The Aeschylus (12 page)

“And what exactly were you told?” Kate asked.

Mason looked at her, his expression unreadable. “We have our mission, and you have yours. When we clean up the mess, you can decide how you want to report it. That is your job, right? Figuring out how to report this to the shareholders?”

Kate put one hand on her hip. “It's a little more complicated than that, thanks.”

“So is our job. And if you don't mind, we'd like to get to it.” He turned to AJ. “Only one stairwell down, is that right?”

AJ nodded. “That's right, it goes right to the main deck. There are three paths down from that point. The northwest end leads to the employee barracks and housing units, the southwest end to the storage tanks. Drilling operation is one level down from there. And the east stairwell goes to security and the generator levels. They all connect at the bottom where the boat deck is. That's a hike no matter which route you take.”

Mason nodded. “Yeah, that gels with the blueprints. You think more than four men are needed to secure the top deck though, huh?”

AJ looked at Dutch and then back. “Considering we don't know what we're dealing with, I'd say so.”

Mason grunted. A moment later, he jogged off, sending the four men ahead of him to the stairwell.

Kate turned and was surprised to see AJ looking hard up. “You all right?”

“Yeah. I guess I didn't think it would matter so much being here.”

“And it does?”

He shrugged. “She's my baby. I didn't build her, but it was my job to make sure she stayed safe.”

“It would have if you were still here, man,” Dutch said.

AJ spat, and Kate winced; it was a vulgar gesture. “Yeah, that's part of what pisses me off.”

Someone cursed below, and then Mason reemerged from the stairwell. “It's blocked from the other side. Onto Plan B.”

“There's no other way down,” AJ said.

Mason chuckled and slapped him on the arm. “That always was your problem old buddy: you don't think outside the box.”

The bigger motioned to his fire team. “Rappel lines. Here and here. Ready?”

The men nodded, drawing nylon rope from pouches on their vests. They were light and thin, each one containing a huge clamp at the end.

“Aren't you too heavy for that?” AJ asked, looking at the hairy guy who'd tackled him on the beach.

The man slapped on a clamp and flashed AJ his teeth. “Your mama,” he said, and hopped over.

It wasn't free fall, but it was a close thing. Each man dropped effortlessly, their feet bouncing against the side wall. They detached and fell the last three feet to the ground, facilely moving to cover. Mason followed, and it didn't look like his age slowed him down one bit.

Kate watched as the team scattered, setting up fire positions around the cargo containers. Their tactics were perfect, each man covering another, the whole unit moving in a wave across the deck. When they got halfway across, they held position, each man surveying the deck with the barrels of his gun.

“Excuse me,” Melvin said, pushing past Kate and Dutch. He was attaching his own rappel line to the railing.

“Just leaving us here, eh?” Dutch asked.

AJ's buddy from the beach, Nicholas, stepped through. “You'll be fine, old pal. Back in no time. Besides, Hal will be here.” He indicated the chopper behind them, where the pilot was smoking a cigarette.

“Nick,” AJ said, his tone serious. “What's down there?”

The boy's smile faded as he strapped on his harness. “You don't want to know.”

He and Melvin dropped out of sight. Kate thought that at the rate the team had been moving, they'd have the whole platform cleared in ten minutes. But it was over an hour before they heard back.

Reiner saw the island before his pilot did. He tapped Marten and pointed. “There it is. Hell of a good size.”

The pilot flipped a switch on the console. “Alpha team leader, come in. This is Delta. Target is in sight, over.”

Mason's voice shot back a moment later, permeated with static.

“Say again, team leader?”

This time, nothing but noise.

Marten sighed and looked at Reiner. “Your call.”

“Let's have a look.”

Marten tilted the rotor, and the helicopter began to move, revealing more of the land mass beneath them. Even at their present distance, Reiner could see more of the black tar tendrils twisting and coiling across the landscape. Their Valley Oil representative had thought it was some kind of organism that had emerged from underneath a tectonic plate. A
Scotia Plate anomaly
. But for all he knew, it could have been caused by a goddamned meteor. Bring up something like that in a room of military grunts, and everyone laughs at you, but he wondered if his teammates were laughing now.

