Organic technology. A pure and unmechanistic science.
Yes, we were the ultimate tool, the technology that would summon them and destroy us. And that’s what it was all about. Those colonists spreading out, seeding and manipulating, bringing forth a great intelligence that could be absorbed and directed to open doorways between distant gulfs of space. When their plan reached fruition, there would be no million-year migrations, but a simple jump through wormholes tunneled with pure psychic force. They would have the universe, star by star.
It would take forever, but they were patient.
But when they brought the real swarm through, they would also bring that cremating atomic pestilence, the Color Out of Space. That extradimensional horror which curved space and dissolved matter as it slithered along, subverting time and reality and suckling the blood of the cosmos itself. Hayes couldn’t pretend to know what it really was, but if the Old Ones could conceivably have a devil, then this was it.
And they were devil-worshippers.
Hayes told Sharkey about this and she agreed with him.
“Doesn’t this fucking thing go any faster?” she finally said.
44
Kharkhov Station.
It came at you out of the whipping, black polar night like some football stadium in the dead center of that glacial white nothingness… a sudden oasis of lights and machinery and civilization. Targa House and the meteorology dome. The power station and the drilling tower. Observatories and storage garages. Most of it connected by a webbing of conduits and flagged pathways and security lights. All of it capped by antennas and wind turbines and radar dishes. Outbuildings and huts scattered in all directions. And, off to the far left, the drifted-over runway that would bring the planes come spring. A self-contained community locked down in this eternal deep freeze. And as far as outside help went, it might as well have been sitting dead center of the Martian desert. Because if you were thinking evacuation or rescue, you’d get it about as fast as you would have on the red planet.
He brought the SnoCat in slow, happy to have made it back and, yet, haunted by what he was seeing before him as if it wasn’t an Antarctic research station, but some forbidden burial ground, a glacial cemetery that had risen from the ancient ice field, gates swung wide open. Just the sight of it made dread rise in him like flood waters, drowning him in his own sweet-hot fear. By that point in the game he wasn’t bothering to talk himself out of such feelings. His guts were telling him that he was going into something bad here and he did not doubt, he accepted that prophecy.
Hayes brought the ’Cat to a stop before Targa House and did not move, feeling the station and letting it tell him things. He couldn’t get past the idea that Kharkhov Station had the same atmosphere shrouded over it as the ruined city of the Old Ones now… toxic and spiritually rancid.
Sharkey and Hayes stepped from the ’Cat and, although they did not admit it to one another, they could sense the fear and agony and paranoia of the place gathering up into a single venting primal scream that they could hear only in their minds.
But it was real. It was raw. It was palpable.
They could hear it on the wind and feel it in their souls. So they were prepared for the worst when they entered Targa House. What came first was the stink… of blood and meat and voided bowels. Death. A stench of death so thick and so complete it nearly emptied their minds just smelling it.
“No,” Sharkey said. “Oh, dear God no…”
But there was no god at the South Pole. Only the cold and the wind and the whiteness, a ravening ancient intelligence that was always hungry, whose belly was never full.
And here, in the community room, it had feasted.
Everyone was sitting at tables like they’d been called in for a group meeting. And maybe they had been. All of them had their eyes blown from their sockets, their brains boiled to stew. Their white faces were spattered with blood and fluid, carved into shrieking masks of pain and terror. All of them. Like a single diabolic mind had seized them at once and drained their minds in one communal swoop. They were all there in that morgue lit by electric lights: Rutkowski and Koricki, Sodermark and Stotts, even Parks and Campbell from the drilling tower, a dozen others, scientists and contractors alike.
Yes, everyone was there but LaHune.
“We… we have to find him,” Sharkey said, swallowing, then swallowing again. “We have to get him before he gets out of here. He’ll make for another station… maybe Vostok or Amundsen. He won’t stop until he does and they won’t let him.”
She came into Hayes’ arms and he came into hers and they joined together there in that stinking, ghastly mortuary. Needing to touch and be held, needing to remind one another that they were still alive and still human. There was strength in that. Strength in who and what they were, not in what those fucking Old Ones wanted them to be. They had each other and they had feelings and those feelings were real and strong, had greased their skids and fed their engines and got them through all this badness up until now. They figured they could squeeze a few more hours out of them.
“LaHune sent us away on purpose, Elaine,” Hayes said. “He wanted us out of the way when he did this, when he made his run. He may have been contaminated for days or a week or who in the hell knows?”
“He didn’t think we’d come out of the city alive.” She looked around, studying the night pressing up against the windows and frosting the panes with its subzero breath. “They haven’t been dead long… he might still be here.”
Hayes was counting on it.
If LaHune had already made his run, it would mean they would have to go after him. Out onto the polar plateau, racing after him, trying to catch him before he reached the Amundsen-Scott Station or Vostok, the Russian camp. Both were hundreds and hundreds of miles distant. If they caught him, it would be dangerous and if they didn’t catch him? Even worse. A break down out there in temperatures dipping down towards a hundred below meant death in two hours regardless of how you were dressed or how hot your little hands were.
It was a simple fact.
So they either stopped him now or let the race begin. Hayes had this mental image of them arriving just behind him at Amundsen, shooting at him, trying to kill him like those Norwegians in The Thing, trying to kill that infected dog. He had a pretty good idea that what had happened to the supposed attackers in the movie would play out pretty much the same in real life: LaHune would be rescued and Hayes and Sharkey would be cut down like mad dogs.
So they started searching the station and until you did, you forgot just how big and how spread out Kharkhov was. How many of those orange-striped buildings there were. How many goddamn places there were to hide. You just didn’t have your main buildings like the power station or Targa House or the meteorology dome, you had dozens and dozens of little fish huts and storage sheds and warm-up shacks. You had the fuel depo and the garage and the service Quonsets, the man-sized conduits that connected them like arteries beneath the ice. In the summer with twenty men you could have done it in an hour. In the middle of that endless polar night, it would have taken all day.