The Spawning (54 page)

Its entire body was creeping with them.

It was like some living cocoon giving forth grotesque pupae.

Some were large with spreading jointed legs like spider crabs and others small and twitching like tarantulas. As everyone watched in horror, legs and segmented bodies were disengaging themselves from the thing. Appendages like pencils burst from its throat, its face, its chest, dozens and dozens of them like wiggling pale fingers. An especially large parasite unfolded itself out of the mouth, a fan of legs reaching out like a pallid hand emerging from the thing's throat. More and more all the time. Several of them rose from the matted hair atop its bulbous head.

Horn couldn't take it anymore.

He opened up with his SPAS-12 and blew the crawling thing into fragments. It literally broke open with a moist, cracking sound. And from the burst smoking husk, the parasites came like an army of bony, embryonic spiders .

Then Long squeezed the trigger on his flamethrower and engulfed the nest in a curtain of fire and what was beneath sizzled and smoked and snapped. The parasites popped open like ticks in the heat,
pop-pop-pop,
one after the other and the sound of that was absolutely hideous. A few scuttlers made it away and Horn stomped one with his boot, its chitinous exoskeleton cracking open with a hiss of white goo.

The others wouldn't make it far in the cold.

Gwen, who was absolutely beside herself with revulsion and fear by this point, was shaking so badly she could barely keep on her feet. She turned away from the stinking, burning mass and then her eyes widened. “Nicky,” she said.
“Nicky . . .”

C
OYLE WAS HANGING ON now out of luck and sheer strength.

He did not dare move.

He did not dare even breathe.

It wouldn't take much and he knew it. The crevice was black and grainy and he could not see a thing, only the flickering light from above that painted the mouth with bands of yellow and orange light.

The amazing thing was that he was no longer aware of the cold. It was there, all right, but with every muscle in his body straining, his blood juiced with adrenaline, he was warm. Very warm. Hot sweat was running down his face, steaming in the frigid air. It was stinging his eyes and trickling down his spine. All he could feel besides his tensing, aching muscles, was the abyssal depths below him. And that made his belly flop over upon itself again and again as he imagined what the impact would be like far below.

Then flashlights were in his face and he could see the crevice angling up to the mouth above. It wasn't very far away at all . . . maybe twenty feet at most, not even. If he could just move enough to dig his cleats in.

“Nicky!” Gwen's voice. “Nicky! Hang on!”

And at that moment, some self-sacrificing part of him wanted to call out to her like some hero in an old movie.
No, don't risk it! Don't come after me! Just leave me down here and save yourselves!
But his mouth refused to frame those words. It, like the rest of him, wanted to live. He did not want to die this way, plummeting hundreds and hundreds of feet into an icy grave.

He could hear them discussing it above and then Dayton simply took charge as he was prone to. What they did was form a human chain with Dayton at the mouth of the crevice, Reja next, then Horn, then Long, and finally Gwen. They dug their Stabilicer cleats in, locked hands, and slowly, inch by inch, they moved closer and closer to him.

Coyle felt himself slide out another inch.

He called up reserves of strength he never knew he had, pressing himself down into the ice, trying to meld himself to it.

Gwen was only a few feet away now.

She had taken her balaclava off and her cold-pinched face was beautiful. Simply beautiful. Her eyes were huge and dark and he could see how much she cared for him. It made his heart squeeze in his chest.

“Hold still, Nicky,” she said.

As her reaching hand got closer and closer, he heard a sudden and intrusive noise up in the cavern: a high and evil buzzing like thousands of bees were fanning their wings. It was a very darkly harmonious sound, but one filled with malefic intent that made the ice around him vibrate and tremble. The Old Ones were gathering in masses now, winging out of the darkness of the Beardmore or flying up from some bottomless crevasse and clustering out there like rooks.

Gwen's hand.

Inches away.

