Beyond the Ice Limit

by Preston, Douglas

  “Three minutes.”

  The tension in the control room, already high, was spiking. But at least it was controlled. The atmosphere throughout the rest of the ship was not. Already, Gideon had seen restless, angry knots of people talking among themselves, many calling for the mission to be aborted and the ship steered to Ushuaia, Argentina, the nearest port.

  Glinn wasn’t in mission control. Gideon wondered briefly what he could be up to that was more important than monitoring what they were about to do, but dismissed the thought. He was probably putting out fires all over the ship. The man had a unique ability to calm people down and project a feeling of unshakable competence and success. Gideon knew it was a mask, one of many Glinn put on.

  “Two minutes.”

  Gideon transferred his attention to the screen of the Baobab. It sat there, swollen, ominous, the branches swaying almost imperceptibly. George, the crushed DSV, remained in place on the seabed, unmoving.

  “One minute.”

  “Arming,” McFarlane said. His thin hand unlatched and lifted the cage covering a red button on the console.

  “All systems go.”

  Now Garza began to count down by voice: ten, nine, eight…

  Gideon waited, staring at the screen.

  “Fire in the hole,” said McFarlane.

  On the monitor, Gideon saw a dozen silt clouds erupt from the seafloor in a geometric array around the Baobab. A moment later the muffled sound was picked up by the sonobuoys on the surface—sound traveling faster in water than in air.

  The Baobab reacted violently, the branches abruptly whipping and snapping about as if searching for an invader, the mouth extruding and opening, apparently sucking in vast amounts of seawater. The trunk swelled grotesquely, to the point that it became almost spherical, looking as though it might burst. At the same time, the creature’s coloration underwent a swift, rippling change, turning from light green to an angry red, mottled with darker spots of purple.

  And then an immense boom rocked the ship: a thunderous blast like a small earthquake that threw Gideon to the floor. The lights flickered and the ship shuddered strongly for a moment. There were some scattered screams. A shower of sparks spit out of a nearby console, and the sound of falling glass echoed from shattered monitors.

  Gideon rose to his knees, but was thrown back to the deck again by another massive, booming noise. The lights flickered and this time went out, along with all the monitors, plunging mission control—which had no windows—into darkness. A second later the emergency lights came on, along with a series of alarms—including the fire-alarm siren.

  A third thundering vibration struck the ship, weaker this time. Gideon rose to his feet, pulling himself up by a console. The monitors were still out, the dim emergency lighting barely adequate to illuminate the space.

  McFarlane struggled up beside him, both of them bracing for the next attack. Nothing happened. Others were now getting up around them. Smoke was pouring out of a nearby console, and Gideon grabbed one of the ubiquitous fire extinguishers strapped to the walls and gave it a blast, extinguishing the embryonic fire.

  Lennart’s voice came over the intercom system. “General quarters. All crew to general quarters. Seal all bulkheads, security to bridge and engineering…”

  As the emergency announcement went on, McFarlane said: “There’s our reaction.”

  “It felt like an explosion. Must have been some kind of sonic attack.”

  “Yes. An ultra-low-frequency sonic attack with a remarkably high amplitude.”

  Gideon’s radio buzzed and he pulled it out. It was Glinn. “I want you on the bridge,” he said. While Glinn was speaking, Gideon could feel the engines coming to life, along with the incipient movement of the ship.

  McFarlane overheard. “I’m coming, too.”

  Gideon did not argue.

  47

  IT WAS NOT a quick trip from the mission control room, deep inside the ship, to the bridge at the top of the superstructure. Gideon had only been on the bridge once before. It was a spacious area, far above the maindeck, with floor-to-ceiling windows giving sweeping views of the surrounding water and the ship itself, fore and aft. There was no internal illumination save a dull-red glow from the nighttime bridge lights and from a few hooded chartplotters and monitors. A gibbous moon hung in the sky, casting a remarkably bright light over the scattered icebergs, which looked like ghosts on the dark water. Bright stars bristled in the overhead dome of night.

