Antarktos Rising
Page 1
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Antarktos Rising
Jeremy Robinson
Published by Breakneck Books (USA) an imprint of Variance LLC. Originally published in trade paperback format.
www.breakneckbooks.com
www.variancepublishing.com
Copyright © Jeremy Robinson, 2007
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For more information e-mail all inquiries to: info@breakneckbooks.com
ISBN: 1-935142-00-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-935142-00-3
Visit Jeremy Robinson on the World Wide Web at:
www.jeremyrobinsononline.com
For Dad
Acknowledgements
My wife, Hilaree is the best kind of wife an author can have—supportive. Even when I couldn’t write well she was encouraging me, giving me the courage to continue honing my craft even when it seemed I was hopelessly doomed. And still, as I continue to grow as a writer, she is steadfastly by my side.
My daughter, Aquila, reminds me of myself as a child, full of adventure and mischief. She reminds me of what true imagination is and I sense our treks in the woods together are just the beginning of adventures to come. Thank you for getting this writer out of the office and back into nature.
My son, Solomon, is still the happiest baby I know. His ceaseless smile never stops infecting the rest of us. He brightens any day no matter how grim. Thank you for infusing me with your joy when I need it most…and when I least expect it.
To my friends and advance readers: Stan {AOE} and Liz Tremblay, Brian {AOE} Dombroski, Kathy Crisp, Sarah Valeri, Frank Ferris, Karen Cooper, James Somers and Tom Mungovan, thank you for your support, good times and prayers. My life would be far less exciting without you guys.
To Aquila Colligan (the girl whose namesake my daughter bears) for inspiring the unique look of this novel’s main character, Mirabelle Whitney, and for being the first kid to make me feel like a Dad, thanks Q!
To James Rollins, whose continued support of my novels and career is a gift beyond deserving. His time and opinions are always given freely and humbly. Thank you, Jim! Also, thanks to Steve Alten, Stel Pavlou and Scott Sigler—incredible authors all—for supporting Antarktos and providing the blurbs that grace its back cover.
Special thanks are due to Charity Heller Hogge at Mighty Pen Editing. Your edits make me look like a better writer than I am.
And finally to my family, who not only support my writing efforts, but are also my close friends, thank you. And now, so you can all say you’re in the acknowledgements…Dad, Mom, Matt, Sandi, Cole, Josh, Ariana and Eli, my immediate family, thanks for listening to my story ideas and always being happy to give feedback. Roger, Cathie, Aaron, Stasia, Jason, Katie and Alex, my in-laws; I may make jokes at your expense…but at least they’re funny…and thanks for having a sense of humor, even about the hard things in life.
And to the Vincents, my dear and beloved extended family, who in previous novels I’ve said are too numerous to mention…today is your lucky day! For the first time, thank you to: Mark, Beth, Heath, Eli, Chuck, Laura, Shawn, Andrea, Lily, Owen, Seth, Emily, Brady, Valerie, Darrell, Elizabeth, Isaac, Katherine, Jared, Patricia, Jim, Jerry, Catelin, Cliff, Marcia, Becky, John and Bev. Extra special thanks to Mark (who I killed in Raising the Past) and Katherine (Kat) whose fate lies within the pages of this book.
“The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.” -- The Dance of Life by Havelock Ellis
"If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it." -- Andrew Denton
“Antarctica represents the last great unknown of modern civilization. She abounds in secrets yet to be discovered and prizes yet to be claimed. She is a shrewd mistress who keeps her most private treasures hidden beneath a skirt of ice that I for one, would like a peek beneath.” -- Antarktos by Dr. Merrill Clark
"Great God, this is an awful place." -- R.F. Scott on Antarctica
“They are dead, they shall not live; Rephiam*, they shall not rise.” -- Isaiah 26:14
*Rephiam is typically, incorrectly, translated as “deceased.”
Prologue
“The only thing more dangerous than freezing to death out here is your jackass stubborn streak.”
“Aimee, do you know what your name means?”
“Of course. Love.”
“And do you know who else shares your name’s meaning?”
“No, Merrill, I don’t.”
“Freya. She was the Norse goddess of love and fertility.”
“If you’re thinking I’m feeling in any way fertile right now, you can go straight to hell. I bore you one child. I’m not going through that again.”
“The birth or the conception process?”
“Both, if you don’t clamp it.”
“You’re misinterpreting my remarks. I simply meant that Freya, love goddess of the Norse, lived in a very cold land. And despite the cold, she was loving . . . and fertile—ouch!”
