“You don’t like her much, do you?” asked Jazmin, raising an eyebrow.
“I like her fine.”
“So, why did you send her to the place they’re most likely to be, when you know she was downright terrified of them?”
“I don’t like people griping when there’s a job to do.”
“I’m not griping, I’m just trying to underst-”
“Not you. Claire. No-one likes tarantulas, Jazmin; certainly no-one normal. And we all knew we were going to have to pitch in, yet she was the only one who threw a hissy fit about it. So, if one of them lands on her, and gives her a scare, or she ends up with a mouthful of web and gets grossed out, then that’s a fair punishment as far as I’m concerned.”
Jazmin pried open the lid of the archive box and let out a scream, falling backwards and upending the whole thing. Anna rushed over, helping her up and away.
“What is it? Did you see one?”
“It’s there!” yelled Jazmin, stabbing at the pile of papers with her finger.
Anna looked down and saw the upside down spider. With its legs pulled in, it was roughly the size of a baked potato. “Is it dead?”
“I don’t know! I remember something about how some spiders play dead by lying upside down!”
Anna pulled a pen from her pocket and jabbed the spider. A leg fell off and a dribble of black dust fell from the socket. “It’s dead. Desiccated.”
“Box it up. We can take it straight to the lab.”
“We’ll box it up, but we’ll keep looking. If there’s one, there could be more in here.”
“Fuck, I hope not.”
***
The massive latch to the boiler room clanked, and Betty put her shoulder to it to ease it open. It took two or three good, hard shoves before it let out a squeal and she staggered through into the dark boiler room. Claire followed behind her nervously.
“Jesus, this is horrible.”
Betty pulled her hood down and ran a hand through her cropped hair, scanning the walls with a torch, looking for a light switch. “It’s just neglected. No one ever comes down here. Think about your boiler at home; you probably only check in on that once in a blue moon, or when you think there might be a problem with it.”
“Yeah, I guess. Man, it’s hot in here.”
“Well, yeah, this is where we get our hot water, what were you expecting?”
Claire scanned the darkness with her torch. The damp floor passed between several huge heating tanks, and the beam of light faded long before it hit the other wall.
“How large is this place?”
“It’s pretty big.”
“And we’re hoping to find spiders here?”
“Spiders that might not even be here in the first place, yeah. But hey, it beats real work, we’ve got each other, and I’ve got a couple of joints in my pocket.”
Claire laughed. “You sound like you’re skiving off on a school trip, you know that?”
Betty found the light switch and hit it. The strip lights flickered for a moment, causing Claire to think she was seeing flickers of movement in the shadows, until they finally came on with a sullen yellow glow.
“Bulbs are old. Like I said – nobody really comes down here.”
Claire shivered and looked up and around. “Should we stick together?”
The horror movie fan in Betty was unable to resist the temptation. “No, let’s split up. We can do more damage that way.”
“I knew you were going to say something like that. Okay, I’ll check this central aisle. Where are you going?”
Betty shrugged before gesturing off down to her left. “This way I guess. We’ve not got walkie-talkies, so you’ll have to scream if you find one.”
“No worries there.”
Claire undid her coat in the hot air of the boiler room and trod carefully down the corridor. Her brain was filled constantly with visions of finding the spiders on the floor, tucked under corridors, or dropping into her hair. She physically shivered at the idea that one could be on the back of her coat right now and she’d never know.
Betty had only taken a few steps down the left hand corridor when she came to a sudden halt and whispered, “Holy shit…”
Stretched all around her, spinning up to the rafters and back into the darkness, was a colossal web of whitish grey threads. In places, the webs were so thick that it was like a cheesy ghost train ride she remembered from childhood. Dust and iron oxide flakes had already gathered in patches, and a couple of small pouch like lumps indicated where some of Tempest Outpost’s mice had come to a grisly end.
“This is unreal…” she whispered, scanning around with her torch.
The tarantula squatting in the web above her stretched its forelegs as the beam of light reflected in its eyes. It knew that this creature was far too large to serve as food, but it also knew that there was some other purpose it could serve. Crawling forward, it spat a web from its spinnerets and lowered itself directly above her. The occasional warm air current was not strong enough to throw it off course and it landed softly on Betty’s shoulder.
The padding on her winter coat was too thick for the engineer to notice the tarantula as it crept slowly forward, and she was only able to offer up a slight gasp as its teeth sank into her neck and pumped in a shot of venom.
Betty dropped to her knees and slapped a hand to the wound. The tarantula rolled from her neatly onto the floor and hurriedly scurried up the wall and back into the web.
Ice cold pain lanced from the spider bite for a moment, and it took Betty a second or two to get her breath back. Standing, she gathered her torch from the floor where she had dropped it, and went in search of Claire.
Claire had made it past a couple of the boiler tanks, still treading very carefully, when Betty caught up with her. “Oh, hey. You find anything?”
“Nah,” said Betty. “There’s nothing here. No sign of them.”
“You’re sure? We haven’t checked very far.”
Betty shrugged it off. “Look, neither of us want to be here. Let’s just pretend we searched. Like Cameron said, they’ll all be dead in a day or two anyway.”
