by Paul Bishop
“Nice of you to show up. What happened? Why did you go offline?”
“I didn’t,” the AI countered.
He queried the rear scanners to see what he was missing at the dogfight.
Weird was the only word that came to mind.
The life signs from the scattered arachnid swarm weren’t consistent. Something was still amiss with the sensors.
“Is anyone else getting weird shit over the array?” he asked.
“That’s a big ten-four, good buddy,” Dak said. “The bugs are blinking like lights on a Christmas tree. By the way, are you okay out there?”
“That boom sent me on a little side jaunt. When we get home, I’ll show you pictures and the souvenir tattoo I got.”
“You’d better.” She laughed.
“These readings can’t be right,” Jen said in Spinner Three. “Nothing alive can fly that fast.”
It wasn’t there on the night vision until it was—literally almost instantaneously.
A brown recluse with bat wings and a spiked dragon’s tail, visible only in wing cam stills, careened through space with an odd flicker and faster than the human eye could follow. At nearly twice the speed of sound, the recluse struck Jen’s spinner and she dropped toward the hardpan.
“ʼNids at three o’clock,” Dak shouted.
At the last instant before impact, Spinner Three went up and over, leveled out over Ross Sea, and skimmed the surface of the frozen water before it whirled upward in a cyclone of fury.
“I see ʼem,” Slade acknowledged. “Going into pursuit curve. Let’s chase ʼem to the other side of the lake. You okay, Jen?”
“Affirmative. What the hell’s going on out here?”
“You’re the science major,” he pointed out.
So far, science hadn’t helped much.
When they first appeared on the ice, three variants of arachnid were categorized according to the familiar bugs they resembled most—ticks, spiders, and scorpions.
Blisters and ʼNids.
At first, they didn’t have wings.
Once they started to fly and after more people died, Endurance Base came online as a full-time military installation and permission to deflect the critters with humane and environmentally safe magnetic field pulse guns was finally granted.
Not that pushing the bugs around did much good. The things constantly evolved to counter any defense against them.
They were still evolving. The bastards were always evolving.
The brain trust at Endurance Base knew more about the bugs than they used to thanks to the new Lin Wu models of biological AIs that used brain-based computing. But they didn’t know enough to answer the big questions. How did alien goo get loose in the Antarctic biosphere? How could it be successfully contained?
So far, there was no record of the bugs moving beyond the Circle.
What would happen to planet Earth if they did?
Dak flitted across the screen above him and swung in on the upper side of the heavy ʼnid swarm with full disruptors humming. Big ticks that looked like softballs with hummingbird wings were hurled aside from both sides of the ship while Simpson rolled in beneath to fling the critters farther away.
Jen filled in behind the first wave.
Slade joined the formation and pounded into the airstream left behind by his three comrades.
He needed to check on the other two flights.
“Squadron Leader to RI-Two. Report, Sam,” he called.
There was no answer.
Dak led Simpson and Jen on a rocket ride into the deep night and back for another strafing run at the hovering ticks. Slowly but surely, they forced them away from the base.
At mission status six minutes, twenty-three seconds, Rime Ice had apparently accomplished its first objective, which was to divert the swarm from its heading toward the base. The twelve spinners had triggered whatever hive-mind the creatures possessed.
Or simply stoked their blood lust.
“Next objective. Let’s try to herd them behind the volcano,” Slade instructed.
If they could succeed in driving the arachnids to the far side of Erebus, it would buy them time. The ʼnids survived in the cold, but they didn’t like it. They preferred the geothermal vents and volcanic flows central to Ross Island. He decided if they chased them in that direction, it might keep the bugs distracted.
With still no answer from his second flight, he left formation to spiral north through a web of winged spiders.
At the South Pole, all flights lead north.
“Check in RI-Two,” said Slade. He pictured Tylor with his beard streaming halfway down his tunic, a souvenir of his time on base. Clean-shaven the day he arrived, he immediately announced, “I’ll shave again the day I leave.” He hadn’t expected such a long deployment.
