by Paul Bishop
“It looks that way,” Slade confirmed. “Do you want monitor duty or to go play in the snow?”
“You have to ask?” She grinned.
He turned to Charlie.
The old guy looked like he’d just crawled out of bed—or a bottle, or both. His rumpled royal-blue coveralls were stained, and he wore his cap with the bill pitched up like a kid ready to play marbles or shoot the dice on a street corner.
It didn’t seem to occur to him that he hadn’t shaved for at least three days.
Charlie was lucky he ran the civilian side of the security teams. If he were directly under Slade’s command, he wouldn’t be on the base.
“Get your team in here and online fast. We’ll need a full staff on monitor duty if the creature gets inside.”
The man waved him away with a lazy smile. “Don’t get your bile in a bubble. Lin Wu will take care of things.”
“Lin Wu is not responding,” Liz told him. “From what I can tell, she’s in strata-two micro-purge.”
He whistled condescendingly. “Aren’t we full of beans?”
“Strata-two micro-purge.” Slade frowned. “Is that bad?”
“Aw, hell, don’t worry about,” Charlie assured him. “Lin Wu’s no different than any other gal. She’s throwing a hissy fit for one reason or other. She’ll get over it.”
“Can I slug him now, sir?” Liz asked.
Dak laughed out loud.
“Later,” the commander said.
“Let me get to my station,” the old man said affably.
“Please.” He didn’t bother to hide the sarcasm.
“Are you ready?” Dak asked.
“Let’s get suited up.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have smuggled in a twelve-gauge scattergun, Colonel?” she asked.
He grinned. “As a matter of fact…”
“Do you want to choose a team from the duty roster?”
“I already did,” he confirmed. “It’s you and me, kid.”
They ventured into white-out conditions, two ground troops with full backpacks tethered together with wireless beacons, wrapped in thermomesh, and their uniforms augmented with tough carbon alloy. Seen through black visors with high-definition color-simulated night vision, the world was still a fuzzy, foggy mass of gray. The open cement courtyard inside Endurance’s front gates was an alien terrain of winter ice and sculpted ten-foot-tall drifts.
Slade led the way and carried a hundred pounds on his back. Dak’s pack wasn’t any lighter. As usual, she carried it better.
A one-story guardhouse stood less than twenty yards away and one hundred yards from the besieged gate with a clear view of the fence under normal conditions. It made a logical first objective.
He aimed for an open blowout on the facing side of the cinderblock building where the snow swirled in miniature cyclones. As they pushed toward it, he recalled his early training and one of the instructor’s words of wisdom. “We’re fighting a dual-front war,” the man had said. “Never underestimate the weather.”
Even as the memory echoed through, the wind swept at them like a truck, bowled him off his feet, and deposited him hard on the slick courtyard pavement. His backpack came unhitched, which forced Dak to stop and assist. They forged through knee-deep snow that soon climbed to their waist. When they finally arrived at the guardhouse, the two flattened against the side of the building.
“It’s impossible to move out here,” she said. “There’s too much snow.”
“I see him,” he said. “There’s the spider—moving on top of the drifts.”
“Huh. It looks like a small one.”
“Small being relative.”
The creature was ten feet tall and fifteen feet long and it pranced on long, hinged appendages around one of the sonic towers and flipped over the magnetic fence on top of a curving marble-hued snowdrift. It’s swollen black abdomen was marked with a red hourglass–definitely a black widow.
“In this weather and at that size, the damn thing can still scurry,” Slade commented irritably.
“And she has friends,” Dak added, “over there.”
Damned if she didn’t. Three additional widows, roughly the same size as the first, flitted up to the peak of the snow pile. It might’ve been a trick of wind and vibrant white snow, but he thought the spiders were glowing.
“What’s it look like from above, Charlie?”
Back in the control room, the man would see a satellite’s eye view of the base on a wide screen. His team monitored enemy status and could anticipate outcomes of potential engagements.
