Outpost

by Adam Baker

  Sian sat in the corner of the canteen, pen poised over a sheet of paper.

  She had a stepfather. Leo. A carpet fitter. He was a nice enough guy. He cared for Sian's mother during that last year of ovarian cancer. Sian spent each Christmas Day at his little terraced house, ate a turkey dinner in front of the TV, but they never progressed beyond superficial pleasantries. It had been three years. Sian often wondered if he had a new girlfriend. A divorcee with kids of her own. Maybe he wanted to drop Sian from his life, but didn't know how.

  Leo was a fit, capable man. He kept a bayonet beneath the bed in case of burglars. He would be all right.

  Sian screwed up the paper. Better this way, she thought. No one to worry about but me.

  The coffee urn. She filled a Styrofoam cup. Punch no longer supplied milk powder or sugar. Everyone took it black and bitter.

  Jane sat in her room with a pad on her lap. She wrote love-you letters to her mother and sister. Then she wrote on behalf of the crew.

  My name is Reverend Jane Blanc. I am chaplain of Con Amalgam refinery platform Kasker Rampart. We are marooned in the Arctic Circle west of Franz Josef Land. We have supplies to last four months. Winter is coming. By the time you read this we may be dead. We have little hope of rescue and we are so far from inhabited land any attempt to sail to safety in an improvised craft would almost certainly fail. I often promise the men we will all get home, but I have no idea how this can be achieved or what horrors might await us beyond the horizon. So I appeal to anyone who may read this note: please do what you can to ensure that one day these letters reach the people for whom they are intended, so that they can know what became of us.

  God bless,

  Jane Blanc

  Jane sealed the notes in an envelope and took it to the canteen. She slotted the envelope into the Peli case.

  Sudden PA announcement: 'Mr Rawlins, Reverend Blanc, please report to Medical right away.'

  Sian. By the sound of her voice, something was very wrong.

  Simon was curled foetal at the bottom of the shower cubicle. He was dead. He held a scalpel in the swollen, blackened fingers of his left hand. He had slashed his wrist. He lay naked in a puddle of pink blood-water and unravelled bandages.

  'Jesus fucking Christ.'

  Rawlins shut off the water. Jane helped drag the dead man from the shower.

  They carried Simon to the operating table. They watched Sian wash him down. They lifted him into a rubber body bag and zipped it closed.

  There was no mortuary on the refinery, so they laid Simon on the floor of the boathouse overnight.

  'He was talking to me,' said Sian. 'Reaching out. Screaming for help and I was too stupid to hear.'

  'A person's life is their own,' said Jane. 'It's not your job to save them.'

  Nikki sat in the observation bubble reading a magazine.

  'We'll be holding the funeral at three,' said Jane.

  Nikki flipped pages like she hadn't heard.

  The crew processed down steel stairs that spiralled round one of the rig's gargantuan legs. An ice shelf had solidified around each leg. They walked across the ice and congregated at the water's edge.

  Jane turned the pages of her service book with gloved fingers.

  'O God, whose Son Jesus Christ was laid in a tomb: bless, we pray, this grave as the place where the body of Simon your servant may rest in peace, through your Son, who is the resurrection and the life; who died and is alive and reigns with you now and for ever.'

  Simon was swaddled in sheets. He lay on a stretcher. Ghost lifted the stretcher and the body slid into the water.

  'As they came from their mother's womb, so they shall go again, naked as they came. We brought nothing into the world, and we take nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.'

  The shrouded body floated just beneath the surface. Ghost pushed the corpse away from the ice with a golf club. It drifted away, drawn by the current, a white phantom shape beneath the water.

  'Support us, O Lord, all the long day of this troubled life, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over and our work is done. Then, Lord, in your mercy grant us a safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at the last; through Christ our Lord. Amen.'

  The crew walked back to the rig. Nobody spoke.

  Jane stood with Punch and looked out to sea.

  'I feel like I'm doing more harm than good,' she said.

  'Shall we go and find your asteroid?'

  'Yeah. Let's get away from this misery for a while.'