“You’re sure?”
Betty smiled. “Of course, I’m sure. Look let’s just have a smoke and say we worked hard.”
“You’re a bad influence on me, Betty Harper.”
“I’m a bad influence on everybody.”
TEN
Betty took Claire back to her rooms, and lit up the joint from her pocket. “You really pulled the shittiest, shortest straw on this run, huh?”
“It’s not so bad.”
“Come on, I know girls like you. You like to work in a shiny glass office wearing nice skirt suits and sexy heels. You don’t get into a job like yours so you can crawl around the boiler room of an oil rig in the South Pole. What’d you do? Royally piss off someone in the office?”
Claire laughed and took the offered joint. “No, actually I volunteered. I hadn’t seen Anna in a long time and, well, I thought the idea of six weeks away from the office sounded like fun. Plus, how many people get a chance to go to the South Pole?”
Betty put some music on the stereo – some ambient, progressive thing – and threw herself down into a bean bag on the floor. “Yeah, I guess that’s true. Your boyfriend not mind that he’s got a month and half with no…you know?”
“Ha! I’m sure he’ll find some way of entertaining himself. Anna asked the same thing, and I said football, Xbox and beer.”
“That’s pretty much how we cope out here. Well, porn, weed and PlayStation for me, but the overall vibe is the same.”
Betty’s eyes flickered to the tarantula climbing up the wall behind Claire, and said nothing. Claire took another deep drag and passed the joint back to her, slumping back against the wall. “I am so tired, Betty. The jet lag and the flight and the spiders and…ugh. I just want to sleep for days.”
The tarantula slowly began crawling along toward her. Betty shrugged. “Well, why don’t you
have a sleep here? We’ve got a couple of hours – at least – before we need to go back and report on everything we found.”
“You sure you don’t mind?”
“Sure. I promise I won’t feel you up or anything.”
Claire giggled, closing her eyes. “That’s a shame.”
The music and the weed and the warmth conspired together to make a virtual blanket, and she lay her head back against the wall, her brain already fogging with the aching comfort on the borders of sleep. She tried to concentrate on the music, and it gradually grew muffled as her brain slowly began to shut down and rest.
She was mostly asleep when she felt Betty’s fingers on her shoulder. Maybe she had thought Claire had been joking when she said it was a shame she wasn’t going to feel her up. She gently tilted her head to one side to expose more of her neck, and she felt the small fingertips crawl softly across her skin. The corner of her mouth involuntarily tugged in a smile and the hairs on her arm rose. She was just about to say something – though she had no idea what – when a terrible pain shot through her neck, spasming up into her lower jaw and ear, and down to her shoulder. The pain felt ice cold, as though she had trapped a nerve while buried in snow. She let out a strangled cry and came fully awake in time to see the spider that had bitten her run up the wall and squat in the corner of the ceiling.
She slapped her hand to her neck and saw that her palm came away bloody. “Fuck! Betty, what the fuck!”
She looked over at Betty and felt a panic attack coming on. Betty was sitting there, impassive, as if waiting for something to happen. What? Had Betty known the spider was there all the time? Had she even…?
Claire relaxed back into the beanbag and closed her eyes. The music and the weed and the warmth conspired together to make a virtual blanket, and she lay her head back against the wall, her brain already fogging with the aching comfort on the borders of sleep. She tried to concentrate on the music, and it gradually grew muffled as her brain slowly began to shut down and rest.
The tarantula waited for a moment, then crawled down the wall, and back into Betty’s hoodie pocket, savouring the warmth.
***
The crew of Tempest Outpost gathered around one of the tables in the canteen, which seemed to have been adopted as a meeting room. Captain Anna rubbed her eyes wearily and groaned raspily in her throat. “So, Jazmin and I managed to find one of these chitinous bastards dead in an archive box.”
Jazmin placed a Tupperware containing the desiccated spider on the table. Those who hadn’t yet seen the spiders leaned forward eagerly.
“It’s weird,” said Roger. “Tarantulas are normally hairy. This dude is totally hairless. It makes him look less like a tarantula and just like a…like a giant spider.”
Kurt nodded. “Agreed. If it’s okay with you, Captain, I’d like to take this dead one for dissection.”
“Fine by me. Just make sure it’s dead – and even if it is, make sure it can’t come back to life,” said Anna, dismissively.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“So, no-one saw anything? No-one saw so much as a web?”
Everyone around the table muttered a negative or shook their heads.
“I’m open to suggestions.”
Cameron raised his hand, and Anna nodded for him to go ahead. “I’d like to fire up the Prospero again, Captain. We’ve found one of these things dead already, which reinforces my faith in my original proposition that these things will have a very short life span. The other three are either dead or dying, likely due to the difference in climate between the Pre-Hadean era of the planet and a drilling rig in the South Pole.”
“Right? Who knew?”
“However, we don’t know what’s happening at the bottom of the ocean below us. For all we know there could be more of these – or other similar creatures – that are dying, dissolving, decomposing…”
Betty spoke up. “That sounds like a very good idea to me. We should definitely bring up some more samples.”
