by David Wood
Sol walked down the ramp to the cement of the port to greet them, hand outstretched. She shook it, then introduced Jeff and Marla.
“Right on time,” Sol said. “So glad you could make it.”
“Jeff thinks this ship is an ice-breaker,” Slater said.
Sol grinned. “He’s right. There’s some capacity for research, which we’ll use to a certain extent, but mostly it’s to transport us to Alpha Base.”
“So that must be in Antarctica,” Slater said, one eyebrow raised.
Sol’s smile didn’t change. “Come on up and I’ll introduce you to the team. Everyone else is already here.”
He turned and strode up the gangplank. With a sigh, Slater followed. A few people milled around on deck, some of them obviously sailors getting the ship ready to depart. But a couple of others looked like soldiers, paramilitary or perhaps private contractors. They were hard-eyed and calm, but seemed somehow coiled, ready for action. They made her immediately nervous.
Sol led her down steel steps and along a narrow corridor into a large cabin. A bar ran along one side, with portholes above it, coffee and cookies at one end, alcohol and glasses at the other. In the middle of the space stood an oval table with a handful of people seated around it. Other than the door they had entered by, one other door stood closed at the far end of the cabin.
“All right,” Sol said. “Let me introduce the team. I’m the representative for SynGreene, obviously, but in terms of team skills, I’m your doctor. Officially, expedition physician.”
Slater was surprised. The man didn’t have the bearing of a medical professional at all. He was large and muscular, disciplined in bearing. She had thought he was almost certainly ex-military. Perhaps he was an Army doctor. He confused her, but people were endlessly surprising.
Sol indicated a large, heavily muscled, dark-haired man in olive green combats. This one definitely had the presence of a military man. “This is Anders Larsen, our geologist.”
The man stood to shake hands and Slater chided herself again for being wrong. Had she completely lost her ability to recognize people? She doubted it. Perhaps both Sol and Anders Larsen might be a physician and geologist respectively, but she was convinced they were ex-military too. Why did that bother her? Did it matter?
Next was a fit and strong-looking woman, quite beautiful, Slater thought, with dark olive skin and thick black hair in a loose pony-tail. This one, at least, had the look of a scientist and not a soldier, though Slater had the distinct impression the woman would handle herself well in a fight if necessary. She exuded confidence. “This is Jahara Syed, our biologist,” Sol said.
Slater shook the woman’s hand, smiling, glad it wasn’t a testosterone pool of a team. Always better to have more women around.
The last person at the table was a middle-aged man, maybe early forties, with neat brown hair and a chiseled chin. He wore new and expensive-looking clothes, had the air of money about him. Old family money, Slater guessed. He stood as Sol introduced him as Digby O'Donnell, expedition archaeologist.
“Call me Dig,” the man said. “Everyone does. Digby is the name all the oldest males in my family share, and father hates me reducing it to Dig. So of course, that’s exactly what I do.”
“Nice to meet you,” Slater said, suppressing a smile. She felt maybe her people radar was recalibrated now. The man’s accent almost had dollar signs falling off it.
“So there’s obviously a lot of extra muscle around coming along with us,” Sol said. “No doubt you saw some of them on deck, and our expedition head, and provider of all funds of course, is Arthur Greene, head of SynGreene. But he won’t be coming along. We’ll keep in touch with him and keep him informed as we go. But this is the core group of experts.” Sol stopped, frowning. “No, wait a minute, we’re missing one.”
The sound of a flush came from the closed door at the other end of the cabin, then the door opened and Slater’s stomach dropped, her face went cold.
“Here he is!” Sol said. “Of course, you know our diver and demolitions expert, Sam Aston.”
Slater’s jaw dropped, her hands trembled, as Aston approached, a nervous smile painting his face.
“Hi, Jo.”
3
Alpha Base, Antarctica.
Aston sat in his cabin on the ice-breaker feeling sorry for himself. His jaw still ached from where Slater had punched him. She had a hell of a straight right. When he had first emerged from the bathroom back at Cape Town she’d stared at him for a good ten seconds in utter disbelief, then turned and strode from the room. But she didn’t make it more than a yard past the door before she came hurtling back in and surprised him with a sock to the jaw that sent him reeling backward, seeing stars. As his head slowly cleared she had yelled at him, red-faced, something his ringing ears missed, then she stopped and stared again. As he hauled himself groggily to his feet, she said, “You let me think you were dead!” And the genuine hurt in her eyes had undone him.
