The cable reeled out at a rapid rate, dropping into the icy abyss of the crevasse. It sped its way downward and stopped. Seconds passed. The winch reeled itself back in. Somehow deep inside Ruger knew that Abbott and Lisk were riding the cable back to the surface, more than likely unaware of what was transpiring there on the surface. They had not been aware. They had been waiting for their rescue…
There was little communication between the five men from that time forward once everyone had been assembled on the ridge by the alien antagonists. Cognizant only of each other’s presence, there seemed to permeate a mutual abandonment, and it was in this state of mental stupor that in unison they responded to what it obviously was that they were being compelled to do.
The engines roared to life on the two snowmobiles as if by magic. To compound their horror, the two machines moved themselves into position directly in front of the men as if they were being driven by ghosts. The aliens wanted them to get on. When the men occupied the machines, several minutes passed before it was recognized that they were to drive them off the slope under their own human control. Perhaps it would have been a better choice to freeze to death.
Ruger recalled that when the five of them ultimately marched into the tent through the midst of the howling wind, how he had braved glancing one more time at the horrifying spacecraft of his ungodly tormentors, which were all lined up ringing the encampment, still hovering motionless in the turbulent air. Ruger was the last to go inside, and he zippered up the tent behind him.
All that had happened, what?…An hour ago? Two? More? Ruger had lost all track of time. They lit the stove. The rest of the electronic equipment was dead, unusable. There was little left to be said. There was little left that could be said.
* * * * *
Precisely when it had been that the winds began to abate, no one would later be able to recall, least of all Ruger who had been drifting away along the edges of his own little dream world, trying desperately to escape the agonizing notion of his pending death. He was unable to shake the ingrained knowledge that these demons were indeed real.
None of them heard the commotion outside even though the pounding of the wind against the walls of the Scott tent had long ceased. The fuel on the camp stove had long been expended—for how long, Ruger didn’t know or care—when his brain was suddenly jarred back into the reality of the predicament.
They were shouts he was hearing. Human shouts. Voices that were calling the names of those he was with. Abbott…Lisk… Almshouse…Prall…Monroe…Then unexpectedly he heard his own name. Anger surged through his body. That these monsters would continue to torment them…Or maybe they were already dead and this was what it was like to be in an altered state of consciousness.
The sudden surge of anger brought a tiny amount of heat to the surface of his cold skin, but it quickly subsided as a shiver worked its way down along his spine. It told him just how cold it was inside the tent. It was downright frigid, and the horrible conditions were not to his liking in the shelter. They could—or more likely, would—perish very shortly of they didn’t get some warmth.
Confusion was running rampant through his mind, at first making him rationalize that he was either in, or near the state of death. Something was fooling him into thinking that the human race was at the threshold of the tent there to rescue him from the evil aliens. The others. Abbott…Grimes…they were all lying down on the tent floor in a fetal position surrounding the camp stove. Are you all asleep? he asked silently. Maybe dead? Who knows?
His attention was suddenly averted to the sound behind him. If this had been purgatory thus far, hell was about to begin. The zipper of the tent was opening, and somebody—something!—was coming through the door. Ruger closed his eyes to say a last prayer to a God he had hoped all his life he would never need. The terror was engulfing him like never before. Wishing only that he would die right then, Ruger attempted to give up all that was his essence. It was stemmed only at the last moment. Before his brain capitulated, it was the words that pulled him back up from the depths of oblivion.
“They’re in this one!” the human voice resounded. “Looks like they’re alive!”
* * * * *
It wasn’t over just yet. Despite the insistence of the man who identified himself as Lieutenant Commander Schwartz, U.S. Naval Attachment, McMurdo Station, that everything was going to be all right and they were being evacuated back to base, Ruger, Abbott, and the rest of them knew better. Everything was not all right. As a matter of fact, it couldn’t have been much worse. It was more than likely just a momentary hiatus before the alien entities resumed activity. Now more than just Ruger’s team was going to be sacrificed.
“Whatever it is you’re trying to tell us, Colonel Abbott,” Schwartz patronized, “you can talk more about it back at base. Right now we’re more concerned about exposure…”
“You sons-of-bitches!” Abbott shouted, pushing away the medic and climbing weakly to his feet. He was followed by the other four as they all rallied close to one another, much to the surprise of the men under Schwartz’s command.
There were a few tense moments before anyone tried to diffuse the erupting situation. It took several minutes before things calmed down and Abbott was able to convince their rescuers that they were all coherent enough to stand on their own two feet. Between sips of the hot soup, Abbott held them at bay with his raised hand until they had some replenishment. It helped immensely. A moment of quiet finally followed.
“Are they out there?” Abbott asked Schwartz, the look of terror still very much evident on his face.
“Is who out there?” Schwartz responded.
There was a momentary pause as the five men looked at each other, then in an unanticipated burst of energy, they bolted out through the tent door into the open glacial field. Schwartz and his medics protested loudly, following behind.
