A/N: Things are going to turn a little 'Thingie' now.
Howlround (Chapter III) by frostygossamer
Timeline: Huge Attraction Ice-station - Yesterday noon
Arriving in the station mess hall, Sam is relieved to find a place set for him at the table between Walker's and Singer's. Walker is helping himself to yet another ladleful of steaming lentil stew as Sam eases into the rather narrow plastic stacking chair. These damn things were not designed for big guys like him.
"Hey! Easy there, hog-belly," grouches Singer, snatching the ladle from Walker's hand. "Leave some for the latecomers, why don't ya."
Walker mutters under his breath and grabs a handful of saltine crackers before scuttling off with his dish back to Ellen's lab. Singer chuckles as he quickly serves himself then passes the big server to Sam.
"Here you go, Sam. Eat up. You'll be needing this after working outside all morning."
Sam inhales the scent of the hearty vegetable stew. It smells delicious. He fills his bowl and passes the ladle on before tasting a mouthful. Good, yes, but something is missing. Dean would have surely added a man-sized dash of cayenne. Yeah, and meat too, obviously. Dean doesn't approve of Sam's vegetarian tendencies. He chuckles at the thought.
He is had several frosty months to reconsider why he quarrelled with his brother. Down here on the ice sheet things no longer seem so black and white. He badly wants to tell Dean he is sorry. So, sure, Dean may be part of a couple now. Well, Sam can work around that, right? Carmen is not so bad and he can be gallant. Hey, maybe she even has a sister?
Hopefully Dean won't simply delete his message when he sees the university's name in the 'From' column of his email client. Sam thought long and hard about what he should say to his brother in that message, but he could only come up with something lame, if heart-felt. He hopes Dean can read between the lines and get that he is sincere. He did try to make it light-hearted, fake a joke of it all. Maybe Dean can fake it too.
Then again, there is a strong possibility his message never made it to Tassie, let alone Kansas.
"Hey!" yells Singer. He stabs at his neighbour's hand with his fork when he absentmindedly reaches for Singer's chunk of bread. "Get your greedy paws off of that, Turner. It's mine."
Turner pulls his hand back and curses. Sam has to chuckle. Clearly, he isn't the only one with relationship problems.
With the radio out, the cabin fever they are all starting to suffer from is only going to get worse. Already arguments break out for no reason, people get vindictive about nothing. They bicker about bathroom privileges and blame each other for missing trinkets. Walker somehow lost the framed photo of his late sister and blamed Walt, simply because the guy admired its silver frame. Ellen mislaid some heirloom necklace, only to find it in the trash a couple days later. Yesterday, Singer accused Roy of snarfing his stash of sour lemon hard candy, without even one piece of cellophane showing up.
Eight men and one woman stuck full-time in the tiny outpost of Huge Attraction, a clutch of claustrophobic wood huts in the back of a remote and icy beyond, are bound to get antsy. Any contact with the outside world would be a blessed relief. Their work on the ice-station is frankly boring, worthy but still boring. Mentally and physically.
Each morning Ellen and Turner - sometimes Walker tags along - go out on Walt's snowcat to one of the test sites and take deep core samples. Each afternoon those samples are hauled back attached to one of the slow-moving cat track vehicles to be analysed and tested for viability by Ellen and her tech in the lab.
They are looking for traces of ancient algae, lichen, fungus and such, that could provide a new source of nutrition or maybe green energy. So far they have isolated a few spores that look likely and Walker is culturing them in the lab, enough to encourage them to keep going, but nothing to write home about. Not yet.
While that goes on, physicist Singer and Sam occupy themselves making an atmospheric meteorological survey. Hence Sam's morning on the ice with a cosmic-ray detector. Unfortunately nothing exciting has shown up here either, except for that random blip on the radar a couple days ago. They put that down to another minor glitch in the software.
Sam's thoughts are interrupted by Project Leader Campbell flopping into the seat lately vacated by Walker.
