The Spawning

by Tim Curran

  The Callisto Party was something special.

  NASA, who was underwriting a lot of research at the stations, had decided to give the NSF’s Antarctic personnel a prime opportunity: the chance to be the first to peek through the window of interplanetary space at another world. To see what it looked like at the very same moment the scientists and technicians at NASA and Houston and the JPL would be seeing it. Not a delayed and censored feed like the sort that would be given to CNN and the other global news networks. But a live feed. Or as live of a feed as can be hoped for from a world nearly 400 million miles from Earth.

  The Cassini 3 unmanned spacecraft had left Earth some fourteen months previous for a rendezvous with the planet Jupiter. Its purpose was to drop probes onto the Jovian moons Europa and Io, Ganymede and Callisto, all of which were suspected of having warm oceans beneath their icy crust. And tomorrow, the first of those probes would descend and transmit live images back to Earth.

  Its target was Callisto.

  NASA would be feeding the images directly to Armed Forces Antarctic Network-McMurdo as they received them.

  It was going to be a big night.

  The first TV broadcast from another world.

  What better reason to get roaring drunk?

  Coyle peered out of the Galley door, looking around the Community Room. They crew was lounging and chatting, tapping away on laptops and playing cards.

  It was going to be a strange winter and he felt that right to his bones. Mount Hobb. The thing under the tarp. Those weirdies from Colony. And tomorrow night, a live feed from one of the moons of Jupiter. Coyle didn’t know why, but the idea of that scared the shit out of him.

  12

  THAT NIGHT, FRYE SKUNKED him four times running at cribbage and cleaned him out at five-card, taking forty bucks in the process. Frye was good at poker, at cribbage. In games that seemed to depend entirely on the luck of the draw, his draw was invariably the luckiest. But usually Coyle put up a fight. He brought something to the table. But tonight he was distracted and he came away with empty pockets. When he suggested another game, maybe seven-card or Rummy, Frye just shook his head.

  “I’ll own your ass at this rate, Nicky. Now I don’t mind you dropping by and giving me your money and drinking my whiskey, but maybe it’s time you pull your head out of your ass and tell me what’s on your mind. Because there’s something and I know it.”

  “You do, eh?”

  “Sure. You got a size ten bug up your ass and I say we pull it out and squish it. You’re nursing my good booze. Your card-playing sucks. And you won’t let me play any happy music.”

  Coyle just smiled. No, he wasn’t much company tonight. That was true. He couldn’t concentrate on the game. The whiskey didn’t want to go down. And he couldn’t tolerate music. Frye’s musical tastes began with Duane Eddy and ended with Gene Vincent. Nothing wrong with rockabilly, but not tonight.

  “Let’s have it,” Frye said.

  They had spent too many tours down there together, too many summers and too many winters. Sometimes it was like they were married, tuned into the same wavelength. “I don’t know,” Coyle finally said. “I think everything’s getting under my skin this year. But don’t ask me to put a finger on what it is exactly.”

  “Oh, but I am going to ask you that, Nicky.”

  “I knew you would.”

  “And?”

  Coyle just sat there, shaking his head in silence. “I don’t know if I’m losing it, but for some crazy goddamned reason I’m linking together too many things that probably have no connection at all. And that’s making me . . . well, uneasy, I guess. I feel like some nutty old woman seeing prophecy in the tea leaves. You know?”

  “No, not in the least,” Frye said, “but I’m still listening. I figure once you get tired of talking around what’s really bugging you, you’ll come out and say it.”

  Coyle laughed. “You figure that, huh?”

  “I do, Nicky. Because nobody knows you better than me. I love you like a brother but you’re a sonofabitch.”

  “Okay. Let’s cut to the chase.”

  He sighed and looked at the nudie calendar above Frye’s desk. The well-thumbed back issues of Popular Mechanics and Hot Rod magazines beneath it. When Frye was on the Ice, all he did was talk about his cars back home: the ‘69 Plymouth Roadrunner and the ‘68 Dodge Charger he had meticulously restored, the ‘70 GTO that was currently stacked in his garage in pieces. That’s the sort of things he liked to talk about. What he didn’t like to talk about were his two marriages and how Antarctica had cost him both of them and a thirty-year old daughter that wouldn’t even speak to him.

