The Spawning

by Tim Curran

  “What the fuck?” Frye said, looking around with wide eyes like he’d just woken up in the belly of a haunted house.

  That weird vibration did not lessen, it increased.

  There was a pounding like fists coming from everywhere, the air crackling like some immense static charge was breaking loose.

  Gwen made it like two steps, clutched her head in her hands and was driven right down to her knees.

  The electrical discharge in the air made Coyle’s skin crawl, made his belly flop, filled him with a manic hysteria that made him want to scream and cry and vomit out his insides.

  And then the worst thing of all: that insane, high piping.

  It came from everywhere, rising into a feverish pitch like a thousand pan flutes blaring out, strident and cutting, amping up into a solid and wavering wall of shrilling noise. Coyle felt his vision blur as he hit the floor. Felt tears run from his eyes and blood trickle from his nose. His nerves were jangling and quivering.

  And then he saw them.

  As a thrumming, scraping agony that was far beyond a headache ripped open in his head, he saw through eyes squeezed into slits what drifted out of the walls. Old Ones. Not living ones, but spectral representations, ghosts, wraiths that came boiling out of the walls in oozing, electrified trails of ectoplasm. They were everywhere, spreading their vast wings and screeching and piping and chittering. And all of them lit white with a pulsing glow like immense, ghostly night-moths, fluttering and flying, moving right through the walls like shades.

  They’ll drain our minds. They’ll drain them dry.

  But through the agony and that storm of phenomena, he knew. Knew what he was not supposed to know.

  Behind that door . . . you are not supposed to go behind that door.

  He crawled forward with his SPAS-12 as waves of force punched into him, driving him backward, compressing him, squeezing the air out of his lungs. It felt like his eyes would blow from their sockets, that his skull would come flying apart at any moment.

  The door.

  He fought his way to it, the room a spinning tempest of wind and cold and heat and undead things. He blew the door open with the SPAS-12 and saw–

  An Old One.

  It was no ghost. Not living, just a carcass sitting down there in the center of a pit scooped from the ice.

  Dead.

  Long dead. Just a mummy sheathed in ice, its limbs withered and eyestalks atrophied, wings threadbare and folded up like ratty umbrellas. The wind and force and psychic energy was coming from it, though, being channeled through it.

  The battery.

  It was the battery.

  Coyle got the barrel of the assault shotgun up and pumped the trigger.

  The Old One’s mummy nearly shattered on impact it was so ancient. Its head fell apart, its torso cleaved out with cracks and fell into itself like a rotten gourd. And right away . . . the phenomena died away.

  Then Frye was helping him to his feet.

  “You okay?” Gwen said, wiping blood from her nose.

  “I’ll live.”

  “Fucking ghosts,” Frye said. “What next?”

  Down there in the pit, sharpened stakes had been driven into the ice. One last booby trap if you made it this far.

  Coyle wondered how long the carcass had been there. Maybe since before the station had closed. Who could say? But it had probably been here all winter, dead maybe, but maybe not truly dead, a sort of a receiver or amplifier to toy with the crew.

  A battery. A psychic battery.

  Regardless, it wasn’t as dead as it should have been. Coyle could feel that. For there was a magnetism to its remains. He could feel a headache thrumming in the back of his skull, opening up and trying to swallow him.

  He turned away.

  Frye lit his flare, ignited one of the gas bombs and tossed it at the thing. It shattered on the ice, jellied gasoline spraying over the mummy and sticking to it, burning bright and hot. He lit his two remaining bombs and threw them into the pit which was engulfed in flame.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Coyle said.

  52

  THEY HAD SIGHTED POLAR Clime when Frye brought the Sno-Cat to a stop and just sat there, peering through the windshield.

  “What?” Gwen said. “What now?”

  But he stepped out of the cab wordlessly, standing on the treads and they joined him out there in the cold and wind. They did not feel either. For they were looking up into the sky which was clear and speckled by stars. Looking at something which filled each of them with a dread they could not adequately put into words.

  “Look at them,” Frye said. “Jesus, look at them . . .”

  The stars were momentarily blotted out by a buzzing swarm of oblong bodies that flew like witches through the sky. Old Ones. And these were very much alive. They passed above the ‘Cat and over the dome of Clime like a flock of migratory night-birds, the sound of them like a droning cloud of hornets abandoning their nest in a hollow tree.

  There were so many they could not be counted.

  “They’re not hiding anymore,” Gwen said. “They’re showing themselves now.”

  Coyle watched them disappear in the glacial blackness above Antarctica. They had always been here. And always would be until the time came when they took to the sky to take possession of the world they had seeded with life and intelligence. And that time was getting closer by the day.

  “Let’s get back to camp,” he said. “It’s going to be starting soon now.”

  And they didn’t need to ask him what he was talking about.

  Because they knew.

  The harvesting of the human race . . .

  EPILOGUE

  CONTACT

  SETI—GREEN BANK,

  WEST VIRGINIA

  MARCH 28

  THIS WAS THE DAY.

