The Aeschylus

1

Kate stared at the approaching shoreline with a similar awe, but unlike Lucja, she saw no movement on the soft brown sands as the RDF boat advanced.

What did you want me to see, Dad? What did you want me to find?

The island had not been in any of the photographs, but she got a strange sense that it was a part of things somehow. It was the only thing she could think about. Her job, her old life, her godfather and his cryptic urgings — they felt like they were a part of a different world. She hadn't been able to process all of the things Doctor Grey had said yet, so she was doing what she always did when she got piece of information she couldn't handle: she was filing it away. She was letting it cook, letting her subconscious draw its own conclusions. She had a feeling that when it all started to click, she'd be in a bad way. It was impossible to think Valley Oil could be responsible for all of this, but if they had made it worse, if they had made a mistake that had cost a single person their life, she would not stand for it. There would be a hellfire retribution the likes of which not even Godfried could prevent. Because now, she had power. Now, she had a claim. Her father had given her a stake, and she did not intend to waste it, no matter what the business consequences.

But she was getting ahead of herself.

The only things she had to go on were the ramblings of the starving doctor and the strange tentacular entities he had called The Carrion.

“There,” Mason said beside her. “That dock is still intact.”

The craft moved towards the shore with an eerie ease. There were no other sounds. No birds on the waters, no insects buzzing on the wind, nothing ahead but the dead calm of a deserted village and the creak of the abandoned docks.

“Cut the engine,” she said.

Christian looked at her strangely, but he did, and a moment later, they were gliding the last few yards towards the decking.

“You hear that?” she asked.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she whispered. “There's nothing here.”

Mason stepped out to the deck, scanning the island with hawk-like eyes. When the ship came within reach of the pier, he paused long enough to throw a rope around a rusted old bollard, and then went back to scanning. Next to her, Christian threw the lever to drop the anchor, and their craft came to a halt.

Mason stuck his head back inside. “Well, no one's firing on us. I'd say that's a start.”

“Clear?” Christian asked.

“No other boats on the dock. No signs of life on the shore.” He shrugged. “I'm not staying here, and neither are you.”

“I'm coming too,” Kate said.

“I figured.”

When they climbed up to the pier, Mason offered his hand to her, but she ignored it. He grunted, giving her that odd smile of his.

They found the place decorated with an odd smattering of metal hooks and poles. Kate thought that it must have been a fishery, but the instruments looked primitive and somehow gruesome to her eyes. Shacks the color of old paper lined the shore, and through the open doors, she saw knives, hammers, and waste receptacles big enough to hold a car. When the wind blew, she heard the rattling of chains brushing together like wind chimes.

Mason motioned for her to stay put, then moved deeper into the zone with his partner in tow. They secured the beach one building at a time, a repeat of The Aeschylus operation in miniature. Kate followed at a distance. The last warehouse held a stench so foul that she couldn't get within fifty paces without gagging. When the two men were done, they both jogged back to the center, covering their noses. Mason said something that Kate couldn't hear, and Christian began to run off towards the hills.

“I told you stay put,” Mason said as Kate approached.

She ignored him. “Are they… are they in there?”

“The workers? No. Whatever is in there has been dead a long time.” He looked around. “Something doesn't feel right, though. You feel it?”

She nodded. She couldn't put her finger on it, but there was something very wrong with this place. And that was the only way she could describe it: wrongness.

“There are footprints leading up through the village. They're modern shoes, so I'd say that accounts for our survivors. At least, some of them.”

Kate gawped. She had been looking for signs of this exact sort, and she had seen none. Mason had good eyes.

“Where do they go?”

“They go up to the rocks, there. After that, it's anyone's guess. We can track them, though. Don't you worry about that.”

Kate pushed past him and began looking for more clues. She wandered for a few minutes, ending up in one of the shacks with open doors. The interior was as primitive as the exterior: metal walls, rusted shelves, and rotted rubber flooring. A layer of concrete had been lain beneath the rubber, its mix so rough that she could feel the irregularities through her shoes. A lone hook dangled from the ceiling cryptically, its purpose lost in the years. There were no signs of life. Nor were there notes, ledgers, or records from the earlier time. Like the docks, the place was dead.