  But for Polies, shattered families and relationships seemed to be the norm rather than the exception. It was hard to hold together something when you were at the bottom of the world ten months of the year.

  Coyle sat there for a moment, like some engine inside had to warm up before he was ready to move. He looked around Frye’s cramped little room, listened to the wind outside that made the walls thump from time to time as they contracted with the cold.

  “All right. First we got that bullshit at Mount Hobb. Then we got that chopper crash. That thing under the tarp. That psycho Dayton. That all strikes me as strange.” He laughed. “I know I’m starting to sound like Locke with his conspiracies, but in the back of my mind I keep knitting all this together and I can’t seem to talk myself out of it.”

  “Maybe there’s a reason for that,” Frye said. “Maybe there’s a very good reason for that.”

  “Which is?”

  “Maybe you’re right. Shit, maybe Locke is, too. I’m as hardheaded as the next guy, Nicky. I’m about as sensitive as a bin of scrap metal, but even I’m getting some funny vibes on this business. Especially after that chopper crash. Now, I don’t know what Horn and Slim saw . . . shit, they’re kids in my book, both green as Kermit’s middle finger . . . but I’m willing to bet it was plenty bad. Slim’s just a punk kid. Jesus, what color’s his hair going to be tomorrow? But Horn has been around enough to know something goddamn odd when he sees it. And I’m willing to bet that what they saw was not a man, not even two of ‘em mangled up together. It was some other kind of thing that I won’t even put into words. Maybe I’m getting too damn old for this business, but that Dayton fellow rubbed me the wrong way. He ain’t right and we both know it. If I didn’t believe Horn and Slim before, after the way that jarhead acted . . . like the Holy Grail was under that tarp and he was sworn by Jesus himself to protect it . . . I do now.”

  Coyle was both relieved and disturbed that Frye and he were on the same page. They were both vets and they both knew right down to their marrow that things were happening this year that were more than a little goddamn peculiar.

  “I just hope nobody goes nuts this year is all,” Frye said.

  “You mean like Danny Boy?”

  “That would be the one.”

  The Safety rep last summer at Clime was Danny McClory, a.k.a. “Danny Boy.” So called because he had cherubic cheeks with more freckles on them than a ten-year old boy running through sun-baked Indiana wheat. Danny Boy came on strong as all Safety reps do at first. He ran all over Clime in his cute little white hardhat, clipboard tucked under his arm, reminding people to wear safety glasses and earplugs and gloves and to tie up their hair around machinery.

  He bugged the hell out of everyone.

  Spent hours watching everyone do their jobs so he could find safer ways of doing them and thereby rationalizing his own existence at the camp when everyone else thought he was pretty much useless.

  He studied the heavy equipment operators working the loaders in the scrapyard and the supply people on the lifts in the warehouse. He nosed around the Galley and labs and equipment shops generally making a plain nuisance of himself. He fined people and handed out written safety tests and OSHA brochures, gave driving tests and stopped people in trucks to see if they had their US driver’s licenses with them. He made the crew watch safety videos like Two Han
ds, Ten Fingers and Shake Hands with Danger in which hapless workers were dismembered by industrial machinery, usually catching their arms in sheet metal presses or their hands in worm gears or augers. He also pasted up safety posters about Polies who ignored safety rules and always used the wrong tool for the wrong job and invariably lost a limb or inhaled some dangerous chemical or fell into an acid vat . . . on that one, the worker in question came out looking like a zombie from a 1950’s horror comic.

  Yeah, Danny Boy was something.

  Then somebody turned him onto crack cocaine and Danny Boy was never the same again. He walked around the compound, dirty and unshaven and painfully thin like Johnny Thunders after a good binge, his eyes glazed over like January windows back home. Danny Boy was flown to McMurdo and put in detox.

  Sometimes the isolation got to people.

