by Greig Beck
“Ha! It’s called ‘abseiling’ or ‘rappelling.’ There is no such word as ‘ropesailing.’ And that heights thing happened a long time ago. It’s not a phobia, Tom.”
Tom sipped his coffee, making an exaggerated slurping sound. Aimee mouthed OK then, to his back. She tore a small fragment of paper from her computer printout and rolled it into a ball which she popped into her mouth, working it around a little more with her tongue. She lifted the straw from the small bottle and placed it in her mouth, took aim and fired the wet projectile at the back of Tom’s head. Satisfyingly, it stuck to his neck.
“Yee-uck. I hate it when you do that.” Tom wiped his neck with his hand and turned around. Aimee sat smiling with her left eyebrow raised and the straw dangling from her bottom lip.
She had known Tom for ten years, ever since he had been at her university spotting on behalf of his company. Even as a gangly, or as her father said “coltish,” nineteen-year-old, her grades and natural scientific talent in the areas of biology and biogenic decomposition made her stand out from a crowded and impressive field. Her potential was a magnet to companies looking for the most valuable of corporate assets: intelligence. Tom had made her laugh till tears ran down her cheeks and humanised science more than any dry professor ever had. He was like an older brother and could still make her laugh today like that kid at university a decade ago, yet over the years he had looked out for her and guided her career and now she was one of the most respected petrobiologists in the world.
Tom Hendsen was the lead scientist working for GBR, a small research company that specialised in geological and biological research into fossil fuels, their discovery, use, synthesis and hopefully one day, replacement. He was forty, slim and tall, with an easy laugh. Though they all had an informal working relationship within GBR he was the natural leader due to his maturity and encyclopedic knowledge of deep earth petrobiology.
Aimee loved Tom, but as with all sibling relationships there were flare-ups—rare, but they happened; just like now. Tom had been urgently requested by the government to accompany a rescue mission to the Antarctic. A private jet had gone down on the ice, or rather, through the ice. A large cavern had been opened up and initial data received indicated a large body of mid-crust liquid that could be surface petroleum and natural gas. It was probably nothing more than screwy data or some illegal dumping ground used by the numerous nations that visited the Antarctic for everything from research to mining—nations that eyed the continent hungrily as the last great unexplored, or rather unravaged, continent on earth. However, it could also be something significant; the Antarctic wasn’t always covered in snow and ice and about 150 million years before, when Gondwana began to break up, what was now the Antarctic coalesced around the South Pole. A number of species of dinosaur were known to have existed and the lush plant life became dominated by fern-like plants which grew in swamps. Over time these swamps became deposits of coal in the Transantarctic Mountains and could have decomposed into reservoirs of oil below them.
“But you hate the cold, and you don’t like field work. I’m more than qualified to at least assist you down there.” Aimee hated the whining tone creeping into her voice. She knew Tom was the best person to go, but she had been working on her current project now for eighteen months and was looking for any sort of interesting diversion—and this sounded like just the sort of thing that she’d like to do.
“Aimee, someone has got to front the board on Wednesday and discuss our results on the viability models for synthetic fuel production or we won’t get the additional funding,” Tom responded in his most patient tone. “You know you’re better than I am at twisting those board members around your little finger.” Aimee could tell Tom was deliberately flattering her and she gave him a fake “gosh, thanks” smile.
“I’ll be back in a week, probably with little more than a cold to show for it,” he said without looking up from his packing. “I’ll take some electromagnetic readings and map the near-surface alteration effects of any hydrocarbon migration and then we can turn the results into some nice 3D models for our friends in the boardroom.”
“Well, make sure you use plenty of colour and description and lose all the jargon or you might as well show them pictures of your auntie’s knitting for all those board members will understand,” Aimee responded half-jokingly, knowing Tom was the best in the business at making complex subjects easy to understand and accessible to even the dullest bureaucrat. “And bring me back some snow.”
“I’ll bring you a penguin, no two, to make a pair of slippers,” he said, both of them now laughing at their silliness.
Her eyes had once more returned to the soft Aimee blue. As usual he had managed to disarm her with a sense of humour that was more at home in a schoolyard than a laboratory. Knowing Tom, he’d spend his time in the tent hunched over his computer and be cold and bored by the end of the first day.
Next time, she thought, it would be her turn, no question about it.
Three
Australian East Coast
Alex Hunter walked from the warm seawater after his dawn swim; it was his favourite time of the day—with the screeching of the gulls as they circled overhead and the shushing of the surf as it crashed onto the golden beach. The sea mist blew gently across his face as his grey-green eyes scanned the horizon. He closed them briefly and drew in a large breath to totally absorb the smells of his world.
