As she steps out of her suit, Adrianna steps in front of her, stopping her, saying, “Please. Don’t do anything stupid.”
Jazz is cold in reply. “A word of advice, Adrianna. Don’t get in my way.”
A red light blinks on the valve on the side of Nick’s mask. He’s out of air.
“Damn it!”
Nick unzips his hazmat suit.
“No, no, no,” Adrianna says. “There could be contaminants.”
Nick doesn’t care. He can’t. He has no choice. He drops the oxygen cylinder from his shoulder. Nick ties the arms of the suit around his waist, wearing it as a pair of baggy trousers.
Jazz disappears up the stairs at the far end of the floor.
“You don’t understand,” Adrianna says with her hands out, trying to stop Nick. “It’s not the big aliens we need to worry about. It’s the little ones. The microbes.”
Nick points back at the elevator, saying, “They’re not dead.”
“Not yet,” Adrianna says. “But everyone else down here is. You don’t get it. There could be pathogens in here we know nothing about.”
“But you haven’t found anything, right?” Nick says, turning back to her briefly as he walks after Jazz. “After months of trying, you haven’t found any alien microbes.”
Reluctantly, Adrianna agrees.
He points at her, saying, “What are you going to do when your air runs out?”
“Goddamn it,” she says, unzipping her suit in a fit of fury. She drops her mask and oxygen cylinder and copies him, wrapping her upper suit tightly around her waist. She ties off the arms in a knot. “If something bursts out of my chest, you’re the first one it’s going for. You know that, right?”
Nick laughs, jogging down the corridor. Water splashes from his boots.
Jazz is up on L2. She has one M4 slung over her back and another leaning on the stairs. She checks the movement of the magazine and the latch on the grenade launcher, making sure neither has frozen in place. An ammo belt hangs over her shoulder, only the pouches are oversized. They’ve been stuffed with flashbangs and fragmentation grenades.
“You cannot wage war,” Nick says, appealing for calm.
Jazz pulls her hair back into a ponytail.
“I’m going to get him back,” she says. “No one and nothing is going to stop me.”
“These are creatures from some other world,” Adrianna says. “Hell, we don’t know what they are. For all we know, they’re machines. You can’t kill something that’s not alive.”
Jazz transfers M4 magazines full of ammo into a lightweight backpack. She shoves a couple of scrunched-up body bags into her pack, working with her fist against the thick rubberized plastic.
“We’re not leaving anyone down here,” she says, fighting back tears. “Not Jon. Not Bear. Not those poor saps we found floating in the water. No one. Do you hear me?”
“Okay, so we go back up in the elevator and bring a recovery crew down here,” Adrianna says.
Jazz replies, “You and I both know that’s not going to happen. Mikhail isn’t going to let anyone else back down here before spring. By then, this whole place will have frozen over. No. We’re here now. We do it. We collect the bodies and stack them by the elevator.”
“And if we run into trouble?” Nick asks.
“Leave that to me.”
Adrianna says, “You know this is like a villager going up against a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in a rickety wooden canoe, right?”
Jazz doesn’t care.
“They’re thousands of years more advanced than us,” Adrianna says. “I doubt our weapons would even scratch that craft.”
Nick says, “And what if there are, I dunno… Things? Monsters? Aliens?”
“Do you see this?” Jazz asks in reply. She holds up a thick, curved metal plate. “This is an M18A1 Claymore. Alien would have been a helluva lot shorter movie if they’d carried a few of these bad boys on the Nostromo.”
“This is madness,” Adrianna says.
“I didn’t start this,” Jazz says. “But I sure as hell will end it.” She points at the wall of ice leading to the airlock at the bottom of the stairs. “I’m only going in there for the bodies. If they let us retrieve our dead, it’s all good. If they want a fight, I’ll give them one.”
“Jazz, please,” Nick says. “This is an intelligent species.”
“That killed at least two dozen scientists, soldiers, and engineers. And indirectly killed at least forty more topside when it fried their brain cells!”
