The Spawning (11 page)

He wondered if he was the only one tying up everything together, seeing wolves behind every tree. Feeling that something big and impossibly ominous was about to happen. But he didn't think so. He knew Frye was and probably Horn, too.

As he looked around, listening in on various conversations, he had the oddest sense that there was a tension here that was independent of him. People were laughing too loud or talking too quickly. They couldn't sit still and when they did they smiled too much like those smiles were painted on and they couldn't get them off. Everything was keyed-up. Now and again, he'd hear a peal of laughter that sounded almost hysterical in tone.

Cassie Malone came over, more than a little drunk, and draped herself around Coyle. “Hey, Nicky! What say we get fucked-up before that Castini thing happens? What say?”

Gwen came over and removed her, leading her back to her chair so she did not fall down, restraining her when she lifted her shirt and flashed her breasts at Horn.

“C'mon, Gwenny! Not like he don't wanna see ‘em! He's always staring at my junk ‘n' stuff!” She burst out laughing. “Did I say junk-stuff or stuff-junk? Woo-hoo, check out my junk-stuff!”

Gwen got her into her seat and pretty much had to sit on her lap to get her to behave.

And on it went.

Hopper stood up and cleared his throat, blew his damn whistle. “Attention! Attention, everyone! Dr. Eicke would like to speak now! Let's all listen to what he has to say! I'm sure it's very important!”

Shin laughed. “What's that guy smoking anyhow?”

“I don't know but I want some!” Cassie Malone called out.

“Probably the same thing your mother was smoking when she was pregnant with you,” Frye told Shin.

Eicke walked out in front of the plasma screen that hung from the wall. He was a bespectacled, round little man with a closely-trimmed white beard that made him look like Santa Claus. Something that was accentuated by his rolling bold laughter and his habit of patting his expansive belly as he spoke. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, nodding and smiling, “I've just received word from the probe team at Ames Research Center in California.”

Gwen sipped her martini and nuzzled Coyle's ear. “You hear that, Nicky? He just said
probe.”

“Ssshh,” he told her.

Eicke looked around. “We can expect to get our feed within the next twenty or thirty minutes. But before we do, I thought I'd touch upon the mission of the Cassini Three itself and, more importantly, the probe it has launched at Callisto.”

He did more than touch upon it.

For the next fifteen minutes he went on in dusty detail about the Cassini 3 mission which was extensive reconnaissance and mapping of the Galilean moons—Europa and Io, Ganymede and Callisto. All of which were considered excellent candidates for subsurface oceans that theoretically might be teaming with life. The entire operation would lay the final groundwork for the Ice Clipper mission that would sample the surfaces of the moons using an impactor and the Ice Penetrator mission that would melt through the ice caps using a thermal probe, a cryobot.

That much was interesting.

But when he got down to the nuts and bolts of the probe itself and talked endlessly of dust detectors and neutral mass spectrometers, heavy ion counters and plasma wave imaging, he pretty much lost everyone. Other than Shin and possibly Hopper himself, nobody really gave a damn about near-infrared mapping or particle investigation or molecular biology studies and chemosynthesis. It was all pretty heavy stuff. Like computers or cellphones, nobody cared how they worked or truly understood the engineering feats involved, so long as they
did
work.

Coyle stopped paying attention about halfway through and started studying everyone again.

He looked at the walls with their pictures of alien monsters and flying saucers and whatnot, his interest immediately captured by Locke's photos of the Beacon Valley megaliths. These were the most recent photographs and although Coyle had not seen the structures firsthand, he knew very well what it all meant. The discovery of those things was the single biggest can of worms opened since the splitting of the atom.

He stared at them.

They looked somewhat similar to Stonehenge and the others that dotted the British Isles and northern Europe . . . save the Beacon Valley stones were far more complex and gigantic. Infinitely more complex: a grim collection of uprights and pylons that were tall and leaning, conjoined and free-standing. Some of which were flattened at their apexes and others supporting horizontal crossbars and still others bisecting at their tops into a profusion of sharp, gnarled spines that towered above the entire mass in spires and spokes, making the entire structure look like it had been overgrown by dead trees.

There was something very unpleasant and disturbing about the megaliths taken as a whole. Something surreal and morbid and, yes, alien.

Coyle didn't like looking at any of it, but he did. He eyes roamed that monolithic forest of pillars and shafts and spidery pipes and he could not look away. His eyes were lost in their tangles and lunatic architecture, drawn to them, captured and held as something morosely black crawled in the back of his mind, in some cellar of primal shadow.

No, he could not look away and some part of him did not want to.

His rational brain could make no earthly sense of what that carven megalithic desolation was built to represent. But his dreaming brain, that primitive machine we all carry in the pits of our psyches, seemed to recognize what it was and understand that its purpose was both mechanistic and spiritual. A thing of dark beauty and nameless obscenity. A very simple construction, really, with a very simple purpose–

Yet, his dreaming and rational brains were light years apart and could not communicate or reach common ground.

Coyle was left shivering between them, wanting to know and wanting anything but. He could only look and let his imagination tell him what he was seeing. The entire thing was quarried from some black pitted stone that made it resemble the great carbonized exoskeleton of some alien insect thawing from the ice.

Finally, he looked away.

“Okay, everyone,” Eicke said. “The feed is coming . . . get ready . . .”

Coyle sucked in a sharp breath, felt something knot suddenly in his belly. He gripped the arms of his chair with everything he had, his knuckles popping white.

Good God,
he thought,
here it comes...

NOAA FIELD LAB POLARIS,
ATLANTIS ICE DOME

A
NDREA MACK DID NOT sleep.

She did not even close her eyes.

The others were tired from a long grueling day in the cold and drifted off almost as soon as their heads hit their pillows. Andrea could hear Kim's breathing across the room, even and deep. In the men's dormitory across the hall there was snoring.