Nobody thought the bugs would be this much of a problem.
Finally, the man’s report came through but crackled with distortion. His voice sounded pinched and worried.
“Squadron Leader. We’re in trouble here, Slade.”
“I have you on my screen,” he replied and picked up the sub-sonic dogfight. “I’m on your back door,” he said and dusted the edge of a long open trench that no human being had ever traversed. “Pull up, Tylor. You have a stream of ʼnids slithering up your belly.”
Tylor’s ship sailed on a horizontal vector straight out from Slade’s nose and against the black he was digitally enhanced—green and shiny. The jagged steep walls of the canyon rose on either side and he followed him in. “This thing must be ten miles deep,” he said. “Pull up, Tylor.”
There was no response and he counted at least a dozen squirming shapes fanned out around the other man’s ship. “Where’s the rest of your flight, man?” he asked. “RI-Two, chime in.” He didn’t think the other man heard him. The shadow of the deep ice hampered the links.
On-screen, a Pterodactyl-scorpion hybrid plummeted and caught the spinner in its claws. The link flared to life, “No defense,” Tylor spluttered. “Can’t get—”
“Barrel roll,” he shouted and activated his guns to unleash twin pulses that screamed between Tylor’s ship and the creature’s talons. “Shake the bastard loose.”
Slade veered right and overshot the scene as the spinner split in half like a balsa wood toy in a ball of fire, it’s sleek wingspan outlined with neon green and it’s blue fuselage violated by a pulsing gold horn. The next thing he knew, he was four miles downrange and the sight of the scorpion’s stinger rending through Tylor’s carbon alloy ship was only a memory.
The pilot’s death scream was nothing but a ringing in his ears.
He pulled back and called to his flight. “Dak, Simpson, Tylor’s gone and the rest of his flight’s missing.”
“Simpson’s down, Slade,” Jen told him. “Me too. That blue light on my panel? The one you warned me about upstairs? It went orange thirty seconds ago. Spinner Three is headed back to base.”
Suddenly, a hail of b-b’s peppered him from all directions and instantly, he buttoned his external vents.
“I have a storm of normals,” he said. “Lin Wu, get me parameters.”
“The swarm is three miles long and four miles wide,” she said.
A billion billion tiny monsters.
The eggheads called them normals, the first class of arachnids found on the ice. They measured anywhere from the diameter of a pinhead to, at most, a golf-ball. Bigger and more alive than should’ve existed in an environment of such extreme cold, they were harmful only if they took a nip out of you or latched on.
Or if a swarm of them collided with you at three hundred mph. Then, they were deadly.
The magnetic disruptors mounted on the spinners were third-generation guns and useless against the heavy onslaught of normals.
What he wouldn’t give for a short-range Sidewinder or Israeli Python 5 air to air missile.
With precision targeting and a minimum of explosive power, he was confident standard munitions could end the threat
and leave the continent relatively free of destruction.
But not free of contamination, he thought.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.” But in his heart, he knew it would.
The barrage of normals that impacted the ship was deafening. He was disoriented, Jen was in free-fall, and he’d lost three ships with others unaccounted for.
The whole thing had gone south, an expression he’d never really understood until now.
“Squadron retreat,” he said. “Rime Ice to the sheet.”
Slade addressed Lin Wu. “We might have scared them off, but I’m not taking any chances. Put Endurance Base defenses into full play. Sonic screens, magnetic wires at perimeters of ten, five and point-six kilometers. Watch for spiders and scorpions first.”
“Affirmative.”
The staccato drumming on the spinner’s outer shell increased.
He wasn’t afraid of a hull breach. The ticks were too small for that. What he feared most was penetration by the smallest one through an open pinhole or vent tube.
If one of the devils were to get inside of you…
Finally, he flew clear of the storm and rejoined Dak inside Endurance airspace.
