Hive (14 page)

For a time it was pretty much business as usual save for a school of transparent fish . . . or what looked like fish . . . and then, Campbell saw something.

“Did you . . . what the hell was that?”

Hayes had seen something like it before.

A murky oblong shape that darted away from the light. Maybe it was nothing and maybe it was everything. Whatever they were seeing, catching glimpses of, there were more than one of them and they were quick, stealthy. That feeling was back on Hayes again and he couldn't shake it this time. Because he was thinking things that he didn't dare say . . . not out loud. For whatever was out there, he had the feeling it or
they
were following the hydrobot, but hiding away from the light. The hydrobot was picking up lots of blips, but that in itself meant nothing except that the sea was very alive . . . which it certainly was.

“I'd like to know what those are,” Parks said. “They remind me of . . . “

“What?” Gundry asked him.

He shook his head. “Nothing, nothing. Thinking out loud.”

But Hayes knew what he was thinking and he wondered if they
all
weren't thinking the same damn thing, seeing those flitting shapes and remembering them from somewhere else and not liking them one bit.

And then -

And then Gundry gasped. “Did you see that? Looked like . . . well, almost like an arch.”

Parks fumbled over his words, relaxed and tried again. “Some weird volcanic structure. Can't be an arch down here, not down here.”

But it was gone too quickly before any real guesses could be made. All they could say for sure was that it had
looked
like an arch jutting from the roiling sediment below. And a big one at that . . . the hydrobot had passed through it.

Parks, almost nervously, started rambling on about volcanism and how it could shape ordinary rock into the most peculiar shapes. And particularly underwater where the lava flow would cool quite quickly, twisting into the oddest forms that very often appeared man-made . . . or, in this case, manufactured by an intelligence. For there was no possible way anything down here had ever been touched by man.

The hydrobot continued on, tracking that magnetic anomaly and Parks kept calling out numbers and other than that, there was only the occasional beeping of the computers as they logged what was going on below. The men, other than the geophysicist, were quiet, expectant maybe. Hayes could only speak for himself. His mouth was dry as fireplace soot and he was grinding his teeth and bunching his fists.

The silence was so thick suddenly you could've hung your hat from it.

The hydrobot ventured forward, scanning over clusters of things like anemones and spiny urchins and finally great outcroppings of coral. Here was an ecosystem of clinging sponges, pale worms, and bivalves. Primitive bryozoans encrusted like bee honeycombs. Campbell pointed out that, though marine zoology was not his forte, these were either new species or ones long thought extinct.

But he was talking just to be heard, maybe to be comforted by his own voice, as the hydrobot's magnometer was reading pulses right off the scale. To which Gundry joked offhand that it must be picking up the emissions of some massive electromagnetic generator with the mother of all magnetic cores. But nobody laughed and maybe because they didn't like the idea of what that alluded to. Because at that particular moment nobody would have been surprised at anything. Had they seen a flying saucer jutting from the lake bed and weeds, they would not have been surprised. For whatever was putting out that kind of raw energy almost certainly had to be artificial.

And then they saw it . . . or the hydrobot did.

Another arch. And so perfect in form its design could not have been a simple natural abnormality for just beyond it other shapes . . . rectangular slabs standing upright and others lying flat like ancient tombstones and what might have been a shattered dome rising from the congested weeds. What they saw of it had to have been several hundred feet across, though in fact it was probably quite a bit larger. Jagged cracks were feathered over its surface.

Nobody said anything, not a damn thing because there was more of it all the time, whatever it was they were looking at. Now they were seeing what appeared to be monuments jutting at wild angles like gravestones in some incredibly ancient cemetery. Things like obelisks and monoliths leaning over, wanting to fall . . . they were coated in a pink slime and set with the holes of borer worms and appeared to be of a vast antiquity. But there was more, always more. Crumbling walls encrusted with colonies of sponges and the carbonate skeletons of long-dead marine organisms.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Gundry said, sounding like he was hyperventilating. “Would you look at that . . . would you just
look
. . . “

Parks kept shaking his head. “A city . . . something, but down here?”

