Hive

“All right,” Sharkey said. “But for them to drift here . . . you have any idea how long that would take?”

“Again, time only means something to creatures like you and me with finite life spans and I think the Old Ones are nearly immortal. They’d have to be. Sure, they may die by accident or design, but not from old age. No, Doc, they drifted here like pollen on the wind.”

Hayes said he figured it was how they worked. Maybe drifting from one star system to the next, something that probably took millions of years. Then establishing themselves on worlds, hopping from planet to planet, seeding them with life.

Sharkey didn’t want to believe any of it, but slowly the logic of it took hold of her despite herself. “Yes . . . I suppose that’s how it must’ve been. It’s just incredible, is all.”

“Of course it is.”

“You heard what Lind said? That business about the helix and organic molecules, proteins . . . the conquest and the harvest . . . the perpetuation of the helix?”

“I heard.”

“And . . . “

“They created life here, they are the engineers of our DNA,” Hayes said. “They created it. Maybe out of themselves or from scratch, who knows? Jesus, this is outrageous. This is really going to throw the creationists firmly on their ass. So much for religion.”

“So much for everything.”

“I guess we’ve seen the face of God down here,” Hayes said. “And it’s an ugly one.”

Sharkey started laughing. Was having trouble stopping. “Gates . . . that’s what Gates was saying. That they might have seeded hundreds of worlds, directed evolution, that their ultimate agenda was harvesting those minds they had created . . . “

And this was the very thing Hayes was having trouble with. “But why? What do they want with them? What could it be?”

“To bring them into the hive, subjugate them . . . who knows?” Sharkey swallowed. “Down in the lake . . . those things down there . . . they’ve been waiting for us all this time. Waiting to harvest what we are. Fucking Christ, Jimmy . . . the patience of those monsters.”

What Hayes was trying to figure out is why they took total possession of Lind like they had. He’d been in the hut that day with Lind and those mummies had freaked him out, made him feel bad inside, but they hadn’t taken over his mind. Was it that Lind was just a sensitive of some sort? A natural receiver, a medium for lack of a better word?

And what about Meiner and St. Ours?

Those things had leeched their minds dry and destroyed their brains. And Hayes himself had been psychically attacked twice by the Old Ones . . . once in the hut alone and last night out on the tractor . . . why hadn’t they killed him, too? Why did he have the strength to fight? And Sharkey? She had had the dreams, too, as they all had. What in the hell were those things saving them for? What was the ultimate plan here?

“You feel up to that drive I was talking about?” he asked her.

“Vradaz?”

He nodded. “I don’t think we have much time left, Elaine. If we can learn something up there, maybe we might make it out of this yet.”

“Okay,” she said, but didn’t sound too hopeful. “Jimmy? Lind said ‘The Color Out of Space’. I’ve heard him say it before while he was heavily sedated. I thought it meant nothing . . . but I’m not so sure now. What is this Color Out of Space?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the Old Ones themselves,” he speculated. “And maybe it’s something a lot worse.”

28

“Tell me again why I’m doing this,” Cutchen said.

“For the good of humanity,” Hayes told him. “What more reason do you need?”

Maybe Cutchen needed some reassurance here, some encouragement, but Hayes didn’t really have a lot to offer up in that department. Why were they going up to Vradaz Outpost, the abandoned Russian camp? Even he wasn’t sure, not really. But something bad, something truly terrible had happened there and he felt it was important that they find out what. Maybe they’d find nothing but a snowed-in empty camp, but Hayes was thinking there had to be evidence of what came down. If even some of what Nikolai Kolich said was true, then the outpost had undergone pretty much the same sort of shit that Kharkhov Station was currently undergoing.

Hayes could remember very well what Kolich had said.

Vradaz was a summer post and they were coring, struck into a cave or chasm or something. Yes. Then . . . I remember things got funny after that.

And didn’t that just sound familiar?

“Storm’s picking up pretty good out there,” Sharkey said.