by Greg Cox
“I don’t want to be,” he said. Tears welled up in his eyes. His throat tightened.
“I don’t blame you.” Jonathan placed a reassuring hand on Clark’s shoulder. “It’d be a huge burden for anyone to bear. But you’re not just anyone, Clark. And I have to believe that you’ve been sent here for a reason. All these changes that have been happening to you, one day you’re going to think of them as a blessing. And when that day comes, you’ll have to make a choice whether to stand proud in front of the human race, or not.”
He sounded like he’d been thinking about this for a long time.
“Can’t I just keep pretending I’m your son?” Clark asked.
His father pulled him close.
“You are my son,” he said emphatically. “But somewhere out there, you’ve got another father, too. Who gave you another name. He sent you here for a reason, Clark, and even if it takes you the rest of your life, you owe it to yourself to find out what that reason is.”
Another father? On another planet?
Clark wasn’t sure where to begin. His dad’s answers had only left him with a brand new set of questions. He turned the odd spike-like object over in his hands, examining it from every angle. Was this nameless artifact the key to his origins? The beam of the flashlight fell upon the triangular head of the key, revealing a symbol inscribed there.
It looked like a capital “S.”
C H A P T E R T E N
The Bearcat was a rough-and-tumble bar outside of Yellowknife, catering mostly to truckers and miners. Several semi-trailers were parked outside, alongside a couple of light utility vehicles belonging to the Canadian Armed Forces. Clark was bussing tables when he heard another big eighteen-wheeler pull up to the bar.
The door swung open, letting in a chilly gust of wind, and a hefty truck driver stomped across the threshold. Stubble carpeted the man’s surly features. The bartender called out a greeting.
“Evening, Ludlow,” Weaver said. “What can I get you?”
Clark went back to his work. It was after five and the bar was packed with heavy drinkers determined to put a dent in the Bearcat’s liquid inventory. Raucous laughter and dirty jokes competed with the Edmonton Oilers game on the TV behind the bar. Sawdust coated the floor, soaking up spilled drinks. Clark stooped to pick up some empty bottles. A greasy apron shielded his flannel shirt and jeans.
He paused as his ears picked up on one particular conversation, a few tables away, where three uniformed Canadian airmen were chatting in the corner. Most people wouldn’t have been able to eavesdrop on the discussion, especially through the noisy din, but Clark had no trouble listening in.
“—found something strange on Ellesmere. AIRCOM’s been making runs out there all week.”
“That rat-hole? You gotta be kidding me.”
“I know, crazy,” the first airman agreed. “But the Americans are there, too. A lot of them. Space Command. NASA—”
Another conversation, much closer at hand, distracted Clark. He looked up to see the newly arrived trucker hassling one of the waitresses, a tired-looking brunette in her early twenties. He pawed at her blouse.
“—c’mon, Chrissy. Give me a peek.”
She pulled away from him, balancing an empty tray.
“Back off, Ludlow,” she said. “I’m serious.”
A leer and a snort indicated just how little he cared what she thought. He grabbed her backside, eliciting a roar of laughter from his drinking buddies. Clark scowled. Chrissy was just trying to make a living. She didn’t deserve to be manhandled by an obnoxious trucker. Still, he tried to concentrate on what the airmen were saying.
“—they’re calling it an ‘anomalous object,’ whatever that means.”
Like a UFO? Clark wondered. Like the ones my folks found?
“Knock it off!” Chrissy protested.
She slapped Ludlow’s hand away and took a step backward, but he grabbed her wrist to keep her from leaving. He yanked her back toward the table.
That’s enough, Clark thought. He’d hoped to avoid to getting involved, but he couldn’t ignore this any longer. He straightened up and headed over to Ludlow’s table. Reaching it, he cleared his throat to get their attention.
“Let her go.”
Ludlow sneered at him, like every bully Clark had ever known.
“Or what, tough guy?”
“Or I’m going to ask you to leave.”
The trucker shoved Chrissy aside. He lumbered to his feet, obviously spoiling for a fight.
