Chapter 1: The Hive

“In hindsight, we should have seen it coming,” the general began. It was all I could do not to stifle a yawn. He wasn’t a bad speaker per se—which was good, because the man loved to hear himself speak—but it was far too early and far too warm on the bridge of the old barge for me not to feel the slightest bit drowsy. An ankle dug into my shins from my right, and I snapped back to attention.

“Can you take this seriously?” hissed the voice that owned the boot.

“Okay, okay, I get it. But you know we’re the extras on stage today, right?” I whispered back.

“We’ve still got a part to play. You’re buying Mom’s ticket to Svalbard, remember?”

“Fine, fine, I get it.”

My little brother, ever the straight arrow. Still, he was right—this was a somber stage, and a little respect would go a long way for my carefully cultivated self-image here. I straightened up in my chair and tuned back in.

“The anomalous structure we’ve come to know as the Hive we believe to be a periodic phenomenon of unknown nature. While the specifics are beyond my grasp, the bottom line is this: every 1200 years the Hive appears, and a global superstorm accompanies it.”

Well, that much was obvious. It was hard not to notice that we were nearly a hundred miles out at sea—and well over a thousand from the nearest city—and you’d still be hard-pressed to find a star in the sky. In fact, we’d seen the Hive the day we left port in Buenos Aires.

“What appears to be unique this cycle is the appearance of unknown types of humanoid creatures stemming from the Ross Ice Shelf.” Right, we knew that part too. Nobody on Earth would sign on for this suicide mission if they hadn’t heard the tales of biblical armies slaughtering cities. I’m sure there were some real heroes out among the half million men on cramped boats heading to Antarctica right now, and General West might have even been one of them, but I sure as hell wasn’t. Luckily, despite the Beretta holstered to my thigh, I had been assured by every power that be that I wouldn’t be fighting. Thank the Lord. So why were my hands trembling?

The overhead projector whirred, and a dim, yellowish image of the continent flashed up on the wall. The captain gestured, and a short Slavic man stood up and peered at us through half-inch-thick glasses. Without so much as an introduction, the old man began speaking.

“Here is the center of the storm,” the old professor said, gesturing to the scratched-out name McMurdo on the map. Unfortunate as it was for the poor bastards stationed there, had it popped up at any of the less populated, less traveled outposts on Antarctica, it might have been weeks before we’d known about it. The old man continued. “From its epicenter extends a 500 km region of extreme anomalous semiconductor interference. This field decreases in strength but has created a number of substantial… difficulties for us worldwide.”

My degree didn’t mean much here. I’m not sure anyone’s did. All we knew was that one night, everything broke. It wasn’t just computers and phones—that would have been disaster enough. Everything broke. Power plants, merchant ships, traffic lights—you name it, and it was suddenly rendered useless. At first, the hypothesis among everyone was electromagnetic radiation, something like a big solar flare, but nobody could find any visible signs of damage, and things like radio communication (albeit with old vacuum-tube-based sets) still worked fine. All the way up in Scandinavia, there were rumors that systems as complex as calculators were still functioning, but down here…

“These difficulties are most pronounced on the Antarctic shelf itself. The equipment we have collected from the volunteer nations around the world has not ever been tested in such conditions, but we believe, with good reason, it will still survive…” He trailed off. That wasn’t much of a shock. The odds of a D-Day-sized invasion of Antarctica repelling an unknown (though a man like Professor Sokholov would never admit it) and likely supernatural army were slim to none. But nobody got to bring F-16s to this battle. The UN had tasked each Security Council member to pull out all the stops and find hardware from before the transistor was even an idea in someone’s head. I looked out at the deck of our old cargo ship and caught the glint of dim moonlight off the barrels of a dozen howitzers. I heard we got those from the National Park Service.

The professor began rambling about previous sightings of the Hive in historical records—the famines of 870 AD, the red fires that filled the skies, etc. Of course he had quite a time talking about his own work back before his arrest. Around 0430, the general finally decided to cut him off. “Professor Sokholov, that’s quite enough. We still need to discuss the operation.” With a slight pout, the old man sat back down. A bit petulant for a man in his seventies, but I was sure I’d get there someday.

All at once, the general turned to face me. My blood froze. Did I forget to leave my briefing on his desk? I caught a hint of a smile in his steel-blue eyes, though. “Sergeant Drake, since you’ve been here the longest, would you care to brief the crew?”

