Beyond the Ice Limit

by Preston, Douglas

  “So how did that work with the meteorite and ice?” asked Glinn. “Both are solids.”

  “The nickel-iron meteorite liquefied from the shock of impact. That’s common. The ice also liquefied from the shock wave. The two mingled violently, and a vast quantity of water boiled in a millisecond, causing a massive explosion.”

  “You think that will happen with our nuke?” Gideon asked. “In the deep ocean?”

  “No. The water won’t do it. You need a second liquid—a very hot one—to mix with it.”

  “Such as?”

  “Metal. Steel. You’d need a large amount of molten metal to mix with the water.”

  “So we put the bomb in a metal shell?”

  “That’s not nearly enough,” said McFarlane. “You want as much metal as possible. Tons and tons of it.”

  “We can’t wrap tons of metal around the bomb,” said Gideon. “We wouldn’t be able to deliver it.”

  “You don’t have to wrap the bomb. You could lay sheets of metal on the seafloor. Lay them flat. You do it above where those seeds are growing. That’ll focus the explosion.”

  “Sheets of metal?”

  “There must be huge amounts of steel plating on this ship. We could cut a bunch of bulkheads out, stack the sheets of steel on the bottom, then detonate the nuke above them. Close enough for the shock wave to liquefy the steel.”

  “How much steel are you talking about?” asked Glinn.

  “I’d guess a couple hundred tons, at least. The more the better.”

  A silence. “How do you propose to stack hundreds of tons of steel two miles down?”

  “Lower the plates on cables.”

  “We have two deepwater cables and one winch,” said Glinn. “The cables are for emergency lifting of a DSV and are rated to no more than twenty-five hundred pounds displacement mass. It would take hours to lower each plate. Even if we could remove sufficient plating from the ship, we’d never get that much metal down there in time. And will the creature just sit still doing nothing while we stack iron around it?”

  “We could dump the metal sheets overboard,” said McFarlane.

  “Those sheets would orient themselves as they sank,” Glinn said. “They would end up being driven into the mud vertically. Would that work?”

  “No,” said McFarlane.

  “Brilliant idea,” Glinn said. “A shame it isn’t feasible.” Again he turned to leave.

  Gideon stopped him. “Perhaps this is insane. But isn’t there already a huge amount of metal lying down there?”

  Glinn frowned impatiently. “Where?”

  “The Rolvaag, of course.”

  56

  GREG MASTERSON FELT like he was losing control of the mess hall. Someone had brought out a couple of bottles of scotch, from God knew where, and they were being passed around. Voices were raised, people were talking over each other, and nothing was being accomplished aside from useless venting.

  This was really pissing him off. In frustration, he climbed up on one of the cafeteria tables. “Hey! Listen up!”

  The roar of discontent went on.

  “Goddamn it, listen to me!” He stomped loudly on the table. “Shut the hell up!”

  That worked. The room quieted down.

  “We need a plan. And I’ve got one.” Masterson let the anticipation build. There were about twenty people there—crew, mostly, with a few members of the scientific staff. That should be enough. And they looked motivated—very motivated. “Are you ready to listen?” He deliberately pitched his voice low, soft, and this worked even better, as the room finally fell silent.

  “Someone shut and lock the door.”

  It was done.

  “Okay,” Masterson said. “I think we all know the mission has failed.”

  A strong murmur of agreement.

  “The ship is crawling with those damned alien worms. And they’re multiplying. Rumor has it they’re in the ductwork. They’re in the engine room. They’re everywhere.”

  He paused.

  “We need to get the hell off this ship. As soon as possible.”

  A chorus of agreement. Masterson could feel the energy in the room. People were really listening and now they were coming together. He saw a whiskey bottle pass from hand to hand.

  “Hey! Put the bottle down, for Chrissakes. We need to keep our wits about us. It’s bad enough that we’re all amped up on speed.”

  It was sheepishly put down.

