Chapter 128 The Ghost Station
The storm didn't stop. It just changed frequency.
The wind had been a physical hammer upon the side of the Beast during the past two miles, and the steel plating had screamed. The wind had again fallen now to a low wailing whistle, because we turned and turned through the jagged black teeth of the formation, as we made our way.
Vane said in a tight voice, "Fuel light is solid red, by your leave." We got perhaps ten miles of tank range. The buses are fueling on fumes. And unless we discover something forthcoming we shall be walking.
It would be suicide to walk in this, Soto, Sato, muttered in the rear, where he was huddled in a thermal blanket. It is well below forty. The wolves would even freeze in an hour.
The Ryker stared through the windshield with his eyes looking into the whiteout. He was as still as a granite sculpture, cold and hard.
"There," Ryker said suddenly.
A gloved finger was raised on pointing toward a shadow before the mist.
It wasn't a rock. It was geometric. There is a blade, thin and jagged, breaking through the natural confusion of the ice.
"Structure!" Vane swore, and struggled with the wheel. "I see a radio mast!"
The convoy took a tottering approach to the shape. As we approached closer the silhouette was made known.
It was a concrete, half-covered snowdrift bunker. The roof was reinforced with heavy steel plating and domed. On its top was a huge satellite dish that was crooked and frozen and that was facing the ground aimlessly.
Jaxon was on the radio, reporting that we were under coalitions. "It's an old listening post. Pre-War."
Ryker, regarding the blast door, read the stenciling that had been put on there by time we arrived: Station 7. This was in the Northern Early Warning System. They were on the alert in case of nuclear launches.
The Beast shuddered and died. The engine choked once, and ceased to work.
Timely enough, Vane groaned, tapping the fuel gauge. "Dry as a bone."
"Everyone out," Ryker ordered. In case it is a Coalition post they will have emergency generators. And diesel reserves."
We scrambled up and out of the frosty cold. The convoy had been drawn in a close circle around the entrance to the bunker. The refugees were lurking in the cars, regarding us with terror-stricken eyes. They were aware just as we were that this was the last of the line. We perished here, in the event that the bunker was vacant.
Ryker came to the airlock. The wheel was solid cemented in a block of blue ice.
"Baron," Ryker nodded.
The Wolf Alpha came forward. He did not change his form, he simply reached out and grabbed the wheel with his huge furred hands. He grumbled, and his muscles contracted beneath his coat.
CRACK.
The ice shattered. The wheel turned.
HISSS.
Air rushed in.
"Vacuum seal," Vane noted. Nobody has opened this door within a decade.
The massive steel door swung to the inside.
Darkness greeted us.
The Tomb
We moved in with flashlights. It was a stuffy air in which the odor of ozone, dust and some sweetness--dried flowers--was apparent.
Check the corners, Ryker said, and his pistol was cocked. Keep a lookout to automated defenses.
But the hallway was silent. We swung our beams through the darkness, and there was the sparkling whiteness of the walls and the grey floor-tiles. There was no Rot here. No vines. No black slime. It was a time capsule.
The main Command Center was reached.
Clear, clear, clear," said Baron, throwing out his shotgun.
I shined my light around. It was a circular room with computer terminals. The walls were covered with maps of the north hemisphere.
And the crew were sitting in the chairs, at their stations.
There were six of them. Their uniforms were out of date blue Coalition uniforms. They were seated up and with hands on the consoles. Their heads were bowed.
They were dead. Frozen solid.
There was not even any struggle, Sato said to himself, going up to the nearest body--a woman with a headset still on her ears. "No wounds. No blood."
She touched the woman's neck. The skin was hard as stone.
Sato said: Oh, they just... turned off.
Lay eyes on the console, Vane said. He was at the main terminal. The power has been switched off, however, the emergency battery is retaining a charge. I can reboot the system."
"Do it," Ryker ordered. We should know what has happened here. And we must find the fuel manifest.
Vane typed a command.
WHIRRR-CLICK.
Lights flicker--red emergency lights. The screens glowed to life, and the lines of green code flitted over them.
"Fuel reserves..." Vane muttered, and wrote like the devil. "Yes! Sub-level 2! It has a 5,000-gallon diesel tank! It's full!"
