Jury Duty (First Contact)

by Peter Cawdron

  Bear asks Jazz, “You’re still keeping your dead-reckoning up to date, right?”

  Jazz offers a pensive, “Yes. Why?”

  Nick is in a daze. He can hear what the others are saying, but his mind is still unraveling at the implications of being part of the jury.

  Nick is a red-blooded American. Nothing stirs his soul more than 80,000 fans standing to sing the Star-Spangled Banner before a game of football, and yet to be loyal to America feels like a betrayal of humanity. Should he put the US ahead of everyone else? For all the hype, being drawn into discussions that potentially impact every single person on the face of the planet is unnerving. Politics is bluff and bluster. It’s all a bit of fun and games until someone gets bombed. Cheerleading is fine when it’s your side claiming divine providence, but when everyone’s equally invested and passionate, the limits become obvious. Patriotism is shortsighted and in need of a new pair of prescription glasses.

  What difference is there between Americans and the Chinese? Or the Russians? They’re all equally blind to the folly of their own unquestioning loyalty to country over species. But when billions of lives are at stake, it’s fair to say there’s a need for a little sobriety. As a drunk, Nick understands this implicitly. Is that it? Are all nations drunk on their own ego? Are they blind to their own humanity?

  Nick is glad Bear interrupted Jazz.

  “GPS is playing up. I’m seeing our position shifting sideways, then back again. Dropping in and out. The damn thing is coming back with different altitudes. Crazy shit.”

  Jazz asks, “Solar storm?”

  Dmitri asks, “Can we be hit with a solar storm when we can’t even see the Sun?”

  “Those auroras,” Jazz says. “There’s plenty of activity out there that can fuck things up down here.”

  “The radio’s gone quiet,” Bear says as the snow howls past the headlights. “I can’t even raise the Brits. We’re on our own.”

  Jazz pulls out her map and flips it over, grabbing her compass and pencil.

  “Okay, we’re still on the same heading as we were at 14:00, right? Any change in speed?”

  “Hard to say,” Bear replies. “I’ve set the throttle at 1,500 RPMs, but our speed over the ground will change depending on the incline. On average, we’re hitting 18 to 20 miles an hour.”

  Jazz says, “I was within a hundred yards of the fuel depot, so I’m happy with my calculations, but any change in bearing or speed has to be noted and time-stamped.”

  “Understood,” Bear says, looking at the map with her.

  Jazz is distracted.

  She double-checks her calculations, checks her compass, and talks with Bear about the effect of wind shear on their heading. Given visibility is down to fifteen feet, Nick hopes Jazz is correct. There’s an awful lot of darkness out there. If there are any features beyond the windswept icy plain, Nick hasn’t seen them. He tries not to think about the possibility of missing Vincennes in the dark, or a mechanical failure causing them to fall short.

  Jazz works the radio, checking different channels and frequencies. Nothing. For the next few hours, she tries at regular intervals. Static is all they hear in reply.

  The wind picks up, buffeting the cabin, raging against their intrusion into the eternal night of an antarctic winter. Lucille is flawless. Despite the cold, she continues trundling on over the dark horizon.

  Vostok

  Two days trundle by without any radio contact. The world beyond Antarctica could have been vaporized and they wouldn’t know it. The storm has become worse, something Nick didn’t think was possible. The snow and ice howling past the headlights creates a white blur. It’s cold in the cab of the snowcat. Damn cold. No one talks much. The focus is on double and triple-checking their course.

  Bear has the makings of a beard.

  Nick scratches at the fuzz on his cheeks and neck, longing for the opportunity to shave again.

  Jazz has always kept her hair immaculate, but living in a snowcat makes that impossible. Like the others, she gets itchy, ruffling her hair and scratching at her scalp. No one says anything, but on those few occasions she pulls down the hood on her jacket her hair is an utter mess, sticking out on odd angles.

  Jazz has drilled Nick on the decision-making process within the base. While she sleeps, Nick asks Dmitri, “Why is she so strict?”

