by Tim Curran
Nothing.
He repeated the message seven times.
Royes knew there would be nothing. Even weird atmospheric and meteorological conditions cleared eventually and MacWeather was saying it was clear out on the plateau. They should have been reading. Either they had equipment failure or . . . well, it wasn’t Royes job to speculate.
He got on the phone. “Mike? Still nothing.”
“Okay,” said the voice. “NOAA has been informed. Give Polar Clime a call, patch me through to Hopper. Somebody’s got to go out to Polaris and check and Clime’s the closest.”
“They have choppers at Colony, don’t they?”
The voice laughed. “Yeah, well, let’s leave those spooks out of it.”
4
POLAR CLIME STATION
“YOU HEARD?”
When Coyle got back to the dome, Frye was waiting for him just inside B-corridor. He had that look in his eyes that Coyle had learned meant trouble was at hand. Right away, he got a sinking feeling in his guts.
“Heard what?” Coyle said, pulling off his wool face mask and trying to work some heat into his numb cheeks.
“You know that NOAA field camp out on the plateau?”
He remembered what Harv had alluded to. That sinking feeling got worse. “What now?”
“MacOps hasn’t heard from them in like four days. SAR time. Guess who pulls it?”
But Coyle knew. Clime was closest and in direct logistical and tactical support as far as MacOps was concerned.
“Hopper will send a crew in the morning,” Frye said.
“You signing up?”
“Hell no, not unless I’m ordered.”
Coyle knew that he was. He just had that feeling. He had the experience and Hopper would want him. There was dread in his belly at the idea of going, yet he knew nothing could keep him from it.
He said nothing for a time. His mind was filled with images of that place out on the ice shelf—stark, grim, and forbidding. Maybe it was nothing but radio failure, technical bugaboos . . . yet he could not bring himself to believe it. Not this year. The bad omens were everywhere and he was honestly starting to believe in things like that.
“If I go it’ll get me off the search party for a day,” he said. “Let’s face it: Cassie is gone. We’ve been over this place like six times now. She’s just . . . gone.”
Frye nodded. “Any ideas?”
“None. She was at the Callisto party. Gwen had another party in her room. I was there. Zoot, the Beav, Slim . . . a few others. Cassie didn’t show, Gwen said, because she wasn’t feeling so good. Drunk. Wanted to lay down.”
“And, poof, she’s gone,” Frye said, snapping his fingers. “No radios signed out. Horn says all the ‘Cats and Skidoos are still in the garage. If she wandered off, she must have left the flagged path. Maybe fell into a crevasse. It happens.”
“She’s been on the Ice for three years . . . why would she do that?”
“People do funny things when they’re drunk.”
Coyle’s eyes were still tearing from the cold, his nose running. He sniffed. “If we find her, she’ll be a corpse. Hate to say it, but you know it as well as I do.”
Frye let out a sigh. “Got people spooked. First those Brits from Hobb and now Cassie here. Wait’ll they hear about the NOAA camp. That’ll get ‘em going.”
“Sure.”
“Could be a coincidence. Could be.”
“I’m starting to not believe in coincidences,” Coyle told him.
He didn’t go into anymore detail about what he was hinting at, but he didn’t need to because Frye read him just fine. The man nodded slowly, said, “Nicky, I was on the radio this morning with Art Fisher over at Pole Station. You know Art, right?”
“Fish? Sure. Got drunk with him once.”
Art Fisher was a mechanic at Pole Station. Pole was several hundred miles from Clime on the polar plateau, sitting on a two-mile thick mound of snow and ice at the site of the Geomagnetic Pole itself. Fisher and Frye were friends. They both liked to refurbish classic cars and they got together on the radio once a week and discussed the internet auctions they had going on, how hard it was to get a decent quarter-panel for a 1970 Charger or a ‘68 Buick Riviera.
“What about him?” Coyle said.