  The Crater

  Jane steered the zodiac. Counter-intuitive: turn the outboard left to steer right.

  'Keep us about three hundred metres from shore,' instructed Punch. 'We don't want to rip the bottom out of the boat.'

  They followed the coastline. They hugged a ridge of lunar rock and black shingle.

  A milky film in the water. Grease ice. The ocean starting to freeze.

  Jane looked back. A rare chance to see the totality of the rig.

  The refinery was constructed around three great distillation tanks, each the size of a cathedral. The structure was spiked by radio masts and cranes. The platform floated on four buoyant legs. It was tethered to the seabed by cables as thick as a redwood tree trunk. It looked like something out of a nightmare: a squat spider big enough to crush cities. A million tons of steel. Product of twenty different slipways. Assembled in a deep-water fjord and towed north.

  'Terrifying,' said Jane.

  'What is?'

  'It's one thing to sit with our feet up in the canteen, dreaming up plans to sail home. It's another thing to see it for real. The ocean. The ice. We wouldn't last a day.'

  'We have time to prepare,' said Punch. 'Plenty of survival gear aboard Rampart. And you wouldn't be out here alone. We would have each other. Ghost is a solid guy. Kind of man you can rely upon in a crisis.' 'Yeah.'

  'And we have you.'

  'Sure. When we run out of food I'll be first in the pot.'

  'I saw a kid on TV a few years back,' said Punch. 'He went hiking in the Rockies. He got hit by a landslide. He woke up with his arm pinned by a boulder. He lay there for a couple of days hoping for rescue. Nobody came, so he used his belt as a tourniquet, then sawed off his arm with a penknife.'

  'Good God.'

  'Picked up his canteen and walked back to civilisation minus an arm.'

  'Damn.'

  'This is your moment. You know that, right? I've seen you, since this shit kicked off. It's like watching someone wake from a long sleep.'

  'But what good is it?' asked Jane, looking out to sea. 'In the face of this. All our heroism. All our will to live. It's a bad joke.'

  Sian cleared Simon's room in Medical. She gathered up his dog- tags, his signet ring, his watch. She found a heavily annotated copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations in his coat pocket. She put it all in a plastic box and gave it to Nikki.

  Nikki was in the observation bubble staring out to sea.

  'Thanks,' she said, as Sian handed her the box. She tossed it aside without looking at it.

  Nikki spent the afternoon scanning wavebands.

  She turned up the volume and put her ear to the speaker.

  'Are you sure you heard it?' asked Sian.

  'There was a voice. Male. English. It faded in and out. Has done for days.'

  She turned the dial.

  'There. You hear it?'

  '. . . elp . . . ear us?..urgent assis . . !

  'Get your coat. We have to boost the range on this thing.'

  Nikki found a coil of steel cable in the boathouse. She carried it to the upper deck.

  'What do you have in mind?' asked Sian.

  'When I was at university I had a crappy transistor radio on my desk. It had a broken aerial. If I let the stub of the aerial touch my anglepoise lamp I got a signal. Maybe we can lengthen the antenna and pull the same trick.'

  'Perhaps we should talk to G
host. He might be able to help.'

  'Girl, you've got to shake off that passive mindset. We're in deep shit. You can't constantly rely on Ghost to kiss it all better. You've got to start taking care of yourself.'

  The short-wave antenna was a scaffold spike four metres tall. Nikki climbed the spike and lashed the cable to the top. She climbed down. She tied the other end of the cable to a balloon pod.

  'Okay. Stand back.'

  She pulled the red rip cord. The plastic case split open. Silver balloon fabric spilled, unravelled and began to inflate. An explosive roar as the helium canister discharged. The foil swelled and rose. The balloon lifted skyward taking the cable with it. A silver teardrop shimmering like a globule of mercury. The cable extended the antenna ten metres.

  'Let's see if that does any good.'

  They returned to the observation bubble and threw their coats over a chair.

  'This is refinery platform Kasker Rampart, can you hear me, over?'

  'Hello? Hello?'

  'This is Rampart. Go ahead.'

