Zodiac Station

by Tom Harper

  The yellow pipe Anderson had been looking at sat in the corner in a tray. The pipe looked pretty ragged, peppered with holes like someone had blasted it with a shotgun. Maybe Malick’s story, the bug munching on his drill rig, had something in it. Hard to see what that had to do with Mine 8. Maybe nothing.

  Anderson arrives, Hagger dies. Couldn’t be coincidence. I wished I could have had a look at the notebook, but I didn’t find it. Nothing in the fridge except a can of Coke. Nothing on the benchtops except instruments, and a paper printed off from about ten years ago. Anderson, Sieber and Pharaoh, ‘Pfu-87: A Synthetic Variant on the Pfu-polymer Enzyme and …’ blah blah blah …

  The door crashed open. There’s only one person who bangs a door that hard at Zodiac. I turned around and saw Greta behind me. All dressed up in her coat and snow pants, and the cutesy hat with the strings down the side.

  ‘How you doing?’ I asked – mainly because I could see she looked furious.

  ‘If one more person tells me that the Internet’s down …’

  ‘The Internet’s down.’

  She made a kind of growling noise. Without really thinking about it, I found myself backing off a couple of paces.

  ‘I was looking for Tom,’ I said.

  ‘He’s working in Star Command.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was interested in astronomy?’

  She gave me one of those Greta looks that says it’s none of your business and she could care less anyhow.

  ‘Help me fix the Internet? You’re the radio man.’

  ‘Sure thing.’

  You’re the radio man. What did she mean by that? Maybe nothing. Or maybe she was thinking of that big antenna strung across Vitangelsk, and the cable carrying the signal to Mine 8. Her face, like always, could have meant anything.

  I got on my gear and headed for the laundry room. The temperature dropped about fifty degrees the moment I went in. There’s a hatch in the ceiling that opens on to the roof. It stood wide open, with a ladder going up and Greta’s boots on the top rung.

  ‘Shut the door,’ she told me.

  ‘Already have.’

  I climbed up after her and clipped in to the safety rope she’d fixed. The storm was still kicking around, and the roof was an ice rink.

  ‘Safety is job number one,’ I said, wriggling into the harness. Hard to do when you’re wearing three pairs of pants.

  ‘Too many accidents,’ Greta agreed.

  ‘Quam must be shitting bricks.’

  That got me one of her twitchy half-smiles. Though I never knew with those if it was what I’d said, or if there was something else completely going on inside her head, and the smile just happened to pop out at the same time. Often, with Greta, I felt like I was the joke.

  I’d been at Zodiac a month and I still hadn’t worked her out. She wasn’t gorgeous, exactly, but she had something that meant she stuck in your mind. Like a lyric in a song that makes no sense, you spend hours trying to think what it means. Oftentimes, I found myself wondering what it would be like to fuck her. And it’s not what you’re thinking. Like I said, I’d only been there a month.

  ‘You think Quam seems stressed out at the moment?’ I tried.

  Dumb question. ‘Always.’

  We crawled across the roof to the main satellite dish that gave the Internet hook-up. You didn’t have to be a mechanic, or even the ‘radio guy’, to see what had gone wrong. The dish was dinged up like someone had taken a hammer to it. Worse, the feedhorn hung off of its bracket like a broken arm.

  ‘You won’t get that working any time soon,’ I said.

  ‘There’s a spare in the store.’

  I didn’t really hear her. The feedhorn’s mounted on a big steel bar bolted right through the back of the dish. I was trying to imagine how big a piece of ice you’d need to break it like that. I remembered the noises coming through my office roof the night before. Almost like footsteps.

  ‘We need to shut down all comms to do the installation,’ Greta said.

  I rubbed my eyes with my mitt. No comms. No plane. One by one, our links to the outside world were getting cut off.

  Greta must have thought the same thing. She nodded to the safety rope.

  ‘Better hold on tight.’

  We unscrewed the broken dish and lowered it to the ground. Between us, we carried it to the shop. Halfway there, she turned and looked back. Her nose wrinkled up.

