She was breathing so hard she feared she might hyperventilate.
A shuffling sound to the left of where she’d last seen the eyes.
The clicking of nails on stone.
“We . . . still . . . live.”
The words seemed to originate from all around her at once, the hollow intonation as much a sensation as a sound.
“Show yourself,” Jade said, but the tremor in her voice gave lie to her bravado.
Scratching, from even farther to her left.
It was circling around her.
Jade swung her beam toward the sound and caught a glimpse of bare, grayish skin as it scurried into a narrow tunnel. She crawled toward it and shined her light inside just in time to see a blur of movement at the farthest reaches of the light.
“Find . . . us.”
The voice echoed from out of sight.
A scraping sound preceded the sudden influx of light.
She realized with a start just how vulnerable she was and how easily she could be sealed inside the pyramid. An animalistic panic took hold of her. She threw herself into the hole and crawled toward the light. She hit her head and scraped her knees and elbows. The sound of her breathing was too loud in her own ears, as though she were in a coffin. She twisted and turned until she crawled through a gap where one of the structural stones had been pushed away from the pyramid and into the undergrowth, through which she could barely see the brown stream.
Movement through the maze of trunks. Something scurrying away from her, low and near the ground.
“Stop right there!” she shouted, and aimed her pistol through the trees.
The pale, skeletal form vanished into the thicket.
Jade dropped her flashlight and ran after it. Branches swatted her face, forcing her to shield it with her forearms. She burst from the jungle and onto the bank of the river where the crocodiles had been basking when she arrived.
The creature crouched naked at the water’s edge. It looked up at her from beneath the ridged brow of its elongated head through wide, alien eyes.
“Release . . . us.”
It rose to its full height, turned, and waded into the murky water.
The crocodiles attacked with unbridled savagery, and, in a flurry of snapping jaws and thrashing tails, dragged it down into the depths.
Blood rose to the surface and diffused into the current.
5
BARNETT
Subterranean Ice Caverns, FOB Atlantis,
Queen Maud Land, Antarctica
Barnett scrolled through the map of the honeycomblike passageways on his iPad while he walked. The sonar scans left considerable gaps in the digitally reconstructed data, but there was more than enough to demonstrate that whatever took out his men could be positively anywhere by now. He passed the tablet back to Morgan and quickened his pace toward his destination. His men had widened the stone corridors and cleared all the ice from the chamber preceding the one where his men had been ambushed. The ice cavern itself had been chiseled in such a fashion that his team was able to reach the hole in the roof, while leaving the evidence largely undamaged. Only Jonas’s body had been removed and his blood scrubbed from the floor, pending formal analysis by Unit 51’s scientific wing, operating under the auspices of the United States Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. So far, they had discovered nothing out of the ordinary, but like the archaea that had subsumed the body of Dr. Dale Rubley, it was always possible that the life cycles of any potentially pathogenic microorganisms were highly dependent upon environmental factors and weren’t readily apparent under normal conditions.
Of course, they had more urgent concerns than the possible risk of infection. At this very moment, something capable of slaughtering two elite soldiers was down here in the tunnels with them.
“Did she tell you what this is about?” Barnett asked.
“No, sir,” Morgan said.
They’d installed thermal imaging cameras in the main junctions of the tunnels, but there were so many smaller passageways and side corridors that there was no way they could possibly cover them all. Most of them were too small for his men to search anyway, even with the sonar and LiDar scanners at their disposal, both of which were capable of imaging enclosed spaces they couldn’t physically explore by mapping points of data using rebounding sonar waves and laser beams. While both technologies formed three-dimensional representations of the tunnels and caverns, the only way either could detect the presence of something living was if it moved while they were actively scanning.
The halogen bulbs had been replaced by black lights and every surface sprayed with a fine layer of Luminol, a chemical that reacted with the hemoglobin in the victims’ blood to produce a bluish glow that stood apart from the ice like fluorescent paint.
“Tell me you’ve found something remotely useful,” Barnett said.
“And good morning to you too, Director,” Dr. Moira Murphy said. Her bulky isolation suit was like a hot-air balloon over her diminutive form. Barnett had plucked her from the grasp of DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—not just because of her skill in forensic investigations, but because of her expertise in a wide variety of fields ranging from computer programming and biotechnology to mechanical and genetic engineering, a consequence of being raised by nomadic academics who regarded the pursuit of happiness as secondary to the quest for intellectual enlightenment.
“I’m in no mood, Dr. Murphy.”
“Then I suppose it depends upon how you define ‘useful.’”
“What do you have?”
“Thanks to the Luminol, we’ve been able to isolate a few distinct tracks, and, utilizing a program of my own design, have been able to digitally reconstruct what we believe to be a fingerprint.”
She removed her tablet from its protective thermal casing, turned it on, and handed it to Barnett. The screen showed an oblong blue design set against a black background. It had the same general shape as a fingerprint, but instead of the familiar whorl pattern, it featured curved horizontal bands that reminded him of ripples and a triangular tip he assumed was a claw.