Claire nodded along. “Yeah. I mean, if these things aren’t dead and have set up a nest somewhere, then we should have some we can study and learn from. We need more of them up here.”
Captain Anna raised an eyebrow. “You’ve changed your tune. You’ve hated having these things on board since they arrived.”
Claire shrugged. “I want to be forewarned. If we have more onboard, Cam, Kurt, Roger and Jazmin can analyse the things. We can at least work out if they’re venomous or not. I mean…if they’re not venomous I’ll sleep easier, won’t you?”
Betty nodded. “And they could all just…be dying down there, like Cameron said. If we have discovered a new species, don’t we have a duty of care to it? We can’t just smash up where they were hibernating and then leave them to a cold, black death.”
Anna rubbed her eyes tiredly. “I don’t really give a fuck about them, to be honest.”
“Icecap Industries, will,” said Claire.
“Excuse me?”
“We’ve found a wholly new species here. If you don’t think Icecap Industries will attach a significant dollar value to that discovery, then you’re just plain being naive. And I’m the one who’s here to investigate how this rig is being run.”
Anna stared daggers at Claire. “I see. So, what you’re saying is that if I don’t authorise another drilling, you’re going to report back to Icecap that I fucked Tempest’s reason to be here?”
“I’m saying I’ll be doing my job. You should be doing yours.”
The atmosphere in the room had gone decidedly cold. After a couple of seconds, Jazmin broke the silence. “Look, we’re all really tired and stressed over this whole deal. Sure, I can understand what Claire’s saying but…Claire, what if Anna authorises the drilling and it turns out that these things are venomous and alive and running around, possibly breeding. The Captain would be in even more trouble with Icecap for letting one of their rigs become basically one big spider’s web. I’m with her – on the side of caution – here.”
Anna maintained her glare on Claire. “I’ll sleep on it, and make a decision in the morning. The ‘fossils’ didn’t hatch until they warmed up, so I don’t think they’re in any danger down there, do you? It’s late, we’re all tired, and we can tackle this in the morning. Everyone’s dismissed. If anyone wants to help me blow off some stress, I’ll be at the Street Fighter II machine with a box of Twinkies.”
Cameron stood up. “I’m game.”
The rest of the crew squeaked their chairs back from the table, and headed off in separate directions. The spider in Betty’s pocket huddled its legs under its belly, and bided its time.
ELEVEN
Kurt didn’t head back to his rooms. He went to the lab to continue typing up some notes on the fossils and spiders they had found. The strip lighting flickered into life and he booted up the computer, dropping wearily into the seat. The coffee he’d left on the desk before the meeting was cold, but he couldn’t find the energy to make another cup, instead grabbing a can of Pepsi Max from the drawer of his desk. He managed to just miss the tarantula clinging to the underside of his desk as it scurried closer.
His report was a little scattered, and – in places – rather ambiguous. Truth be told, the discovery of the spiders had rattled him rather a lot. He understood the significance of their discovery, and in a philosophical sense, it felt very much as though the rug had been pulled from under him. Every single thing he had learned about geology and the evolution of the entire planet could be thrown into disarray if this was shown to be correct.
The meeting itself had rattled him, too. He didn’t want to be in a position where he would be forced to take a side in the debate. He could see the benefits of firing the Prospero a second time, but he also understood the need for caution. Of course, if a second drilling did bring up more geode like objects, they’d all be better prepared to deal with them. Lock and seal them in vivaria straight away. Were there vivaria on board? Possibly. If not they’d improvise and demand that Ic
ecap send some straight away, and screw the expense.
The species we have discovered I have named Theraphosidae Caliban, although aboard Tempest Outpost, they have already earned the common names “Ice Spiders” and “The Tarantulas”. They certainly appear to be tarantulas, although due to their condition (ie. Fossilised) at the time of discovery, it was not possible to conduct a full examination to confirm this.
One key difference was noticeable, however, which was the absence of any hairs of the type normally associated with your typical tarantula. Many tarantulas are capable of firing urticating hairs from their abdomen as a defensive weapon. The absence of such hairs on the Ice Spiders have three possible explanations – firstly, that the hair is typically present, but was lost during the hibernation/fossilisation process. Secondly, that these are not true tarantulas, but rather large spiders, or something else entirely. Thirdly, and possibly most terrifyingly, that these creatures have no predators in their natural habitat, and as such have no need for any kind of defensive weapon.
Kurt let out a strangled cry as a white lance of pain shot from his knee cap up his thigh and radiated down his calf. His leg spasmed involuntarily, and he kicked out backwards, falling off his chair. His eyes fell instantly to the tarantula squatting under the desk, and he knew instantly that he had been bitten by the monstrous thing. He scrambled to his feet, desperate to find something to capture or kill the beast with.
Snatching up a plastic beaker, he turned back to the computer and tried to remember what it was that he had been doing. He had needed the beaker for something, but it eluded him now. He set the beaker next to his cold coffee, and righted his chair. Sitting back at the computer, he deleted the last five pages of his write up on the Ice Spiders, saved it, and rubbed his eyes wearily.
***
Tempest Outpost Page 5