  “God knows how many of our crewmates have been infected. And remember: there’s no way to tell. No way to tell. Not until it’s too late.”

  Agreement all around.

  “Okay. The closest mainland port is Ushuaia, in Argentina. It’s seven hundred nautical miles northwest of here. If we start now, at full speed, we’ll get there in fifty-eight hours.”

  A chorus of agreement.

  “Up there in mission control, they’re going on as if nothing had changed. They still think they can kill that monster. They’re delusional.”

  “Or maybe they’re infected!” someone cried.

  “That’s also a possibility,” Masterson agreed. “As I said, there’s no way to know. All I do know is, in fifty-eight hours, we could be off this ship and safe in Ushuaia.”

  This observation was greeted with a roar of approval.

  “What do we do, then? Simple. We take over.” He looked around fiercely. “In this room, we have the expertise needed—engineering, navigational, operational. And we have the manpower. We can do this.”

  Another dramatic pause. “We can do this!” echoed through the restive crowd. He also heard the word mutiny sprinkled here and there.

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “Mutiny. But a necessary mutiny. A mutiny to save not only our own lives—but the lives of every other uninfected person on board.”

  This suggestion silenced the room. You could hear a pin drop.

  “Are you with me?” Masterson asked quietly.

  A low murmur of agreement gathered steam.

  “It’s now or never. Stand up if you’re with me.”

  One stood up, another, and then another, and within a moment they all rose with a loud scraping of chairs and a swell of voices.

  “Is there anyone who disagrees?”

  No one did. And this only served to reinforce Masterson’s belief that they needed to carry off this mutiny as soon as possible.

  Right now, in fact.

  57

  GARZA CRAWLED ALONG the horizontal supply-air duct that ran the length of the ship, with his two remaining men ahead of him, Moncton behind. They were all wearing construction helmets equipped with powerful headlamps. It was noisy and dirty, but there was, at least, a flow of fresh air. They were approaching the engine room, but so far had seen no sign of worms.

  He had in hand an improvised weapon: an electric zapper. They all had them. Moncton had had the idea, and he’d assembled them quickly, using flashlight shells, a spark circuit and spark gap, and a capacitor, the whole thing powered by a pair of D batteries. Moncton was turning out to be some kind of genius: the chief engineer had taken a piece of worm, found it conducted electricity like mad, and decided they must be highly vulnerable to surges in voltage. In about fifteen minutes he assembled all the necessary zappers, and now they were on their way to the engine room, to see if they could find where the worms were breeding.

  So far they’d found and zapped a couple of worms—and the zappers had worked beautifully. The zapped worms were dead—or at least so they seemed, all withered and contracted into little gray knots.

  Using his radio, he’d ordered Bettances, the chief of security, to deploy his own teams into the ductwork in the other areas of the ship. If they didn’t locate the breeding source of the worms soon, they’d be overwhelmed—and fast.

  Now they came to an X-junction. Garza consulted the HVAC diagram on his tablet and noted they were just a few bends away from the engine room duct. The two men in front of him used cameras on selfie sticks to peer around the co
rners, but saw nothing.

  The crawling went on forever. They had to pause at every junction, every gasket, and inspect for worms. Garza believed that the worms might be like denning rattlesnakes, seeking each other out and gathering in one mass for mating. He believed that could very well be taking place in the ducts above the engine room—because of the heat. If he was right—if they were all assembled in a single nest—maybe they could take them all out at one go.

  “Take the left duct,” he said, and they crawled on. They were almost there.

  Patrick Brambell awoke, feeling terrifically refreshed, although his body ached from lying on the floor. How had he gotten on the floor? He recalled going to sleep in the chair. As he sat up, he saw that Sax was sleeping in another chair, her feet propped up on the lab table, still set up for the blood tests. Her face was smooth and peaceful, her lips a little wet, her glossy hair spilling across her neck.

  “Dr. Sax?”

