They pulled on their furs, raised the hatches, and stepped up into the little conning towers. Stood there in the raw air looking up in awe, looking up that ice-walled shaft at a strip of pallid Antarctic sky more than two hundred feet above their deep entombment.
Cruising half-speed side by side, they watched this icy grandeur unfold. Belinda asked, her voice sounding small and uncertain between these colossal ramparts, “What are those things? Those … like lumps up there on the walls?”
The gusts of sleet and snow variably veiled the cliffs so that they came in and out of focus, as if at a constant readjustment of the atmospheric lens. The women struggled to interpret what was clinging here and there to those prodigious walls, both white cliffs studded with sizeable, irregularly shaped nodes of a darker hue than the ice.
“Look at them,” Melody muttered. “What the …?”
“My God!” Belinda said. “See those, like, tusks on that one? See there? It’s a goddamn walrus.”
As if the word brought it into focus, the huge mummified shape was unmistakable within its glossy bonds.
And, now that their eyes had been instructed, they began discerning other shapes webbed to those high walls: a very big shark, a cephalopod even bigger whose gathered tentacles bulged like coils of suckered cable, and near that, something four-legged and almost as big … a polar bear, mummified with its jaws agape, and its fore-claws lifted for attack.
Belinda said, “Whatever this predator is, it must be huge!” They were armed. Knowing that arctic realms bred bigger fauna, they both had Thompson sub-machine guns aboard. Belinda lifted hers from its rack on her dash and held it up tentatively before her. It had seemed such a beast when she’d test-fired it, but here between these high walls, to which such giants clung entombed, it seemed a comical, slight thing.
Their boats advanced. The sheer walls began to fall away from them, lying back in more gradual slopes from the channel they cruised, until soon it was not a chasm, but a white river valley.
“Listen,” said Belinda, her eyes locked on her sister’s as they rode thirty feet apart. Her unforced voice seemed to ricochet sharply over the icy spaces. “Do you see what I see ahead there? Am I crazy? Hasn’t all that been …
built
?”
Coming abreast of what she meant, they both stood staring up that slope. Melody nodded in a dazed way. Half that whole frozen hillside seemed one vast, stepped hive, tier upon receding tier of crudely faceted cells. The cells were of a giant scale, sized to house larvae big as skiffs, and wrought of a hard-sheened substance almost as pale as the ice, but nuanced with faint color here and there like mother-of-pearl.
The cells were not so precisely shaped as those of wasp combs are. An irregularity in their faceting seemed to express a cruder instinctual energy. The sprawling structure declared a rude, Cyclopean power abroad in this white waste.
“My God,” Belinda said.
“Shit!” barked Melody, seeing then what her sister did—a colossally agile crustacean bigger than both their boats combined, a kind of huge crab of a streamlined make, narrow-thoraxed, running on six legs while holding aloft two forelegs prodigiously clawed and hinged like a mantid’s. Arcing back up from the stern of its thorax was a jointed tail tipped with the stinger-bulb of a scorpion, but the size of a wrecking-ball.
Huge and swift, it came down the great comb, its legs rippling like pistons in their smooth succession. Its great weight glided across the faceted cells, leapt down onto the ice-slope, and launched from a hundred meters. Hanging on the white air above the channel with its barbed arms outreached, it landed in an explosion of brine, seized Belinda’s sub by stern and prow—and hoisted it aloft.
The giant seemed to triumph over its prey for a moment, brandishing the little sub while Belinda whiplashed in her cockpit seat, the monster flourishing near a ton of steel at the leaden sky. Then the colossal crustacean spun around and ran with it straight back up the slope, and into the vast comb of its hive.
“Stay on com!” Melody shouted into her sister’s stunned face on her screen. “Dog your hatch down—I’ll take that fucker apart!”
“Just don’t take
me
apart, okay?” Belinda’s voice was oddly absent, more amazed than galvanized. “I’ll signal if—”
Her transmission was cut off, even as Melody was grounding her prow on the glacier. She flung back her bubble and jumped out, seizing up her Tommy-gun and bag of extra magazines.