"How's the chow today?" He reaches for the ladle.
Sam has scarcely opened his mouth to pass on his thoughts on the quality of its seasoning when Campbell's walkie-talkie splutters and Ellen's voice crackles out. Campbell grabs the handset from his belt and answers.
"Campbell here. Say again, Ellen. What's that you've found?"
Despite the distorted reception, Ellen's voice comes through loud and clear, with maybe a hint of tetchiness to it.
"Hey, Campbell, we're out here at Site 43 over in the north-west sector. Looks like we've gotten some real weird readings in our GPR survey. Something strange under here. Big sucker about ten meters down. Crazy thing is it reads as magnetic as all hell. Almost like a false secondary pole, only ridiculously localized."
"Subsurface hematite mountain maybe?"
"Nuh-uh. Not this time. Seems to be a-"
A yelp and a whine come from the receiver. A second is lost before she continues.
"Freakin' wind, damn it. Uh, from its depth, could be a prehistoric meteor maybe? Either that or more hot military debris that's melted its way through the ice layer. It's metal for sure."
Campbell's face lights up. He knows the Astrophysics boys back at the university like nothing better than a good sized hunk of space-rock to drool over. And something with exotic physical properties? So much the better.
"Sounds exciting, Ellen. I'll get everyone over there to help you bring it up."
They can almost hear her shrug. "Sure, Samuel. If you think so. But I'd guess it's only another chunk of burned-out NASA hardware."
Ellen sounds a little pouty. As a microbiologist, this isn't the kind of thing she would waste time on at all. Campbell, however, has different priorities.
"Could still be interesting. We'll be with you in an hour. You can brief me when I get there."
Campbell shuts off his radio link and turns to Sam and Singer, who are all ears.
"You waiting for a bus or what?" he snaps and everyone hurries to suit up for a long afternoon on the ice.
In twenty minutes, with only Doc Crowley left at base, the team are all sitting in the trailer hitched to the smaller snowcat as Roy heads out to the bore site.
They are in for a fun afternoon.
~O~
Timeline: Drilling Site 43 - Yesterday afternoon
The afternoon is clear and bright as they arrive at the drilling site designated 43. The freezing wind has died down for a while and the sun, unfiltered by cloud, shines on snow of an undisturbed white more perfect than is ever seen on any other continent.
The scene is serene, marred only by an odd rumble from the small cat's engine and the impatient grumbling of Ellen, whose work has been held up by this annoying new find. Turner looks glad of the excuse for a break. Ellen steps forward the instant Roy turns off the engine. The snowcat makes an unhealthy rattling, scraping sound before falling silent.
"It looks like a big son-of-a-bitch, Campbell. Rufus and I have paced it out and marked its outline with marker flags to give some impression of its size."
Sam blinks and can now make out the ring of small red flags against the white background. The object isn't as big as he imagined but big for a satellite fragment, roughly the length and width of a king-size bed. They can probably lift it, unless its composition turns out to be mostly lead. Or gold. Oh yeah, sure.
Turner comes over. "I'm gonna run a line of thermite charges around that mother and see if we can pop it out like a cork." Campbell nods.
The guy is an artist at what he does. Another hour and he is poised with his hand on the plunger of the electronic detonator, ready to blow the rig. The rest of the crew have drawn back and are standing in a wide circle, speaking in low voices. No one wants to risk disturbing the blasting expert at his dangerous work. Turner is serious about his explosives.
Replacing his ear-defenders, Turner puts his whistle to his lips and blows. Ellen already has her defenders on. Everyone else ducks automatically, their fingers in their ears.
KA-BOO-OO-OOM!
There is an earth-shattering roar followed by a prickly shower of ice shards which sting Sam's face like needles and cover his head and broad shoulders like frosting. He shakes them off as the sparkling cloud showers down around them and quiet returns to their surroundings. For a moment, none of them breathes.