  As he stared at the moonlit view, Gideon saw something puzzling. The sea, as far as the eye could reach, was covered with shapes, big and small. It took him a moment to realize they were thousands upon thousands of dead fish, along with much larger shapes of what looked like sharks and porpoises. And, about a quarter mile away, he made out a cluster of huge white corpses, some fifty feet or longer each, just beginning to drift to the surface: dead whales.

  The ship was gaining speed. The scene on the bridge was one of tight efficiency underlain with an intense urgency. First Officer Lennart was at the conn, relaying the captain’s orders regarding heading, engine, and rudder. Captain Tulley stood next to her, a ramrod-straight fireplug of a man, murmuring his orders. Garza was nowhere in sight: he had gone off to oversee the security teams searching the ship for the missing worms.

  Glinn was speaking to the officer of the watch, Warrant Officer Lund. Glinn turned and waved them over.

  “Why are we under way?” asked McFarlane. “Are we running?”

  Glinn looked at McFarlane. “No. We’ve been attacked, and we’re moving out of range in order to effect repairs.”

  “The amplitude drops by the square of the distance,” said Gideon. “Which means we probably don’t have to go very far.”

  “Correct. The calculation was four miles. Mr. Lund, please brief them on the condition of the ship.”

  “Yes, sir.” Lund, pale and blond, turned his narrow face to them. “We’re taking on water. The bulkheads were sealed and the bilge pumps can handle it. The electricity generators are offline—fuel leaks—but should be fixed in an hour or so. The ship’s navigational and engine equipment survived in pretty good shape. Ringo, which was at a depth of a thousand meters at the time of the sonic attacks, is a complete loss. The other major damage was to mission control, which is full of delicate and sensitive electronics. The damage appears to be severe but not catastrophic: monitors smashed, motherboards shaken loose, contacts broken. But the stand-alone computers, laptops and desktops mostly survived intact. They were shaken up but seem to be fine.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Lund,” said Glinn. The warrant officer stepped back.

  “And the nuke?” asked McFarlane.

  “We haven’t checked on it yet,” said Glinn.

  “Don’t worry about the nuke,” said Gideon. “Nuclear weapons are designed to be robust—built to be manhandled before being dropped.”

  “Please make an examination, just to be sure,” said Glinn. “Now we have a decision to make: abort, or proceed?”

  Gideon knew what he was going to say, but he waited. McFarlane looked at Glinn. “Let’s hear your views first.”

  At this, a bitter smile gathered on Glinn’s face. “Ah, Sam. For once, you want to hear my views. My apologies, but I’m not giving you the opportunity to disagree with me just for the sake of it. You two make the decision. If it’s a tie, I’ll break it.”

  “I say, go ahead,” said McFarlane after a moment.

  “Agreed,” said Gideon.

  “In that case, we go ahead. We’ll repair the ship and head back to the target area, with the goal of deploying the nuke as soon as possible.”

  “Is there anything that can be done to protect the ship from a future attack like that?” asked the captain, who had overheard the conversation.

  “I have an engineer working on it,” Glinn told him. “He thinks we can lower a set of metal sheets into the water, to act as baffles. It won’t block the sonic attack, but it may mitigate it. We have only a day, tho
ugh.”

  The captain nodded. “The weather.”

  “Exactly. A serious storm is approaching that will preclude any progress for at least a week. Whatever we do, it must be done in the next twenty-four hours. And in any case…” He paused a moment. “If we can’t isolate and kill the missing worms, we’re fighting a losing battle. Besides, the ship’s complement can’t go indefinitely without sleep.”

  He looked at Gideon and McFarlane. “In other words, we can’t afford to waste any more time with analysis. Let’s go full speed ahead and take that thing out with the nuke.”

  48

  MY DRINKING DAYS are past,” said McFarlane, in answer to Gideon’s invitation. It was one AM and McFarlane, in his usual brusque way, had invited himself into Gideon’s cabin to discuss the seismic results, which Gideon had recently downloaded into his laptop.

