Hive (24 page)

Cutchen was looking for a hole in her logic . . . or Gates' . . . and Sharkey knew it. He was looking at it from all sides and trying to find the hole in it. Either he couldn't find one or it was so big he'd already been sucked down into it without knowing. “Okay,” he said. “How is it these things got here? Not in ships as we understand them, I'm guessing.”

“No, they did not possess a material, mechanistic technology, according to Gates. Not in the way we do. He said they would have possessed an
organic
technology if you can wrap your brain around that one. A living technology maybe supported by a certain level of instrumentation . . . but not gadgets like we have. Not exactly. They would have been light years beyond us to the point that their minds might have been strong enough to manipulate matter and energy and maybe even time as they saw fit.

“But as to your question, they
drifted
here. They went into a dormant state, according to Gates, and drifted on what he called the solar winds. I suppose it's the same way they drifted into this solar system. Gates mentioned them possibly manipulating fourth-dimensional space. You might remember that bit if you ever had any quantum physics . . . you jump into the fourth dimension at Point A and jump out at Point B. A to B could be ten feet away or ten million miles, it wouldn't matter. You could transverse incalculable distances easily as a man stepping off his porch. Maybe that's how they crossed interstellar voids. But if Lind's
memory
of them was correct — and I tend to think it was — then, yes, they went into a sort of dormancy and drifted here.”

“Shit, Elaine, that would have taken eons,” Cutchen pointed out.

“So what? It wouldn't have mattered to things like them. A thousand years or a hundred-thousand would be all the same to something that was essentially immortal and endless. Lind was in contact with that memory, Cutchy, a memory a billion years old and probably even two or three. And he experienced it . . . the dormancy, the drifting. Even the cold and lack of atmosphere were no deterrent to them. Nothing would be.”

“I'm still having trouble with this,” Cutchen admitted. “I mean, listen to what you're saying here. Something like this . . . to put forth a plan, a grand design for this planet that wouldn't see fruition for hundreds and hundreds of millions of years. It's just too incredible. That amount of time . . . “

“You're looking at this as any being with a finite lifespan would. But time means nothing to them, nothing at all,” Sharkey said, realizing she was using the same arguments on him that Hayes had used on her.

Cutchen sighed. The bigness, the longevity of such an operation, the huge scale it must have been carried out on . . . all of this was flooring him. Not to mention that everything she said completely dwarfed man's history, his importance, his very culture. It made the human race no more significant in the greater scheme of things than protozoans on a laboratory slide. It was very . . . sobering. “All right. So these Old Ones drifted here, started life with some master plan behind it all . . . then what? Just hoped for the best?”

“Hardly. Our evolutionary development would have been carefully monitored through the ages,” Sharkey told him, glancing back to her screen from time to time. “Remember, they colonized this world and they had no intention of leaving and still haven't. They would not have left anything to mere chance. Gates wrote that there are great gaps in our own fossil record, times when our evolution jumped eons ahead for no apparent reason. 500,000 years ago, for example, the brains of our ancestors suddenly doubled in size if not tripled. It happened more than once, Gates said. These were the times, Cutchy, when those ancestors of ours were carefully manipulated by the Old Ones. Through selective breeding, genetic engineering, molecular biology, methods we can't even guess at.”

“And . . . and they've been waiting for us . . . their children . . . all this time?”

Sharkey nodded. “Yes, waiting and watching through unimaginable gulfs of time while the continents shifted and the glaciers arrived, while the Paleozoic Era became the Mesozoic and finally the Cenzoic. While our ancestors evolved along lines already laid out for them. And at times, I would think, entire populations would have been taken to their cities and altered, then placed back again with selective mutations installed. They've waited and watched and now, if Gates is right, we're ready for harvesting. Our intellects are sufficiently advanced to be of use to them. Down there in that warm lake, Cutchy, is the last relict population of a race as old as the stars.”

“And now we've come,” he said. “Just as they knew we would.”

“Exactly. Men have always been drawn down here to the Pole, haven't they? And if what Gates is saying is correct, then it's been more than a sense of exploration. As a race we would be drawn to those places where our memory was strongest.”