  “Father won’t tolerate interference with jurors.”

  “Father?”

  Bear leans over the seat, talking a little too loud for Nick’s liking and almost waking Jazz.

  “Artificial Intelligence,” he says. “Dumb as dog shit, but it runs everything.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No one trusts anyone down there,” Dmitri says, “So everyone trusts Father. His code base and machine-learning algorithm are shared by all nations at Vincennes.”

  Bear says, “And he gets cranky if anyone corners a juror. Jazz is coaching you now so she won’t need to later.”

  “Not that she won’t try,” Dmitri says.

  “Not that you won’t try,” Bear says, looking over his shoulder at the burly Russian.

  “Anyone thirsty?” Dmitri asks, shifting the subject. No one answers.

  Water has to be heated before they can drink it, but not to the point of boiling as that wastes electricity. Their instant coffee is tepid. Plain water tastes strangely metallic.

  “Hungry?” Dmitri asks, fetching a can from the storage area. Nick never wants to see another goddamn can of sardines as long as he lives. Dmitri eats the stuff like it was candy.

  Jazz stirs. Nick’s not entirely sure she wasn’t listening in.

  “What did I miss?”

  “A whole lot of nothing,” Bear says as snow and ice whip past the windows. Out beyond the headlights, there’s nothing but darkness.

  “Have you told Nick about your plans for next season?” Dmitri asks.

  “What? No?”

  Jazz looks awkward. She shifts in her seat. She’s not happy with Dmitri bringing this up.

  “Come on,” Bear says. “Spill the beans. Hell, I’d talk about anything right now just to pass the time.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Jazz replies, shutting down the conversation.

  “What is?” Nick asks.

  “My personal life.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’d rather keep it out of this,” Jazz says as though Nick was the one that brought it up.

  “She’s getting married,” Bear says.

  Jazz hits him across his chest, swatting him with her outstretched arm.

  Bear laughs, letting out a fake, “Ouch!”

  “It is cause for celebration,” Dmitri says.

  “You really are bored,” Jazz says. “Wedding plans are nothing if not painful.”

  “She’s getting married in London,” Dmitri says.

  “Ontario?” Nick asks.

  “United Kingdom,” Bear says.

  Jazz asks, “Why don’t you just get on the radio and let everyone know?”

  Bear plays along, grabbing the radio microphone and broadcasting, “Hey, Vincennes. Jazz is getting married. Please put some champagne on ice for us. Over.”

  There’s no reply. Boredom has turned this into a game for Bear and Dmitri. The two men laugh. Even Jazz plays along.

  “No invite for you.”

  “Couldn’t afford the flights,” Bear replies.

  Nick says, “Getting married in the middle of a multi-year expedition to explore an alien spaceship is…”

  “Is what?” Jazz asks, challenging him.

  “I dunno?” Nick replies, trying not to offend her. “It’s unusual, right? I mean, this whole damn thing is unusual.”

  Bear grins. “Love doesn’t take a holiday.”

  “I will shoot you,” Jazz says, leaning over the seat and punching him playfully on the arm.

  Dmitri laughs.

  “All right. All right,” she says. “I give up. Yes, I’m marrying Captain Jon Danes of the British Expedi
tion. There. Are you happy now?”

  “At Halley?” Nick asks.

  “He was stationed at Vincennes,” Jazz replies. “He’s spending the winter back in Europe, although it’s already summer up there.”

  Bear has a smirk on his face. He sings, “Summer loving—”

  Jazz pushes his shoulder, rocking him to one side. They both laugh.

  Dmitri says, “Our little girl is all grown up.”

  “Don’t,” Jazz says, swinging around and pointing her finger at him, but Dmitri just laughs. It’s the release of tension. Trundling across an endless frozen plateau in the middle of winter is enough to drive anyone mad. Nothing changes. A slight bump or a rise in the ice is cause for comment. Normally, it’s hours of dead flat ice. They could be going in circles or about to drive off the edge of a cliff. Nick wouldn’t know.

