeding would drop it in 3… 2… 1…

  As the massive jaws closed around him, Breen thought that, had it been a Hollywood movie, the creature would have dropped inches from his feet.

  Breen’s smile disappeared as he was swallowed to drown in a pool of stomach acid.

  Chapter 21

  The monster dragged itself across the snow towards the hole from which it had emerged, leaving a trail of bright red on the white surface. When it disappeared under the surface, distant cheers could be heard.

  Camila watched it for some moments. She’d had an excellent view of the American as he attacked it. While she had nothing but contempt for the imperialist aspirations of the capitalist north, the man, just a working class stiff with a crap job, had been a paragon of bravery. He hadn’t even flinched as the monster devoured him.

  But like most heroes of the people, he wouldn’t be remembered in the history books, written by the oligarchy to glorify their own. He’d likely be remembered by no one other than—if he was lucky enough to have one—his family. For a few years more, he’d live in someone’s memory, and then he’d be forever gone.

  So Camila sat and thought about him.

  She had other things to do, but there was no rush. Time wouldn’t begin to flow normally again just because they’d finally managed to hurt the big monster. They were caught here until the end of time. It was the universe giving justice to the unjust, and the person chosen to deliver the blows was Camila herself. It was at once an honor and a privilege to have been selected.

  Mourning time over, she stood and stretched. The wind was unrelenting now, and she was chilled to the bone, summer or no summer. But like time itself, that didn’t matter either. Eternal cold was just another part of their sentence.

  She strode over the snow.

  ***

  Javier couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. Breen had sacrificed himself in a blaze of glory to save everyone on board the Irizar. Whatever he’d hit with the RPG might not have been enough to kill the monster, but it had proved to be sufficient to remove its desire to keep fighting. The creature crawled away and disappeared. Javier hoped there were sharks down there who might get a scent of its blood in the water. Being torn apart by hungry fish was the way that that thing deserved to die.

  He stood in the entrance to the shallow ice cave, some kind of depression in the snow, and looked around. Though the biggest of the nothosaurs was off the board, he knew there were at least three of the smaller ones out and about. Those were just as deadly and, after emptying the clip of the last FAL, Javier was back to his handgun as the only way to defend himself.

  Though he searched deep inside, Javier couldn’t find the will to move, even after the largest of the creatures was long gone. He looked in the direction of the icebreaker, but all he could really see was the very top of the superstructure, where the antennae and satellite dishes had once perched and which now consisted mainly of jagged and broken metal.

  A dark figure in the distance appeared to be heading his way. It was moving slowly, picking its way through the broken ice, still a hundred meters away.

  Javier stepped out of the cave to get a closer look. Surely it couldn’t be...

  He never finished the thought. Something cold made contact with the exposed skin of his neck, the only part of his body other than his face not covered from the elements.

  “Don’t move,” a voice said softly in his ear.

  The coldness, he realized with a start, was a knife beside his jugular.

  “Good. Now, the first thing I’m going to do is to remove the pistol from this holster. If you so much as twitch, I’ll give you a big red smile. Do we understand each other? If we do, don’t nod.” A strange giggle followed the words.

  Javier was in shock. This was a bolt out of the blue, so completely unexpected that he was having trouble processing what was happening. It even took him a few seconds to understand that the person with a knife at his throat was a woman… and that the voice sounded familiar.

  “There we are. Now turn around… slowly.”

  He obeyed. And then smiled.

  “Camila! You’re all right! We thought they’d gotten you.”

  Her eyes didn’t waver, and neither did the pistol she now held. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

  Confusion reigned. “What do you mean? We searched for you but you were nowhere to be found… well, we didn’t search the pile of bodies too closely.”

  “I meant what I said. You can’t get rid of me that easily. I can only imagine how happy you were to see I was gone. One less enemy of your kind.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Shut up!” Camila waved the gun in his face. “I have absolutely no interest in listening to your lies. I’m not just some powerless ignorant who will do your bidding. Now get in the ca
ve and kneel down. I don’t want anyone stumbling on us before we’re done.”

  Javier said nothing. He didn’t know what to say. All he wanted was to get back to the Irizar, to see if Natasha was all right. He waited to see what Camila would say next. Hopefully, now that she was back with the crew, and safe, she would calm down.

  She seemed surprised to realize that he wasn’t going to respond. “Listen to me well Javier Fucking Balzano. If you don’t play the fool, I’ll make it quick, but you need to hear the judgement before we finish.”

  “Judgement?”

  “Of course. Did you really think you could just go through life as an oppressor and nothing would happen to you? Just like that? Well, I’m here to tell you different.”

  “An oppressor?” he laughed. “Of who?”

  “Of the people who give their lives so you can be comfortable atop the pyramid.”

  “Doesn’t God judge those things?” Javier replied. He wasn’t a practicing Catholic, but it was as mild an answer as anyone could give in Argentina. Everyone was Catholic, even if no one ever went to church.

  “I don’t buy into the fiction of the church, either. We live in the 21st century, Javier. The tide has turned, and people like you don’t run the world any more. It’s time you realized that.”

  He had to laugh. “People like me? I’m just a guy trying to work his way up through the ranks. I’m about as far from running the world as you can be without actually being on a different planet. If I ran the world, I’d ask them to give me something better than my two-room apartment.”

  She stamped her foot. “Don’t even think about pretending to be poor with me. You don’t have the faintest idea what it really means to be powerless. Think of the plight of the real poor, people who know what it’s like to be hungry. Have you ever been truly hungry?”

  He remembered the survival training and other times out in the field, but he said nothing. It wasn’t what she’d meant, and that answer would only enrage her further. He remained silent.