by Greig Beck
“Bears don’t have opposable thumbs. In fact, trapeziometacarpal articulation is primarily confined to higher-order creatures like primates and us.” Anne looked up momentarily, but her vision seemed turned inwards. “Us,” she repeated softly.
Russell rested his forearms on his knees as he crouched. “I would have said simian morphology for sure, but it seems to have a type of scaling, like a reptile.” He tapped it with the knife. “Weird, maybe not scales, more like a hard shell like the chitin you see on crustaceans. What do you think, Anne?”
The woman just stared down at the thing.
Russell leaned closer. “Anne?”
“I don’t know.” She looked up, and her face was bleached white behind her visor. “I don’t know.”
Alex stared at the women, confused. He felt she was hiding something. “Anything you can tell us will help, Anne.”
“He’s right. Come on, this is more your field,” Russell said. “Up close, it does look more like crustacean segments.” He angled his head. “But I can see there are bones inside as well as the endoskeletal protection.” He sat back. “This must be one tough sonofabitch.” He turned to raise his eyebrows at her. “Anne, c’mon, tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I, I just don’t know anymore,” she stuttered and looked distracted.
“Then just guess,” Russell pressed.
She grimaced behind her visor. “Uh, obviously some sort of resident mutated organism of unknown definition.”
Casey’s lips pulled back in disgust. “Mutated organisms, yeah, Morgs for short. Perfect.”
“Works for me,” Dunsen added.
“But resident?” Scott McIntyre scoffed. “There’s nothing like these creatures, resident or otherwise, anywhere that I know of.”
“He’s right.” Russell looked skeptically at Anne.
“We don’t know that.” The female NASA agent stood quickly and walked away a few paces.
“Jesus,” Scott said, watching her.
“Hidden all the way up here in the mountains, it could be like a Yeti thing,” Dunsen said.
“A Yeti?” Monroe snorted.
“I’m just thinking out loud here, okay?” Dunsen snarled back.
“Yep, I’ve seen one – about six-four and speaks with an Aussie accent.” Casey reached out to punch Dunsen’s shoulder with the back of her hand. “Just messin’ with ya, big guy.”
Alex stared at it. “I also don’t buy that these things are resident. This creature looked like it had evolved to adapt to this type of environment – it could see in the mist, breathed the gases, moved fast in this damn slippery mud, and was strong as hell.”
“This thing, this Morg, looks more hatched than born.” Sam looked down at the talon. “If they can be hurt, they can be killed. We take ’em down.”
“Always my plan,” Casey said.
“No, we don’t know they meant to kill us.” Anne spun back at them. “For all we know, they think we’re attacking them.”
Alex saw the woman’s eyes go wide, showing real fear, but for what and who?
“Whatever,” Casey said. “They’re fucking dead.”
“They coordinated their attack on us, even though we outnumbered them,” Alex said. “Out there, they tried to encircle me. They’re not dumb animals – we can’t afford to underestimate them again.”
“Jesus, Alex,” Morag said. She turned back to the claw, disgust and fear twisting her features. “I’ve reported on some strange stuff, but I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”
“No one has. That thing isn’t indigenous … and I mean earthly indigenous.” Sam straightened, gripping his gun even tighter.
“Wait, what?” Calvin Renner scoffed. “You mean that thing might have come down in the fucking space shuttle?” He gave Morag a hard look. “Jesus Mags, we’re out of our depth here. We need to call this off, and just get the fuck out of here.”
“Settle down. It didn’t come down in the shuttle. It’s probably like Monroe said, some sort of deformed …” Morag shrugged. “I don’t know what.”
Casey nudged it with her boot. The claws clacked together. “This high up, and so remote; maybe Dundee is right … for once.”
Dunsen snorted. She glared at him for a moment before turning at Alex. “Remember those things up at Black Mountain?”
“I remember.” Alex shook his head. “But I don’t think that’s what it was.”
