The Apocalypse Club (29 page)

“We know absolutely nothing about this alien intelligence other than the fact that it is, most likely, responsible for the creation of all life on this planet,” Tristan said. “It would be extremely unfortunate if the first contact we made with them was through a power-crazed electronic presence bent on universal domination.”

“Right. I am beginning to see your point. So, um, how exactly do we stop him, then?”

“You were right about one thing,” Max said.

“I was?”

“We can’t use the Weather Station to stop him from melting the ice sheet.”

“I don’t think I was right about that,” I said. “I think I actually suggested the opposite.”

“Shut up.”

“Okay.”

“But that doesn’t mean we might not be able to use the Weather Station to our advantage, anyway,” Max said.

“How?”

Tristan began pacing back and forth. “The ice sheet is on the verge of breaking up within weeks. Possibly even days. His plan has been in the works for many years and its successful completion is almost within his grasp. This is not something he is going to trust to anyone else. He is going to want to be there firsthand.”

“But how can he do that if he doesn’t actually have hands?” I asked. “Or any other actual body parts, for that matter?”

“My guess is that he’ll use a C-Mech,” Max said.

“Of course!” I said, smacking my forehead. “That makes perfect sense. Can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself.”

“Would you like me to explain what a C-Mech is?” Max asked.

“Yes, please do.”

“It’s basically a cyborg,” Max said. “Titanium endoskeleton covered with genetically engineered flesh on the outside.”

“Sounds kind of like a terminator,” I observed.

“There’s one major difference,” Max said.

“What’s that?”

“Terminators work, at least in the movies. The C-Mechs were originally supposed to replace the GDI. Why have living soldiers when you can just manufacture them on an assembly line and pump them out by the thousands? You download a human consciousness into the brain-box and the idea is that you get all of the advantages of a human – instinct, training, etcetera – and none of the disadvantages. It gets injured or killed, then you just order new parts and it’s ready to go again in a couple of weeks.”

“So what was the problem?”

“The problem was they never worked properly,” Max said. “They were buggy. They blew up the wrong shit. They lost connectivity. The flesh reacted with the metal in some pretty spectacularly horrible ways. The first batch got such bad gangrene that they loaded them all into a canister and set the controls for the heart of the sun. But that wasn’t the worst of it.”

I swallowed. “What was the worst?”

“The worst was that grunts downloaded their brains into the things and then they couldn’t get them back out. Imagine being trapped in a malfunctioning robot. How do you think you’d react? Especially if it’s down to four hours of remaining battery life and you have access to high explosives and artillery.”

“Fuck me.”

“Pretty much.”

“So why in the hell would Hudson ever trust himself to something like that?” I asked. “Why not just download himself back into his own body?”

“He’s been out of that body for quite some time,” Tristan said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it hadn’t deteriorated significantly in that time, despite their best efforts to the contrary. The rocks only seem to work on living, animate things in that respect. No, his body is probably no longer an option for him.”

“The C-Mechs are also pretty much indestructible,” Max said. “They tested them up to G-zero four megaton blasts and they walked away. All the flesh was gone, of course, but the frame was intact.”

“They have also made some improvements to the prototypes in that time,” Tristan said.

“How do you know this?” I asked.

“We have sources on the inside,” Max said cryptically.

I thought about asking, but decided against it. “And you think they’ve made enough improvements that Hudson would trust his life to one of these things?”

“Yes,” Tristan said. “He won’t risk his life setting foot aboard a potentially hostile or dangerous alien ship in an ordinary body. That part of the country is more than dangerous enough all by itself. All it would take is one relatively small ice wall to give way and he could suddenly find himself trapped under two hundred thousand tons of rock that won’t melt for another fifty years.”

“Okay,” I said. “So where does the Weather Station come into it?”