She was about to head back outside when she spotted a rectangle of cloth on the ground. It had once been red, but had darkened with the passage of years. She picked it up and unfolded it, wishing she had had the foresight to bring gloves. When the flag dropped to its full length, she recoiled. The symbol in the center, as old and decrepit as it was, stirred more emotions in her than she would have thought possible.

“Boss!”

At the sound of the shout, she dropped the flag and rushed outside, her nerves tightening. Looking towards the hills, she saw Christian had returned and was beckoning them from beyond the shacks.

“You find my chopper?” Mason called. He had been doing some exploring of his own, but from the looks of things, he hadn't done any better than she had.

“No sir.”

“Did you find the path?”

“Here,” he said, pointing.

When they saw it, they could only stare. The entry that had once served as a passageway to the other side of the island was overgrown with Carrion tentacles. They had grown so thick as to be impenetrable, dripping moisture onto the soft black earth.

“More of those things from the platform,” Mason said. “Guess we're not getting through this way. Time to head back.”

Kate felt her breath quickening. “No. There's something here.”

“There's nothing here.”

“There is.” She could feel it. The ground here was old, and there had been people in the long ago. Not oil workers and not men from the company, but soldiers of a different age. If they had fallen victim to the same fate as The Aeschylus, she had to find the survivors before it was too late.

Mason looked at the ground. He picked up a rock and hocked it, watching as it hit one of the tentacles and bounced off. “We're too late for this, you know. I think whatever happened has happened already.”

“And the footprints? Your chopper? What about them?”

He only stared.

“I want to know what happened to those people. If you won't take me, then I'm finding a way through myself.”

The look he gave Christian was not one of anger, but amusement. “Well it's your funeral, honey. And I was only kidding anyways.” He checked his weapon. “Your daddy would be proud of you, you know.”

“The next time you have a thought about him, just keep it to yourself.” He was right though, and Kate knew it. She knew it, and she was glad.

“We go around. The water is shallow all around the beach, so we'll use the perimeter.”

Kate girded herself. She wasn't afraid of a little water.

2

There were a lot of days AJ had tried to forget over the years. The last time he had ridden with Black Shadow was one of them. The day he knew his marriage was over was another. But the one he just couldn't shake was the day he got fired from his last real job. That particular affair had sucked out his humanity like snot through a straw. That's when he had started drifting. That's when he had lost his faith in the whole goddamned lot. Now, he was starting to realize just what that day meant, and how wrong he had been to try to push the memory away.

“You got that look in your eye,” Dutch said.

The pair of them were walking through the mid level of the platform, assessing the damage done to the drilling machinery. With Reiner and Marten missing, Mason and Vytalle gone, the Black Shadow team was spread so thin that no one was watching them. Or so he thought.

AJ stopped and looked at the remains of the drill shaft in the center of the walkway. He'd seen it when it was under construction, but out here in the flesh, it was incredible. Protected behind steel girders and mesh, the shaft extended up out of sight to the derrick above, and it dropped all the way down to sea level below. From there, it extended several hundred feet and into the ocean bottom. The crude would be pumped up through a network of piping, and it would end up in storage tanks near the bulkheads at the spar base. “They built this all on land, you know. You ever been out to one of the construction sites? It makes the mining machinery we work with look kids' toys.”

Dutch didn't really look interested. “What's on your mind, buddy?”

“This wouldn't be here right now if I had my way, Dutch. That's why they got rid of me. You remember?”

“I know, you told me once. I remember.”

“It's eating at me, Dutch. I didn't want to show it in front of the girl, but being here and seeing this stuff… it's got me thinking.”

Dutch shifted. “Hold on, friend. No way this business is your fault. You can stop that shit right now, if that's what you're thinking.”

“Nah, it's not what I'm thinking. But that stuff the doctor said makes a weird kind of sense, doesn't it? What if all this goes even further back? What if they never should have put the platform here in the first place?”

Dutch shrugged. “I wasn't there. Can't tell you, good buddy.”