“I’ve been coming here for fifteen years,” he said. “I’ll leave when I’m ready.” He snatched a foaming glass off the table and hurled the liquid in Clark’s face. “But my buddy here needs a new beer, so why don’t you help us with that?”
Beer ran down Clark’s face. His expression darkened and he clenched his fists at his sides. Ludlow had no idea who—or what—he was messing with.
The trucker snickered at Clark’s anger.
“Hey, Weaver!” he called out to the bartender. “I think your busboy’s about to go postal.”
The bartender shrugged and kept on wiping the bar counter. He weighed the value of a busboy against a steady customer.
“You’re fired, kid,” he said casually.
Ludlow grinned triumphantly. Laughter spread across the bar. Even the airmen looked amused by the episode. Nobody came to the Bearcat expecting good manners and a tranquil atmosphere. Brawls were considered a good night’s entertainment.
“There,” Ludlow gloated. “Crisis averted.” He nodded toward the exit. “Now out!”
Meaty hands shoved Clark in the chest. He seethed, wanting nothing more than to pound the crap out of the trucker. Solar fire smoldered behind his furious blue eyes, ready to be unleashed. A hush fell over the bar as the staff and patrons waited to see what the humiliated busboy would do next. Was he going to stand up to Ludlow after all?
“It’s not worth it, sweetie,” Chrissy said, looking worried.
He knew she was right. Even though it killed him, he backed down and unclenched his fists. He tossed his beer-stained apron onto the floor and headed for the door.
Ludlow lobbed an empty beer can at him. It bounced off Clark’s back.
“Here’s your tip, asshole!”
* * *
Ludlow was still chuckling at his own wit later on, when he decided to get back on the road. He stood up from the table and tossed a handful of greasy singles next to a half-eaten meal. Then he belched loudly
“This food sucks!” he announced for everyone to hear. “I’m calling the health department.”
Chrissy kept her distance as he pulled on his hat and exited the bar. He strolled across the parking lot, fumbling for his keys, only to stop in his tracks.
His jaw dropped.
His eyes bulged.
“What the hell?”
Ludlow’s eighty-thousand-pound rig was nothing but a heap of mangled metal. The cab was smashed flat, while the entire trailer had been twisted into a smoking pretzel. The smell of burnt rubber polluted the air.
He wasn’t going anywhere tonight.
* * *
Clark trudged along the side of the highway. A duffle bag was slung over his shoulder. Snow and ice crunched beneath his boots. The road wound through densely wooded hills. The Northern Lights glimmered on the horizon.
He smiled for a moment, imagining Ludlow’s reaction when he saw what was left of his eighteen-wheeler. Then he put The Bearcat behind him and kept on hiking north... toward Ellesmere Island. The conversation he’d overheard in the bar played over and over again in his mind.
What sort of “anomalous object” had been found up north?
A truck approached from the south, heading his way.
Clark stuck out his thumb.
C H A P T E R E L E V E N
From above, it looked as though the Ice Age had never left Ellesmere Island. Vast ice caps and glaciers covered the mountainous Arctic island, which was barely more than five hundred mile
s south of the North Pole. Global warming had taken its toll on the thick ice shelves that extended beyond the island into the sea, but Ellesmere was still forbiddingly white, and barren in appearance. It was said to be one of the most remote places on Earth.
Lois Lane hoped the trip was worth it.
The Sikorsky S-61 helicopter touched down on a landing field at the northeastern tip of the island. Lois braced herself for the bitter cold as she exited the ’copter. A heavy parka and boots provided a degree of protection against the harsh polar climate. Her long auburn hair was tucked beneath the hood of the parka. Not the most flattering outfit she had ever worn, but Lois didn’t care about that.
If anything, she sometimes regarded her own— admittedly—striking good looks as an impediment, getting in the way of her career. She wanted people to pay attention to her byline, not her eyes or figure.
A two-man welcoming committee was waiting. The older of the men, who was obviously in charge, came forward to meet her.