“All your accumulated knowledge of the ancient world won’t change the fact that I am freezing cold, hungry, and five miles from camp.”
“Don’t hit me again. I could have chipped the fo
ssil.”
“Merrill, the limb has been preserved on this giant ice cube for millions of years. I think it will—”
“You know, it might not be that old. And you must have this confused with the Arctic. Antarctica is a continent . . . with land.”
“I swear, I will . . .”
“What?”
“The sky.”
“My . . . Where’d that come from?”
“Merrill?”
“Wrap up the fossil! I’ll get the other side. Fasten it tight!”
“There isn’t time! Merrill!”
“Aimee?”
“I can’t see you through the snow!”
“I’m here!”
“I can’t see anything!”
“Leave the fossil! Follow my voice!”
“What’s that noise?”
“Ignore it! We need to find each other!”
“Merrill, I—hmph!”
“Aimee? Keep talking so I can find you! Aimee? Aimee!”
Shift
Chapter 1
Anguta grew more terrified as each paddle stroke carried his bone-and-sealskin kayak across the unusually placid Arctic Ocean and closer to the whale. His knotted muscles shuddered in spasms, not from the cold but from the realization that his lifelong goal might finally come to fruition. At age fifty-seven, the idea of single-handedly killing a sixty-foot humpback and towing its carcass back to the village seemed a ridiculous task. And while this rite of passage had been a long time coming, his aging body didn’t feel up to the job.
Grasping a bone-tipped spear in his gloved hand, Anguta did his best to ignore the throb of arthritis attacking his knuckles and waited . . . patiently . . . for the leviathan to return to the surface. Three days of tracking and sustaining himself on cured salmon had taken him this far. If he didn’t take the beast this year, he would return to the arctic waters off the coast of Alaska to try again—and he refused to consider that option. This was the year. He knew it.
“Come to me, whale,” Anguta mumbled through his thickly scarfed mouth. “Come to me and I will honor you with a quick death.” Anguta knew the death would only be quick if he were lucky enough to pierce the whale’s eye and penetrate its brain on the first blow. Otherwise, his first strike would tether his kayak to the whale’s body and a day-long struggle between man and beast would begin. The tradition belonged to his tribe alone, and Anguta was the only man who had yet to achieve the task. He had tried every year since he was nineteen.
Anguta cursed himself for finding the largest humpback in the entire ocean. He had hoped to find a young calf, newly weaned from its protective mother, but instead he had encountered a large bull, perhaps close in age to Anguta himself.
The old man’s only consolation was that he was not cold. After years of fruitless arctic hunting trips, he had learned that technology could be useful. His outer layers were traditional Inuit—furs of caribou, bear, and seal hide. This covered him from head to toe, leaving only his eyes exposed. Underneath the furs was a combination of moisture-wicking fabrics and a military-grade thermal bodysuit. His eyes were sealed behind a face mask that not only warmed his skin, but by virtue of its tinted surface also dulled the harsh glow of bright sun on white ice.
Anguta let his eyes wander across the mirrored water which perfectly reflected the cloud-specked sky. He looked for any distortion that would reveal the presence of a rising whale, but saw only sky. His thoughts drifted with the clouds. He pictured his wife, Elizabeth, a French Canadian originally out of Quebec, feeding the dog team. Their marriage had been extremely unconventional at the time but was more common these days. Though shunned at first for his choice of wife, Anguta and Elizabeth’s marriage had produced five children and seven grandchildren, all of whom he now missed greatly and wished were there beside him, hunting the whale. His marriage and half-breed children had already broken so many of his people’s customs. Why not one more?
Chapter 2
Looking down at the canteen in his hand, Dmitriy Rostov wished that it was full of vodka instead of water. But his lust for the clean spirit’s warmth on his tongue lasted only a moment, a much shorter duration than it had only a year ago. Dmitriy, at the age of thirty-seven, had learned he was an alcoholic, a plague that claimed 45 percent of his Russian compatriots. It was said that two-thirds of Russian men die with a bottle in their hands, a fate Dmitriy had resigned himself to . . .
“Dima, come see this.”
. . . until he’d met her.
Viktoriya Petrova.
“Coming, Vika,” Dmitriy called as he picked his way across the stone-strewn shoreline of Vadim Bay. The bay was part of the Kara Sea, a remote region off the northern coast of Siberia which could only be navigated during mid-summer. The bay was a large U-shaped inlet with cliff walls on either side. Behind the rocky shore grew a forest of strong pines that creaked and swayed in the salty sea breeze.
