The Nexus Colony (35 page)

But as Ruger tugged one last time on the rope to test its integrity, to his utter surprise the cable next to him started to move slowly up through the air toward the ceiling overhang. Its unexpected movement turned everyone’s attention for a brief instant. It ascended for about twenty feet, stopped, then reversed and dropped back toward the crevasse floor.

“Monroe!” Abbott exclaimed.

“No,” Ruger responded. “It’s got to be Allison!”

“
Who cares!
” Almshouse responded, reaching skyward toward the descending cable.

“Get over here!” Ruger screamed at Grimes, gesturing for him to get ready into position to be hooked up. “Get the harness on!”

“Get it!” Abbott yelled. “Hurry!”

When the two men were secure, as if on cue, the cable began to reel in, and the two men rose slowly upward toward the ceiling and the start of crevasse wall, momentarily dangling helplessly in the air.

Ruger quickly glanced at both Abbott and Lisk, a look of abandon on his face. “I don't know if the rope will hold more than one,” Ruger announced, dismayed. “Its liable to give.”

Abbott cursed under his breath. He looked stone-faced at Lisk, then back at Ruger. “Get the fuck out of here, Mike. Send the cable back down as quick as you can.
Go!
”

Abbott and Lisk watched as the three men ascended the crevasse, two on the cable, and one on the rope. Ruger lagged behind as he fought with all his strength to pull himself skyward toward the relative safety of the surface. Abbott turned his undivided attention back toward the tormentors. If Abbott knew anything about alien
Grays
at all, it was a presumption that by the nature of their physiology they were light sensitive. They had experienced it in the interior of the chambers. But was the ambient lighting here in the bottom of the glacial crevasse enough to temporarily stem their advance?

“
Shit!
” Abbott cursed, wishing he’d had enough presence of mind to retrieve the carbide lamps. He could have shined the beam toward the opening. It would have been more effective than all the bullets in the world.

Maybe.

O
nly by coincidence, the space shuttle’s latest mission had been launched about two weeks prior to the arrival of Abbott’s team in the Mulock Glacier region. It’s orbital trajectory had taken it on a circumpolar path. It returned eleven days later. The space shuttle utilizes an incredible new tool which archaeologists are using to study ancient civilizations from space.

The tool—called the SIR-C radar imaging system—is capable of imaging manmade structures which lie hidden beneath the desert sands or under the dense canopies of the jungles. It had already imaged buried segments of the Great Wall of China and had found evidence of numerous long-forgotten Central and South American temples.

Anton Vandergrif was beside himself. Spread out on the table before them were imaging photographs of parts of Antarctica. Korbett could only marvel at how somebody—probably Ted Payne—could pull enough strings to get the space shuttle to deviate slightly from its mission objective to get radar imaging of the Mulock Glacier from space.
But, my God!
Korbett thought.
Look what we have discovered!

“What time is it in Antarctica?” Korbett muttered to himself out loud, glancing at the world clock on the table.

“Eight thirty,” Darbury responded, and Korbett gave him a perfunctory glance.

Everyone was silent in awe of the pictures. The images showed what could possibly be as many as twenty manmade—he corrected himself,
alien-made
—structures buried beneath the glacier. Whatever was down there, it was definitely a contrived geometric pattern. In his mind, Korbett attempted to sort out more of the data, which by now was piling up in his brain like a landslide of information. He tried to fathom the possible scenarios of how they were going to deal with this. He had to try to make some sense of it all, because he was going to have to brief the President when it was all over. That’s when Maggie came hurriedly into the room.

She handed the communiqué to Korbett, who saw the concerned look on her face. Everyone gathered around the table.

“It’s from Abbott,” Korbett said, surprised.

“Look at the time of transmission,” Maislin commented. “Doesn’t make sense.”

Everyone knew the satellite window was closed. Odd that the message could have gotten through because there shouldn’t have been any communications link-up. They all brushed aside the thought. The message itself was what was bringing everything to a sudden halt, including the incredible evidence that only moments before had been consuming them.