“Docking in thirty seconds,” she said. “It looks like the main swarm of bugs went north.”
“No place else to go,” he agreed.
“Maybe we got lucky and the front scared ʼem back to their hidey-holes. Endurance Base reads peaceful,” she added.
“Condition Two,” Lin Wu informed them. “Weather cycle is Farrer 7.8. Moderate to Severe. Rising.”
“We have a storm front coming in,” he muttered.
“You want me to help locate the missing ships?” Dak offered.
“You go on in,” he replied. “I’ll stay out.”
“Okey-doke. Good luck, pal. Docking in ten.”
Slade ran the perimeter of the base and logged dock sequencing from six ships after Dak. His own spinner made eight.
Where the hell was Jen?
He swerved into a wide arc over Endurance and soared out into the black. “Jen, do you copy?”
Nothing could be heard on Spinner Three’s channel but static.
When did she last check in? When had he heard from her? He turned toward Ross Sea.
“Jen, come in?”
The commlink was dead.
3
Alderman Slade grew up in rural South Carolina, the only son of career military overachievers.
Since he wasn’t all that vital to his parents’ lives, he spent summers on his grandpa’s farm near Atlanta. Grandpa was an old Army man himself and a county sheriff.
Preferring the nearby rural communities, he didn’t visit the city. Those long, lazy days spent with old folks and cowboys, pigs, chickens, and horses, cemented the boy’s proclivity for small groups and small communities.
He preferred the peaceful to the chaos, the quiet to the boisterous.
In the country, he learned how to shoot and how to be alone.
Unlike many people, he wasn’t surprised when he landed in Antarctica. His only regret was he wished he had found it sooner.
“Good on ya,” Grandpop had said when the assignment came through. “You can finally escape this awful heat and these goddamn bugs.”
How was the old man to know he’d have to endure more of both?
His first job on base had been to explore the lava flows and steamy vents around Mt. Erebus, a task performed with a team of six science students, three from Australia and three from Argentina. What they’d learned about the origin of the bugs—next to nothing—and what to do about them—absolutely nothing—wouldn’t fill a fifth-grade language arts essay.
Many terabytes of data storage were used, nonetheless.
After two flight promotions, his second assignment on base was to lead Rime Ice, the airborne defense unit put in place after the initial hopes of science finding a way to contain the bugs failed.
The duty was brutal, mentally and physically taxing, and more fun than he’d had in his entire life.
Until today, when the squadron took a drubbing with one confirmed fatality. Maybe more—probably more. He was grand-slammed with emotions he’d never suspected he could feel.
Slade swept low across Ross Sea and bounced up over the island snowpack and back out. As he moved, he tapped Jen’s link and followed with calls to Simpson and the missing RI-Three team to call, call, and call again.
He waited anxiously for a return signal. Even if they were dead or their ships broken in pieces, there should’ve been a signal of some kind.
Lin Wu was active and alive in every ship. She should’ve located the spinners directly.
It shouldn’t have taken her an hour.
“Three ships on the ground near Beacon Valley,” the AI said as he banked hard toward the ice-free range between Pyramid Mountain and Beacon Heights.
“Intact?”
“Negative.”
Beacon Valley was the closest thing on Earth to the surface of Mars—dry and rocky, desolate and without life. Some of the coldest conditions on the continent were logged there, and if a human ventured outside in the deep winter, even with thermomesh and a glass flight suit, she wouldn’t last more than an hour. Not with a Farrer Eight atmospheric system coming in when the hurricane-force winds could exceed two hundred and twenty mph and create a windchill in excess of minus-eighty.
“Life signs?” he asked. “Besides your own bio-matter in the ship servers.”
“Arachnids,” she said. “Embedded in the servers’ bio-matter.”
“What about human life?”
“Negative.” She echoed authentic human empathy. “I’m sorry, sir.”
A few miles farther, they found Simpson’s ship beside a glowing apparition that defied explanation or even visual definition as the blizzard winds kicked up a snowy fog.
