Zodiac Station

by Tom Harper

  A shout spun me back around. Fifty metres away, Fridge stood in the open doorway of Star Command. His hair was wild and burnt away in patches; smoke smudged his cheeks. He leaned on a ski pole, but the pole was too short for his height so he listed like a drunk. His right leg hung bent at a painfully unnatural angle. I couldn’t understand what he was shouting.

  I still don’t know if I heard the shot. If I did, I thought it was just another pop from the burning Platform. I’d started to run to Fridge. He’d seen me and turned, dragging himself towards me, still shouting. Then he suddenly fell backwards. I thought he’d dropped his stick, or skidded on a patch of ice. It was only when I knelt beside him that I saw the hole in his jacket. Round as a ten-pence piece, straight over the heart, blood pumping out through the hole.

  I took off my hat and pressed it over the hole, trying to staunch the bleeding. It wouldn’t work. I tried anyway. Holding it in place, I looked up. The creature stood about ten metres away, rifle in hand. No emotion on his face.

  ‘What have you done?’

  Pharaoh looked as stricken as me. He ran over and grabbed the gun by its barrel, twisting it out of the creature’s hands. He must have let it go. Pharaoh threw the gun on to the snow and stared up at his creation. There were tears in his eyes. They rolled down his cheeks and froze in his beard.

  ‘What have you done?’ he repeated.

  Overshadowed by the creature, Pharaoh didn’t look like the unstoppable tyrant I’d always known. He’d grown small, an old man whom time had caught up.

  ‘Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man?’ said the creature.

  Pharaoh squinted up at him. ‘What?’

  He said it again. Shreds of black smoke blew around his face.

  ‘Where did you learn that?’

  ‘Careful.’ Louise had backed away. I didn’t know who she was speaking to. ‘Don’t do anything—’

  My hat was soaked through. I pulled off my neck-warmer and laid it on top. A drop of blood squeezed out from the hat and trickled down on to the Zodiac badge.

  ‘I made you,’ Pharaoh said. A trace of the old arrogance, holding out against a changing tide. ‘You owe me everything. Every cell in your being.’

  ‘And you? Does a father owe his son nothing, except the fact of his existence?’

  Pharaoh took a step back. ‘I’m not your father, Thomas.’

  ‘What, then? A god?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Why are you talking like this?’ said Louise.

  ‘My master? Am I your slave?’

  ‘Of course not. You’re—’

  Whatever life might be, it goes in an instant. One moment, Pharaoh was living, a being of infinite capacities. The next – nothing. Those big, disproportionate arms he’d created reached out and clutched him in an embrace. One arm went around his head, the other held his shoulders fast. Almost as if he was trying to comfort him.

  One arm moved; the other didn’t. The neck cracked. Pharaoh slumped to the ground.

  Louise screamed. I was too far away. Thomas picked up the rifle where Pharaoh had thrown it, aimed and fired. Blood sprayed from her neck and fell on the snow like rain as she twisted away and fell hard. Her body jerked as a second shot went into her.

  I moved towards her, but a hand on my shoulder spun me back. He held me there, his fingers digging into my collarbone.

  ‘Come with me.’

  Fifty-three

  Anderson’s Journal

  I struggled, of course, but I hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten in hours, and he had the strength of the damned. It wasn’t a fair fight. When I was down, he pulled open my jacket to take it off me – that really would have been the end. Then he saw the broken zip and thought better of it. He stuffed me in a sleeping bag, wound it up with rope, and tied me on the sled behind the snowmobile, packed in with the survival gear.

  Strapped down, I could only twist my head and watch as he carried the bodies to the gulch and dropped them in. Pharaoh, Louise, Fridge; one, two, three. When he came to Fridge, the creature stripped off his yellow coat and put on Fridge’s red Zodiac jacket. Fridge was big enough it just about fitted him.

  He walked past and disappeared from my field of vision. The sledge rocked as he mounted the snowmobile. The engine coughed into life; I gagged as exhaust fumes blew over my face.

  The smoking hulk of Zodiac Station slid by out of sight. I felt a see-saw bump as we crossed the shoreline. Then we headed out on to the ice.

  I can’t write much about the journey. While it was happening, it felt like one long moment stretching for eternity – and then when we stopped it seemed to have gone in a flash. Hours, I don’t know how many, navigating the sea ice: bouncing over cracks and ridges, backing up when an obstacle blocked our way, trying again. Once I opened my eyes and saw dark water rushing beside us, as if we were taking a scenic drive along a lake. The snowmobile heeled over on the slope, and for a terrifying second I thought we’d tumble in. Mostly, I kept my eyes shut, my head burrowed in the sleeping bag to keep off the wind and the fumes. Pressing myself flat against the sledge to minimise myself. Dematerialise. Bumping and jarring as the sledge whiplashed on the rugged ice. The knots that seemed so tight weren’t tight enough to stop me bouncing, bruising me deep into my bones. I waited for us to drop off the edge of the world.