Frye just shook his head which meant it wasn’t going to be good. He grabbed one of Coyle’s arms with a grubby hand. “They had shit go down over there yesterday you ain’t gonna believe. Real bad shit.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, Art said they had this beaker up there, this geophysicist name of Lewton. Funny sort. Spent his time over in the Dark Sector there playing with that Viper telescope trying to figure out whether the universe was expanding or compressing, probably just scratching his nuts mostly.” Frye looked around like he was keeping an eye out for enemy agents. “So this Lewton starts getting real, real funny, you know? He stays over to the Sector and won’t mix. Gets real paranoid. Starts watching everybody real close. Well, somehow he got himself a little Colt pistol over there. Maybe he bought it from one of the ANG pilots. Who knows? Well, yesterday, he walks into the dome and shoots this other Beaker named Rome about six, eight times. Kills him. Now get this. He says Rome wasn’t human anymore. That something had taken him over. What do you think of that?”
Coyle just stood there. People vanishing and now murder. Christ.
The ball just wouldn’t quit rolling here. He felt suddenly very tense, wondering if he’d ever truly relaxed since he’d heard about those megaliths over in the Sentinels or the mass disappearance at the Mount Hobb Station. Again, he had that sense that this was just another piece in one godawful puzzle that was slowly coming together. Right before the Callisto feed he’d had a funny feeling dug deep into him that something big and especially bad was about to happen. But the Callisto thing wasn’t it. That was just another puzzle piece. Something else was coming, something was taking form all around them and he didn’t want to think of what it might be.
5
EMPEROR ICE CAVE,
BEARDMORE GLACIER
MARCH 4
BIGGS WAS LISTENING TO the chatter coming in over the HF radio from Scott Base on Ross Island as he scratched another day off on the calendar above the transceiver. The Kiwis were really squawking over there. Apparently, twice in the past three days they lost power all over the station. They were scrambling to figure it out and had even brought in techies from McMurdo.
Like somebody threw a big switch, the guy on the box was saying. Didn’t make sense.
Biggs grunted. “Welcome to Antarctica,” he said.
The screen of his laptop told him it was a brisk -40° out on the Beardmore, but a reasonable minus ten inside the Emperor and a comfy +69° in the Hypertat where he was resting his rosy ass.
Just inside the mammoth mouth of the Emperor Cave, there were four high-tech Hypertats set up. And maybe Biggs didn’t respect a lot about the NSF or the beakers that cracked the whip, but he absolutely respected the technology.
Minus forty out there. Brrr. And to think dickheads like Robert Scott and the boys had tented out in that weather. Jesus.
The Hypertats were really something.
They were essentially high-tech Quonset-shaped huts with their own generators, water supplies, and plumbing facilities. Inside they looked like something from Star Trek with their banks of instrumentation, computer workstations, modular living areas and fold-out bunks. When you were inside, you could almost forget you were down in Antarctica and maybe fantasize that you were deep in space or living in some futuristic Martian colony. The Hypertats had kitchenettes and bathrooms, HF and sideband field radios and INMARSAT satellite hookups for voice and internet. They shook a bit when the wind blew through the cave mouth, but they were securely bolted to the ice and had backup systems to keep you warm, fed, and alive to the point of redundancy.
God bless the Hypertats.
Outside the Hypertat and the Emperor was the bleak and unforgiving territory o
f the Beardmore Glacier: a white wasteland of ice falls, pressure ridges, black razorbacked glacial moraines, and buckled crevasse fields sunken in a river of rippled blue ice. Only the highest frost-rimed mountain peaks broke through the ice cap. Drift blotted out the sky and the subzero winds were like knives. It was a merciless, savage, and frozen void.
About as close to hell as you’d ever want to go.
But in the Hypertat, inside the cave . . . livable.
The chatter from Scott Base faded out and the airwaves were suddenly dead. Not a peep from any of the stations on the band, nothing out of MacRelay, just static. Biggs had already put in his daily call to MacOps to let them know they were still alive and breathing up on the Beardmore. And Dryden’s lower team down in the depths of the cave had already called in.
Nothing to do now but twiddle his thumbs.
Play some solitaire on the laptop.
