Physics of the Crowbar

Fish Game

The heavy-duty cargo tram was intended to be thoroughly mined. Freeman hefted a claymore from the crate beside it and added it to his utility belt. Apparently the crew in the sand-bag fort had been tasked with closing the rail line, but he'd gotten to them first.

Claymores go both ways, he thought.

And when the tram ran aground in a wash of yellow fire, he was ready.

He rode the ruined machine through a hail of bullets and down the shaft, trusting blind instinct that so useful a space as a ruined silo would naturally be filled with wastewater.

He wasn't wrong.

The trolley hit with a splash. He swam to the surface and looked up; the silo wasn't the end of the line, by any means. Doorways lead off into ruined observation decks and systems laboratories.

Something twitched in the shadows and he froze, treading water, until he heard the grating howl and saw the long claws of a puppet. Relief flooded through him as he climbed out of the water and gripped the crowbar. He killed it with a single practiced blow.

He didn't like how his heart rate stabilized when he saw it was only his own parasitized colleagues moving in the shadows. But they didn't move too fast, and they didn't shoot from a distance. Biological response, he reminded himself. The wet body isn't distinguishing former friend from foe, only prioritizing threats. He didn't have the mental energy to argue with his subconscious.

The water was icy cold and oily, but not irradiated. Small blessings. He followed the flooded corridors out of the silo and into what appeared to be a decommissioned marine biology lab. He was confused until he remembered this was cold-war era. Someone had probably been testing missiles on sharks. Or sharks in missiles. Or shark-mounted missiles.

The dank, rusty pool still held something. Something large, by the churning black water, something hungry- he fired twice on reflex as the thing breached, the torn body of a scientist in its jaws, and saw his bullets spark and deflect from its armored hide.

It might have been generously called "deep sea," by someone who only saw a photo. By the shiver running up Freeman's spine, by the utter lack of reaction to his shots, he was certain it was extraterrestrial. He was not a biologist, he didn't like animals, he didn't watch deep sea exploration films and he never went fishing, but the thing's double-jaw, iridescent ocular array and metallic plated armor didn't look like anything his colleagues had bragged about catching.

He skirted the pool, staying well back from the catwalk's edge.

The observation laboratory above the pool was occupied. A man he'd never seen before was peering through the plexiglass and madly scribbling notes. "Did you see it? They said it was from the Challenger Deep, but it isn't from earth. It can't be! A whole week and still no word on the genetic sequencing results. I've got a hundred dollars on it being extraterrestrial but Jamison says it's from Baikal."

A week.

Freeman dislodged the scientist from the lab notebook and flipped back through.

The triplicate pages fanned a rainbow of white, yellow and pink. Notes, drawings, records of tissue samples for DNA sequencing... all carefully dated back a week, and further. There were other specimens, other notes, other experiments...

He slammed the notebook down and glared at the man.

"What do you want me to do about it? I can't make it go away, so I might as well study it!" He protested. "If you need to cross the pool, you can get through using the old diving hatch. There's a tranquilizer gun in the shark cage. It may work, it might not. We hadn't gotten that far yet."