The Spawning (3 page)

Another flurry of pounding and the door blew wide open, snow and wind and subzero air rushing in at her.

It had come for her now.

Backlit by the shuddering security lamps and the weird purple-blue twilight, she saw a tall rigid form, glistening and hung with icicles. A cloud of frost and snow swirled around it, obscuring it.

Coiling limbs reached out for her.

Terrible red eyes looked down upon her with a flat malevolence.

She did not know what it was, only that it was something malignant.

Something shadowy.

Something monstrous.

And whatever it was, it said a single word in that buzzing voice:
“Butler.”

Out of whose womb came the ice?

—The Book of Job 38:29

POLAR CLIME STATION,
FALLING STAR ICE STREAM,
EAST ANTARCTICA
FEBRUARY 21

A
DESERT.

A frozen white desert.

Not a continent exactly, more like a crudely-gutted, rawboned cadaver thrusting from eons-old ice, its hide scraped clean and picked dry, nothing left behind but a meatless architecture of bones that the wind had long ago blown clean.

That was the first thing you thought when you stepped off the plane and onto the frozen crust at Polar Clime. And as you took in the soundless windy desolation around you, the jutting barren peaks of the Transantarctics rising from the snow in the distance like the jagged spines of some long-fossilized saurian, you were even more certain.

The place was lifeless.

An ominous polar desert.

A frozen tomb at the bottom of the world.

To one side towered the mountains that split the continent right in half and to the other, the endless hazy expanse of the polar plateau where the ice cap was three miles thick in places. That was Antarctica. A relic from the Ice Age, simply immense and sterile and just as lifeless as the dark side of the moon. Everywhere, blowing snow and hovering patches of ice-fog, glaciated ridges and horns of sculpted blue ice. The godless repetition was broken only by outcroppings of eroding volcanic rock that were only slighter older than the ice itself. If you stared at them too long, those rocks began to take on hunched quasi-human shapes. And if you didn't look away, you might hear them speak in a piping dead voice which was the voice of that ancient and mystical continent itself.

At the very edge of the wind-blasted polar plateau itself sat Polar Clime Station.

It looked like some crazy Martian playset a kid had forgotten out in the snow. All the buildings were bright red and flagged, capped by aerials and radar dishes and wind-speed indicators. At the very center sat a low dome with a snapping American flag atop it, boxlike buildings circling around its perimeter and connected by tunnels and drifted walkways.

Clime was a godforsaken place to spend a summer, let alone the long black Antarctic winter where the sun did not truly rise for five months. And when you came for the winter, you were there for good. You and whatever was inside you that might keep you sane while the days became weeks and the weeks became months and boredom set into you with teeth and the wind blew and the snow fell and that white frigid cage held you tight like a berry in a deep freeze.

That was the reality of the eternal darkness at Polar Clime.

The sign on the flagged ice road coming in from the airstrip itself pretty much said it all, all you had to know that year and maybe all you would ever know again:

UNITED STATES ANTARCTIC PROGRAM

NSF POLAR CLIME

WELCOME TO THE END OF THE WORLD

W
HEN COYLE FIRST HEARD about the disappearance of twenty-five people from Mount Hobb Research Station—the entire summer crew, in fact—he started to get some funny ideas. The sort that made it hard to close his eyes at night and even harder to dismiss some of the crazy stories you heard about down there. Absolutely demented stuff about pre-human cities that were older than the glaciers themselves and things from other worlds supposedly found frozen in the ice.

It was hard to get away from that business and particularly with what had happened down at Kharkov Station five years before.

Not that Coyle really believed any of that, but it was still at the back of his mind like an open sore that refused to heal. Back home, back in the world, all those tales and urban legends were easy enough to laugh off, bored minds with too much time on their hands and too many idiots spinning conspiracy theories on the internet.

But down in the cold wastes . . . well, it wasn't so easy to dismiss regardless of what common sense told you.

There was something about those ice-clad mountains and deep-cut jagged valleys and snow plains blasted by subzero winds. It got inside of you. Told you things you did not want to know and made you remember things long forgotten.

