Beyond the Ice Limit

by Preston, Douglas

  It was hell, controlling the DSV with the weight of the nuke dangling below. It never ceased swinging and pulling the Pete along with it, back and forth, requiring constant course adjustments. But he made decent progress and, within a few minutes, the hulk of the Rolvaag reared above him. He slowed, bringing Pete in behind the cover of the ship. He didn’t dare turn off his lights during the forward movement; he hoped the glow wouldn’t be picked up by the Baobab.

  The two pieces of the wreck loomed up over him, its great rust-colored hull sweeping upward and out of sight. He came to a halt mere feet from it, well hidden from the Baobab. He shut off his lights and settled in for a short wait—his last. Funny, now that he was facing death—certain death—no thoughts came into his brain. Just the final steps he had to take in order to position the bomb, complete his mission. And—he smiled grimly—save the world.

  Twenty-four minutes.

  Suddenly, through the starboard viewport, he saw lights approaching. Bright lights. He was confounded: what the hell was this? He turned on his own lights and saw, with utter surprise, the DSV John—coming straight at him at flank speed.

  66

  ELI GLINN FELT the vibration of the ship’s engines and knew immediately what had happened.

  “What the hell?” Garza said. “The captain didn’t have orders to move!”

  “It’s not the captain,” Glinn told him. “The mutineers must have seized the bridge.”

  Garza shook his head. “Well, they’re just a few minutes too late, aren’t they?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “Mother of God,” said Garza, staring at the spot in the water where Gideon’s DSV had disappeared. “That took guts. Even for a dying man.”

  “It’s not over yet,” said Sam McFarlane.

  Glinn glanced at the man. His face was gaunt. He looked like a ghost. His eyes were sunken.

  “Gideon might be a little crazy,” said Garza, “but the guy’s got luck. He hasn’t failed yet.”

  There were shouts—and then Glinn saw a group of armed mutineers running toward them across the aft deck, weapons drawn. The DSV handler took one look at them, then sprinted off in the direction of the hangar. A burst of gunfire rang out and he was cut down.

  “Down!” the mutineers commanded, as they surrounded them. “Facedown on the deck! Keep your hands in sight.”

  Raising their hands, Glinn, McFarlane, Garza, and Wong were surrounded. They knelt, then lay facedown. The men searched them, removed their weapons, handcuffed them, and hauled them back to their feet. Glinn noted that one of the men had flecks of blood on his shirt—he had recently, it seemed, suffered a nosebleed.

  “Where’s the ROV?” the one with the nosebleed asked. “What just happened here?”

  “What just happened here is that you bastards are too late,” said Garza, spitting on the deck.

  The men stared at him. They looked confused. “What do you mean, too late?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “We’re going to lock you in the hold so you don’t cause any more trouble,” said the man with the nosebleed. “Come with us.”

  As they were being marched below, Glinn noted that much of the terror and chaos that had gripped the ship had subsided. The vessel had become more organized; the crew were going about their business with purpose. An unnatural calm had fallen. Was that because they were finally moving away from danger and heading for port…or because most of the crew had now become infected?

  He glanced more closely at Prothero’s lab assistant, Rosemarie Wong. Her lab coat was splattered with blood.

  “Are you hurt?” Glinn asked.

  “Not my blood,” she said. “You know what’s going on, don’t you?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  She lowered her voice. “They’re almost all infected.”

  Glinn nodded.

  “And we’re next. They’re locking us up in a worm-infested hold so that we, too, can join the cause.”

  Glinn felt a sense of infinite exhaustion. But the Baobab would not prevail; Gideon would succeed in killing it. He wondered what would happen when the worm-infested ship and the parasitized crew docked in Ushuaia. But he realized such concern was pointless. If the Baobab was destroyed, there wasn’t much the infected crew could do about it. On the other hand, if Gideon failed in his mission…then it would just be a matter of time.