The giant had a seventy-yard lead when Melody came sprinting up after. Seeing how swiftly it ran even with its seventeen-foot burden, she dreaded losing Belinda entirely and cut loose a burst of .45 slugs—amazing recoil!—that by wild chance took off the bottom joint of the rearmost of the brute’s four left legs while her slugs sparked away on up the icy slope. The predator faltered slightly, but then ran on, Melody running up after it.
She dared not fall behind and fail to see where the thing installed Belinda in the colossal comb—indeed, her sister must not
be
installed. If this seeming arthropod was at all wasplike, it would paralyze its prey when sealing it in a cell.
She fired again as she ran, not daring to send anything high enough to hit the pod, but desperately trying to catch another of its legs to slow it down.
Unhit, the thing danced nimble as a nightmare, holding her sister in her boat above it like a trophy.
And now, they were running up across the comb itself, whose amber gloss and hexagonal patterning made it seem some colossal insect’s compound eye that she crossed, her soles drumming on the waxy caps that roofed each cell, whose translucence showed the dim shape of prey within them.
Furious though her pursuit was, she kept glancing at those shapes beneath her as she ran, and some of those prisoners seemed to stir.
Or … if they were paralyzed, perhaps they were
being
stirred by the larvae devouring them.
Desperately Melody sprinted across this vast, waxen pavement, still firing bursts of the Tommy and stumbling and scrambling higher and higher. If—oh please!—she got the boat back and Melinda was unharmed, how was she going to get it back down to the channel, which was already five hundred meters below and behind her, and dropping fast as she climbed?
She could see the boat aloft in the giant’s pincers; its bottom had just enough of a keel on it to cut into this snow-crowned ice. It just might
run
back down this glacier like a big sled. Its tough little rudder might even help to guide its plunge through the deeper snow on its way down to the channel. But how could you
steer
it at the speed you’d be going?
The predator was fast and untiring. Melody’s legs pumped up the slope at the excruciating limit of her strength. If the thing weren’t carrying the weight of that boat, she could never have hoped to keep up with its machinelike power.
Her heart was hammering at breaking point, but now here it came, the opening she’d hoped for: they reached the crest of the ice-slope just where its sharp rim had crumbled along a stretch of a few hundred meters, creating a ribbon of negotiable footing.
She was a toiling shape of sinew and bone, all flesh burnt off her. And there, the huge crustacean laid that boat upon the ice-rim and wheeled to meet her, two pairs of its jointed legs scissoring the air to take her.
Melody was no longer praying. She had
become
a prayer, her every nerve a single plea for luck.
She leapt, arms wide, in a half-blind plunge to embrace the boat, to seize their stolen survival, and she felt an instant of surprised delight at how well-aimed her lunge was. Here was her grateful body crashing against the little sub’s hard hull, hugging its bubble with her every sinew and driving hard with her legs to shove both her and the boat and her sister at its wheel inside—all at once straight back down the slope, and into almost-freefall, this shrieking, racketing, rocketing plunge straight down the ice wall.
“Damn you!” she screeched to the vessel she clung to.
“Turn!”
Melody’s every cell screamed it. She had to
angle
down, toward where the channel broadened to an embayment, with enough open water to receive them if she plunged slantwise toward it.
How fragile at this speed was the vehicle’s grip on the ice! To force a
turn
in such a plunge seemed madness, meant tumbling death, the shattering of neck and spine. But what would it do to her to go straight down and hit the water at maximum acceleration?
Clenching her jaws and bidding her body a terrified goodbye, she twisted her frame’s whole length powerfully rightwards.
It torqued the whistling hull crossways so that the slight keel caught and cut a slanting course down the steep wall on a branching path, descending down the steeps at perhaps forty-five degrees off the vertical.
And now they were aimed at a further, much broader part of the channel with room to maneuver after their high-speed impact with the water. Their destination had improved, but not their chances of surviving such an impact, for after just a few seconds of descent they were
rocketing
again, shrieking down at a speed that would break their bodies upon entry.
