Fight the Future (13 page)

"Get out of the car, Agent Mulder."

"Why? The upholstery is already ruined."

"Get out."

Taking a deep breath, Mulder joined him on the asphalt. He looked down at the felt envelope in his hand. The Well-Manicured Man stared at him with an intensely somber look, still grasping the handgun.

"You have precious little time, Agent Mulder. What I've given you—the alien colonists don't know it exists… yet. You have in your hand the power to end the Project. To take what is most valuable from them."

"I need to know
how
—" Mulder cried.

"The vaccine you hold is the only defense against the virus. Its introduction into the alien environment may have the power to destroy the delicate plans we've so assiduously protected for the last fifty years."

"May?" Mulder clutched the envelope and shook his head. "What do you mean may?"

"Find Agent Scully. Only then will you realize the scope and grandeur of the Project.

And why
you
must save her. Because only her science can save you."

Mulder stared at him, waiting for more. But the Well-Manicured Man only pointed down the street.

"Go."

Mulder started to protest, but the other man raised the gun and pointed it at him.

"Go now!"

Mulder did. Walking quickly away from the car, then hastening into a run, looking back over his shoulder as he fled. Behind him the Well-Manicured Man stood watching him for a moment; then turned and got back into the car. He shut the door, and Mulder had the faintest glimpse of movement behind the tinted glass. Seconds later, the car exploded.

Mulder's voice was drowned by the roar of flames shooting up from the vehicle. The impact wave knocked him to the ground. He lost his grip on the precious envelope and it briefly flew from his hand into the darkness. Gasping, he struggled to his feet, and reached out for the little dark-green rectangle, its con-tents spilling onto the street. The light from the blazing car touched what was there: a syringe; small glass ampule, miraculously undamaged; and a tiny piece of paper with numbers meticulously written on it.

BASE 1

south83°00Lat. east 63° 00 Long. 326 feet

Mulder picked up the envelope and its con-tents.

CHAPTER 13

POLE OF INACESSIBILI.TY

ANTARCTICA

48 HOURS LATER

The ice was so vast and colorless that it blended into the sky, so that there was only white: endless, eternal, terrible. White and devastating cold. Inside the cab of the snow tractor, Mulder's breath turned to vapor thick and white as smoke. Ice crystals formed where several days' worth of beard had sprung out upon his face, coating the edges of his mouth and eyes. Even with the heat blasting inside the cabin, he could barely feel his hands inside their heavy gloves, resting awkwardly on the wheel. He hunched over the controls, focusing all of his energy on what lay before him. The tractor crawled on across the harsh frozen land like an insect, leaving parallel lines behind it to mark its tortured journey across the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf.

Hours passed. In that land without night he lost all track of time, and with no land-marks—no buildings, no mountains, nothing but snow and ice—he grew fearful of losing his bearings as well. Finally he maneuvered the tractor to a stop, reached for the handheld Global Positioning Satellite monitor to check his position. He squinted as numbers scrolled across the GPS monitor's screen. They told him that he had reached his coordinates. Glancing at the dashboard, he saw that the gas gauge hovered just above

'E.' Looking out the front window, there was nothing but snow to see, nothing but white all the way to the hori-zon. He checked the GPS device one more time, then reached for the door latch and stepped outside.

Snow crunched underfoot, snow whirled around his head. In this forbidding environ-ment, even with the GPS device in his hand, he might as well be taking a space walk—without the security of a lifeline.

He trudged across the ice. The snow squall abated, and his footprints showed clearly behind him.

When he looked back at the snow tractor it looked very small and insubstantial against the endless vista of white ground and steely sky. He began a long, laboring ascent of a gentle grade, now and then sliding and catch-ing himself by digging hands or heels into the soft new snow. When he reached the top of the incline he dropped to his knees, instinctively ducking his head.

Below, spread out across the plain like some misplaced vision of a space colony, was an ice station surrounded by tractors and Sno-Cats and snowmobiles. Mulder pulled a pair of com-pact high-powered binoculars from his parka and scanned the domes and support vehicles, looking for signs of life. None, until he let his sight linger on the most distant dome.

