She’d heard various reasons for the tunnels during her time at Shackleton. Some people had heard they were originally meant to be year-round pedestrian walkways between labs, living quarters, and maintenance hangars, but that funding dried up before they could be built. Others were sure that the tunnels had been—and still were—meant to connect to military facilities that none of them knew about. It was typical tinfoil-hat bunk, but she’d been in the tunnels when odd noises came to her from hundreds of feet ahead, or boot tracks that she’d never seen before disappeared after heading down one of the branches.
Cass knew that the primary reason for the tunnels, the one that disappointed everyone when they heard it, was simple: they harbored the sewage, fuel, and electrical lines for the station. All of it needed to be protected from the punishing environment and as a result, the main tunnel went on for nearly a half mile under the ice, with a dozen or more tangents branching off to carry the necessary resources to, or away from, every corner of Shackleton. Access hatches with ladders leading to the stub-ups on the surface had been built every five hundred yards as a safety measure, but the reality was that the doors and latches in most of them had frozen years ago and even those that might work were probably buried in drifts on the surface. That left the tunnels as the best way to access the more mundane needs of the station.
Of course, it was foolish to think you could keep smart, adventurous—and most of all, bored—people from doing crazy things in a place as strange as an ice tunnel. She’d heard of one attempt to start an ice bar and at least three attempts to sleep overnight in ice niches until the campers found they couldn’t feel their toes after the first hour. There were the truly creepy and hidden utilidor tunnels, left over from the original 1950s station that had been abandoned and snowed in decades before. “Spelunking” had, in fact, been a popular Shackleton pastime until someone had slipped and broken an arm in a freak accident, and now the old tunnels were off-limits. Naturally, that just meant people were more careful to not get caught.
About halfway down the long, long tunnel was the one bit of civilized relief: the warming hut, a small cube cut out of the ice and lined with insulation. There was room enough for about three people to stand over an electric heater that was kept bolted to the center of the floor.
But her destination was far short of the halfway point. Not far past Jerry was a metal ladder leading to an emergency hatch. Iced over, uninviting, and seemingly impassable. While the bottom ten rungs were, in fact, solid ice, she happened to know it was not iced over on the remaining five rungs, nor was the hatch itself sealed by ice. She knew that because one night, several months ago, she’d dragged an acetylene torch and a portable tank to this very spot and spent two hours carving out the topmost handrails and melting the access hatch open.
She’d been inspired to do it because a little time studying the base’s engineering schematic had showed her that this hatch had to pop out either very close to, or actually in, one of the old wooden Jamesway huts that dotted the outer perimeter of the base. The collection of red shanties, nicknamed the Summer Camp by adventurous Polies who would take over residence in them when the temperature stayed above freezing, had been part of the original base. More than half of the two dozen huts were buried in the snow. The rest, while still standing, had been officially condemned.
Never a group to waste a resource, Shackleton base staff had, over the years, appropriated the ones that remained and made them into impromptu gyms, bars, and lounges. There was even a climbing wall in one of them. Every few years, some desk jockey in Washington heard about the huts and filed orders for them to be torn down to maintain order. Each time, of course, the directive was somehow lost, ignored, or destroyed. Cass was thankful that the order had never been carried out.
She paused in the small closet-like space that housed the ladder and listened one more time, waiting for a scrape of a boot on the ice or laughing banter of two friends daring each other to go deeper into the ice tunnels than they’d ever gone before.
Nothing.
Reaching into a parka pocket, she swapped the handheld flashlight she’d been carrying for a headlamp. With a hood, balaclava, and scarf all competing for space on her head, she had to wrestle the thing to get it in place. Once it was secured, she turned on the light, letting her eyes adjust to the strange red light. All of the headlamps and many of the flashlights had their lenses covered in a red gel to keep from interfering with the sensitive astrophysics sensory equipment in case a worker forgot and stepped outside. While the precaution made sense if you were, indeed, going outside, it was strange to experience the gaudy red illumination in the tunnels underneath the station.