“Ms. Lane? I’m Jed Eubanks with Arctic Cargo.” His breath frosted in front of his lips. “We’re a private contractor augmenting NORTHCOM on the operation.”
US Northern Command had been established in the wake of 9/11, to defend and secure the United States and its interests. Although the island was under Canadian rule, NORTHCOM was authorized to coordinate efforts with America’s allies. In recent years, Lois knew, budget cuts had led to the privatization of various support services on Ellesmere.
“Got it,” she said. “How far’s the station?”
He indicated a distant ridge. Snow and ice covered the rugged hills and valleys. They were far above the timberline, so there was no vegetation or wildlife in sight. Sunlight glinted off rolling expanses of white.
“Camp is just over yonder,” he said. “I’ll walk you there. Joe can get your bags.” He turned toward his associate, a strapping young man with a scruffy black beard. “Help her out, Joe.”
Lois briefly checked Joe out. He wasn’t bad-looking, in a hunky Ice Road Trucker kind of way. He nodded to her and began unloading cargo from the helicopter. As he did so, he reached for her overstuffed duffle bag.
“Careful,” she said. “That one’s heavy.”
He lifted it easily. Lois was impressed.
Guess they grow them strong up here, she thought.
Leaving Joe to deal with the luggage, Eubanks escorted Lois away from the landing field.
“Gotta confess, Ms. Lane,” he said, “I’m not a fan of the Daily Planet, as such. But those pieces you wrote when you were embedded with the 1st Division were mighty impressive.”
She appreciated the good review, especially after what she’d survived to get those stories.
“What can I say?” she responded. “I get writer’s block if I’m not wearing a bulletproof vest.”
“So what brings you to the ass-end of nowhere?” he asked. “Ellesmere’s not exactly your standard vacation spot.”
That was putting it lightly. The Alert Station at the tip of the island was the northernmost permanent settlement on the planet. The base had been established as a weather station back in the fifties, and had served as a joint US/ Canadian listening post during the Cold War. Today it also hosted a handful of environmental science facilities, but nothing worth writing headlines about—until recently.
“Same thing that brought a few hundred assorted Army personnel,” Lois said. “Word is their climatologists found something under the ice.”
Eubanks neither confirmed nor denied her words, but the view from the ridge lived up to the rumors Lois had heard.
The remote outpost, which rarely housed more than fifty residents at a time, had ballooned into a miniature city supporting hundreds of US and Canadian troops. Temporary structures consisting of insulation draped over steel and aluminum frames had been erected in the snowbound valley. Barracks, garages, hangars, and mess halls had sprung up practically overnight. Mechanical earth movers had been employed to carve out a large settlement out of the permafrost.
And at the center of the base was a deep pit, where a thermal meltdown generator was being used to bore through the packed ice. Steam rose from the borehole.
Lois could only imagine the money and logistics that had been required to set up an operation this massive in the middle of a frozen, barely habitable wasteland. NORTHCOM wouldn’t have gone to such lengths unless they’d had a very good reason—one she was determined to ferret out. She could practically smell a scoop.
The station’s tactical operations center was located within walking distance of the pit. Eubanks led her into the hut, where he handed her off to the folks in charge. They didn’t look happy to see her. That was fine with Lois. She hadn’t expected them to be.
The commanding officer stepped forward and introduced himself.
“I’m Colonel Nathan Hardy with US NORTHCOM,” he said brusquely. He had a receding hairline and a stern disposition. His ramrod bearing practically screamed “career military,” as did the eagles on his uniform. He gestured toward the man beside him. “This Dr. Emil Hamilton with DARPA.”
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency specialized in developing new scientific technologies for use by the military. Hamilton certainly looked the part of an egghead scientist. He was a professorial type, in his sixties, with a bald pate and neatly trimmed goatee. Lois could easily envision him puttering in a lab somewhere, working on various hush-hush projects.
“We were expecting you tomorrow,” Hardy said gruffly.
She just shrugged.
“Which is why I showed up today,” she replied.