"Jackpot," Jaxon breathed. "We can fill the convoy."
"Wait," Vane said. He stopped typing. "There's a log entry. The final one before it was shut down. Dated ten years ago. The day the Spire fell."
"Play it," Ryker said.
Vane hit a key.
The main screen flickered. A video feed appeared.
It depicted a man--the Commander of the station. He appeared worn out and horrified. He was talking to the camera and his breath was fogging in cold air of the station.
"This is Commander Halloway. Station 7. Final entry."
Then the picture was blurred and cleared off.
The rescue vessels were never seen. We watched them on the radar. They started out of the capital... and they continued. They didn't stop for us. They broke orbit."
Ryker stiffened. "The Purists."
There was a message addressed to the flagship Aether, we have got, and I fear I am trembling, continued Halloway. They informed us that the surface was weakened. It was said that Project Clean Slate was launched.
"Clean Slate?" I asked.
They are not saving us, Halloway said, the tears stuck on his face. "They blocked the comms. They shut us down in the satellite grid. They said... they said we are Control Group.
"Control Group?" Sato gasped. "My god."
Halloway said they would like to know how the Void has approached the human genome. They are making the world a petri dish. They handed over the arms to fight... just to see whether we would last long. To measure the mutation rate."
He stared directly at the camera.
"We are not soldiers. We are lab rats. And I will not transform my crew into monsters in their information.
Halloway took something out of camera. A bottle of pills.
We are discontinuing life support. We are choosing a clean death. Should any chance to find this... do not trust the sky. The sky is watching."
The screen went black.
Silence filled the room. All there was was the cool of the fans and the wind blowing against the thick walls.
"They knew," Ryker whispered. His voice was furious, but deathly silent. "The Purists didn't just flee. They watched."
They made the apocalypse an experiment, I horrified, said Sato. "They let the Rot spread. They let the cities fall. To find out whether humankind would evolve or not.
And when we did not develop quick enough,
confronted Baron growled, they left us to decay.
I said Valerius, I remembered the Commander up on the roof. "He called me the 'Asset'. He wasn't saving me. He was collecting a sample."
Ryker was the one who wanted the Origin Stone. "To study it. To observe its attachment on a human host.
He banged his fist against the console. The metal dented.
"We aren't survivors to them. We're variables."
Variables, said Vane gloomily, are a pain to the equation.
He drew a drive out of the terminal.
I got their flight path, I downloaded their flight path, said Vane. Pre-docking, it was transmitting telemetry information to a ground station via the Aether. It is not a refueling lav, Ryker. It's a laboratory."
"Where?" Ryker asked.
Vane pulled up a map. There was a red dot shining in the far North, in the Titan Mountains, in the peaks.
"Station Zero," Vane read. The Primary Observation Post.
That is where they are, said Ryker. "That's where Valerius went."
It is three hundred miles, Jaxon said, viewing the map. Through the worst country in the continent.
"We have fuel now," Ryker said. "And we have a reason."
He turned to the frozen crew.
Jaxon, get a detail to Sub-level 2. Siphon the diesel. Load up all the tanks, all the jerry cans. Take away the food, blankets, weapons of the station. Leave nothing."
"And the bodies?" Jaxon asked.
Ryker stared at the frozen face of Commander Halloway.
"Leave them," Ryker said softly. "They chose their rest. We don't have that luxury."
and we went back out in the cold.
The wind felt different now. It did not simply seem like weather. It was as though the sigh of a casual viewer.
With the Beast filled up with the humming of the fuel pumps I glanced up at the grey sky. The Aether was looking on somewhere up there behind the clouds. They were not recording our struggle. They were measuring our pain.
The maze is a trap. They believe we are rats in a maze, I told Ryker.
Ryker made sure he had loaded his pistol. He faced North, towards the mountains.
Then we will go and see them how the rats will chew through the walls, Ryker said.
"Mount up!" he shouted to the convoy. "Next stop: Station Zero!"
The motors sprang to action, and this time more powerfully, as on fuel of the dead. We drove out of the rocks formation abandoning the Ghost Station.
We weren't running anymore. We were in pursuit of scientists who destroyed our world.