Hive

The mummy was big. Probably an easy seven feet from end to end, shaped like some great fleshy barrel that tapered at each end and was set with high vertical ridges that ran up and down its length. Its skin was an oily gunmetal gray like that of a shark, set with tiny fissures and minute scars. Midline, there was a pair of appendages that branched out like tree limbs and then branched out again into fine tapering tendrils. At the bottom of the torso, there were five muscular tentacles, each an easy four feet in length. They looked oddly like the trunks of elephants . . . though not wrinkled, but smooth and firm and powerful. They ended in flat triangular spades that might have been called feet on another world.

And the ice kept melting and the water kept dripping and that weird rotten fish-stink began to come off the thing.

“What’s that there?” Lind said. “That . . . that a head?”

“Yes,” Gates said. “It would seem to meet the criteria.”

Maybe for a biologist, but not for Hayes or Lind. They stood around like mourners, just wanting to throw dirt over it. At the top of the thing’s torso was a flabby, blunt neck that almost looked like a wrinkled-up scarf or foreskin. On top of it was something like a great five-pointed starfish, dirty yellow in color. The radial arms of the star were made of tapering, saggy tubes and at the end of each, a bulbous red eye.

Hayes thought that it looked like the creature had been frozen very quickly, flash-frozen like one of those mammoths up in Siberia you read about. Because it looked . . . well, almost startled like it had been caught by surprise. At least that’s what he had been thinking, but the more the ice melted and the more of that head and those five leering red eyes he saw, the more he was thinking it looked pissed-off, arrogant, superior, something. And whatever that look was, it sure as hell was not friendly.

You wouldn’t want to meet this fellah on a good day, Hayes thought, let alone with that evil look about it.

And thinking that, he just couldn’t imagine how something like it could have walked. For it was debased and degenerate, the sort of thing made to crawl, not walk upright like a man. But according to what Gates told Bryer, it stood and walked, all right.

“That’s some sort of wing there I’d bet,” Holm said, indicating an arched tubular network like bones on the thing’s left side that were folded-in on themselves like an oriental fan. Even folded, you could see the fine webbing of mesh between the tubes. “And another over here. Certainly.”

“Jesus, you mean it could fly?” Lind said.

Gates scribbled something in his notebook. “Well, at this point we’re opting for some sort of marine adaptation . . . maybe not wings, but possibly fins . . . though until we can actually examine them, I’m only guessing.”

In his mind, Hayes could see that thing flying around like some sort of cylindrical gargoyle, dipping down over sharp-peaked roofs. That was the image he had and it was very clear in his mind for some reason as if it was something he had seen once or maybe dreamed about.

“Has LaHune see it yet?”

Gates said he hadn’t, but that he was very excited about the prospects of the discovery. And Hayes could almost hear LaHune saying just that, Gentlemen, I am most excited about the prospects of this monumental discovery. Yeah, that’s exactly how he would have said it. Hayes shook his head. LaHune, he was some kind of guy. Dennis LaHune was the NSF administrator who ran Kharkhov Station, summer and winter. It was his job to keep things running, make certain resources were not wasted, keep everything on the straight and narrow.

Yeah, Hayes thought, resident ballbuster, bean-counter, and NSF ramrod. That was LaHune. The headmaster lording over this clutch of unruly, free-thinking students as it were. LaHune had more personality than your average window dummy, but not much.

Lind said, “I can’t believe he hasn’t come to see what we have out here. You would think it was his job.”

“C’mon, Lind,” Hayes said. “He’s got more important shit to be doing like counting pencils and making sure we’re not using too many paperclips.”

Gates chuckled.

The water that melted off that irregular block of ice was being collected in buckets, tagged for later study. Drip, drip, drip.

“Gets under your skin, don’t it?” Lind said. “Just like that movie . . . you ever seen that movie, Hayes? Up at the North Pole or maybe it was the South, they got this alien in a block of ice and some dumbfuck throws an electric blanket over it and it unthaws, runs around camp sucking everybody’s blood. Think that guy from Gunsmoke was in it.”

Hayes said, “Yeah, I saw it. Was kind of trying not to think about it.”