Rounding a boulder, Dmitriy came face-to-face with Viktoriya; it was the closest their faces had ever come to touching, though still not quite close enough for Dmitriy. She was bundled in a red parka and thick snow pants. Even in the summer, the temperature at Vadim Bay, located hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle, was cold enough to chap the skin.
Surprised by Dmitriy’s sudden appearance, Viktoriya stumbled back and tripped over a loose rock. She yelped as she plummeted down.
“Vika!” Dmitriy’s strong and steady hand had sprung out before he could think about what to do and snagged the arm of her parka. Her descent stopped. Dmitriy thanked God he was sober. A year ago, she would have fallen to the rocks and he would have laughed drunkenly. He realized now that he would never have come this far without her encouragement. He had been headed for a very early retirement from the Ministry of Emergency Situations, but when Viktoriya had been assigned as his new partner, she had seen something worth saving in him. She had an iron will and whipped him into shape; when the reviews came in, his report showed a marked productivity increase. Now only ten days away from his fortieth birthday, he was a new man. His job was saved.
No. More than his job. He not only began to care for himself while on the job but also at home. Showering daily, brushing his teeth, wearing deodorant—all the good habits that Dmitriy had abandoned during his days as a drunk returned. The pale, oily-skinned, puffy-faced waste of a man had, under Viktoriya’s influence, changed to the core. He’d shed pounds, smelled clean, and when he finally began shaving again, displayed the handsome face of which his mother had once been so proud. It wasn’t that Viktoriya had changed his mind—she’d infected his heart. Like his person, he kept his apartment neat and nicely decorated. Just in case she came to visit. Just in case the day came that he would tell her everything he felt. He’d always imagined being at home, in the city, on that day. But here, alone, in the wild, he felt brave. Today would be the day.
He pulled her up until her cushioned body rested against his. They were closer still than ever before—close enough for Dmitriy to smell the subtle fragrance of her perfume. Rose.
“Vika, are you all right? I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Fine. I’m fine.” Viktoriya looked into his eyes and paused for a moment. Unspoken words flashed between them, stripped away his bravery, and transformed his mind into that of a nervous fourteen-year-old boy on his first date.
Chapter 3
From her perch high above the city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Mirabelle Whitney could see that the trip into town for an ice cream wouldn’t be worth it. Not for another few hours, anyway. Her royal red, nineteenth-century Victorian house sat atop Prospect Hill, the tallest hill in the seacoast region at two hundred feet. From her second-floor bedroom deck, she had clear views of downtown Portsmouth and the ocean beyond. To her left, she could see Kittery, Maine, across the Piscataqua River, and to her right she could see the thick tree lines of Greenland and Rye.
This was the view that kept her anchored. There wasn’t a single time of the year when the scenery dulled. Her eye
s lingered on the downtown again. The congestion that clogged the streets and spilled onto routes 95, 1, and 16 was due to the combination of summertime revelers and rush hour traffic.
Tonight, she thought. I’ll get ice cream tonight.
Whitney stretched her lean body, allowing her midriff to peek out from between her white tank top and khaki shorts, absorbing every ounce of warmth she could. She wasn’t a huge fan of the moist New England summers, but she knew warm summer air would soon be a thing of the past.
Sweet ocean air passed through her nostrils as she breathed deeply, took half of her long blond hair, and rolled it into a bun on the side of her head. A quick jab with a decorative chopstick she’d saved from a trip to Tokyo held the bun in place. As she rolled up the other side, a frigid breeze tickled the hairs on her forearms. She shivered.
Ocean breeze is cold today, she thought.
After finishing the second bun, she looked at her reflection in the window glass. She looked like an anime version of Princess Leia . . . a dark-skinned, nappy-blond-haired version. Whitney smiled. For the first time in a long time, she thought she looked good. Maybe it was the reflection of Portsmouth and the ocean in the background that caused her to cast a fairer gaze at herself. She wasn’t sure. But her brown skin and darker brown eyes hadn’t looked this vibrant in a year.
Whitney knew that while her outward appearances were improving, her heart was still healing. No amount of exercise or sleep could erase the torment she had endured the past year.
Cindy Bekoff, her friend and psychologist, believed Whitney’s upcoming trip to Antarctica was an excuse to flee from the pain. “There aren’t many places on earth more remote,” she had said. “You need to deal with your pain before moving on.”