That was a short time ago. It had all happened so quickly. Ruger and Abbott were now standing outside the cargo bay door of the LC-130, bundled up against the frigid air that at the moment had turned very still. The alien spacecraft—all of them—were gone. There was simply no trace of their presence in the air. There was only the encampment up there on the slope, left in complete disarray. And the strange, circular pool that had frozen over like a glassy mirror. Schwartz had asked what it was. No one offered an explanation. Abbott only asked that they chip away some of the ice to take along.
“Let’s go. We’re out of here,” one of Schwartz’s subordinates called down the ramp, barely audible above the din of the turbo-prop engines. Everyone else was already on board. The two men took one last look up the glacial slope before boarding. The hydraulic door whined, clamping shut like a giant steel jaw.
The LC-130 had already re-oriented its position onto the ski-drag trail, facing the direction for take-off. The engines revved into a high-pitched crescendo, and it was the most beautiful sound Ruger had heard in a very long time. They felt the subtle motion as the plane surged forward, straining and groaning against the resistance of the ice. They were only into the take-off roll a few short seconds when unexpectedly the engines were feathered back to an idle. Ruger looked at his friend Grimes and nervously snickered, remembering that Hilly hated so much to fly anyway in these airborne contraptions…
The plane came to a slow stop. It hadn’t even moved a hundred feet. Their hearts dropped as the five of them looked at one another, nervously laughing to fend off the growing terror.
In the stillness, no one spoke. A minute passed before they heard Schwartz’s voice. Ruger peeked through heavy eyelids. Schwartz was standing next to Abbott, a strange look on his face.
“Why aren’t we taking off?” Abbott asked, surprisingly calm-voiced.
“I think maybe you’d better come up front, Colonel,” Schwartz said, choking.
Ruger felt the fear rising again out of the pit of his stomach. Something was wrong. Ruger knew right then and there what it was, but desperately prayed that he was going to be wrong. They b
olted out of their harnesses, hurried toward the flight deck behind Schwartz, crowding into the front of the plane jostling for position to peer out through the front Plexiglas window.
They had returned. Ruger could see them off in the distance, strategically positioned at the extreme opposite end of the ski-drag where he had placed the flagpole marker which was no longer visible, presumably blown away by the force of the earlier katabatic winds.
They could see only two of them at the moment. But the rest were out there, somewhere. The dull gray disks were hovering only a few yards above the ski-drag trail in a tight formation, obstructing the LC-130’s take-off. That was why the pilot had pulled off on the throttles and they had rolled to a stop. Whether the aliens were testing if humans were willing to sacrifice a collision was a moot point now. The humans had backed off.
Both the pilot and co-pilot looked back at Lieutenant Commander Schwartz, helpless, waiting for him to give an order what to do which never came. Abbott clenched his fist in rage and pounded the back of the co-pilot’s chair. Schwartz looked at him imploringly.
“Oh my God! They’re coming at us!” the pilot exclaimed.
“Damn!” Abbott cursed loudly.
“What are those things?” the co-pilot muttered.
“I don’t know,” the pilot responded, “but I sure as hell have never seen anything like that before!”
“I saw one once,” the co-pilot replied nervously. “But not this close.”
“Sir?” the pilot inquired, turning again toward Schwartz. “What do you want me to do, sir? Come on. Talk to me.”
The two disks continued closing toward the aircraft, very slowly, very deliberately.
“Jesus!” someone exclaimed, pointing out the front of the plane at what everyone else was now witnessing.
In the distance beyond the two slowly approaching disks, suddenly two more had entered visual range from either side and were falling in behind in formation.
“Oh my God! That’s it! We’re all done!”
Two more appeared behind that. And then another two, until finally there were twelve of them once again. Two rows of six each. In the last few seconds, they had slowed and ceased movement, stacked up in a tight formation.
“They’re going to attack!” Schwartz screamed.
“Shit! Shit! We’re done!” the co-pilot cried out.
“Just hold it!” Abbott’s commanding voice suddenly bellowed above all the excitement. “Just everybody hold it!” he yelled again.
There was a moment’s pause as everyone looked at Abbott. Out front, the spacecraft remained halted. From this head-on view, it was now difficult to count them because they were directly behind each other in two rows.
“What are they going to do?” someone back in the crowd asked.
To everyone’s surprise, Abbott answered quite calmly, “Nothing.”
Moving forward to get a better view, Abbott motioned for the pilot to stand-by. The formation had still been a good quarter mile off only seconds ago, but in the next instant, at a speed that was so incredible the human mind was incapable of comprehending, the twelve alien spacecraft had changed position. In the span of that time, the disks moved in closer to the LC-130…blink…blink…blink…peeling off each row of the formation one at a time and re-positioning themselves to the right and to the left of the ski-drag trail. It had resembled a string of blinking lights that someone had switched off and on.
“What are they doing? Oh my God!” the co-pilot shouted.
“I’ll tell you what they’re doing,” Abbott bellowed for everyone to hear. “They’re telling us to take off!”
“What?” Schwartz responded.
“Do it! Do it now!” Abbott commanded. He turned, slapping the pilot on the back to get his attention. “Throttle up and fly us the hell out of here. Now!”
“They’re going to kill us,” Schwartz responded absently.