“We’re trackin’ four heat signatures on the gate, Colonel. Ninety meters from your position and more coming behind in a steady column. It looks like a colony. Otherwise, it’s like any other day on the ice. Crappy.”
“Heat signatures confirmed,” a welcome voice said inside his helmet.
“Lin Wu! You’re back with us,” Slade said. “What happened?”
“Heat signatures confirmed,” she said. “Security measures are in play. Sonic screens are down.”
“I mean what happened to you? You went offline.”
“Heat signatures confirmed,” she said.
Dak cut in. “She’s been offline often lately. I wanted to talk to you about it yesterday before they found the commander.”
“Okay, one thing at a time,” he said quickly. “What’s behind Gate Five?”
“Gate Five is an entry and exit way for the Endurance Base waste retrieval system,” said Lin Wu.
“Right, right, I know,” he said. “The septic system.”
Even with the messy business of fighting arachnids and with treaties being ratified and discarded every few days, much of life in Antarctica was still about reducing humanity’s footprint in the pristine land, as it had always been. Waste removal had always been a major concern and a massive undertaking, and with more people than ever, the job was as tough and as important as ever. Security at Gate Five was the best on base.
“I meant what kind of defense is behind the gate? We upgraded to the Benson sonic screens, but didn’t Charlie’s team put in a static generator?”
“Charlie here, sir. Yep, static generator running behind the screens. I can’t believe the spider will press it. The black widow is a cowardly bastard, even at ten feet tall. If she smells burning ozone, and with the high harmonics tearing through her ears, she’ll turn tail fast enough.”
“Unless she’s a new kind of monster,” he said glumly.
If the animal happened to be phasing like the spiders in the field had phased, it would crawl past the sonic screens and magnetic fences. It could actually begin to tear the base apart.
He clicked through a series of the GPS routes laid out on the snowpack in front of him by Charlie’s VR system. Any one of the strategic plans would work under normal conditions to corral the bugs and shoo them from the base. But like Dak said, the snow was impossible for them to move through, while the spiders could skitter across the tops of the polished drifts.
Slade relayed his concerns to the other man.
“I get that it’s slow-going,” Charlie responded, “but you’ll need to be closer to the bugs if you want your sidearms to have any effect.”
“We won’t use sidearms today, Charlie.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Feed me the precise coordinates for the column. Note any other life forms in the area.”
“Sending. There’s nothing alive out there except you and the enemy.” The man sounded confused “But what do you think you can do without disruptors? You gonna wrestle with ʼem hand-to-hand?”
“Something like that.” At the base of the guardhouse, they stood on a patch of dry cement, fifteen by twenty feet wide. It was as good a place as any to unpack the fire.
He’d left the deflectors at home. Now, he was ready to engage a new kind of monster.
Quickly, he unslung his backpack and urged Dak to do the same. They unpacked a succession of steel levers, bars, barrels, and
slide mechanisms that fit together with expert precision and, once assembled, violated every treaty currently in play.
It took the two of them five minutes to assemble Grandpa’s Strata-14 and its meter-high tripod, a 40mm grenade launcher not unlike the old Mark 19. Belt-fed and air-cooled, the gun had shields against the snow and ice and gravity damps to absorb recoil, but weather would still be a problem. Hell, on a clear Georgia day, the thing was a chore to fire.
“We only have a hundred rounds here,” she said and unrolled one of three thirty-two-grenade belts. “We’ll be out of ammo in about three minutes.”
“That’s all it ought to take.” He jacked the leader into the hammer slide, shunted it forward, and struggled with the unwieldy tripod to bring the trigger to chest height. Finally, he fed Charlie’s coordinates into the cannon’s onboard computer.
“Targets locked in,” Dak confirmed. “Jesus, Slade. Take a look at that.”
The black widows were closer than ever. Some glowed and others were transparent and faded out as they phased in rapid succession.