Slade ground his teeth. Whatever had taken the spinners apart was down there and now, the weather threatened to knock his ship apart as fast as any bug.
A message crackled through from the base. “Dakota here, bud. We have wind shears sharp enough to slice cheese. Get your ass back here. No joke.”
“I found RI-Three,” he said. “Simpson too. In Beacon Valley.”
“What about Commander Morocco?”
“I’m coming in,” he said and avoided a direct answer to the question.
He forced himself to turn back.
There was nothing else he could do.
Decontamination was an hour-long ordeal of scans and scrubs and peeling stuff Slade would rather not know about out of his nose and from under his toenails. He changed clothes and continued to search for Jen with every piece of base equipment available—digital and analog.
He could wish for a St. Bernard, if only for the cask under its collar.
There was no way he’d send a dog outside in the blizzard.
With her out of the picture, protocol put Dr Ron Stevens in temporary command of the base. He knew the man as an ill-mannered twerp he’d met once at the all-Antarctic Christmas party one year.
“Keep trying post three,” he said. “And if you can’t get a signal from there, try bouncing it off the Biodome satellite to post five.” He thumbed out of the communication link on his portable and jogged down the narrow beige corridor to the briefing room where Stevens, Dak, and the Lin Wu hologram waited.
When he stepped through the heavy hatchway into the sterile room with its rubber floor mats, blue-green table, and avocado-colored chairs, he was already talking. “What do you have for me?” He dropped into a chair between Dak and the hologram. Stevens sat across the table and tested the heat of his coffee with a pinkie finger.
Dak said, “The storm’s a killer gale. You barely made it in. And the listening posts are down, which you already know.”
Slade held up his portable and thumbed an app to trigger a trio of tracking beacons that were supposed to ping as soon as they found what you asked them to look for. The programmers boasted you
could hear the first splash of morning coffee in a cup on the other side of the planet—if only you knew where to listen.
If you had no idea where your target was, it might take a few minutes longer.
All he pulled up was a spinning blue dot.
“Official status of Commander Morocco?” asked Stevens.
“Missing, and because of weather quarantines, we’re not doing a goddamn thing to find her,” Slade responded. He stared across the table at the man. “That leaves you in charge, Stevens.”
Forty-something and with greased-back hair, plastic-framed glasses, and untamed mutton chops, Stevens wore a rumpled white shirt, black nylon slacks, and an ochre jacket streaked with ketchup stains. A laminated name badge the size of an old paperback novel hung from an orange cord strung around his neck. He held a pen in his right hand and jotted notes on a legal pad on the table in front of him.
The scientist glanced at his watch. “Computer, put me down as assuming command of Endurance Base at oh-thirteen-hundred hours.”
The hologram shifted in her chair. “Affirmative, sir.”
Lin Wu wasn’t accustomed to condescending talk.
“Welcome to my world,” Slade said with a quick glance at the AI.
If you didn’t know the girl was an artificial construct rendered from directional laser light and programmed by a Nevada think-tank, you could almost believe she was a flesh and blood woman in her mid-twenties, likely hailing from somewhere on the Pacific Rim. Lin Wu had short-cropped ebony hair, brown eyes, slender arms, compact breasts, and a green-and-indigo uniform that inexplicably left her midriff exposed.
She was probably the manifestation of some geek programmer’s love for old mid-century American TV spaceship shows.
But if the AI’s body was there, her consciousness was all over, housed on base and in the ships’ organic servers.
“Doctor Stevens wants to know about the new deviations you saw in the field,” she said.
“New deviations,” he said and played dumb. “Beats me.” He looked at Dak’s coffee cup and raised his eyebrows in question. “Should I be drinking a cup of that?”
She shook her head.
He assumed as much and checked on the trio of scanner apps. They reported nothing yet. No sign of Jen and no splash of coffee on the other side of the planet. He wondered what they drank at the North Pole and if the answer there was the same as here—“Not enough.”