  She opened her eyes, then sat up. “Oops, sorry. I didn’t mean to be sleeping.” She glanced at her phone. “Not for that long, anyway. The cell phone alarm was supposed to go off.”

  Brambell picked his phone off the countertop. “Looks like we slept through the alarm. Well, we certainly needed it!” He chuckled, with a twinkle in his eye. “Haven’t we been naughty—sleeping like this. Better not tell anyone.”

  “I feel so much better. I was just about dead. I feel like a new woman.”

  “Me, too. New man, I mean.”

  Sax laughed lightly. She stretched, stood up, and looked over the setup on the table. “Do you really think you can come up with a blood test for that thing?”

  Brambell sighed. “I doubt it. It seemed worth a try, but you know, on further reflection it’s pretty far-fetched.” It was crazy, really, to think a simple blood test would somehow reveal an infection from an alien parasite.

  “There must be better ways to spend our time,” said Sax.

  Brambell cast his mind back to the problem. What they desperately needed, he realized, was more information about the creature. That was the real problem: their ignorance of the Baobab, what it was, how it thought, why it was here. He felt extremely curious about it. It had come such a vast, lonely distance, and its life cycle was proving to be as complex as anything on earth—even more so.

  “We’re spinning our wheels in this lab,” Sax said. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  “No, indeed.”

  “I wish there was a way for us to be more useful.”

  Brambell fell back into musing. “The problem,” he said slowly, “is that the wrong people have been sent down to observe the Baobab. Gideon Crew: a nuclear engineer. Lispenard: a marine biologist. Garza: another engineer.”

  Sax nodded. “That’s a good point.”

  “Technocrats all. None of them are humanists—not like you and me.”

  Sax nodded, running a hand over her glossy brown hair, smoothing it down. Brambell found himself admiring just how healthy it looked, and how delicate and white her hand was. He wondered why he hadn’t paid more attention to her before.

  “What they really should have done,” Brambell said, “is to send someone like you or me down there—you, with an MD and PhD in medical science, or me, with an MD and decades of experience. We’re the ones best suited for understanding an alien organism like that.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  Brambell fell into another musing silence, thinking. His mind seemed unusually clear; it was remarkable, really, what a good nap could do. As he went back over in his mind the progress of the expedition so far, it really did appear to him now to have been a dog’s breakfast from the very beginning. Everything had been done the wrong way. The whole concept—of killing the creature—was flawed. It was clearly intelligent, and as such it could be communicated with. Reasoned with. Understood. Prothero had started down that path, but there had been no concerted effort; not really. If the Baobab could learn whale speech, surely it could learn human speech…

  “You know?” said Brambell, turning to Sax. “I think one of us should go down there and try to communicate with that thing. That would solve all our problems in one fell swoop.”

  He found Sax looking back at him with admiration in her eyes. He hadn’t noticed before how pretty she was. “Dr. Brambell, that is truly insightful.” She hesitated. “But…how would we get down there?”

  “We’ll simply borrow a DSV. I believe John is right there in the hangar, ready to go. I truly feel that a simple conversation, a respectful meeting of the minds, would solve all our problems.”

  “We…just take it?”

  “Yes,” said Brambell. “We take it. Only one of us can go, of course, and that one will be me.”

  “I should be the one to go,” she said. “After all, I’ve had some experience piloting DSVs.”

  “I’m not sure,” Brambell said.

  “Oh, please do let me go. You’ll be with me every step of the way—in spirit.”

  Brambell thought about this. Then he nodded. “Very well. Since we’ll be launching the DSV without any help, I suppose it might take my strength to manhandle the necessary equipment alone.”

  “Thank you, thank you!” Sax said, her eyes shining.

  “Dr. Sax, I don’t believe we should waste any more time—do you?”

  “Dr. Brambell,” she said, clasping her hands together, “I so admire your wisdom and courage.”