“They’re moving too fast,” he said. “Getting too close.”
His grandpa had told him the grenade launcher was safe to use on targets a hundred and twenty yards away.
“Spiders at sixty yards from your location,” Charlie said. “You’d better get out of there, Slade.”
“Hit it, Dak,” Slade instructed and held onto the cartridge belt while she pressed the Strata’s trigger.
The grenade launcher thundered to life with a leap and jerked the steel from his gloved hands with an angry snarl. It gobbled cartridges and spat them out with a scream. Whatever was ailing Lin Wu hadn’t affected the targeting sub-routine he’d fed into the gun.
He watched with grim satisfaction as the lead widow was rent asunder with a loud thump, followed by a roaring ball of fire. Behind her, five more spiders exploded in geysers of snow and bright orange flame, their dismemberment marked by pillars of dark black smoke.
“It smells like fried chicken,” Dak commented.
“What the hell’s going on out there, Slade?” Charlie demanded. “Have you gone freakin’ crazy?”
He ignored the call. “I’m feeding you another belt,” he said while she continued to fire and laid down a line of deafening blasts that scattered blackened spider parts across the ivory landscape like soot. Everywhere, hot raining goo splattered onto the snow or twirled like snowflakes in the sub-zero air.
Slade called out to halt the flurry of blood. “They’re scampering. We’ll use the scatterguns for cleanup.”
She backed away from the grenade launcher.
He pitched her a Stoeger twelve-gauge and pointed to the right. “Little one at two o’clock,” he said. “I’ll take the two at eleven.” They set out at an angle to each other and delivered volleys of lead shot into glowing, phasing arachnid flesh. The assault shredded the targets it into tendrils of worthless meat while they pumped cartridge after cartridge ahead of them in waves of destruction.
This was what nobody wanted for Antarctica, but this was what bloated bureaucracy and government mismanagement brought.
“I have a priority encoded communication for you, sir,” Charlie said. “It’s from Dr Stevens in Lab Four. Do you want to take it?”
By now, the scientist had probably gotten wind of the spider-fight and the grenade launcher. He imagined the man was livid and ready to threaten him with any number of treaty breach fines or penalties for animal cruelty.
“What is it?” he demanded, not able to hide the irritation in his voice.
“I need you to get back here,” Stevens said curtly. “Right now.”
“I’m a little busy defending the base,” he protested, not believing the doctor wasn’t fully aware of what was happening outside.
“If you want to defend the base, you need to see this,” the man urged insistently. “We have bigger problems than a giant spider.”
“Tell me.”
“You know how the tick we showed you phased in and out? Well, Commander Morocco is now also phasing. Essentially, she and the animals in her system have become one. There’s no possible way to separate them.” His explanation sounded rushed and possibly a little panicked. “Worse, the phase duration is getting longer, more pronounced, and more random as time goes on.”
Slade fell back on his heels.
“If it continues like this, in another half-hour, we’ll lose her.”
For only an instant, he wanted to throw himself bodily onto the spider, to kick and punch its soft, mushy guts, and to bite and claw it’s shiny black beaded eyes. He imagined rending the spider into torn, bloody pieces before he escaped the bitter cold.
The image became himself, covered in yellow, blazing goo as he raced through the corridors of Endurance and screamed.
6
He tried to hold her hand, but it kept vanishing.
“There’s a file you need to read,” Jen said. She sounded sleepy and slurred her words. “In my quarters…floor safe.” She nodded toward the table beside her bed where her tablet sat next to a water bottle and a thin plastic card with a hologram chip. “Use the key,” she said.
When he closed his eyes, she felt like mercury slipping between his fingers.
Slade sat with her in the Med Space cubicle and could only watch helplessly as her slender arms and hands and legs glowed tan and gold like an old sepia-tone photograph lit from behind. Her unblemished jawline, her perfect nose, and her lips all glowed brightly for an instant, then faded into nothingness.
