Operation Antarctica

by William Meikle

  Then he pushed open the door.

  *

  The air was much warmer now – Banks felt heat wash on his cheeks and brow. And the cause was immediately obvious. The golden circles and lines that circled the saucer on the floor glowed golden, a radiating heat as warm as the bar on any electric fire. The silver surface of the saucer caught the glow and reflected it back, somehow adding to the sense of a radiator that was in the process of warming up even farther.

  High above the saucer, white fluffy clouds scudded across blue sky that showed through the domed glass roof – the snow and frost beyond the glass had already melted away, as it had on the floor, where the damp patch now stretched almost to the doorway where they stood. Small streams of water ran down the walls from condensed drips of melting frost, the only movement in the hangar apart from themselves.

  Banks had been convinced that the corpses of the dead must have been brought into this area – they had searched everywhere else there was to search in the facility – but the larger chamber was empty – the corpses that had been on the floor were gone from here too. The hangar did not, however, feel empty – it felt that the saucer watched them, a huge, unblinking, eye. Again, Banks’ gut told him they were being scrutinized by something that was gauging them, measuring the risk they posed.

  Wiggins called from his right.

  “Cap, you need to see this.”

  Banks went over to where the private stood by the meters and gauges along the wall. The meter that had been down at zero on their last visit now hovered at a reading in the hundreds, and was definitely rising, albeit slowly.

  “What the fuck is this shite, Cap?” Wiggins asked, but Banks didn’t have an answer for him. He didn’t have an answer for much of anything.

  *

  Hynd brought the rest of the squad back to join the others when it was obvious there was no sign of either the dead, or of any immediate threat, in the hangar.

  “Somebody’s definitely screwing with us here,” Wiggins said.

  “You think?” McCally replied. “It’s like a fucking bad horror movie.”

  “Nah. I don’t see any lasses with huge knockers hanging out of their dresses.”

  “Yet,” McCally replied.

  “Stow that shite, lads. We’re on the clock here. So what now, Cap?” Hynd asked.

  Banks looked back at the saucer. It seemed even more golden now. The glow from the floor markings was definitely intensifying, and the meter still rose.

  If it’s this warm when the meter is only at the low levels, what the blazes will it be like when it gets fully charged?

  He pushed the speculation away; he didn’t have enough information to form any conclusions – at least none that made any sense to him. He turned away from the gauges to talk to the sergeant.

  “There’s only one other place those bodies could be,” he replied, and looked over the sarge’s shoulder at the still unblinking golden eye of the saucer.

  Hynd saw where Banks was looking.

  “In there? Don’t talk bollocks, Cap. There’s not enough room.”

  Banks let out a harsh laugh.

  “Maybe it’s bigger on the fucking inside.”

  “Aye,” Hynd replied. “That’s all we need right now, fucking Daleks.”

  “Can you see a door?” Wiggins said. “I cannae see any door in the bloody thing. How the fuck do we get inside?”

  “If you’re so bloody keen, lad, then come with me and we’ll find out,” Banks said. He turned back to Hynd. “Watch the doors, and watch our backs. Any funny business, shout loud and we’ll get the fuck out of there fast. Understood?”

  Nobody asked what he meant by ‘funny business,’ and he was glad of that, for he wasn’t quite sure himself. He only knew what his gut was telling him – shouting at him now – but he forced himself to take a step toward the saucer, then another.

  Wiggins followed him, two steps behind.

  *

  Banks stopped when he reached the outer gold circle. He unzipped his parka and dropped back the hood – it was several degrees warmer again this close to the source of the heat, and he felt it rise in waves from the golden circles on the floor.

  “Fucking Nazi under-floor heating,” Wiggins said. “The bastards thought of everything.”

  Banks put a finger to his lips, and Wiggins went quiet. Across the chamber at the door, the rest of the squad stood watching them, apart from McCally, who’d gone over to watch the gauges and meters.

  Banks stepped over the two concentric outer gold rings, but didn’t move inside yet, straddling the gold circles with a foot on either side. McCally immediately called out.

  “The meter’s rising faster, Cap,”

  “I thought it might,” Banks called back. “Something’s responding to our presence here. I think we’ve started something up. So if anything starts happening apart from the meter moving, shout. And shout loud, okay?”

  McCally gave him an okay sign, and Banks stepped all the way inside the circles, taking care not to tread on any of the other golden lines and squiggles. He braced himself, not knowing if an attack was coming but prepared for one anyway, but there was only the steadily rising heat, with no indication that his presence in the circles had been noted in any way.

  It was as warm as any British summer’s day now, the heat rising upward, like sun off hot sand at a beach, but Banks refused to shuck off his cold weather jacket – he had no guarantee that this warmth wouldn’t disappear as quickly as it had started.

  He motioned to the private, and Wiggins stepped gingerly over the gold circles to join him. This time, something took note. As soon as the man was fully inside the circles, a crack then a creak echoed across the hangar, and when they looked at the saucer, it was to see a door-shaped seam on the surface just to their left ahead of them.

  “Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in,” Wiggins muttered as Banks stepped forward.