AJ didn't want to repeat the story of his dismissal, but he didn't think he had to. He believed Dutch when he said he remembered.

When The Aeschylus was green lit, it needed sign off from a lot of people: from the board, from the budget committee, from the CEO, from international projects, from engineering, from legal, and from security. Yeah, that last had posed a problem. He had posed a problem. When you allocate two billion dollars to a new facility, you damn well better see it gets built, objections or no objections. The only holdouts were him and the geologists, and the geologists had caved.

In the end, the scientists had agreed the temperature readings of the water were consistent with their predictions of a payload beneath the crust. That was true. But what they didn't push was the fact that the temperature readings were whacked out all around the island as well. What they didn't push was that the temperature of the water between the island and the location of the facility had increased so suddenly over the past ten years that it would point to an entirely different geological phenomenon. AJ thought it might be a shift in the South American tectonic plate. Or the eruption of hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean. Or some kind of biochemical waste that had made its way from Argentinian power plants into the south sea. Hell, he didn't know. It wasn't his job to know. But when you go sniffing around and you find something out of the ordinary, there is usually a reason. So, he had pushed for a delay. Him. A man with no stake, no claim, and no expertise. To their credit, certain people had marked it as noteworthy, just not two billion dollars noteworthy. In the end, they proceeded anyways, and AJ was let go.

The question that was eating him now, however, wasn't why he had been dismissed. That was clear enough. The question that was really eating him, was why they would bring him back. Because now shit had hit the fan, and he sure as hell wasn't looking at a hydrothermal vent problem.

“You heard the doc say he kept all of the files he could get his hands on, right? I haven't seen anybody go back to the kitchen, have you?”

Dutch didn't say anything, and he didn't have to. AJ watched his eyes flick over their surroundings, watched him count the others. Melvin and the good doctor were on the level above, Jin was working in the communications building below. McHalister and the kid were all the way up on the helipad, and Nick was probably nagging the old guy into telling him stories of the good old days. That left—

“St. Croix. You know where he is?”

“I heard him,” Dutch said. “He was down with Jin, but that was a few minutes ago.”

“So what do you think?”

“You know I'm with you on most things, buddy. But sticking your nose where it doesn't belong — that's the girl's job, not yours. Not mine, either.”

“Yeah.” AJ's mind flicked to Kate, knowing she was alone with the two biggest jugheads on the mission. He hoped she was all right. “She's not here, and we may lose our chance when they get back. Maybe the doc couldn't make sense of those files, but I bet she can. Kate's high enough up the food chain.”

“Might.”

“Yeah, might.”

“And you think you can trust her?”

“She wants to get to the bottom of this, Dutch. I don't know why, but it means something to her. Don't tell me you don't see it.”

His friend paused. “Maybe. You think anyone will try to stop us if we go up there?”

“If Mason were here, yeah.”

“But he's not here.”

“He's not here.” Never mind that AJ was also starting to feel a good deal of personal responsibility in spite of what his friend said. He didn't think he needed to share that, though.

Dutch sighed. “All right, what do you want me to do?”

3

The terrain around the perimeter was rocky and rugged. The trio walked through sand when they could and stepped on protuberant stones when they couldn't. For a short stretch, they marched through the water itself, the face of a cliff cutting their progress on dry land. The water was warm, and its caress more unnatural than Kate would have thought, but neither the man in front nor the one behind seemed to notice.

On their way through the shallows, Kate saw an islet just off the shore. It was covered in greenery and the ancient, white filth of animal droppings. It should have been teeming with birds—or penguins or seals, she thought, remembering how far south they were — but it was as empty as the rest. Nothing stirred along the coast but the lap of the water and the gray, creeping fog rolling in from the east.

“There,” Mason said. He had stopped just in front of her.

At first, she wasn't sure what she was looking at, but the object ahead was too regular to be of the same ilk as the terrain. Then the fog cleared, and she realized it was a wall. It wasn't a single contiguous barrier, but a semicircle of chunks, each rising some fifteen feet and extending maybe twenty or twenty-five feet lengthwise. Fence and barbed wire stretched between the gaps, a razor barrier built to deter what the walls did not. She had never seen anything like it. It was a fortress, but it looked like a fortress made from pre-assembled blocks, a giant's block house made with a giant's constructor set.