Will-o’-the-wisp.
Like hoar frost in the midnight sun.
For the next three minutes or so, he sat alone in the room, woozy from the fluorescent-lit green walls, and wondered if he’d see her again and where she went.
“The password is Shackleton,” she said when she materialized like no time at all had passed for her. “Don’t laugh.”
“Yeah, that’s not the best password.” He grinned. “What’s in the file? What am I looking for?”
Her eyes remained closed but her voice was stronger now—like it had been before the mission—and he listened carefully while he grasped her fingers.
Maybe this time, she wouldn’t go.
If he could hold on tightly enough, maybe he could keep her there.
“File about Endurance Base. About the arachnids. About why they never fly outside the circle. Like Shackleton…”
What she said was true. The ʼnids and blisters never ventured beyond the shifting latitude of the Antarctic Circle into the more temperate zones. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, when the creatures traveled, they only followed a half-dozen routes and all roads led to Endurance Base. It was a mystery but not a big one.
The entomologists merely assumed the bugs were hungry.
Before he could reply, she was gone again. In her absence, he had something new to think about.
What about Shackleton?
The famed British explorer had led three expeditions to Antarctica in the early twentieth century. His most infamous was the doomed voyage of 1914 when his ship, Endurance, was trapped in a Weddell Sea ice pack, stranding her crew near Elephant Island. With heroic will to survive, Shackleton and his men returned to civilization. Anyone else would have been grateful to never return, but the explorer did as if compelled by forces other than reason. Drawn to the ice, he eventually perished there near South Georgia Island at the age of forty-seven.
Why did Jen compare the bugs to the early pioneer?
He let the question percolate at the back of his mind.
Stevens waited outside her room. When Slade left, the scientist followed him down the hallway.
“I can have you arrested for what you did out there,” he said and his voice cracked under the strain of command. “I hope you realize that. I hope you understand that by using standard munitions—”
“If you intended to arrest me, you’d have already done it,” he retorted roughly. “You know as well as I do that if we hadn�
�t eliminated them, that line of widows would be standing right here, where I am now, chewing on your left ventricle.”
“Granted, you saved some lives,” the man conceded.
Slade turned full circle to confront the doctor. “Some lives?”
“All right, you saved all the lives. Now, what I intended to say was that by using standard munitions, you’ve opened a pandora’s box. You scattered toxic biological matter everywhere. The contamination is incalculable.”
“Far less than letting the spiders litter the place with our dead bodies.”
“Where do we go from here?” the man finally asked after an uncomfortable silence.
“You tell me,” he said. “How do we know another wave of these things isn’t coming across the shelf right now? How do we know a storm of phasing normals won’t penetrate the base and infect all of us?”
“We don’t know it,” Stevens replied. “It’s your job to defend us against them.”
“That’s what I did today. It’s your job to explain why it’s suddenly happening so we can put a definite stop to it.”
They stood at an impasse, nose to nose in the middle of a steel corridor.
“The tissue samples we’ve tested from the phasing ticks conclusively show signs of the goo.”
“What else?”
“Why do you think there’s something else?”
“Your eyelid flutters when you’re nervous. Don’t bluff an old poker player. There’s something you’re not telling me.”
Stevens swallowed hard and scratched his ear. Finally, he said, “It’s about the quantum phase. I think the ticks are moving.”
“Moving? Okay, moving how? As in swing-dancing or as in packing up and heading to Idaho? I don’t follow you.”
“Like packing up and heading to Idaho. I think when the ticks aren’t here, they truly aren’t here. The latest data suggests the phase is a form of conveyance. They’re here”—Stevens pointed at a spot in mid-air—“then they phase and they’re over there.”
“Where do they go?” Slade asked.
“That’s the trick—to learn where they disappear to. Is the destination predetermined? Is it random? We’ve seen them move on a massive scale outside.”
