Z-Minus Box Set 2

by Perrin Briar

  But Dr. Scott didn’t hurry. His upbringing wouldn’t allow it. He’d slowly stood, buttoned up his jacket, turned, and walked calmly toward the door.

  He could recall the sight of his father in his bed to this very day. The bed wasn’t overly large, but it seemed to swamp him now that he was all skin and bone. His father had never been a large man, but there was a substance to him that everyone always commented on, as if he were cut from different cloth. No one said that anymore.

  His father lay in bed, surrounded by the family lawyers and usual hangers-on. He signed something, his skeletal hand barely able to lift the pen, jittering and shaking. He left a long strained line across the page after his signature.

  Embarrassed to be witnessing his father’s weakness, the hangers-on bowed and dismissed themselves, scuttling out of the room, eying the young Dr. Scott as they passed, no doubt hoping for a sign of early preferential treatment from the new king of the Scott empire.

  The room, though cavernous, seemed very small and intimate then. Dr. Scott was alone with his father. He dreaded telling him what he really wanted to do, and decided against it. Why upset the old man on his deathbed? And that was when Dr. Scott knew he would never be able to disappoint his family. Duty was to be his life, as it had been his father’s.

  But then his father surprised him.

  “Come closer,” he said between gasping breaths. “Closer.”

  The young Dr. Scott obliged.

  “You love science,” his father said.

  Young Dr. Scott gibbered, eyes wide. Had his secret been as easy to spot as his father’s?

  “Don’t… Don’t deny it,” his father said. “Especially to yourself.”

  He coughed then, so hard and hacking that the young Dr. Scott thought he might not recover. But he did.

  “Don’t waste your life doing something you don’t want to do,” his father said. “Do something you love. It will love you in return for a lifetime. Don’t live without love. Life is too long, and love too short-lived. Be the man you want to be, not what the family wants. I always wished I had been born in a later time, now, like you, but I know now that was never the problem. Great men and women are born at all times. You must have courage and do what you know you should. Be great.”

  His father’s hand dropped. It was light and without power. His eyes rolled back, his head lolled to one side, and his body went slack. And that was it. One moment there was life in his eyes, the next they were empty. That was how fast life could move from one state to another.

  “Father?” the young Dr. Scott had said. “Father?”

  Dr. Scott had cried. He had not been close to his father, and doubted he would have been much upset if it hadn’t been for those final few words. They’d come from a man who regretted a great deal. Somehow they’d made up for all the times he hadn’t been present on birthdays and holidays, had made up for a fatherless childhood, because now Dr. Scott had his father’s permission to be and do whatever he wanted. He was free from bondage. Duty was now an excuse he could not call upon.

  The rest of the family had been admitted into the room. They cried dutifully, gripping their father’s cold hands, burying their faces in the bedspread. They weren’t really upset, he was sure. The upper classes were all good actors.

  The first thing Dr. Scott did was call his university and tell them he wanted to change his major to science. It was a problem, the school said, because all the classes were full. Dr. Scott used the family money by himself for the very first time that day. He told them to offer to any student currently enrolled on the biology course to change to business. In return, he would pay all their course fees, and guarantee a good job in the family business upon graduation.

  He had a place on the biology course within an hour.

  It turned out the boy he’d exchanged places with was a whizz with numbers. Dr. Scott found not only a new friend, but his future CEO. He was young and untested, but Dr. Scott could see the passion he felt for science reflected in the young man’s eyes for business.

  The family business had never done so well. Why? Because Dr. Scott knew what the secret of good business was, just as he knew what the secret to good science was: passion. Not duty or obligation, but the unwavering pursuit of perfection.

  True passion was a rare commodity, perhaps the rarest. And yet he met people every day with it, whether they were accountants, scientists, bankers, actors or singers. It didn’t matter what the field was. With enough passion and good luck, anyone had the potential to be and do anything. He firmly believed that, because it was what he had achieved.

  Suddenly he was a man at school with no barriers and nothing to hold him back. He dated many women, knowing they would never be the ones he would get to marry. There were some family traditions that weren’t so easily broken, and he’d pushed his luck choosing an alternative major at university as it was.

  Expectation. It was what stifled the dreams of many. Duty, its ugly twin. He was going to marry a woman as befitted his birth and blood. In the twentieth century, he was betrothed. But he didn’t really care. In his working life he was a superhero. It was the life he lived at home that was his boring secret identity.

  He’d had two children – at his wife Margaret’s behest. It wasn’t that Dr. Scott didn’t want kids – he did – and it wasn’t that he didn’t like sex – he in fact loved it – but he didn’t want either of those things with his wife. She was not an attractive woman. Well-born and intelligent, yes, but not his type at all, and abysmal in the sack. He supposed it was partially his fault. If he didn’t educate her, no one would. But how could you educate someone you felt nothing for?

  Dr. Scott was a sex maniac when he wasn’t working or studying. He loved nothing more than a good compatible woman to take out his needs and desires on. He’d found that many women liked to be ‘used’ in bed. They liked the hunger a man felt for them. It brought out the same carnal urges in them too, and that made for dynamic sex.