“There’s something else that’s weird.” Russell used his probe to turn it over. The huge clawed fingers curled, and he pressed one out flat. “I think this thing has fingerprints.”
“What?” Anne immediately pulled a small smart phone from her pocket and photographed the claw tips.
“Seriously?” Renner pointed. “What are you going to do, see if it’s got any outstanding warrants when you get home?” He looked on the verge of panic.
Morag shrugged. “Take your pussy hat off and put your news one back on, Calvin. This thing is the find of a century.” She looked at Alex. “Can we take it with us?”
Alex looked back down at it for the moment. “No. No excess weight. Also, these things are meat eaters.”
“How do you know that?” Anne demanded.
“I just … know it,” Alex responded, still staring at the claw. He had seen the jaws and teeth; they were used for ripping and tearing flesh. And he had felt the hunger coming off the things in waves – they wanted him for the meat on his bones, he could sense it.
He straightened. “I don’t want anything catching the scent of that piece of bleeding meat and come looking for it.” He turned again out at the mist. “Speed is the key … now we know there’s more than just Russians out there.”
Anita Erikson nudged Max Dunsen. “Bleeding meat, that’d be you.”
“Yeah, and I’m all beef.” He winked at her.
“Knight?” Sam asked.
Alex turned back to the ominous fog. “Yeah, we need to track and find him.”
“How?” Russell Burrows asked. “You said yourself, there’s no trail.”
Alex kept his back turned.
Anne walked closer. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Captain, but we should leave these things alone. You know our priority is the downed Orlando shuttle. It’s vitally important now.”
“She’s right.” Scott McIntyre shrugged. “You and your men knew the risks, and we can’t afford diversions. Leave him; time is critical.”
Faster than Morag could even comprehend, Alex Hunter was in front of the man, his hand around his throat and lifting. McIntyre was not a small man, but his feet left the ground, and amazingly the HAWC leader didn’t even seem to be straining.
The things were meat eaters, and they had taken his HAWC. And then this guy wanted to cut him loose in a blink. Alex pulled McIntyre real close, visor-to-visor, so close McIntyre would be able to see every spot, line and scar on the HAWC leader’s face.
Alex teeth were grit. “And if it was you snatched by one of those creatures?” Alex pointed the man’s face toward the huge claw. “Would you want us to leave you alone with that?”
“No.” McIntyre’s voice was little more than a squeak.
Alex let him go, dropping him to the slime, and turned away. “Form up.”
The HAWCs fell in around him, and Morag noticed that the civilians crowded in closer; even Scott McIntyre.
Alex’s head turned, looking along his team. “We find our HAWC.”
“HUA!”
He raised a clenched fist. “And we show them who the real killers are.”
“HUA!”
CHAPTER 20
NASA Astrobiology Laboratory, Greenbelt, Maryland
Chief science officer Jim Teacher read the plaque on the wall as he waited for his delivery.
NASA Astrobiology; dedicated to the study of organic compounds derived from stardust and future sample return missions, meteorites, lab simulations of Mars, interstellar, proto-planetary travel.
Quite a mouthful, but it made
him beam with pride. The bit about stardust always got him right in the heart muscle. It conjured up images of shooting stars, sparkling magic dust, and kids sitting cross-legged in wide-eyed wonder.
The phone buzzed, and he snatched it to his ear, grinning as he heard the news.
“Excellent. Take it directly to lab-45, we’re all set.” He watched on the monitor as the helicopter touched down and his technicians raced to meet it.
He replaced the phone. “Aren’t we, Harry?” Jim looked toward his ever-morose colleague, Harry McManus, who was standing beside him also watching the monitor.
“Sure, ready as we’ll ever be … with what we’ve got.”
“Yeah, well, we’d all like more funding, Harry.” Jim sighed. “But we aren’t going to get it, are we? And with a downed shuttle, it’s going to be even tighter to get budget approval next year.”
Harry groaned, grumbled to himself and folded his arms, his eyes still on the monitor as technicians took the sealed container from the helicopter pilot. “Strange business.” Jim turned. “But was it there under the ice, or did it come down in the shuttle?” He turned back to the screen. “Or, is it finally our stardust?”