  58

  AS GARZA AND his team neared the engine room, he could feel and hear the vibration of the turbines coming through the ventilation duct. The focused beams of their headlamps cast a strong light down the duct to where it ended in a T. Beyond that T, and to the right, was the engine room duct. That was where they had initially encountered the nest of worms.

  He felt fairly confident there were more.

  He tapped the foot of the guy in front, and used hand signals to indicate they were to move up to the T and then pause. It was impossible to crawl through the ducts without generating a lot of noise and vibration, but Garza hoped that the worms would not be alerted, since plenty of noise and vibration was already traveling through the ductwork of the ship.

  The ducts were of sturdy galvanized steel, and well attached, but even so they were not designed to carry the weight of four people, and as they moved the metal groaned in protest, swayed occasionally, even sagged a little. They had spread out to try to distribute the weight, but it still felt at times that the ductwork might just come loose and precipitate them to the floor of whatever room they were in.

  As they neared the junction, Garza signaled another halt. He listened, straining to hear any scritching movements of shifting worms or the chalk-on-blackboard squealing sounds they made when excited. But there was nothing: just the humming of the engines and the whisper of moving air.

  If there was a mass of them around the corner, there would be no running away. All four of them knew that. On their hands and knees in a confined space, with no possibility of turning around, they would have to stand their ground—stay and fight, like the defenders of Thermopylae.

  The point man edged up to the T and, holding his camera out on its stick, eased it past the corner.

  The image appeared on Garza’s tablet. It took a moment to wrap his mind around it: the duct was free and clear for perhaps twenty feet, but then it became totally blocked by a large, bubbling mass that looked like thick, gluey porridge, or perhaps a giant glistening fungus. The surface of the mass was covered with what appeared to be giant pustules, but as he watched, a pustule burst and from it dropped a worm, which crawled off. And then another pustule burst; another worm dropped out.

  So the worms were breeding, but not at all in the way he’d assumed. It was a single entity, pumping out eggs. Fine—that made it all the more vulnerable.

  In silence he passed the tablet around so everyone could see what lay ahead, and then gestured for them to move back a little. When they had done so, he whispered: “That mass is right above the ma
in engine. Probably attracted to the heat.”

  Nods.

  “We can’t get into the engine room. So we have to attack it from here—inside the duct.”

  “How?” asked one of his men.

  Moncton, who was behind Garza, whispered, “We Tase it.” He held up his electrical prod. “I can set these to shock on contact, like a Taser. We throw them at the breeding mass.”

  “The current from a couple of D batteries isn’t going to kill it,” one of Garza’s men said.

  “The circuitry in here produces low current but high voltage,” Moncton said in a low voice. “Nine thousand volts, to be exact. So yes, it might kill it. It will kill it. That life-form conducts electricity better than copper.”

  “We’re dead meat crammed into this ductwork. We can’t even turn around!”

  “Pass me your zappers,” Garza said. “I’ll do it. I’ll toss two, keep one in reserve. Moncton, you take charge of the fourth zapper. Meanwhile, the three of you get back. And be ready to haul ass.”

  There was just enough room at the T-junction for Garza to squeeze past the two forward men. Moncton quickly unscrewed each device, tinkered with it, screwed it back together. “Just turn the flashlight switch on,” he said, handing three of them up to Garza. “Then the current will flow between the prongs as soon as there’s a connection—which there will be, the moment these prongs make contact with that thing. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Garza began to crawl forward, past the T-junction and to the right.

  His headlamp illuminated the pulsing mass. The worms were very responsive to light, and the bloated mass also reacted. The pulsing suddenly stopped. The worms crawling around it froze, coiled up, and took a protective, striking position.

  Garza braced himself, switched on the first zapper, and tossed it as easily as a horseshoe. It was a good throw and its two prongs struck the mass squarely; there was a flash of electricity and the thing contracted violently, with a flabby rush of air, most of its pustules bursting and releasing worms in various stages of development.