A crackling sound rose up, that electronic pinging and humming as if some eldritch machine buried in the ice was starting up, sending out oscillating waves of power. He felt a sickness roll in his belly, a hot-sweet nausea at the sound and feel of it. If those things attacked now, came to drain their minds now–

He lifted a hand to clutch Gwen's.

And the crevice shook, rippled with seismic energy that shook the glacier, made Dayton's chain of bodies tense. Everyone cried out. More than a few were cussing. But they did not falter, did not hesitate in what they were doing.

Coyle gasped. He started to slide and it felt like the bottom of his belly had opened up, because he knew he was going down this time.

Then Gwen snatched his wrist and held it in a grip of iron.

“Got him!” she called out.

“Okay.” Dayton's voice. “On the count of three we move together! One . . . two . . . three . . .”

“Mama's got you, Nicky,” Gwen said, straining. “She won't let go . . .”

They moved together as Dayton had instructed. Left leg up a few inches, then right, then left and then right. Coyle could feel the irresistible strength flowing through that chain of arms and helping hands, that strength and willingness to sacrifice which he knew was purely human and had nothing to do with aliens or their engineering. This was real. This was vital. This was the human condition in all its unstoppable glory.

Coyle was dragged up ten inches, then a foot, and then he arched up his knee and dug his cleats into the lip of the crevasse and pushed and then he was part of it, part of that caterpillar of human muscle and human determination. He moved farther and farther from the crevasse. Dayton was out of the crevice now. Then Reja and Horn. They gave one last powerful jerk and he was up himself.

His ass thumped firmly in the crevice mouth, cleats dug in.

Somebody dropped their flashlight and it rolled past him, end over end, the arcing light picking out the fissured convolutions of the crevice itself and then bouncing over the lip and into the fathomless blackness below. The light reflected off the splintered blue ice walls and the sheathed icicles marking the descent into nameless depths far below. Then the light was gone. They never heard it hit, down and down and down it went, swallowed into the chasm.

His head spinning, Coyle finally allowed himself to suck in an unrestricted breath.

W
HEN COYLE GOT TO his feet, that rumbling rose up again and everything vibrated. The cavern shook and icicles fell. Seismic waves of force passed through the glacier and Coyle and Gwen clung to each other as it felt like the entire cavern was about to collapse on them.

But it didn't.

But something was happening.

Something far below them was making itself known and nobody really wanted to know what that was. But in their hearts, they were aware of what it might be. That something hellish and pestilential was being born down there and what they were hearing and feeling was its birth pains.

It died away, then came again and the Emperor shook, ice falling around them. It was repeated again and again and each time, that rumbling from below was louder, closer, more insistent like something was being summoned from the bottomless, crevassed underworld beneath.

While the rest of them just trembled at the very idea of it, Dayton followed it to its source: the huge circular tunnel punched into the ice wall that looked very artificial and very recent. The rumbling echoed up from the tunnel and though it seemed to come from far below, it was not far enough for anyones' liking.

Lights panned the mouth of the tunnel, reflecting off the blue ice and dying off in the stygian blackness far below. There was something cold, eternal, and mordantly evil about what might be down there, but nobody dared comment on the fact.

“Long? Reja?” Dayton said. “Go over to the Polar Haven and get us some rope and climbing gear. The survey crew left quite a collection.”

“You're not going down there?” Gwen said, astounded at the very idea.

“Yes, I am.”

“But you can't do that . . . whatever it is . . . is down there!”

Dayton smiled thinly. “That's why I came. To search for survivors and sort out anything that posed a danger. And down there, down below, is something I've been waiting a long time to see. Something very old.”

“Nicky!” Gwen said. “Will you please talk sense to this man!”

“Sure,” he said. “I'll talk sense to him all the way down.”

T
HE TUNNEL CANTED DOWN at a near perfect 30° angle so the incline wasn't so bad at all. With Stabilicers on their boots, climbing harnesses, and rope, it was a fairly easy descent. Dayton was an old hand at mountaineering. He pounded in the titanium ice-screws, checked everyone's climbing rigs, then led the way down.

