by Jonah Buck
“First of all, I’ve had more time out in the field than you ever will. I know what I’m doing. Second of all, you can eat a burlap sack full of dongs.”
“You’ll be thankful to work with us someday. Assuming you don’t go out of business or get yourself killed in some spectacularly stupid fashion, first.”
“We’ll work for you when hell freezes over.”
“Well, I’m stuck here with you, and I don’t know if you’ve looked outside recently…”
Denise was about to say something snide when she heard footsteps approaching from the hallway. She closed her mouth, and her teeth clicked together. An uncomfortable quiet fell over the group.
Who the hell did Metrodora think she was? She only knew two members of St. George’s Squires, Metrodora and Butts McGee, and they were both unpleasant. Assuming what she’d gathered about the organization as a whole was accurate, they had a lot of resources and experience at their disposal. She might lack the resources, but that didn’t mean she was some sort of naïf about surviving dangerous situations and creatures, though. Nor did it mean she was ready to jump at the chance to join their organization. Better funding would be nice, but it wasn’t worth it if everyone she had to deal with was a bastard and a half.
She’d quit sport hunting because she couldn’t take it anymore. She’d grown up with her father on the plains and grasslands, learning everything there was to know about the great animals of the savanna. She knew how to track elephants and lions, and she knew how to follow the great, wandering herds of grazing animals that moved across the lands. She knew where their vital organs were and what bait to use to lure predators into a kill zone and which watering holes were the best to lurk near.
She’d learned all that, but the things she hadn’t really understood were what caused her to give the life up. It had taken a tour group of Belgian dentists out for a hunt to show her that. They’d been tracking a group of elephants for days, and Denise had picked out a particular older female from the herd that would be a good target.
Her tour group had different ideas, though. Sometime when she wasn’t paying attention, they’d decided that they all wanted an elephant. When she gave the signal, the bellow of gunfire nearly knocked her over. Half the elephant herd went down in the span of a couple of seconds. The earth shook as their huge bodies collapsed under their own weight, and they smashed into the dust.
The image that always stuck with her, the one that gave her the cold sweats when she tried to go hunting after that, was the baby elephant she saw trying to stir its mother with its trunk. That baby elephant had already had one of its ears blown off by a stray round, but it was desperately attempting to rouse the great bulk of its mother as it stood on the suddenly red soil.
When the hunters started reloading, Denise had yelled at them to stop. They didn’t stop. They raised their guns and started firing again at the fleeing elephants, issuing a second ragged volley. She punched one of them out, knocked a tooth out in fact. It hadn’t done any good, though. They’d wiped out nearly the entire herd, including the baby elephant standing next to its downed mother.
That was the thing she couldn’t stand anymore. That moment of relative stillness before the second round of gunfire, the moment she saw that young elephant, had taught her something she hadn’t learned on the trail before. The animals she was hunting weren’t so very different from her in some ways. Maybe they didn’t have clearly articulated thoughts, but they knew distress and pain and fear. Before it had all been a game, the thrill and the triumph of the hunt, of besting a wily opponent with skill and finesse. But the sudden realization that she was inflicting pain for sport, removing something living from the world for no better reason than idle amusement, that realization had hit her like a burst of thunder. Predators maimed and killed because they needed to in order to eat. She’d been doing it in order to decorate her office.
She’d already rearranged her life once because she didn’t want to deal with the responsibility of making the world a worse place. Telling Metrodora and the Squires to shove it where the sun didn’t shine wasn’t such a big matter compared to that.
She liked her new gig a lot better. It managed to utilize some of the skills she’d developed, and she got to make a positive impact on the world. Even though her business was geared toward monsters…or aberrant zoological specimens or whatever Metrodora called them, most of her work so far had been a little more down to earth.
A few hundred people every year were eaten by lions or crocodiles. Man-eaters were a genuine problem in some parts of South Africa, especially once the creatures fully developed a taste for human flesh. She didn’t mind hunting creatures like that because they were a menace to society. Getting rid of them actually did people some good.
There were creatures more dangerous than lions and crocodiles out there, though. She’d only found herself on her current career path after some unpleasant circumstances forced her to reacquaint herself with the art of survival. Sometimes she still had bad dreams about those times. Flashing teeth. Crashing through the jungle. The sound of leathery wings flapping across the night sky. The veldt burning as dark, seething figures shambled forward. Cornelia’s missing leg.
It was all a kaleidoscope of blood and screams. She’d learned something valuable from those times, though. Her skills could be used for something good. She could help people who needed aid against the creatures of the night. That didn’t mean she needed to use those skills helping a bunch of jerkoffs, though.
Denise would do this for St. George’s Squires this time because she’d already agreed to do so. Curiosity and excitement and the promise of a nice payment had temporarily eclipsed her better judgement. But once she was back in Cape Town, that was the end of it. She’d do the bare minimum to establish if something dangerous had come from that meteorite or not, and then she wouldn’t raise another finger for them.
