The Spawning (16 page)

By afternoon, they refused to even mention it.

Maybe they needed to pretend that it hadn't happened or it had absolutely no significance for them. That there could possibly be no connection between the structures on Jupiter's moon and those in Beacon Valley. But there was a connection and you would have had to have been pretty much blind or mindless not to see it or feel it and know that this was revelation unlike any the human race had thus far known. The connections were strung so tight and solid you could have tripped over them and broken you leg.

They were that real and that physical.

But, by that evening, just about everyone at Clime was pretending those connections were not there, carefully stepping over and around them.

Slim wasn't helping anything by telling anybody that would listen about what had been under that tarp. Horn was wisely silent about it, but not Slim. He'd been blabbing to Locke and Locke, of course, had woven it all together in the finest conspiratorial fashion and called for an emergency meeting of his little UFO study group which he called the PUFON, the Polar UFO Network. Something Frye referred to as
Poop-on.
Everyone seemed to have conflicting thoughts about the Callisto feed which really wasn't surprising. The most amusing was that of Harvey Smith, their communications tech. Harv thought it was all bullshit. Just movie FX stuff that the Freemasons had thrown together to frighten everyone.

Like he told Coyle: “I don't believe in little green men, Nicky, and especially if it turns out they're Masons.”

Coyle didn't really know what Hopper or Special Ed thought about any of it and they weren't really saying.

So things were tense.

Then Cassie Malone turned up missing.

P
OLAR CLIME WASN'T THAT big.

Not as big as McMurdo, certainly, or even Pole Station. But it was easy to forget just how much of it there was until you had to cover it on foot.

The dome itself was laid out pretty much like a wagon wheel with the Community Room forming the hub. The spokes were the various corridors running off of it. A-corridor housed Medical, the offices of the station manager, HR and Safety, Emergency Supplies, firefighting gear closet. There were unsheltered walkways leading out from it across the compound to the Heavy Shop, garage, and Fuel Depot. B-corridor was mainly living quarters for the staff and crew. Coyle and Frye's rooms were in B. As were Hopper's and Special Ed's and the scientists. A walkway led from it to the main road that led to the warehouse and runway. C-corridor was the same. Crew's quarters. Gwen was here. As well as the other ladies. A long tunnel led from it out to the Atmospherics Lab. D-corridor housed the labs—Bio, Geo, Coring etc. There was also a hydroponics garden there where The Beav grew tomatoes, carrots, and beans. A tunnel led from it out to the CosRay Lab. E-corridor was mostly crew's quarters. Slim had had his there. Harvey was over there. As were Horn and Cryderman and the FEMC crew. The rest was storage. A tunnel led from it out to T-Shack, the Transmission Shack, where Harvey worked. This was the hub of radio transmissions at Clime. The lower level of the dome held more storage and the back-up generator, electrical substation, water recycling plant, and was also the where all the man-sized conduits that led to the outbuildings terminated.

There were plenty of places to hide when you came down to it.

And in the search for Cassie Malone none were overlooked.

Gwen, Zoot, Danny Shin, and Locke had already been over the dome once and now they were going over it again. Special Ed, Gut, and Hopper went room to room to room. Coyle and Frye handled the lower level. They knew all the hiding places and conduits. Horn and a couple guys from the FEMC crew, Stokes and Koch, checked the outbuildings.

When they were done with the lower level and Frye had gone off to other pursuits, Coyle bundled up tight in his ECWs and checked the compound even though he knew it had already been checked. He looked for Cassie in the warehouse and Power Station. He nosed into all the little warm-up shacks and Jamesway huts and Hypertats of which there were a dozen spread over the perimeter of the dome. He even nosed around out at the Skua Pile, where people dumped anything they could not use or store, everything from chairs to bookshelves. Not garbage, just things that someone else might want to scavenge. He didn't know what he hoped to find, maybe Cassie's frozen corpse sprawled amongst abandoned bean bag chairs, picture frames, and laundry baskets.

Flashlight in hand, he circled the compound in the wind and icy blackness.

