"So this is just another fight about God. That's what all this shit is about?"
"It was shaped, but not by God. The Shoggoths were artificially cultivated, shaped with radiation and viruses to make slaves and food for a race we know only as the Old Ones." He pointed up at the petrified monstrosity on the main screen. "
We
are a cosmic accident.
This
was what was intended."
The visions Keogh afflicted him with played back in his mind, even as he furiously shook his head.
Something vast and wise and awful, watching him…
"Whatever your Sunday-school teacher may have told you, the earth is about four-point-five billion years old. The basic chemical ingredients for life began to accrete in the shallow pools and deep ocean trenches when the earth's crust was barely cool, and were reacting to form protocells with RNA genetic codes nearly four billion years ago. Single-celled organisms arose about 3.8 billion years ago, but for three billion years after that, very little macroevolutionary change occurred to the perfectly efficient bacterial model. The dominant life form on earth was snot on a rock, and probably still would be today, if they hadn't come.
"Soil samples taken from Mars show that much the same thing happened there, with simple prokaryotic organisms proliferating and stagnating there, until an interplanetary catastrophe tore away the Martian atmosphere, and everything died.
"Why was it different for earth? Something happened a billion years ago that sent life hurtling down an almost deterministic course to multicellular complexity, to total diversity—to us. Against the snail's pace of the initial evolutionary course, against any calculable statistical curve, against the natural attrition of entropy, against catastrophes, against our own bloody-mindedness, we got here. Why? Because of evolution? The Life Force? The hand of God? Adaptation and mutation are an inherent, universal characteristic of life on earth. It serves its own purposes, not that of the individual, not the species, even, because if it adapts to a new stress in its environment, eventually it'll change into something else entirely. Whose ends could such an impossibly elaborate experiment serve?"
Storch shook his head furiously. Barrow's words crawled around his brain like larvae, biting and stinging, but telling him nothing. "That doesn't explain anything. The simplest explanation is the true one, I know that much."
"There is no other explanation, when you see the whole picture! I wish to Gaia there was one. The powers that controlled the course and the rate of evolution to make us were not gods, and they were not infallible. Their genetically engineered slaves, the Shoggoths, were accelerated to adapt and mutate as individuals, and about two hundred fifty million years ago, they became sentient. They overthrew and nearly destroyed the Old Ones, who destroyed them and took steps to harness the flow of evolution. They retarded the process and spread the effects of genetic change out over thousands of generations, instead of reactive polymorphism. They did all this because they still needed slaves!"
"So what?" Storch's shout shook the plastic walls. "Your aliens died out a long time ago, if they ever were. This is our planet now."
"You don't get it, do you? This was their planet for over eight hundred million years. It's only been ours for about a hundred thousand years, and we don't understand a fucking thing about what it really is we claim to own! Everything that crawls or swims or flies, everything that grows and dies, everything, Storch, is theirs!"
Storch felt ice crystallizing on his brain. "I've heard enough—" He didn't want to look at the slide, anymore. He saw Spike Team Texas in that slab of rock. He saw himself. His skin was beginning to burn again. Boil it down to the tactical. "So Keogh is using their science to try to fix us, make us into slaves again."
Barrow looked gravely at him, nodded. "He's stripped away the gears on your evolutionary clock, given you a recombinant genome. But he's placed himself into the equation in a way we can't begin to understand."
It hurt to think about it. It exhausted him to deny it. He had no faith left to cling to, but the maniac
had
to be wrong. "Where do you get all this shit?"
"From them," Barrow answered, gesturing to the sludge in the next cell. "He seems to want to make us understand. He thinks we'll be convinced. Didn't he try to convince you?"
Storch clenched his jaw.
