“Don’t mind me,” she says, looking across at Bear, “I’m old school. I trust dead-reckoning over satellites.”
Bear seems to find that quaint, grinning at her as he speeds up, messing with her equations. He ensures the lights on the British snowcat are visible through the driving snow.
“You laugh,” she says. “But just you wait till a solar storm hits and we lose our bearings.”
Bear doesn’t bite. He sets the throttle and sits back, watching the old-style metrics in front of him.
The snowcat is more like a tractor than a car. There are only two pedals, both of which are mounted on huge steel bars protruding from the deck of the vehicle. The clutch and brake are clumsy, being designed to operate with thick boots. There’s no accelerator as such, just a throttle set below the steering wheel. It’s a thick bar moving along grooves in a steel plate, allowing the engine to be set at a precise, steady rate. Not only does it ensure consistent fuel consumption, it makes the calculations Jazz is doing realistic. There’s little to no variation in their speed as they trundle over the ice.
“How fast are we going?” Nick asks, seeing the tachometer along with dials showing oil pressure and engine temperature.
“At the moment, about fifteen miles an hour. Out on the plateau, we can hit twenty plus.”
“And that’s fast?” Nick asks.
Bear laughs. “Oh, for Antarctica, that’s like racing around in a Lamborghini. Twenty miles an hour might not sound like much, but you have to remember, we run day and night without stopping. If we could travel as the crow flies, we’d eat that up in three days. As it is, we’ll probably cover fifteen hundred miles in about four or five days.”
“Oh,” Nick replies.
Jazz says, “The only time we’ll stop is at the fuel dumps. You’re going to have to shit and piss in the bucket behind the backseat, but it’s not all bad. Bear smuggled some chocolate off the Te Kaha. Compliments of Eddie.”
“Wonderful.”
Lucille rides up a gentle slope. For the longest time, there’s no change in the view out the windshield. Snow flurries rush across from the side, blurring their vision. Their headlights are good for about twenty to thirty feet. Beyond that, the dim glow of navigation lights on the British vehicle are barely visible in the darkness.
“Do we have guns?” Nick asks out of curiosity.
“Yes,” Jazz replies. “Why do you ask?”
“I was just wondering if we might run into polar bears.”
“There are no polar bears in Antarctica.”
Dmitri says, “It’s too damn cold.”
“Oh. So why do you have a gun?” Nick asks. “Are there like killer penguins or something?”
Jazz laughs.
“Procedure,” she says. “Standard military deployment. Just in case.”
Nick can’t let that go.
“In case of what?”
“Nothing,” Jazz says, turning back toward him with her arm resting along the top of the bench seat. “Honest. There’s nothing out there in the darkness.”
Neither of the other men say anything which Nick finds strange. He’s expecting them to reinforce her position, but they don’t. There might not be anything in the darkness, but there is something beneath the ice.
“We’re going to be running shifts on driving and navigation,” she says, changing the subject. “Bear and Dmitri for eight hours. Then the two of us while they rest. Through the night, we’ll switch and run two four-hour shifts to keep everyone frosty.”
“Oh, I’m frosty all right,” Nick says. “Are you going to turn on the heater?”
“It’s on,” Bear says, looking over his shoulder and grinning at Nick.
Time becomes immaterial.
Nothing beyond the double-glazed glass seems to change.
Were it not for the rocking of the cabin, they could be sitting still on the ice with the engine idling, watching as the driving snow slides sideways through their spotlights. Minutes pass like hours as boredom sets in.
Without the sun, it feels like it’s always midnight, but the digital clock on the dash reads 16:07. It’s just after four in the afternoon. Fuck.
Jazz and Dmitri swap spots, clambering over the bench seat, but Nick finds the cold creeping in anytime he shifts his arms or legs. To keep warm, he stays still.
“Who knows a good ghost story?” Bear asks without taking his eyes off the driving snow.
“Ghost stories, really?” Jazz says, rolling her eyes.
“Sure,” Dmitri says. “I know one. It’s called the Former Soviet Republic.”
“What about you?” Bear asks, glancing over at Nick. “Have you ever seen a ghost?”