“Why not?” Hayes said. “Why the hell not?”

Parks couldn't seem to stop shaking his head. “Because . . .
because
this goddamn lake has been cut off from the world, tucked under a glacier for forty-million years, Hayes, that's why.”

“What about the ruins Gates found? Hundreds of million years old, pre-human in origin . . . I guess this pretty much supports what he told us.”

But you could see the look of disbelief on Parks' face. Maybe he hadn't really believed what Gates had said, maybe in his mind — regardless of the facts staring him dead in the face — he had refused to accept the concept of a civilization predating humanity by half a billion years. Human arrogance had a hard time with that one. It reduced the species' significance considerably. Just another drop in the bucket, hardly the chosen ones.

“A city,” Campbell kept saying. “A city.”

But “city” wasn't what Hayes was thinking, not at all. What he was seeing was sprawling and wild without any indication of an overall plan, more like a graveyard than a city, something that expanded as necessity required. All those monoliths and shafts, oblong slabs and worm-holed pillars, low stone buildings carpeted in ooze and weeds and marine creepers . . . yes, there was something inexplicably morbid about them like centuried graves and collapsing mausoleums and ivy-choked crypts. A necropolis, a marble-hewn city covered in rot and growth and sediment, falling into itself. The structures were crowded together and overlapping one another like what you might see in a medieval slum . . . crowded, claustrophobic, tangled with what might have been deep-cut lanes snaking amongst them. Hayes was looking upon it all, barely able to breathe, at the complexity and profusion. Everything jutting and leaning and rising and falling, like some litter pile of worm-holed bones heaped atop each other for uncounted millennia . . . pyramids and domes, shafts and cones and arches. Yes, like broken skulls and rib staves green with moss, pillared femurs and stove-pipe ulnas and ladders of eroding vertebrae. All dusted by a perpetual rain of silt that was blown and drifting like dandelion fuzz.

The hydrobot was rising as the city or graveyard itself began to rise up a sloping hill and then they saw it, the city. The
real
city. Not this rotting collection of debris and artifacts, but the city itself rising higher and higher up a submarine mountain . . . or maybe the city
was
the mountain. The silt began to thin and they saw the colossal, dead immensity of it as the hydrobot rose up, showing them something that had been hid from the light for forty million years.

Hayes just stood there, something fused inside of him.

A cyclopean, eon-dead city of towers and spires rising up to an incredible height and looking much like some fantastic crystalline growth ballooning up from its base . . . if it really had a base, for much of it seemed to be sunken in a forest of weeds and kelp. The structures were honeycombed with doorways that were like mossy cave mouths from which spilled a limitless blackness. It was a vast, shadow-enshrouded metropolis of perverse geometric architecture. The ruins of some primordial alien city deposited here on this muddy, weedy lake bottom . . . and still the hydrobot rose, its lights splashing over great galleries and domes and spirals of cubes that gravity should have pulled down, but didn't.

It looked to Hayes like some gigantic calliope set with the naked, tubular pipes of a cathedral organ rising above to unknown heights . . . deserted and derelict and tomb-like, shot through with vaults and hollows. He saw panes of crystal and arches and spires and spheres crowded together and built, it seemed, right through one another as if the entire thing had been dropped and had shattered like this, collecting in some irregular pattern of razor-backed shards. And all of it encrusted with an amazing variety of sponges and barnacles and flowering anemones, pale slimy mosses and gardens of thick weeds that seemed to grow right out of the lurching walls, swaying gracefully in some unseen current.

“The . . . the magnetic anomaly,” Parks said. “It must be centered in there somewhere, somewhere.”

“Yeah,” Hayes heard himself say. “Like some engine, some generator that's still running after all this time.”

The hydrobot was still rising, panning the city and trying to pull back as far as it could to give a broader view of what it was seeing, put it in some kind of perspective, but its lights simply wouldn't penetrate far enough and all it could show them was more of that weird architecture, that morbid gigantism. Shadows darted and jumped and danced amongst the structures and the effect of it was disconcerting to say the least, making the city appear to be in motion, to be creeping and reaching out at them, those doorways shifting . . . vomiting storms of silt, weeds swaying and undulating.

