Authors: Subterranean Press
“Working, sir,” calls the number four pilot. Moments
later the treacherous rain turns to hail stones, rattling and booming but
fundamentally unlikely to stick to the flight surfaces and build up weight
until it flips the ship over. “I think we’re going to–”
A white and ghostly wall comes into view in the
distance, hammering towards the bridge windows like a runaway freight train.
Gagarin’s stomach lurches. “Pull up, pull up!” The first and second pilots are
struggling with the hydraulically boosted controls as the Korolev’s nose
pitches up almost ten degrees, right out of ground effect. “Come on!”
They make it.
The iceberg slams out of the darkness of the storm and
the sea like the edge of the world; fifty meters high and as massive as
mountains, it has lodged against the aperture between the radiator fins.
Billions of tons of pack-ice has stopped dead in the water, creaking and
groaning with the strain as it butts up against the infinite. The Korolev skids
over the leading edge of the iceberg, her keel barely clearing it by ten
meters, and continues to climb laboriously into the darkening sky. The blazing
eyes of her reactors burn slick scars into the ice below. Then they’re into the
open water beyond the radiator fins, and although the sea below them is an
expanse of whiteness they are also clear of icy mountains.
“Shut down engines three through fourteen,” Gagarin
orders once he regains enough control to keep the shakes out of his voice.
“Take us back down to thirty meters, lieutenant. Meteorology, what’s our situation
like?”
“Arctic or worse, comrade general.” The meteorologist, a
hatchet-faced woman from Minsk, shakes her head. “Air temperature outside is
thirty below, pressure is high.” The rain and hail has vanished along with the
radiators and the clear seas–and the light, for it is now fading towards
nightfall.
“Hah. Misha, what do you think?”
“I think we’ve found our way into the freezer, sir.
Permission to put the towed array back up?”
Gagarin squints into the darkness. “Lieutenant, keep us
at two hundred steady. Misha, yes, get the towed array back out again. We need
to see where we’re going.”
The next three hours are simultaneously boring and
fraught. It’s darker and colder than a Moscow apartment in winter during a
power cut; the sea below is ice from horizon to horizon, cracking and groaning
and splintering in a vast expanding V-shape behind the Korolev’s pressure wake.
The spectral ruins of the Milky Way galaxy stretch overhead, reddened and
stirred by alien influences. Misha supervises the relaunch of the towed array,
then hands over to Major Suvurov before stiffly standing and going below to the
unquiet bunk room. Gagarin sticks to a quarter-hourly routine of reports,
making sure that he knows what everyone is doing. Bridge crew come and go for
their regular station changes. It is routine, and deadly with it. Then:
“Sir, I have a return. Permission to report?”
“Go ahead.” Gagarin nods to the navigator. “Where?”
“Bearing zero–it’s horizon to
horizon–there’s a crest rising up to ten meters above the surface. Looks
like landfall, range one sixty and closing. Uh, there’s a gap and a more
distant landfall at thirty-five degrees, peak rising to two hundred meters.”
“That’s some cliff.” Gagarin frowns. He feels drained,
his brain hazy with the effort of making continual decisions after six hours in
the hot seat and more than two days of this thumping roaring progression. He
glances round. “Major? Please summon Colonel Gorodin. Helm, come about to zero
thirty five. We’ll take a look at the gap and see if it’s a natural inlet. If
this is a continental mass we might as well take a look before we press on for
home.”
For the next hour they drive onwards into the night,
bleeding off speed and painting in the gaps in the radar map of the coastline.
It’s a bleak frontier, inhumanly cold, with a high interior plateau. There are
indeed two headlands, promontories jutting into the coast from either side of a
broad, deep bay. Hills rise from one of the promontories and across the bay.
Something about it strikes Gagarin as strangely familiar, if only he could
place it. Another echo of Earth? But it’s too cold by far, a deep Antarctic
chill. And he’s not familiar with the coastline of Zemlya, the myriad inlets
off the northeast passage, where the submarines cruise on eternal vigilant
patrols to defend the frontier of the Rodina.