“So there’s no doubt we’re dealing with some kind of animal,” Barnett said. While he’d suspected as much based on the nature of the wounds it inflicted and its ability to squeeze into such a small space, he’d privately held out hope that at long last they’d discovered where Hollis Richards had been hiding.
“Not just ‘some sort of animal.’ We’re dealing with a species that was able to survive being frozen in solid ice for millennia. A higher order of animal specifically adapted for an extended period of cryobiosis, one capable of essentially slowing its heart rate and metabolism to such an extent that it barely qualified as living.”
“Nothing could have survived down here for that long.”
“And yet we’re surrounded by evidence to the contrary. Let me show you something.”
Moira led Barnett to the other side of the cavern, where his men had first breached the ice.
“Look at this right here.”
Barnett stared at the solid ice, and through it, at the ancient bones crammed into a recess in the stone wall.
“Are they human?”
It almost looked like a man had been folded into a ball with his knees to his forehead, his arms pinned between his ribcage and his thighs, and wedged into the hole.
“Undeniably, but that’s not why I called you down here. Try running your fingers across the ice. Right there in the cavity where his abdominal contents were.”
Barnett looked at her curiously for a moment before doing as she asked. There were distinct ridges in the ice he hadn’t been able to visually appreciate. They almost matched the contours of the internal margin of the ribcage.
“So what is it?”
“What we believe to be the physical outline of this miraculous species. The majority was melted by the flamethrowers, but we were able to create a plaster mold from that section you just felt.” She looked around the room. “D
esmond? Can you grab the mold for me?”
Dr. Desmond Bly was their resident speleologist. He was barely five feet tall and skeletally thin, which had helped him map some of the largest and most dangerous cave systems on the planet. As one would expect from someone who spent the majority of his time alone in the darkness, however, he lacked certain social graces. Fortunately, Barnett hadn’t recruited him for his personality.
Bly sighed and made a grand show of how put out he was to have to set aside his laptop and the digital maps he painstakingly pieced together, and removed the white mold from the insulated case he’d been using as a stool. He tossed it to Morgan, who was marginally closer than Barnett, and plopped back down with his computer.
Morgan passed the cast to Barnett, who turned it over in his hands. The bottom was coarse and uneven, while the top was relatively smooth, save for the same distinct ridges he’d felt in the ice.
“It looks like an armadillo’s shell.”
“Carapace, technically,” Moira said. “Although if we were to use the distance between the armor-like bands and the degree of curvature to extrapolate its size, we’d be dealing with an armadillo that was roughly three feet long from its nose to the tip of its tail.”
“Armadillos can’t take down full-grown men.”
“Nor are they able to climb straight up vertical sheets of ice, which brings us back to the fingerprints. Those horizontal flanges are called lamellae, and, if I’m correct, function like those on a gecko’s toes, which are covered with microscopic structures called setae. Each of these microscopic bristles further splits into nano-sized tips called spatulae that create van der Waals interactions with surface molecules strong enough to support a disproportional amount of weight.”
“But none of that tells us how it killed my men.”
“I was saving the best for last.” She looked at Bly, who rolled his eyes and once again set aside his work. He opened the thermoprene case and removed another plaster mold. “Based on my analysis of SA Jonas’s wounds, I concluded that they were inflicted by teeth. The subject’s jaws are dorsolaterally flattened in such a way as to create a rostral shelf, and the teeth are interdigitating in orientation.”
“In English, doctor.”
Morgan retrieved the mold from Bly before he could toss it. When he turned around, his expression told Barnett everything he needed to know.
“This animal—for lack of a better term—has an elongated snout with interlocking teeth designed for gripping and tearing.”
Barnett took the mold from Morgan. There were only six teeth, two on one side and four on the other, but their configuration was unmistakable.
“The fourth tooth from the front, as you can clearly see, is longer than the others and designed to inflict the most damage,” Moira said. “I’ve studied similar wounds, although not in person, caused by—”
“Crocodiles,” Barnett finished for her. He handed the mold to her and headed back toward the tunnel to the main complex. “Good work, Dr. Murphy.”
“I wish I could tell you exactly what we were dealing with.”
“So do I, Doctor, but I think I just might know someone who can.”
6
TESS
The Cage, FOB Atlantis
It had taken Dr. Theresa Clarke several months to acclimate to working in the faint glow of the red bulbs, which were so dim she might as well have been trying to function in total darkness. She’d had no choice in the matter, though, not that anyone around here cared much about her opinion anyway. She’d basically utilized her skills in satellite archeology to leverage her position in Unit 51, despite not being entirely certain what it actually was. All she knew was that reality was even better than her dreams and she couldn’t wait to get down here every morning when the motion sensors triggered the alarm by her bed and the cameras started recording.
