Terminal Freeze

52

Marshall raised himself onto one elbow, momentarily stunned by the force of the blow. The central corridor of the science wing had been transformed into a bedlam of sound and violence: the beast, ripping into the shrieking Sully; blood, spraying from the climatologist’s ruined limbs, spraying the walls and floor in a maelstrom of crimson; Gonzalez and Phillips, scrambling backward, trying to get in a clear shot at the creature; the tray that held the sonic weapon lying on its side, wheels still turning; Usuguk, stepping forward past the soldiers, shaman’s charm held out before him as his chanting rose in pitch and urgency.

As Marshall watched, ears ringing with the impact, he saw the beast bat Sully-still screaming-into the air with one powerful swipe of a forelimb. A second swipe knocked the scientist through a doorway and into the forward office. The creature bounded in after him, disappearing from view. An enormous din-the crash of furniture, the impact of a body slamming against walls-erupted from inside. Sully’s screams grew ragged.

Marshall tried to rise to his feet, staggered, pulled himself up. It was too late-Sully was going to die. They were all going to die. For a second he wondered if there was time to get them out of the science wing, to close the hatch on the monster, but he quickly dismissed the thought. There was no time. It was over, the thing would kill Sully and then it would turn on them, one at a time, and-

His eyes fell on the sonic weapon, its pieces in disarray on the hallway floor. And yet it had worked. That last waveform Sully had tried, the sine-it had clearly affected the creature. He tried to drown out the ferocious din, the shouts of the soldiers, the painful pressure in his head. Tried to think, to concentrate, in the few seconds he had left. Why would a sine wave work when a sawtooth wave or a square wave didn’t?

He stopped. Maybe it wasn’t the waveshape at all. Maybe it was something else entirely…

He dashed toward the cart, righted it, and frantically began picking up the electronics that had shaken free and reassembling them.

“What are you doing?” Logan cried. Sully’s screams had now stopped but the terrible crashing and banging in the forward office continued.

“Trying again.” Marshall checked the connections from the amplifier to the drivers, snapped a loose potentiometer back into place. “It’s the harmonics; it has to be. That’s the only answer. But we need proper acoustics if we’re going to maximize-” He looked around wildly a minute. “Come on, give me a hand. That thing will be back out any second. We have to get this into the echo chamber.”

“You don’t have time for that shit!” Gonzalez said. “What’s the point of moving it?”

“It’s like adding poison to an arrowhead. We’re maximizing the payload.”

With Logan ’s help, Marshall wheeled the cart down the corridor, slipping repeatedly on a floor made slick with Sully’s blood. Usuguk followed in their path, still chanting, shaman’s rattle in one hand and a bone fetish in the other. With difficulty the two men trundled the cart past the control room, past the corridor intersection, and through the rear hatch into the echo chamber itself.

“Gonzalez!” Marshall cried. “I’m counting on you to slow it down!”

Motioning to Phillips, Gonzalez fell back to a spot just outside the echo chamber and took up a defensive position.

The crashing and banging from within the forward office stopped.

“We’ll need to set it up in the center to get the greatest effect,” Marshall told Logan.

Together, they pushed the cart to the middle of the catwalk. The electrical cables stretched taut, and for a dreadful moment Marshall thought they would not reach. But there was just enough play in them to position the weapon precisely in the center of the chamber, a spot marked on the floor of the catwalk with a label reading “0 dB.”

Marshall glanced at Usuguk. “You might be safer in that monitoring booth,” he said, gesturing to the glass-enclosed landing at the rear of the catwalk.

The Tunit stopped his low chant, shook his head. “Do you forget already what I taught you? If you are going to walk on thin ice, you might as well dance.”

“Your call.” Marshall turned the cart so the drivers were facing down the corridor, checked the connections, snapped the machine back on. No response. Frantically, he reseated vacuum tubes, tightened leads, and tried again. This time a low hum sounded from the massive woofer. He scanned the device, recalling the basics of sound generation on a synthesizer, reacquainting himself with the controls for amplitude, frequency, oscillator waveshape, filter envelope. He grabbed the amplitude knob, turned it sharply right. The cart began to tremble.

He noticed Logan was looking at him. “I calculate I’ve got about three minutes left to live,” the historian said. “If I’m lucky, it’ll happen quickly. In that case, I’ve probably only got two minutes. I’d like to die knowing what it is you tried to do.”

“That last waveform Sully tried,” Marshall replied, eyes back on the controls. “The one that caused the creature to react. It was a sine wave. That’s the purest sound wave possible. No harmonics, no overtones. So I’m going to pick up where he left off-I’ll use Fourier addition to complicate the pattern. Maybe it’ll hurt the creature enough to drive it away. If we can keep it away long enough, maybe we can create more portable-”

He fell silent. The creature had emerged from the forward office. Now it slowly turned to face them. Its forelegs and paws were sop-ping with blood, and its fangs and vibrissae were flecked with gore.

Marshall took a deep breath, tried to steady his shaking hands.

The creature took a step toward them. Quickly, Marshall set the waveform of the first oscillator to sawtooth, the frequency to 30 hertz, verified the amplitude of the master output was at 100 decibels. He pressed the tone button. The room rumbled with a low tone just above the threshold of hearing.

The creature sprang forward.