It was a simple one sentence message. Korbett looked around the room at each one of them. The stress of the last several days was showing on all their faces. Probably his, too. He responded, affirmatively, “Let’s do it.”

“Let’s abort,” Maislin announced.

Korbett tossed the communiqué onto the pile in the middle of the table. He should have called for it earlier. The words on the paper intoned what may have been an untimely decision on Korbett’s part. It said:

H
ow the tents had withstood for so long against the ferocious katabatic winds was testament only to human innovation. Not that it really mattered anymore. The winds tearing away at the shelter might be the more merciful way for the five remaining humans to be terminated.

Lightfoot had disappeared first. Then Monroe and Allison –
my poor, poor Allison
, Ruger thought—
they had been taken away by these evil entities
…
God only knows what fate befell them.

The monsters looming outside were all too real. Ruger’s unreserved hatred and anger, his helplessness…they were only being subdued by the nightmarish horror that had unfolded—and was
still
unfolding—outside the thin, canvass barrier that only separated them visually from their unearthly antagonists.

Totally exhausted from the ordeal, their body resistance down to its lowest levels since they arrived, they crowded around the fading warmth of the camp stove like it was their last bastion of hope, awaiting only to be dispatched by their tormentors like lambs to the slaughter. They almost wished they would freeze to death and end it all right there and then.

There was nothing left to be said—nothing that
could
be said—that was going to change the situation. The blood vessels in Ruger’s brain were pounding like they were going to burst at any moment. Abbott, Lisk…they were the cool ones. Ruger sensed that somewhere deep within each of their souls they had made their inner peace with whatever form of a god dwelled therein. Almshouse. Grimes. They were portraits of human pathos, unable to come to grips with anything, let alone themselves.

Make your peace, man,
Ruger intoned, wanting to tell his friend Hilliard Grimes, but somehow was unable to formulate any words to express himself outwardly. Perhaps it was sheer cowardice, Ruger thought of himself. He was not a man prone to weep, but the emotions of a man facing imminent death are restricted by no self-imposed barriers.

Ruger turned his head away from his friend, no longer able to watch the despair in Grimes’ pallid face. Trying to shrug the awful feeling of abandon, Ruger took in a deep breath. Even then, there was no spirit left. The repetitive litany of his prayers were losing significance, and at last his conscious repetition faded into nothingness, the holy invocations lost to the emptiness outside.

Ruger fought off the nausea, swallowing back the awful taste of bile that wanted to spew up from his empty stomach. So far, he was sure he hadn’t urinated in his pants, but looking again at his pathetic friend, Ruger thought that perhaps Grimes had even passed off worse than that.

The wind outside.
They
were probably waiting for it to subside, although Ruger couldn’t fathom why. He was still absolutely astonished by the way their craft hovered in the air all around the encampment seemingly unaffected by the wind’s turbulence. It looked almost as if they were in a state of suspended animation, out of dimensional phase with the physical reality of the immediate environment. That the wind had no effect at all seemed to be more frightening than if it had. If it had no bearing on their interactions with the humans…

In the silence of the horror, Ruger’s mind began to drift, and his foremost thoughts returned back to the moment he had reached the top of the crevasse wall hours ago. Grimes and Almshouse…

The two men reached the top several minutes before the struggling Ruger. As he strained every muscle in his adrenaline-filled body, Ruger pulled his muscular bulk the last twenty five feet to the crevasse edge. Nervously, he awaited to see the cable begin its reverse descent back down along the ice wall.
They should have reversed it by now
, and by the time Ruger reached the top and pulled himself along the steep slope toward the ridge the cable still had not dropped.

The wind howled with a relentless fury, and he felt the pain of the frigid air stinging his face and burning his eyes. Struggling to retrieve his goggles from the pocket pouch, he somehow managed to get them set onto his face to protect his eyes. He could now see the rig at the top of the ridge only a short twenty yards away. Grimes and Almshouse were standing side by side right next to it, facing away in the direction of the encampment.