  The banter dies when Bear starts talking about spikes in the electrical supply system and the heating pump on the engine block.

  Hours pass like decades.

  The GPS flickers in and out, giving results that broadly agree with the calculations Jazz has been maintaining. At times, it says they’re hundreds of meters below the ice or somewhere high in the clouds, which doesn’t lend much credence to their actual location in terms of latitude and longitude. Bear says, even with the storm, their location should be good to within a few kilometers.

  “We’re getting close,” Jazz says, scratching yet another equation into the margin on her map with the grease pencil.

  For the past few hours, they’ve been counting down from a hundred kilometers. Now, Nick is genuinely excited. He cannot wait to crawl up onto a bunkbed and get some decent sleep. Closing his eyes at that moment is going to be bliss.

  Bear grabs the radio handset. “Vincennes, this is US Expedition 104. Come in, over.”

  There’s no reply.

  Nick asks, “What if we drive right past them in the darkness?”

  “We’re not driving past them,” Jazz insists, but how does she know?

  “Vincennes. US Expedition 104,” Bear says into the radio handset. “Are you reading me? Over.”

  Nothing.

  Bear asks, “What’s the plan, boss?”

  “Okay, assuming the agreement between dead-reckoning and GPS has a margin of error of less than ten kilometers, then we’re close. If we can’t raise them, we’ll stop and conduct a grid sweep. We’ll circle at five hundred meters, winding back and forth over ten clicks until we find them.”

  “Comb the snow?” Bear says. “Okay. That’ll work.”

  “How are we for fuel?” Dmitri asks.

  Bear checks a gauge. “At the moment, we’re good for roughly four hundred kilometers. At the moment, we could make the Russian base at Vostok.”

  “Good. Good.”

  “We could still end up missing Vincennes in the darkness,” Nick says, leaning over the bench seat and pointing at the map. “I mean, we’re assuming it’s in this area, but we could be further east than we think. We could end up searching nothing but ice.”

  “We could,” Jazz says, agreeing with him. “And if that happens, we shift our search area over here.”

  “We can’t search forever,” Bear says, “We’re going to burn through a helluva lot of fuel going nowhere while conducting our search, especially when we start pushing into that headwind. If we’re wrong in our initial assumptions and there’s nothing in the first search area, we’ll have burned through two hundred clicks. That will put Vostok out of reach. After a second search grid, we’ll be running on fumes. We won’t have enough for a third.”

  Jazz says what they’re all thinking.

  “Fuck.”

  Bear continues with, “Then there’s the difficulty of U-turns in our dead-reckoning. Without visual points of reference, we could end up with a lopsided pattern. What we think of as nice and uniform and square could be a kindergarten drawing with crayon going everywhere.”

  Bear leans on the steering wheel.

  “We have no choice,” Dmitri says. “Without radio contact, we have to do something. It only makes sense to search the area.”

  “Yeah, but he’s right,” Jazz says, surprising Nick by pointing at him. It seems she needed a moment to collect her thoughts as she goes on to say, “We could miss Vincennes in the dark. A helluva lot of people have died out here because they convinced themselves they were right about their location when they were wrong—dead wrong.”

  She slams her gloved hand on the dash. “Goddamn it!”

  Bear says, “Yeah, the base only spans a few hundred yards. We can see less than fifteen yards in this storm. Even with a good search pattern, we could sail right past them and not even know it.”

  “There’s another problem,” Nick says.

  “What?” Dmitri asks.

  “Doesn’t the lack of a response bother anyone? I mean, I get that we couldn’t talk to them way back by the fuel dump, but now we’re right on top of them, surely a radio signal can get through. If we’re only a few miles away, they should be able to hear us, right?”

  Bear looks at Jazz. Dmitri shakes his head.