  It had to come sooner or later. Everyone at SETI had firmly believed this. According to the Drake Equation, there were potentially thousands of planets out there with civilizations technologically-comparable to that of Earth and possibly hundreds far in advance of that. Sooner or later, one of them was going to grab a radio signal or a light emission and drop us a line.

  And now it had happened.

  But the truly unusual thing was that the signal was not coming from some extrasolar world. It was not originating from Tau Ceti or Epsilon Eridani or some other incredibly distant place.

  It was coming from relatively nearby.

  Callisto. Jupiter’s moon.

  There had been a lot of nonsense talked about Callisto ever since the Cassini 3 spacecraft dropped its probe there. Lots of buzz on the internet. Secret messages supposedly leaking out of Antarctica and even NASA itself. NASA, of course, was denying it all. And now this. Now this.

  This is what Sadler did not like. This is what was making him suspicious.

  Sadler was an astrophysicist and this should have been his dream, especially for a guy like him that had been involved in the search for ETI, ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, for the past twenty years. He’d been with SETI during its heyday as a government project with a fat budget and during the NSF-funded Targeted Search and, yes, he’d been there when congress pulled the plug on it back in the ‘90’s. SETI had survived that and become a private institution that thrived on heavy corporate and private donations.

  So Sadler should have been ecstatic, and part of him was, but most of him was just concerned.

  For the past six hours, the SETI network—both the ALA, the Allen Telescope Array, and Optical SETI—had been receiving signals from Callisto. Dream signals, really. High definition pulses directed at the Earth in the form of both high-amplitude microwave and infrared waves. The beauty of this was that conventional radio waves could also be produced by quasars and pulsars and even black holes. Using infrared in addition to microwaves left absolutely no doubt that the signals were artificial. They were being sent by an unknown intelligence and apparently by a transmitter of exceptional strength.

  Sadler w
as watching the hive of activity that the control room had become.

  People were happy. They were shaking hands and hugging, talking openly and boldly about ETI as they hadn’t in years. They were certain that SETI would soon be swamped with federal funds again. That congress would prioritize what it was they were doing and the NSF would be handing out blank checks. Sadler should have been celebrating, too, but he wasn’t, and he honestly wasn’t sure why.

  What the hell is wrong with you? he thought as he sat there before a bank of computer screens that were hooked to the billion-channel analyzer. Your whole life, everything you’ve been doing all these years, has been geared to this moment. You’ve ate, drank, and slept ETI. You’ve argued with nay-sayers and nearly come to blows with other close-minded theorists who glumly practiced their flat-earth science. This is vindication. You were not just some hard-headed, happily-deluded egghead with too many sci-fi paperbacks on the old bookshelf. You were right. Just as you always knew, you were RIGHT.

  Today is the day you’ve dreamed and fantasized about.

  Can’t you let out a cheer? A little one even?

  But he couldn’t. Because there was something damnably wrong about all this and he felt that right to his core. He did not doubt that the signal was extraterrestrial. He just saw trouble with it, like it was not the greatest news in the history of the race but the worst thing imaginable. He did not like it. Did not like the idea that there was some advanced civilization apparently based off of Callisto that had been monitoring us all these years and now decided to say howdy, how ya’ll doing on that blue world out there?

  There was something disturbing about this.

  He had the craziest and most irrational feeling that a new chapter had been opened and by virtue of its revelations, there could never, ever be any going back to the old one. This would blot it out entirely.

  A hand clapped his shoulder and he saw Frank Clark standing there. Good old Frank. How many bottles had they killed discussing ETI and life on other worlds, divergent streams of evolution and technological and social development? Good God.

  “The intensity is increasing,” Clark said, toying with his scraggly gray beard as he did whenever he was nervous or on the verge of big things. “But I don’t suppose that cheers you up any, does it, old hoss?”

  Sadler tried to smile, but it just wouldn’t come. “I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me, Frank. I should be jumping for joy, but–”

  “But you’ve got a bad feeling?”

  “Yeah.”

  Clark nodded. “You’re not alone, my friend. Look at this old face? Does it look happy? Does it look overjoyed? Well, it’s not. I have the same feeling as you have.” He laughed. “I feel like Oppenheimer . . . like we’ve just exploded the bomb.”

  “Maybe we’re getting too old.”

  Clark looked around. “It’s not just us, Carl. This whole thing has the young and the old by the collective balls. Lookit this place, will you? It’s goddamn swarming. We were a handful yesterday and now we’ve got visiting scientists and diplomats. All the types that laughed at us last week. And what’s worse is that this place is crawling with spooks. We got the NSA and the DIA and probably the CIA here, too. They claim they’ve only sent their best and brightest cryptographers, but I got an ugly feeling that our old girl, Little Miss SETI, is about to be absorbed by a larger entity with a lot of abbreviations in its title.”

  Sadler didn’t like that part of it, either, but what could you do?

  This whole thing had become political as well as scientific now and the military-industrial-intelligence machine had to get its particularly dirty, worn fingers in said pie.

  SETI had picked up the microwave signals first.