  ‘Those oil drums shouldn’t be so close to the Platform. It’s a fire risk.’

  ‘Not a big risk at twenty below.’

  ‘I’ll move them.’

  ‘Can we do it later? This dish is killing my arms.’

  Inside the shop, everything was shipshape in that obsessive Greta way. Weirdly, it reminded me of being in a church: the light coming in through the windows, the dust in the air, the smell of burning. The broken-down snowmobile under the tarp could have been a coffin set out for last respects.

  We laid the dish in a corner. Greta went to the store to dig out the backup; while I waited, I eyed up the tools on the wall. She had everything there. A couple of big sledgehammers, for example, that could make a nasty dent in a piece of steel.

  Maybe I was crazy. I’d heard the wind outside last night. If anyone had gone out on that roof, he’d have been blown into the mountainside at a hundred miles an hour. You couldn’t stand up, never mind swing a hammer.

  Even if you wore a safety line? Greta had looked pretty nimble up on the roof just then.

  She came out of the store empty-handed. As much as you could ever tell, she seemed puzzled.

  ‘No joy?’

  ‘It’s not there.’

  I guess I didn’t look too surprised. ‘You know how pissy this is going to make everyone,’ I warned her.

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t even tell me.’

  She stepped towards the door – and found me blocking her way. I wanted to get some things straight while I had her alone.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘You knew Hagger as well as anyone.’

  She gave me an Oh, please look.

  ‘Did he ever say why he brought Tom Anderson up here?’

  ‘Ask Tom.’

  I didn’t like her tone. ‘I’m asking you.’

  I was standing closer to her than I’d realised. In the sunlight, I could see the tiny soft hairs on her cheek. I had a powerful, stupid urge to kiss her.

  ‘You and Tom seemed to hit it off pretty fast,’ I said. ‘Soon as he gets here, you’re racing off together. Maybe you wanted to trade Hagger in for a younger model. Maybe Hagger got in the way, and Anderson got rid of him.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  Something inside of me snapped. I only meant to grab her, but suddenly, not even thinking, I was kissing her, pressing my mouth against hers. She struggled, but I had her pinned against the wall. And I was hard.

  I tasted blood in my mouth. The bitch bit my lip. I pulled back, ready to slap her. That was what she wanted. Before I knew it, she’d grabbed a crescent wrench from its hook on the wall and swung it against my elbow. Christ, it hurt.

  Greta was breathing hard, her cheeks red.

  ‘Is that what you did to the satellite dish?’ I gasped. I wanted to hit her back, but there wasn’t anything in reach. And she was holding that wrench like a morning star.

  ‘Get out,’ she said.

  Truth is, I was so hopped up on adrenalin, I didn’t know what I’d do next. If I’d slap her, or get her down on the floor and fuck her, or what. I stared her in the face.

  ‘If you ever do that again, I’ll feed your balls to a seal,’ she said.

  I left.

  I knelt down in the snow outside. My legs were trembling; I wanted to puke. I blamed it on the pain in my elbow. I didn’t know what came over me in there. She was dangerous.

  I rubbed snow on my face to cool off. I took some breaths. It felt like a jackhammer was pounding against my skull, harder and harder, until I clocked it was coming up from the sky. A helicopter flew over the stati
on: big, ugly-looking thing with a double-bubble nose. Must be DAR-X heading home. Too high to see if Malick was in there waving.

  I went over to Star Command. The crucified Buzz Lightyear smiled down at me as I reached the caboose. I went in without knocking. Anderson was inside, still wearing his coat and hat, looking at a readout on a monitor. Three machines that looked like laser printers sat on a tabletop, humming and clicking.

  ‘What’s going on?’ My voice sounded loud and fake, even to me. Did he look guilty – or just surprised someone had burst in on him? I admit, everyone looked guilty to me that day. Someone had to be.

  Anderson waved a plastic Baggie at me. All I saw inside was water. ‘Analysing Hagger’s samples.’