“U-um, sir, I’m not sure I’d be the right—” I started to say before I felt a familiar hand on my shoulder. Of course my brother had put him up to this. The bastard. He thrust a stack of transparency film into my coat pocket. It was best not to keep the general waiting.

I stood up and loaded the sheets into the old projector. All of a sudden, I felt two dozen sets of eyes on my face. I breathed, counted to five, and exhaled.

“Thank you, General.” I began. “Though we don’t yet understand the precise mechanics of the Hive, we do know a great deal about it.” I advanced the slide, and a grainy photo appeared. To the untrained observer, it probably looked something like a black-and-white photo of an incandescent light bulb. I gave the crowd plenty of time to appreciate the details (or lack thereof) before continuing. “The Hive, simply put, confounds modern science. As of yet, we don’t know anything about the composition or mechanism behind it, the storm that accompanies it, or the… creatures that it appears to spawn.”

That drew a few murmurs from the crowd. That was probably the most generous way anyone had ever described them. Most had taken to simply calling them demons, and that wasn’t too far off the mark. Most descriptions were of gaunt, tall humanoids: ashen red skin, sunken hollows for eyes, prehensile tails—the whole nine yards. Think any depiction of “demon” minus the pitchforks and wings, and you wouldn’t be too far off. To a… man… every one of them had some measure of physical deformity, large or small. Some simply had crooked spines, while others had entire additional tumorous appendages. I wasn’t particularly well-versed in this, but my understanding was that their body was a sort of large cancerous mass—a malignant tumor of sorts—that granted them incredible regenerative properties. The stories from the early days of the invasions across South America were the stuff of nightmares—and yet here we were, an honest-to-goodness volunteer army gearing up to fight beasts that would eat buckshot for breakfast and come back for seconds.

I caught my mind wandering and snapped back to my slides. “What we do know is that the Hive itself constitutes an incredibly powerful energy source—far in excess of anything we can sustainably produce or maintain here on Earth. Through it streams 10¹² W of broad-spectrum radiation—though mostly long-wave infrared…” I caught the eyes of the general in the crowd, silently pleading with me in English, please.

I cleared my throat and set down the carefully scrawled notes I had written for someone else to hopefully give. No use getting stressed by something like this on a day like today. “Simply put, the Hive is a generator, and every single minute, minute by minute, flows the power of the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima.” I gestured out the window to the swirling storm that blotted out most of the faint crimson sky. “In the time we’ve been talking, thirty-five ‘bombs’ have gone off high in the atmosphere, their heat powering the air currents that make this storm.” I walked back over to the projector and gestured at the small glowing orb in the center of the frame. “All from this 5-foot sphere…”

A hand shot up from the crowd. One of the young Brits on my brother’s team. Miles I think. Far too young to even be here, but not too young to ask the question of the hour. “And the anomalous interference?”

“The Hive very likely powers that too, though we don’t yet understand how…” I trailed off. The faces in the audience had grown dark. These were powers beyond the reckoning of modern science. I tried to put it into terms they could understand.

“The aim of this mission is the destruction of the Hive.” Ears perked up. “This photo was taken by one of our WB-57 aircrews on loan from NASA. At their closest approach, they were still 60,000 feet below the target and didn’t have the speed or power to fly any further into the storm without being torn apart. From this data, we learned that the Hive is completely surrounded by winds exceeding 500 knots and seems to hover between 100,000 and 120,000 feet—well outside the reach of most modern aircraft. Of course, as you all know, we don’t have the luxury of working with modern aircraft…”

The theory behind the Hive was simple enough. There was a debate months ago during the DC hearings about how to model the structure itself and whether physics as we knew it applied—but everyone eventually agreed on three things. First, priority over understanding the Hive was to stop the deleterious effects it was having on the world—primarily the interference it was causing to our electronics, and secondarily the storm that would render much of the Southern Hemisphere unlivable in due time. Second, how exactly the Hive worked was far less important than what it was doing. Third, and certainly most contentious, the Hive probably still obeyed the laws of thermodynamics. I wasn’t personally too convinced on that one, but on the other hand, it didn’t make sense to try to fight unknowns with unknowns.

The plan that followed was simple enough. The labcoats like Sokholov concluded that even if the Hive could convert its pure mass to energy (like a giant atomic bomb, for example), it would have fizzled out weeks ago—therefore, the Hive was just a conduit. Imagine a transmission line, likely sized to only carry a certain amount of current, and only in one direction. If someone were to try to force through a tremendous amount of energy from the other side, they might just be able to burn it out. Now we were into the meat and potatoes of the plan.