“Listen to me, you idiot!” Abbott exclaimed, gritting his teeth. He put his face near to Schwartz, speaking in a slow, deliberate tone of voice for everyone to hear. “If we were to be terminated, it would have been done by now! You understand?”
Schwartz still gaped, dumfounded.
The pilot froze, his hands clenching tightly to the throttle arms. Abbott reached and grabbed the pilot by the collar, screaming into his face. “Do you hear me? They’re telling us to go! They’re letting us fly out of here. Now throttle up those fucking engines and get this plane out of here now!”
Before anyone knew what was happening, the pilot had throttled the controls full forward. The LC-130 lurched, and a moment later was hurdling down the ski-drag picking up speed, bouncing and groaning as it hit the mounds of recently formed ice, the alien craft zipping by as they hovered stationary along the runway.
The floor of the flight deck rumbled beneath their feet, each man in the crowded compartment fumbling to grasp for something to hold onto.
“Eighty knots,” Abbott heard the co-pilot calling out the ground speed, and several moments later calling out again, “One twenty.”
Just before the aircraft reached the end of the ski-drag runway, the pilot called out, “Rotate,” pulling back on the yoke controls, rotating the flaps, the aerodynamic thrust and lift propelling the bulky machine into the air. They felt the earth falling away beneath their feet as the vibration suddenly ceased, replaced by a new feeling through their senses as the massive aircraft, now airborne, climbed steeply into the charcoal gray sky ahead.
Sweat beaded on the faces of both pilot and co-pilot despite the sudden chill that had permeated throughout the flight deck brought on by the rapid change in altitude and pressurization. Their ears began popping, and it took several seconds for everyone to “valsalva” and adjust themselves to the changing air pressure.
No one had spoken a word since the moment of takeoff. The minutes passed. The plane now passed through the fifteen thousand feet altitude mark, and it was almost as if some psychological boundary had been reached, as the men on the flight deck began stirring, subconsciously marking the magic altitude as the benchmark by which they had escaped the menacing entities. But it was not to be. It began again.
The pilot had just begun banking slowly toward the next leg of the flight path route that would return them to McMurdo when things started getting wild all over again. This time, there were fifteen humans whose presence had been pre-arranged to bear witness to the most incredible event to take place on the Antarctic continent since the cataclysmic occurrence that, millennia ago, had buried The Land beneath a sea of eternal ice. For the aliens were now about to destroy their ancient colony, and they were going to see to it that these human intruders would testify to the power of their mastery over the human species.
The pilot was the first to notice that something had suddenly gone awry. The aircraft instrumentation began going crazy. He grabbed the yoke, but it stiffened in his hands when he tried to pull the plane back onto its heading, having stayed visually focused on the mountain range ahead. But the control yoke did not respond. It wouldn’t even move. The plane kept banking along the same elliptical curve, moving toward a heading that along the arc could take their flight path back toward the Mulock Glacier.
“What the hell…” the pilot cursed under his breath as he fought the yoke.
The co-pilot looked at him, stifled.
“She’s not responding,” he said, then gestured to the co-pilot, “Take her!”
The co-pilot instantly grabbed the control yoke at his position. He yanked on the handles. “She’s not responding here, either!” he called frantically.
“What the shit!” the pilot exclaimed. “It’s jammed or something.”
The plane continued to bank to the left until, completely unexpected, it reached the approximate heading toward the glacier and magically tapered off. Both pilot and co-pilot sat back in their seats horrified as the control yoke, as if by some magic hand, steered the plane into position along the heading. The yoke moved forward, and the plane began
a slow descent.
Frantic, the pilot grabbed the control yoke and pulled back with all his might trying desperately to level off the aircraft, but to no avail. The plane was definitely under control of some sort, but not by them.
“I don't fucking believe this!” the pilot exclaimed, releasing the yoke and holding his hands in the air. By this time, everyone had crowded back onto the flight deck watching things unfold. The aircraft leveled off at nine thousand feet.
“What’s going on here?” Schwartz said, casting an imploring glance at Abbott. “Jesus…they’re going to kill us off after all, aren’t they?”
“No,” Abbott responded, forcing his way forward to take position behind the pilot. “They’re not.”
“Look!” someone shouted, and to everyone’s horror the now familiar blink…blink…blink…brought the twelve alien disks to within close proximity of the lumbering aircraft. They were flying in a staggered formation of six each, two rows directly ahead of the aircraft. It was almost as if they were towing the plane through the gray sky.
No longer left to control their fate, the men on-board the LC-130 Hercules could do little else other than to transmit their frantic MAYDAY calls over the international emergency frequency. But in the end, in the weeks and months to come, the analysis of the U. S. Government would correctly interpret the act as a pre-ordained part of a much more complicated agenda. This was just one more piece of the million part puzzle. The men on this plane had only been fulfilling their role. It was very simple what that role would be. They were to watch.
What happened in the span of the next fifteen minutes was mostly beyond the comprehension of one single human mind. But collectively, they were all able to later reconstruct the catastrophic event that took place on the Mulock Glacier.
The Nexus Colony Page 34