  ‘I heard they were bullshit. He doped the data.’

  He didn’t ask how I knew. ‘I don’t think he did. If you look at the notebooks, he knew the samples were dodgy but he didn’t know why. That’s what he was looking for.’

  I didn’t buy that for a second. Hagger knew exactly what he was doing. I pointed to one of the machines.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A mass spectrometer. It gives you the mass of the elements in a sample, so you can guess what’s in it.’

  ‘And this one?’

  ‘DNA sequencer.’

  ‘I didn’t know we had those here.’

  ‘Hagger must have set them up.’

  Far away from where anybody could see them. They looked good, but who knew what was inside them. ‘Do they work?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  Was he covering for Hagger? Time to show a little more leg. I pulled out the sheet of paper and showed it to him.

  ‘I got another reading on that interference. Looks like it’s coming from near Vitangelsk.’ I watched him like a hawk as I fed him the bait. If it meant anything, he hid it well.

  ‘Up by Mine Eight,’ I threw in.

  He read the numbers. ‘It’s the same as before.’

  ‘If only we could unlock it,’ I deadpanned. ‘You know, with a key.’

  His eyes flicked up at me. Only for a second, but my senses were white-hot and I caught it. He knew. He fucking knew.

  ‘Why did Hagger bring you here?’ I asked

  I thought he didn’t hear me – the DNA sequencer had started to spit out some data, and he was copying them down in his notebook. A string of letters, G’s, C’s, A’s and T’s, repeating themselves in random combos. Not so different from the numbers coming through the antenna, if you thought about it.

  ‘Have you ever been to New York?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure. Empire State Building, NBC tour, all that shit. Why, you want some tips?’

  Just then, Kennedy walked in.

  ‘Quam’s gone out to check one of the bear cameras.’

  It was all I needed to hear.

  Thirty-two

  Eastman

  I was in that office so fast, the balls on the Newton cradle were still swinging. Tick, tack. For once, my luck was in: he’d forgotten to log out of his computer. His email sat wide open on the monitor.

  I sat on the edge of his chair and scrolled through his in-box, the messages that had come through before the Internet went down. For such an anal guy, he didn’t file as much as he should. It was all in there together, and with everything that had been happening, there was a lot of traffic. Stuff from the honchos at Norwich HQ, from his ex-wife, from the flight contractors. I read through it as fast as I could.

  Please update your Health and Safety report, in light of recent events, as a matter of urgency.

  The BSPA Twin Otter has been delayed in Port Stanley by mechanical failure and will not now be available until next Wednesday.

  The consultation on Zodiac Station’s function in the new Polar Research Funding framework will conclude in June. Please ensure your submission is completed by then.

  Will you be home in August? I’ve got to go to a conference in Copenhagen, and it would be helpful if you could take the girls.

  Please demonstrate how your research program fulfils Value for Money criteria, in conjunction with the new Delivering Excellence in Research initiative.

  There was £500 missing from your child support payments this month.

  If he had to deal with that bullshit all day every day, no wonder he was so tense. And reading between the lines, it looked like money was a problem – maybe his job was even on the line.

  I checked my watch. Fifteen minutes down – and there was no telling when Quam might come back. Reading through everything was like picking up pebbles looking for diamonds.

  I had to try smarter. I found the search box and tried a couple of terms. Vitangelsk. Mine 8. Radar. Not really that smart: a six-year-old would have known to use code words. And another five minutes gone.

  I listened out. All personnel were still confined to base, so the Platform was loud with noise: talking, laughing, footsteps. No chance of picking out Quam when he came.

  The last message I’d read was still open on screen.

  There was £500 missing from your child support payments this month.

  Nothing relevant – but it got me thinking. First, I thought how much it would suck to have Quam as your dad. Then I wondered if he was short of cash – and what he might do for money.

  I put a new term into the search. A single character: £. It brought up a bunch of results, but not as many as you’d think. There’s no money on Utgard.

