The Spawning (58 page)

But there was no mystery to Icebox Two that they knew of. Back in the seventies and before, things had just been abandoned on the Ice. These days everything from sewage to scrap to garbage was shipped out so as not to disturb the environment, not so back then.

Yet, even knowing that, Coyle could not get past the feeling that this place had been abandoned. And in a hurry.

Many of the rooms were collapsed beneath shrouds of ice and snow. The corridor leading to the generator room was caved-in. The floors creaked and the walls cracked as they explored and everyone was very aware of how dangerous this was, how the old trusses might buckle at any moment and bury them alive in a womb of ice and debris.

Then they came down a small hallway with bulging walls and a ceiling that hung down like a full belly. Ice was hanging in stalactites everywhere. It led to a heavy wooden door that was not froze shut, but locked. Locked from the other side.

“Look out,” Frye said as an old iron pipe on the ceiling swung down, nearly braining Coyle. It ran the length of the room disappearing into the wall. The rusted bracket that held it was hanging by one badly worn screw.

“Turn off your lights,” Coyle whispered to them.

“What?” Gwen said.

“Turn ‘em off.”

They did and then they all saw what he saw. For coming beneath the doorway was a faint, flickering illumination. And there was nothing down in that darkened catacomb which could account for that.

“All right then,” Coyle whispered. “Let's invite ourselves in.”

But they never had to for someone came out to meet them.

In fact, their host came right
through
the door without opening it. And seconds before it happened, they all began to feel it as an intensifying static charge in the air.

What they saw was Cassie Malone . . . or what had once been Cassie.

She came drifting out, a luminous sugar-bone white ghost from a shadowbox, a high-voltage galvanic ghoul membrane-fleshed in crackling cellophane with an electrified crystal skeleton beneath trying to burn its way out.

Gwen let out a cry at the sight of her, stumbling backward.

“Don't let her touch you,” Frye said. “She's like Slim now.”

She drifted forward, a conductive, voltaic puppet caught between life and death, blue-white static charges forking out from her and crawling over the ceiling. She reached out to them with glowing fingers like live fuses that smoked and popped, eyes gibbous moons of pure atomic fission.

Coyle fired a round into her and there was a flash of light as the steel pellets made contact with her supercharged electrical field.

Her mouth was a shriveled black wormhole and she called out to them with a shrieking discordant voice that was part maniacal laughter, part noisemaker, part hissing steam oven.

What she was saying they did not know because the air around her or the field she created did not seem to conduct sound as they understood it.

The closer she came, the colder the room got and the colder they got. It was some sort of endothermic, heat-sucking, reaction: she was drawing energy from them to give herself form and motion.

It was Frye who saved them.

He jumped up grabbed the hanging pipe on the ceiling and brought it down into her, grounding her as he had done with Slim.

The effect was instantaneous.

Cassie made a screeching/whining sound like a drill bit through metal and there was a blinding flash of light and a resounding explosion that put them all on their asses . . . arcing whirlwinds whipped through the room, ice flew and frost filled the air along with burning bits of what had once been Cassie Malone.

“It burned,” Frye said, looking at his hands where he had grabbed the pipe. “It burned.”

Gwen checked him over but he seemed no worse for wear.

“Look over there,” he said, shining his light around and picking out something wedged in the corner that they had missed.

It was a body, curled and blackened.

It was an absolute horror. Just a shrunken, leathery thing that looked like it was made of pine bark. Not a man, really, but a mummy pulled from a tomb . . . dry and corded, limbs contorted. Just awful.

“It's Harv,” Coyle said. “He must have dug his way in.”

Frye nodded. “Sure,
she
called him out here. And she would have called each and every one of us out here sooner or later.”

“I've heard the voices, too,” Gwen said.

“But she was just a conduit, not the battery itself,” Coyle told them, knowing he was getting close now.

The locked plank door that Cassie had come through. That was where he had to go. He went over there and . . . right away, something happened.