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Jazz says rather emphatically.
“No,” Nick says, ignoring Jazz. “No ghosts. The closest I’ve come is a skeleton.”
“A real one?” Bear asks, surprised.
“Unfortunately.”
“Come on then,” Bear says. “We’re all skeletons on the inside, right? We’re a bunch of bones brought to life by blood and sinew. Tell us about your skeleton.”
“Well,” Nick begins. “This is going to sound kind of crazy—like something from a Stephen King novel—but I swear, it’s true. Every word.”
No one speaks. For a moment, Nick loses himself in his memories. Instead of traversing a glacier in Antarctica, he’s back in South Carolina, where he ought to be.
“In high school, we had this skeleton hanging at the back of the biology lab. To me, skeletons are creepy. They’re us laid bare, stripped of everything that makes us human. Every day I went to class, there it was, giving me a greeting from beyond the grave.”
“And it was real?” Bear asks. “You know, not like a Halloween skeleton or something.”
“Oh, yeah. It was real,” Nick says. “Over time, I found it fascinating. Skeletons are different. They’re not a dead body. Well, they are and they aren’t. They don’t look like anyone. They don’t look like they were ever alive, but they were.
“After about three months, I cracked. I had to know who it was, where they were from, what they were like. It turns out, that collection of yellowing bones was a teenaged girl that died in a flood in Bangladesh about two decades earlier.
“I doubt she willingly donated her bones to science, but there she was, with a metal screw drilled into the top of her skull. She was doomed to hang from a steel frame. A metal bar bent back over her head and down beneath her dangling feet. The base of the frame was rickety as hell. It’s amazing she never fell over. It seems she was cursed to haunt our classes forever, destined never to graduate. I thought it was sad. Once she died, she could never grow old.
“Anyway, she disappeared for a few weeks. No one thought anything of it, but I missed her macabre reminder of our fleeting time on Earth. It turns out, she was on loan to another school. Lucy was cheating on us, or so we joked.
“So one day, I was called to the admin block with a friend and asked to take Lucy back to the lab, only that seemed cruel. We were teens. All three of us. It seemed wrong to have one of our own condemned to a lifeless existence, never experiencing friendship or joy, so we decided to take Lucy on a tour of our school.
“First stop was a classroom with a solid wooden door. We knocked between bursts of laughter. The teacher was in the middle of class, so she called out, Come in, but poor Lucy couldn’t open door handles with her feeble stick-like fingers and boney knuckles. We knocked again. Somewhat irate, the teacher yelled, I said, Come in! To which, we knocked even louder. Finally, the teacher threw open the door, yelling, Who is it? On seeing Lucy, she screamed. Within seconds, she was chuckling in delight and calling us rascals. I think Lucy would have approved. Certainly, the teens in the class roared with laughter.
“From there, Lucy wandered throughout the school, sticking her head around the corner of a door, peering through the glass, and tapping on windows with her zombie-like hands. Each time, both teachers and kids alike responded with
shock and then delight at this macabre interruption to their otherwise mundane day.
“Sure beats being locked in a cupboard, huh, Lucy?
“Eventually, with the hour almost up and the corridors about to be flooded with kids rushing to their next class, we returned to the biology department. For once, we knocked with genuine resolve. We were here. Our task was complete. The lab assistant opened the door and screamed, which confused me. She was the only one actually expecting Lucy on her metal stand.
“I don’t know what happened to Lucy after that. They started keeping her in a locked cupboard. I think someone must have complained about our whirlwind tour. Like me, they were probably freaked out by her empty, hollow eye sockets staring at them.
“We only ever saw Lucy on the odd occasion when they let her out for discussions about anatomy. As horrific as her death must have been, I’d like to think she would have enjoyed that one sunny afternoon traipsing around our high school thousands of miles from where she was born and raised.
“Whenever I saw her, I’d wonder about the life that once animated those bones. I would have liked to meet Lucy. The real Lucy. She always left me feeling numb at the realization we were both the same—that our only difference lay in time and chance. So yeah, that’s it. Not really a ghost story, but it’s all I’ve got.”