  *

  Banks took off his gloves, unzipped his outer jacket, and stepped right up close to the saucer. He put a hand on what he hoped was the doorway. He’d expected the metal to be warm to the touch, but it felt cold, almost bitterly so, under his fingers.

  He turned back to look at McCally. The corporal made a maybe yes, maybe no motion with his left hand. That wasn’t enough to stay Banks from his chosen course of action. He pushed on the metal, and it gave way under the pressure, sinking several inches inward before sliding aside to his right with a squealing creak that spoke of a mechanism that had not been used for many years.

  Beyond the revealed entrance, the interior of the saucer lay in darkness and a cold breath of winter came out, accompanied by the smell of stale air and dust. There was still no hint of the stench of death, and Banks took that as a good sign. He pulled down his night-vision goggles and stepped up inside the craft.

  *

  The floor was cold underfoot. He felt it rise through the heavy rubber soles of his boots, and through the material of his trousers at his ankles and shins, feeling colder still after the relative warmth just feet away outside the door. He tensed, ready for action should any of the shifting shadows look to be getting closer to him, but there were no bodies inside the vessel, no life of any kind. Even more surprisingly, instrumentation, control mechanisms or means of propulsion, were all noticeable only by their absence – the saucer was little more than an empty shell of metal only an inch or so thick. Only a long window on the opposite side from the doorway broke the monotony of the blank walls. Despite the age that the documentation had intimated, there was no sign of any rust or degradation of the metal inside the saucer, and if he hadn’t known better, Banks might have thought the whole structure newly built sometime not long before they arrived.

  As he stepped inside farther, the window across the saucer was letting in enough light that he could abandon the night goggles again and look around properly. Despite the rising heat out in the hangar, the floor and walls of the interior of the saucer had a thin covering of frost, and the cold
was severe enough for Banks to zip up his parka again and pull the hood up over his ears.

  There were no footprints on the floor save his own leading in from the doorway, and no sign that anyone had entered the vessel in the years since it had taken its position on the hangar floor. There was certainly no sign that the bodies of the dead had ever been stacked inside at any time, never mind in the past few hours.

  And yet his gut shouted at him even louder now. Something was definitely off here, and it had him twitching. He almost jumped when Wiggins spoke behind him.

  “Is it safe to come up inside, Cap?”

  Banks motioned the other man forward, but stopped him from going further than he had gone himself. He heard his own confusion echoed back at him when Wiggins spoke again.

  “What the fuck is this, Cap? Surely this bugger never went anywhere? There’s no fucking controls.”

  Banks hushed the younger man to silence – he’d spotted something else, and as he moved across the saucer floor toward the window, his heart sank to see what was inlaid on the floor. There were more of the golden circles and lines here, two sets of them, twin pentacles set on the floor six feet apart and eight feet from the window, the same ones he’d seen the young blond pilots stand inside in the photographs.

  As Banks approached the left side one, the lines took on a dim glow, and the frost melted around the outer circle. Dark shadows swirled around the interior of the craft, and Banks tasted an impossibility: salt water, ice-cold at his lips. He heard a whisper, soft and low, like air escaping from a tire.

  “Do you hear that, Cap?” Wiggins whispered.

  Banks nodded and put a finger to his lips again, calling for quiet. The sibilant sound echoed around the saucer interior, melding with the rise of distant chanting, a choir singing in a wind. Banks couldn’t pinpoint any source. If it was a recording, there was no obvious mechanism, and no off switch. And whatever it was, it was getting steadily louder.

  “Where the fuck is it coming from?” Wiggins whispered, as if suddenly afraid to raise his voice. The chanting got closer, a strange, guttural cacophony that contained no words of any language Banks could recognize. At that point, he wasn’t even sure that human vocal chords were capable of making the sounds he heard, yips and cries, chirps and whistles intermingled with bass drones and harsh glottal stops. The whole effect was exaggerated by a sudden blast of even colder air that swept through the saucer like a gale.

  “Somebody opened a window,” Wiggins said.

  “I don’t think so,” Banks replied, and pointed at a spot between the two pentacles on the floor.

  At first, it was just a darker shadow that sucked the light away, leaving only bitter cold behind. Banks strained to make out detail as the chanting rang in his ears and the floor of the saucer vibrated in sympathy, swaying lazily in time. A shout came from outside, McCally by the sound of it, but he was so very far away, and Banks couldn’t drag his gaze away from the dancing shadow between the pentacles on the floor.

  The chanting took on a definite beat that set his whole body shaking, vibrating with the rhythm. Flakes of frosty ice tumbled from the walls, the sound as they hit the floor also, impossibly, in perfect time with the growing beat. Banks’ head swam, an effect not dissimilar to knocking back a large measure of liquor too quickly, and it seemed as if the walls of the saucer melted and ran, as if they too were made of no more than melting frost and ice. The light from the window receded into a great distance until it was little more than a pinpoint in a blanket of darkness, and Banks was left alone, in a cathedral of emptiness where nothing existed save the dark and the pounding chant.