  'Thank God. Thank Christ. This is drilling station Kasker Raven. Hope you're in better shape than us, Rampart. We could use your help.'

  Kalashnikov. Four rotting cabins facing the sea. A wooden Orthodox church with an onion dome. Wooden grave markers.

  Jane tethered the boat to the jetty. She climbed ashore. Punch passed her backpacks.

  The cabins had been built by whalers. They had partially collapsed. Rooms choked with roof beams and snow. The little church was intact. Some of the fittings were a hundred years old. Rotted pews. A rotted altar.

  The back room. A blubber stove with a cobwebbed flue. A shelf loaded with antique supplies. Fry's cocoa. Heinz Indian relish. Tins of boiled cabbage.

  The floor was littered with modern camping detritus. Empty stove canisters. Food wrappers. A ripped sleeping bag.

  Jane found a box. Calorie bars and a couple of cans.

  'Eight years old,' said Jane, checking the expiration date. 'Probably still edible.'

  'Bit of a wasted trip. The place is good for firewood, I suppose.'

  'What's worth more right now, do you think? By weight. Bullion or a packet of peanuts?'

  They stood in the doorway and watched sunset. Mid-afternoon. Eighteen hours of night.

  'By mid-winter the ocean will be frozen,' said Punch. 'You could walk to the Canadian mainland. A fifteen-hundred-kilometre hike. Pitch dark and minus fifty, but if you, me and Sian took the snowmobiles and a sledge loaded with fuel we could get a hell of a long way before we had to ski.'

  'Global warming. The sea freezes less and less each year. No guarantee we would reach Canada.'

  'Worth a shot.'

  'And leave everyone else behind?'

  'Too many of us. An entire football team. I doubt it's possible to get us all home, by land or sea.'

  'I read a lot of travel books before I came here. Fantasised what it would be like. I read Scott's journal. Those last entries as they froze to death in that tent. "Had we lived, I should have made a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman." I got totally caught up in the romance.'

  'Scott was a self-aggrandising dick.'

  'That's my point. Shackleton got his men home. Shipwrecked on an ice floe. Couple of lifeboats. Bit of food. He got them home. Every single one.'

  They closed the door and used the ripped sleeping bag to plug holes in the frame.

  Punch unfolded a map.

  'One or two research stations on this side of the island. Marine biologists. Geologists. Most of them like Apex: little more than a couple of tents. Pretty much all of them will have been evacuated for winter.'

  'This one?'

  'McClure. Seismologists, I think.'

  'Walking distance?'

  'Yeah, what the fuck.'

  Jane unpacked the radio.

  'Shore team to Rampart, do you copy, over?'

  She waited for a reply, but instead heard a strange tocking sound like the crackle of a Geiger counter.

  'Atmospherics?' suggested Punch.

  Jane re-tuned.

  'Shore team to Rampart.'

  'Rampart here.' Sian's voice.

  'We made it to Kalashnikov, over.'

  'Tell Punch we miss him. Rawlins is brewing some atrocity in the kitchen. Regurgitated egg, I think.'

  'That ticking noise. Can you hear it at your end?'

  'It comes and goes. It's not our equipment.'

  'We'll move on at first light.'

  'Did you find anything?'

  Jane picked up one of the calorie bars and turned it in her hand.

  'No. There's nothing here.'

  'You could tow us. Rope your boat to a raft and tow us.'

  The guy from Raven sounded tired and desperate.

  'A zodiac could make it. It would take a couple of days, but it could make the trip.'

  Rawlins thought it over. Nikki sat at the back of the observation bubble and watched him deliberate.

  'No. Sorry, but no. If you were in my position you'd say the same thing. It would take more than a couple of days. The motor would burn out. And that little boat is the only sea-going vessel we have.'

  Raven was a drilling platform seven hundred miles north on the other side of the Kasker oil field. Seven men running out of fuel. They were crowded in a single room, wearing survival suits for warmth.

  'We can keep the lights on another couple of weeks. Basic power. After that, we'll freeze for real.'

  'I can't do it, Ray. I'm responsible for the men on this rig. I can't risk them, and I can't risk the boat.'