“Hey, Nicky,” Frye said and maybe he'd said it more than once because he was looking a little irritated. “Hey, fucking Nicky Coyle, you with me here or what? You listening to a word I'm saying?”

Coyle smiled. He hadn't been paying attention.

Frye just shook his head. “Jee-ZUZ-Christ, a couple weeks into it and you're already getting the long-eye.”

Coyle was sitting in a little warm-up shack with Frye, catching the rays off a Preway heater. Though Coyle was a cook—and a damned good one—he was helping Frye with the off-load from an Air National Guard C-130 transport.

Winter crews were small and you had to help out wherever needed. There were nearly a hundred people at Clime in the summer and just eighteen or nineteen come winter. Mostly the maintenance crew, contract personnel, a few scientists conducting experiments on grants from the NSF. The ANG C-130 idling on the strip was the last they'd see this year.

This was winter off-load: crates and skids and barrels. Machinery parts and medicine, construction materials and laboratory supplies. Food and cold-weather gear and tanks of fuel. Not to mention more important things like DVDs and liquor, tobacco and skin magazines. All the stuff that made the bleak winter livable.

Frye pulled off his cigarette. “Like I was saying, first Kharkov five years ago and now Mount Hobb. Twenty-five Brits missing. Ain't no fish-and-chips out here, baby, so I'm thinking they didn't step out for a bite. You know what that makes me think, man? Makes me think I should say screw this and hop on that One-Thirty, get the hell out of Dodge.” He winked at Coyle. “That is, if I was the superstitious type.”

“Which you are not.”

“Perish the thought. Takes a lot to rattle a guy like me, Nicky. Hell, this'll be my twenty-third year down here. Only the glaciers have been here longer than my wind-burned white ass.”

Frye was the Waste Supervisor, but given his experience there wasn't much he couldn't do. He knew the ropes so well he could identify the individual fibers. He was there for off-load because nobody knew better than Frye where everything should be stored. And once the bird was empty, then it would be time to load up the last of the spring waste: flattened cardboard and pure garbage, scrap metal and lab waste, barrels of sewage and contaminated radioactive debris that the scientists produced.

The ice from his beard was melting and Coyle was squeezing it out, droplets of water dropping onto his heated Carhartt overalls and blue parka. “It's all gossip. All we have is gossip about Hobb. Just chatter coming in from McMurdo. Who knows what the hell happened there?”

“That's it, that's it exactly.” Frye pulled off his cigarette, a flake of ash falling and blending right in with his steel-gray beard. “Now you're talking sense, Nicky. You get the rest of these wet-ends around here to believe it and we'll have ourselves a real crew. They got a bee in their bonnet ever since that Kharkov business.”

And they did, Nicky knew. A real big one.

Something the NSF wasn't real happy about.

The NSF ran Polar Clime just as it ran all the other U.S. stations in Antarctica. If you were a scientist and you wanted to keep your funding or a blue collar individual who wanted to keep your very lucrative contracts, you kept your mouth shut. Because ever since the Kharkov thing, nothing could get your ticket down there cancelled quicker than talk of lost cities and extraterrestrials.

If you wanted to keep your job, winter or summer, you had to keep your mouth shut . . . in mixed company, that was.

The U.S. Antarctic Program was managed by the National Science Foundation which itself was an immense bureaucracy. Under NSF auspices, the USAP—or “The Program” as it was known to veteran Polies—ran the whole show. They got the scientists their grants and kept the stations running, some just in the summer and others right through the year. The USAP hired support contractors like Raytheon and ITT to staff its stations, which provided the blue collar muscle that kept the stations going and supported the scientists. Most of the people on the Ice were grunts: mechanics and cooks, heavy equipment operators and electricians, boiler jockeys and pipefitters. Same as in the real world. The pay was good as were the benefits, but the bureaucracy ranged from being trivial and ridiculous to downright intrusive and controlling. The winters were less so, but it was always there.

The great company eye kept watch over everything and everyone.