A loud creak causes Walker to pull in an audible gasp of frigid air. Slowly, ever so achingly slowly, the ice emits a sinister growl as the freed section begins to slide upward, like a cork from a bottle but in super slow-mo. It looks like it is going to work.
They all take a step forward to get a better look. The block is almost opaque. Sam can't see anything for trapped bubbles and suspended detritus. Whatever happened here the ice must have boiled to vapour when it came down.
"That baby's gotta weigh WELL over a ton," exclaims Singer, taking a step closer. "We gonna be able to haul a mess of ice that size back to the station?"
Turner waves them all back a ways. "Not so close, guys. Could be dangerous."
As he speaks a weird sound begins, low and throbbing at first, rapidly rising to a high brain-piercing pitch. Sam turns his back on the noise and hits the ground. Something has gone wrong. Somehow they must have set off a chain reaction inside the mysterious object. A flash of intense blue light explodes overhead.
"That baby's gonna blow!" yells Singer, right before the pressure wave hits them.
VROO-OOMPH!
Then quiet.
~O~
Minutes later, Sam comes around to realize he is at Site 43 lying on his stomach in the snow, not home in bed having a weird dream. There is a strange dull silence in his head. He rolls over and sits up just as Singer is helping Ellen to her feet and the others are staggering up too.
Campbell mouths something at Sam he can't make out. It occurs to him the guy is shouting. Sam has gone completely deaf. He points at his ears. Campbell nods and comes over to him, extending a hand to help him up.
He mimes, "You OK?" Sam nods.
There is a large jagged hole where the object used to be. Some of the others have edged closer to look down into the deep cavity. Sam and Campbell join them. The hole is now half-full of steaming meltwater, nothing else. Has the strange object been totally vaporized?
"Crap," grunts Campbell, and Sam hears him this time. "Whatever it was, I guess the thermite ignited its power source."
As they all watch, they notice something float up from below water level and bob right under the surface. It looks like it is all that is left of the object. A central core? A protective capsule? A shapeless still-frozen mass, about six feet in each dimension, it is impossible to tell what it is.
Campbell turns to Walt and Roy. "Get some ropes, boys. We may as well get that thing up outta there and check it out. Could give us some idea what the hell it coulda been."
Over the next hour, all of them working together, they manage to lift the amorphous frozen lump out of the water-filled crater and secure it with ropes on the trailer of Walt's big cat. Campbell and Sam jump on behind Walt while the others pile onto Roy's smaller cat.
The journey back to base is long and slow. No one wants to lose their curious and precious new cargo along the way. Even if it does turn out to be no more than aerospace refuse.
Singer and Turner shout over the engine noise of the smaller snowcat to speculate about what the icy mass could contain.
"If it turns out it's some commercial crap I'm gonna write my congressman," grumbles Singer. "The Antarctic ain't here to use as the world's freakin' scrap yard."
"Could be it's an escape pod from an alien spaceship," suggests Turner, chuckling, "Or maybe some kinda extraterrestrial probe?"
"Aw, sure," retorts Singer. "More like a hunka useless junk."
"Bobby. Man, you have no imagination," chides his colleague.
"I'm a physicist, Rufus, and a realist. Not a screenwriter for Disney."
As they haul their load back to Huge Attraction, Sam watches Campbell. From his quiet smirk, the guy seems to be calculating the kudos he expects to win with this find.
At least that is what Sam assumes is going on behind those mean brown eyes.
~O~
Timeline: Huge Attraction Ice-station
When they land up back at the ice-station it is already evening and Campbell tells Walt and Roy to drag the ice block into the snowcat garage for the night.
"Get the thing under cover, guys. We'll do a thorough technical analysis on it first thing tomorrow."
The tractor garage stands roughly two hundred yards from the admin block and contains the workshop used by the two snowcat engineers. When weather permits, the two drivers spend lots of time doing maintenance in here, largely as an excuse to get away from the suffocation of the cramped main building. They have the place nice and cosy with a TV/DVD combo, a portable heater and their own hot plate.