“The largest Weather Station in the world is located on the Förssagen ice sheet, less than a mile from the site. It’s reachable through a narrow passage in the Handleer Crevasse, which is, thanks in part to Hudson’s efforts, now accessible from the sea. If we can cut the comlink connection to Hudson’s C-Mech and hack into the Station, we can use it to create a storm that will drop the remaining ice sheet on Hudson’s head, trapping him in there for good.”

I tried to swallow, but my throat was dry. “I think there were a lot more
ifs
in that sentence than you actually used.”

“I looked at the site and it’s technically doable,” Max said. “Like most plans, it depends on a lot of things not going wrong.”

“This may not be the time to bring it up,” I said. “But we weren’t the ones who hacked into the Weather Station the last time. About the only thing we did was cut the lock off the door.”

“And that’s about all we’ll have to do this time, too,” Max said. He smiled and reached into his pocket, pulling out what looked like a USB stick. “Recognize this?”

It took me a moment, but I did. “That’s not –”

“Oh, but it is.”

“But I thought we dropped it on the ground at the site! I thought it got blown away in the storm!”

“If experience has taught me anything,” Max said. “It’s to never leave useful gear behind on the field of battle. Particularly if that gear might be used against you as evidence at some point in the future.”

“Do you think it’ll work?”

“It worked the first time.”

“I guess that depends on how you define
worked
. We did get arrested and spend two months in the JD. I have a feeling we wouldn’t get off so lightly this time. And we are a little further away from our objective. This isn’t just a bike ride to the park.”

Max gave me a disappointed look. “Oh Mark. How quickly you forget. If there’s one thing we know how to do other than attacking Weather Stations, it’s stealing transportation.”

“How quickly
I
forget? We drove it through the front of a convenience store.”

“Well,” Max said, “considering what we’re going to steal, I would say that our chances of doing that a second time are extremely remote.”

“I don’t think I like the sound of this.”

“You will when I explain the details.”

“I’ve never been a big fan of implied consent. What if I don’t like the details?”

“Many years ago,” Tristan said, interrupting. “I was on an expedition in the Bolan Pass in what is now called Pakistan. We were excavating the site of an Indus Valley settlement at Mehrgarh dating back almost ten thousand years. We had all the necessary permits and permissions, of course. The dig had taken many years and no small outlay of funds to organize.”

“Yes?” I said, asking more what this had to do with our immediate discussion than what happened next.

“We had been on site for almost a week when a group of about a hundred horsemen rode out from the Hindu Kush and told us we were digging up the graves of their ancestors. They were armed quite fiercely. Not many rifles, but the leader and many of his men were carrying great scimitars that looked like they could take the head off a rhino with only a casual flick of the wrist. We were supposed to have a small garrison of troops to help us in the event that we ran into issues with any of the local tribes, but they had been called away on the second day to suppress an uprising to the south. Not that they would have helped us much. We had certainly paid for them, but they were only five men, three of whom were perpetually drunk. I don’t think any of them knew from which end of the rifle the bullet came out. In any event, they were going to be of no help to us. The horsemen told us that, as defilers, we would all be put to the sword.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Well, as you can plainly see, I am still here,” Tristan smiled. “If there’s one thing all of my adventures have taught me, Mister Simms, it’s that plans are nice but terribly fragile things. A plan is like a bottle, and when it breaks – and it will break, believe me – you had best adapt to drinking your water out of something else.”

This didn’t mean much coming from a man who looked like a pasty academic who had never faced down anything more threatening than an unabridged Oxford dictionary. “Thanks for the advice.”

Tristan unbuttoned his shirt – a formal-looking thing that had at one time been the height of starched fashion but was now quite faded and wrinkled – to reveal a long scar running from the base of his neck to his left shoulder blade. “Their leader ordered that the men with digging tools be put to death first. I was quite a young man, then. Younger than either of you two gentlemen are now. It was my first expedition. I was there as an assistant. The archaeologist owed my father a favour and my father was happy to get me out of the house and the country for a few months. I had been given the task of scrabbling through the dirt with the paid labourers – for which, of course, I was not being paid. It became something of a joke among some of the members of the group.
Ah, there’s little Lord Smythe down on his hands and knees in the mud with the proles!
I didn’t mind. I got to see all of their discoveries before they did. Hold them in my hands. Clean the dirt from them. I also got to learn a little more about how they actually worked.