The Polaris habitat was basically a long rectangular box. A temporary shelter erected by the NOAA techs. The men slept in one room, the women in another. There was lab space with diagnostics and computer science workstations. Generator room and water plant. A coring room. A supply cabinet and food locker. The common room took up most of the structure. Here was the galley, the DVD library and TV, the workout bike, the radio, the usual amenities of camp life.

All in all, it was silent.

The only sound save breathing and snoring, was the wind outside, forever moaning across the polar plateau, shaking the habitat, and throwing a scrim of ice and snow against its walls.

Andrea heard all these things.

But she was listening to something else.

Something buried in the wind. A single melancholy voice that was calling to her and had been calling to her now for days.

Quietly, she slipped out of her bunk and into the common room. She hastily pulled on her thermals and ECWs, then looked out the window into the shifting blackness of the polar night.

She saw a shape beckon to her as it pulled away into the shadows.

“I'm coming,” she said. “I'm coming.”

Listening to the wind and knowing now that it owned her, she popped the airlock and stepped outside to whatever waited for her.

POLAR CLIME STATION

T
HE SILENCE THAT DESCENDED on the Community Room was immense.

It was thick and almost suffocating in its dire enormity. No one moved. No one touched their drinks or food or even seemed to breathe. You could practically hear fingernails growing and cells dividing.

Then somebody gasped.

The static on the screen went blue with assorted transmission fields of rolling numbers coming from NASA. Then it flickered and an image swam into view. A brownish-orange sphere that was set with darker reddish areas and speckled by white and yellow splotches that were the scars of ancient impact craters. The voice-over said this was Callisto as seen from five-million miles out by Cassini 3. The image had been enhanced, but in no way doctored.

Callisto.

The second largest moon of Jupiter as photographed by Cassini 3 nearly four-hundred million miles from Earth. The voice-over explained that this photograph was several days old. That since it was taken, Cassini 3 had fallen into a parabolic orbit around the moon itself and had descended to send out its probe. And that any moment, the live feed would be coming in, traveling across the reaches of space at the speed of light.

The image flickered.

And then flickered again.

There were a series of pinging sounds and beeps, scratchy-sounding telemetry coming in. Lots of background noise like static and blowing wind and rushing water. A low, unnerving hum that rose and fell, but never went completely away.

The voice-over said the feed was coming in now.

The picture rolled, went blurry, sharpened . . . then they were seeing what the probe was seeing as it descended down towards that ancient moon. It wasn't much at first. Except for the coloring, it could have been Earth's moon. Yet, looking upon it, you knew it most certainly was not. Because everyone that saw the image knew that they were looking at something no human eyes had ever seen and that was something that no man or woman could take lightly.

The image spun as the trajectory took the probe down, down, down until the voice-over said it was now twenty-five miles above the surface, moving east to west. It kept descending and soon enough, everyone in the room was looking at the surface of Callisto which was oddly featureless—no mountains or hills—just a weathered and scarred crust cut by deep fissures and huge impact craters with concentric stress rings fractured around them. Not much else really.

It was empty, dead, barren.

Like clay waiting to be formed, sculpted into something . . .
anything.

Nobody said a word.

Everybody in that room was tense as if they were waiting for something to happen, only they didn't know what.

Coyle sat there, a strange crawling sensation at his spine.

Gwen's hand gripped his own in a hot, sweaty embrace.

It was ridiculous, but he did not like what he was seeing.

The surface was just too old, too ugly, too something. He couldn't quite put a finger on it. The human mind, he knew, looked for signs of life, of motion, of activity. And right then even a couple little green men flitting about would have been welcome. Because Callisto was empty, dead, motionless. Like something suspended and waiting. An insect in amber. It was not simply lifeless and sterile like the moon or some barren asteroid. You got the feeling that
something
was there. Something was hiding in the shadows and craters.

The probe had dropped to 20,000 feet now.

It was firing its rockets.

The images were lost until it landed.

Then they came back.

The probe had touched down just due south of the Valhalla impact basin, in a curious trench that was several miles wide and was believed to be cut down to the icy crust covering the ocean itself. The probe panned its searchlights around and there was little to see but an empty plain of something like pack ice and black, blasted rocks. The voice-over came on and said that the probe was operating perfectly. Telemetry told them that it was drilling into the ice to sample for organic molecules and paleo-indicators.

Then the image began to tremble.

Everyone tensed.

Something was happening.

“Earthquake,” somebody said.

But Eicke was quick to point out that there was no seismic activity on Callisto. That it was a geologically dead world. No volcanoes, no earth tremors, no nothing. It didn't even have wind or weather or anything that you would call an atmosphere.

The trembling continued.

The voiceover was gone.

Seconds before it happened, Coyle felt it.

Four-hundred million miles away, he actually
felt
it. About sixty or seventy feet from the probe, the crust fanned out with a series of cracks and broke apart as something struck it from below, pushing aside the ice in great plates. Whatever it was, it was rising up and up, a gigantic black mass of vertical shafts and pipe-like structures. Rising, rising. The external mics of the probe recorded the thundering and booming that sounded oddly like an airstrike.

“Oh my God,” somebody said. “Oh my fucking God.”

And, yeah, that about covered it. For what had risen up now from that primordial crust, towering high above the probe itself, was exactly what had been melted out of Beacon Valley: a series of interconnected megaliths. An exact duplicate of what was at that moment in a valley of the Sentinel Mountains. The shafts and crossbars, slabs and pillars and piping. It rose up, water and sheets of ice dropping from it, some primal alien machine that was black and corroded and skeletal as it reached up to the sky with those spiky protrusions.

God, Coyle thought, like some rawboned spider with a million legs breaking free of an egg.

It was Locke who broke the silence.