After an hour of hard swimming he wasn’t even breathing hard. At thirty-six years old and just over six feet tall his body was lean but strongly muscled across the arms and chest, representative of someone who trained vigorously and often. However, numerous scars attested to the fact this was no frame created in a gymnasium, but one that was hewn in and for battle. Alex shook his head from side to side and then dragged his hand through his short black hair. His square jaw and angular cheeks ensured there was no shortage of female attention, however, a complex and dangerous lifestyle meant there could never be any permanence to his relationships. Alex had been trained to win, to fight and succeed no matter what the odds, but there were some things that he felt were beyond even his capabilities. He could never settle down, could never describe his work, and could never share his success and failures with anyone other than his military peers. And now, following his field accident, he was more alone than ever.
Like a bronze statue Alex stood motionless on the sand, hands tightly gripping a faded beach towel; his eyes became lifeless chips of glass as he travelled in his head back to a life that now seemed to belong to someone else. Angie was gone, she was already leaving him before his last mission but had promised she would wait and be there to talk to him when he returned; he never made it. He didn’t think she had stopped loving him—just couldn’t stop the worrying, he guessed. In the time they had together they had loved and laughed like teenagers, and even now little things about her still haunted him: her thick brown hair that always smelled of fresh green apples, the line of perspiration on her top lip after they had made love, her enormous brown eyes. She said he could make her blush and go tingly just by talking to her. They were going to be married, and now he couldn’t even call her, he had ceased to exist. He had heard she was seeing some suit from Boston; she’d be OK.
His mother had been told he was dead, heaven knew when he would ever be authorised to tell her the truth. Since his father had been taken by a heart attack ten years ago she had quit her job and slowed right down; she swapped a job in advertising for flowers, vegetables, and games of bridge two nights a week. He could still see her on the front porch in late spring with her spoilt Alsatian, Jess, asleep at her feet, her paws twitching in a dream where snooty overweight Siamese cats tripped over right in front of her. Until he learned to control and conceal his new abilities, it wasn’t safe for anybody to know he was alive.
Life had made Alex a strange trade, one where he had both gained and lost. The thick towel Alex was gripping tore in half; he hadn’t realised that the pressure had been building within
him.
His rehabilitation, if you could call it that, was complete. Two years ago on a clandestine search and rescue mission in northern Chechnya, Alex Hunter had been ambushed and shot in the head—a trauma that should have killed him. He had been in a death-like coma for two weeks and when he had emerged from hospital after another month he was different, somehow altered. The bullet was lodged deep within his cerebellum in the junction between his hypothalamus and thalamus, a position that made removal more manslaughter than surgery. However, instead of causing irreparable damage as it should have done, it had ignited a storm of both physical and mental changes that had astounded his doctors.
Alex remembered them trying to explain what had happened to him and their assumptions when some of his abilities had started to emerge. Even among the gathered specialists in his room there was debate on how the human midbrain functioned. Some argued that humans make use of less than half of their total brain functions, with the other significant portion locked away for evolution to make use of when environmental or chronological factors dictate they are ready. Others were just as adamant that the unused portions were an evolutionary remnant of no more use than the appendix or tonsils.
What the bullet had done was force a significant re-routing of blood to his midbrain, the area largely responsible for selecting, mapping and cataloguing information. Alex had also been told that it was the primary powerhouse of endocrine functions, where control of pain, adrenaline and natural steroids are monitored and distributed. What had disturbed Alex the most was that the midbrain was the part of the human brain that contained the largest areas with an “unknown uses” classification. The flush of extra blood into these areas of his brain triggered massive electrical activity as a new engine room powered up and switched on, waking new or long dormant abilities.
Alex’s agility, speed, strength and mental acuity had increased off the scale, and now in high intensity activities, the world around him seemed to slow to a crawl as he out-thought or out-moved reality. His doctors had been left in amazement that he could complete agility or strength tests at a speed that could sometimes only be further analysed with reduced motion camera equipment. It wasn’t all good news though; Alex had been left with bouts of rage that were sometimes barely controllable. During these outbursts his strength and speed peaked. To date he had been able to channel that aggression back into his exercises—but God help those around him if ever that control slipped.
After the first few rages, and the realisation that they looked to be part of the package that had come with the physical upgrade, he had been happy that Angie wasn’t in his life anymore. If he had ever hurt her, even while thrashing in his sleep, he may have been driven to turn that murderous fury back on himself.
Alex’s superiors had quickly shut down any further testing by the hospital and allowed him to complete his recovery at a private house owned by the United States military on the northeast coast of Australia. The brass were keen to ensure Alex’s psychological rehabilitation was as complete as the physical improvements as soon as possible. No psycho-suppressant drugs had worked with Alex; his body would overwhelm any chemical with more natural stimulants of its own; that battle could only end in one of two ways—Alex’s heart exploding in his chest or a massive embolism in his midbrain. The military psychologists had managed to provide him with some tailored sensory techniques that allowed him to gain control of his furies and at least keep him out of the hands of the chemists. Alex smiled to himself. He was living one of the techniques right now; salt, sea and sand always helped him to unwind. He only had to mention it to the doctors and here he was—his simple task was to upload the sensory experiences and play them back in his mind to inject a wave of calm into his consciousness. However, he also had a secret safeguard, a smell, a redolence, one that immediately soothed him even during the most lethal of rages; he simply imagined the fragrance of fresh green apples.