“Now we don't have any notion that this new anomaly, whatever it is, had anything to do with what happened to the crew.” That's what their Valley Oil contact had said. He'd said it with a straight face too, like he really believed it. “For all we know, they could have gotten scared when it started showing up and ran off. You know how superstitious they are down there. Or maybe its appearance caused some kind of dispute and they had a mutiny. Maybe they were hit by terrorists and its appearance is completely coincidental. We just don't know. But the fact is, the site is unsecured. We need it locked down, and
we need everyone who's had contact with this new anomaly accounted for. We can send in our analysis teams once that happens, but until it's been declared safe and we get those workers away—”

“If we can find them,” Mason had cut in. “And if they're alive.”

The representative had smiled then. “Yes, of course, but let's not jump to conclusions. We just need you to assess the damage from on site, gather the workforce, and make sure no one else comes near the place. With communications down, this has turned into a bit of a situation.”

Reiner grimaced.
A situation
. Is that what you called it when you sent in nine men with enough firepower to level a small town? As to the three civilians who had come along for the ride, that was a dirty deal. Reiner had done too many things in his line of work to worry about dirty deals, though. Life was cruel.

The chopper closed in on the land mass. Marten had to increase their altitude; the center of the island was covered in hills and mountains.
Mountains
. Even the geography here was alien. The terrain of the island shifted from sand, to grass, to jutting rock, as if God couldn't make up His mind when He was trying to decide what kind of island to make.

“Ain't that something?” Marten asked.

Reiner reached into his pocket and pulled out a stick of gum. He offered Marten a piece, but the pilot shook his head. He pointed down to the buildings on shore. “You recognize 'em?”

The satellite photos had shown as much: concrete walls, metal bunkers, and rotted tarp that had all but disintegrated. Further up the coast, Reiner knew they could expect a group of warehouses and a small factory from an industry long dead. But they weren't going in that direction. They were going towards the... well, towards the source.

The executive said they had detected half a dozen fissures beneath the surface of the water. The largest of the underwater fissures, of course, was directly beneath The Aeschylus. The largest fissure of all—the
source
—as it had been called, was on the island. Reiner didn't know if that meant that this place was just the biggest, or if it had actually seeded the other spots, and he didn't care. Their job was to have a look, and that's what they were going to do.

As the chopper crested the next set of hills, he saw it.

Marten's mouth hung open. “Good God...”

The thing on the island was not a fissure. Set between the mountains, it looked, at first glance, like a crater. But it was a crater without a bottom. Where the earth should have been, there was only an empty void of black, endless space. It looked like it could very well go to the center of the earth.

“That's not possible,” Marten said. His face was white. “There should be a lake there. That thing descends below sea-level for... who knows how far. It's like the earth just... goes straight down.”

“How far south to solid land?” Reiner asked. He couldn't quite keep the shake out of his voice.

Marten shook his head. “Two hundred miles, maybe. We're close to the coast but this doesn't make any sense.”

As Reiner looked at the edges of the crater, however, he thought maybe it did. There was no rock. Where the hole opened to the mountains, there were only more of those strange, black tentacles. They reached up and over the sides, covering the edges and extending onto the hills beyond. From their current position, they looked enormous.

“A Scotia Plate anomaly,” Reiner said. It sounded even crazier out loud. “Well, shit on toast.”

“What?”

Reiner shook his head. “Never mind. Call the boss, hoss.”

Marten flipped another switch and put the chopper into hover. They were directly over the center of the hole now, the sea barely visible over the tops of the hills. He hit the radio button, but shut it off an instant later. The static that came through the speakers nearly blew their eardrums. He tried again and got the same result.

Reiner yanked his headset off. “Goddammit, boy.”

