Terminal Freeze (26 page)

Very slowly, the thing resolved out of the blackness. Striped shadows flexed to the motion of muscled flanks. Ekberg stared in horror as-creeping inch by inch into the half-light, like a swimmer emerging from a dark pool-outrageous and terrible details gained form. The huge, shovel-shaped head, covered with short black hair, coarse and glistening. The overhung upper jaw, fronted by an array of huge fangs and flanked by two tusks, behind which-horribly-hung hundreds of narrow, razor-sharp tendrils, like the vibrissae of a walrus. The wide mandible, small and set back by comparison yet anchored to the skull by a massive hinge of bone. And-most shocking because she had seen them before, at least a lifetime before, encased in ice-the unblinking eyes that stared back at them with a mixture of lust and malice.

“Christ,” Conti murmured beside her. “Christ. It’s magnificent.” Slowly-very slowly-he aimed the camera, armed the Record button, and began to film.

Wolff was standing right behind him. He began to raise his gun, but he was shaking so badly Ekberg could hear his teeth rattling. “Emilio,” he said in a strangled voice. “For the love of God-”

“Quick, Kari,” Conti interrupted in a whisper. “Sound.”

But Ekberg could not move. She could only stare.

Moving so slowly she could not be sure it was even moving at all, the thing began its approach down the dappled hallway. Its massive forelegs were bowed slightly, like a bulldog’s, tapering to bulbous, hooflike paws barbed with cruel talons. It was fully visible now, the length of a young horse. The line of its back tapered from high broad shoulders down to squat, powerful haunches matted with coarse hair. She stared, mouth agape. Then, almost unwillingly, her gaze returned to the mouth: the curved fangs; the countless, unutterably hideous mass of tendrils that hung down behind them. She noticed that the tendrils did not just shake gently in time to the monster’s steps, but seemed to slither among themselves with independent movement…

The pain in her head was spiking cruelly, her heart laboring in her chest. And yet she could not retreat, could not even move. She was transfixed by fear. Now the creature stopped again, crouching, maybe twenty feet from them. But not once did it blink or look away. It seemed to Ekberg that its eyes were hard and deep as topaz, burning with fierce inner fire.

It remained motionless for perhaps sixty seconds. The only sound was the low whirring of Conti’s camera, her own strained breathing. And then, once again, it began creeping toward them.

This was too much for Wolff. With a low groan he wheeled around and went tearing back down the corridor, gun clattering unheeded to the ground.

The thing paused again, more briefly this time. A narrow tongue, forked and pink, peeped out from below the vibrissae. It extended-farther, farther-licking first one tusk, then the other.

It was at this point Conti seemed to go a little mad. He began to laugh, softly at first, and then louder. At least, in her paroxysm of horror and disbelief, Ekberg thought it must be a laugh: a strange, high sound.

Eeeeeeee, Conti keened, still louder now, the camera tilting visibly as his shoulders shook: Heeee-eeeeeeeeeee…

“Emilio,” she whispered.

“I’ve got it!” Conti cried, almost hysterically. “It’s a wrap. It’s a wrap! Eeeeee-heeeeeee-”

In two bounds the thing was on him, knocking him violently into the air. The camera sailed down the hallway, hitting a wall and then falling to the floor, shivering into pieces. As he fell, the creature caught Conti between its enormous front paws and began to spin him, like a craftsman using a lathe, clutching him close and running the wriggling razor tendrils hanging from its upper jaw back and forth along his form, from head to foot and back again, working him like a cob of corn. Gobbets of blood began raining out in all directions, spattering the walls and ceiling and causing nearby lightbulbs to pop and sizzle. Conti’s banshee laughter morphed into a sharp scream, rising violently in pitch. Abruptly, the creature jammed the director’s head into its mouth and bit down. There was a low crunching sound and the scream stopped. The beast opened its mouth again and Conti dropped heavily to the ground. And then at last Ekberg found her feet and began to run, past Conti and the nightmare beast that was hunched over him, heedless of the dark, heedless of any obstacles in her path. And as she hurtled headlong down the shadow-haunted corridor and away from the insanity, Conti began to make noise again: not laughter or screams, not this time, but the sharp snapping of bone: crack, crack, crack…

When Marshall stepped into the control room, black metal box in hand, he could see Sully and Logan in the studio beyond the glass partition, bending over a wheeled cart of stainless steel. As he looked at the cart, his heart sank. The contraption sitting on it looked more like a child’s erector set than a weapon for killing a two-ton monster. On its upper tray sat a small forest of analog and primitive digital equipment: potentiometers, voltage-controlled filters, low-frequency oscillators, long-throw fader and control pots, all connected by a cloud of multicolored wires. On the lower tray was an old vacuum-tube amplifier, connected by thin red leads to a woofer and a high-frequency driver.