An unwieldy giant tripping over its own lumbering bureaucratic feet and the reams of requisition forms and safety postings and half-assed psychological profiling that were its lifeblood. People came for the adventure and found a microcosm of the land they had left behind replete with whiners and paperwork, tattling and lying and ruthless self-promotion. A place where your pet rock or incense burner might be confiscated because they were in direct violation of company policy and self-appointed neo-Nazis reported you for smoking in unauthorized areas or taking too long in the showers or spitting your gum into the snow.

This was modern Antarctica.

Forget about Mawson and Scott and their daring deeds in that pristine wilderness and worry more about using too many staples or not flushing the toilet or not kissing ass on the right people. Social Darwinism at its lowest ebb.

And this, all of this, was the reason why Coyle found it hard to believe that the USAP or NSF could really, effectively, cover-up something of the magnitude of an alien city or a race of beings from beyond the stars. The Program was bloated with bullshit and political maneuvering, poisoned by corporate swindling and overseen by a lumbering, swollen Mickey Mouse bureaucracy that could barely contain the seams of its own pants.

But you never really knew.

Coyle had spent some twelve years on the Ice—proper noun to veteran Polies—and he knew how things worked. Or he liked to think he did. Mostly he worked winters because the crews were smaller and the NSF stranglehold was lighter. Frye and he had wintered-over together the past four years straight, three of them at Clime and the other at Amundsen-Scott Station, which was known to vets as “Pole Station” and never anything else. Before that, they had pulled winters and summers at McMurdo and Palmer and even a couple stretches at East Camp, which was across the runway from the Russian camp at Vostok. They'd spent a lot of time together and were pretty tight, like brothers or father and son. Same blood running through their veins. That's how Coyle knew that Frye was asking him what he thought about all that Mount Hobb business without actually
asking
him.

Not that he'd ever admit to it.

Frye was a working class hardcase from toenail to eyelash, a real terror to workers and managers and beakers alike. Foul-mouthed and evil-tempered and plain intolerant of anybody who had not been on the Ice at least a decade, he would never, ever admit that the whole Kharkov thing spooked him and the Mount Hobb business was bringing it all back in spades.

Never.

F
RYE STOMPED OUT HIS cigarette, pulled out a bag of Red Man chew and stuffed the rough-cut leaves into his cheek, started working them. “Sometimes I get to thinking about Kharkov. Crazy shit that was.”

“NSF said those people choked to death. Gas. As a good little employee who's looking forward to his fat little bonus for being such a cooperative rat in the maze, I must believe what is told me, my friend. The NSF is incapable of mistruth.”

“Good boy, Nicky. You suck NSF ass, that's the way. You'll go places. It worked for me. Twenty-five years ago I was washing dishes at McMurdo and now look at me. I've moved up to sewage.”

Coyle smiled. “Point being, I don't know what happened at Kharkov. Maybe I don't want to know anymore than I want to know what happened at Hobb. But the way I see it, we'll never know the truth, so we're better off to sweep it all under the rug with the rest.”

“Ain't you curious, Nicky?”

“Sure, but I know trouble when I see it.”

And it was trouble.

He knew that much. The whole Kharkov business was shady and he had a feeling the Hobb business would be the same. He didn't like any of it. The winters were long enough without imagining things. Coyle was invited down to the stations every year and that was partly because of his Ice-Time and mostly because he was a damn good cook and station managers fought over him. But it wasn't because he was a company man or an ass-kisser. He ran the NSF down as much as anyone, he just did it under his breath was all.

You don't bite the hand that feeds.

“You know what that mother-raper Locke is spouting off about? He says this winter's gonna be like that one five years ago,” Frye said. “Same spooky shit going on, only it's starting earlier this time around, he says. That's what he told me over my eggs this morning . . . and damn good eggs, too, Nicky. Just like that winter when the shit hit the fan at Kharkov, he tells me. We got field camps with scientists out there. That means something big's going down, Locke says. You know they don't run field camps, not in the winter. The only time I ever heard of it was that year at Kharkov when that beaker . . . what was his name? Gates? When he found that buried city.”