  Dr. Scott was a man of simple pleasures, and once he was done with the woman, and she with him, she left. It was better for them both this way. He no longer needed her, and she no longer needed him. He could then get back to what was important to him: his work. But finding good women specific to his needs wasn’t easy.

  He used to pay for sex, but there was something somehow unsatisfying knowing the woman may have had sex multiple times that day already, and her groans were prone to be mechanical and fake. He never knew if they were genuine or not, but the fact it was open-ended was something Dr. Scott loathed. He liked answers to be certain, and with these women, they were not. He believed in authenticity. And so, he attracted less-experienced women to him. He groomed them, tested them, to see how excited they felt at his touch.

  He had not been faithful to Margaret. He’d have been surprised if she had been faithful to him. If she had, she was a fool. Love and sex were something to enjoy, as was discovery. He wouldn’t have given them up for anything. He was certain Margaret knew about his other women, but he didn’t care.

  He hated returning home. It was like returning to the office after a long eventful holiday. The only person in his family worth speaking to was Susan, his daughter, who shared his interest in science. Most days he stared at the newspaper, going over all the memories he’d had on his most recent adventure.

  And what adventures they were. He traveled the world making great discoveries. He was the envy of the science world. But now it was coming to an end.

  He’d lived as his father had told him – a life full of passion and no wasted time. What a crime it was that so many people wasted so much time, wasted their lives, when every day should have been cherished, when every moment should have been lived to its extremes. But people did live to one extreme, he supposed. Extreme boredom.

  It was what he did while excavating that really defined him. He’d lived enough for two lifetimes – one for himself, the other for his father. Any time he was afraid in his working life, he recalled the words of his fa
ther, and it was all he needed to pick up his courage and force himself to do whatever he was afraid of.

  He’d gotten into a few close calls and scrapes, but that was what life was. If you weren’t within a breath of death at all times, how did you know you were still alive? That was where the most interesting parts of life resided; in those moments where life and death merged. That was where he resided, where he belonged. He’d gotten dengue fever in the Amazon jungle, had slid down the side of Everest due to altitude sickness. But he’d lived through it all. But stray too close to a razor’s edge and one day you’ll get cut.

  Now he faced his most dangerous mission yet, and he was not going to survive it. Not a chance. In fact, he intended not to.

  And that was what he clung to now, what his final memories were, of his sexual conquests, not his friends or family or regret over things he had or hadn’t done over the years. He’d almost died a dozen times, and now it was time to finally bite the bullet.

  He’d had a good life. He’d done what he wanted to do, and achieved a great deal. Did he want to die now? Of course not. Only a fool would want that. There was still a great deal he wanted to achieve. This was the end, and it was fine with him.

  Dr. Scott looked up at the awards and accolades he’d amassed over the course of a long career, a distinguished career. His was one they wrote about in all the textbooks, his name in italics, phrases he’d coined in capitals with references to his various articles in the appendixes.

  He picked up an envelope from the tabletop and leaned it against the photos of the team members he’d worked with in the past. All with beaming, happy smiley faces. Each had gone on to do their own groundbreaking research, most of it funded by Dr. Scott himself. Nothing bred success like success. And Dr. Scott liked nothing more than success being attributed to him. But this time success had bitten him and gotten its pound of flesh.

  Dr. Scott looked out of his small window at the whiteness of the world outside. The Antarctic was a forbidding place, somewhere not everyone could cope with. It required someone of a hardy disposition, who could live without the conveniences of a modern life. But it also meant he could work as closely with the ice as was possible. It meant getting his hands on the ice blocks free of contamination, direct. It was a position many thousands of scientists wanted, but he alone had won.

  He’d spent a great deal of time cooped up in his little room, bashing at the keyboard and writing journal entries and research results. His home and family were in New York, but this was where he really belonged. The people who came and went – who seemed to get younger every year – or perhaps it was just him getting older – were his friends, and those who he worked with most often became like family to him. Family he chose for himself.

  He coughed, a wheezing thing that racked his whole body. Something splattered into his hand. He didn’t look at it. He knew what would be in his palm. He wiped his hand on a tissue, leaving a globule mass of red and thick yellow jelly. He didn’t need to be a world-class scientist to know that wasn’t healthy.

  Dr. Scott gave his favorite figurines to his current team members. Kate. Daniel. Jeff. Lindsey. Ian. Patrick. Carl. He’d given a figurine to everyone he could recall. He had one left, his most recent addition. He paused before penning the name. He smiled through his shark-like teeth. ‘Dr. Hamish Foster’. He attached the tag.

  He looked at each of them sporting their little collar labels. Matching uniforms, like gold medalists in the Olympics. So this is what a man’s life comes down to. A few childish toys. But given the chance, would he have changed anything about his career? No. His lifestyle and wealth afforded him the kind of life very few people could enjoy. And he did enjoy it. And he appreciated it. It made him sad it now had to end.

  He’d lived the majority of his life out of suitcases. It’d taught him the value of a minimalist life, something his wife Margaret could never understand. It meant all he had to give was his set of figurines. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had. Everything else in his life had been taken care of. His wealth had been calculated and divided up, to be handed out to various family members. No one gave a damn about his little figurines. But his real family did. They understood.