“We were using a new type of explosive, you see. Some of the site was hidden below a thick layer of rock and this was the easiest and cheapest way to gain access to some of the more remote chambers. It was like gelatin, but in the extreme heat, had dissolved into an almost liquid state. It was also extremely unstable. One of the containers had broken open the previous day and leaked a large volume of the stuff all over the ground next to where we had stored some of our supplies. Precisely on the spot where the leader and his chief riders were now waiting to watch us executed.

“Anyway, I was one of the first ones pulled out. I was marched over in front of the leader and told to bend. In so doing, I was able to see that the leaked explosive appeared to have crystallized in the night. The soil was filled with what looked like thousands of twinkling gems. But, because of all the dust stirred up by their horses, the riders had failed to see it. As my would-be executioner raised his sword over my neck, I reached into my pocket and took hold of my lighter. We were forbidden to smoke on the site, obviously, but I had stolen the lighter from my father’s study before I left home. It was all I had to remind myself of my family and I wasn’t about to be parted with it. In this case, however, I deemed it necessary.”

“You blew them up?” I said, amazed.

“Enough to scare the rest back into the hills.” Tristan pointed at his scar. “My executioner took exception with me incinerating his leader and tried to finish the job.”

“What happened to him?”

Tristan buttoned his shirt back up again. “He did not succeed.”

Okay, I thought. Maybe I was wrong about this guy. “Wow! You’re a tough motherfucker! A regular Indiana Jones!”

Tristan allowed himself a small smile. “I am a survivor, Mister Simms. I have outlasted or outwitted more difficult circumstances and evil than most. What I need to know from you is if you also wish to survive. If not, we will leave you here and be on our way.”

Being left in a strange underground complex in the middle of nowhere didn’t seem like a recipe for survival to me. “Fuck it. I’m in. Can I ask, though, if you have any weapons other than that polar bear spear gun thing you pointed at me way back?”

“Don’t worry,” Max said. “We’re covered.”

T
he most important things to keep in mind when stealing a boat:

• any vessel larger than a house will move about as fast as one, making your getaway a ponderous affair;
  
• if you crash into anything (e.g., rocks, other boats, docks, stationary objects of any kind) while making off with your newly stolen vessel, your getaway may be of a more downwardly vertical than horizontal one, requiring you to flail and plead for your life for assistance from the very people you just robbed;
  
• people don’t tend to leave boats running and unattended while they run into a convenience store to buy cigarettes, so easy opportunities to steal them are not as frequently presented as they are for say, pickup trucks, golf carts or bicycles;
  
• if you don’t know how to start, steer or navigate one (particularly at night), your attempt will most likely be met by a great deal of stumbling, cursing, and the pushing of random buttons that appear to be important but in fact don’t actually do anything;
  
• no matter what anyone might claim, unless they have done it before, stealing one is not “a cakewalk”;
  
• any member of your group who has spent most of the last 20 years in a cave will be of very little help, although that may not stop them from proffering a series of escalatingly inane pieces of advice in an English accent, which becomes more infuriating with every passing word;
  
• not everyone knows which way is port and which is starboard, even if you happen to believe this is the most commonly distributed piece of information in the world and that one can no longer simply say “left” or “right” as soon as one steps off the dock;
  
• if you do end up in the water, it can be quite shockingly cold, even in the summer, and pointing this fact out should not automatically label one a “pansy-ass little girl’s blouse”;
  
• in the event you do have to abandon ship, do not assume that every member of your party can swim, even if they have spent the better part of the last decade working for the world’s foremost paramilitary organization;
  
• there are many good reasons why seawater has not become the world’s most popular beverage; and
  
• unlike a flu or a virus, the effects of sea sickness can manifest themselves with alarming speed.