Hayes was thinking the entire thing looked like some enormous and hideous alien skull, articulated and grinning, punctured with holes and narrow crevices.

But the total effect made him realize how far he was from home and how very alone they were. In a place so distant and remote, a place of echoes and ghosts and lost voices. A place where the sun never rose and the chill never lifted.

No, even for Parks, there was nothing but acceptance now. Bare, stark acceptance of things they now knew and all those things they did not. For no human brain could have conceived of such a city. The very insane geometry of the place made you want to vent your mind in a single rending and wet scream.

The hydrobot had been steadily rising for nearly an hour now and it told them that it had come up over five-hundred feet, but finally they were reaching the pinnacle of the city. From above it looked like a maze-like, congested forest of dead trees . . . all spires and shafts and what looked like the intersecting steeples of a thousand churches. All of which seemed to be connected by a spider-webbing of filaments like ropes. Hayes caught sight of something like gargoyles perched near the tops on flat, see-sawing widow's walks. But they were not gargoyles as such, but slime-covered things like immense horned grasshoppers with too many limbs. Something about them made his guts suck into themselves.

But maybe he hadn't seen them at all.

Maybe it was a trick of the light or darkness, for everything was obscured and encrusted with polyp colonies, gorgonians, whip corals, and the corrugated helixes of bryozoans.

The hydrobot hung over the top of the city, within spitting distance of a tangle of skeletal spires. It just hovered, apparently interested in something. Hayes and the others didn't see what it was, not right away. But for Hayes, he could
feel
it. Feel that something was coming, something terrible and overwhelming, something that crushed him and sucked the juice from his soul. Oh, yes, it was coming, it was coming now. Hayes felt weak and dizzy like some low-grade flu was chewing at his guts. And in his head, there was a low, constant humming like high-power lines at midsummer or a transformer cycling at a low ebb.

“What the hell is that?”

Somebody said that and nobody seemed to know who it was. They were all staring at the screen, at what the hydrobot had been tracking long before it became visual. Except it wasn't an
it,
but a
they.
Everyone in the booth saw them . . . those streamlined, cylindrical forms that looked impossible and ungainly laying on, say, a dissection table, but down here were fluid and free and fast-moving. They rose up above the city, like a swarm of vampire bats come to drain the world dry. Gliding up and forward, filling the ether above the city, their bodies pulsed as they rocketed forward, expelling water like squids and octopi, moving easily with those great outstretched fin-like wings.

Hayes felt like he was going to pass out or throw-up or maybe both. Alive, dear Christ, they were alive. The Old Ones. And what was even worse is that what he was seeing, that swarm rising like locusts, was exactly the image he had gotten from Lind's mind.

Exactly.

The creatures came on, incredibly obscene as they bloated up and narrowed with their bastard propulsion. There was no doubt what was attracting them.

When they were maybe twenty feet away, the screen flickered, rolled, and went black. Everyone stood in shocked silence for a moment or two, not sure what to say or what to do.

Parks started hammering on his keyboard. “Dead,” he said. “Dead. Primary and secondary cryobots have lost contact with the hydrobot. It's off-line, I guess.”

Well, thank God for small favors, Hayes thought, feeling numb and ungainly. He was glad. If he had had to see those things any closer, he would have lost his mind. If those globular red eyes had filled the screen they would have wiped his brain clean and he didn't think that was an exaggeration.

“They're still down there, still active,” he said, almost mumbling. “All these millions of years they've been waiting down there . . . waiting for us.”

Parks stood up, something like rage burning in his eyes. He went right after Hayes and Gundry had to stop him from going right over the top of him and maybe stomping him down in the process. “You can't know that!” he said, drool hanging from his lower lip in a ribbon. “There's no way you could possibly know that! You're imagining things and making up things and acting like a scared little boy!”