  Reluctantly, Jazz says, “Maybe the storm has slowed us more than I thought. We could be going into a search pattern too early.”

  Bear picks up the radio again.

  “Vincennes, this is US 104 Lucille. We are in need of navigational assistance. We sure could do with an escort for the last few clicks. Come in, over.”

  Nothing.

  “Vincennes, Lucille US 104. Sound off. Over.”

  “Let’s try Vostok,” Dmitri says. “They’re nearby.”

  Nearby is a relative term in Antarctica. Vostok is hundreds of kilometers from Vincennes. Jazz nods. Dmitri reaches over the back of the bench seat and holds out his hand for the microphone. Bear hands it to him. Dmitri raises the mic to his lips and speaks clearly, saying, “Станция Восток. Станция Восток. Это американская экспедиция № 104. Проверка связи. Над.”

  He releases the transmit key and listens. His finger is poised, ready to respond if there’s a reply. Nothing.

  “Станция Восток. Американец 104. Заходи.”

  Through the crackle of static, a few words drift across the radio waves in Russian.

  “…Американец… Восток… Слабый… Гроза.”

  “What are they saying?” Jazz asks.

  “Ah, they’re saying our signal is weak because of the storm.”

  “But they’re receiving us,” she says. “At a distance of roughly four hundred clicks.”

  “Yes.”

  Outside, nothing changes. Lucille continues on over the frozen plateau. Snow and ice whip past the headlights. The diesel engine hums. The cabin rocks. As always, the darkness is impenetrable.

  Jazz draws a line from their position to Vostok Station, measuring the distance. She writes on the map, working through a series of calculations, taking into account wind speed, fuel consumption, time and distance. No one speaks. Finally, she breaks the impasse.

  She sighs. “Bear, adjust your heading by twenty-two degrees north by northwest. Reduce speed to fifteen kilometers an hour. We’re going to want to conserve what fuel we have in case we need to negotiate any ravines.”

  “Understood.”

  “Dmitri, tell Vostok we’re lost. We cannot find Vincennes and are getting no reply over the radio. We are declaring an emergency and heading for Vostok. We have limited navigation and are going to need help finding them.”

  Dmitri is sullen. He nods reluctantly, lifting the microphone and speaking in Russian.

  “Станция Восток, говорит американская экспедиция 104. Мы объявляем чрезвычайную ситуацию. Повторяю, черзвычайная ситуация. Мы не нашли Валькирию. Мы не можем связаться с Валькирией. Наши навигационные возможн
ости ограничены. Восток, мы идём в вашем направлении. Просим помощи. Приём.”

  The radio crackles in reply with, “…Американ...ериканская экс… Восток…”

  The three of them watch Dmitri with intense curiosity, observing the slightest twitch on his face. Whether it’s the rise of his lips, the tightening of his jaw, or the way his eyebrows narrow, they’re all desperate to understand what’s being said.

  “Восток, приём, как слышите? Мы объявляем чрезвычайную ситуацию. Идём в вашем направлении.”

  Again, the silence within the cabin is painful as they wait for a reply only one of them understands.

  “…Валькирия… часов… ждите…”

  “What is it?” Jazz asks.

  “Ah, I’m not sure how much of what I’m saying is getting through to them. We might have to wait until we get closer.”

  “What did they say?” Bear asks.

  “The storm. It’s bad,” Dmitri says. “I’m getting words without context. Words that don’t make sense. I think they’re saying stand by. Maybe they’re in touch with Vincennes.”

  “Did they say that?” Jazz asks.

  “I don’t know,” Dmitri says. “They spoke about Vincennes, but I can’t make out all of their words.”

  “Jesus,” Jazz says, burying her head in her hands. “I didn’t want this. I did not fucking want this.”

  She looks up, taking a deep breath and steeling herself as she addresses Nick. “We can’t fuck around out here. As much as I’d like to stop and search for Vincennes. We can’t. If we miss them and run out of fuel before reaching Vostok, we’re dead.”