  'So you're going to let us die? Is that what you're going to do? Wash your hands?'

  'You're not going to die, Ray. Just chill the fuck out. Give me twenty-four hours, okay? I'll talk to some of the lads. We'll put our heads together. We'll thrash out a workable plan, all right? Let us think it through.'

  Rawlins signed off. He sat back and rubbed his eyes.

  'Must be tough,' said Sian. 'Being boss in a situation like this.'

  'I nearly threw myself down the stairs yesterday. Stood at the top of the steps outside my room and leaned forward. Just wanted to break my arm or my ankle or something. Then someone else would have to take charge.'

  'I can't speak for anyone else,' said Sian, 'but I'm glad you are at the helm.'

  'I haven't got a fucking clue how to help these guys. Better fetch Ghost. Maybe he can come up with something.'

  Ghost wasn't in the canteen. He wasn't in his room.

  Nikki put on a parka and descended to the pump hall at the bottom of the rig. She found Ghost rolling an empty oil drum across the floor.

  'We have a contact. Seven guys on a drilling platform north of here.'

  'Raven?'

  'Yeah.'

  'Jesus. I thought they would be choppered out for winter.' 'Marooned like us. We've been talking to a guy called Ray.'

  'I know him. I met him.'

  'It doesn't sound good. Very little fuel. They can't hold out much longer. Rawlins wants you to come up with a rescue plan.'

  'Why me?'

  'Because you've pulled three rotations out here. You understand this environment better than anyone.'

  'Seven more mouths to feed.'

  Nikki looked around.

  'They say you spend a lot of time down here,' she said.

  'I'm looking for anything useful.'

  Nikki gestured to the oil drum.

  'I'll make you a deal. Be honest with me, and I won't tell anyone you are building a boat.'

  'I'm just doing a little housekeeping.'

  'You think it's time to bail out. And you're right. There are too many of us to ferry across the North Atlantic. But you can't do it on your own either. I could help.'

  Nikki was restless. She sat in the canteen sipping tap water from a mug. Nail and his gang had turned the corner of the canteen into a gymnasium. Nail stood alone pumping dumbbells.


  'So how about you?' asked Nikki. 'You and your friends. What's going on in your heads these days?'

  'Ever found yourself in a jail cell?'

  'I take it you have.'

  'It's a waiting game. You have to get a little Zen and do your fucking time, otherwise the confinement will drive you batshit. We're not going anywhere until spring, so Rawlins and his buddies better dredge up a little mental fortitude. All their frantic activity and scheming hasn't got us an inch closer to home. It's all just wasted energy.'

  'And come spring? What will you do then?'

  'Endure. Survive. Prevail.'

  'Yeah,' said Nikki. 'I don't doubt you will.'

  Jane and Punch walked four miles inland.

  McClure. Three weatherboard huts on stilts. Empty fuel drums and a little latrine hut.

  There was a Snowcat and trailer parked outside.

  'Looks like we caught a ride,' said Punch.

  They climbed the steps of the main hut and pounded the door. No reply. The door was unlocked.

  'Hello? Anyone?'

  They explored, room by room. Nobody home.

  A dormitory. A cramped recreation space with a dartboard and TV. A couple of laboratories jammed with rock samples, ice cores and microscopes.

  'Looks like they left in a hurry,' said Jane. 'Personal possessions are gone. Wouldn't expect them to abandon all this lab equipment, though.'

  'Probably got an airlift at short notice. Jumped in an Otter. Hand luggage only.'

  Punch checked cupboards.

  'Maybe they left food.'

  'And if they did?' asked Jane. 'Share it with everyone or hide it in your secret den?'

  'If we were smart we would go back and tell them this place was levelled by a storm and we found nothing. If we bring back a Snowcat, you can bet we will wake up one morning and find it gone.'

  'I've been fat all my life, all right? You don't have to tell me people are shit. But I'm not going to sell out at the first tiny provocation, and neither are you. We're better than that.'

  They searched the base.

  'Toothpaste,' said Jane. 'That's all I found. Plenty of esoteric lab gear but nothing worth hauling back.'