"Bingo," he whispered.

There, jolting over the ice fields, was another snow tractor. It crept across the barren landscape toward the ice station, coming to a halt beside one of the domed buildings. For several minutes the vehicle sat there, and then a door opened on the dome and a man emerged wearing a parka and fur hat.

The man stood on the doorstep for a moment, his face obscured by a cloud of gray vapor. Then he tossed some-thing into the snow and walked to the vehicle.

The Cigarette-Smoking Man. Mulder watched as he yanked on the door of the snow tractor and clambered inside. The vehicle reversed, driving over its tracks in the snow, then slowly crawled off toward the far horizon.

Mulder drew the binoculars back from his eyes. He was breathing even harder now, more excitement than exertion, and had to force himself to sit for several minutes, to calm him-self for what was ahead.

Finally he pocketed the field glasses, stumbled to his feet, and started down the far side of the slope toward the ice station.

He moved cautiously and with effort, care-fully weighing each step before setting foot on the ice crust before him. When he reached the bottom of the slope he glanced furtively behind him, still unable to shake the fear of being fol-lowed; then turned and went on.

Mulder's gaze remained fixed on the domes. Ahead of him, the ice station very gradually grew larger as he approached, until the domes loomed up against the cloud-streaked sky. He had only a few hundred yards left to go, when with a cry he stumbled. Beneath one boot the ice crust gave way. There was an instant when the world seemed to trembled before him, the domes like huge bubbles floating atop a milky sea. Then the ice collapsed under him.

He fell, landing on his back. The surface beneath him was cold and hard and smooth. He lay there for a moment, grunting as he caught his breath and trying to determine if he'd broken anything. Pain shot through one arm, and the gun wound at his temple throbbed, but after a minute had passed he rolled over, wincing, and began figuring out where the hell he was.

He had fallen on some hard, narrow, metal-lic structure, like a catwalk or steel floor. Its dull black hue was in stark contrast to the dead-white of the ice that encased it. There were vents in the floor through which air blew.

Warm air only by the relative standards of the Antarctic; but when Mulder lifted his head to gaze upward he saw what had happened. The air had caused a bubble, an air pocket, to form beneath the ice: above him the ceiling had been carved into patterns corresponding to the vents below. Where he had fallen through, the ice had softened and melted enough that it at last gave way at his tread. He rose to his knees, the air from one of the vents blowing onto his face. The vent was open, with no protective grate or covering, and big enough for a man to crawl into. Mulder pulled off the hood of his parka and his gloves, and looked deep into the vent, then back up at the hole he'd fallen through. No way back up there, and nothing around him but solid ice. He gazed back at the vent.

It was his only choice. He took a deep breath, then pulled himself forward into the darkness.

Inside the vent was cold and pitch-black, its sides corrugated to give him easy purchase. He moved cautiously, feeling ahead of him as the ribbed corridor snaked downward, until a pinprick of light appeared. Several more min-utes of creeping and he had reached the end, another vent opening into god knows what. He squeezed through headfirst, grabbing at a small ledge that projected beneath him and with dif-ficulty maneuvered his legs until he could swing himself down and then onto the ground.

Mulder blinked and shoved his gloved hand into his pocket, fumbling until he with-drew a flashlight. It clicked on; he swept it up and down in front of him, revealing a terrifying landscape.

He stood in the middle of an endless corri-dor carved into the ice. To the left and right, as far as he could see, were tall glassy shapes, regu-larly spaced on both sides of the passageway, like ice coffins stood upright against the cavern walls. He trained the light on the corridor, marking where it curved off into the distance; turned and did the same in the other direction. Then he spun around and pointed it directly in front of him. Mulder reached to brush frost from the surface ice. He gasped at what he saw.

There was a man frozen in the ice. Naked, his eyes open and staring into some long-forgotten distance. His hair was long and dark and matted, his flattened features oddly inhu-man: broad nose with flared nostrils, pro-nounced brow ridge, lips drawn back to show yellowing peglike teeth. Drawing closer he could see that the man's flesh had the same weird translucence as that of the fireman in the morgue.