  I scanned through them. Mostly budget stuff, a few questions about maintenance. And then this:

  We have received a grant of £100,000 from Luxor Life Sciences Corporation in respect of work at Zodiac. Please advise which fund to credit.

  I thanked God and Bill Malick that I’d been paying attention. They came here a couple years back, just when we set up Echo Bay … looking for a place to build a gene bank. They’d looked around Mine 8. And here they were paying an awful lot of money to Quam.

  ‘What the hell?’

  Time was up. Quam stood in the doorway, like he’d just walked in on me fucking his daughter. He looked terrible. I’m not judging – I mean, most of us at Zodiac looked like Deadheads – but Quam was usually so pristine. He combed, he shaved. Now, he had red-rimmed eyes, crazy hair and stubble like an axe-murderer.

  And a face so red I expected to see a fuse sticking out his head. He slammed the door, crossed the room, and would probably have hauled me out of his chair by my collar if I hadn’t have jumped up.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing here?’

  No point trying to bluff. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been doing here?’ I said. Adrenalin had me pumped; I was feeding off of his anger.

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘Luxor Life Sciences mean anything to you. Huh?’ I emphasised it with a jab of my finger that almost took his eye out. ‘They’ve damn sure been paying you enough.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Bullshit you don’t. What about Mine Eight? And Hagger – you want to tell me what you did to him?’

  ‘Are you trying to imply—’

  ‘Shall I get Jensen in here? He had a hell of a story to tell me, how you called him in to fly you to the Helbreen last Saturday. He said you came back alive. He wasn’t so sure about Hagger.’

  All the colour drained out of his face. ‘What Hagger did threatened everything we’d achieved at Zodiac. I had to stop him before he ruined everything.’

  ‘So you killed him.’

  His whole body shook. ‘No.’

  ‘And then you took his notebooks up to the cabin and burned them to cover the tracks.’

  He didn’t try to deny that one. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I’m smarter than you, Quam. I’ve been up to Mine Eight; I’ve seen the antenna at Vitangelsk. Did you think you could keep all that secret for ever?’

  He didn’t have anything to say to that. Couldn’t even look me in the eye. He stared past me, at the Newton’s cradle on the table. His fingers
twitched, like he couldn’t stand that it had stopped, he had to set it going again.

  I picked it up and slammed it on the floor. The frame cracked; the balls came loose and scattered across the room like a pinball machine. Quam flew at me, but I was quicker. I grabbed his wrists and twisted so hard his eyes watered. Damn, it felt good.

  ‘How long have you been working for the Russians?’

  ‘Russians?’

  ‘Did Hagger find out? Or maybe he was part of it and got cold feet?’

  ‘Hagger had nothing to do with it.’

  We were both shouting – and the walls at Zodiac are made of spit and toilet paper. I tried to bring my voice down before someone came in.

  ‘How about Anderson and Greta? Were they helping?’

  It didn’t quiet him down any. ‘You’re mad,’ he shouted. ‘Russians, radars, murders … you’ve read too many spy novels.’

  ‘What was in those notebooks you burned?’

  He scratched the stubble on his cheek. The skin underneath was chafed raw, like he’d been doing it a lot.

  ‘Hagger was a fraud. His results, his samples, everything. I did him a favour.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘I had to protect Zodiac. Do you know how badly Norwich want to shut us down? This would have been the perfect excuse. Scandal, questions in the press, demands to do something.’

  ‘Very convenient.’ I pointed to the email on the screen. ‘How about Luxor Life Sciences?’

  ‘They gave us a grant.’

  ‘I bet they did. Did they also tell you to take out anyone who poked into what was happening up at Vitangelsk?’

  ‘I don’t …’ He was struggling to speak. He sat down hard in his chair. ‘I don’t know who they are. They’re planning to do something with Mine Eight but they haven’t got all the funding. They asked me to keep an eye on things.’

  ‘Is that why you snoop on other people’s emails?’

  He had the audacity to look hurt. ‘That’s for morale. If anyone’s not happy here, I have to be the first to know about it.’ He tapped the papers on his desk. ‘It’s all in the contract.’