In the back, Beeman was sleeping on his bunk and Warren had his headphones on, playing X-Box with that same blank expression that he went through life with. Fine and fine. Beeman was Navy, a lieutenant-commander, ramrod stiff with protocol shoved so far up his ass he could not breathe. And Warren? Nobody knew what Warren’s thing was. He handled maintenance. Like Biggs himself, Beeman ran him. Yes sir, no sir, whatever you say, sir. Warren wouldn’t have said shit with a mouthful.
Biggs, being the way he was, tried to stir up some revolt, but it just didn’t work. “Hey, Warren,” he’d say when Beeman was outside. “How do you like our commander? How do you like him riding you all the time?”
“I just do what I’m told,” Warren would tell him. “That’s why I’m here.”
No, you couldn’t get a rise out of Warren.
Everything was the same with him. Biggs, on the other hand, openly despised Beeman being in charge. The whole Emperor Project was Dr. Dryden’s thing, but Beeman was the guy who made sure everything kept running and he treated Biggs like a common swab. Always on him. Always watching him.
Biggs wanted that kind of shit, he would’ve joined the Navy.
When he joined The Program, he’d been hoping for something different. He wanted to get away from the petty bullshit of the world. Antarctica. Frozen realm of white mystery. Sure. What he got was the petty bullshit of the world in a tight, condensed form replete with half-ass bureaucrats like Beeman.
But Antarctica was different.
If you liked the perpetual dark of winter. The overcrowding. The cold. The dryness that split your skin open. The isolation. The fucking desolation. Then, yeah, it was different.
Biggs wasn’t crazy about the cold, but sometimes he got just plain shack-happy in the Hypertat and had to take a stroll outside in the ice cave, just for a breath of fresh air.
And, man, was it fresh.
Fresh the way air could only be in the coldest, windiest, and driest continent on the planet. You didn’t dare step out there without your ECWs on and Vaseline shoved up your nose. The dryness not only burned your face and split open your lips, it liked to play hell with sensitive mucous membranes like your nasal passages. The moisture in your nose would freeze on contact with the glacial air and crack open . . . along with the tissues in there.
Just some of the things you had to remember at the bottom of the world.
Dress for the cold. Shove petroleum jelly up your nose. Lotion your dry skin daily. Keep the humidifier running. Make sure you sign out and take an emergency radio when you leave the Hypertat. And never, ever wander out of the cave into the Antarctic winter night alone. The winds and cold and blackness caught you out there, you were fucking toast.
You had to remember these things.
Just like you had to remember there was a pecking order. The beakers were the big wheels and you had to kiss their asses on a daily basis and snap to when some jarhead like Beeman started working that bug up his ass.
You didn’t . . . well, then you’d end up like Biggs.
A guy who was not especially liked because he couldn’t kiss ass properly, was not a team player, and had a real big mouth on him. And, according to Beeman, was also lazy, shiftless, and a general disappointment.
“Well, I sure as hell feel bad about that, Lieutenant-Commander sir,” Biggs would say, paging through one of the fuck books he brought along. “Here I thought me and you were just starting to hit it off.”
“You better watch that mouth, Biggs. Swear to God, you don’t wanna push me.”
“That’s a roger, Big Chief. Consider my mouth being watched.” Biggs would flip a few pages, never even looking at Beeman so Beeman would know that he was unimpressed with him, with the Navy, with the whole set-up. Not even worth paying attention to. A fucking gnat. And when Beeman stomped off, bitching about stomping civilian ass, Biggs would call out: “Anything else, El Kahuna?”
“Shut your mouth! How about that?”
And Biggs would salute him with a very limp-wrist. “Over and out, Big Chief.”
And that, of course, made the red, white, and blue in Beeman’s starched Navy-issue shorts run like water. And he would start reaming Biggs’s ass on regulations, protocol, and NSF policy. The whole time he was being read out Biggs would keep up a running commentary on what he was looking at, which tits he liked and which he didn’t and how the Lieutenant-Commander sir, ought to consider getting a set of tits in the spring, help him channel that aggression.
