The Winter Over

by Iden, Matthew

  She took obsessive care to count her steps on the way back. At twenty, she raised her head to check her progress. There was still no beacon coming from the direction of Shackleton, but to her left, she suddenly saw a bright red flare, like a bloodshot eye staring back at her in the darkness.

  Is that the lab? It didn’t seem possible she could’ve missed it—and that still didn’t explain why the flag line had veered away from the lab instead of heading right to it—but this was about the same place where she’d put her head down and stared at her boots for what she’d thought would be her final push to COBRA. She’d been concentrating on her steps and the flag line, trusting it to take her to the lab, not looking around. So . . . she’d missed it. But that wasn’t the real question.

  What was she going to do now?

  If she wanted to head for the light, she’d have to abandon the flag line. Untethered, she’d be like an astronaut on a spacewalk, with about the same amount of risk. Or she could do the sane thing and return to base. After what she’d been through, she’d still be claiming those extra desserts or Pete would risk losing a mouthful of teeth.

  She looked at the light again, trying to calculate the distance. How big did a light have to be to figure out how far away it was? She glanced along the flag line, then back at the red light. When she’d looked back to find Shackleton, she’d been no more than seventy-five meters away—maybe closer—which would seem to suggest, naturally, that the COBRA lab was less than that. As long as the light didn’t go away, she could march right to it.

  The idea was ridiculous. Nobody in their right mind would let go of a flag line so they could deliver a mauled midwinter’s dinner.

  Then she thought about the day in the galley, and the look on Jun’s face as the tears had rolled down his cheeks as he told her about his wife.

  How much was a small kindness worth?

  Squaring herself to the light, she let go of the line.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Cass stared at the red light without blinking. Thirty paces after letting go of the umbilical cord that was the flag line, she calculated that she was a little less than halfway to the lab, but what scared her was that the wind had started to pick up and what had been a bright, if baleful, beacon was now flickering and disappearing as the increased snow started to blind her. She realized belatedly that when she’d first caught sight of the light from the flag line, a momentary lull in the wind had increased her visibility. She hadn’t counted on the gale force returning and cutting off her vision.

  The main culprit was the light from her headlamp, which, as before, was bouncing off the sheet of white blowing a foot from her face. Reluctantly, wondering if she truly had gone insane, she reached up and turned the light off. The plunge into darkness was enough to make her heart stop, but as her eyes adjusted, the red star of the COBRA lab shone more brightly than before. She reoriented herself and trudged forward.

  At fifty paces, her stomach muscles began to relax as two more red and one very small green light appeared. The whine and roar of the wind were deafening.

  At eighty paces, the red light was almost directly overhead, the only guide she had to keep from running into the wall. She put a hand out until she finally felt something solid. Looking up, the two-story outline of the COBRA building was barely visible above her. Keeping constant contact with the wall, she walked the building’s perimeter until she found the door dimly illuminated by a red spotlight so encrusted with ice and snow that it gave off nothing more than a weak pink glow. Struggling against the gale, she opened the door and tumbled inside.

  The muted silence inside the building’s airlock was almost unnerving after the endless, shrieking wind. Cass pushed back her parka’s hood, stripped off her mask and balaclava, and savored the feeling of safety. By normal standards, the tiny room wasn’t really warm and the squall had pushed snow through the millimeters-wide gap between the door and the wall to lie in drifts on the floor, but it was a refuge after what she’d waded through.

  She kicked the snow away from the inner door, then pushed it open. A blast of warmth hit her and goose bumps raced over her body at the sudden temperature shift. Beyond was a mudroom of sorts. She slammed the door shut with a boom and stripped off her parka and bear claws, the bulkiest parts of the ECW gear.

  Once past the mudroom, the COBRA lab building expanded into a colossal space the size of two or three barns. Dominating the center and reaching up to a height of about sixty feet was a single massive dish antenna that she’d been told could both project and collect through the domed roof that sheltered the lab proper. The dish was on a ten-foot-tall concrete pedestal that served as a de facto wall for about ten office cubes surrounding its base; scaffolding and metal stairs led up to the pedestal from the concrete main floor. The atmosphere was hushed; COBRA provided enough shelter that the sounds of the frigid hell outside had been reduced to a soft white noise, interrupted only by electronic noises and the whirring of computer cooling fans.

  She cleared her throat, but her voice came out as a croak. She wasn’t used to yelling. “Jun?”

  There was no answer. She frowned. You might not hear the outer door, but no one could’ve missed the noise of the inner door slamming shut. She set off through the forest of desks and computer racks.

  “Jun?” she called again, but the sound seemed swallowed by the dense equipment and mountains of scientific gear surrounding her. A large monitor caught her eye, distracting her as it frantically updated a chart. A solid blue line peaked and valleyed constantly as it recorded some kind of astrophysical data every half second.

  Wandering around the antenna, she came across a workstation that seemed more lived-in than the others. A quilted winter coat hung over the back of a chair. A cup half filled with green tea sat on the desk. Deep dents on the seat of the chair indicated this was probably command-central for the lab. The rest of the workstations were only lightly used; perhaps manned only in the summer.