Melody pressed her boots’ toes against the ice behind her, trying to brake their plunge. But, hugging the cockpit bubble with her whole body, she couldn’t exert any leverage against the glacier speeding under them.
Clinging thus, she could not see her sister’s face, but she felt her presence right beneath her, riding this long plunge with her, the pair of them in touching distance, but powerless to touch before the impact killed them.
Melody lifted her head, letting the icy spume streaming up from the runners sting her face, fixing her eyes on the wall they plunged down, to perceive any feature that offered some natural channel to guide their plunge. The shriek of their keel seemed terror itself.
Please God, Belinda might, just might—braced inside—survive the impact, but when the boat slammed into the water that impact would tear her own grip right off the bubble and she’d hammer that water head-first. Even if it didn’t break her neck, it would surely stun her stone-cold as she knifed deep down in that freezing channel. Deep-sunk and stunned, the sudden killing weight of her drenched clothes would drag her to her death.
The boat’s keel shrieked. The sleety air flayed her ears. The corner of her eye caught big movement on the slope ahead.
The huge crustacean was racing down the steepness, impossibly swift. Its nightmare agility was an enlargement of the familiar little miracle of a spider rushing with equal ease straight up or down a wall. But this bug was big as a truck, and its descent was going to intersect with theirs.
Melody had no hope of survival if she did not jump clear of this hurtling boat,
without
jumping short and landing on the boulders below. She had to do it in the next six or seven seconds to stay on the ice shelf.
Belinda down inside the boat was screaming something up at her.
Was she saying
hold on
?
The thought caused a tightening of Melody’s embrace of the bubble, just as the boat’s actual pilot re-took command and wrenched their prow
toward
their huge predator.
The spidery giant, its glossy black eyes on their stalks bent toward them, veered more sharply to intercept and seize them. Beneath its hideous eyes its chelicera—the largest of its mouthparts—scissored like jointed scythes with its greed to take them.
“Oh shit!” shouted Melody, seeing their intersection not fifty meters off. And at that, Belinda wrenched the wheel, and they were shrieking dead for the brute.
Its crooked legs danced hard to turn and meet them, but their suddenness had thrown it off-balance. Melody, from her rooftop vantage, watched the huge legs tilting and faltering, the monster outmaneuvered. As the mighty tail with its stingered bulb struck down on the ice behind her, they shot past its forelegs straight under it. She watched a huge pincer arc down at her two seconds too late and shatter only the air with the snap of its closing.
“No!” she screamed, for instantly here came Belinda’s target looming at them: one of the brute’s
back
legs. Caught with its weight on that leg, it could not dodge the dead-on impact of the hurtling boat.
Collision
, in the next nanosecond, proved to be deliverance. The leg shattered with a tree-snapping report, and their boat leapt through.
Still Belinda steered them slantwise to the killer slope and then brought them around into a counter-slant. She was switchbacking, yes! Melody glanced back upslope and saw that their impact had cost the brute half of another leg on the same side as the first amputation. Again, the machinelike predator was pistoning downslope after them, though now there was a wobble to its gait.
It came crookedly dancing down. But though at first it veered left and right, echoing its quarry, it suddenly got smart and began to make a beeline that transected their zigzags. Even damaged, it was far more stable on this steepness than its prey. Melody craned her neck back and saw with horror how quickly it gained on them.
The vast speeding slope below her, the channel still so far, the predator huge and tireless and hungry—the physics of their situation struck Melody’s heart like a sledge.
They swung into another giddy switchback, and as they streaked slantwise down again, the relentless arthropod came down in a leap, the cage of its crooked legs striking the ice in a spray of fragments that echoed on their hull even above the roar of their keel and the wind.
The huge predator on its straight plunge would surely intersect them on the next switchback. Melody screamed, “Break another leg when it jumps us!” Through the dark polarized bubble she could just see Belinda’s head nod.
The shriek of their hull was a demon’s song, while the wild winds flung swarms of sleet and snow, drenching them with a light now pallid and now blazing white. A surge of wind came booming down the channel that they plunged into. They could see where this chasm in the Shelf narrowed back to the slender but ample channel they had entered by.