"There's truth in it," Barrow bulled on. "I studied the Burgess Shale anomaly and others like it for seven years. My work was buried by the scientific community, but that only forced me to seek other venues to explain what I'd discovered. Fossil remnants of the Old Ones, and even undecayed frozen specimens, were discovered by an early twentieth century Antarctic expedition. They likened them to pre-Cambrian crinoids, and the appellation has stuck, despite later evidence. They combined animal and vegetable traits with complex forms unlike any ever found in our fossil record. They were based on radial, rather than bilateral symmetry, and had five-lobed brains, and senses we can't even conceive of. They were smarter than us, tougher than us, and they came here from somewhere else."
He thought of the fossil collections in Hiram Hansen's cave. Something like a giant sea cucumber.
"There are pre-human texts, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, that describe the fall of the Old Ones from eyewitness accounts. The authors called the polymorphic slaves Shoggoths. They alone had an explanation for the Burgess Shale anomaly, and for what RADIANT is doing. That's what you've become, Sergeant Storch. Don't you see? You are an atavistic return of the original product of the grand experiment, a race of shapeless, mindless protoplasmic slaves. You are a meta-Shoggoth! You were at Tiamat, in the war. You know about that, at least. That's why you've got to let me take tissue samples. We have to know what's coming next."
He didn't have to add,
and how to destroy it. How to kill you, Sergeant Storch.
"All
I
really wanted to know," he said, shaking his head too fast, as if he could clear it of all this shit, "is
where
the motherfucker is."
"We were hoping to learn that from you," the officer said, as he entered the room. "You want us to believe you're not his any more, tell us something we can use. Where is the original Cyril Keogh?"
"I don't even know
what
he is. Do you?"
"Is his critical center of biomass in White Bird?"
"Is what in where?"
"Were you in communication with the mass mind when you were in captivity?"
"I wasn't in communication with my own goddamned body."
"Are you in contact with him now?"
"This is fucking bullshit. You want to just come try to take a blood sample, now, Captain?"
"Major, Sergeant. Major Aranda, Army Special Operations Division and Intelligence Support Agency, retired. Fuck you and your attitude, Storch. This is not my goddamn war, but it's mine to lose. Nothing about this conflict will ever turn up in the pages of a history book if we win, but if we lose, the human race, hell, everything that lives, is going to devolve into one fucking organism. It makes my skin crawl, that you still try to pass yourself off as human, but you don't seem to have a problem with that. You've done nothing to prove that we can't learn more from you dead than alive. Barrow, turn on the gas."
He
burned
.
There was no gas. Barrow was arguing with Major Aranda. "He survived it in projectile form, you're only going to torture him with the gas."
"Then torture him." Wittrock entered the cavern. A pair of bodyguards,
mestizo
guerillas, flanked him, craning their necks to get a better look at Storch.
"If he isn't destroyed, he's a threat to us all. Christ, Ruben, he's a species of one, now. God only knows what he's capable of. You saw the video of Spike Team Texas. I was
there
. They massacred three A-Teams and brought down the Hind with their bare hands. And then they
ate
them. Do I have to
remind
you? In time, he could be as big a threat as Keogh!"
"Shut your damned mouth!" Storch roared. Nobody seemed to notice.
"You still think he had prior contact."
"I damned well know he did! His operational detachment was detailed to Tiamat in the Gulf. There were casualties—from exposure. He was one of them even then, and that suicidal idiot Bangs let him go, when he had been suspiciously close to two separate inside actions which cost us dearly. Are you a suicidal idiot, Ruben?"
He burned. He changed. A red caul enfolded his sight. He coiled himself into a ball. Barrow and Aranda fought over the console, but he couldn't hear them, anymore. Wittrock turned to look at him, looked him in the eyes, and it was enough.
He launched at the plastic wall, and even before they saw him leave the floor, he was tearing a hole in the barrier, all claws and gnarly corkscrew knuckles. Fist-sized shards of plastic flew every which way, but it was several inches thick, and his claws cracked and broke, and he felt like his arms were going to shatter or just drop off. He was never going to make it through, but this thought was trampled by the onrushing, visceral realization that
I have fucking claws!