  He glanced at his watch: twenty-six minutes to detonation. As they’d been led below, he’d noted that something seemed wrong: given the sound of the engine, and the sense of forward movement, it was clear the ship wasn’t reaching its normal cruising speed of twelve knots. Instead, it seemed to have plateaued at around four or five. Why, he didn’t know. But at this rate, the ship wouldn’t clear the six-mile radius of possible shock wave from the explosion. Perhaps that will take care of the infection problem, Glinn thought grimly as they descended into the darkness of the hold.

  They were thrust through a bulkhead door into a dank, throbbing space in the very bowels of the ship. The door clanged shut, cleats were dogged from outside, and absolute darkness fell.

  And then he began to hear, from all around, a rustling, scritching noise.

  67

  GIDEON COULD SEE that John was on a kamikaze mission, AI obviously turned off or overridden, the mini sub intending to ram him. He ramped up the propulsion and brought Pete around to face John while at the same time ascending as quickly as possible. But being tethered to the nuke made his DSV sluggish and difficult to maneuver. He realized that what he had to do, above all, was to protect the six propellers in the rear from damage.

  Slowly, agonizingly, his propellers humming, the DSV rose, the tethered nuke dangling. John came on fast but erratically, and through either misjudgment or mishandling it missed ramming Pete, passing just to one side; as it swept past, Gideon glimpsed Antonella Sax working the controls, struggling to bring the DSV back around without the help of the autopilot. It was incredible: the senior exobiologist, in thrall to the alien life-form. What in hell was she thinking?

  Now Pete was ascending faster, while below him he watched Sax’s DSV make a loop, coming back around and heading for him once again. Gideon realized she was on a trajectory to hit his stern—aiming, rightly so, for the propulsion system.

  There was nothing he could do, he realized, to avoid an impact. Quickly moving his joystick around, he rotated the DSV so as to put the propellers behind and watched, helplessly, as John came straight at him. Sax’s calm, bland face could be seen illuminated through the forward viewport, staring at him as she closed in.

  There was a terrific crash and Gideon was thrown forward, arrested by the safety straps, his DSV recoiling from the blow. A monitor cracked and a shower of sparks fell inside the personnel module. But the titanium sphere was built to withstand immense pressure, far higher than any ramming would accomplish. She couldn’t sink him by ramming him—but she could make it impossible for him to deliver the weapon to the proper altitude.

  Sixteen minutes.

  As his ascending sub cleared the upper edge of the Rolvaag, the Baobab loomed into view. Gideon was shocked: it was now glowing from some sort of internal phosphorescence, a gigantic, pale, greenish-yellow thing that no longer looked like a tree but rather a vast polyp, swelling and subsiding as it drew in and expelled water.

  He wondered if Sax could be reached on the UQC; if there was any chance of talking her out of this crazy defense of the Baobab. He switched it on.

  “Antonella!” he cried. “Can you hear me?”

  John was coming around for another swipe at him. To his surprise, her voice came back, calm and steady. “I hear you loud and clear.”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “The question is, what are you doing?”

  “I’m trying to kill that thing—which intends to destroy the earth. Don’t you understand that you’ve been infected? You’re being manipulated!”

  At this, Sax gave a low laugh. “So you, too, Gideon, have dr
unk the Kool-Aid. This splendid and intelligent life-form comes to earth, and our response is to try to kill it? How sad.”

  “Yes: because it’s a parasite, and it’s going to kill us if we don’t kill it first.”

  Another mild laugh of amusement. “You know nothing about it. I’ve been communicating with it, Gideon. What an extraordinary experience. I know what it wants, what it thinks, what it feels. It’s come here in peace and goodwill—and it can’t understand why you want to exterminate it.”

  This was nuts. And he saw that something else was coming in besides her voice transmission; some sort of data dump into the UQC. Was she trying to hack into his DSV? But even as he was getting ready to shut it down, her DSV was bearing down on him. He rotated Pete, once again trying to shield his propulsion. But this time he could see that Sax was coming in low.

  She’s going to ram the ROV containing the nuke.

  He reversed the joystick and slowed his ascent so she wouldn’t hit the ROV. But to Gideon’s absolute horror, his maneuver only caused her to miss the ROV and come in just above it—the mech arm of the John slicing right through his tow cable. It snapped with a violent jerk, and, through the downward viewport, he saw the ROV plummet toward the wreck of the Rolvaag and disappear into the big gash in the hull.