Once her eyes were ready, Cass mounted the first rung, moving carefully both to protect herself and to keep from knocking ice off the rungs and leaving evidence of her passing. The climb was easy enough at first, but at twenty feet, she was sniffling and gasping from the effort; this wasn’t like humping up the steps in the Beer Can.
Between the thickness of her gloves and the ice that rimed the ladder, her hand felt like it barely wrapped around anything solid, which was unnerving enough. But at the halfway point, she spared a peek between her boots at the ice tunnel below. A mistake. The light below seemed no bigger than the size of a plate. Cass closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and continued moving slowly and deliberately up the twenty-three rungs until the lamp revealed a closed hatch above her.
Resetting her grip on the top rung, she grunted as she one-handed the latch open. Taking another step up, she crouched at the top of the ladder and pressed her back against the stubborn door until it gave an inch, then a foot, then banged all the way open like the attic door of an old house.
She turned her head in semicircles to pan her headlamp over the inside of the Jamesway she’d discovered over the summer and had been covertly visiting ever since. A quick glance showed no one in the hut and nothing out of place, if you could call a jumble of chairs, tables, and random junk nothing.
Cass climbed the rest of the way out of the tube, then wrestled the hatch back down, dropping it into the floor with a dull thump, a sound barely audible over the wind that rattled and hummed like a train was passing outside. It was an unsettling difference from the absolute stillness of the tunnels.
She straightened up and made a more careful inspection of the tiny space, exactly sixteen square feet, reduced to about the distance of her outstretched arms by the junk that had been chucked into the hut over the years.
The hut had probably started out as a temporary shelter for a mining or construction crew, but the NSF had officially stopped using Jamesways in the seventies, which meant generations of Polies had probably commandeered the hut for a thousand different things since. Nosing around like a rat, she’d found broken drill bits, survival blankets, a part of a parachute from the original navy base from the 1950s, and the remains of a dozen eggs that had long since given up the ghost—cracked and frozen but not rotten.
The geek in her had been thrilled to find the curiosities, but she’d been even happier to see the sheer amount of crap in the hut, since she’d had an ulterior motive for poking around.
Moving carefully, she lifted a thick piece of shag carpet from a section of flooring that looked a lot like a wooden packing crate, which was exactly what it was. Kneeling, she pulled out her multi-tool and flicked open the knife blade. Slipping it into a gap between the boards, she pried up the floor, revealing a small, shoebox-sized depression in the ice. In the niche was a spaghetti-like mess of wires, circuits, and diodes, all mounted on a scrap of plywood.
Cass folded and punched the shag carpet into something like a pillow, gingerly lowered herself onto it, then reached into the depression and lifted out the hodgepodge of electronics with a surgeon’s care. She rested the whole thing on the floor beside her. Slipping a hand deep into her parka, she extracted a small black box about the size of two stacked paperback books. It was a twelve-volt SigmasTek rechargeable battery that would’ve lost its
charge in an hour if it had been sitting in the ice below the hut, but lived most of its life safely on a shelf in her berth. Kept warm by her body on the trek to the Jamesway, it was juiced and ready to go.
All of this was done by the light of her headlamp. She pulled off the elastic band and, stretching her arm to the limit, hung it from a nail in a sidewall to act as an impromptu overhead light. Pawing at her cuff, she pulled back the sleeve of her parka and checked the time. Two minutes to go. She pulled one glove off and went about connecting the electrodes to the battery, sparking to life the crudest shortwave crystal radio in the history of amateur electronics.
Electrical work had never been a specialty of hers, but you couldn’t graduate from an engineering school without taking a few courses here and there, and every student had a friend in EE who had kluged together a homemade soldering iron, hacked an ATM machine, or built their own robot. Eventually, some of it rubbed off. In her case, she’d learned to build her own ham radio.