  And then we stopped. It felt sudden, though everything feels sudden when you have no control. The engine cut out and the silence hit me like a brick. Just wind and whiteness.

  He dismounted, opened the engine cover and fiddled with the drive belt, the same way I’d seen Greta do it when we’d towed Hagger’s snowmobile home. Then he went round to the back and pushed. The machine slid obediently over the snow, towards a break in the ice a few metres away. It splashed into the water, breaking the sugary crust that had already begun to form, and sank. Was I next?

  He unloaded the sledge. The skis, the stove, the ration box and the tent. A strange replay of that first night with Greta, when we’d camped out and been found by DAR-X. Except tonight, the role of Martin Hagger (deceased) will be played by Thomas Anderson. The first of that name.

  He put up the tent. He unstrapped me and carried me inside, like a bear bringing his meal back to the cave. I rubbed my arms inside the sleeping bag to get blood back where the cords had numbed them, while he melted ice over the stove. He thrust the metal cup against my lips, his clumsy hands spilling it over my face. The water was so hot I choked, but I forced it down. I had to get my strength back. The snowmobile was gone. The nearest settlement was probably Svalbard – or maybe Nord Station, on the tip of Greenland. Hundreds of kilometres.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ I whispered.

  ‘You are my salvation.’

  He poured water into one of the orange meal packs and handed it to me. No spoon. I slurped it down. The pack said it was chicken with pesto, almost the most far-fetched thing I’d heard that day.

  I swallowed it all and asked for another.

  ‘Do you like it?’ he asked. Genuinely curious, like a parent weaning a child.

  ‘It’s better than nothing.’

  He squatted on the floor of the tent, watching me with those brown eyes that looked so much like Luke’s.

  He’s fascinated by the idea that he has a biological twin.

  I’ll kill him, I promised myself. If I had to wrestle him into the water myself, drown us both under the ice, I’d find the strength.

  ‘You keep a diary.’ Not a question. ‘I’ve watched you writing it. Through the windows.’

  What else did he know about me? All the time I’d spent at Zodiac, searching everywhere for answers, and really it was me who’d been under the microscope. Writhing like a worm.

  ‘I left it on the Platform,’ I lied.

  ‘You have a bulge under your coat, over your left breast.’

  I undid the Velcro holding my coat together and extracted my journal. Damp, where I’d fallen in the underground stream, but the Gore-T
ex had mostly kept it safe. I handed it over.

  Play along, play along. I told myself my chance would come.

  He gave me another meal while he read the first pages of the journal. When I’d swallowed it down, I asked, ‘What’s next?’

  ‘There is a coastguard ship forty kilometres from here.’

  ‘That’s a long way without a snowmobile.’

  ‘I am impassive to cold.’

  He had a strange way of speaking, this outsize man-child. Stiff and earnest, like someone attempting a foreign language. With only Pharaoh and Louise to talk to all his life, he must have learned most of his English from books. Old ones, by the sound of it.

  He went back to the journal. Inside the bag, I felt my pockets for any sort of weapon. A penknife, a screwdriver. Even a carabiner might do. I had nothing except a Bic pen.

  Thomas looked up. ‘Do you know what life is, Thomas? Is it the same as existing?’

  ‘I’m not a philosopher.’

  ‘Are you aware of endoliths? Single-celled organisms that inhabit the pores in between individual grains of rock, kilometres underground. They absorb nutrients from the rock itself; they obtain their energy from the heat of the earth. It requires all their resources simply to stay alive. Once every hundred years or so, they divide. One cell becomes two. And science says that is life.’

  ‘Technically.’

  He seemed to want more. ‘You know you are alive. From the day you were born, you never doubted it. I lack that comfort. I feel I am alive, but all I know is what is inside me. How do you feel?’

  ‘Pretty rubbish, to be honest.’

  He didn’t smile. I never saw him smile. Was that one of the untidy genes Pharaoh snipped out of his genome? Can you be human, if you can’t smile?

  ‘I think,’ he said solemnly, ‘life is taking your chances.’

  He read. I lay there, waiting for my chance. But it’s hard to launch yourself out of a sleeping bag. Every time I moved, he was on to me quick as a cat.

  I tried to force myself to stay awake. I wondered about Greta. Did she get out, after all? Did she make it back to Zodiac? Did she come down the hill thinking she’d was safe, euphoric with success, only to find a smoking ruin? Would she die of cold or starvation before the rescue party came? If they came. Perhaps it was better to imagine she’d died in the cave, snuffed out in a second by a million tons of ice settling.

  I thought about Luke. I imagined the creature escaping, making his way to Cambridge. Looking for his twin. I thought about finding him in my home, and what I would do to him then.

  But even the imagination fails in the end. Robert Frost was wrong: desire, hatred, the hot-blooded emotions – they’re no match for the cold. The world will end in ice. I began to drift. Each time my eyes opened, there he was, sitting beside me reading the journal. More than once, I saw him mouthing phrases, repeating them to himself as if studying for an exam. Sometimes he asked me questions. ‘What is the Overlook Hotel? Who is Willard Price? What is a Dalek?’

