Marc Cerasini: AVP: Alien vs. Predator

Fin tossed the hands-free on the desk and checked his watch. It was almost time. Fingers flying across the keyboard, he activated Big Bird’s onboard sensors. As the satellite began its assigned task of deep-mapping the Antarctic continent from orbit, Fin propped his feet up on the console, snatched a candy bar from the pile, and tore at the wrapper with his teeth. Munching chewy nougat and crunchy peanuts, Fin touched another button. A television screen near his foot came to life.

“Right on time,” said Fin with a sigh of satisfaction. On the monitor, the black-and-white credits for Universal's 1943 classic Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man began to roll.

Sixty-two minutes later—just as Bela Lugosi’s Frankenstein monster was about to square off against Lon Chaney, Jr.’s, Wolf Man in the ruins of Frankenstein’s castle—a blinking red light interrupted Fin’s much anticipated downtime. He bolted upright in his chair and switched off the television, to activate the main HDTV monitor above his console. A real-time digital image shot by Big Bird filled the big screen. Fin studied the flickering picture for nearly a minute, trying to comprehend what he was seeing.

“Oh my God,” Fin gasped at last, his legendary cool shattered. Then he whipped his head around and called over his shoulder, “Dr. Langer! Over here, quick. Take a look at this.”

“What is it?” the day supervisor demanded.

Fin’s gaze never left the screen as he replied, “It’s the data stream coming in from PS12.”

“Where is she now?”

Fin triple-checked the satellite’s navigational data before answering. “She’s right above Sector 14.”

Dr. Langer blinked. “But there isn’t anything in Sector 14.”

Fin pointed at the image on his monitor. “Well there is now.”

Over Fin Ullbeck’s shoulder, Dr. Langer saw a series of interlocking square shapes—perfectly symmetrical and, if PS12’s sensors were correct, very large. Too large to have formed naturally.

“What are we looking at?” Langer asked.

“Thermal imaging,” Fin replied immediately. “Some kind of geologic activity tripped the heat-sensitive sensors, which activated the cameras. Then Big Bird’s computers alerted me.”

Dr. Langer studied the image. The shapes mimicked precisely the look of man-made structures as seen from high earth orbit. But that, of course, was impossible. Nothing existed in Sector 14, unless you counted polar bears and penguins. So if those interlocking shapes really were structures, then they were built a long, long time ago—which made this the most important archaeological discovery of the twenty-first century, perhaps of all time.

“Wake them up,” said Dr. Langer.

Fin reached for the phone, then paused. “Who?”

“Everybody…”

As he spoke, Dr. Langer’s eyes never left the screen.

Climbers had two ways to ascend the Khumbu Ice-fall. The sensible route up the four-thousand-foot frozen waterfall was with Sherpa “icefall doctors.” These expert mountaineers would scout ahead, lay aluminum ladders across deep crevasses, plant anchors, and string rope so that climbers could proceed with some amount of caution—accompanied, of course, by their experienced Sherpa guides.

The reckless way to conquer the single most hazardous site on Everest was to go onto the ice alone, stake out a point at the base of the waterfall and start your ascent, placing your own anchors and stringing your own ropes as you went, hoping there weren’t any deep crevasses that needed bridging. In this type of climb, anyone who became trapped by an ice slide, buried by an avalanche, or swallowed by a crevasse that opened then closed without warning (all pretty much daily occurrences on Khumbu) would likely remain frozen in place until global warming thawed the entire planet.

This was how Alexa Woods chose to make her ascent.

After hours of hard climbing, the young woman’s lone slender form appeared as a mere speck on the vast, shimmering wall of ice. Buffeted by fifty-mile-an-hour winds, she now dangled less than a hundred feet from the icefall’s summit.

With a controlled swing of her leanly muscled arm, Lex buried the head of a Grivel Rambos ice axe into the frozen waterfall. As the blade bit into the ice, water trickled around its head, reminding Lex that underneath this icy shell, tons of fresh water poured off the mountain. Nearly half the fatalities on Everest occurred right here on the Khumbu’s shifting wall, but she did not let this thought linger or break the rhythm of her climb. For Lex, the universe and all its stressful potentialities had condensed themselves into a few economical motions—swing the axe, kick the crampon, pull on the rope and move up. Every move was calm, deliberate and careful.

Wrapped from head to toe in extreme-cold-weather gear, Lex sank the spiked crampons strapped to her boots into the icy wall. As a gush of fresh, cold water continued to bubble out of the hole her axe had gouged, Lex anchored her safety line with an ice screw and paused to rest. Risking frostbite, she pulled off the face mask that covered her delicate features and put her lips near the ice.

The bracing, near-frozen water refreshed and restored her. After drinking her fill, Lex stuffed her long, dark curls under her thermal mask and pulled it down over her face. Hanging on the rope with the safety harness pressing against her breasts, Lex listened to the constant wind and the steady sound of her own heartbeat.

Below her icy perch, the magnificent and brutal topography of this rugged ecosystem appeared uninhabitable—a trackless expanse of snow and ice broken only by black granite mountains so high their summits towered over the clouds themselves. Yet Lex knew this seemingly unlivable landscape was inhabited. In fact, it was the ancestral homeland of the Sherpas, the “People of the East” whose society and culture were as old as Tibet. Thousands of Sherpas dwelled in the forbidding Khumbu Valley, planting potatoes and herding yak in the shadow of the mountain they revered.

Before the coming of Westerners, the Sherpas had guided yak trains across the mountains along dangerous, shifting routes to trade wool and leather with the people of Tibet. Today their descendants routinely risked their lives leading groups of international tourists who flocked to Everest up the mountain—and rescuing those who ran into trouble.

A short, stocky people with Mongolian features, the Sherpas were the backbone of any mountaineering expedition attempted in the Himalayas. Called “the Gods of the Mountain,” their skill and stamina were legendary. And though they had constant contact with the modern world, the Sherpas retained their traditional religion and customs; Lex admired them for that.

Tibetan Buddhists of the Nyingmapa sect, Sherpas still grew or raised most of their food. Herds of yaks provided wool for clothing, leather for shoes, bone for toolmaking, dung for fuel and fertilizer, and milk, butter and cheese for consumption.

Most Sherpas who worked on the mountains spoke English, and Lex had shared many a meal of daal bhaat —rice and lentils—and a savory yak-and-potato stew called shyakpa with the bold icefall doctors and pathfinders, the bearers and guides, and the emergency rescuers who lived at the base of Everest. Open and giving people, the Sherpas were as generous with their trade secrets as they were with their heavily sugared tea, which they drank from Western thermos bottles, or the rice beer, called chang, that each Sherpa household brewed.

Much of the kinship Lex felt with the Sherpas was a result of their shared profession. Her work—providing survival training and guidance to scientific expeditions into the Antarctic wilderness—was the modern equivalent of the Sherpas’ age-old livelihood. And like the Sherpas, what Lex did for a living was risky. If she made a mistake, and even if she didn’t, in the extreme climate of the Himalayas, death was always hovering near, always a possibility.