“Huh,” Bear says, lost in thought, staring out into the darkness.
Decisions
An eerie green glow breaks through the clouds like some alien monster lurking in the darkness. For now, the storm has abated. Antarctica is locked in a perpetual night. It’s a little after 11 AM, not that Nick cares. For him, not seeing the sun ever is utterly dispiriting. Jazz wasn’t kidding when she said Antarctica was worse than Mars.
“Don’t wander off,” Jazz says as Nick gets down from Lucille, dropping from the ice-covered steel tracks into the snow. It’s been three days, and he has to stretch, if only to remind his legs they still work. The wind curls around the snowcat, chilling his cheeks. Hell has frozen over. He tightens the hood wrapped around his face.
Bear drags a thick black hose over to Lucille. Like a snake, it winds its way from the barrels forming the fuel dump to the Day-Glo orange snowcat. Most of the barrels are buried in snow, forcing Bear to chip away at the ice to open their access ports. An aluminum frame rises from the middle of the plateau. Although it looks like a radio mast with steel wires holding it in place, it’s a flag pole, marking the location of the fuel reservoir. A tattered flag rattles in the gale descending upon them. The red, white and blue of the Union Jack are barely visible in the darkness.
Their escorts have already turned around, having pulled into the other side of the fuel dump as they prepare for their run back to Halley. Dmitri and Jazz talk with the British team. Headlights fight the darkness.
“What is that?” Nick asks, pointing at the sky.
Bear stands on Lucille’s tracks, watching as diesel is pumped into the tank.
“Aurora Australis. The southern lights. Beautiful, huh?”
“I guess.”
For Nick, the green glow is foreboding.
Although they haven’t had much to do with the British teams, seeing their headlights disappear into the oncoming storm is disconcerting. They’re heading in the opposite direction. From now on, the American team is on its own—just four of them pushing on into the antarctic winter. Bear fills up the empty diesel barrels on the back of Lucille, extending their range.
“Does it ever freeze?” Nick asks.
“The diesel?” Bear replies. “We’re using a class-four mix. There are so many additives in this stuff, it’s barely fuel.”
“Huh.”
Jazz is anxious to get going. She said the weather forecast provided by meteorologists at Halley wasn’t encouraging.
Within a few miles, the wind increases, buffeting the snowcat. The cabin rocks in the gale-force winds as the storm returns. Hail strikes the metal roof, making it difficult to think, let alone talk. On they drive, seeing nothing beyond the reach of their headlights. Snow flies sideways, whipping along the ground. There’s no horizon, just a blur where the darkness defeats the light.
“So, how does it work?” Nick asks, trying to take his mind off the feeling of being lost. “The jury.”
“Okay,” Jazz says, reaching into her rucksack and pulling out a bunch of papers. “Let’s go through a decision.”
She thumbs through the papers with her gloved fingers, struggling to separate them.
“All right, this was a decision made last month. It’s a ruling between the US and China on meta-materials.”
“What are those?”
“Ah,” she says, scanning the page. “They’re materials that have unusual properties. Things that aren’t found in nature.”
It sounds boring, but Nick doesn’t say that.
Jazz says, “The US wanted to release the structure and composition to the broader scientific community under the guise of a peer-reviewed research paper on emerging materials for use in space exploration.”
Now it sounds like psychobabble.
Jazz holds up a photo to show him what it looks like at an atomic level.
Nick says, “So, basically, it’s a waffle minus maple syrup.”
“Don’t joke about waffles,” Bear says.
“This is a microscopic image of the actual material recovered from the outer layer of the alien craft,” Jazz says, walking herself through the notes in front of her. “Ah, it’s a lightweight ceramic nano-truss capable of withstanding loads almost a million times its own weight without losing its shape. It absorbs energy rather than reflecting it, making it appear jet black.”
“Oh, okay,” Nick says. Finally, something about this deliberation sounds important. It’s still obscure, but clearly this material is impressive. “Why did the Chinese want to block its release?”