It was working for him. The military had their first super soldier by accident, and as long as he was available for further testing, he would be allowed to stay on the active duty list. But Alex Hunter was now like a caged lion—training up to six hours a day and still not fatiguing, he needed something more than further exercise or drills. He judged himself fit for duty and was looking forward to the promised call from his superior and mentor, Major Jack Hammerson. As he drew in one last breath, he smiled. “Holidays are over,” he said quietly to himself.
Major Jack Hammerson’s face advertised all his years of active service like a billboard. Deep lines etched his forehead and cheeks and where the elements hadn’t carved his features, combat scarring had. In his fifties, he was still a man of iron who kept up the daily training that had taught him how to incapacitate a foe in less than seven seconds, a skill he had needed to call on in active service many times. A Greek military history buff, “the Hammer” had refused promotions so he could maintain an active role with his beloved special services unit and ensure his lads were the best trained and the most lethal soldiers on earth. He made sure they always came back home from battle like the Spartans—with their shields upon them.
Hammerson sat with one fist clasped in his other hand and looked at the information spread out on the desk before him. SOCOM, the Special Operations Command, had been tasked with directing a covert rescue and research mission down to the Antarctic. They’d all disappeared. Science personnel and a supporting team of Green Berets had all fallen off the grid. No radio contact, no satellite images, and nothing showing up from the VELA thermal imaging satellites—they were just gone. Hammerson reached down and picked up one of the photographs sent before the party had stepped off the earth. His eyes narrowed as if he were trying to will himself down into the ice so he could make sense of the images. He knew General Malcolm of SOCOM and the guys he sent down to be the mission shield wouldn’t have been slouches. With their hostile-environment training and thick clothing, even in a freezing environment, their bodies would have taken several hours to cool; VELA should have picked up something.
Now it was his turn. Politically, command couldn’t send a larger force, but they still wanted more military potency. There would not be a third team deployed; this was it. They needed maximum defensive and attack capabilities. Jack Hammerson dropped the photograph; he already knew who he was going to send.
Hammerson had known Alex Hunter since his first days in the squad and had initially thought of him as an enthusiastic and talented but average member of the team—if anyone could be just average in his specialised unit. However, in the eighteen months since Alex’s mission accident, he had become vastly different. Now, no one could touch him in the strategy and tactic exercises, and in hand-to-hand combat training he had lifted another man weighing over 200 pounds above his head and thrown him fifteen feet as though he was no more than a hollow, store-built mannequin. Alex’s doctors thought it was some form of beneficial side effect of the bullet lodging so close to his endocrine engine room; Hammerson saw it as a gift to be fully honed to its ultimate potential.
Hammerson took personal command of Alex and provided the extra training he needed to mould him into the special service’s first super weapon—codenamed “Arcadian.” Like Zeus, born of Arcadia and destroyer of the Titans, the new Alex had been created by war—he would go in fast, hard and with maximum lethality.
Alex was again primed for red duty and the current situation in the Antarctic was just the set of circumstances that required a special resource. Jack Hammerson reached for the phone; it was time Arcadian came in.
Four
Wednesday morning Aimee checked her presentation for the last time to ensure she had the relevant information bullet-pointed and just enough feel-good blue sky built in to entice the most hard-boiled petroleum investor. Her handouts were printed up and bound professionally and she thought they looked pretty damn good. More than anything else she wanted to walk out of that boardroom in two hours (or less if lucky), and have good news for Tom when he returned on the weekend.
Instead of the seven members of the board she was expecting, she only recognised one, Alfred Beadman the chairman, who greeted her warmly just inside the door. Seated at the table were four people she had never met before. She assessed them all quickly—two sporty student types, a middle-aged nerd and a military man. She turned her attention back to Alfred, a fatherly figure to her and someone she knew she could always trust. He led her to a seat without letting go of her hand and asked her to sit down.
Her immediate thoughts were that they were going to be shut down and that she had somehow already let Tom down by failing in her funding request and further, getting them bounced right out the door of GBR. Aimee closed her eyes and imagined Tom walking back in at the weekend and saying in his boyish manner “I’ve got a surprise for you,” while holding a box behind his back, and Aimee responding with “and have I ever got one for you.”
After a few moments Alfred spoke softly. “Aimee, we’ve lost contact with Tom—with all of them.”
It was as if the entire atmosphere had been sucked out of the room; no one moved or spoke, no one even breathed. They just sat and stared.
“What do you mean you’ve lost contact?” Aimee was on her feet radiating a mix of disbelief and red hot anger.
“It may not be serious, but exactly what I said, Aimee. I think it might be best if we give you all the facts, bring you in from the cold so to speak, and then we can determine what the first and best course of action is to be. Please sit down, Aimee dear, so we can begin.” Knowing how volatile Aimee could be, it was clear that Alfred was speaking as calmly and evenly as he could. He watched her retake her seat, then turned to his left and introduced the fearsome looking man that couldn’t have been more military looking if he were wearing a uniform cut from the stars and stripes.