He couldn’t blame her for her fury. He deserved every last atom of it. He had needed to hide, needed to avoid Chang, and get his life together again. He honestly believed she would be safer without him, but he knew, deep in his heart he knew, that he could have trusted Jo Slater. That he should have trusted her. She was honorable. She wouldn’t have sold him out. And he owed her better than this.
But at the time, head ringing from her blow, the rest of the team standing around agape, he had only said, “I’m so sorry. I know we need to talk about this, but please don’t walk away from this job. I know how much it means to you. To your career. If you can’t handle me being here, then I’ll walk away.”
Sol had tried to intervene and they had both turned on him, told him to shut up. Aston had warned Sol days ago that there would be fireworks. As soon as he had learned that Jo Slater was coming in, he had told Sol it was a bad idea to have him, Aston, along. In truth, he’d nearly backed out right then. But the knowledge she was coming had unlocked something inside him, releasing a torrent of guilt. He had to face her. It was time to come clean. Perhaps they could repair something of their friendship. If not, at least they knew they could work well together, if she could get past or ignore this betrayal. It was a lot to ask. Back there, in the meeting room, Slater had turned on her heel and stalked out. Aston told Sol to go after her and he had made himself scarce. Sol had convinced her to come back, reconvened the meeting, and collected Aston from the deck, where he sat in the sunshine rubbing his jaw.
Sitting on his bunk now, Aston sighed. What an idiot he had been. There was so much broken between them that he needed to repair, but she wouldn’t let him. Back there in the cabin in Cape Town he had seen something harden in her eyes, some shutter of defiance and self-preservation.
Back at the table, she had turned to Sol and said, “So, what’s this job?”
Sol smiled. “Each of you needs to sign your NDAs here, then we go to Alpha Base on Antarctica. You get the full story there.”
And that’s where Aston and Slater had come briefly together, both protesting stridently that being transported to the literal end of the Earth before knowing the job trapped them into doing it.
“You have a choice,” Sol had said. “Sign now, come along, and learn what there is to know. If you really want nothing to do with it, the ship will take you back again. But I’m sure you’ll want to be involved.” Then his face had hardened slightly and he’d added, “Besides, what choice do either of you really have? Your careers, your lives, pretty much depend on this expedition and what it can help you rebuild.”
Sol’s friendly veneer showed a crack then and Aston saw a hint of malice behind it. He had been affronted by the assessment, but also infuriated at its accuracy. Slater seemed to share his outrage. They looked at each other, him hopeful, her scowling, then both shrugged.
“Fine,” Slater said. “Give me the forms.”
She signed, had her cameraman and sound assistant sign theirs, then all three had left, Slater demanding to know where the
ir cabins were. For more than a week, the time that it took to reach Antarctica, Slater had managed to prove that a ship could be a wasteland if you wanted to avoid someone. She had taken her meals in her cabin, insisted her crew do the same, and had avoided Aston at every turn. If she saw him coming, she simply turned and went the other way. If he managed to get close enough to talk to her, to apologize, to beg her to have a conversation with him, she blanked him, icy, and left.
She had every right to her anger, and he had no right to force her to talk with him. He supposed she’d have no choice but to interact with him eventually. Or he would get back aboard the ice-breaker and insist they return him to Cape Town. He’d leave her to have the job, the money, the career she deserved. It was the least he could do, but he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
Sol’s voice over the PA interrupted his reverie, informing them that they were approaching landfall and Alpha Base. Whatever else, Aston was getting to see Antarctica. A rare experience. He headed up on deck to watch as the ship approached its destination.
Wrapped in a navy blue, fur–lined parka, Aston breathed deeply of the cold, salty air. The ocean all around them was slate gray under an overcast sky that merged seamlessly in the distance with the coast of Antarctica. As his eyes adjusted to the brightness, powerful despite the clouds, he picked out sharp edges of ice and snow, dark rock slicing through it here and there as the land cut into the sea. Then he noticed Slater standing at the rail not ten strides from him, her crew behind. The cameraman was Jeff Gray, Aston had learned, and the sound assistant was named Marla Ward. He got a lump in his throat, remembering Dave and Carly, counterparts to these two who had both died, horribly, at Lake Kaarme. What fate might await these unsuspecting folks? Then again, surely they had seen Slater’s Lake Kaarme documentary. Did they consider the whole thing a clever hoax too? Were they along for the money, assuming anything exciting would be added in post-production, which was the prevailing theory on the Kaarme film? He realized they had been filming a sequence, capturing Jo Slater, intrepid reporter, arriving at the Antarctic continent. Slater waved a cut and they hung up their gear. Slater glanced over and saw Aston watching and her jaw hardened.