  And then I woke and he was gone. I scrambled out of the bag and crawled outside, just in time to see him clipping himself into the skis he’d taken from the emergency sled. He looked ridiculously large on them, like a circus elephant on a bike.

  ‘I’m coming back,’ he told me.

  I didn’t believe him. I threw myself at him, but he simply pushed off on his sticks and glided away into the fog. I couldn’t chase; I didn’t even have boots on.

  I crawled back into the tent. He’d left me the journal, at least, and I had a pen in my pocket. I picked it up and started to write.

  USCGC Terra Nova

  ‘Captain?’

  Sitting at the chart table in the wheelhouse, Franklin closed the book and looked up. Nearly at the end, only a couple of paragraphs left.

  ‘Ice is giving out,’ Santiago reported. ‘We should hit open water soon. Longyearbyen in seventeen hours.’

  ‘Good.’ Franklin pulled off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. ‘How about Anderson?’

  ‘You mean the real Slim Shady?’

  ‘The one who got away.’

  ‘Nada. Pilot says if you want him flying bigger circles, he’ll need more fuel. And overtime.’ Santiago hesitated. ‘He also said you should give him a quarter and take him to Foxwoods. You’ll get better odds.’

  Franklin rested his hands on the journal and stared out the window.

  What the hell is out there?

  ‘Call in the helo and wrap it up. No one can survive this place for long.’

  ‘What about Anderson, sir? The one we do have.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Do you think he’ll live?’

  A line from an old movie ran through Franklin’s head. He had to smile.

  ‘Who does?’

  Anderson’s Journal – Final Entry

  Writing in a hurry, numb fingers clutching pen. All alone. Scribbling.

  He’s gone out, he may be some time. Said he’d bring help – rescue – think he lied. Knows that much about being human.

  He’s gone to the ship. Thomas Anderson, sole survivor of Zodiac Station. They’ll take him to England. Home. He’ll have a life.

  Life means taking your chances.

  I thought I would have one. Maybe I did. Missed it.

  Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice …

  On the rocks.

  We took risks, we knew we took them. Things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint.

  I wish to register a complaint.

  I love you, Luke.

  Sounds from the ice. Groaning, throbbing, like a living thing. Breaking up? Almost like an engine. Footsteps. A bear?

  Here I am. A speck of life adrift on the ocean, huddled for survival on my frozen raft. Clinging to hope, until the ice melts.

  Acknowledgements

  The Arctic can be a slippery place. For helping on my travels and keeping me out of crevasses, literal and figurative, my profound thanks go to Nick Cox of the UK Arctic Research Station at Ny-Ålesund, for sharing a fraction of his immense knowledge of Arctic science; Sara Wheeler, for telling me how to get to Svalbard; Doug Benn and Griet Scheldeman, for a crash course in glaciology and glacier caving, and an unforgettable night drinking whisky in Longyearbyen; Tom Foreman, who led the way through ice caves and abandoned mines; Stefano Poli and Yann Rashid of Poli Arctici, for three extraordinary days on the ice; the Kennedy family, for essential provisions; Karoline Baelum at the Svalbard Science Forum, who painted vivid pictures of science in the field; Jon Hawkins and Danny Davies, for lending me warm clothing; Sarah Hawkins, for introducing me to the right people; Miriam Iorwerth for sharing her amazing photographs; and James McIntosh, who miraculously knew everything I needed to know, and was always happy to help. Kevin Anderson gave me sedatives, antidepressants and head injuries whenever I wanted them. And an evening in the pub with Des Roberts-Clark provided me with more understanding of genetics than a month in the library, plus a fistful of plot ideas.

  I’m grateful to everyone at Hodder for doing what they always do, which is running the best operation in publishing: Anne Perry, Kerry Hood, Jason Bartholomew and all their colleagues. Oliver Johnson steered the book with his usual ineffable genius; and Caroline Johnson scraped off the barnacles with a razor-sharp copy-edit. Jane Conway-Gordon watched my back and muttered dire warnings about polar bears.

  For every day working on this book in the Arctic, I spent twenty at home. For those, and all the time in between, I’d like to thank my wife, Emma, for constantly supporting me despite some of my wilder scientific ideas (she has a professional interest in genetics); and my sons Owen and Matthew, for encouraging and distracting me in equal measure. One day, I promise, we’ll go to the North Pole.

  All the science in this book is based on actual research. In some cases I may have exaggerated or misappropriated the facts either to serve the story or to simplify complex ideas, or from sheer ignorance. In every case, those
distortions are all mine, and no reflection on the real scientists who told me about their work.

  For anyone who’s curious, Utgard is located about halfway between Svalbard and Franz Josef Land, and further north, but you won’t find it on any map. Likewise, Zodiac Station combines details of various Arctic and Antarctic bases, but the base, its personnel and its parent organisation are entirely fictional.