A thin predawn light stains the icy hilltops gray as the
Korolev cruises slowly between the headlands–several kilometers
apart–and into the wide open bay beyond. Gagarin raises his binoculars
and scans the distant coastline. There are structures, straight lines! “Another
ruined civilization?” He asks quietly.
“Maybe, sir. Think anyone could survive in this
weather?” The temperature has dropped another ten degrees in the predawn chill,
although the Ekranoplan is kept warm by the outflow of its two Kuznetsov
aviation reactors.
“Hah.”
Gagarin begins to sweep the northern coast when Major
Suvurov stands up. “Sir! Over there!”
“Where?” Gagarin glances at him. Suvurov is quivering
with anger, or shock, or something else. He, too, has his binoculars out.
“Over there! On the southern hillside.”
“Where–” He brings his binoculars to bear as the
dawn light spills across the shattered stump of an immense skyscraper.
There is a hillside behind it, a jagged rift where the land
has risen up a hundred meters. It reeks of antiquity, emphasized by the
carvings in the headland. Here is what the expedition has been looking for all
along, the evidence that they are not alone.
“My God.” Misha swears, shocked into politically incorrect
language.
“Marx,” says Gagarin, studying the craggy features of
the nearest head. “I’ve seen this before, this sort of thing. The Americans
have a memorial like it. Mount Rushmore, they call it.”
“Don’t you mean Easter Island?” asks Misha. “Sculptures left
by a vanished people…”
“Nonsense! Look there, isn’t that Lenin? And Stalin, of
course.” Even though the famous moustache is cracked and half of it has fallen
away from the cliff. “But who’s that next to them?”
Gagarin brings his binoculars to focus on the fourth
head. Somehow it looks far less weathered than the others, as if added as an
afterthought, perhaps some kind of insane statement about the mental health of
its vanished builders. Both antennae have long since broken off, and one of the
mandibles is damaged, but the eyeless face is still recognizably unhuman. The
insectile head stares eyelessly out across the frozen ocean, an enigma on the
edge of a devastated island continent. “I think we’ve found the brother
socialists,” he mutters to Misha, his voice pitched low so that it won’t carry
over the background noise on the flight deck. “And you know what? Something
tells me we didn’t want to.”
Chapter Sixteen:
Anthropic
Error
As the summer dry season grinds on, Maddy finds herself
spending more time at John’s home-cum-laboratory, doing the cleaning and
cooking for herself in addition to maintaining the lab books and feeding the
live specimens. During her afternoons visiting in the hospital she helps him
write up his reports. Losing his right hand has hit John hard: he’s teaching
himself to write again but his handwriting is slow and childish.
She finds putting in extra hours at the lab preferable
to the empty and uncomfortable silences back in the two bedroom prefab she
shares with Bob. Bob is away on field trips to outlying ranches and quarries
half the time and working late the other half. At least, he says he’s working
late. Maddy has her suspicions. He gets angry if she isn’t around to cook, and
she gets angry right back at him when he expects her to clean, and they’ve
stopped having sex. Their relationship is in fact going downhill rapidly,
drying up and withering away in the arid continental heat, until going to work
in John’s living room among the cages and glass vivaria and books feels like
taking refuge. She took to spending more time there, working late for real, and
when Bob is away she sleeps on the wicker settee in the dining room.
One day, more than a month later than expected, Doctor
Smythe finally decides that John is well enough to go home. Embarrassingly,
she’s not there on the afternoon when he’s finally discharged. Instead, she’s
in the living room, typing up a report on a sub-species of the turtle tree and
its known parasites, when the screen door bangs and the front door opens.
“Maddy?”
She squeaks before she can stop herself. “John?” She’s
out of the chair to help him with the battered suitcase the cabbie
half-helpfully left on the front stoop.
“Maddy.” He smiles tiredly. “I’ve missed being home.”