Harry shrugged. “According to the Orlando’s mission manifest, there were plenty of plant and animal specimens onboard.”
“Blasted by radiation, yeah maybe,” Jim stood. “We’ll do this one by the numbers, right?”
“Always do,” Harry mumbled.
* * *
Harry McManus cursed the primitive conditions that he and fellow astro-biology scientist Sarah Mantudo had to work in as he perspired into his heavy polyurethane suit. He shifted and rubbed an arm against his side, trying to wipe away a tickling river of sweat running down to further soak his underwear.
The private sector had so much more money, he cursed, and therefore top of the line facilities, staff, and rates of pay he could only dream about. Government agencies had to fight for every scrap. And Jim was right, a multi-billion-dollar shuttle orbiter going down didn’t exactly scream money well spent.
He could only grimace and put up with his slicked hair and hot, red face behind his splatter mask and bio-filter. He snorted; they didn’t even have full HAZMATS or negative-air-pressure labs. They sort of faked it and usually that was enough. But today, he didn’t think it was, and that made him nervous as hell.
He blinked and tried to focus on his work. Initial analysis showed the Orlando sample contained two things: the first was the greenish-brown blob of biological matter. The second thing was some of the gases that had collected in the mountain-crater basin.
The spectroscopic analysis hadn’t been conclusive, answering a few questions, but raising dozens more.
Harry read the chart again and shook his head as he looked at the elemental breakdown of the atmospheric gas. The thing was, today’s atmosphere contained approximately seventy-eight percent nitrogen, twenty-one percent oxygen, one percent argon, and 0.4 percent carbon dioxide, plus small amounts of other gases and water vapor, depending where you were on the planet.
But the gases from the Orlando sample were extremely high in methane, carbon dioxide and thirty-two percent oxygen – eleven percent higher than in the current global atmosphere. This stuff was thick and heavy, the greenhouse gas from hell, and was one possible reason for why the gases were creating a sort of heavy environmental bubble over the Alaskan mountaintop.
But he knew there was a precedent for this type of atmospheric structure. Harry let his mind wander – hundreds of millions of years ago the sun was only about seventy percent as bright as it is today. Earth should have frozen over, but it didn’t because heavy gases in the atmosphere trapped enough of the sun’s heat to keep it warm.
And he also had a suspect. Harry looked at the pictures the scanning microscope had taken moments before. He had also run a biological filtration over the mixture, and the results both intrigued and alarmed him – there were significant amounts of a free-floating spores, sub-microscopic, and some little bigger than a virus. They would have easily been missed if he hadn’t run them through the micron filters.
He enlarged one of them, looking closely at the spiky ball with a whip-like tail. There were also small holes all over the spore that seemed to quiver, or vibrate, as if … he frowned, looking across to the collected matter in the filter.
Harry grabbed a small microphone and set it up over the mass of spores, and recorded for a few minutes before transferring it to the computer. He ran it back, and his screen showed the vibrations as a constant sound, so he turned it up. There it was. A sort of whine, like wind whistling in through window cracks of an old house.
There were plenty of precedents – after all, Urnula Craterium was a species of mushroom that hissed as it released its spores. But this had more of a musical note texture. Harry chuckled softly. Maybe these guys are all singing to us. Or screaming …
That’s enough of that, he thought
He went back to his scope, peering down at the microscopic entities. They were similar to the bluish-green microscopic organisms called cyanobacteria that lived in Earth’s oceans. They absorbed carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight via a process of photosynthesis, and then they gave back oxygen. But these little guys from the mountaintop were also giving off a whole range of gas mixes and were airborne, and nothing like their water-based cousins – if they were even related.
As Harry watched several of the microbes used their spikes to join together, then more of them, until they had formed a clump that settled on the floor of the container, creating a tiny speck. Like the slime. But then they broke apart and dissipated into a gas again that was an atmospheric primordial soup.
