Hive

Hayes worked the stick of the SnoCat, pressing in the clutch, and bringing it up to high gear as they came over a rise and moved across a barren ice plain. He figured they’d make Vradaz in thirty or forty minutes if the storm didn’t swallow them alive. They were plunging through Condition Two weather, sheets of wind-driven snow blasting the SnoCat and making it tremble. It was dark out, of course, and the only lights came from the ‘Cat itself. All you could see in the high beams was the white, uneven tundra broken occasionally by knobs of black rock and the swirling, blowing snow.

“You’re not going to get us lost are you?” Cutchen said.

“No, I don’t think so. I have a roll of kite twine on the back of the ‘Cat and I tied the other end to Targa House.” He glanced out his window at the huge rectangular mirror out there. “Shit . . . must have run out of string.”

“Ha, ha, you so funny,” Cutchen said.

“Relax. GPS knows the way and I took a bearing on Vradaz before we left. If we get lost, the beacon from Kharkhov will bring us back home.”

“If worse comes to worse,” Sharkey said, “we can gather up some wood and start a signal fire.”

“Boy, you guys are good. I’ll book you in Vegas when we get back . . . unless we don’t get back.” Cutchen thought about that a moment. “You think these Old Ones have much of a sense of humor, Hayes?”

“Yeah, I think they do. Look-it all the gags they’ve pulled on us. They’re some really silly bastards, you get to know ‘em.”

The SnoCat began to jump and lurch as it passed over a field of sastrugi, frozen ridges of snow and ice that looked like waves heading ashore at a beach. Except these never moved and they were tough as granite. But the SnoCat handled them just fine, jarring and bouncing, but handling it better on its twin sets of caterpillar tracks than an ordinary wheeled vehicle would have.

Hayes swung the ‘Cat around a glacial valley, the storm getting worse, beginning to howl and screech, filling its lungs full of frost and white death and letting it back out in a wild, whipping tempest. The cab of the ‘Cat was warm even without their ECW’s on, but outside? They wouldn’t have lasted long. Hayes had followed the ice road that Gates and his people had flagged for some thirty miles before the GPS told him it was time to trail blaze. It was dangerous work on an Antarctic night, but he had plotted a course on the contour map so he didn’t drive them into a fissure or crevice. It was lumpy and bumpy rolling over serrated ice ridges and steering around weathered black outcroppings of stone, but they were going to make it.

Hayes had already decided that.

He just wasn’t giving much thought to whether or not they’d make it back again.

One heartbreak at a time.

The wastelands to either side were dead white with canopies of ice that jutted like mountain peaks. You caught them out of the glare of the lights and out of the corner of your eye, they looked like monuments and gravestones sometimes. The landscape became very hilly as they approached the Dominion Range, full of sudden gullies and ice-pilings, horns of wind-blasted rock rising up like church spires. Rough, dangerous country. The Dominion Range was located along the edge of the East Antarctic ice sheet, where the massive Beardmore and Mill Glaciers came together. Had it been daylight, Hayes knew, they would have been able to see the rugged cones of the Transantarctic Mountains rising before them.

The SnoCat plodded along, plowing through waist-high drift and over ridges of ice. The wind kept blowing and the snow kept pushing from the high elevations, threatening to bury them at times.

“Hey! You see that!” Cutchen said, almost choking on his words.

Sharkey tensed next to him and Hayes tried to swallow. “What? What did you see?”

“I . . . well, I saw a shape . . . I thought I saw a shape,” Cutchen said. “Off to the right. It passed right by us . . . then I lost it in the snow.”

“Probably some rocks,” Sharkey pointed out.

“No, it was moving . . . I think it was moving away from us.” Cutchen let that hang a moment, then added, “I thought I saw eyes reflected.”

“Eyes?” Hayes said. “How many?”

Sharkey crossed her arms almost defiantly. “Stop it. Both of you.”

“Just a shape,” Cutchen said. “That’s all.”

Hayes was going to tell him he was crazy, that there was nothing moving out there but them, but the spit had dried up in his mouth. It felt like something was spinning a web at the base of his spine, a chill stealthily creeping up his back.

“It was probably nothing,” Cutchen said like he was trying to convince himself of the fact.

Ten minutes passed while Hayes hoped they’d see nothing else. He checked the GPS. “Okay, we should be right on top of Vradaz . . . gotta be right in this area somewhere.”