The only place he didn't check was Icebox Two, the old abandoned Navy weather station out on the plateau. But it was like a mile distant and hadn't been used since the 1970's. It was buried under a mountain of snow and ice. He didn't figure Cassie would have gone out there. At least not without a bulldozer.

Finally, putting it off long as he could, he went into T-Shack, passing the vast array of transmitters and forest of antennas that were enclosed behind a chainlink fence so some idiot didn't accidentally run a dozer into them. Taking the outer door, he came in out of the cold, puffing frost, his beard threaded with ice.

Harvey was at the console. When he saw Coyle come in, he jumped like a monster was stopping by for dinner.

“What . . . what were you doing out there, Nicky?”

Coyle breathed in and out, working the stiffness from his face. He set his long-barreled flashlight on the table near the door, studying the banks of communications gear, the walls and ceiling which were hung with wiring and cables. “I'm looking for something, Harv. You seem a little surprised to see me. Why is that?”

Harvey just sat there, eyeing him suspiciously. His face was flushed red. Even more so than usual. “Um . . . I . . . I guess you just surprised me. People usually take the tunnel out here. They don't come in from the outside.”

“I dare to be different,” Coyle said. He pulled off his mittens and then the insulated gloves beneath. He rubbed his hands together, getting some warmth back into them. “You seen Cassie around?”

“No. She's missing.”

“Yeah, I know she's missing, Harv. That's the point of searching for her.”

“Is that what you were doing out there? Looking for her?”

Coyle shrugged. “Maybe. And maybe I felt like a little walk.”

Usually, he handled Harvey with kid's gloves. But not today. They had some seriously ugly shit about to bury them alive down here and still the petty nonsense went on unchecked. He just wasn't in the mood for Harvey's conspiracies about goddamn Freemasons.

He knew Harvey suspected him, so he went right over to him. Got in real close, enjoying how the man practically cringed. “You got much chatter out there today?”

“What do you mean?”

“What the hell you think I mean? C'mon, Harv, get a grip for godsake. What's going on out there?”

Harvey swallowed. “Not too much. Pretty quiet out of McMurdo and Scott Base. They had some big winter carnival doings there last night. The lot of ‘em are probably hung-over. Pole Station had a power outage for two hours last night. They fixed it, though.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing else . . . except . . . well something's going on out at that NOAA station. Not sure what and nobody's saying.”

Coyle pretended it meant nothing to him.

The transmission room of T-Shack with all its assorted equipment only took up part of the building. The rest was made up by spacious living quarters because somebody always had to be on site to monitor the radio. Harvey and Cryderman, who absolutely despised each other, spent alternating shifts out here. Harvey would only stay in his own room at the dorm, but Cryderman often lived in the spacious quarters of T-Shack for days on end. And why not? T-Shack had a full bar, pool table and pinball machines, an awesome DVD library and video game set-up. A fully stocked kitchen with every sort of convenience food known to man and the microwave ovens to cook them with. It was a nice set-up.

Coyle stepped out of the radio room, nosing around in the lounge and game room, the bedroom in the back, the kitchen. Found nothing but Cryderman's pyramids of beer cans, his collection of skin magazines and X-Box games. That was about it.

When he came back into the radio room, Harvey was watching him more intently than ever.

“What are you looking for?” he wanted to know. “Cassie never comes here.”

“Maybe I'm not looking for her now. Maybe I'm looking for something else.”

Harvey swallowed. “What might that be?”

Coyle just stared at him. “That's a secret, Harv. A big, scary secret.”

With that he took the tunnel back to the dome, bundled up again, shoved some more Vaseline in his nose to combat the dry, cold air, and braved the icy darkness yet again.

The wind had subsided somewhat, but the temperature was still dipping at forty below. Outside the dome on the walkway leading to the garage and Heavy Shop, he just paused, looking around and even he wasn't sure exactly for what. He didn't honestly believe by that point that they would find Cassie.