The group had spent the last thirty minutes ripping open crates and breaking apart racks of unused instrumentation, frantically trying to cobble together a machine capable of generating a wide variety of high-frequency sound waves at as great an amplitude as possible. They had ultimately taken the tweeter from a much larger piece of sonic equipment than the woofer, on the assumption that high frequencies would most likely prove harmful to the creature. Although Marshall had been a proponent of the scheme-mostly because it was the only plan that seemed to have a chance-he was well aware what a gamble it was: whether the device would work at all, or whether in fact it would deter the beast. They were assembling it on a movable cart so that it could be placed anywhere-ideally, far outside the science wing-allowing them a fallback position in case it failed.

He handed Sully the metal box. “Here’s the ring modulator. Faraday managed to liberate it from an active sonar emitter.”

Sully placed it on the upper tray, connected two wires to it, grunted in satisfaction. As the sonic weapon had come together, the climatologist had grown less dubious and increasingly excited about its potential. “We should try emitting white noise first. A signal of equal power within a set bandwidth-that would give us the most efficient burst of sonic pressure.” He glanced over at Marshall. “Where is Faraday now?”

“Back in the equipment room, gathering spares.”

“Well, this just leaves the dry-cell batteries. You didn’t happen to see any, by chance?”

“No. But I wasn’t looking. I was too busy tearing apart that transducer array.”

“I’ll go find some, then.” And the climatologist straightened up, walked through the control room and into the corridor. He glanced briefly over his right shoulder before disappearing to the left.

Marshall knew why Sully had glanced to the right. He had glanced that way himself before stepping into the control room. That way led to the main hatch of the science wing: where Gonzalez and Phillips were standing guard, machine guns at the ready, watching for any sign of the creature.

He became aware that Logan was looking at him. “Any idea what kind of secret research was meant to go on here?” the historian asked.

Marshall shrugged. “So little of the equipment was actually assembled or unpacked, it’s difficult to tell. But from the variety of passive sonar devices-I haven’t seen much active sonar equipment here-I’d guess they were hoping to supplement the early warning radar with a stealth sonar emitter.”

“As in, much closer to Russia.”

Marshall nodded. “Possibly even within. Active sonar would give you an object’s exact position. But an installation like Fear Base wouldn’t need to know that-at least, not right away. They’d be more interested in whether an object was simply headed for them-and passive sonar could do that, silently, using TMA to plot a missile’s trajectory.”

“TMA?”

“Target motion analysis. Its solution would give range, speed, even course-long before the radar here could get a positional lock.”

“And all in a package small and quiet enough to escape notice. Interesting.” Logan paused. “The real question, I guess, is whether it’s going to save our asses.”

Marshall glanced down at the mad-scientist device on the tray between them. “I think we have a fighting chance. Of the five senses, hearing is the only one that’s a completely mechanical process. A sound wave actually changes air pressure, causes vibration. Extreme low-frequency sound can cause shortness of breath, depression, even anxiety in humans. High-frequency noise has been thought by some to interfere with normal heart rhythms or even cause cancer. There are all sorts of rumors of infrasonic or ultrasonic weapons that can injure, paralyze, even kill.” He shrugged. “Who knows? Perhaps that kind of research was the real intent of this installation.”

“That would be ironic.” Logan patted the side of the cart. “And now this is complete?”

“Except for the batteries, yes. Sully’s out gathering those.”

“So we’ve got our weapon. Now we just need the target.”

“There’s no guarantee it’s heading this way-we may need to find a lure of some kind.”

“Or perhaps the proper term would be ‘bait.’” Logan paused again. “There’s something else I’ve been thinking about. These two creatures-the one you found, and the one they found fifty years ago: Do you suppose they’re related?”

“Good question. I’ve only glimpsed a bit of it, through a block of occluded ice. But Gonzalez’s descriptions seem to match Usuguk’s, and-”

“I didn’t mean it that way. I meant, are the creatures related?”

Marshall looked at him. “You mean-like father and child?”

Logan nodded. “Or perhaps mother and child. Separated, then flash-frozen in the same freak climatological event.”