Twenty minutes into it, Coyle began to get uneasy.

It was silent.

Dead silent.

The only sounds were the echoing of cleats digging into ice and rope threading through harnesses, men grunting and occasionally cursing. Nothing else. That rumbling had stopped almost as soon as they began their descent which made him think that whatever had been making it was lying in wait down there for them.

But he wouldn't dwell on it.

He was less worried about himself and where he was going and what he might meet than he was about leaving Gwen and Horn above. Just the two of them. They were both capable . . . but there were dangers in Emperor Cave that no man or woman was the equal of.

They kept descending.

After a time, Dayton called out, “We've come two-hundred feet.”

“How far we going?” Coyle called down to him, his voice echoing off into stillness.

“We got four-hundred feet of rope.”

Coyle knew full well that Horn and Gwen were not happy with him for volunteering for this. Gwen, as a matter of fact, was downright pissed. But he had to do this. He had to see. Somehow, it was necessary.

As they decended, flashlights lighting up the tunnel and casting jumping shadows around them, he was amazed by the tunnel itself. The ice was old, pellucid and deep blue. The tunnel was perfectly symmetrical. No so much as a scratch or cut as if it had been burned through, melted, something.

He couldn't even imagine how.

And part of him didn't want to.

Down, down, down.

Goddamn Dayton, he's leading us to our deaths and look how happily we follow.

Coyle was amazed by it.

Every single shred of survival instinct and self-preservation within him was screaming at him to get out of here, to get back to the chopper and get out . . . but was he listening? He was not. Is this what it was like for soldiers in battle? Knowing they were going to die but pushing further into the breach anyway, consumed by a higher purpose than simple continuation?

About ten minutes after Dayton called out that they were down well over 300 feet, he called them to a stop. “Wait here, all of you,” he said and went down alone. They listened to his cleats biting into the glacier, felt the tug of the rope.

They waited five minutes.

Coyle was amazingly warm. Part of that was the exertion, but another part was the ice itself which maintained an even 32° farenheit regardless of external temperatures. It was simply a matter of physics.

“All right!” Dayton called out. “Come down!”

Coyle was the last to reach the ice plateau that Dayton stood on. It was sort of a shelf, perfectly smooth. Dayton was standing at its outer edge. There was a drop of maybe fifteen feet and then . . . earth. Solid ground. The actual crust of Antarctica.

He pounded in another ice-screw and threaded his rope through his harness and rapelled down there.

They followed him, one by one.

The ground was uneven, frozen solid as granite, rising in low hills and tight hollows, rivers of ice spreading in every which direction. The ceiling was at least sixty feet above them, an absolutely dazzling display of hanging icicles. Light had never touched this place before. The ground had not been exposed to the sun in at least thirty million years.

They came to a lake of ice and crossed it.

With only flashlights to see by, it would have been easy to get lost down there as they threaded over ice flows and in-between rising shelves of rock and through winding hollows, but Dayton, as always, was prepared: every twenty feet or so he sprayed a glob of luminous paint, leaving a ghost trail behind them.

As they moved down a slope and finally reached a great flattened plateau that looked very much like an ancient riverbed, he said, “We've come down another seventy feet.”

As they crossed the rocky plateau, the belly of the glacier so high above now that their lights could not reach it, Coyle began to notice that instead of shelves of jutting rock and heaps of loose stones he was seeing titanic broken columns and flat slabs and what looked like shattered pyramidal shapes rising from the earth.

All of it was far too symmetrical to be natural in origin.

They were getting close to something now.

Something ancient.

Something that made him feel tense.

And they were all feeling it, he knew. He could sense it coming from every man in an unbroken current: an almost electric atavistic dread. But they pushed on and the shapes around them became more numerous and then, within ten minutes, a huge gully opened up before them . . . and rising from it and up into the glacier high above was what they had come to see.

T
HE CITY.