Icebox Two began to shake.

Noises broke open all around them . . . whisperings and pinging noises, a metallic screeching that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. The floor was vibrating like dozens, hundreds of hammers were banging on it from below. Squealing sounds came from the walls and it sounded like screaming human voices, hollow and drawn-out and impossibly shrill, were echoing up the corridors.

“What the fuck?” Frye said, looking around with wide eyes like he'd just woken up in the belly of a haunted house.

That weird vibration did not lessen, it increased.

There was a pounding like fists coming from everywhere, the air crackling like some immense static charge was breaking loose.

Gwen made it like two steps, clutched her head in her hands and was driven right down to her knees.

The electrical discharge in the air made Coyle's skin crawl, made his belly flop, filled him with a manic hysteria that made him want to scream and cry and vomit out his insides.

And then the worst thing of all: that insane, high piping.

It came from everywhere, rising into a feverish pitch like a thousand pan flutes blaring out, strident and cutting, amping up into a solid and wavering wall of shrilling noise. Coyle felt his vision blur as he hit the floor. Felt tears run from his eyes and blood trickle from his nose. His nerves were jangling and quivering.

And then he saw
them.

As a thrumming, scraping agony that was far beyond a headache ripped open in his head, he saw through eyes squeezed into slits what drifted out of the walls. Old Ones. Not living ones, but spectral representations, ghosts, wraiths that came boiling out of the walls in oozing, electrified trails of ectoplasm. They were everywhere, spreading their vast wings and screeching and piping and chittering. And all of them lit white with a pulsing glow like immense, ghostly night-moths, fluttering and flying, moving right through the walls like shades.

They'll drain our minds. They'll drain them dry.

But through the agony and that storm of phenomena, he knew. Knew what he was not supposed to know.

Behind that door . . . you are not supposed to go behind that door.

He crawled forward with his SPAS-12 as waves of force punched into him, driving him backward, compressing him, squeezing the air out of his lungs. It felt like his eyes would blow from their sockets, that his skull would come flying apart at any moment.

The door.

He fought his way to it, the room a spinning tempest of wind and cold and heat and undead things. He blew the door open with the SPAS-12 and saw–

An Old One.

It was no ghost. Not living, just a carcass sitting down there in the center of a pit scooped from the ice.

Dead.

Long dead. Just a mummy sheathed in ice, its limbs withered and eyestalks atrophied, wings threadbare and folded up like ratty umbrellas. The wind and force and psychic energy was coming from it, though, being channeled through it.

The battery.

It was the battery.

Coyle got the barrel of the assault shotgun up and pumped the trigger.

The Old One's mummy nearly shattered on impact it was so ancient. Its head fell apart, its torso cleaved out with cracks and fell into itself like a rotten gourd. And right away . . . the phenomena died away.

Then Frye was helping him to his feet.

“You okay?” Gwen said, wiping blood from her nose.

“I'll live.”

“Fucking ghosts,” Frye said. “What next?”

Down there in the pit, sharpened stakes had been driven into the ice. One last booby trap if you made it this far.

Coyle wondered how long the carcass had been there. Maybe since before the station had closed. Who could say? But it had probably been here all winter, dead maybe, but maybe not truly dead, a sort of a receiver or amplifier to toy with the crew.

A battery. A psychic battery.

Regardless, it wasn't as dead as it should have been. Coyle could feel that. For there was a magnetism to its remains. He could feel a headache thrumming in the back of his skull, opening up and trying to swallow him.

He turned away.

Frye lit his flare, ignited one of the gas bombs and tossed it at the thing. It shattered on the ice, jellied gasoline spraying over the mummy and sticking to it, burning bright and hot. He lit his two remaining bombs and threw them into the pit which was engulfed in flame.

“Let's get the hell out of here,” Coyle said.

T
HEY HAD SIGHTED POLAR Clime when Frye brought the Sno-Cat to a stop and just sat there, peering through the windshield.