Cutchen was sweating now and couldn't help himself. The idea of it all was terrifying. Like the human race had never, ever been in command of its own destiny. It was shocking. “It's like we're . . . what? A seed planted in a fucking garden? Cultivated, cross-bred, enhanced . . . until they got the proper strain, the proper hybrid they desired.” He just shook his head. “But what do they want, Elaine? What do they have in mind? To conquer us? What?”

She shrugged. “I'm not sure and neither is Gates. But one thing's for sure, it's our minds that they want, our intellects they need. They are of a single mind, a single consciousness, a hive mentality. That is exactly what they intend for us to be. For us to be
them
but in human form.” She scrolled through a few pages on her laptop. “According to Gates, they've bred certain characteristics into us. There are probably latent gifts we all carry in our minds, our carefully engineered minds, that they will now exploit. They'll reawaken faculties that we've long forgotten about, but have been buried in us all along . . . “

“Like what?”

“Abilities they planted in us long ago. Abilities that would make us
like
them. Mechanisms seeded in our brains, special adaptations that have been passed on through our genes . . . wild talents that occasionally make themselves known like telepathy, telekinesis, prophecy . . . talents that, when the time was right, would make us like them — a single, ominous hive mind. That coupled with an overriding instinct, a blind compulsion to serve them. An all important seed they would have planted in our primitive brains and is still there today.”

Cutchen said, “So everything we are, our entire history and even our destiny . . . these Old Ones were the architects of it? We're . . .
synthetic?”

“Yes and no. Our culture, our civilization is our own, I think. Though much of it might be based upon archetypes imprinted upon our brains eons ago. Even our conception of a god, a superior being, a creator . . . it's no doubt based upon some aboriginal image of them placed into our subconscious minds. They would have seen themselves as our gods, our masters . . . then and now . . . and we, in essence, were designed to be their tools, an extension of their organic technology, to be used for what plans we could never even guess at. But it might be in us, that knowledge, lying dormant in our brains until they decide to wake it up. And when that happens . . . when that happens, there will be no more human race, Cutchy.”

Cutchen's face was beaded with sweat, his eyes were wide and tormented. “We have to stop this, Elaine. We have to stop this madness.”

“If we can.
If
we can,” she said, her voice filled with a bitter hopelessness, a dire inevitability. “Lord knows what they planted in us, what buried imperatives and controls that they might be, right now, getting ready to unlock on a global scale to bring us to our ultimate destiny.”

“Which is?”

But Sharkey could just shake her head. “I don't know and I don't think I want to find out.”

“We're fucked, Elaine. If Gates is right, we're fucked.” Cutchen kept trying to moisten his weathered lips, but he was all out of spit. “I really hope Gates is a lunatic. I'm really hoping for that.”

“I don't think he is,” Sharkey told him. “And the scary part is, nobody's heard from him in over forty-eight hours now.”

T
he way Hayes was seeing it, he'd paid for this dance and LaHune was going to have a cheek-to-cheek waltz with him whether he liked the idea of it or not. And LaHune most certainly did not like the idea. But he knew Hayes. Knew trying to get rid of the guy was like trying to shake a stain out of your shorts.

Hayes was tenacious.

Hayes was relentless.

Hayes would hang like a tattoo on your backside until he got exactly what he wanted. No more. No less. But LaHune, of course, had had his merry fill of Jimmy Hayes and his paranoid bullshit. Had it right up to his left eyeball and this is what he told Hayes, not bothering to spare his feelings one iota. In his opinion, Hayes was the rotten apple in the storied barrel. The bee in the bonnet. And the cat piss in the punch.

“I've had my fill of you, Hayes,” LaHune told him. “I'm so sick of you I could spit. Just the sight of you roils my stomach.”

Hayes was sitting in the administrator's office, his feet up on his desk even though he'd been warned a half dozen times to get his dirty, stinking boots off of there. “Are you trying to tell me something, Mr. LaHune? Because I'm getting this funny feeling in my gut that you just don't like me. But maybe it's just gas.”