Hardy scowled, but Lois refused to be intimidated. She took off her hood and laid her cards on the table.
“Let’s get one thing straight, okay, guys? The only reason I’m here is because we’re on Canadian soil, and the appellate court overruled your injunction to keep me away. So if we’re done measuring manhoods, you want to tell me what your knob turners found?”
Hardy looked as if he would have preferred to assemble a firing squad, but orders were orders, so he and Hamilton led her over to a bank of sophisticated computers and monitoring equipment, where they introduced her to Staff Sergeant Sekowsky. Unlike his tight-lipped superiors, the curly haired technician seemed eager to talk about what his crew had discovered.
“NASA’s EOS satellites pinged the anomaly first.” He pointed to computer screens cycling through false-color portraits of the seabed and nearby glacial topography. The glacial ice was rendered in shades of blue, while the ocean appeared as green above the rocky gray sea floor. Layers of snow were, appropriately, white. “The ice shelf plays hell on the echo soundings... but there’s definitely something down there.”
Lois squinted at the screens. She wasn’t an expert on interpreting images of this sort, but it was evident that that there was a large solid object embedded deep beneath the ice.
“A submarine, maybe?” she speculated. “Soviet-era?” That would be interesting, but not quite the front-page story she was hoping to find.
“Doubt it,” Hardy said. “At three hundred meters, that’s considerably larger than anything we know they built back then.”
Lois did the conversion in her head. Three hundred meters was roughly a thousand feet long.
That would be an awfully big sub.
Dr. Hamilton asked Sekowsky to call up an “aerial reflection radiometer view.” Lois made a mental note to look that up later, and observed that the image on the screen appeared to have been taken from orbit.
“And then there’s this,” Hamilton said. “You’d expect a sub to be buried in the seabed, but this thing’s lodged one hundred feet above sea level, at the base of this tidewater glacier.”
Lois saw his point. How would a sub end up frozen in the ice, a significant distance above the ocean?
Unless it dropped from the sky.
“Could an earthquake have moved it?” she asked.
“Maybe,” Sekowsky said. “But that’s not the spooky pa
rt. The ice surrounding it is nearly twenty thousand years old.”
* * *
Twenty thousand years?
Lois was still processing that as Colonel Hardy marched her across the encampment to her quarters. The Arctic sun had dipped below the horizon, taking with it what passed for warmth. Shivering in her parka, Lois decided she would never complain about Metropolis winters again.
“Here it is,” Hardy said, like a grumpy innkeeper. Joe tagged along behind him, still carrying Lois’s duffle bag. Hardy opened the door to the shelter, then realized that Lois had lagged behind. “Ms. Lane.”
Despite the cold, she had paused to take in the view. Steam rose from the excavation site where the meltdown generator was living up to its name. The Aurora Borealis shimmered high overhead, spreading across the night sky in rippling curtains of green and red. Pristine sheets of ice reflected the aurora.
“Try not to wander,” Hardy said impatiently. “Temperatures drop to minus forty at night. And if a whiteout rolls in, we won’t find your body until next spring.”
Lois tore her eyes away from the heavenly lightshow.
“What if I need to tinkle?”
“There’s a bucket in the corner.”
Lois entered the shelter, which turned out to resemble an industrial cargo container more than a cozy bed-and-breakfast. Sure enough, the accommodations consisted of a cot, a sleeping bag—and a bucket.
Hardy smirked before taking his leave. Joe, the hunky baggage carrier, gave Lois an apologetic shrug as he put the duffle bag down, then left without a word. Lois found herself alone in a glorified shack in the middle of an Arctic wasteland.
Could be worse, she thought. Somebody else might be onto this story.
* * *
She waited long enough to let her babysitters to get out of the cold, then cracked open the door of the shelter and peeked outside. As she’d hoped, there wasn’t a guard posted. Where was she supposed to go anyway? Hardy clearly expected her to stay inside, where it was safe and warm.
How little he knew her.
Getting the official story wasn’t enough. If she wanted to find out what was really going on, she needed to shake her handlers and poke around on her own.