When they got close, Mason crouched by one of the gaps and produced his knife, a massive steel tool with a dozen rip teeth. He began rocking the blade, the thin wire of the fence trapped between the serrated edges. Kate could see he had probably not been the first one to get in; the fence was ripped in several places along the base. From the looks of things, something had wanted to get in, and badly.

As the last wire snapped, Mason grabbed the bottom of the fence and stood up, producing a gap just wide enough for a person to slip through. “Ladies first.”

Kate peered through with the same trepidation she had felt along the shoreline. In spite of the gap between the walls, she could not see what was on the other side. She swallowed, telling herself the answers could be on the other side of that fence, the workers could be on the other side of that fence.

“We don't have all day, princess. Vy, you go ahead.”

Without a word, Christian stepped past her and dropped to the ground. He disappeared into the opening, crawling his way through.

Mason smiled at her. He couldn't possibly predict what was on the other side, but it was a knowing smile just the same.

Kate got down on her belly and crawled. It was strange, but the ground was cold. It whispered of winter, as if in the long ago, the island had been a different place altogether. She got to her feet on the other side and found herself slipping through the gap in the concrete walls, into the inner sanctum.

When she turned, what she saw was not a surprise, not really, but it still packed a punch. There were no workers, nor any sign of Mason's missing chopper. The inner workings of the fortress — the bunkers, the towers, the machinery, the very ground itself — was a twisted and terrible ruin.

4

The folders had been stuffed into the kitchen pantry. They were clumped along the shelves, papers leaking out in spots and spilling to the floor. They mixed with the empty cans of food and filth left by the kitchen's last inhabitants. AJ found himself wondering why the staff had kept so many hard copies when he kicked a group of cans and found a stack of hard drives underneath. A fat lot of good they would do him now, but it didn't look like Doctor Grey had taken any chances. The place was an evidence locker.

“I never would have pictured the doc as a hoarder,” Dutch said. He was looking over AJ's shoulder.

“Yeah, me either.”

“Think you'll find what you're looking for?”

AJ looked at the corrugated file folders, the strewn papers, and wondered what other junk might be buried under the trash. “I don't know. I hope so. If all the doc was doing was collecting doughnut receipts, then I'd say he was crazier than he looked.”

“Well, this was your idea.”

“Just keep a lookout. Let me know if any of those idiots start to wander this way.”

“Yeah.”

“And stay out of sight.”

“Yeah.”

“Dutch, you hearing me buddy? No chances.”

His friend looked at him, exasperated. “Yeah,” he said.

As Dutch stepped into the hall, AJ found Gideon's flashlight and turned it on. The place looked small in the darkness and even smaller in the light, but as far as self-made prisons go, it wasn't bad. The pantry didn't look any less a disaster on second glance, but he made his own filtering system. He kept anything that looked useful, and he tossed the rest out of the pantry door.

“Still all clear, Dutch?”

“Yeah. I just poked my head around the corner. Looks like your buddy is coming back down from the helipad.”

“My buddy?”

“Melvin. I've seen the way you two stare into each others' eyes, all dreamy like.”

“Yeah, great. You see St. Croix?”

“No.”

“Keep looking.” And then, as he found payroll receipts, “Hey, you want to know how much a roughneck makes out here for a three week shift?”

“No.”

AJ tossed the file down. “It's a hell of a lot more than you.”

“You're breaking my heart.”

He uncovered accounting information, payroll stubs, insurance claims, sick reports, employee reviews, and everything else he knew existed and hated dealing with at his own job. So far, nothing useful. He tossed more files out the door, then found a couple with banking information he decided to keep. He knew that he and Dutch didn't have a lot of time before Mason came back, but there had to be something in here. Else, why would Gideon keep it all? If the man himself was present, they might have been able to ask him.

When he got to the end of it, he found he had less than a dozen sheets in the keeper pile. Cursing, he swept a line of cans off of a nearby shelf and sent them clanging to the floor.