Another glance at her watch. Twenty seconds. She blew on her fingers, put the earpiece in—wincing at the sudden cold in an unexpected place—and began fiddling with the tuner.
“Vox,” she said, but the cold clutched at her throat and her voice came out in a rasp. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Vox. Come in, Vox. This is Blaze.”
Only the empty void of static answered her. She repeated the call every ten seconds, giving a self-conscious grimace each time she had to say her call sign out loud. The handle hadn’t been her idea.
After three minutes of constant calling, the answer came back, like a missive from deep space. “Blaze, this is Vox. Are you there, over?”
The voice was heavily accented and the radio waves gave it a hollow, tubular sound, but she grinned. “I’m here, Vox. What took you so long?”
Pause. “I keep telling you, my dear, you don’t know the Russian mind. Stalin might be a wax statue in the Kremlin’s front lobby, but Soviet-style paranoia is alive and well. It takes me an hour to put all the excuses in place to get to the radio. And I can’t talk for more than fifteen minutes, or someone is bound to come looking for me to make sure I’m not plotting against them.”
“It’s not that bad, is it? You’re ten thousand miles away from the nearest KGB agent. Or whatever you guys call it these days.”
“Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii ,” Vox said. “Not KGB, FSB. And, yes, they are on the other side of the planet, but it’s still a part of the planet I’d like to return to someday. So I do my work, watch over my shoulder, and report on my fellow scientists whenever I can.”
“You’re plotting against your other team members?”
“Of course.” It was difficult to tell with the static, but she thought he sounded surprised. “How else am I supposed to keep them paranoid enough to leave me alone?”
She laughed. “That’s crazy.”
“Russians invented crazy,” he said. “But you can’t tell me you Americans don’t do something similar.”
“Of course we don’t.”
“Please. Give me one break. No competition? No gossip? No secrets?”
The smile melted away as she thought about Sheryl. Not a word of this to anyone until I can make an official announcement, understand? Hanratty’s face floated into view from a murky corner of the hut, followed by Keene’s bland, bearded face. Everyone on base knew about Sheryl before you were done taking your gloves off.
She hesitated. She’d met Vox—real name unknown—during an unexpected hiatus at the Christchurch base on the last leg before the flight to McMurdo. The layover was usually a no-nonsense twenty-four-hour pause before the crew shoved off, but a surprise storm along the coast had grounded aircraft for a week. With hundreds of scientists, workers, and other Polies trapped in a mid-sized New Zealand city with nothing to do except indulge in bouts of epic drinking, every bar in the city had turned into an intoxicated, impromptu United Nations. Cass had met Vox, a shaggy-haired, gap-toothed, thirty-something radio astronomer in the company of six Swedish physicists en route to borrowing time at the Lyubov Orlova station.
The lot of them had been amazed to meet a female engineer who didn’t have “a face like a wrench,” as Vox put it, and had challenged her to prove her bona fides. Grinning, she dove into a description of Lami’s theorem and the basic principles of kinematics until their eyes glazed over and they begged her to stop. She did shots of vodka and aquavit the rest of the night, then gave herself permission to follow Vox back to his hotel and screw him until they both passed out. The next day, mortified, she’d tried to slip out, but he’d stopped her, laughed at her discomfort, and told her he wanted to stay in touch.
“How the hell are we supposed to do that?” she’d asked. “We’re going to be at the South Pole for the next nine months. What do you want to do, meet for coffee?”
Which was when he told her, if she were half the engineer she claimed she was, it should be a snap to build, borrow, or steal a shortwave that could reach across the fifty klicks separating Shackleton from Orlova. She laughed, told him he was crazy, but they agreed—if they each managed to get their hands on the parts—on a time, date, and frequency. They’d had their first broadcast less than a month after she’d gotten to Shackleton and had managed a radio “date” every week or two since, whenever their schedules would allow.