“Jesus.” Marshall swallowed. “If that’s the case, let’s hope the parent doesn’t find out what happened to junior.”

Logan rubbed a hand over his chin. “Speaking of junior-have you wondered what did kill it the first time?”

“You mean, if it wasn’t electricity?”

“Right.”

“Yes. And I don’t have any answers. Do you?”

“No. But I find it very interesting that neither creature has eaten any of the people it killed.”

“I told you. It did not die. It chose to leave the physical world.”

It was Usuguk who spoke. He had been sitting, cross-legged, in a corner of the studio, the backs of his hands balanced on his knees, so silent and motionless that Marshall hadn’t even been aware of his presence. Seeing the Tunit’s tranquil, reserved expression, sensing his quiet yet granitelike conviction, Marshall felt himself almost ready to believe this, as well.

“That tale you told me,” he said to the shaman. “About Anataq and the gods of darkness. It was unsettling, even to me, an outsider. I have to ask: If you truly believe we are dealing with a kurrshuq-a devourer of souls-why did you agree to come back with me?”

Usuguk glanced up at him. “My people believe that nothing happens without a reason. The gods had a destiny for me, foreordained from the day I was born. When I was a young man, they led my step away from my people-led me to this place-knowing that in the end it would bring me back, stronger and closer than before. By turning my back on the spirit world, I embraced it.”

Marshall returned the look thoughtfully. And then he understood. All these years, by living-even by the most traditional Tunit values-an ascetic, monastic, spiritual life, Usuguk had been atoning for temporarily betraying his faith. And returning here-the very place of that betrayal-was his final act of atonement.

“I’m sorry it’s come to this,” Marshall said. “I didn’t mean to expose you to such extreme danger.”

The Tunit shook his head. “Let me tell you something. When I was a very young child, back when the hunts still took place, my grandfather would always return with the largest walrus. People wanted to know his secret, but he would never tell. Then, finally, when he was an old, old man, he confided in me. He would take his kayak out past the straits, he explained, into the deep ocean currents, farther than anyone else ever dared go. I asked why he would do such a thing-as you say, expose himself to extreme danger-just for the largest catch. He told me that the hunt itself was danger. If you are going to walk on thin ice, he said, you might as well dance.”

There was a noise from beyond the glass partition and then Faraday entered, loaded down with electrical and mechanical equipment. “Here are the spare oscillators and potentiometers,” he said. He glanced over the apparatus on the cart. “Where are the batteries?”

“Sully went to find some,” Marshall replied.

“Good. Once we have those, we can start the test runs, and-”

At that moment there was a sharp crackling noise from the control room. Marshall looked over. It was the radio Gonzalez had issued them, balanced on the top edge of the mixing board.

The radio crackled again. “Hello?” It was Ekberg’s voice. “Hello?”

Marshall stepped out of the studio and into the control room. He grabbed the radio, pressed the Transmit switch. “Kari? It’s Marshall. Go ahead.”

“Oh, God. Help me!” Her voice was ragged, pitched at the edge of hysteria. “Help me, please! That thing-it got Emilio. It picked him up, it picked him up, and it-”

“Kari. Calm down.” Marshall tried to modulate his voice, keep it reasonable. “Now I want you to tell me: Where are you?”

He heard a series of panicky breaths. “I’m…oh, God…I’m at the entrance plaza. By, by the sentry station.”

As Marshall pressed the Transmit button again, Logan and Faraday came in from the studio and took up positions around the radio. “Okay. Do you have a flashlight?”

“No.”

“Then head down to the stairs to the officers’ mess. Quickly and quietly as you can. You’ll find spare flashlights there. Weapons, too. Do you know how to use a gun?”

“No.”

“That’s okay. Now go there right away. Once you’re there, radio me again.”

“It’s going to come for me, I know it is. When it’s done with Emilio. It’s going to come, and it’s going to…it’s going to-”

“Kari. I’m coming to get you. I’ll lead you to my position. Just keep your head. And don’t lose that radio.”

There was another crackle, then the radio fell silent.

Marshall turned to Faraday. “Find Sully. Help him with the batteries. Then move the sonic weapon out of here, into the corridors of E Level. We’ll need this science wing as a fallback if it doesn’t work.”

Faraday nodded, then quickly left the control room. Marshall looked over at Logan. “Remember what you said about bait? Looks like it’s going to be me.” And without another word he snugged the radio into his pocket and raced out of the room, heading for the hatch to the central wing.