The Apocalypse Club (28 page)

“What is this?” I asked, walking up to the glass and peering through into the darkness. All I could really see was my own dark reflection.

Tristan opened a small panel and began pushing buttons, causing lights to flicker on the other side of the glass. My eyes got wider as the lights got brighter.

“Holy shit!”

I was looking out over what appeared to be a thick rainforest. The lights only illuminated about the first forty or fifty yards, but the trees seemed to go much further back than that. The most striking thing about it was that all the leaves, bushes and undergrowth was white instead of green. It made the landscape look distinctly alien.

“They’ve evolved to survive – in fact, thrive – without sunlight,” Tristan said, noticing my expression of combined awe and confusion.

I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. “Are there things living in there?”

“Oh yes,” Tristan said. “Look.”

He pointed to an overhanging tree on my left where something that looked vaguely like a cross between a pig and a large groundhog shuttled into view. It had large, expressive black eyes that blinked up at the overhead lights. I could see what looked like a black slash down the side of its body that appeared to be dripping onto the ground. Had it been injured? Was it bleeding?

Before I could ask, I heard a strange clicking sound that seemed to be coming from the trees. It was not a bird-like or animalistic sound. It sounded more like someone running a drumstick along a chain-link fence.

“Is that –”

Before I could finish my sentence, something large and dark shot out from behind a rock, grabbed the pig in one of its four arms, and disappeared again in a flash of teeth and claws. The pig squealed once and then there was only the sound of bones being broken and flesh torn apart.

“What the fuck was that?” I yelled, jumping back from the glass.

“I call them PKs,” Max said.

“PKs?”

“Psycho Killers.”

“Not a very scientific name, but an accurate one,” Tristan said. “They’re humanoid in appearance, mostly, but far better adapted to nocturnal hunting than you or me. It’s hard to say, of course. We haven’t been able to closely examine one.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said. “There’s no way for those things to get in here, is there?”

“No,” Tristan said. “That is an entirely contained biosphere. The only way in or out is through a secure door one floor down from here.”

“Well that’s a relief,” I gasped. “Sort of.”

“We cycle the lights on a twenty-four-hour basis to approximate daylight,” Tristan said. “I was just turning them on now to show you. That was probably what confused the boar.”

“Not for long,” I said. “How in the world did you do this?”

Tristan nodded toward what looked like a rectangular steel lab table on the wall opposite the viewing area. The top of the table was glass. The only thing inside was a glowing blue sphere roughly the same size as a five-pin bowling ball. It was held in place by thin metal vice grips on its horizontal axis.

“We found these during our joint expedition,” Tristan said. “They emit a high level of what appeared at first to be harmless radiation.”

“At first?” I said, taking a step back.

“This is a self-contained zero-point energy storage unit,” Tristan said.

“A who-say-what now?”

“That means you’re fine, dipshit,” Max grumbled.

“Oh, okay,” I said, not really feeling confident about stepping forward again but doing it anyway. “What is that?”

“I don’t know,” Tristan said. “We found several of them frozen in the ice at the bottom of a large fissure in the middle of the second week. It is, quite simply, something never previously identified as existing anywhere else on earth.”

“Huh,” I said. “So you’re thinking…meteorite?”

Tristan shook his head and spun a dial on the side of the cabinet. The ball rotated 180 degrees to reveal a marking carved into the underside. I leaned closer to the glass for a better look. It didn’t look like some sort of natural indentation in the otherwise perfectly blue sphere. It was a symbol, and it had definitely been carved out. It looked like a letter or Chinese character, but not one I recognized.

“Ah,” I said. “So somebody made it, then.”

“That seems extremely unlikely,” said Tristan.

“Why is that?” I said. “Maybe somebody else dropped it on a previous expedition.”

“If so, they would have to have been in the area long before Greenland or anything around it was formed,” Tristan said. “According to our best estimates, this rock is approximately 22 billion years old.”