  Coyle shook his head. “But it all bugs me. Mount Hobb and that crash and that thing and Dayton. Christ, I’m starting to sound like Locke, but I’m getting paranoid or something. I’m starting to think that Colony Station is a snake nest. That all this is connected. Maybe Locke is right. Maybe there’s something going on.”

  He hated like hell to admit that.

  Locke was a very smart guy, but he was definitely out there. He claimed that the very fact the NSF had deep-field projects running this year was suspicious. They hadn’t allowed such a thing since the winter of the Kharkov Tragedy when Dr. Gates ran a paleontology expedition up in the Dominion Range, south of Clime.

  Field camps could be dangerous in the summer, let alone the winter when the weather was bad and the cold unbelievable and planes and helicopters simply couldn’t rescue you if you got in trouble. Those camps had all the most modern equipment and survival gear, but if things went to hell, you weren’t much better off than the days of Shackleton and Mawson.

  This winter, there were a variety of deep-field projects going. The first was run by a guy named Chambers and was situated in the foothills of the Marshall Mountains at an old derelict British station called Icy Ridge. He and his team were doing experiments for NASA with some kind of high-gain antenna. The second was being run in a series of ice caves in a narrow valley up on the Beardmore Glacier by a Dr. Dryden. The whole thing was funded by the Navy, word had it, but was supposed to be concerned with glaciology. With the military being involved, of course, nobody believed that for a minute. There was also another up on Wolfshead Glacier and yet another in the Mount Kirkpatrick range studying a series of subterranean caves. And if that wasn’t enough, there was also a NOAA atmospherics camp out on the plateau that Clime was in direct support of.

  On the surface, there was no reason to link these expeditions with any of the rest of it, but Coyle was doing exactly that and feeling damn foolish about it.

  “Well, if anything’s going on, Nicky, we’ll start seeing the signs, I suppose.” Frye shrugged. “Then again, maybe we’re both just out of our heads and I’m beginning to think so. This keeps up, I’ll have to join Locke’s UFO group.”

  “I’ll second that.”

  Frye looked contemplative for a moment. “I think if I try real hard, I can dismiss all that horseshit. Put it out of my mind. But I can’t put Kharkov out of my mind and I sure as hell can’t put those . . . whaddyacallem . . . megaliths out of my mind. I’m not stupid. I know that they’re not natural and I know that the ice they melted ‘em out of is too old for people to have built ‘em. I think that’s what I keep thinking about.”

  Coyle kept thinking about them, too. Nobody was saying much about them just yet save the conspiracy nuts on the net. But they were old. Real damned old. Part of a world that no longer existed and built by a race that nobody wanted to think about.

  He took another shot of whiskey, a nice pleasant buzz coming over him. But all the alcohol in the world couldn’t cleanse the knowledge from him that everything from Mount Hobb to the chopper crash and all the rest were pieces of some big puzzle that was slowly coming together.

  “You know what?” he said. “I got the funniest feeling that something big is about to happen and when it does, there won’t be any going back to the way things were before.”

  If Frye thought he was crazy, he didn’t say so. He just drank.

  Coyle could feel it in his guts: something big was coming, only he couldn’t begin to know what shape it would take. Only that when it arrived, it would be revelation of the worst possible sort.

  13

  NOAA FIELD LAB POLARIS

  ATLANTIS ICE DOME,

  POLAR PLATEAU, FEB. 24

  THREE WEEKS INTO IT and already a comfortable, if somewhat tedious, routine had been established.

  Andrea Mack, Captain Starnes, and Professor Borden had their science and like most scientists they found it hard to look beyond the boundaries of their own particular obsessions. Something that Kim Pennycook, as a science writer and web producer, found alternately amusing and disturbing in that it only further reinforced the stereotype of the absent-minded professor. Even out in the cold and the wind, they became distracted and had to be collected when Dr. Bob, their field specialist, got the grub on the table.

  When she mentioned this to Captain Starnes, who was the leader of the expedition and a commissioned officer in the NOAA Corps, he just smiled. “What is absent-minded to you, lady, is simply dedication to us.”