  The results couldn’t have been worse—and were a bad shock to Gideon. McFarlane, Cassandra that he was, had been correct in his pessimistic speculation. Like the icebergs that surrounded them, almost ninety percent of the creature was below the seabed.

  He heard a brief commotion in the hall; voices raised in argument. The entire ship was awake, and a few were already becoming strung out on amphetamines. Gideon felt the bulge in his own shirt pocket: a bottle of the pills sick bay had been liberally passing out. He hadn’t taken any, and didn’t intend to unless it became absolutely necessary. The truth was, he had no desire to sleep—and probably couldn’t have even if he wanted to.

  The sweep of the ship, now being led personally by Garza, was still under way, although half the search parties had been pulled off to help with repairs. Not a single worm had been found. But in the interim, someone had sabotaged the CT scanner—destroyed it completely. The same had happened to the X-ray machine. Clearly, more people had been parasitized and were apparently doing the bidding of the mother creature.

  But how was the thing giving instructions? There was no way for it to communicate to the worms in the brains of the infected—was there? The very low-frequency sound it emitted was fully damped down before reaching the ship. How did it even know what to do? Sabotaging the CT and X-ray machines required not only intelligence but a sophisticated understanding of human technology. How was it possible?

  And this thought was what led to a sudden revelation. It was a crazy, perhaps even insane idea. But it was the only thing that fit all the facts and explained everything—even the mysterious kill me plea.

  Gideon would have to think hard about voicing his idea, because it seemed so outlandish. He glanced at the lean, weathered figure of McFarlane, bent over the laptop. He had rapidly come to respect, and in some ways depend on, the man’s judgment, even if the way he expressed himself was frequently offensive. He would test his idea on McFarlane first.

  “Look at this,” McFarlane said. “That cluster, there.” He turned the laptop screen toward Gideon, which displayed a picture of the area underground, surrounding the creature. “I’ve been using software to enhance it.”

  Gideon saw what looked like a grouping of ovoid objects, connected by thick cables.

  “It’s deep—over a thousand feet below the seafloor. You know what I think? I think those are developing seeds. Or eggs.”

  Gideon stared.

  “Look closely at the structure. There’s a hard shell around them, forming a covering. And then a liquid medium surrounds a round nucleus, a sort of yolk-like suspension.”

  “How large are these? What’s the scale?”

  McFarlane did some typing and a scale bar appeared. “Each one is about three feet in diameter along the long axis, two feet along the shorter axis. The nucleus inside is about nine inches by six.”

  “The size and shape of a human brain.”

  A long silence. He found McFarlane looking at him curiously.

  “Note,” said Gideon, “that there appear to be six of them.”

  “Noted. What are you getting at?” McFarlane asked.

  “We’ve lost two people to the creature: Lispenard and Frayne. We also found three headless corpses in and around the wreck of the Rolvaag.”

  Gideon saw the light of dawning understanding in McFarlane’s eyes. “Go on,” the meteorite hunter said quietly.

  “Note also that Lispenard videoed what appeared to be a brain-like organ in the trunk of the creature. But that brain is much larger: about fifteen inches in diameter.”

  A long silence. “And?”

  “I have a theory.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “The Baobab is a parasite, of course. But it’s parasitism of a kind unknown on earth. It takes the brains of other organisms. Why? Two reasons. First, because it has none of its own. So it parasitizes the brain of another organism, which provides it with the intelligence it requires.”

  McFarlane listened intently.

  “Now for the second reason. Dr. Brambell said Alex Lispenard’s brain was missing when the thing voided the remains of her DSV. Not just missing, but carefully removed. The same thing may well have happened to Frayne before his DSV was excreted. And as I said, we found three corpses from the Rolvaag that were all missing their heads. But the Rolvaag is a damned huge wreck. Who’s to say there wasn’t a fourth headless body somewhere inside that we haven’t seen?”

  “Two plus three plus one,” said McFarlane.