“Come on in.” She closes the screen door and carries the
suitcase over to the stairs. He’s painfully thin now, a far cry from the
slightly too plump entomologist she’d met on the colony liner. “I’ve got lots
of stuff for you to read–but not until you’re stronger. I don’t want you
overworking and putting yourself back in hospital!”
“You’re an angel.” He stands uncertainly in his own
living room, looking around as if he hadn’t quite expected to see it again.
“I’m looking forward to seeing the termites.”
She shivers abruptly. “I’m not. Come on.” She climbs the
stairs with the suitcase, not looking back. She pushes through the door into
the one bedroom that’s habitable–he’s been using the other one to store
samples–and dumps the case on the rough dressing table. She’s been up
here before, first to collect his clothing while he was in hospital and later
to clean and make sure there are no poisonous spiders lurking in the corners.
It smells of camphor and dusty memories. She turns to face him. “Welcome home.”
She smiles experimentally.
He looks around. “You’ve been cleaning.”
“Not much.” She feels her face heat.
He shakes his head. “Thank you.”
She can’t decide what to say. “No, no, it’s not like
that. If I wasn’t here I’d be…”
John shuffles. She blinks at him, feeling stupid and
foolish. “Do you have room for a lodger?” She asks.
He looks at her and she can’t maintain eye contact. It’s
all going wrong, not what she wanted.
“Things going badly?” he asks, cocking his head on one side
and staring at her. “Forgive me, I don’t mean to pry–”
“No, no, it’s quite alright.” She sniffs. Takes a
breath. “This continent breaks things. Bob hasn’t been the same since we
arrived, or I, I haven’t. I need to put some space between us, for a bit.”
“Oh.”
“Oh.” She’s silent for a while. “I can pay rent–”
This is an excuse, a transparent rationalization, and
not en-
tirely true, but she’s saved from digging herself deeper into a
lie because John manages to stumble and reaches out to steady himself with his
right arm, which is still not entirely healed, and Maddy finds herself with his
weight on her shoulder as he hisses in pain. “Ow! Ow!”
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
“It wasn’t you–” They make it to the bed and she
sits him down beside her. “I nearly blacked out then. I feel useless. I’m not
half the man I was.”
“I don’t know about that,” she says absently, not quite
registering his meaning. She strokes his cheek, feeling it slick with sweat.
The pulse in his neck is strong. “You’re still recovering. I think they sent
you home too early. Let’s get you into bed and rest up for a couple of hours,
then see about something to eat. What do you say to that?”
“I shouldn’t need nursing,” he protests faintly as she
bends down and unties his shoe-laces. “I don’t need…nursing.” He runs his
fingers through her hair.
“This isn’t about nursing.”
Two hours later, the patient is drifting on the edge of
sleep, clearly tired out by his physical therapy and the strain of homecoming.
Maddy lies curled up against his shoulder, staring at the ceiling. She feels
calm and at peace for the first time since she arrived here.
It’s not about
Bob any more, is it?
She asks herself.
It’s not about what anybody
expects of me. It’s about what I want, about finding my place in the universe.
She feels her face relaxing into a smile. Truly, for a moment, it feels as if the
entire universe is revolving around her in stately synchrony.
John snuffles slightly then startles and tenses. She can
tell he’s come to wakefulness. “Funny,” he says quietly, then clears his
throat.
“What is?”
Please don’t spoil this,
she prays.
“I wasn’t expecting this.” He moves beside her. “Wasn’t
expecting much of anything.”
“Was it good?” She tenses.
“Do you still want to stay?” he asks hesitantly. “Damn,
I didn’t mean to sound as if–”
“No, I don’t mind–” She rolls towards him, then is
brought up short by a quiet, insistent tapping that travels up through the
inner wall of the house. “Damn,” she says quietly.
“What’s that?” He begins to sit up.
“It’s the termites.”
John listens intently. The tapping continues
erratically, on-again, off-again, bursts of clattering noise. “What is she
doing?”