  It was a good crew and Kim figured the winter would be an easy one. Unlike last winter at Palmer Station where there were two distinctive cliques ready to tear out each other’s throats with Kim, somehow, trapped in-between like a tasty bit of red meat.

  In the past six years she had been documenting camp life and scientific endeavor for the NSF as part of an ongoing web presentation called Polar Life. From glaciers to mountains, icecaps to pack ice, she had been there studying penguin nesting and ozone hole shredding, tracking neutrinos and ice sheet slippage.

  Though with her own background in environmental studies and ecology she found the science fascinating, the longer she spent down on the Ice, the more intrigued she became with the dynamics of camp life, the interpersonal relationships, ups and downs of isolation and crowding.

  Her third day at Polaris Lab she had interviewed Dr. Bob who was responsible for maintaining the camp, keeping the researchers warm and fed and comfortable as they plied their science in Earth’s most inhospitable environment.

  When she asked how he liked wintering with scientists, he said, “I like it just fine. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my share. Some can be demanding and egotistical and in the case of one particle physicist I can think of, tyrannical. But for the most part they’re good people. I get along fine with them.”

  “In the summers,” Kim said, “there’s a dividing line between scientists and workers that’s very apparent.”

  “Oh, sure. But you’d get that in a factory or an Army base, anywhere people are crowded together. But in the winter it’s different. A plumber and botanist play chess together. A heavy equipment operator and geochemist shoot darts. It has to be that way when the crews are smaller. You get very tight, cohesive.”

  Her second week she spent mostly with Captain Starnes launching weather balloons in conjunction with the Balloon Inflation Facility at Pole Station and the Atmospheric Research Observatory. Both the BIF and ARO had a detailed schedule of balloon launches and payloads that Starnes had to adhere to strictly.

  “You can use satellites to track ozone depletion but that’s notoriously unreliable because you’re looking through the entire layer,” he told her. “With balloons, you get right in there. I played with balloons when I was a kid and here I am still doing it.”

  The balloons carried radiosondes that measured humidity, wind speed, pressure, temperature etc. and ozonesondes that tracked ozone levels in the stratosphere. The results were sent to the ARO immediately.

  This was Starnes’s thing.

  Professor Borden was a geomorphologist involved in climatic studies. He was taking core samples from the ice sheet. Trapped gases in the glacia
l ice gave his people back at Princeton a detailed archive of ancient climate data.

  Kim spent her second week getting a feel for what he was doing and the past three days she’d been hanging out with Andrea Mack, a planetary sciences grad student from UCLA who studying the mechanics of ice sheets.

  “When I told my mom I was going to spend my summer in Antarctica, she thought I was crazy. She said I’d freeze to death. I told her that rarely happened anymore,” Andrea told Kim. “But she was bothered about me coming. How can you go down there, she said, with what happened with those other poor people? She was talking about Kharkov Station, I think. But that’s mom: she likes her gossip and she’ll believe just about anything.”

  “Then you attach no credence to the supposed events at Kharkov?” Kim asked her.

  “No, none whatsoever. I’m a scientist. I don’t doubt the existence of alien life but the idea that it’s down here in Antarctica and has been for millions of years, that there are extraterrestrial cities under the glaciers older than the Cretaceous . . . well, that’s stretching reality a bit too much.”

  Kim had video of each interview archived that she could edit later for Polar Life. The NSF, of course, would demand that any mention of Kharkov be excised out of respect for the families of the cursed crew. Maybe that was the reason. Maybe it was something else.

  No matter, even without the ghost stories of Kharkov, Kim was convinced that she was going to get some unprecedented footage this winter. The crew was small, insular, inter-dependent, and the relationships would be strong, nearly intimate. She was going to witness things this winter that would be absolutely revelatory.

  She just had that feeling.

  And on this, she was right.

  14

  FEBRUARY 25

  VOICES.

  They said if you listened to the wind long enough you would hear voices on it and maybe even your own name being called and sometimes Kim Pennycook could almost believe that one. And especially on nights like this when the wind screaming across the polar plateau sounded like the voices of the dead howling to be let in.