Hive

“Yes.” Another long pause and Hayes could almost imagine him mopping sweat from his brow. “Crazy business . . . the men up there, they wanted to get out, said they could not stay up there. These were scientists, Elaine, and they were scared like schoolchildren, yes? Talking rubbish . . . noises and bumps, knocks and tappings, shapes seen flitting about at night . . . madness, that’s all it was.”

Sharkey chewed her lower lip. “Dr. Gates will find this all interesting.”

“It was rubbish, Elaine, make sure you tell him that I did not believe these things!”

“Oh, of course not, Nicky.” Sharkey stared at the dials and LEDs on the radio, thumbed the mic again. “Did those three men . . . did they say anything?”

The silence dragged on longer this time, much longer. “Yes, even sedated, they would not stop talking. It was all nonsense, Elaine. Silly stories, all of it. They were raving. Sounds in the night, noises in the walls and on the roofs . . . knocks at the door, scratching at the windows. Things of that nature. There was a ruined house when I was a child and . . . but, no matter. These men were raving about nightmares and voices in their heads . . . weird figures wandering through the compound that were not men . . . ghosts, bogies, I think. They spoke of devils and monsters, figures that walked through walls. It was a terrible business.”

Kolich signed off soon after this and seemed to be in a hurry to do so. Maybe he was being overheard or maybe the memory of all that wasn’t sitting on him right. Regardless, he had something that needed doing and he went to do it.

“What do you make of that?” Hayes asked.

Sharkey kept staring at the set. She shook her head. “Nikolai is a man who likes to talk, Jimmy. But he was very abrupt about all this. Any other time I would have been on here an hour hearing about his take on that business. It’s not like him.”

“I got the feeling that maybe he was talking about something he wasn’t supposed to be saying.”

“Me, too.”

“But you saw the familiar pattern there, I take it?”

She nodded. “It’s like what we have . . . but worse.” She was looking in his eyes now and Hayes saw something like fear in them. “Is this what’s going to happen here, Jimmy? Are we all going to go mad and kill each other?”

“I don’t know, but I think we better do something here before this gets out of hand.”

“Like what?”

He smiled thinly. “Oh, I was thinking about asking you to take a little Sunday drive with me. Up to a place called Vradaz.”

PART THREE

THE WINGED DEVILS

“That ultimate, nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

21

Zero hour.

Gundry and his people weren’t calling it that, but that’s how Hayes was seeing it. The cryobot had been launched some twelve hours before. It took nearly eight of those for it to melt through the remaining 100 feet of the ice dome over Lake Vordog and then it dropped to the misty, black waters of the lake far below. Gundry and his people had not slept for over twenty-four hours now and Hayes didn’t see that happening anytime soon.

They were all wired.

Hayes had gotten up at like four a.m. because he, too, was excited. Excited and, yes, apprehensive as to what might be found down in that ancient lake. He went about his work, checking in at the drill tower from time to time to see how things were proceeding. Apparently, Gundry and Parks, the project’s geophysicist, had been concerned about the possibility of there being some massive methane ice bubble trapped down below the cap. Most permafrost regions have quantities of methane beneath them, they explained to him.

“You see, Jimmy,” Gundry explained to him. “There was some anxiety about what we’re doing down here. Environmental groups were worried that we would pollute that pristine lake below and among the scientific community, there was some grave concern that we might tap into a dangerous quantity of methane gas . . . which, if released, could prove disastrous to world climate.”

When Hayes heard that, his mouth maybe dropped open. “You mean . . . Jesus, Doc, you saying you guys could’ve wiped us out just to explore that goddamn lake?”

“That was something of a concern, so to speak,” Gundry admitted. “But we took every precaution and all our tests and coring confirmed that, while there certainly were quantities of methane, there was also helium, nitrogen, trace amounts of exotic gases such as xenon . . . but nothing that could affect our atmosphere.”

So, Project Deep Drill went ahead.

And now the cryobot had melted its way through the ice cap and dropped into the lake itself. It had been there some three hours now, sending back a wealth of information on the lake’s temperature, chemistry, and biology. It had already detected vast quantities of organic molecules and even varieties of archaebacteria, eubacteria, and eukaryotes. So the lake was definitely alive just as they thought and not only alive, but organically rich.