I tried to process what he was saying. It had been a long time since I had taken high school introductory science. “Um, but wouldn’t that make it…”

“Older than the known universe, correct,” Tristan said.

“But…” I tried to think of something meaningful to say. Nothing came to mind. “How many of these did you find?”

“Nine of them in all.”

“Any idea what the symbol means?”

“I spent a great deal of time on that question,” Tristan said. “Interestingly, I did find some similarities in some of the symbols and letters that were incorporated in ancient glyphs and runes. Of course, that isn’t my area of expertise, so it’s strictly amateur guesswork.”

“And what did your best amateur guesswork come up with?”

“The closest thing I could find was one that means approximately the same thing as ‘beginning’,” Tristan said. “In our language, though, we would refer to it another way.”

“And what way would that be?”

He smiled. “Apocalypse.”

W
e returned to the anteroom because Tristan didn’t want to leave the lights on in the terrarium for longer than necessary and standing there knowing what was lurking in the darkness on the other side of the glass kind of gave me the creeps.

“Okay,” I said. “So you found some very old blue bowling balls in Greenland and then came home to live in a cave with whatever that was. How does that connect to tornadoes coming out of the sky on command?”

“Hudson wants what’s under that ice sheet,” Tristan said. “He can’t blow it up and he can’t risk drilling through it, so he’s taking a different approach.”

“Which is?” I asked.

“He’s melting it.”

“Say again?”

“I don’t think he settled on that approach immediately, of course. He did try several other expeditions, but they yielded no more than the first. Several of his expeditionary partners died, although it’s just as likely that he had them killed when they discovered what he was really up to. Ghenzhai. Cabosta. Others.”

“Are you saying that your former expedition partner is creating global warming so he can dig up the world’s oldest balls in Greenland?” I asked.

“You just saw what a tiny fragment of one of those rocks can do in a controlled environment,” Tristan said. “Imagine what you could do with eight of them in nineteen twenty-three. Not only do they have apparently unlimited biogenerative capacity, they are also an unlimited energy source. And, like all energy sources, can be used for almost any purpose. One side effect of even extremely limited exposure is that they prolong biological life. I have not aged a day or had so much as a mild cough in the last 90 years. I don’t know what is under all that – rapidly shrinking – ice. But keep one thing in mind, Mister Simms. These do not appear to be naturally occurring objects. They are not fragments of a meteorite.”

“So what are you saying?” I asked. “They’re…”

“Cargo,” he said. “And whatever brought them
here
is still
there
.”

“But that still doesn’t answer my question.”

“Imagine a power source like that in the hands of a man like Hudson,” Tristan said. “Unscrupulous, yes, but also brilliant. And fearless. I saw him scramble up rock faces and into cracks in the earth that left professional alpinists trembling. Every advance in technology achieved in the last century has his name on it somewhere. Most of it still hasn’t seen the light of day because he keeps it for himself. But he’s always there. Hiding in the background. The owner of the company that owns the blind trust that owns the company that owns the patents and trademarks.”

“I met him.”

“Not in the flesh, I imagine.”

“No. It was a teleconference. How did you know?”

“His body is somewhere, but he has little use for it at the moment. Terrified that it might become damaged, you see. Exposure to the rocks extends life, but it doesn’t make you immune from being hit by a truck while crossing the street. Or killed by a political undesirable who happens to sneak through your security controls.”

“Then where is he?” I asked. “In suspended animation somewhere?”

Tristan laughed. “No! His body may be. He probably retains a certain affection for it. He always did have a vain streak. But Hudson would never sleep through something like this. Particularly when his plan is moving into its final stages. But his mind is everywhere. He transferred his consciousness into a machine, you see. One that is powered by a fragment of one of his rocks, so he never has to worry that he will be extinguished by a blackout or an electromagnetic discharge.”

“Is it at the Firmamental head office?”

“I very much doubt it. I’m sure the original is in a bunker somewhere untouchable by anyone else. But he gets around. Any machine connected to any other machine anywhere in the world is open to him. Phones, computers, you name it. Anything with a network connection or that draws power from an outside source. He is omnipresent.”