  From her pockets, she pulled out the food she’d rescued from the cooler: a foil package of steak, a plastic container of mashed potatoes with the gravy already mixed in, and a single squashed dinner roll. Hunger tied her stomach in knots at the smells of the food, but she placed the packages on the desk noticing, as she did so, a single sheet of paper resting on top of the keyboard. Cass tilted her head. In an environment as hostile and scientific as the South Pole, seeing paper that wasn’t already in a book was almost weird. Glancing guiltily over a shoulder, she leaned forward. She only meant to skim the contents, but when she saw the opening line, she picked up the paper and started to read. It was a printed e-mail.

  Jun , it began, this is a terrible thing to send you in the middle of your time down at Shackleton, but this isn’t something that can wait .

  With a growing feeling of dread, she read the rest of the page, although she knew what it was going to say. Jun’s wife was leaving him. Unable to wait the five more months until he returned, she had filed for divorce. The words of the e-mail expressed regret and even some reluctance, but the intent was clear and unmistakable.

  Sick for Jun’s sake, Cass carefully put the paper back. What kind of heartless bitch would drop that kind of bombshell while someone was trapped at the South Pole for nine months? She looked back at the sheet. And an e-mail ? She hadn’t had the guts to make a satellite call for something this important?

  Cass raised her head, flushed with guilt. If Jun wasn’t responding, there might be a good reason for it; he didn’t want to talk to anyone after getting news like this. On the other hand, he could probably use someone to talk to. She wasn’t exactly in Keene’s league, but she knew something about getting through tough times.

  She continued around the pedestal, feeling like a prowler. The stillness in the air made her jumpy, a kind of anxiety increased by the occasional surge in the distant wind as it suddenly shifted direction and went from the soft hiss she’d noticed to an audible assault on the building.

  Halfway around the circuit of the
antenna pedestal, she distinctly felt as though she were alone in the building. There had been a set of ECW gear in the changing room by the door that she’d assumed was Jun’s, but it wasn’t unusual to have extra nearby as a precaution. He could’ve been so dismayed by his wife’s e-mail that he had grabbed his set of gear, suited up, and returned to Shackleton to nurse his pain before Cass had even set out for COBRA.

  The idea made rational sense, but rang hollow to her. Jun was too much of a professional—everyone at Shackleton was too much of a professional—to let even the worst news interfere with his work. Had he cut out of a twelve-hour shift early to get some alone time in a different setting, he would’ve asked Anne or one of the other astrophysicists to take over. Maybe he’d lie about being sick or find another excuse, but he wouldn’t simply abandon his post.

  She was standing still, considering the idea, when she raised her head to look at the concave inner face of the enormous antenna. Most of the interior lighting was on the workstation side of the building, so the greater part of the structure was in shadow, giving the dish the appearance of a waning moon. Its surface was smooth, with a dull gray finish. Beneath the dish was a steel framework superstructure that acted as a support, but Cass guessed from the sight of hydraulics that it was also used to position the antenna.

  Her eyes followed the edge of the dish, running around the outside of it like a finger would trace the rim of a bowl, until her gaze stopped on the object that had drawn her gaze inexorably upward.

  The simple, final horror of what she was seeing was too much for her to process in the first few seconds. The collection of scientific debris and paraphernalia made Jun appear, at first sight, like simply another piece of equipment. It wasn’t until her eyes, following his body downward, stopped at his shoes—the small, battered sneakers with a hole in the toe—that the full impact of what she was seeing hit her and she began to cry.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  She kept her cool until Taylor reached for her arm.

  When, frantic and almost hysterical, she’d been unable to raise anyone on the building-to-building comm system, Cass had thrown on her parka and gear, then raced out of the COBRA building. Luck was with her—the wind had mercifully died down to a stiff breeze, allowing her to use the weak light from her headlamp, her own occasional footprints, and some dead reckoning to make her way back to the flag line.

  Some sense of self-preservation was screaming at her to slow down, but the vision of Jun’s body slumped against the curved frame of the antenna overruled everything. Gasping and crying, her tears freezing to her face, she tripped and jogged as fast as she could back to Shackleton, barely maintaining a hand on the flag line and, at some points, just keeping the nylon rope in sight so she could keep up her speed.

  She made it back to the base in fifteen minutes, banging open the door to Destination Zulu and shucking her parka and gear, dumping everything inside the foyer. She raced along the hall to the galley, following the noise of a party in full swing, wiping her face and pressing her hands to her face as she went.

  Cass burst into the room unnoticed thanks to the carousing. The lighting was a hellish patchwork of overhead bulbs that had been removed to make a kind of mood lighting and a single tiny disco ball turning forlornly in the center of the ceiling. Hip-hop music blared tinnily from speakers in one corner. Most of the crew was on its feet, dancing or shouting conversations at one another, happy to forget the fear and anxiety of the last few days. The heat was on, the electricity worked, and life at the South Pole was back on track.

  Cass scanned the room, frustrated, trying to find someone to talk to, someone to scream at. The smell of the food was nauseating now. Ruddy faces, drunk on good times or just drunk, mugged at her like fun-house distortions, the fumes of the booze on their breath making her want to vomit. Someone, Tim, maybe, made as if to steal a kiss. While bobbing away from him, she caught a glimpse of Hanratty, sober as a judge, watching the party from a corner of the galley as though observing a social science experiment.