They were peering off in the direction of the camp, and even when Ruger began yelling frantically above the howling tempest to, “
Send down the cable! Grimes…Almshouse…
” they ignored his desperate pleas.

Ruger’s confused emotional state—anger, fear, frustration—he fought desperately to keep it all from coming unglued. As he pulled himself along the slope the last few yards, his ire was focused so intently on the two men that he initially failed to see what had been keeping them from reacting at all to his shouts. Even the ominous, lone disk-shaped craft that was hovering motionless just above and behind Ruger’s head had initially gone unobserved.

When Ruger’s line of vision broke the horizon of the ridge line, in an instant his brief surge of anger diminished to be replaced by a feeling of absolute terror. Inside of the span of a few seconds, Ruger experienced a total shift of emotions, his heart dropping into a well of complete abandon. For they had not left
The Visitors
behind in the bowels of the glacial crevasse. Their minions were waiting on the surface, and they hovered over the distant encampment like an evil manifestation of everything that men know is not of human convention.

Ruger stood alongside the two others, and in his horrified stupor he counted the number of distant alien craft that loomed like conspicuous dots against the gray landscape.
One…two…four…seven…
eleven in all, still not seeing the twelfth spacecraft hovering just over his shoulder only ten yards away.

The symmetry of their formation suddenly changed without warning. One ship moved out of the formation, and in a spectacular motion, it was as if the craft had singled out the three intruders far up the slope. It traversed the two mile distance in a matter of one second…
blink…blink…blink…
almost faster than the human eye was capable of even registering. Before Ruger’s brain had time to process what had just occurred, in an instant the craft had taken on a distinctive form and was hovering a few yards in front of them. It was a mere twenty feet in width, a cupola extruding from both the top and bottom of the craft ringed by a series of windows, and it was dull gray in color. It was as if Ruger was standing in the middle of a dream
,
the phantasmagoric image of the spacecraft there visually in front of his eyes, yet something in his brain telling him it wasn’t quite real, not quite solid, more like a projection from some other dimension that hadn’t yet taken on full physical reality in this time and space.

He felt the push of the wind threatening to knock him off balance, but the ominous disk was unaffected, totally stable in front of his eyes as if the force of the rushing air was passing right through the molecular structure of the craft.
They’re not really here! They’re not really here!
something in his brain started yelling. But as if to mock his denial, suddenly and unexpectedly the winch began to operate itself, and as Ruger turned to look, he was shocked yet again when he saw the twelfth craft only yards behind him.

The cable reeled out at a rapid rate, dropping into the icy abyss of the crevasse. It sped its way downward and stopped. Seconds passed. The winch reeled itself back in. Somehow deep inside Ruger knew that Abbott and Lisk were riding the cable back to the surface, more than likely unaware of what was transpiring there on the surface. They had not been aware. They had been waiting for their rescue…

There was little communication between the five men from that time forward once everyone had been assembled on the ridge by the alien antagonists. Cognizant only of each other’s presence, there seemed to permeate a mutual abandonment, and it was in this state of mental stupor that in unison they responded to what it obviously was that they were being compelled to do.

The engines roared to life on the two snowmobiles as if by magic. To compound their horror, the two machines moved themselves into position directly in front of the men as if they were being driven by ghosts. The aliens wanted them to get on. When the men occupied the machines, several minutes passed before it was recognized that they were to drive them off the slope under their own human control. Perhaps it would have been a better choice to freeze to death.

Ruger recalled that when the five of them ultimately marched into the tent through the midst of the howling wind, how he had braved glancing one more time at the horrifying spacecraft of his ungodly tormentors, which were all lined up ringing the encampment, still hovering motionless in the turbulent air. Ruger was the last to go inside, and he zippered up the tent behind him.

All that had happened, what?…An hour ago? Two? More? Ruger had lost all track of time. They lit the stove. The rest of the electronic equipment was dead, unusable. There was little left to be said. There was little left that
could
be said.