“Hang on,” Jazz says, scanning the content in front of her. “They argued it could be used to build supersonic kinetic weapons with the impact energy of a tactical nuke. So no explosives, just insane speeds. They suggested this kind of missile would be virtually invisible to radar.”
“Oh,” Nick says. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“Which way would you vote?” Jazz asks.
Fuck.
Nick doesn’t have enough information. The jury had to be presented with more than that. He has no idea what to say. Even here, within the confines of the snowcat, he’s aware of the expectation to side with his country. Is it treason to question intent? To want some assurance how this will be used? Jazz looks at him as though the answer is simple. He should just blurt it out, but Nick takes this seriously, after all, such a weapon could be used against a warship like the Te Kaha, destroying it in the blink of an eye. What would happen if such a device slammed into a building in downtown New York?
“There must be more arguments,” Nick says, trying to buy himself some time. He’s acutely aware Dmitri is watching him with curiosity. It seems Jazz wants unquestioning loyalty while Dmitri is looking for something else—a spine. As for Nick, his motivation is simple. It’s not that he’s struggling with indecision. He doesn’t want to be a fuck-up. He wants to reclaim all that was lost to his arrogance. Sandra was right to walk out on him. He hit her. Oh, he claimed it was just a push, but that wasn’t true. The crazy thing was, even in the heat of the moment as she stood there by the door ready to leave, she never called him out on that lie.
Jazz stares at him, narrowing her eyes.
“They must have debated this,” Nick says, pleading for more information. “I mean, we’re down here to learn from this thing, right? So we’ve learned about a new kind of wonder material. There must be lots of applications. I mean, it’s swords and plowshares, right? It’s all a question of how we use this material. It could be used to make planes more lightweight, saving fuel.”
Jazz nods. She likes his logic, but Nick’s not fooled. She likes it because it supports the US position.
“And there mus
t be more to the Chinese argument,” he says. “Why wouldn’t they want this material?”
Jazz skims through a few pages, saying, “Hmmm. This material only forms under extreme temperatures and pressures. There are only three experimental labs capable of recreating it.”
“All of them in the US?” Nick asks.
“Yes.”
“Okay, so they’re afraid of the US gaining a strategic advantage over them.”
“I guess.”
“Well,” he says. “They’re right. We would use it to make bombs. I mean, we’ve got the biggest military in the world. We love our bombs—especially the expensive ones that make people rich.”
“You’re not helping the argument,” she says.
“I’d vote, no,” Nick says.
There’s silence.
Jazz glares at him, gritting her teeth.
“What was the final decision?” he asks.
Begrudgingly, Jazz says, “It passed with an injunction limiting the use to civilian projects for a period of 18 months.”
Nick nods. That makes sense as a compromise. It’s only now he realizes he’s being called on to make decisions that will shape the future of life on Earth. Nick had assumed this was about First Contact, but it’s not. Vincennes was built to exploit alien technology. To him, the real question is, who were these aliens? Where did they come from? Where have they gone? Are they still out there? How can we contact them? But it seems human progress is more important than contact.
Bear says, “Hey, ah. Boss lady.”
“What?” Jazz snaps, still irritated by Nick’s decision. She does not look impressed at being interrupted. No doubt she wants to dissect Nick’s response and school him on the appropriate US-centric perspective. Ordinarily, Nick would be the first to yell, USA. USA! But he feels conflicted by the insistence on loyalty. Nick’s not good at much, but the one thing he excels at is in being stubborn.
Perhaps if Jazz hadn’t demanded loyalty of him, he’d have been more obliging. He would have probably walked into that trap without a thought, but being pushed provoked pushback. This particular demon has always been part of his personality. Oh, he tries to be as rational and logical as the next guy, but deep down, Nick knows he’s an emotional pinball. What logic was there in taking out his frustrations on Sandra? Hell, it was easy to justify the argument as her fault, but she was sick of his self-centered bullshit. If only she’d sucked it up and let him have his way. Yeah, #AITA. If he’d posted on Reddit, asking, ‘Am I the Asshole?’ thousands of people would have taken delight in setting him straight with a definite ‘Yes.’
Jury Duty (First Contact) Page 11