  “Hey, take it easy,” someone said as she shoved her way through the crowd. A hand plucked at her shirt as if to slow her down. She chopped down and the fingers disappeared with a curse.

  There . From across the room, she could see Hanratty watching her. Something in her face must’ve alarmed him; he turned to Taylor, who had appeared almost magically at his side, then the two of them intercepted her before she’d made it halfway through the galley.

  “What is it?”

  “You son of a bitch,” she yelled, but the music was too loud for anyone but Hanratty and Taylor to hear her. “You and your fucking test just killed a man.”

  His dark eyes shone dangerously bright, shrinking and growing as the lights flickered. “What are you talking about?”

  “Jun. You know, Jun? The scientist?”

  “What about him?”

  Hands balled into fists at her sides, Cass barely kept herself from punching the man in the teeth. Faces began turning their way. “Harmless, polite, nobody Jun killed himself because of your little social science experiment and you’re not going to get me to follow him.”

  “Jun’s dead ?” For the first time since she’d known him, Hanratty looked shocked.

  “Yes, you cocksucker. He hanged himself from the middle of that great-goddamned antenna in the COBRA building. And you had Pete send me out there to find him.”

  Shaken, Hanratty turned to Taylor, who bent his head close to catch every word. The security chief’s eyes widened, then he jerked his head toward the door to the galley. Hanratty turned back to her. “Jennings, this isn’t the place to handle this. Let’s go to my office and you can debrief me fully.”

  “Debrief? Debrief? Jun is dead . He just committed suicide .” She clawed at Hanratty’s shirt, balling the fabric in her fists and screaming into his face. “You want a debrief? Here’s your fucking debrief. You’re through experimenting on me. You’re through experimenting on us. You’re going to call McMurdo now and we’re going to shut down this station tonight .”

  The last words came out as a shriek that she couldn’t contain. The accumulated suspicions and fear she’d been harboring, the residual guilt and paranoia, bubbled up and out in a scream. Some of the crew, seeing Cass grab Hanratty, stopped what they were doing and stood or turned their way or stepped closer. Someone turned the music off abruptly.

  “Nothing to worry about, everyone,” Hanratty said, his voice jerky. “Cass here has had a little too much to drink.”

  “I am not drunk,” she yelled, furious. She pivoted to address the room. “I just came back from COBRA. Jun Takahashi killed himself tonight.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Hanratty said. The galley was deadly silent, as though the air had been sucked out of the room . . . then the crowd erupted in groans and whispered “nos.” Anne buried her face in her hands. Carla and Colin, stunned, stood with mouths literally hanging open. Biddi and Dave, along with others who hadn’t quite understood the message, were asking what had happened; those who had understood began shouting simultaneously, demanding details from Cass, an explanation from Hanratty.

  “They’re using us like rats in experiments,” she yelled at the top of her voice, trying to convince the crowd on the strength of her voice alone. “This whole winter-over is all just a goddamned psych test. They’re using you, using all of us. Sheryl’s death was faked! The power outage was planned!”

  The words came out in a garbled rush, but enough of the message got through that people started yelling questions.

  “What?”

  “What did she say?”

  “What does she mean, Sheryl isn’t dead?”

  Hanratty, glancing at the outraged crowd, gestured. “Taylor, get her out of here. I’m going to have to handle this.”

  The security chief nodded and reached for Cass’s arm.

  The patronizing, take-charge gesture broke her last remaining thread of self-control. As the man’s fingers curled around her bicep, she scream
ed incoherently and drove the butt of her palm into his face. Taylor’s nose buckled with a crunch and blood exploded across his face. Shocked by the assault, the security chief looked at her in disbelief, then shook his head like a bull and swung.

  His fist caught her on the side of the head, a clumsy punch that stunned her but galvanized the onlookers. The room broke into full chaos, with crew members surging forward to try and separate the two. Taylor, not a popular man, had as many hands restraining him as Cass, although someone grabbed her from behind and shouted in her ear, “What the hell were you thinking?”

  Hanratty was shouting for Ayres and Keene to help him. Taylor, his face a nightmarish mask of blood and anger, struggled against the hands restraining him. The crew split into camps, with some trying to tug Cass out of the galley under Hanratty’s shouted orders, others trying to subdue Taylor, while still others tried to quell the panic and rage that had destroyed the night’s festive atmosphere with an explosion of violence and recrimination. Jun’s suicide seemed forgotten.

  While Ayres and Beth Muñez tried to pacify the crowd, Hanratty, Deb, and Keene bundled Cass out of the galley and down the hall toward the administration offices. Taylor followed them, cursing and holding a napkin to his nose. The procession was an awkward tangle of bodies and emotions, with Cass struggling against the three of them. The shouts and bellows of the uproar behind them faded.

  They dragged Cass through to Hanratty’s office, where she was shoved into a guest chair. Cass, caught between crying and snarling, bruised, simultaneously cold and white hot, seethed.