Marshall did a frantic mental calculation. A second note, overtone free, several octaves higher…

Even as he did so, the creature picked up speed, coming toward them at great leaps down the corridor. He set the second oscillator to sawtooth, dialed its frequency to 800 hertz.

“Christ!” Logan shouted.

Gonzalez and Phillips were firing now. Over the whine of the speaker, Marshall could just make out Phillips’s ragged cry, his weapon firing wildly, up and down and side to side as he lost the last remnants of his shattered nerves. The creature reached the soldiers, paused once again to shake its head violently, vibrissae dancing madly left and right. Phillips dropped his gun, rose to his feet, and ran down the corridor, wailing. The creature ducked its head, raised it again, and with a dreadful swipe of its foreleg knocked Gonzalez-still firing, point-blank-back into the echo chamber, a dreadful blow that sent him cartwheeling over the heads of Marshall and Logan. The sergeant hit the rear wall of the echo chamber with a crash, then slid down the curve of the wall to the floor twenty feet below, where he lay in a confusion of insulation and sound foam, stunned.

Marshall ’s hands were shaking badly now and he fumbled to set the third and final oscillator: sine wave again, this time at a very high frequency-60,000 hertz. A quick glance ensured that the amplitude envelope was fully front-loaded. Then, grasping the master fader, he pulled it all the way down. The eerie screeeeeee of the sine wave grew fainter, then stopped altogether.

“What are you doing?” Logan asked through gritted teeth. “You turned it off-and now we’re trapped!”

“I want to draw it inside the chamber,” Marshall replied. “We’re only going to get one chance at this. It has to count.”

With a precise, almost finicky movement that seemed wildly out of place for such a massive beast, the creature lifted one foreleg over the lip of the hatchway. The other foreleg followed. It glanced first left, then right, yellow eyes taking in the chamber. The strange low wash of singing in Logan ’s ears increased, and the pain in his head grew almost unbearable. Now the creature was fully inside the chamber, stepping out onto the catwalk. It groaned beneath its weight. One step, two…the creature crouched back on its haunches, tensing for another-and final-spring.

You might as well dance. With a quick movement, Marshall grasped the amplitude dial, set it to 120 decibels, and threw up the fader.

Instantly, the echo chamber came alive with sound. It was as if the sphere filled with a million wasps, all droning together, their hum amplified and re-amplified. The creature began to leap even as its entire frame convulsed. Marshall twirled the dial, raising the volume to 140 decibels. The creature convulsed again in midair, more violently this time, curling in on itself as it hurtled toward them; this arrested its jump and it fell heavily to the ground, shaking the catwalk alarmingly. Marshall ’s entire universe now seemed to be the frantic, terrible hum that echoed through the chamber, feeding on itself and building with an independent crescendo of power and intensity that seemed to penetrate his very pores. The creature scrabbled on the catwalk, clawing forward, first one paw, then the next, the bloody talons digging into the metal plating. Grasping the dial, his breath coming thick and fast, Marshall steeled himself, then twisted the dial all the way: 165 decibels, the amplitude level of a jet engine. Beside him, Logan covered his ears with his hands; the historian opened his mouth but any cry he made was completely masked by the barrage of noise-a screeeeeeeee that now seemed to be part of Marshall ’s very essence. His hands, too, went instinctively to his ears, but they were scant defense against the excruciating violation of sound. Spots danced before his eyes, and he felt himself grow faint.

The creature went rigid. Another violent trembling shook it from forepaw to hindquarter. It raised its head, opening its terrible jaws wide, the fangs still dripping with Sully’s blood, the vibrissae undulating fiercely. It turned sideways, banged its jaws against the catwalk with a horrifying impact: once, twice. It gathered its limbs, reared back. And then, as Marshall watched, its head came apart in an eruption of gore and matter, spattering them with a rain of blood, collapsing virtually at their feet. Drenched, the sonic weapon arced and squealed, then fell silent in an explosion of sparks.

For a long moment, Marshall simply stood there, trembling. Then he glanced over at Logan. The historian was looking back, blood trickling from his ears. He was speaking but Marshall could not hear him-could not, in fact, hear anything. Marshall turned away, stepped over the motionless creature-black blood still flooding from its ruined skull-and began walking toward the hatch leading out of the science wing, his limbs leaden. All of a sudden he felt a need to get out of this dark place of horrors, to breathe clean air. He sensed, more than heard, Logan and Usuguk swing into place behind him.

Slowly, painstakingly, they made their way up to the surface: to D Level; to the more familiar spaces of B Level; and finally to the entrance plaza, shadowy and lifeless. Still deaf, sodden with the creature’s blood, Marshall walked into the weather chamber, not bothering to don a parka. Stepping through the staging area, he pushed open the double doors leading to the concrete apron beyond.

It was dark, but a faint blush at the horizon line hinted dawn was not far away. The storm had subsided and the stars were coming out, lending a spectral brightness to the snowpack. Vaguely, as if from far away, Marshall recalled an Inuit proverb: They are not stars, but openings where our loved ones smile down to reassure us they are happy. He wondered if Usuguk believed this as well.

As if in response, he felt the Tunit touch his sleeve. When he looked over, Usuguk wordlessly pointed one finger toward the sky.

Marshall glanced up. The deep, unearthly crimson of the northern lights-the lights that had haunted them since the nightmare began-was quickly ebbing. Even as he watched, it faded away to nothing, leaving only the black dome of stars. There was no indication, even the faintest, that it had ever been there at all.