They’d originally mounted overhead lights in the adjacent chamber, but the occupant shattered them every single time, even after they covered them with those metal cage thingies. The night vision cameras had fared little better. It wasn’t until they installed the thermal imaging that they’d been able to actually tell what it was doing in there, which was where she came in.
The wall that divided the tunnel from the cavern on the other side was composed of a foot of reinforced concrete to either side of a solid steel core and sunken eight feet into the surrounding limestone. The inset window was the sole point of vulnerability, although it would basically take a nuclear detonation to so much as crack the lead-lined glass. The lone egress was hermetically sealed, utilized the kind of door they used for the vault at Fort Knox, and featured a mazelike chute that allowed them to feed the creature on the other side.
Tess leaned across her console and spoke into the microphone.
“Are you hungry?”
Her voice echoed back at her from the speakers inside the cavern. She watched the heat signature of the subject stiffen on the monitor and turn toward the window, through which she could see only darkness. The thermal imaging didn’t provide the sharpest images, especially since she’d narrowed the temperature gradient window level so that everything below seventy-eight degrees appeared black and everything above one hundred degrees appeared white. The twenty-two degrees in between were represented by a spectrum from blue and purple at the lower end to pink and red in the mid-range to orange and yellow at the upper limit, which meant that other than the pinkish clouds of radiant heat emanating from the electrical warmers in the ceiling, the entirety of the cavern served as a black backdrop limned with just enough blue to create texture and depth.
The creature stood apart from it like a blazing beacon. Its outline was formed of a purplish pink that brightened from red to orange to the golden auras that defined its face and chest. Its elongated head cocked first one way, then the other, like a predatory bird. As irrational as the thought was, Tess couldn’t shake the feeling that it could see her through the monitor.
The creature had been formally classified as Subject Z—represented by the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet, Zeta—as an allusion to the 1965 newspaper report describing the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill by aliens that would later be described as Grays, the stereotypical physical expression of which looked identical to the mutated form of Dr. Dale Rubley. The article printed a drawing by Mrs. Hill, detailing the route the spaceship had used during her abduction, which an amateur astronomer recognized as the Zeta Reticuli star system, leading to the quasi-official designation of the species as Zeta Reticulans.
Tess had heard the being speak on the audio files recorded inside the research station last year, when it had been responsible for the deaths of nearly the entire staff, but it hadn’t uttered so much as a single syllable since being caged down here. It was her job to establish communication with it, and the powers that be were running out of patience.
“Would you like to eat?”
Subject Z stared at her through the camera for several seconds before making a sound she could barely hear. She would have to play it back and enhance the track, but she could have sworn it almost sounded like it said, “Yes.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, and clapped her hands over her mouth. She turned to face the armed agent guarding the door to the cage. He wore black fatigues and stood so still that she often forgot he was there. “You heard that, didn’t you?”
His only reply was a slight shrug of his shoulders, upon which he wore the red insignia of Unit 51: an upside-down triangle offset on top of another upside-down triangle, both of which were enclosed inside of a third. At the very center were the Roman numerals LI.
“Well? What are you waiting for?”
The guard—whose name was Carson, although she didn’t know if that was his first name or last—spoke into his transceiver. A horrible squeal erupted from the depths of the earthen tunnel behind her.
She hated this part more than anything in the world.
A silhouette pushed a cart toward them through the unlit corridor. Its
wheels squeaked, and the cage on top of it rattled. The squeals became frantic, turning into screams that sounded almost human. The man pushing the cart looked just like all of the others, which she figured was why medieval executioners wore hoods. His name was Les Dutton, and everyone claimed he was the best cook to ever enter the service, but Tess couldn’t even look at him without hearing those awful screams.
He lifted the cage from the cart, hooked it to the slot in the door, and pressed a series of buttons on the wall panel. The cage and the seal in the door simultaneously opened with a hiss of pressurized air.
The pig stood frozen in the cage, its cries echoing off into the silence.
“Go on,” Carson said, and nudged the cage with the toe of his boot.
It scurried forward and Dutton resealed the opening behind it. He set the empty cage onto the cart and pushed it back down the hallway without a word.
The feeding chute utilized a series of baffles to guide the pig through the maze. They closed behind it, one by one, until it made the final turn, which caused the inner seal to disengage.
It emerged from the left side of Tess’s screen as a vaguely piggish shape of pink and orange. She hadn’t so much as heard the creature move or noticed its thermal signature disappear, presumably behind one of the flowstone columns.
The pig squealed and issued an orange stream that quickly faded into a blue puddle around its hooves. It took several tentative steps into the cavern and raised its snout. She could hear it sniffing the air through her console. Its ears pricked and it held perfectly still.
Tess looked away, but not before catching a blur of color from the monitor to her right as the creature emerged from an entirely different hiding spot than she’d expected. She closed her eyes and tried not to hear the pig’s screams, which, fortunately, didn’t last long. When she opened her eyes again, the cavern walls were decorated with golden arcs that darkened from orange to red as they trickled down the granite.
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