LaHune sat there, really trying to be patient. Really trying to hang onto his dignity which had been chewed up, swallowed, and shit on by this man from day one. Yes, he was trying to hang onto his dignity and not come right over the desk at Hayes, that smarmy, bearded dirtball.

“No, you're reading me fine, Hayes. Just fine. And get your goddamn feet off my desk.”

Hayes crossed one boot atop the other. “You saying it's over between us, then? No more quickies behind the oil tanks in the generator shack?”

“You're not funny, Hayes.”

“Sure I am. Ask anybody.”

LaHune sat there, sighing heavily. Yes, Hayes had pissed all over his dignity, his authority, and his self-respect. But that would come screaming to an end one way or another. LaHune wasn't used to dealing with working class hardcases like Hayes. Guys like him buttered their bread on the wrong side and spawned in a different pond. Maybe he was good at his job, but he was also smartassed, disrespectful, and insubordinate.

“I'll tell you what you are, Hayes,” LaHune finally said. “You're reckless and childish and paranoid. A man like you has no business down here. You're not up to it. And when spring comes . . . and it will come and no aliens, flying saucers, or abominable snowmen will stop it . . . when it comes, I'll see to it that you never get another contract down here. And if you think I'm joking, you just fucking try me.”

“Hey, hey, easy with the profanity! Remember my virgin ears, you fucking prick.”

“That's enough!”

Hayes pulled his feet off the desk. “No, it's not, LaHune. And it won't be until you pull your over-inflated head out of your ass and start seeing things as they are. We're in trouble here and you better start accepting that. You're in charge of this installation and the lives of these people are in your hands. And until you accept that responsibility, I'll be riding you like a French whore. Count on it.”

LaHune said nothing. “I don't what to hear about your paranoid fantasies, Hayes.”

“That's all it is? Paranoia?”

“What else could it be?”

Hayes laughed thinly. “Where do they put your batteries, LaHune? I think they're running low.” He sat back in his chair, totally frustrated, folding his arms over his chest. “Those goddamn mummies are making people go insane. You've got three men from the drilling tower, that Deep Drill Project, that are missing. You've got three dead men . . . what more do you need?”

“I'll need something factual, Hayes. St. Ours, Meiner, and, yes, Lind have died from cerebral hemorrhages. If you don't believe me, ask Dr. Sharkey. Dammit, man.”

Hayes uttered that laugh again. “Cerebral hemorrhages? No shit? Three of ‘em in a row? I didn't know they were catchy. C'mon, LaHune, don't you think that three exploded brains pretty much tweaks the tit of chance a little too hard?”

“I'm not a medico here. It's not my job to engage in forensics.”

Hayes just shook his head. “All right, let me try again. Remember that day we called Nikolai Kolich over at Vostok? Sure you do. Well, old Nikolai, boy, he told us some kind of fucking yarn. You remember that derelict camp Gates and his boys found? Yeah? Well, that there was a Russian camp from the old Soviet red scare days of yore. Joint called the Vradaz Outpost. Yup. Now this part here, boyo, it's going to sound just whackier than Mother Teresa working the pole in a thong and pasties. But Kolich told us they all went mad at Vradaz. Yup. Crazier'n bugs in bat shit. You know what drove ‘em crazy?
Spooks.
Sure. Now I know this is all going to sound real fantastic to you, real far-out and nutty, because you've never heard of nothing like this, but I'm willing to bet you can wrap your spooky little brain right around it, you try hard enough.

“See, how it started at Vradaz was that those scientists up there, they drilled into a chasm, found some things in there. We'll call ‘em
mummies,
okay? Well, not long after, all those commy scientists started having real weird dreams and before you could say Jesus in drag, they started hearing things. Knockings and poundings. Funny sounds. Then they started seeing apparitions, ghosts that walked through walls and the like. Well, the Soviets said that's enough of this horseshit, so they sent in a team to take care of those boys, root out the infection so to speak. So, those silly communists, they killed everyone there. Isn't that a funny story?”