Harry looked over at his colleague, Sarah. “Have you got a sec?” he asked.
Sarah lifted her head from her microscope, and listened as Harry told her what he’d just learned about the microbes and the heavy gases.
“Gigantism,” she said distractedly.
He straightened. “Go on.” He concentrated, deciphering the mushy words coming through her bio-filter.
Sarah continued to work on the biological sample for a few more moments. “Remember the insects during the Carboniferous period?” She looked up from her microscope. “They grew large in the air, some as big as condors, and on the ground, to horse size. Insects don’t have lungs, but instead a tracheal breathing system, which limits how big they can get because they can’t absorb the necessary oxygen. But millions of years ago when oxygen levels were higher, then those upper limits didn’t apply.”
“Meganeura,” Harry said softly, referring to an ancient, extinct dragonfly as big as an eagle.
“Yep, plus spiders the size of a small dog and even a freaking millipede nearly nine feet – would not have been a fun time to be a soft-bodied mammal.” She went back to looking down her scope.
“Interesting,” Harry said. The weird thing was that he had just read a paper that postulated that early forms of bacteria had been a factor in the first instances of evolution in organisms – they had triggered cellular and even DNA changes. And the most abundant bacteria on a primordial Earth could have been like the ones he was seeing. It had always been suspected that life on the planet was kick-started by microorganisms that arrived from somewhere else in the universe.
Harry stared off into the distance and let his mind work. What effect would they have on life now, if they arrived again? Perhaps another catalyst for the evolutionary process – to both man and beast?
Gigantism, Sarah had said. He mulled the word over as he sifted through the implications. He shook his head to clear away some frightening thoughts.
“Anyway, how’re your tests going? Anything interesting?”
“Well …” She nodded slowly into her microscope eyepiece. “This substance has switched on, become activated, probably because of the higher temperatures in the laboratory.” She looked sideways at him. “In a freezing environment, it’s inactive. In a moderately warm environment like on the mountaintop, it’d st
art to grow, but primarily stay benign. But here, like in this lab where it’s seventy-two degrees, its metabolism is accelerating.” She looked back down. “It seems highly caustic and looks to be converting organic matter. A little like some sort of digestion process.”
“Caustic – an acid? Is it excreting it?” Harry asked. “You need to—”
“Yes and no, and more like coated in it, now,” she responded. “And yes, Harry, I have checked the data, three times. It’s coated in a substance that’s suspiciously like a digestive enzyme.”
“It’s certainly unique. In the atmospheric sample, I can see spore-like microbes free floating. I would expect that if this embeds in an organism it might influence the DNA.” He turned to her. “Perhaps even making mutagenic changes there.”
Sarah snorted. “More likely just give you a nasty burn.”
Harry sighed. “Jesus Christ, you know what? We shouldn’t be working on this stuff here. It requires much greater scientific scrutiny, better equipment, and a truckload more damned biosecurity.”
“Harry, we work with what we’ve got. That’s what makes us great.” Sarah turned and winked before looking back down into her microscope eyepiece, and moving the sample a little under the lens. She reached up to adjust the scope at her eye a tad.
“Yeah, great.” He was about to turn away when he noticed that she had her visor up again.
He sighed. “Jesus, Sarah, will you at least please put your face mask down?”
She made a guttural sound in her throat. “I can’t see a damn thing. And the vents are working full blast anyway.”
Their benchtops had vents that sucked the air down to the filters, scrubbers and incinerators. Nothing should float free at all. Sarah pointed at them, and then turned, looking angry, and slapped the mask down over her face.
“Thank you.” Harry sighed again, louder and longer this time. He should have refused to work on the samples unless he and Sarah had biosafety level-4 facilities.
He snorted. Like bullshit he’d refuse. If he’d said no, then NASA would have called up that weasel, Bernie Hillstrop, to come in and do the analysis; he was dying to take over Harry’s department. He clicked his tongue. Still, the risk of contamination was extreme.