“What?” Gwen said. “What now?”

But he stepped out of the cab wordlessly, standing on the treads and they joined him out there in the cold and wind. They did not feel either. For they were looking up into the sky which was clear and speckled by stars. Looking at something which filled each of them with a dread they could not adequately put into words.

“Look at them,” Frye said. “Jesus, look at them . . .”

The stars were momentarily blotted out by a buzzing swarm of oblong bodies that flew like witches through the sky. Old Ones. And these were very much alive. They passed above the ‘Cat and over the dome of Clime like a flock of migratory night-birds, the sound of them like a droning cloud of hornets abandoning their nest in a hollow tree.

There were so many they could not be counted.

“They're not hiding anymore,” Gwen said. “They're showing themselves now.”

Coyle watched them disappear in the glacial blackness above Antarctica. They had always been here. And always would be until the time came when they took to the sky to take possession of the world they had seeded with life and intelligence. And that time was getting closer by the day.

“Let's get back to camp,” he said. “It's going to be starting soon now.”

And they didn't need to ask him what he was talking about.

Because they knew.

The harvesting of the human race . . .

SETI—GREEN BANK,
WEST VIRGINIA
MARCH 28

T
HIS WAS THE DAY.

It had to come sooner or later. Everyone at SETI had firmly believed this. According to the Drake Equation, there were potentially thousands of planets out there with civilizations technologically-comparable to that of Earth and possibly hundreds far in advance of that. Sooner or later, one of them was going to grab a radio signal or a light emission and drop us a line.

And now it had happened.

But the truly unusual thing was that the signal was not coming from some extrasolar world. It was not originating from Tau Ceti or Epsilon Eridani or some other incredibly distant place.

It was coming from relatively nearby.

Callisto. Jupiter's moon.

There had been a lot of nonsense talked about Callisto ever since the Cassini 3 spacecraft dropped its probe there. Lots of buzz on the internet. Secret messages supposedly leaking out of Antarctica and even NASA itself. NASA, of course, was denying it all. And now this. Now this.

This is what Sadler did not like. This is what was making him suspicious.

Sadler was an astrophysicist and this should have been his dream, especially for a guy like him that had been involved in the search for ETI, ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, for the past twenty years. He'd been with SETI during its heyday as a government project with a fat budget and during the NSF-funded Targeted Search and, yes, he'd been there when congress pulled the plug on it back in the ‘90's. SETI had survived that and become a private institution that thrived on heavy corporate and private donations.

So Sadler should have been ecstatic, and part of him was, but most of him was just concerned.

For the past six hours, the SETI network—both the ALA, the Allen Telescope Array, and Optical SETI—had been receiving signals from Callisto. Dream signals, really. High definition pulses directed at the Earth in the form of both high-amplitude microwave and infrared waves. The beauty of this was that conventional radio waves could also be produced by quasars and pulsars and even black holes. Using infrared in addition to microwaves left absolutely no doubt that the signals were artificial. They were being sent by an unknown intelligence and apparently by a transmitter of exceptional strength.

Sadler was watching the hive of activity that the control room had become.

People were happy. They were shaking hands and hugging, talking openly and boldly about ETI as they hadn't in years. They were certain that SETI would soon be swamped with federal funds again. That congress would prioritize what it was they were doing and the NSF would be handing out blank checks. Sadler should have been celebrating, too, but he wasn't, and he honestly wasn't sure why.

What the hell is wrong with you?
he thought as he sat there before a bank of computer screens that were hooked to the billion-channel analyzer.
Your whole life, everything you've been doing all these years, has been geared to this moment. You've ate, drank, and slept ETI. You've argued with nay-sayers and nearly come to blows with other close-minded theorists who glumly practiced their flat-earth science. This is vindication. You were not just some hard-headed, happily-deluded egghead with too many sci-fi paperbacks on the old bookshelf. You were right. Just as you always knew, you were RIGHT.