Walker admits he is anxious to learn a little more about the value of their catch.
"Ellen, think I'd like to go in the lab and run the geophysics we did on site right away. At least get a better estimate of size and composition before calling it a day, huh?"
Ellen agrees. He is trying to pretend scientific curiosity motivates him but Sam suspects, from what he has already seen of the guy, he is more interested in what the thing might be worth, as scrap weight. Sam despises that sort of attitude.
Turner steps up, offering to go along and help Walker out.
"Last time I blew anything this big out of the ice - some ten years ago up in the Arctic Circle - it turned out to be a perfectly preserved woolly mammoth. Never expected to find anything so big in Antarctic ice. Maybe this could get me another mention in the New Scientist."
Sam considers Turner's attitude to be more forgivable. Who wouldn't want to grab a little fame out of this worthy but thankless way of life?
He has had precious little recognition for what HE does.
~O~
Back in the relative comfort of the mess hall, Sam and the rest of the team share out welcome bowls of oatmeal and mugs of hot chocolate to warm their hands and hearts as they wind down before retiring for the night. Right as they are starting to peel off toward their separate rooms for a well-earned sleep, they are interrupted by the noisy return of Turner. He is followed by Walker clutching a length of readout paper in his hands.
Campbell picks up his mug and takes the pair in his office. Sitting down at his desk, he steeples his fingers over his hot cocoa.
"So you two have gotten some initial findings already? Anything exciting?"
"You could say that," chuckles Turner. "Kinduva weird one this-"
"It's anomalous, sure," butts in Walker.
Campbell sighs and takes the printout from him, smoothing it on his desk. Walker points out the relevant columns of figures on the paper.
"These are the readings and this - here - is the analysis. It looks like the object was mainly ferrous metal with traces of chromium, silicon and some other trace compounds, roughly five and one half meters long."
"About the size and shape of a small spaceship," puts in Turner, archly.
Walker ignores that and continues. "Certainly the thing was pretty, uh, geometric to have been a regular meteor. But the strength of its magnetic flux is paradoxical. The quantity of iron present, it shouldn't produce that kinda effect. It's beyond the parameters NASA have been working with but the Soviets? Who knows?"
Campbell nods his head, disappointed. "So it's likely it WAS ex-orbital debris, huh? Spy satellite?"
"Kinda sturdy for a US or Soviet snooper," objects Turner. "Those babies are like kids' paper kites compared to this. I'd guess we're looking at serious muscle here."
"Then what?" demands their leader. "You're not saying it was some damn MISSILE we were monkeying with?!"
Walker shrugs but Turner cocks an eyebrow.
"Well, my money says either ordnance the Cold War forgot or, uh, Martian probe powered by some alien hyper-magnetic technology. I kinda like Martian probe."
By this time his inquisitive nature has brought Sam to listen at the open door of Campbell's office. He is moved to join in the conversation.
"You gotta be joking, guys. You're not tryna say we just found some ET, uh, Space Oddity embedded in two million year old ice, right? You two been smoking something out there?"
Turner laughs and pats him on the shoulder. "Sam, it's as good a guess as any. Until that thing we brought back defrosts anyways."
Walker grumbles to himself as he folds up the readout paper, annoyed Turner seems to have found a way of mocking his work yet again.
"We're scientists here, Turner," he gripes. "This is NOT the place for freakin' sci-fi fantasy."
Campbell leans back in his chair. "I gotta agree on that."
Turner holds up his hands. "Tryna lighten the mood, buddy. Right now we could all use a lighter mood."
Sam chuckles. Turner is surely right. He takes the printout from Walker and runs his eyes over the numbers.
"Guess it COULDA been artificial, Rufus. Only how would it wind up down here at the South Pole without tripping the early warning system?"