He noticed something else strange, then. It was very warm inside the chopper. He and Marten were outfitted for freezing weather—it was still only about twenty-five degrees at this latitude, even at the height of the summer season—but he realized he was sweating. It was the air. It was as if the thing
below was breathing on them. It sounded absurd, but as he looked at Marten and saw the flush on his face, he knew he wasn't imagining it.

They stared at each other a moment, their minds reaching the same conclusion.

“Let's you and me get out of here.”

“Yeah,” Marten said. “Yeah, I think that's a good idea.”

He flipped the switch to take the chopper out of hover, then pushed down on the foot pedal.

Reiner could hear the blades speeding up. “Come on!”

Marten looked at him. The color had completely drained from his face. “It's not moving.”

Reiner looked out of the window. He could see the blades spinning, could feel the S-70 trying to move, but it wasn't.

A noise came from below them, something like a hiss from the bowels of the earth. And then, the chopper was spinning downwards, spinning and spinning into a vacuum. Reiner screamed.

In seconds, the chopper had descended into the blackness of the pit. Looking at the crater, you would never know it had been there at all.

Somewhere Over the Atlantic:

December, 1938

“Are you coming?” Jan asked.

He knows
, Lucja thought.
He knows and that's why he's grinning
. For a brief moment, she considered telling him no, to shut the door and lock her family outside. Instead, she got to her feet and bristled.

“Of course I'm coming. I'm just grabbing my coat. It's cold on deck, you oaf.”

She expected a retort, but Jan only looked amused. Not because he was making fun of her, she realized, but because in some way, he understood the frustration of it all.

Ari and her father were well ahead of her by then. She put her head down and slunk after, not wanting them to see her face. If they did, they would want to know what was wrong, and of course, she would tell them. Her father would see it as just another headache, more like than not. Worse, it would give him an excuse to blame her emotions on her woman problems. How could she not be emotional? Things were getting worse by the day. She needed someone to talk to, and the only person she could trust was now in prison on the other side of the ocean.

Once she reached the deck, Jan shut the trap door behind her and went back to doing whatever it was he did down there. The previous night, she had seen him writing a letter. When did he intend to send it? He was a strange man, not that the other soldiers were any better. The fat one—Sealer or Seiler, or whatever his name was—he frightened her. And the lieutenant was... well, he was hard to figure out. She supposed he was the only one with manners though, and that counted for something.

Her father stopped ahead and waited for her. “Lucja, are you all right?”

“I'm fine.”

“Stay close tonight. You know, some of the men on this ship haven't been home to their women in a long time. You're getting to the age where...” He paused, looked embarrassed, then said, “Just stay close, all right?”

That was almost funny given the circumstance, but she nodded. If he had meant to tell her that men could not control themselves around pretty young women, he had done a poor job of it. Her mother had put it much more eloquently. “Always be careful when you're alone, darling,” she had said. “A man in the heat of passion has less sense than a dog.”

And what would her father do if she were attacked? Very little, she thought dismally. Looking past him, she caught sight of Ari and Zofia stargazing over the bow.

“You see that constellation up there?” he asked Zofia.

“Where?”

Ari pointed, and Lucja followed his gaze to a cloud of magenta hanging far above.

“It marks the great table constellation, Mensa. You see it? Those stars form the shape of a table cloth. You can always tell where it is thanks to the Magellanic Cloud. A Portuguese poet called it The Spirit of the Cape, Adamastor. It was supposed to be a storm that would destroy any ships venturing too far south. Of course, they never got far enough to see exactly what it was.”

“You talk funny,” Zofia said.

Ari turned red. “Do I? I guess I do. I just think it's funny something so far away could scare people.”

“It is scary.”

“I suppose it scares me too. It's only visible from the southern hemisphere. You know what that means?”

Zofia shook her head, her thumb falling predictably into her mouth.

“It means we're a long way from home.”

Lucja shivered. A long way from home indeed.

When her father moved to join them, she slipped away and climbed the ladder to the wheelhouse. It was cold up top, but the sea was a beautiful thing. As she stepped to the rails, the water below looked almost inviting.