  The only part of his will he took any interest in were the large donations to various science foundations across the world, projects he believed in and thought would make a difference to the human project.

  Would Margaret like the little figurine he’d left her? Almost certainly not. If it wasn’t encrusted with jewels, she wasn’t interested. She was incapable of seeing past the superficial, caring only what she could show her friends. Like the golden pendant he’d bought her for their twentieth anniversary. If she’d known he’d bought it from a flea market he doubted she would have worn it.

  Dr. Scott covered his mouth and coughed. It was a wet, hacking thing. He spat into the tissue and tucked it in his pocket.

  Now, he was a shadow of his former self, and so were his discoveries. You expected to lose the strength of youth, they warned you about it, but no one warned about the loss of respectability. That had been the greatest blow to a man such as Dr. Scott.

  Until today.

  His team had been drilling into the ice to uncover the ice cores and the secrets they held, and the story that hadn’t been told for over seven million years. That’s when they came across it, packed between two ice layers like the fish in a monger’s window.

  It promised to usher in a new era of Dr. Scott’s career, to the heights he hadn’t had since his heyday a decade earlier. The fossil was perfectly preserved, its jutting jaws perfect, its fins beautiful. He couldn’t have wished for a better specimen.

  But it contained a secret, dark and sinister, that would wreak havoc upon the human race if untended. Dr. Scott felt a fresh wave of shivers, but these he had experienced before. The excitement of a question unanswered.

  He turned to the row of drawers behind him and pulled the specimen out of its icy prison. It’d frozen to the container. Dr. Scott caught the tray before it fell to the floor. He gripped the tray and pulled the specimen out.

  It was an ugly thing, a fish frozen during the Pliocene era. Its beauty was in its perfect preservation. Its flat stubby teeth would have been used to graze on underwater plant life, picking and chewing on the shoots – a world away from what the Antarctic was now. There was no way a creature such as this could survive in these waters today. Its ancestors would have either evolved to cope with their surroundings or moved on to warmer climes where green underwater vegetation still grew. Or they perished, unable to adapt quickly enough.

  He looked at the dead eyes and said what he’d never said to any discovery he’d made before:

  “I wish I’d never found you.”

  Carl, one of his divers, had enough resin to make a new bubblehead figurine for him. He was a talented artist, and Dr. Scott had employed him largely because of this skill. The figurine featured a fish-like dolphin head, and stood up on its flippers. It was an excellent piece of work and fit in with the others. His final discovery. He smiled at the recognition he would receive, and then remembered he would be receiving it posthumously.

  Dr. Scott approached the door, cast an eye over his office, his inner sanctum, and peered at all the little figures, his landmark discoveries dotted about the room. Each had a tag with a name attached to it. His final gift to friends and family. He shut the door on his past and turned to meet his future.

  Duty or passion. Sometimes they were the same thing.

  There, lying in a small puddle of blood on the floor, was a single tissue dabbed with blood, having fallen from Dr. Scott’s pocket. All the little figurines were staring at it, eyes wide and fearful.

  It was the beginning.

  Z-MINUS: 8 hours

  Laurence M. Gould scythed through the shards of ice like a red-hot blade. The fragments made calming thudding noises on the hull. The air was cleaner than Hamish had ever experienced. In fact, it was too fresh. Hamish had to keep coughing to clear hi
s lungs. He’d get the craving to suck on exhaust pipes before the week was out.

  Captain Meadows was very hospitable, even offering his own cabin to the seasick Hamish, who clutched his stomach with every slight wayward movement. It had been rough coming out of Punta Arenas’ Chilean harbour, the sea lolling and ungainly. Now, the surface was calm and clear, not a ripple to be seen. Hamish still wanted to hurl.

  They’d passed an island of sea lions on their journey. The creatures had looked up and watched as Laurence M. Gould passed, completely at ease, waiting for the stranger to leave their neighbourhood. It seemed a shame to ruin the calm tranquillity with Laurence M. Gould’s juddering engines.

  Laurence M. Gould was clean and efficient, like its crew. He was a seventy-meter ice breaker, launched in 1997 and used by researchers from the United States’ National Science Foundation. There were two deckhands, Jerrol and Glyn. They moved with the smoothness of those who knew every intimate nook and cranny of their vessel. It only made Hamish feel even more like a spare.

  He wasn’t the type to sit idly by while others did the work. It wasn’t in his nature. He’d asked if he could help. They asked him to tie a knot in the rigging, and after seeing his effort, they immediately redid it themselves and never accepted his help again. Some things were better left to the experts.

  The clouds were reflected perfectly in the flat clear water below, and the white smudge on the horizon swelled as they pulled closer to the giant landmass until it stretched from one horizon to the other. It was cold, but no worse than the frigid temperatures he was used to on the east coast during the ‘winter vortex’ season.

  Then some black smudges came into view, clear and vibrant against the white. They seemed at odds with the beautiful blanket of nature around them. The smudges became distinct, resolving into square blocks that clung unnaturally to the snow like limpets. It was Palmer Station, and it was going to be his home for the next two months.