And that basically was their relationship.
If there wasn’t blood in the offing by spring, Biggs was going to be real surprised.
Bored with solitaire, he surfed the web, checked out some porn and some NHL stats, then decided to send an email to his brother in Nevada. He knew that the NSF spooks read every single email coming out of the stations and field camps so whenever he sent one, he made sure to mention something in there that would cast Beeman in a bad light. Something that would make his superiors cringe. Today he wrote his brother how he thought Beeman was gay, how he kept hitting on him and suggesting there was room for one more in his sleeping bag. Beeman would’ve vapor-locked if he read it, knew the shit Biggs was up to.
After that, nothing much to do but scan the bands, listen to Beeman snore, and check the forecast from MacWeather, think about what a long, long winter it was going to be and how he had volunteered for this shit. Back home, it was spring. Pretty soon the college girls would be on the beaches in their thongs. And while that was happening, Biggs would be marooned on the Ice with fucking Lieutenant-Commander Beeman, the poster boy for brainwashed military assholes everywhere.
He sighed.
He looked up at the map of the Beardmore Glacier on the wall. A black pin marked the location of the Emperor ice cave. It sat in a massive crevice known as Desolation Trough that cut nearly a half a mile into the glacier and looked much like a jagged scar on the topographical map. Desolation was capped off by the Cerberus ice falls, the peaks of Mount Wild and Mount Buckley rising in either direction.
“Desolation is right,” Biggs said under his breath. He just wished something would happen.
Anything.
But out here in the ancient ice . . . what possibly could?
6
POLAR CLIME STATION
IN THE SUMMER THE stations were crowded.
You had two or three people living in rooms that were barely large enough for one. At a big station like McMurdo, which was more along the lines of a city, you had actual dorm buildings like you did at a college and dorm rooms were assigned by who you were and what you did, how many years you had on the Ice. And sometimes, of course, by who you knew and who you blew.
Generally, the administrators and high-ranking scientists got the best accommodations followed by your veteran contract workers. The fingies, new guys, got whatever the others didn’t want. At a small station like Polar Clime, things could get extremely crowded in the summer. Not only did you have dozens and dozens of contract personnel, but beakers from all over the world studying terrestrial microbiology, paleontology, geology, glaciology, meteorology and
upper atmospherics.
A madhouse.
But winter was different.
The station ran with a skeleton crew. In the summer there were over a hundred people at Clime, in the winter less than twenty-five. So even low-ranking fingies like Slim had their own rooms, such as they were.
When Coyle went to see Slim, he went over to E-corridor. His own room was over in B on the other side of the dome. He’d never been to Slim’s room, but he knew he’d find it, all right.
And as soon as he cut down E all he had to do was follow his ears.
Slim was a metalhead and he had his music cranked up to a deafening level so that the floors were thumping with a staccato beat. He didn’t listen to the heavy metal of Coyle’s misspent years, stuff like Black Sabbath or Judas Priest or Iron Maiden, but newer, cutting-edge brain damage thrash like Arch Enemy and Slipknot, some of which had lead singers that sounded like Satan vomiting his guts out. Coyle had once asked him if he ever listened to AC/DC and Slim admitted he’d never really heard of them. Which only went to show that even heavy metal had its generation gap.
Coyle pounded on the door and then pounded again.
Slim’s door didn’t open, but one down the way did. Harvey stuck his balding, round head out, his face stuck in a perpetual grimace as usual like he’d just bitten into a turd and couldn’t get the taste out of his mouth. “Nicky!” he said. “Would you please tell that idiot to turn that garbage down? How am I supposed to concentrate here with that devil-music blasting? I’m writing a letter to mother.”
“I’ll talk to him, Harv.”
Harvey’s door shut without the slightest reference to the Freemasons. Maybe Harvey had decided that Masons weren’t into metal, which meant that Slim wasn’t one of them.
Slim answered the door with a dopey look on his face like he’d just smoked up some good bud. He wore an Atreyu sweatshirt, the sleeves pulled up to display all the skin tags, many of which he’d given himself.