Well, maybe one finger in particular.
She did her best to wipe the sour expression off her face as the sound of footsteps in the hallway grew louder. Turning around, she glanced out at the entrance to the mess hall to see who was coming.
Dr. Benoit walked past. When he noticed the three of them, he stopped. “Is everything alright?”
“We’re fine. Just eating some dinner before getting some sleep. We want to be well-rested for some exploring tomorrow,” Cornelia called. Hopefully, the mention that they were going to bed soon would help shoo Benoit off.
It didn’t. “Ah, that is good thinking. You have had a long journey down here. I would imagine that must be tiring. Mr. Adams is coming back from the Sulaco with some of the crew. They have promised to start a poker tournament with us at some point. We could use some fresh excitement around here.”
“Sounds fun. We’ll turn in soon, though,” Denise said. She turned back around to face away from Benoit, hoping he’d get the message and leave them be. Part of her wanted to finish her verbal scrap with Metrodora and the rest of her just wanted to get back to business as quickly as possible so she could get away. Both parts made her want to snap at Benoit.
“But of course. Say, what do you think of our marvelous cuisine?” Benoit seemed determined to hover around for another few minutes.
“It’s, uh, pretty good,” Denise said, stirring her food around a bit more.
“Thanks for trying to shield my feelings, but believe me, I know it’s awful. Nothing is fresh down here. It all has to be packaged thousands of miles away. Dreadful,” Benoit tsked. He glanced back and forth between the three of them. “Very well. I’ll bid you good evening in case I do not see you again before you turn in.”
“Good night, Doctor,” Denise said as Benoit sauntered off in the direction of the research center.
Denise turned her attention back to the matter at hand. She glanced at Metrodora but decided not to say anything else. They’d end up stabbing each other with forks if they got into it again, and she didn’t want to try explaining that to the station’s physician.
“Alright, we know Delambre Station is very new. Unusually new, even,” she said when the sound of Benoit’s footsteps faded away. “Does that give us anything concrete, though? It seems a bit odd that they’d rush to build a station just to study a meteorite, but that’s not really proof that there’s something nefarious out on the ice. What else have we got?”
“Did you notice they have a gun locker near the entrance to their science quarters?” Cornelia asked.
“No,” Denise said.
“It’s built into the wall. It’s a bit hard to see because it’s partly blocked by a gurney at the moment. I never saw it open, so I don’t know what’s actually inside. Maybe they repurposed it to hold something else. Could be sensitive equipment. Could be guns. No idea.”
“Alright, that’s something. Maybe,” Denise said.
“And the men here,” Metrodora said. “They’re all relatively young. Military age. You would expect at least a few older, esteemed professor-types around at a brand-new facility like this. These are all relatively young men, though.”
“Meaning?” Denise had noticed too, but she didn’t want to let Metrodora off the hook so easily. She was going to have to show her work.
“It’s impossible to draw any conclusions from that, but it does strike me as unusual. Uniformity is suspicious. It implies there’s some criteria beyond simply academic skill.”
“Might just be the environment. They didn’t want to post anyone down here that might be too feeble if there was a problem.” Denise was still feeling petty and probably would have tried to refute it if Metrodora had said it was a little chilly outside.
“And have you noticed how several of them seem to lurk behind our shoulders from time to time. Like Benoit just now,” Metrodora continued. “They seem interested in keeping an eye on us.”
“I’m not sure how unusual that is,” Cornelia said. “They haven’t seen any new faces in quite a while. Let alone women. I’m surprised we don’t have half of them hanging off us like leeches right now.”
“But what I find unusual about that is—”
Denise cut Metrodora off. “The thing that I find the most peculiar was the warning that we should stay away from anyone we run into outside. Even if conditions are bad, hell, especially if conditions are bad, I don’t know why we would come all the way back here in case someone needed help.”
“Crevasses? Unstable ice?” Cornelia volunteered.
“Maybe. Still, it’s odd. I’m not sure it gets us anywhere, though. We’ve got a number of odd little elements that don’t seem to go together.” She thought again of the gurneys and their restraints parked outside the main entrance to the research wing to the building. “But we don’t have anything that points in any particular direction.”
“I think it’s all probably pretty innocuous,” Cornelia said. “At least as far as our concerns go. The French government dispatched people here as part of some political gambit with research benefits attached. They get a permanent foothold in the area, and a better claim on the continent. The scientists here are eager to spend some time around new faces, but they’re supposed to be secretive about their research, so we get a bunch of things half-explained to us, and we’re turning it into something more suspicious than it is. It could all be realpolitik, with the meteorite as a convenient catalyst for a power move.”
That sounded fairly reasonable to Denise. Maybe it didn’t explain absolutely everything about what it was going on here, but she was only supposed to look out for a fairly specific set of problems. So long as there weren’t any little green men with bug eyes wandering around the place and attacking people, it didn’t matter much to her one way or the other what the French were up to down here. It would pique her curiosity, and there was nothing so fun as rampant speculation, but it wasn’t really her problem. They were probably studying that meteorite and half a dozen other projects out in the research wing.