“What the hell is going on in there?” Dutch called.

“Nothing! Nothing! That's what the hell is going on.”

“Then you and me better split, good buddy. We're not meant to be visitors.”

AJ gave the stack on the floor another go, not really looking. Then he stopped. Dutch had said something there, something about…

Visitors.

The piles of discard lay strewn across the floor, but he began digging through them with renewed fury. He created a new trash pile in the sink, a metal tub filled with dishes and old food that would have attracted a thousand bugs anywhere but here. He tossed in equipment lists, old memos, hand-written notes, and… and he stopped just as he was about to throw in a visitor's report. The Aeschylus was private property, and it was legally hazardous. All visitors were documented, both at the home office, and here at the site. He pulled a sheet from the list. The paper had been filed a week before, showing a chopper that had come in with men from the east coast office. Three men, to be exact. Two of the men were environmental microbiologists like Gideon. They had been given a task to analyze and document the first appearance of the fungus. It looked like much of their report was missing, but it had all been declared “unharmful” and “non-invasive,” and the entire thing had sign-off from the third member of the party: Valley Oil's head of legal council. Head of legal council, here on the platform. The microbiologists had stayed on The Aeschylus, but the third party had departed shortly after.

“Dutch!” he called. “Dutch, get in here!”

But his friend wasn't responding. AJ's voice drifted out into the open air, dying on the high ocean winds.

5

“What is this place?” the girl murmured.

Mason looked at her and then back at the hole. Some kind of basement sprawled beneath him, the earth ripped open at his feet. To his right, one of the base watch towers lay crumpled and burned on the ground. A nearby bunker had its insides blown to the outside. The rest of the base wasn't much better: broken doors, scorched concrete, spent shell casings from another era crusting the earth like seeds. It remained as they had left it, whoever they were. Like the oil platform, however, the inhabitants were gone. Long gone, by the looks of things.

“Whatever it was, it's dead now,” he said.

“Where is everyone?”

“Take a look at this place. You tell me what you think.”

“It doesn't tell us anything about Gideon's friends though, does it?”

Mason turned and saw Christian reemerging from the fence. He was wet, the bottoms of his pants dripping. He gave a single shake of his head, and Mason nodded.

“We're not going any further without taking a swim. Can't skirt around the edge out there any more.”

“So?”

“So this is it.”

“It?”

“Now you're just being dense. I kind of liked that about you when we first met, but now, you're just pissing in my soup.”

“But we haven't found anything!” She looked around stubbornly.

“Why don't you take a look at that gate there and tell me what you see?”

When they had been at the docks, the path leading into the hills had been overgrown with the fungus. But if that had been overgrown, the main gate here was infested. There were more growths than he could count, bent and twisted and gnarled like old oaks.

“More of them,” she said. “There's no way through.”

“That's right.”

She shook her head, taking another walk around. “They have to be here. Gideon said so.”

“Gideon is whacked out of his mind. And if you think we're going to stay here and dig through those things at the gate, so are you.”

The girl might not get it, but he did. This was the end.

El fin.

And a grand end it was. No chopper. No Reiner. No goddamned fucking workers, and no goddamned fucking answers.

He turned to the nearest bunker. Without knowing he was going to do it, he threw down his rifle and kicked the closed door. The metal shuddered under his weight. It didn't solve a goddamned thing, but it felt good. Mason smashed it again, and before he knew it, he was hammering at it with kick after kick, slamming his heel into the door. The metal bent and shuddered, but it didn't give.

He looked back at the woman, and she was scared. She was right to be scared, stupid cow that she was.

Mason turned to Christian and made a give me motion with his fingers.

Christian reached into his pack, pulled out a breach charge, and tossed it to him. Mason caught it with both hands. He slapped it on the remains of the door, pushed the button to arm it, and then rolled around to the side of the bunker. The door blew inwards, sending shrapnel and thunder across the terrain.

“What the hell do you think you're doing?” Kate yelled.

Mason laughed. She tried to sound angry, but it wasn't working; she was still too scared.