“We don’t know what happened in there,” Adrianna says, pointing at the airlock leading to the subterranean lake.
Jazz hoists a pack over one shoulder and picks up the spare M4.
“Well, let’s go and find out.”
Contact
Machinery whirs around them. Clunks resound through the walls of the airlock. The overhead light fades to dim red as the air pressure increases.
Adrianna says, “Try to yawn. You need to equalize the pressure in your ears.”
Jazz winds the handle on the outer hatch. She pushes on the steel plate. Hinges creak. With her M4 out in front of her, she steps forward, pointing the barrel into the darkness.
“No light?”
“Must have lost power,” Adrianna replies in a whisper.
“Can you restore it?”
“I don’t know. I can try.”
“What’s the layout?” Jazz asks, turning on a flashlight mounted on the side of her M4.
“Ah,” Adrianna says. “You’re on the edge of a lake that varies in depth from 100 to just over 350 meters. It’s roughly two kilometers wide and thirty kilometers long. It links to dozens of other similar subsurface lakes. The cavern we’re in is on the southeast shore. We’re in an open area that spans roughly a football field, but most of that is covered by the lake. There’s a thin strip of bedrock running to your left. Follow that.”
Nick steps over the edge of the airlock. A thin sheet of ice breaks under his boots, giving way to the rocks beneath. Adrianna reaches out for him, holding onto his shoulder as she steps down into the darkness.
She follows close behind him, saying, “Watch your step.”
The darkness doesn’t scare Nick. He’s always been able to separate the fear of the unknown from the empty darkness. Why be afraid if there’s nothing out there? Only this time, there is something out there. This time, it’s something from another world. This time, it’s already killed a helluva lot of people. He swallows the lump rising in his throat.
Jazz is already thirty feet ahead of them, leaving the two of them to feel their way in the darkness. Her flashlight illuminates dead spotlights mounted on aluminum stands. She follows the wires running along the ground to an industrial battery pack the size of a desk.
“Plenty of juice,” she says. “They must have blown the lights.”
As his eyes adjust to the dark, Nick notices something blue in the water. There’s a shimmer on the edge of his vision like that of a faint neon sign.
“What’s that?”
“Bioluminescence,” Adrianna says. She crouches, running her hand through the water. A blue shimmer trails behind her fingers.
“That’s normal?”
“Perfectly,” she replies. “In a world without light, you have to create your own.”
“And that’s from—from Earth, right?”
“Yes. We see this everywhere from Tasmania to Hawaii. Most of the time, it’s overlooked because we’re too busy shining streetlights and headlights everywhere, but this has been around for hundreds of millions of years.”
Rocks crunch softly beneath his boots. “What causes it?”
“Bacteria. It gets incorporated into plankton, jellyfish, even squid. They use bacteria to create a cold light. There’s even a species of shrimp down here that vomits light.”
“It vomits light?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Why on Earth would anything do that?” Nick asks, watching as water drips
from Adrianna’s fingers. The point at which each drop hits the lake glows in a soft, neon blue. It’s as though the water has been electrified.
“Oh, light can attract mates or confuse predators. There are lots of reasons to glow. Camouflage. Enticing prey.”
“But you said those tiny fish back there were blind,” he says as they walk on around the edge of the lake.
“They are. That’s all the more reason for these things to give off light. It’s like passing notes in class knowing the teacher can’t see you.”
The more his eyes adjust to the ambient light, the better he can see. A blue glow laps at the rocks around the edge of the lake. Above them, the ice isn’t quite as dark as he first imagined. It catches some of the glow, casting it back at them.
Long, dark legs pass through the water, casting shadows. Thin spikes cling to the rocks barely a foot beneath the surface.
“What the hell is that?” Nick asks, stepping back and pointing.