So he stood there, studying the shadowy hulk of the dome behind him, T-Shack, and the garage in the distance. The security lights bathed them in pale orange light. A few flakes of snow danced in the illumination. No one was out and about. The sky over Clime was a black canvas speckled with the stars of the Milky Way and lit by shimmering bands of green, red, and yellow auroral light captured by Earth's magnetosphere in an impressive display. The colors winked off the dome and the roofs of the various buildings. It was beautiful, but its stark beauty only illustrated how very isolated they were at the bottom of the world.

A place where people just disappeared into thin air.

MACRELAY, BUILDING 165,
MCMURDO STATION,
ROSS ISLAND

F
OR DAYS NOW, SHIFT after shift at MacRelay, it was the same: Make contact with NOAA Field Station Polaris. They had dropped completely out of sight—or hearing—and the word had it that a Search and Rescue operation would be initiated. But before a SAR was launched, they gave it every chance.

Radio signals were notoriously FUBAR on the Ice. Magnetic interference. Atmospheric interference. Storms. Even solar flares played havoc with two-way communications. About the only thing that was reliable was SATCOM and then sometimes that hit the skids, too.

When he came on shift that night, Carl Royes, the radio tech, got on SATCOM and HF right away. “Polaris-one, Polaris-one, this is MacOps MacMurdo. Do you copy? Repeat: Do you copy? Please respond Polaris-one. Over.”

Nothing.

He repeated the message seven times.

Royes knew there would be nothing. Even weird atmospheric and meteorological conditions cleared eventually and MacWeather was saying it was clear out on the plateau. They should have been reading. Either they had equipment failure or . . . well, it wasn't Royes job to speculate.

He got on the phone. “Mike? Still nothing.”

“Okay,” said the voice. “NOAA has been informed. Give Polar Clime a call, patch me through to Hopper. Somebody's got to go out to Polaris and check and Clime's the closest.”

“They have choppers at Colony, don't they?”

The voice laughed. “Yeah, well, let's leave those spooks out of it.”

POLAR CLIME STATION

“Y
OU HEARD?”

When Coyle got back to the dome, Frye was waiting for him just inside B-corridor. He had that look in his eyes that Coyle had learned meant trouble was at hand. Right away, he got a sinking feeling in his guts.

“Heard what?” Coyle said, pulling off his wool face mask and trying to work some heat into his numb cheeks.

“You know that NOAA field camp out on the plateau?”

He remembered what Harv had alluded to. That sinking feeling got worse. “What now?”

“MacOps hasn't heard from them in like four days. SAR time. Guess who pulls it?”

But Coyle knew. Clime was closest and in direct logistical and tactical support as far as MacOps was concerned.

“Hopper will send a crew in the morning,” Frye said.

“You signing up?”

“Hell no, not unless I'm ordered.”

Coyle knew that he was. He just had that feeling. He had the experience and Hopper would want him. There was dread in his belly at the idea of going, yet he knew nothing could keep him from it.

He said nothing for a time. His mind was filled with images of that place out on the ice shelf—stark, grim, and forbidding. Maybe it was nothing but radio failure, technical bugaboos . . . yet he could not bring himself to believe it. Not this year. The bad omens were everywhere and he was honestly starting to believe in things like that.

“If I go it'll get me off the search party for a day,” he said. “Let's face it: Cassie is gone. We've been over this place like six times now. She's just . . . gone.”

Frye nodded. “Any ideas?”

“None. She was at the Callisto party. Gwen had another party in her room. I was there. Zoot, the Beav, Slim . . . a few others. Cassie didn't show, Gwen said, because she wasn't feeling so good. Drunk. Wanted to lay down.”

“And,
poof,
she's gone,” Frye said, snapping his fingers. “No radios signed out. Horn says all the ‘Cats and Skidoos are still in the garage. If she wandered off, she must have left the flagged path. Maybe fell into a crevasse. It happens.”

“She's been on the Ice for three years . . . why would she do that?”

“People do funny things when they're drunk.”

Coyle's eyes were still tearing from the cold, his nose running. He sniffed. “If we find her, she'll be a corpse. Hate to say it, but you know it as well as I do.”

Frye let out a sigh. “Got people spooked. First those Brits from Hobb and now Cassie here. Wait'll they hear about the NOAA camp. That'll get ‘em going.”