  He saw stars, in vast swathes of gold and blue and silver, all dancing in great purple and red clouds that spun webs of grandeur across unending vistas. Shapes moved in and among the nebulae; impossibly huge, dark, wispy shadows casting a pallor over whole galaxies at a time, shadows that capered and whirled as the dance grew ever more frenetic. Banks was buffeted, as if by a strong, surging tide, and tasted salt water at his lips again, but as the beat grew ever stronger, he cared little. He gave himself to it, lost in the dance, lost in the stars.

  He didn’t know how long he wandered in the space between. He forgot himself, forgot Wiggins, dancing in the vastness where only rhythm mattered.

  Lost in the dance.

  *

  He only came out of it slowly, aware that someone was shouting in his face. The voice sounded alien and strange, and it was a struggle to even recognize the noise as words at first, for they echoed and boomed, coming from a great distance down a long tunnel.

  “Cap? John? Come on, man, wake the fuck up.”

  Banks finally found something to grab on to. John – that was his name, somewhere that wasn’t out in the dark, somewhere firm, somewhere he had a friend. He mouthed a word, trying it out for size in his throat, then managed a whisper.

  “Hynd?”

  “Aye, it’s me, man. Come on, Cap. Come back to us.”

  The chanting receded as fast as it had come, and Banks’ sight returned between one blink and the next. He looked up to see his sergeant lean over him. Hynd had a concerned look on his face. At the same moment Banks noticed that fact, he also realized that he could see the high glass dome of the hangar roof over the sergeant’s shoulder.

  “What the fuck am I doing on the floor?”

  Hynd laughed bitterly.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing. Cally and I had to drag you and Wiggins out of yon fucking saucer. We found you both lying on the floor, twitching and singing to yourselves. It’s as if you were hypnotized or something.”

  “Aye, or something,” Banks said, and tried to stand, only to find that he had gone dizzy and weak at the knees. Hynd had to help him upright. He noticed that he’d been dragged all the way out of the saucer, and all the way out of the glowing golden circles, and was now standing over nearby the gauges and meters.

  He turned to look at the saucer, then wondered if he had come all the way out of the dream after all. Where before it had sat flush to the floor, the craft now hovered, six inches clear of the lines of the pentagram. There was no sign of the door again, just a seamless stretch of smooth metal. The craft hung in the air, golden yellow now, and humming softly.

  We turned the fucker on.

  - 8 -

  Banks’ head cleared slowly, enough for him to be aware that the squad was all looking to him for direction. This was beyond their training – beyond Banks’ training too – there was nothing here to fight, nothing to shoot, just the golden hovering craft, six inches off the floor with no sign of any controls or engines to indicate how it was done, its sheer impossibility taunting them.

  “It’s a trick; it has to be,” McCally said.

  “It’s a fucking great trick though,” Wiggins said. He too was looking groggy, but he pushed McCally away when the corporal offered a helping hand. “Under the floor heating, disappearing dead men, and now the grand finale, the incredible levitating UFO. Fucking Nazi wankers are really taking the piss now.”

  Banks saw that he was within seconds of losing the squad’s attention completely.

  Get them moving.

  “Bollocks to it all,” he said. “I’ve had enough of this buggering about in here. This is obviously a job for the boffins, and I’m guessing the brass will send the real specialists to relieve us. So let’s go back upstairs to the wee hut, shut the door on this thing, and drink tea until they get here.”

  “No argument from me, Cap,” Wiggins said. “I just about pished myself in there.”

  “To be fair,” Hynd said, “you don’t usually need an excuse.”

  The humor wasn’t quite as natural as usual, but Banks appreciated the sarge trying, and the men all laughed, albeit without much joy in it.

  But it’s a start. Now, get them out of here.

  He saw sweat glisten on some of the men’s faces, not from fear, but from the temperature in the hangar, which appeared to have stabilized somewhere in the 60s Fahrenhe
it, positively balmy compared to the Antarctic air just beyond the dome.

  Hell, they shouldn’t have bothered with the saucer. They could have conquered the world without a fight if they’d given us the secret of this kind of heating.

  The hut out on the ice was going to feel frigid after this, but he couldn’t bear the thought of spending any more time this close to the empty saucer. His experience among the stars had left him wrung out and shaken, and all he wanted to do was to breathe fresh air again and feel real salt water spray on his cheeks.

  “Cally, you and Hughes on point. Wilkes and Patel next up, Wiggins is with me, Sarge and Parker, watch our back. Double time, let’s get the flock out of here. Silent running until we’re topside.”

  *

  Cally pushed the hangar door open and checked the corridor before turning and giving a thumb and forefinger okay. The squad moved out. As soon as the double door closed at their back, the temperature dropped, although the golden glow stayed with them for the first ten yards of the tunnel. It was only when they left the limits of its light and had to revert to their night-vision goggles that Banks felt some of the tension flow out of him, tension he hadn’t realized he’d been holding onto since waking on the floor of the hangar. Each step took him farther from the dance in the dark, and he felt some of his sense of purpose return at the same time as the beat of the rhythm slowly faded from his muscle memory.

  He wasn’t given time to enjoy it. Before they even got halfway down the corridor, the double door at the far end opened. A blast of colder air hit them, then tall shadowed figures stepped into the doorway and walked forward, calmly and steadily.