  Suddenly—untethered from the weight of the bomb—Pete shot up like an air bubble, rushing faster and faster, leaving John a rapidly dwindling cluster of lights in the blackness below. Out the side viewport, he had an extraordinary view of the gigantic glowing creature as he rushed upward past it, its vile orifice swelling and pumping; it writhed its branches threateningly toward him, but he was now moving so fast that he caromed right through their grasp, and a few minutes later the DSV popped up on the surface of the ocean, the mini sub tumbling about like a billiard ball before finally righting itself.

  In pure astonishment, Gideon looked out the forward viewport. Pete was bobbing like a cork on the surface of the ocean. A few miles away, he could see the receding silhouette of the Batavia.

  He glanced at the countdown. Twelve minutes to go.

  What the hell, Gideon thought; his mission had failed but he might as well try to save his own ass. He jammed the joystick forward and headed the DSV for the ship.

  Nine minutes to detonation.

  He kept the joystick pushed to the maximum, but the DSV moved slowly at the surface, impeded by the heavy seas of the approaching storm. He was eking out a few knots at best. For whatever reason, the Batavia clearly wasn’t going at top speed, either, but nevertheless it was still going faster than he was…and he was never going to catch up.

  Eight minutes.

  So the bomb had dropped into the Rolvaag itself. The quick-and-dirty simulation he’d managed to do in the short time available showed that the bomb, detonated on or inside the Rolvaag, would probably be insufficient: the steel of the hulk would absorb too much of the blast. He could only hope his calculations were off.

  Six minutes.

  He knew that the Batavia itself had to be at least six miles from the point of detonation, or the shock wave would rupture its hull. There was no way Pete was going to clear the danger zone, and as he saw the Batavia limping along, he realized it would not make it, either.

  Four minutes.

  At his current speed of two knots, he would be three surface miles from the Rolvaag when the bomb went off. Two squared plus three squared…what was the God-damned square root of thirteen? Three and a half miles—that would be his straight-line distance from the blast.

  Two minutes.

  He had to stop thinking about the blast. Instead, he thought of Alex. He pictured her face. He thought of her, freed from that monster. That was better.

  One minute.

  The light arrived first—a dull flash in the bottom viewport. And then, three seconds later, the shock wave hit and it was like being punched by a gigantic fist and all went black.

  68

  AFTER THEIR WOULD-BE jailer had sealed the hatch, Eli Glinn could make out the clang of his departing footsteps. They had been put in the lowest part of the hold, called the lazarette, which contained the ship’s steering gear and enclosed the hull seals for the azimuthing propulsion pod. It was dark and hot. Below the steel-grate floor, he could hear water sloshing around and the sucking sound of a bilge pump.

  He could also hear a gathering noise all around them, a chorus of rustling and scratching: the worms, emerging from their hiding places.

  “The scientist in me,” said Wong, “wonders how it works. I mean, you get this worm up your nose and into your brain, and then you’re doing the creature’s bidding. But you have no idea that’s what you’re doing. How do the infected people rationalize their actions?”

  Glinn felt a certain comfort in the distraction this problem afforded. “Human beings,” he said, “have a bottomless capacity for rationalization and self-deception. The worms simply jack into that capacity.”

  “True. But do you suffer amnesia? Do you remember a worm crawling up your nose?”

  “I imagine we’ll soon find out,” said McFarlane.

  In the darkness, Glinn was sorry he couldn’t check his watch to tell the time. There were only minutes to go before the explosion. He wondered if the ship was inside or outside of the danger zone. He hoped inside, and that the ship’s destruction would be quick.

  McFarlane gave a shout. “Son of a bitch! Fucking worm!” Glinn heard him moving around, stomping and shuffling.

  “Ugh!” Wong brushed off a worm and slapped at her clothing. “They’re all over!”

