Aesa stares out the bank of windows. Rounding the end of the mobile research station, they give her an expansive view far into the darkness. But the windows also spill light onto the dark ice shelf around the station. She has turned the big lights off to see what’s out there. She thought she saw something and she has been staring intently for minutes.
Sure enough, what she thought might be a wolf turns out instead to be a white bear in a thick coat of fur. He saunters around the edges of the patch of light and approaches the trailer timorously, his eyes made red by the station’s reflected glow. Aesa stands to get a better view, knowing the bear is watching her. He pauses and a gust of wind ruffles his fur. He tilts his head. Is this making a statement she wonders? Finally, he coolly wanders off.
Aesa cannot imagine how anything could be so far north. She is re-immersed in her work when she later hears the bear roar from far off. It makes her look up. She scans the arctic sky, immeasurably deep and black and star studded.
To the North Aesa sees night shining clouds near the pole, noctilucent, crystals of glowing ice, at a very high altitude, the mesosphere, fifty miles up. Once rare, now more frequent, they signal changes to the atmosphere, a kind of environmental warning.
Aesa weighs the coincidence of the bear and the night clouds, dismissing it out of hand. She checks indicators on the sat array spread out over the snow next to the station. She notices the artifact of a transmission of a type that is unknown to her. It appears in a list of simultaneous downloads.
Curiously, she sees that it requires her action. Pulling it up, a note is attached, addressed to her, Aesa Halvorsen, of Svalsat. At first, she is amused that someone has hacked her name, the name of perhaps the most remotely located person in the entire Northern hemisphere of the planet.
She reads the note, which makes her somewhat less amused, and takes a step further. She examines the attached material, finding it mostly encrypted. Unfamiliar with the form of encryption, she guesses it must be military. There are only a few parts of the massive content that are readable to her, and they’re not much really. But they’re enough.
If she sends it to the sat somebody is going to be looking for it there. That much is clear to her. She pushes her chair back and pauses.
It’s not a treaty violation because it’s not obviously military, despite the form of encryption. She can say she had no idea what kind of encryption it was. She can say that she thought it was scientific, but she recognizes that such reasoning will probably not wash with KSAT, the company she works for. She takes a few more minutes to check everything again on the monitor before her, considers, and then reconsiders, her options. Finally, she keys it on, just as the sender requested, all the while taking a deep breath. As she watches it upload, Aesa’s big breath turns into a long sigh.
She reaches for the radio mike and presses the push to talk button.
“Svalsat One. Svalsat One. This is Svalsat Two. Over.”
She waits a bit and then repeats her message. Finally, she gets a response.
“Svalsat Two, this is Svalsat One, go ahead, over.”
She knows this is Kristian.
“I’m thinking about calling it quits. Can you pick me up? Acknowledge. Over.”
“No problem. We were heading out anyway. Be there shortly. Over.”
“Missing you. Over.”
“Wilco. Me too. Out.”
She begins to pick up, getting things back in order, having to do some cleaning in the process, all the while packing up her stuff. A half hour goes by before Kristian calls. He has left Svalbard station, is on his way in a snow cat, and wants her to set off a flare to help him zero in on her location.
Aesa grabs her coat and a parachute flare, taking off the end caps as she steps out the door. The wind is down so she figures that the flare shouldn’t drift too far. She holds the plastic tube high, pulls the safety pin, and then presses down on the trigger at the bottom. The rocket motor erupts and seconds later the flare launches, rapidly achieving a height of at least a thousand feet in a fast and powerful woosh skyward. The parachute pops and the flare goes limp, waving back and forth as it lazily descends the velvet sky, illuminating a large area with its red hue. She knows Kristian will be able to see it easily. He should be halfway between Svalbard and her position. As Svalsat is less than thirty miles away, there is even a good chance they can see it from there.
Aesa waits. A few minutes later she repeats the firing of another flare. It takes less than a minute before it too falls, extinguishing itself, pssst, in the snow. She wonders if her bear is watching all this from somewhere out there.
When Kristian and Daniel show up, they help Aesa load her things aboard the snow cat. They don’t bother to lock up. Aesa takes one last look at the mobile station and the night shining clouds luminescing over the pole. She can’t wait to get back to Longyearbyen and then Oslo, out of Spitsbergen and then to Norway. She knows she may have to disappear for a while. She thinks the Caribbean might be good this time of year. Heck, as far as she is concerned, it would be nice any time of year.
Chapter 84
On Fire Page 83