Adrianna scoops up a handful of water and sprinkles it across the surface of the lake, causing a soft glow. A spider-like crab, easily four feet in length, holds still, watching for movement. After a few seconds, it creeps along the rock face below the water’s edge, disappearing back into the depths.
“Jesus,” Nick whispers. “And that doesn’t scare you?”
“No. It’s not after me. I’m not a fish.”
“This shit is freaking me out.”
“This shit, as you so aptly put it, is nature.”
Further along, part of the ceiling has collapsed, scattering frozen blue/white ice on the dark bedrock. The two of them pick their way over the rubble. Ahead, Jazz sets up a couple of claymore mines on a boulder of ice the size of an SUV.
“What are you doing?” Adrianna asks.
“Think of it as an insurance policy.”
“You can’t fire explosives in here. The pressure surge could cause the cave to collapse. We’d be buried under a mile of ice!”
“We should be so lucky,” Jazz replies, linking the claymores together.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Don’t worry, doc. This is just a contingency.”
The gap between the boulder and the shoreline is barely a foot wide. Nick pushes his back against the ice as he shimmies past. Something moves in the water. Something big. Twenty feet below the surface, something glows. It swims along beside them before retreating into the shadows.
“Did you see that?” Nick asks.
“Don’t start,” Adrianna says, not impressed with either of them.
“Does any of this seem strange to you?” Jazz asks, flashing her light across the rocky ground as it curves around the lake.
Nick replies, “All of this seems strange to me. What I want to know is, what seems normal to you?”
“Nothing. That’s the problem.”
“What were you expecting?” Adrianna asks, coming up beside Jazz.
“Bodies.”
Jazz waves her M4 around. The flashlight illuminates dark bloodstains on the ice.
Under his breath, Nick mumbles, “Fuck.”
Jazz follows the trail. Smeared frozen red blood leads down to the dark water.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Jazz asks Adrianna.
“God, I hope not,” Adrianna replies as the water is disturbed roughly forty feet from shore. They step back, staying away from the edge of the lake.
Quietly, Jazz asks, “Where’s the spaceship?”
“Uh, it’s another hundred yards that way.”
“We’re not going to make it,” Jazz says.
“What? Why?” Nick asks, hating the darkness around him. Spotlights. Right now, he’d love nothing more than to flick the switch on a set of massive floodlights. For once, the darkness terrifies him.
Jazz replies under her breath.
“We’re being hunted.”
Jazz pulls a grenade from her ammo belt and slips it into the launcher mounted beneath her M4. She moves slowly, trying not to make any sudden moves or too much noise.
“By what?” Nick asks.
“I don’t know, but don’t get too close to the water.”
Nick looks around. There’s barely ten feet of rocky ground between the ice wall and the lake. What the hell constitutes too close? As soon as Jazz said that, Nick was ready to put a couple of miles between himself and this goddamn cesspool. He reaches for the ice, running his hand along the frozen surface. He has to crouch to stay close to the wall.
“What’s down there?” Jazz asks Adrianna. “Could it be alien?”
“I—I don’t know. I don’t think so. We did hundreds of samples. We never once came back with anything other than terrestrial DNA. There were a few previously undocumented species of bacteria. We were able to identify trace amounts of fecal matter from animals like shrimp and squid, but they’re all related to known species topside. Nothing extraterrestrial.”
A splash of water echoes through the cavern. Waves ripple against the rocks, glowing as they reach the shore.
“Something’s in the water,” Jazz says, peeling the flashlight from the side of her M4. Nick can hear the sound of duct tape being pulled loose and it terrifies him.
Jazz hands Adrianna the flashlight. “You and Nick continue on. I’ll lag behind. That’ll allow me to flank whatever that thing is.”
“What?” Nick says in alarm. “We’re the bait?”
“Since you put it like that,” Jazz says, smiling in the half-light. “Go. I’ve got you covered.”