I tried to fathom this. “But that would mean he…”

“I suppose you could say he has become the closest thing to a god that humans have been able to imagine,” Tristan said. “As the world has become more interconnected, his power has only grown. And his fear.”

“Fear?” I almost shouted it. Words need propulsion when the chasm between speaking and comprehending is as wide as that. “What in the hell could somebody – or some
thing
, if that’s what he is now – possibly be afraid of?”

“The same thing that all living things fear,” Tristan said. “Death. His rocks may lose their power. All of his machines may be destroyed or deactivated. He has taken steps, of course, but nothing is entirely foolproof. Eventually, even if he outlasts all that, he knows, this world itself will die. Through cataclysm or the inevitable collapse of our sun, he cannot stay here forever. And forever is very much on his mind. Immortality, Mister Simms. We dream of it before we even know what it is. And believe me, none of us truly know what it is. Do you know that there are small cults scattered throughout the world who know of his existence and worship him as a god?”

“No, but I see where they’re coming from.”

“He allows many of them to survive. Vanity. Except for one group in Nevada who applied for tax-free status, of course. Them he was forced to wipe out with a flash flood. The others survive in isolated pockets of perceived conspiracy nonsense. Many of them pray to him for fame, wealth, curses for various diseases, good weather. The usual things. I wouldn’t be surprised if he answers them from time to time, the old fraud.”

“But if he’s everywhere, he must be here!” I said, panicked.

Tristan raised a calming hand. “This facility is completely off the grid. All power is supplied by that blue rock you saw in the other room. I don’t actually need food or water.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“I was in there, too. Does that now mean I’m now going to live to be two hundred years old?”

“No. The storage unit is totally sealed.”

“Hmm. You wouldn’t be able to just maybe crack it open a little for me, would you?” I asked. “An extra fifty years or so might not be a bad thing.”

Tristan took a deep breath. “I have lived a long time. Long enough to see my wife, my child and most of my family die. When Hudson and I went our separate ways, he knew that I knew far too much to just let me walk away, so he has been hunting me ever since. When he couldn’t get me, he went after my family. I tried to save them. Tried and failed. It’s not me he really wants, anyway. It’s that damn rock. He has tried everything to get it back.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked. “Blow up all the Weather Stations to stop them from melting the ice sheet?”

Tristan looked grim. “No, I’m afraid we passed that tipping point many years ago. The sheet is almost gone. And there are thousands of Weather Stations all over the world. Most of them quite well guarded. Even if you did manage to take one of them down, he would have it back up again in moments.”

“Did we talk about this already and I missed it? What exactly is his plan?”

“As I said before, he believes – and I happen to agree – that those rocks are not just random space debris. They were shipped here. He believes that whatever brought them here is still sitting under the ice.”

“An alien spaceship?”

“If you consider that we as a species evolved from rocks that travelled here on that ship, it’s a bit of a stretch to call it an
alien
craft,” Tristan said. “It would be more accurate to call it our mother ship.”

“Right. And what exactly is Hudson planning to do with it?”

Tristan looked at me like I was a particularly dull student. “All things being equal, I think he means to fly it out of here, my boy.”

“To where?”

Tristan shrugged. “I would assume, to back to wherever it came from.”

“And we’re going to…”

“Try to stop him, naturally.”

“Right,” I nodded. “Of course. And, uh…”

“Yes?”

“Why would we try to do that, exactly?”

“You of all people have seen firsthand the damage that Hudson has done to this planet with only a fraction of the power that may be available to him if he succeeds,” Tristan said. “Imagine the havoc he would wreak with unlimited resources and entire galaxies at his mercy.”

“I am trying.” The most I could conjure up was an image of the Mars Curiosity rover being sucked up by a giant black funnel cloud. Nope. E.T. being sucked up by a giant funnel cloud? Not really doing it, either. Never really liked that alien with his glowing finger, big bug eyes and squealing voice.