Never Fear by William F. Nolan

Author:William F. Nolan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, anthology, apocalypse, never fear
Publisher: 13Thirty Books

THE SHADOW OF HEAVEN

Jason V Brock

There are more things in heaven and earth…

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

-William Shakespeare, HAMLET 1.5.166

(Hamlet to Horatio)

I.

“There—I think I see it, Commander.”

Ensign Adams’s breath disappeared overhead as he lowered his binoculars, pointing with a gloved hand at the unstable horizon through the ice-rimmed main windows of the ship. “Looks like something about ten kilometers out, sir.” Backlit by the windows, he turned to face Commander Merritt, the senior officer aboard the destroyer USS Higgins. Cloaked in his winter overcoat, the ensign’s brittle voice seemed distant in the cold dry air, his words nearly obliterated by the surging wind and unforgiving swells of the squall. Outside, colossal waves, some the size of buildings, slammed the Higgins—exploding across the ship’s icebound hull in frosty white plumes, adding to the inches-deep transparent slick of frozen seawater on the deck as she plunged further into one of the most hostile environs on the planet: the Southern Ocean. Gales such as this arose suddenly and with terrifying ferocity this close to Antarctica, reducing visibility to a few feet, churning the barren seascape into a foamy lather as it thrust icebergs the size of city blocks into the path of interlopers to this foreboding, isolated part of the world. At times, mighty whitecaps pounded on the destroyer with such titanic fury that they caused the vessel to flinch backward, bobbing like an oversized cork in the roiling black depths.

Merritt, his drawn face numb from the chill, carefully considered the ensign’s words, leaning against an interior deck rail to keep his balance as they rocked in the grip of the storm. Bringing his binoculars to his face, he scanned the dead gray interface between leaden sky and dark water beyond the icy windows Adams was motioning toward, noting the faint curtain of blue-green ripples from the southern lights, streaked by rose-colored lightning ribbons in the distance as freezing night collapsed around them. Even on the closed bridge, the saline-tinged atmosphere had gotten so frigid that the inside of his nose crystallized with each breath.

Our luck to be the closest in the vicinity of a distress call.

“Are you sure you saw a vessel? Maybe it was a ‘berg,'“ the Commanding Officer asked at last.

“It didn’t look like an iceberg…” Adams was scrutinizing the horizon as he spoke: “One moment, sir.”

As he worked against the storm’s fury, the commander was troubled that, in their attempts to discover the exact whereabouts of the missing research ship Terra Australis Incognita, they might have gone astray. The weary leader and his crew of just over two hundred were stuck now, committed to the search even as they struggled with the dreadful conditions approximately 300 miles off the coast of West Antarctica—well off-course from their originally assigned bearing based on Australis’s last communique. Merritt was further aggravated that they had been pulled into this mess just as the Higgins was returning for shore leave after a long, tedious mission: Subsonic underwater audio testing. The original search-and-rescue

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