  He heard, around his feet, the sound of the gathering worms like the rustling of autumn leaves. He felt one begin to slide up inside one pant leg, then the other. He shook his limbs, slapping at the clothing even as he realized he was only delaying the inevitable. Maybe he should submit. But somehow he couldn’t do that—the feeling of the worms crawling on his flesh was so revolting that he slapped and kicked at them, trying to shake them off. But there were too many, too many, and they clung to the skin in a sticky sort of way.

  Garza was shouting, McFarlane was swearing, Wong was screaming. The hold filled with their cries. And still the worms came…

  And then it happened. It was as if they were inside a bass drum and someone abruptly pounded it, viciously, with a mallet. It was a boom so deep and so violent that it shook Glinn to his very bones, shook the brain within his skull, shook him into oblivion…

  But not for long. He came to lying on the grate, with a splitting headache, his ears buzzing. It was still dark. The scritching of the worms was gone—to be replaced by the sound of roaring water.

  “Sam?” he croaked.

  A groan.

  “Rosemarie?” Glinn felt around and located her, giving her face a light pat, then another. “Rosemarie?”

  She gasped. He helped her sit up. “My head,” she murmured.

  “You hear that?” came Garza’s voice. “The explosion ruptured the hull. The ship is sinking.”

  “And we’re locked in the hold,” said Wong, her own voice strengthening. “From worms to water. Pick your fate.”

  Meanwhile, the throbbing sound of the engine had become a grinding noise. After a moment, it ceased altogether.

  “Anybody have any ideas on how we might get out of here before we drown?” Glinn asked.

  “No,” said McFarlane in a low voice.

  “I do,” said Wong.

  “Now’s the time to tell us.”

  “We find out how the worms got in here. And we go out that way.”

  “That’s right,” said Garza. “And we know how the worms got in here: through the ventilation shafts. Even a hold as deep as this one—especially one this deep—has to have serious ventilation.”

  Glinn heard Garza rise and begin feeling along the slanted bulkhead of the lazarette, tapping the walls. There was a hollow bang.

  “Here it is,” he said. “And here’s a gasket. Just follow the sound of my voice. We’ll crawl out of here.�
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  69

  GIDEON SWAM BACK from unconsciousness, racked with pain. It took a few minutes for him to think through what had happened and realize he wasn’t dead.

  The DSV was still floating on the surface of the ocean, but it was now upside down. His chair was on the ceiling, its straps loose and dangling. Something was wrong with his arm, and when he examined it he saw the ugly, shocking sight of a bone sticking out of his forearm, oozing blood. The interior of the sphere was wrecked, glass and wire everywhere, the acrid smell of smoke hovering in the dead air. The only light came in through the viewports.

  But…the shell was intact and he was alive.

  The sub had been battered severely by the shock wave, but the titanium hadn’t been breached. He could see, outside the starboard viewport, the R/V Batavia, about two miles away. It was listing in the water, no longer moving. Even as he watched, the list grew more pronounced and he could see that the ship was launching orange lifeboats.

  Dead air. He took a deep breath, felt a wave of dizziness. As he surveyed the interior wreckage of the sub, he saw that all life-support systems were dead. His only air was what was already inside the shell, and he’d been breathing it now for several minutes, perhaps even longer. It felt like the oxygen levels were dropping, as he was panting—or maybe that was due to the horrible pain of his broken arm.

  He needed to get out. And that meant climbing down and exiting from below; since the DSV was floating upside down, its only hatch was on the bottom. He hoped to God the force of the explosion hadn’t warped the hatch, trapping him inside…

  Pushing aside all thoughts of anything but escape, he tried to move. His head was splitting, he was bruised and cut all over; glass was in his hair, blood was trickling into his eyes, and his arm was a fright. Every movement was excruciating.

  He had to immobilize that arm if he hoped to be able to do anything. And he had to do it quickly, before he fainted from shock. Using his good arm, he managed to unbutton, then pull off his shirt. Gasping through the pain, he lashed the broken arm against his abdomen, keeping it in place. Clearing away debris with his good arm, he unsealed the hatch and—thank God—managed to open it. Water did not rush in—the air in the personnel sphere had nowhere to escape, and it formed a sort of bubble. The water was going to be cold, around fifty degrees.