"Publicity stunt?" Turner suggests, with a cheeky grin.
"Crazy high-ticket publicity stunt," counters Sam, and Turner shrugs.
Campbell laughs dryly and shoos them out his office door.
"Gonna be a few more days till the supply plane gets here and we can send in a report. I hope you guys are gonna have something SENSIBLE on this by then."
Sam and Turner come back from Campbell's office lightened up enormously, especially by the sore look on Walker's face. Turner flashes him a how-about-a-drink hand gesture but Sam is ready for bed and declines with a shake of the head.
Almost everyone has turned in by now. Everyone, that is, except Roy who has decided to spend a while in the snowcat workshop checking out the niggling rattle in the smaller cat.
Alone...
~O~
Out in the tractor garage, Roy finds the melting mass standing in its corner quietly dripping.
Plop, plop...
Walt threw a tarpaulin over it before going back to the admin block, leaving the thing alone to thaw out. Roy reckons he has better things to do than worry about it as he runs over his maintenance checklist. After an hour of tinkering with the cat, he gives up, tosses his tools in the toolbox and wipes his hands clean on a rag.
Plop, plop...
He steals a quick peek at the murky hunk of ice under its tarp. Nothing to see yet. He puts a teen-horror DVD in the player and settles in with the secret bottle of Jack Daniels he keeps hidden under the worktable. His feet propped up on the table, he is nodding off before the first scantily clad starlet's Wilhelm scream.
Plop, plop... Slurp...
~O~
Meanwhile, back in the main building, Sam lies under a scratchy blanket in his army-style cot, huge stockinged feet hanging over the end of the bed, his arms folded behind his head. The air in the accommodations is a little chilly but it is a lot cosier inside than outside in the snow. Out there a shrieking wolf-wind whistles over the drifts, swirling up the fine icy flakes like an ice-desert dust devil.
He reaches out and grabs the photo frame from his night table. It contains a snap he took at Dean's auto shop a couple years ago. His brother is standing in front of a small crowd of his employees proudly holding up some local trade award won by his business.
Dean's wide smile seems to mock him somehow. Sam really wouldn't belong in that picture. Not need Dean? Hell, Dean doesn't need him. How could he have been such a dumb-ass? He shoves the frame in the top drawer face down and slams it shut.
"Yeah, dude, I know. Big freakin' mistake."
He listens to the howl of the gale outside and contemplates the complete isolation of their little crew so far from civilization and so cut off from telecommunication of any kind. He is feeling low, so low even the laughable idea there may be some dangerous space-creature de-icing only a few hundred yards away can't make him feel any worse.
Sighing theatrically, he carefully shuffles onto his side, burying his face in the thin pillow. Back in Kansas right this minute Dean is probably cuddled up on his memory-foam mattress with his sexy new brunette, snug under a fluffy duck-down comforter. The lucky sonuva...
He is asleep inside a minute, oblivious to the drama about to unfold around him.
Outside, the wind howls an eerie lament as it rolls across the bare tundra like some demented beast.
OOH OH WOE... OOH OOH WOE OH...
Some hours later Sam starts awake, heart racing, breathing fast, eyes blinded by solid, blank darkness. "No!"
He was dreaming, turning in the narrow confines of his bed, grotesque visions rushing through his restless brain. Horrible, nightmarish.
Sam shakes himself and takes a couple deep, raw breaths. "I'm fine. I'm safe. We're all safe," he chants.
It has been a long time since he had a bad dream like that. Not since he was a kid. Not since his parents' fatal car wreck. And his big brother isn't here to tell him not to be such a wuss and offer him a place in his bed, like he did way back then. So Sam pummels his thin pillow and tries to get comfortable. Sleep, though, will not come as easily this time.
He doesn't know why, but something feels wrong. Very wrong.
TBC
A/N: What is that 'thing' defrosting in the Quonset hut? We'll soon see.