Gundry refused to go into the control booth anymore.
Campbell and Parks had pretty much been in there since the day they launched the cryobot. Though the hydrobot was dead, the primary and secondary cryobots were still operating. Still operating and passing reams of information to the surface.
But that wasn’t all they were passing.
They were picking up a series of vibrations down there that were steady and organized, a constant stream of pulses that repeated every five minutes to the second. Gundy knew it was not due to some natural phenomena. This was purposeful and directed and he knew it was coming from the archaic city down below. These vibrations were very much like Morse code. The computers could crunch those pulses into mathematical symbols, attach to them a numerical value… but it would take months if not years to accurately decipher what the Old Ones were sending.
Or maybe not.
Because maybe on the surface those pulses sounded like noise, but inside, deep inside your mind, you recognized them and understood them. Something long dormant in the human brain was receiving them and waking up. That’s why Parks and Campbell would not leave the booth — they were in tune with it. Gaunt, haggard zombies with eyes like staring glass was all they were now, listening and listening as the Old Ones imposed their will upon them and stripped away their humanity inch by inch.
Gundry could not go in there now.
Those pulses made something in his head ache and something in his belly recoil. The three techs who had operated the drill were gone now. Gundry didn’t know what had happened to them exactly. Just that one afternoon they stood over the drill hole, staring down into it with blank looks on their faces. And by evening, they were gone. Gundry figured they had wandered off into the Antarctic night just as they were told to.
There was a sudden vibration in the drill tower that Gundry could feel coming up through his feet. It was a constant, electronic humming that rose and fell. Made him want to chatter his teeth and scream his mind away. But it was more than that, for it got inside his head and made something hurt in there. And he knew if he would only stop fighting against it, the pain would recede and a black wave of acceptance would carry him off to eon-dead worlds.
Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
The pain was so intense in his head now, thrumming in cutting, tearing waves, that Gundry’s vision blurred and tears were squeezed from his eyes. His molars ached and drool fell from his lips. But he was still a man and he would remain one. Digging frantically into his desk drawer, he pulled out his little .38 and put the barrel in his mouth. There was an explosion and an impact, a shattering and a sense of falling.
Gundry’s corpse slid from the chair to the floor.
Denying the intellect of the hive, he died as a man with freedom on his tongue and defiance in his soul.
31
“I’m all out of answers. I’m empty and finished and just going through the motions now,” Hayes said the morning after they returned from the Vradaz Outpost. “I don’t know what to think and what to feel. Like a rat in a fucking maze. Once again.”
“Least you’re not alone in the maze,” Sharkey told him.
Why did that seem precious little consolation?
No, he would not have been able to handle any of this alone. It would have stripped his gears. But at least alone he could have sought the oblivion of suicide, but now that was out of the question. For he felt a sense of responsibility here. Maybe to his race and the world, but certainly to those that were still alive at Kharkhov Station.
Maybe he was inflating his own importance, but he didn’t think so. For he had an odd and unwavering sense of necessity.
Looking back, he was the only who had felt the badness coming and seen it for what it was. More or less. Maybe the others had, too, in some sense, but just refused to admit it. He felt somehow that he was the guiding hand in this shitfuck and if there was going to be any closure to it, he would be the one to shut the door.
Maybe because those things had tried to infect his mind several times now and had failed. Maybe it was this that gave him such a feeling of self-importance. Sharkey was on the same page with him and so was Cutchen… most of the time… but the others?
No, from LaHune on down they were mice.
Just going about their mindless business and nibbling their cheese, pretending they were not in incredible danger. St. Ours had been an asshole. Hayes would be the first to admit to that. But good or bad, St. Ours had had enough gumption to sense danger and fight against it.
But what now? What came next?
Hayes just wasn’t sure.
Sharkey had just finished telling him two disturbing pearls of knowledge. First that Gates and his people had not been heard from in nearly thirty-six hours now. And secondly, that she’d been on the radio with Nikolai Kolich at the Vostok Station and he had pulled a complete 360 on them, acting like he had never said a word about anything odd happening at Vradaz. Completely denying it all like somebody had a gun to his head. If they’d had an ally there, they’d lost him now.
“We have to decide what we’re going to do, Jimmy. Do we try and sit this out? I don’t think so. Something has to be done and it’s up to us to do it. We can’t expect LaHune to help us and probably nobody else either.” She appraised Hayes with those crystal blue eyes of hers that always made something seize up inside him. “What I’m thinking is we first… neuter those mummies out in the hut. A little exposure to our lovely air down here ought to put them back to sleep. Also, how do you feel about me sending a message to the NSF that we’re in serious trouble here?”
Hayes didn’t know if that was such a good idea. “I’m willing to bet the NSF will ignore it. Because, chances are, LaHune is sending in his glowing daily reports, fiddling while Rome burns to fucking toast.”
“You’re probably right.”
He figured he was. “We’ll look like a couple crackpots. Besides, Cutchy says we’re heading into a full-blown Polar cyclonic storm within twelve hours. We’re going to be looking at white-out conditions when those winds start sweeping down from the mountains, picking up everything in their path. No way in hell a rescue team can get in here… even if they wanted to.”
Sharkey didn’t dispute any of that.
Winter on the Antarctica continent was savage and relentless, marked by screaming subzero winds, perpetual darkness, and wild blizzards that buried camps almost overnight. Planes did not fly to the South Pole even on good days, let alone what they were facing a Condition 3 blizzard with zero visibility and 80 mile-an-hour winds that would lock Kharkhov down for days if not weeks. So whatever was going to happen here, they were going to face it alone.
“There’s more here at work than the weather, Elaine, and I think we both know it.” Hayes lit a cigarette, seemed to find revelation in the glowing tip. “We’ve all been sensing a lot of things, some of it coming in dreams and some of it coming just as feelings we can’t honestly explain. I’m probably the worst of the lot, spouting out reams of bullshit that I have no way of explaining or proving. Most of what I’ve been… what word should I use here?… intuiting has been about those dead ones out in the hut, the others down in the lake. But not all of it’s been about that. I told you I had a bad feeling about LaHune and I still do. And now, with our good buddy Nikolai Kolich turning his pink tail on us… I’m getting an even worse feeling.”
Sharkey just watched him, far beyond the stage where she would even consider trying to talk him out of his conspiracy theories… because piece by awful piece, the puzzle he’d been prophesizing was slowly coming together. “You think…” She swallowed, paused. “You still think that LaHune is sitting atop a conspiracy, don’t you?”