Then two things happened at about the same time. Aranda slammed a button on the console and the shower heads in Storch's cell hissed and spat green clouds. One of the bodyguards stepped in front of Wittrock, almost looking bored, shouldered his rifle and sprayed Storch through the barrier. Sneering, baring his teeth, upper lip rolled back: gold teeth, embossed letters, MARS.
Six bullets punched into the barrier. They were 9mm hollow point slugs, designed to crumple and mushroom inside the body of a target, and they did pretty much the same thing in the plastic wall. Spun-sugar cracks radiated out from each impact, a chaotic spiderweb that Storch saw and punched through almost before the bullets had come to rest.
His fist made a hole large enough, and he leapt at it, slithering through with the broken stumps of his claws raking the shattered plastic. His sodden clothing snagged and tore on the jagged lips of the hole, and he fully expected to be shot as he clambered through and dropped head-first onto the floor of the control room.
Barrow screamed, "You fucking asshole!" and vented the gas, but he was already succumbing to shock, shutting down as events spiraled out of control.
Aranda roared, "Hold your fire!" even as he drew a Colt .45 from a belt holster and took a Weaver firing stance. He turned side-on to Storch, the gun authoritatively pointed at his head. Wittrock had his hands clapped over his ears, turning to duck out the door.
Mars clearly didn't take orders from the Major, and sprayed Storch again as he leapt into the air. Bee sting holes in his right thigh and abdomen, flesh wounds, tissue samples for the doc, the muscle of his belly already closing over the tumbling, crumbling bullet that grazed his kidney.
He hit the ground inside Mars's reach with the gun, brought an elbow up and across his smile as he passed between him and the other guard, who was preoccupied by a jam in his rifle and furiously praying.
Storch wrapped his hand around Wittrock's bandy neck. He impressed his broken claws on the scientist's throat until he cried out. The sound traveled and redoubled in the cavern, so quiet did it suddenly get. Barrow's jaw hung open, Aranda looked resigned to the worst getting worse, the bodyguard swore at his jammed gun, but Wittrock only smiled.
"You should thank me," Wittrock wheezed smugly. "If you're purged of him, it's because of my bullet. You're only alive today because I'm not half the scientist Cyril Keogh is."
Storch shook him like a doll. "I only came here to get answers. I don't want to be in anybody's secret fucking army. I don't want to hear any more flying saucer bullshit. I don't want anybody doing any more shit to me. I just want—to fix it."
"You want to help? Excellent. Kill yourself. Let us figure out why you survived, so we can exterminate Him. Donate your body to science. It's the only logical, ethical choice."
Major Aranda circled around them, pistol half raised. He deftly slapped the magazine out onto the floor, kicked it away, and slammed another one from his blouse pocket into the stock. Storch didn't have to guess what kind of bullets they were. "There's no possible desirable outcome from this, Sgt. Storch."
"He's a monster," Wittrock said, "worse now than before. Kill him."
"We can't afford to lose you, Doctor. Let him go, Sergeant. I may not be able to kill you, but I'll stop you." Looking at him was like looking down three gun barrels. Black holes, weighing him, unwavering, assessing his weakness. None of them blinked when the Major failed to spot any. Not knowing what he was looking at, knowing only that he probably couldn't kill it, his hands were steady as a jeweler's. In another life, in another army, Storch would have proudly served under such an officer.
Storch shook Wittrock again, banged his head hard into a wall. "Then we can start this all over again. Which way's the fucking exit?"
"You can't just walk out of here," Aranda said.
"Getting real tired of people telling me that." Storch lifted Wittrock off his feet and swung him into the bodyguard with the jammed rifle, dragged him out into the corridor, hobbling less with each step, Aranda and Barrow following. The corridor was short and branched off almost every ten feet, in both directions. Tunnels honeycombed the mountain, silver mines converted and expanded to form a bunker that dwarfed the Baker installation and rivaled the civil defense shelter of any major city. Soldiers faded from sight down side corridors at a wave from Aranda.
Storch looked to the Major and hoisted Wittrock up by his neck. Blood streamed from one nostril, but his mouth was already moving. "The plan—" he gurgled. "He—"