  “Precisely. That cluster of six objects, a thousand feet below the seabed, are developing into seeds. But I think that, at their core, they contain human brains. Six new creatures, each with its own intelligent brain. The fifteen-inch brain inside the trunk of the creature, on the other hand, is the one it brought with it—from outside the solar system.”

  “An alien brain.”

  “Exactly. Kill me, kill me. That was the alien brain speaking directly to us—that was not the Baobab speaking. The alien brain wants to die, desperately. Can you image what it would be like, to have your brain removed and incorporated into another life-form, used as a slaved processor or computer? And kept alive against its will—for millions of years? Kept nourished, functioning…and sane. Think about the four things Prothero has so far translated from blue whale speech: Kill me. Long time. Far away. And, perhaps most telling of all: net. It explains the final words of both Alex and Frayne—words that suggest a sudden, surprising meeting of some kind. A meeting between the human brain and…the alien brain. And it explains how the worms work. All they do is put a goal into their human’s brain. A simple little goal. The parasitized human brain does all the complex thinking of how to achieve that goal—either to protect the mother plant, or to steal a DSV and drive down to unite with it. To make another egg. Just like the toxo infection in a mouse brain Glinn described. Makes the mouse go to the cat: to be eaten. The parasite in the mouse isn’t giving it detailed instructions; it just causes the mouse to lose its fear of cats.”

  He paused, realizing how ridiculous it all sounded.

  McFarlane didn’t respond right away. He sat back in the chair, crossed his legs, and closed his eyes. For a long moment he made no movement. And then he said, without opening his eyes: “Think of the existential horror of it. A brain with no body, no life, no interactions, no sensory input. Just endless existence. No wonder it wants to die. And no wonder, as Prothero reported, the communication ended so abruptly, both times: the Baobab silenced the alien brain, kept it from continuing the conversation.”

  Gideon let that thought sink in. If McFarlane was right, that meant Alex, effectively, was still alive: her memories, her personality, everything she was. But trapped, disembodied, in the creature, to be used as a vehicle for its procreation. The horror of it was almost beyond imagining.

  He opened his eyes.

  “Are you all right?” McFarlane asked.

  “No. Because you know the biggest irony of all? That thing had harvested four brains from the Rolvaag, probably when it first sank—yet it remained quiescent. Now it has two more—and it’s suddenly growing active. I think by coming down here, we pro
vided it with just enough additional brains for it to move to the next stage of development. Instead of killing it, we’ve helped it to propagate.”

  “Maybe so.” McFarlane waved his hand. “But you know what? I think you’ve just figured out how to kill it. By destroying all seven of those brains.”

  49

  PATRICK BRAMBELL HAD done six months of a general surgery residency, which was how he discovered that he was not cut out to be a surgeon. He was not a team player, which made for bad OR etiquette, and he did not enjoy working with his hands like a mechanic.

  And now here he was, performing emergency brain surgery.

  The patient, the exobiology lab assistant named Reece, lay anesthetized on the operating table, under bright lights. His head had been shaved and the surgery area cleaned and scrubbed with betadine. Reece’s cranium had been placed in a three-pin Mayfield skull clamp, which held it rigidly in place. A testament to EES thoroughness that such a device happened to be in the surgical cabinets on board.

  He had already gone through a stressful procedure—guided in real time by a neurosurgeon in Australia, via Skype—in which he had fixed a lumbar drain in the patient’s lower back to remove some cerebrospinal fluid; this, the Australian neurosurgeon explained, was to “loosen” the brain and make it easier to operate on.

  Standing at his side and assisting was Dr. Sax. This was little comfort; Sax was, indeed, an MD, but she had gone on to get a PhD and had never practiced medicine, let alone surgery. She was, if anything, more nervous than he was. As for his own assistant, Rogelio, after Glinn’s crew-wide announcement about the parasitic worms, the man had locked himself in his stateroom, refusing to come out under any circumstances.

  On a large monitor in front of him was Dr. Susanna Rios of Sydney, standing over a detailed plastic model of the head and shoulders of a human patient, lying facedown. Next to it was a real human cranium. These were the props she was going to use to guide him through the surgery.