* * * * *

Precisely when it had been that the winds began to abate, no one would later be able to recall, least of all Ruger who had been drifting away along the edges of his own little dream world, trying desperately to escape the agonizing notion of his pending death. He was unable to shake the ingrained knowledge that these demons were indeed real.

None of them heard the commotion outside even though the pounding of the wind against the walls of the Scott tent had long ceased. The fuel on the camp stove had long been expended—for how long, Ruger didn’t know or care—when his brain was suddenly jarred back into the reality of the predicament.

They were shouts he was hearing. Human shouts. Voices that were calling the names of those he was with.
Abbott…Lisk… Almshouse…Prall…Monroe…
Then unexpectedly he heard his own name. Anger surged through his body. That these monsters would continue to torment them…Or maybe they were already dead and this was what it was like to be in an altered state of consciousness.

The sudden surge of anger brought a tiny amount of heat to the surface of his cold skin, but it quickly subsided as a shiver worked its way down along his spine. It told him just how cold it was inside the tent. It was downright frigid, and the horrible conditions were not to his liking in the shelter. They could—or more likely,
would
—perish very shortly of they didn’t get some warmth.

Confusion was running rampant through his mind, at first making him rationalize that he was either in, or near the state of death. Something was fooling him into thinking that the human race was at the threshold of the tent there to rescue him from the evil aliens. The others. Abbott…Grimes…they were all lying down on the tent floor in a fetal position surrounding the camp stove.
Are you all asleep?
he asked silently.
Maybe dead? Who knows?

His attention was suddenly averted to the sound behind him. If this had been purgatory thus far, hell was about to begin. The zipper of the tent was opening, and somebody—
something!
—was coming through the door. Ruger closed his eyes to say a last prayer to a God he had hoped all his life he would never need. The terror was engulfing him like never before. Wishing only that he would die right then, Ruger attempted to give up all that was his essence. It was stemmed only at the last moment. Before his brain capitulated, it was the words that pulled him back up from the depths of oblivion.

“
They’re in this one!
” the human voice resounded. “
Looks like they’re alive!
”

* * * * *

It wasn’t over just yet. Despite the insistence of the man who identified himself as Lieutenant Commander Schwartz, U.S. Naval Attachment, McMurdo Station, that everything was going to be all right and they were being evacuated back to base, Ruger, Abbott, and the rest of them knew better. Everything was
not
all right. As a matter of fact, it couldn’t have been much worse. It was more than likely just a momentary hiatus before the alien entities resumed activity. Now more than just Ruger’s team was going to be sacrificed.

“Whatever it is you’re trying to tell us, Colonel Abbott,” Schwartz patronized, “you can talk more about it back at base. Right now we’re more concerned about exposure…”

“
You sons-of-bitches!
” Abbott shouted, pushing away the medic and climbing weakly to his feet. He was followed by the other four as they all rallied close to one another, much to the surprise of the men under Schwartz’s command.

There were a few tense moments before anyone tried to diffuse the erupting situation. It took several minutes before things calmed down and Abbott was able to convince their rescuers that they were all coherent enough to stand on their own two feet. Between sips of the hot soup, Abbott held them at bay with his raised hand until they had some replenishment. It helped immensely. A moment of quiet finally followed.

“Are they out there?” Abbott asked Schwartz, the look of terror still very much evident on his face.

“Is
who
out there?” Schwartz responded.

There was a momentary pause as the five men looked at each other, then in an unanticipated burst of energy, they bolted out through the tent door into the open glacial field. Schwartz and his medics protested loudly, following behind.

That was a short time ago. It had all happened so quickly. Ruger and Abbott were now standing outside the cargo bay door of the LC-130, bundled up against the frigid air that at the moment had turned very still. The alien spacecraft—all of them—were gone. There was simply no trace of their presence in the air. There was only the encampment up there on the slope, left in complete disarray. And the strange, circular pool that had frozen over like a glassy mirror. Schwartz had asked what it was. No one offered an explanation. Abbott only asked that they chip away some of the ice to take along.