Ice Station Death

by Gustavo Bondoni

  “No. You won’t find any,” Anna interjected.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I was there. Here, I mean. I’d just started as an assistant, but that day… I honestly thought they’d shoot us all. The soldiers were so angry at us. A lot of them had friends who’d been affected. Instead, we got orders from Moscow to pack all the evidence and put it on a truck. I’m surprised you found any documentation.”

  “This was a duplicate in… another facility.”

  Anna grimaced. “And here I thought we were special. Of course they’d duplicate everything.”

  “Yes. Unfortunately, they never duplicated that particular strain, which means we’ll have to build it again. Luckily, with the documentation we have here, you should be able to get that done in a few weeks as opposed to the year or more of work I’d need to isolate it through traditional means. After all, we can print DNA strands here, and we have the Anthrax genome pretty much worked out. All you have to do is to build me Anthrax 836 again.”

  “That was the worst of all the strains. I was relieved that we got it out of here. Well, at least I was relieved once they convinced me they weren’t just going to open all the storage cases and leave us in there to die.”

  “Yes. The extreme virulence is probably what caused the mutation.”

  “But how did it get into the nothosaurs? I doubt they ate the anthrax.”

  “We have no idea. Maybe it made its way up the food chain, algae to krill to fish to nothosaur and then into nothosaur sperm. Maybe it fell onto the nothosaur’s eggs. We just don’t know. The one thing we do know is that once you recreate the strain, our chosen method of injecting it into a fertilized nothosaur egg should make the mutation come to us that much more powerfully.”

  “I’d think having a nothosaur should be enough for most people. What exactly are we trying to create with this mutation?”

  Park thought of the photos he’d been shown, of the hard men telling how they’d never been so frightened in their lives, how they’d barely escaped. Of the sadness he felt when he got news that the largest of the creatures had been killed in Antarctica.

  “Something beautiful,” he said.

  The End

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  THIS IS what happened…

  1

  The group came to a sudden stop in front of the enclosure, just as I knew they would. Just as many groups before them have.

  And as every group before, they all stood gaping and gasping at what they saw beyond the hardened nanoglass. One little girl, maybe six or seven, with a purple ribbon holding her ponytail, broke away from the group and wandered closer to the glass as a huge shadow glided by. Standing in my usual post beside the group, I caught her wide-eyed expression. Wonder sparkled on her face. A slight smile curled her lips and she pressed a small hand on the glass. Ah, to be so young and full of love of all things. It’s not until adulthood strikes when all the wonders of the world great and small fade into nothingness.

  “The livyatan is a species of whale thawed several years ago by the Great Melt of 2024. Since then,” I said through the mic near my mouth, “the species have dominated the oceans, surpassing that of the blue whale in length and weight. This is Orville, and even as a juvenile, he is already as large as a full-grown blue whale.”

  The group gave a few ohhhs and took pictures with their phones as Orville passed by the glass again.

  Underwater World opened eight years ago, boasting an array of nanoglass tubes for guests to walk through and observe a small chunk of North Pacific life. There were also restaurants and gift shops and fun activities for the kids. The park was a success from day one and I had gotten lucky enough to be a part of it. Did I always want to be a guide for an underwater park? Heh, no. Not at all. I loved diving and thought I’d end up doing that for a living. Sometimes our dreams just aren’t in the cards. Being a guide, though, wasn’t bad, just long repetitive days and by closing time, it took every last ounce of strength I had just to smile.

  I guided the group of guests away from Orville. The quarinious kept sticking around the park for some damn reason. At times, he’d disappear for a couple weeks, but he always returned to glide his behemoth self around for all the guests. I didn’t get it, nor did the biologists of the park. Odd behavior, but at least it was friendly behavior.

  Some of the ocean’s beasts weren’t so friendly…

  A couple great whites cruised overhead as I led the group down Tunnel 30. Last leg of the tour. Also, the most unpredictable. The guests ooohed over the big white sharks, as so many had before them. The little girl with the purple ribbon, the one so full of wonder, sidled up beside me.

  “Do you like your job?” she asked.

  I smiled as best I could. “Absolutely. And just wait, the best part is coming!”

  She frowned a little. “If you like it, then why are your eyes so sad?”

  Funny how kids picked up those little details. I smiled for real then. “Just been a very long day, hun.”

  She nodded and we walked a few more feet in silence.

  “Addy,” a woman, surely the girl’s mother, called. “Stop bothering the poor lady and come back here.”

  Addy glanced at me, all sad-eyed.

  I snorted. “I’ll be okay. Go on back to your mom and enjoy the show.”