  They were the best equipped to do so. It was called the Omni-Directional Sky Survey Project. Its aim had been to canvas the sky in not just a wide-range of radio frequencies, but also throughout the optical spectrum. So SETI grabbed it first with the ATA, but it wasn’t long before their optical observatories at Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbus were in on the act. Pretty soon, Arecibo was in on it followed by the VLA radiotelescope system—Very Large Array—and dozens of others from England to Australia to the far reaches of the former Soviet Union. And the signals kept coming and getting stronger and stronger.

  And everyone wanted to know what they were saying.

  Thing was, they didn’t seem to be saying a thing. What they had were high-frequency pulses, regular and directed, in the electromagnetic spectrum and they seemed to be shielded and encrypted. All the cryptographic muscle of the United States and its numerous allies were unable to break the code, if code it indeed was. The best they’d been able to do was digitally represent the signals in prime numbers. But these were terribly random and did not seem to repeat at any identifiable interlude.

  So was it a message . . . or was it something else entirely?

  Clark sighed. “I got a bad feeling in my gut, Carl, and so do you and you know what? I think they do, too. All of them.”

  Sadler was interested now.

  “Everyone is nervous as hell, Carl. They’re ready to have kittens. They laugh and they joke and they hoot and holler . . . but none of it touches their eyes. Their eyes are scared. I mean, they’re scared. All the festive bullshit and ass-slapping and congratulating are fictions. Fictions. I can see it in their eyes. They’re acting all happy-go-lucky because they know it’s how they’re supposed to act. They’re playing the part. All of them. But inside?”

  “Inside their guts are twisted up?”

  “You got it. They feel like they’re waiting for the phone to ring, you know? Waiting for the doctor to call and tell them whether that mass on their brains is benign or malignant.” He swallowed a couple times like he had no spit in his mouth. “And you want my opinion, old buddy? It’s going to be malignant.”

  “Least it’s not just me,” Sadler said.

  But he did not feel better. He could not get past the sense that this was not only going to change human culture, but warp it into something intrinsically diabolic. And there was no more common sense behind that anymore then there was about an astrophysicist with a Ph.D. from Cornell turning down one big-money radioastronomy position after another so he could follow his gut sense and hunt for bug-eyed monsters in outer space. He had done it because he felt that there was intelligence out there. No, he knew it. Just as he knew that there was something incalculably pestilent in these signals, something parasitic that would suck the blood out of the race drop by awful drop.

  Clark cleared his throat. “Lucy . . . Lucy asked me to invite you and Karen for dinner Friday, Carl. She’s making one of those terrible French seafood concoctions from her Juliet Child book. I told her I’d ask you, but if I were you I’d decline. She made me some kind of soup the other night and it tasted like rancid crayfish in salty, tepid water. Christ, it was unholy. Feel free to decline.”

  “We’ll be there.”

  But the disturbing thing was that he didn’t think they would be. That things like dinner parties and backyard barbecues were about to become things of the past, relics of a way of life that no longer existed. Because by Friday, the world was going to be a much different place and there wasn’t a goddamn thing that he or anyone else in that massive room of cutting-edge technology could do about it.

  “Something’s happening, Carl.”

  And something was.

  The natives were getting restless. Real restless. Everyone had gathered in little groups before the banks of computers that the cryptographers used, which were hooked up to the NSA and DIA’s massive cryptological networks.

  “Maybe . . . maybe they’ve decrypted the message,” Clark said.

  One of the crypt techs grabbing a cup of coffee overheard him and shook her head. “For something to be decrypted it must be encrypted. And I’m not sure this is encrypted at all. I don’t think this is a message. Unless, well, unless it’s meant to be subliminal somehow.”

  “What’s going on?” Sadler
asked her.

  She did not look at him, did not take her eyes off the overhead screen that digitally encoded the electromagnetic pulses, turned them into oscillating waves that everyone could see. “It may just be a stream of energy directed at us.”

  Sadler felt a chill run up his spine. “To what end?”

  She just shrugged and he knew it was pointless to grill her. She would not speculate or hypothesize wildly. It was not in her makeup. She was NSA and the cryptology techs of the National Security Agency knew how to keep their mouths shut.

  “Look,” she said. “Do you see it? The wavelengths are changing. They’re erratic, but intensifying. It’s very . . . curious.”

  And Sadler figured it was that, all right.

  Something was about to happen and he could almost feel it building in the air of the institute like static electricity. Growing, powering up, potential energy about to go kinetic. And everyone seemed to be aware of it. They were not speaking. They were not doing anything but staring at the screen, transfixed by those jumping digitalized displays.

  One of the techs turned up the audio so that everyone could hear what the radiotelescopes were hearing. Earlier it had been sort of a rumbling, mindless static like that you heard coming from a radio that could not lock onto a channel. But this was different. It, too, had changed. Not meaningless static now, but a rising and falling far-off drone as heard through a windstorm. And something else, a sound almost like respiration just beneath it. As if something out there was breathing and they were hearing the signature of that across the deadness of almost 400,000,000 miles of space.

  The droning was getting louder now.

  It was something insistent.

  Something that would not be denied. Something that had been broadcast not to be deciphered or even understood really, but simply listened to.