The Spawning Read Online Free PDF Page B

Coyle had asked him why he put up with it. Why he let those people treat him like dirt. And Special Ed told him, “I’d rather they took it out on me than on each other.”
    Horn was part of the Casualty Team because he was a trained medic. If it hadn’t been for that, Special Ed would have cut his strings a long time ago. But with a guy like Special Ed, necessity and proficiency as Mass Casualty Team leader and putting on a fine productive company face were always far more important than trifling things like pride, dignity, or self-respect.
    â€œHey, Nicky,” Horn said. “I heard somewhere that the NSF buried all those people from Kharkov right in the ice. That last year, they chopped ‘em out and took ‘em to Colony for dissection or something. You hear that?”
    Coyle smiled.
    Special Ed just shook his head. The NSF would not be involved in such things. To him, The Program was a virgin in a pristine white confirmation dress with its legs duly crossed. To guys like Horn it was a bagged-out five-dollar whore.
    Coyle kept out of it.
    He had opinions on Colony Station like everyone else but he wasn’t going to wade in the muddy waters of conspiracy like Locke and his UFO followers. But that didn’t mean he didn’t think there was something damn odd about Colony. It was a restricted area with perimeter guards and everything. And this in Antarctica of all places like maybe it was Area 51 or something and they had to keep people away.
    What people?
    This was Antarctica for chrissake.
    It was weird. Coyle had never been there and he supposed very few actually had. But everyone claimed to know all about it. Colony had only existed for the past two years. Like Clime, which had only been around for three, it was one of the newest American installations. But it was not like Clime. Though it was never admitted publicly, Colony was a military operation with armed guards and motion detectors and this at the bottom of the world. Go figure.
    All Coyle knew for sure was that there was a posting on the board at Clime that forbid travel to or anywhere near Colony. And that was not only strange, it plain smelled bad.
    And now, apparently, Colony had crashed a chopper.
    Coyle didn’t know what they were getting into here. At places like Clime, there were lots of little teams that had been thrown together, trained to deal with everything from fires to fuel spills to outbreaks of contagious diseases. Any problem that could conceivably occur at a remote outpost. The Mass Casualty Team was trained to deal with anything that involved bodies or wounded. That could be anything from a plane crash to a fire to a terrorist attack. Most of the drills were pretty ridiculous and it had been hard to take them seriously, especially with Hopper running around blowing his whistle like a track coach.
    No one seemed to know who came up with the scenarios, but they were something, all right: the tanks at the Fuel Depot rupturing, sending millions of gallons of diesel fuel and hi-test rushing at the station itself; the entire base going up in flames as a result of somebody cooking meth in their rooms; and, Coyle’s favorite, the NBC drills where nuclear, biological, or chemical agents had been set loose at the station. This gave everyone a chance to don their Hazmat suits for decon operations. The suits were big and white and puffy, pumped full of air, and very hard to move around in with any grace. Your field of vision was strictly limited. There was nothing funnier than seeing eighteen or twenty people rushing around the compound tripping and bumping into each other, getting angry and pissed-off while Hopper blew his whistle, the lot of them looking like heavily-swaddled toddlers that had just learned to walk or marshmallow-shaped munchkins with absolutely no sense of balance.
    Priceless.
    But it was all part of the modern Antarctic experience and you had to love it.
    Coyle had twelve years Ice-Time and