  Her smile was so bright and infectious. I smiled back, and she returned to her mother. The big ohhhs and ahhhs (probably a scream or two) were just up the way. A final thrill before tucking them into bullet shuttles to the surface.

  I just hoped the ornery bastard was around. I’d been burned before and the guests leave pretty damn disappointed. The biologists were supposed to be working on something during show times to lure him in. Of course, asking them to do real work was like pulling teeth. Lazy, the lot of them.

  The tunnel opened up to a great glass cavern. A full view of the Millennium Trench and the vast dark blue of the deep sea. The trench was the result of a massive earthquake a year or two before the park was built and it never failed to amaze even me sometimes. But…

  “Where are you, you bastard,” I muttered.

  The man standing next to me frowned. “What?”

  I plastered on my professional smile and said, “Nothing at all.” I moved away from the group and spread my arms. “Here, my friends, is the Millennium Trench. Once thought to be the very opening to Hell itself. Many strange and dangerous creatures appeared after the trench opened up.”

  A woman in the back said, “I thought all of that was a myth. Nothing really came out of the trench.”

  I chuckled. There was always one skeptic in a group. Always one that doubted and believed everything the media fed them. It actually made the final show more powerful.

  I lowered my arms and focused my gaze on the group. My sight slipped over each and every one of them. A practiced theatric that worked every time, even then. “That’s what they claim. Yes. They claim many things. But what if I told you it’s so you don’t panic? So, you don’t worry about what lurks in the deep while you’re enjoying your swim or boat outing or fishing trip? What if I told you…” I counted to the three. “…that monsters are real…”

  It worked. Even the skeptical woman appeared a bit uneasy, glancing around. Little Addy, I felt sorry for though. The terror in her eyes and slack face broke my heart a bit. Who brought a child so young to the park anyway, for shit’s sake?

  I waited, but what was supposed to happen, didn’t.

  Damn.

  I watched the group first mellow, then look around a bit bewildered. Like a bear cub stepping out of its den for the first time.

  I sighed. Burned again. I turned around, just to be sure. Nothing. Just the vast blue of the north Pacific. Sometimes I hate the—

  It came from the right and slammed into the glass cavern so hard it shook the floor. The guests screamed. Pretty sure every single one of them. I even let out a small yelp. Because, damn it, he wasn’t on cue. Not that
any species was trained in the park, but…yeesh.

  This time was much different than others, however.

  Its teeth actually broke through the nanoglass. Spurts of water jetted down onto us. I ushered the group toward the exit, managing to get them all past the door threshold. If this mad bastard really breached the facility, I would hit the blue button, sealing them off from the flood.

  Still, the show must go on.

  “This is Roofus,” I shouted over the cracking glass, spraying water, and cries of terror. “He came from the Millennium Trench and is believed to be a crossbreed between a Mosasaurus and a Liopleurodon. No mutation here. This is the real deal. Our marine biologists say Roofus, here, is very rare. Possibly the result during the final days of dinosaurs. As the surface dinosaurs died out, the ones protected underwater procreated with whatever was nearby, and large enough. It was a very different thing, going from the surface to the seas. Pretty much whatever lived in the ocean survived for a while after the massive meteor strike wiped out everything else.”

  The nanobots in the glass worked extra hard to seal the leaks created by Roofus’ foot-long teeth and tremendous power of his jaws. He shook, but to no avail. The cavern and tubes were anchored deep into the seabed. Never, during my time at the park, had he attacked the glass cavern so violently.

  Typically, he rose out of the trench and sank his teeth in, but not so much as to puncture the glass. He’d been doing it so long, one would think he was trained. Not so much. Not everything could be trained. You couldn’t take the wild out of a wild thing. It just laid dormant until something woke it up.

  The cavern had taken on about six inches of water. Not enough yet to seal the guests out.

  They cried out. One man spun and ran toward the bullet shuttle while others simply gaped up at the teeth sticking through the glass.

  Finally, Roofus let go of the cavern and rushed away into the trench. The holes left by his teeth patched themselves up quickly.

  I sighed, heart still thundering, and ushered the group to the bullet shuttle.

  All of them were extremely quiet as I loaded them into the shuttle and shut the doors. I taped the green button on the wall and the shuttle jetted away. Zero to 200 miles per hour in six seconds. Thankfully, by design, there was no sonic boom.

  I let out a long breath, ran shaky hands through my hair, and simply stood there gaping through the doorway to the glass cavern for a few minutes.

  What the hell had gotten into Roofus?

  Straightening, I intended to find out.

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