Mulder grimaced, then drew back in revulsion as he saw something
inside
the man: an embryonic creature with huge, oblique black eyes, frozen like its host.

Mulder turned and quickly paced down the dim ice corridor. Where it ended, dim light seeped through several low, arched openings. Mulder dropped to his knees to peer through, and saw before him a brief passage that widened into a sort of balcony. He bellied down on his stomach and pulled himself through the arch, grunting as he scraped against ice and metal. When he reached the other end, he poked his head out onto the bal-cony and gazed up in wonder.

All around him was space, sweeping to a domed ceiling almost inconceivably high above him. He looked down and fought a wave of vertigo; wherever the bottom was, it was at least as far away as the top. Very carefully he pulled himself out, until he crouched on the lip of the balcony—actually a ventilation port opening onto the empty center of the dome. All around him, circling the dome, were count-less other ports; hundreds of them, thousands. Shakily he got to his feet, steadying himself against the wall behind him, and gazed down to the floor of the dome. There, a large central theater glowed with an eerie intensity different from the pale light that emanated elsewhere in the vast space: an icy, almost livid, glow. Leading down to this central theater were sev-eral enormous tubular spokes. One of them angled up past Mulder, perhaps an arm's length away.

It took several minutes for all this to sink in. The scale was too immense, much huger than anything Mulder had ever seen, could even imagine seeing. But strangest and most terrifying of all was what he saw within that central space: row upon row of roughly man-sized pods, dark-colored, hanging in formation from long railings that extended into the dark-ness. He squinted, trying to figure out what they were, and where the seemingly endless rows led; while hundreds of feet above Mulder, another figure gazed in disbelief at what was before him. Within the heated cab of his Sno-Cat, the Cigarette-Smoking Man leaned for-ward to clear a spot on the foggy windshield. Behind him the outlines of the ice station could barely be seen; before him a vague shape grew more distinct, until at last he could see it clearly—

The snow tractor Mulder had abandoned on the ice.

For a long moment, the Cigarette-Smoking Man gazed at the tractor. Then, without a word, he turned his own vehicle, and as quickly as he could, he drove back to the base.

Beneath the ice, Mulder continued to peer into the dimness, tracing the rows of frozen objects in an attempt to determine their origin. As he did so, he noticed that in the furthest recesses of the dome, the rows appeared to be moving. The objects suspended from the rail-ings slid along slowly and rhythmically, one by one clicking into place as though part of some gargantuan machine. He blinked, trying to get a better view, and then saw what he had not noticed before.

On the floor hundreds of feet below him, and within the shadow of those moving rows, lay a discarded cryolitter. Its plastic top had been removed and lay discarded alongside it. Amidst the dull gray bulwarks and stark, com-manding architecture of the dome, it looked surprisingly small and frail, the sole artifact made to human scale. And because of that, it unsettled Mulder more than almost anything else he had seen.

His face grim, he tore his gaze away and once more stared at the long tubelike structure that rose a few feet behind him. It had a small opening, just wide enough that a man might fit inside. Without stopping to think of the dan-ger, Mulder slipped inside.

It was tight, but he could fit. He began to climb down, struggling to see in the near-darkness, hands and feet slipping as he tried to gain pur-chase. The tube felt slippery, almost oily, to the touch, but there were small protuberances like rivets which he could steady himself on. He climbed down for what seemed like hours, fighting exhaustion, when without warning his hands slipped and he began to slide. He strug-gled futilely to stop, but continued until he reached the end of the tube and found himself striking a narrow ledge. He scrambled desper-ately at last managing to hold on.

His breath shuddering, he looked down-ward. As he did so the binoculars slipped from his pocket and fell. He watched them fall, light glinting as they twisted and turned. He waited for the sound of their impact, waited and waited and then held his breath, to make sure he wouldn't miss the sound of them hitting bottom.

He heard nothing. There was no bottom; or if there was, it was so far below him as to be the yawning chasm of a true abyss. He looked downward and saw an unimaginably black and bottomless pit. The sight terrified him. With every ounce of strength that remained, Mulder pulled himself along the ledge, his fingers dig-ging into the slick material, until finally he managed to lift himself up, and then over, onto the inner side.