“See if there are any more locked doors here, would you Vy? We'll give them a good once-over for the lady before we head out.”

The woman looked like she was about to say something else, but when Mason bent and picked up his rifle, she paused. “Now, they know we're here,” she said finally. “I bet they heard that all the way back at the platform.”

“Isn't that what you wanted?” Mason asked. “If anybody happens to be alive and wants to be saved, I bet they'll come running, don't you?”

“I don't know.”

“Yeah, well, I do. And we ain't gonna find shit.”

The anger was on him now, fierce and unbidden, but there was nothing to be done for it. He'd just have to ride it out.

And so would she.

He pushed past her into the open doorway. The other side was lined with shelves and boxes and, to his surprise, rifles. It looked like they had stumbled into the middle of a supply bunker.

“Nice,” the girl said, looking at the munitions. “You could have blown us sky high.”

“I didn't, so shut your mouth.”

They stepped past the wreckage of the doorway and into the body of the room. They were greeted by a pair of corpses wrapped arm-in-arm on the floor, almost perfectly preserved. It was an oddly touching sight.

“There you go,” Mason said. “Nothing but bodies.”

“These aren't blackened like the others,” she said. “And I'd say they've been dead a long time. Probably suffocated, if that door was sealed.”

“Well, they didn't die of food shortage,” Mason said, looking at the cans stacked nearby. He couldn't read any of them. Mason could speak Arabic, Farsi, Russian, and a little Spanish, but not German. That was the wrong war.

“What happened here?” she asked.

At one time or another, Mason had been all around the world. He'd been through hellfire and darkness, and he always managed to find his way back. He had a high tolerance for the unexpected, as any team leader did. But his tolerance for the totally fucking strange was just about to hit the red. This place was abandoned except for two stiffs wrapped around each other like a couple of homos, and the only clue they had were more of those goddamned tentacles. Something had torn this place apart, but he was becoming less and less interested in what that something might be.

Christian appeared in the doorway. “Nobody else here, boss.” He noticed the two corpses on the ground but didn't comment.

“Then we're packing up.”

Part of him wanted to scout the whole island. Part of him wanted to bring the other chopper back here and do a full scan, hit every sector, and use thermal vision. But that was wrong, and it wasn't the mission. He had been letting his curiosity get the better of him, and that was dangerous. It was time to cut their losses and go.

The fact that two of his men had disappeared into the void (quite literally) would eat at him, but he'd have plenty of time to think about that later, say… when he was retired, resting in his own little beach house. He'd tell his superiors that Reiner's helo had disappeared and most likely crashed into the ocean. That was the truth. With radio communications down, that was the most likely scenario, and yet…

And yet.

It didn't feel like the truth. It didn't feel right.

“Vy, your radio still shot to shit?”

Christian put a hand to his ear and nodded. Still no ear-to-ear communication, not even short range. It wasn't the platform after all. It's those things, he thought. Here, on the middle of the island, they were still hamstrung.

Totally. Fucking. Strange.

Both Vy and the girl were staring at him, and he realized he'd been zoning. Jesus, it was time to go. He'd brought them all of the way out here with no way to get word back. He'd assumed the radios would start working once they had distanced themselves from The Aeschylus, but that had been a mistake.

“We're leaving.” He looked at Christian. “Did you find somewhere that might be of use?”

“It looks like they kept prisoners here. The prisoners' bunker locks from the outside.”

Mason grinned. Maybe not everything was bad luck.

The girl looked flustered. “So that's it? We're giving up? We're just going back? Sorry guys, we couldn't find your entire staff? You're acting like you don't care. Do you know that?” She was beginning to get that look in her eyes, the one that politicians had when they were listening to every word you said, but it just wasn't getting through. He didn't have to guess where she got it. And that look, as irritating as it was, would make the next five minutes a little easier.

“Just get your ass out the door, honey.”

“We're going to find them. We have to. I'm not giving up on those people.” And then, more quietly, “I'm not giving up on my father.”

When she turned, that's when Mason grabbed her by the hair and yanked back so hard her feet slipped out from under her.