“I am not liking this,” he replies, staying well away from the water. The glacial ice meets the bedrock at about waist height. In close to the wall, the ceiling of the cavern is barely five feet high, forcing him to bend over as he inches on. His hand remains in contact with the ice, trailing along the smooth surface as rocks crunch softly beneath his boots.
Adrianna flashes the light around, running it over the waves, but that hurts rather than helps their night vision. Immediately afterward, nothing is visible beyond the gloom.
“Keep the flashlight off the water and on the rocks,” Jazz says. “Pretend you haven’t noticed.”
“We really are bait,” Adrianna mumbles in the darkness.
“We’re gonna die,” Nick says.
“Great,” Adrianna says. Sarcasm hangs from her lips. “Thank you for that astute observation.”
Nick gets more nervous with each step. He’s sweating in the cold. His fingers tremble. His rubber boots feel like lead weights. He’s got to say something, if only to keep his mind turning over.
“Where does all this water go?”
Adrianna says, “This lake is part of a maze of interconnected ravines and lakes hidden beneath the ice sheet. It’s a network bigger than the Grand Canyon. We know so little about what lives down here.”
“What did you expect down here?” he asks.
“Microbes,” she replies. “Nothing like those fish or that crab.”
“What else could have made it down here?”
“I don’t know, but it would have been trapped here for a helluva long time. Four hundred thousand years is plenty of time for natural selection to come up with a few oddballs.”
In the quiet of the cave, even a whisper travels hundreds of yards.
“We’ve got this all wrong,” Adrianna says softly. “There are three of us down here.”
Nick’s confused. “Of course there are. You, me, and Jazz.”
“No,” Adrianna says, peering out at the glow on the water. “Us, that alien spacecraft, and them.”
“Them?” Nick says as water swirls near the shore.
“An entire ecosystem full of predators and prey.”
Blue lights flicker on the waves.
Adrianna sounds nervous. “Umm, I’m not so sure the blackout was intended for us.”
“What do you mean?” Nick asks, no longer interested in seeing an alien spacecraft. Right now, he’d like to see the inside of that elevator again.
“Tha
t was a threat response, only we never threatened it. We were observers.”
Before he can say anything, there’s a splash of water out in the deep. Bioluminescence lights up the spray. Waves rush in toward the shore.
“What was that?” Adrianna asks.
“It was big,” Nick replies. “That’s what it was.”
From the darkness somewhere behind them, Jazz speaks. The way her voice carries, Nick could swear she was next to them, but she’s not.
“If shit goes down, hit the deck and douse your light.”
“Got it,” Adrianna says.
The ledge narrows, forcing them near the water’s edge.
“Sweet Jesus,” Nick says, backing up against the ice. “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
“An eyeball,” Nick replies. Panic seizes him. “In the water. An eye the size of a basketball racing along beneath the surface. Watching us.”
“Exactly what did you see?”
“A big, black, long thing with big-ass eyes.”
“If you could be more specific,” Adrianna says, reaching out and resting her hand on his forearm.
“You think I’m mad, don’t you?” Nick says a little too loud. “You think I’m making this up. I didn’t imagine that.”
“No, it’s just—”
The water beside them explodes, showering the bedrock and ice with spray—blue phosphorescence rains down on them. Out of the darkness, tentacles lash through the air. Adrianna drops the flashlight. It rolls into the water. Immediately, it’s grabbed by a long, thin, flexible arm and dragged into the depths.
Nick and Adrianna lie flat on the rocks, soaking wet.
Tentacles strike around them, searching the foreshore. Rocks are dragged back into the water. An eerie blue glow fills the cavern.
“I see you,” Jazz yells, lighting a red flare. Pungent smoke cascades from the burning tip. A blood-red glow reflects off the water. Jazz is roughly eighty yards away, back by the collapsed ceiling. “You wanna dance? I’m over here, big boy.”
“Run,” Adrianna yells at her.
Jazz drops the flare at her feet. She’s not going anywhere. She backs up against the ice boulder at the narrowest point on the path.
Jury Duty (First Contact) Page 25