“In order to destroy the Hive, we need to deliver a nuclear weapon to the core. Lacking any computerized guidance solutions, a pilot will have to physically deliver the warhead to target. This means not only climbing to that altitude but penetrating the storm surrounding the Hive and traversing through potentially hostile airspace to do it.”

I clicked the next slide into place, and a blotchy yellow schematic flashed up on the projector screen. “This is the primary vehicle—an experimental X-15B and the only one of its kind. With 20,000 lbs of fuel aboard, a single pilot, and a modified AIR-2A nuclear weapon, it should be able to not only climb to altitude but retain the speed and control to penetrate the storm walls.”

“Should?” asked General West. “Should as in…”

“We ran through the numbers to the best of our abilities back before we left, but frankly, there are still too many unknowns to really—”

“Then give me the number, damn it!” he shouted.

“63%. There’s a 37% chance the aircraft disintegrates when it tries to breach the storm…”

The silence felt oppressive. In truth, 63% was incredibly generous. If the hasty modifications to the plane and the rocket sled we brought worked in the cold, and if it could cross fifty-odd miles of demonically infested airspace without being shot down, and if all the controls and equipment even worked that close to the core… Truth be told, I’d say the odds were at best 1 in 3—and calling it anything but a suicide mission wouldn’t feel right.

“Go on, sonny.” The voice this time was an old man of at least seventy. With the thick accent of a farm boy all these years later, he was the oldest of the crew, and everyone just called him “Gramps.” He was our pilot.

I turned to General West. “Gram—uh, Major Burton here was informed of the risks and volunteered for the mission. He’s one of the few men left with any hypersonic flight experience on the X-15, and our single best shot at destroying the Hive.”

The general cocked his head for a second. “But you’re not telling me we only have one shot at this, are you?”

“We do have a second aircraft, but—”

“Well, go on then.”

“You’re not gonna like it, sir.”

“There’s a helluva lot about this situation I already ‘don’t like’—lay it on me, son.”

I clicked the next slide into place. A tiny, lawn-dart of an aircraft flashed up on the projector, carrying a rocket almost as large as it was. “Given the conflicting information in early reports about the presence of hostile air elements, we deemed it prudent to prepare an escort aircraft for the X-15B. In the event the X-15 is seriously damaged or destroyed in transit, the escort is equipped to complete the mission.”

“Equipped to?” the general asked, clearly looking uneasy at the flimsy-looking plane.

“Technically, yes. It’s an old NF-104 ‘Starfighter’ that was supposed to be fully converted into a research plane during the Apollo program. It was easy enough to strip out the fire-control radar, most of the instrumentation, and install the necessary hardware for the JATO system. Then we just swapped out her fuel for hydroboranes and overhauled her—”

“You didn’t answer my question, son.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“How much legwork is ‘technically’ doing here?”

The old bastard was sharp—I’ll give him that. Truth be told, the F-104 was my baby, and the entire reason a museum conservationist like me got to go on this expedition to begin with. Still…

“She’s the very last Starfighter, sir, and she was never designed to fly this high or this fast in weather this cold. We’ve pulled out every stop we can think of to reinforce the hull, stretch the fuel tanks, and upgrade the engines, but at the end of the day… we estimate about a 3% chance of success if it had to be used to carry out the mission.”

Again, even that estimate was insanely generous. In truth, it was as likely the airframe would melt from the speeds we’d be pushing it to as it was to disintegrate when it hit the bulk of the winds. Even the nuke we’d armed it with was older and less sophisticated than the X-15’s, but powerful enough still it probably couldn’t escape the blast radius.

“3%…” The general repeated for a moment, looking genuinely unsure. Like most brass, he’d been given the broad brushstrokes of the picture. We’d sail down to Antarctica on a requisitioned Coast Guard icebreaker while half a million poor souls gave their lives to buy us time to set up. We’d then fly a very old plane carrying an even older nuke into a big storm and hopefully save the world. He looked positively deflated having just been told that the best mankind had to offer in the face of its own extinction amounted to a weighted coin toss.

A thin German man strolled up to the front. Ernst was in his mid-fifties now, and accent aside, had integrated well into the crew over these past few weeks. He was also one of the few pilots around today with any experience on the F-104. He was the only sonofabitch who laughed when I told him his odds of coming home alive…

With a grin on his face, he patted the general’s shoulder and looked to me. “So when do we start?”