“There’s still something I don’t like,” Metrodora said.
“What’s that?”
“About the men stationed here. How many of them have you seen? I count about ten in total.”
“Yeah, that’s about what I’ve seen. Somewhere in that ballpark.”
“That’s what’s been bothering me. And the ages again. According to the records we acquired, the French government dispatched a large number of biologists down here. Close to sixty. Enough to leave this mess hall crowded. And those were just the ones we know of. There could have been more. The oldest one we know of was seventy-two years old. Have you seen any of those people here?” Metrodora asked.
Denise realized this was the point she’d cut Metrodora off from making a minute ago. “Sixty scientists?”
“At least. Those are just the records we had passed to us. Could be more. Probably more, with support staff to consider.”
Denise was pretty damn sure there weren’t sixty people at this station. Even if the majority of them were devoted to their work, they would have to come out of the research wing to eat sometime. Plus, Benoit hadn’t said anything about there being more people here. The way he’d run off introductions had implied that she’d met most everyone except for a couple of people in the lab. That was maybe twelve people total. Maybe twelve. Only about twenty percent of the total number of people Metrodora was saying should have been here.
“Alright. Quick tally of early conclusions.”
“Some things don’t add up,” Metrodora said. “I don’t like what I’ve seen so far.”
Denise nodded. “Cornelia, you seem less convinced.”
“When I was taking my nursing classes, there was a saying the instructors liked. If you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras. When they said it, they meant when we saw symptoms consistent with both a bout of flu and some ultra-exotic death plague, we should start out assuming it was the flu. I’ll grant you, this whole situation has some fishiness to it, but it’s not really inconsistent with the French trying to flex some diplomatic muscle, either.” She looked at Denise. “You want to grace with your opinion, glorious leader?”
“I’m still kind of agnostic about my conclusions so far,” Denise said.
“Boo. Cop out,” Cornelia stage shouted.
Denise continued. “There’s something weird going on here, but I don’t think we have any real proof about what it might be. We certainly don’t have anything to connect it to that meteorite we’re here about. If the Squires are worried some sort of creature got loose down here, I’m not sure there’s anything to worry about. The researchers seem to have control of the station.”
Denise shushed her last words down to a whisper as she heard more footsteps out in the hallway. She twisted around to see who was coming again. There were two sets of footsteps this time.
A second later, Fletch and Poole appeared in the doorway. Fletch glanced in and noticed the three of them. “Hey, I asked if we had permission to borrow a plane tomorrow, and Dr. Benoit gave the okay. We’ll have ourselves an air tour once the wind abates a bit.”
“That’s great. Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“By the way, we’re going to set up a poker tourney in here pretty soon. You three want in?”
“We’re good. Thanks. How are things on the ship?”
“Doesn’t look like we’re going to get blocked in by ice. At least not tonight, anyway,” Poole said. “That whaling ship is still somewhere nearby, too. They’re keeping their distance, but they’re sticking to this general area. Other than that, not much going on out there.”
“Alright, good luck with your cards, then. We’ll see you in the morning.” Denise did her best to shuttle them off before turning back to Denise and Metrodora. “Right. It sounds like we don’t have a lot more time before this place starts filling up. Cornelia, any last thoughts?”
“I’ll play the devil’s advocate here. Yeah, there’s some stuff that doesn’t seem quite normal, but that doesn’t mean that anything’s actually wrong. Those biologists could have been shipped down here for a very
short period of time, maybe for a specific whale migration event or something. If they aren’t here now, it might just mean they’re already on their way back to Europe or something. Benoit and his team might just be the skeleton crew. I don’t think we can jump to any conclusions here yet.”
“Fair enough about jumping to conclusions. We don’t have a lot to go on right now. Metrodora?”
“We need to break into the research wing of the building.”
“Wait. Hold on. What?”
“It’s important that we start eliminating some possibilities. We’re not going to do that just sitting around in our rooms and this mess hall. We can’t rule out much of anything right now. Maybe this expedition is a big waste of everyone’s resources. Maybe it’s not. I intend to find out one way or another. That seems like the most direct route.”
“Slow your butt down for a minute. We haven’t exhausted all our options yet. Not by a long shot. We’re going to have more chances to investigate outside tomorrow. Fletch just said he can show us around from one of the planes. That could tell us something.”
“Getting into the laboratories could tell us something right now.”
“No. We’ll only do that as a last resort, something for in case we’re really stuck for answers. If we get caught doing that, it’ll be hard to squirm out of it. If the French are really serious about this place, they won’t take too kindly to having us wandering around in there. Maybe Cornelia is right and this place is supposed to be a stepping stone for the French military. For all we know, they’re developing weapons in there. If we get in there and find something like that, they’re going to think we’re spies. We play this smart.”