So, aside from radio contact, she’d known this guy a total of twelve hours. Severe and threatening, Hanratty’s face appeared before her again, warning her not to shoot her mouth off. Then she remembered Biddi’s theory that Hanratty was counting on her to keep her mouth shut, just because of her so-called rank.
Her lip curled. Screw it and screw him . She launched into a description of the situation around Sheryl, starting with Hanratty’s orders to help retrieve the body and ending with the strange interview with Keene.
“Jesus P. Christ!”
“H,” she corrected.
“H? H what?”
“It’s Jesus H. Christ,” she said. “Not P.”
“Why is it H?”
She paused. “I have no idea. Use P if you want.”
Static ate up part of his reply. “. . . are you feeling?”
“Better than I thought I’d be.” Better than I have a right to be . “It’s a terrible thing, but I wouldn’t be dwelling on it so much if Keene hadn’t acted so strangely.”
“Keene is your psychiatric officer?”
“Yes.”
“Tell him nothing. He will only use it against you. The thought police are always the same. Believe me, this is something we Russians know about.”
“I thought the Soviet era was over,” Cass said with a small smile. “The wall came down decades ago, didn’t it?”
“Same play, different cast,” Vox replied. “But about this man Keene, Blaze: remember. No one wants in your head if they don’t plan to use it for themselves.”
She snorted. “He can dig around all he wants. He’s not going to find anything of value.”
“A painful memory to you is an item of value to him. We all have skeletals in our closet.”
“Skeletons,” she corrected absently, her mind dwelling on remembered forms and shapes different—yet not so different—than Sheryl’s. There will be some survivor’s guilt, as well. You’ve had some experience with that, I believe?
“Blaze?”
“I’m here,” she said. “Vox—why do I have to call you that, anyway? You know my name.”
“Maybe I like mysteries. I am dating you, no?” He paused. “That is joke. My name is Alexander Mikhailovich Krestovozdvizhensky.”
“What the hell? I can’t pronounce that.”
“That is why I pick Vox, no? Simple. Elegant. Latin. You can call me Sasha if you want, is short for Alexander. Though, I prefer if you call me Vox.”
“Sasha,” she said. “I like it. It’s dashing.”
“No one has ever called a Russian radio astronomer dashing before, but I accept your compliment.” He laughed
. There was a short pause, then, “Blaze, I’m sorry, I have to go. Comrade—excuse me, First Researcher —Konstantinov is thundering up and down the hall, looking for me.”
“Same bat channel, same bat time?”
“Yes, whatever that is. Poka .”
And, suddenly, he was gone.
Lying still, her body heat slowly leaching away, Cass felt herself on the verge of shivering, and the smell of the shag carpet filled her nose with must and a disagreeable synthetic odor, but she continued to recline on the Jamesway floor for long minutes after the connection was lost, pondering the randomness of things. Besides Biddi, she’d made few friends at Shackleton and, after yesterday’s events, there really wasn’t anyone at the station she’d feel comfortable telling about the horror of seeing Sheryl’s body lying on the ice.
Instead, she’d turned to a Russian national with a lopsided smile and a sense of humor for support. His motives, outlook, and background? Unknown. She sighed and rolled to her feet. A one-night stand and a few months of radio dating weren’t much to build a relationship on. But a disembodied voice coming out of the darkness seemed the best she was going to do.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My name is Cass Jennings. I was born west of Boston, Massachusetts, about a five-minute walk from the Waltham Watch Company. I visited almost every weekend as a kid, which might explain why I’ve always wanted to take things apart and put them together again —
Cass jumped as someone hammered on the door to her berth. Bang, bang, bang . Biddi’s voice came through, muffled but distinct. “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and . . . you bloody well better let me in, is all.”
Self-consciously, she closed the little, nearly blank diary and shoved it under her pillow, then swung her feet over the side of the bed to answer the door. Had the closet not been in the way, she could’ve reached the knob from the bed.
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