“Jo, please,” he called over, not moving to get any nearer. “Can we talk?”
“What about?” she snapped. “The way you let me think you were dead? The way I tried to convince the world my film wasn’t a hoax without any backup from others who were there, because they’d all died? The way my career fell apart while you could have been there to help me? The way I grieved for you, you asshole!”
Aston swallowed, licked his lips, searching for anything to say. At least she was finally talking to him. “I’m sorry,” he managed, and it sounded weaker than saying nothing at all.
Slater turned and strode away around the deck, putting the bulk of the bridge tower between them. He wanted to follow, to try to smooth things over, but she was right. He was an asshole. What a total mess.
Jeff Gray approached him, smiling crookedly. The man had a way of being annoying, just by existing. The cameraman took a huge bite from a sandwich he had fished from his pocket and talked around the bulge of food in his cheek. “She’ll calm down. Give her time.”
Aston tried to ignore the enthusiastic mastication. “I don’t know. She’s got every right to be angry with me.”
Gray shrugged. “She loses her temper with me all the time, but she always comes around.”
“You worked with her for long?”
“A few months. I had my own production company but we... had a run of bad luck. The company was highly successful, just not profitable.”
Aston frowned. “How is that possible?”
Gray gave him a condescending smile, ruined by the crumbs on his shirt and the speck of mayonnaise clinging to his lower lip. “You’d have to work in television to understand. A producer friend bailed me out and hooked me up with a job on Slater’s show, supposedly until I could get a new project up and going. But, you know what happened to her show, right?”
“Yeah. Hopefully it’ll get resurrected here. With you on camera, I guess that’s a new start.”
Gray’s laugh was a high-pitched giggle, incongruous with his oversized body. “Talk about back to basics, huh? How the mighty have fallen. Still, I’m not complaining. I’m glad to be working.”
Aston wondered what this guy’s story really was. It seemed the man had glossed over some significant details. Marla stood back a little, listening in, but saying nothing. She flicked a little smile to Aston when he glanced at her and rolled her eyes. He smiled back. He had decided immediately upon meeting her that he liked her. She seemed like the sort of person he could get along with. He and Marla had enjoyed a few conversations on the voyage, while Slater wasn’t around. But the young sound engineer always seemed a little guilty, like she was maybe betraying Slater by talking to Aston at all. Regardless, he liked her. Smart and interesting. Unlike the generally unpleasant Jeff Gray. “Well,” he said. “I guess we’re all lucky to be working.”
“Was it all a bunch of crap?” Gray asked suddenly.
Aston raised his eyebrows, surprised the man would question him about that. “Kaarme?”
Gray nodded.
“No, it wasn’t. It was all true.There were no special effects in Jo’s film. We lost a lot of good people.”
“Whoa,” Marla whispered. In all their conversations over the past week, she had never brought it up. Gray just stared, momentarily motionless. Aston wondered if the man was trying to decide whether to believe him or not.
“Anyway,” Aston said. “When we get back from this trip, I plan to go public and make sure everyone knows that. If Jo will let me.”
“I think that ship may have sailed,” Marla said, coming to join them at last. “People pretty much have their minds made up. And you coming back, after all that stuff about you dying there? It’ll only make people more certain that Jo made everything up.”
Aston hadn’t thought of that and it annoyed him. She was dead right. It had been an olive branch he intended to offer Slater, to try to make things better. But maybe it would do more harm than good. What a mess. The phrase kept rolling around in his mind like a mantra.
“Oh well,” he said. “I guess I’ll ask Jo what she’d prefer I do. If she ever talks to me again.”
Marla laughed. “She’d like you to jump overboard into the freezing ocean, I think. Preferably with something heavy tied to your ankles.”
Aston smiled, infected by Marla’s easy confidence. “Yeah, I reckon you’re right.”
“I love your accent.”
Aston looked down at Marla, a good foot shorter than him, looking up through her sandy fringe. “Really?” She hadn’t mentioned it before.
“That wasn’t a come on, by the way. I just really dig it.”
Aston was slightly disappointed by that comment, but did his best to hide it.
“Australian, right?” Jeff Gray said, clearly trying to re-insert himself into the conversation.
“No, you damn Martian!” Marla said. She rolled her eyes again, grinning, and strolled off in the direction Slater had gone.
“I knew it was Australian or some other kind of British. You can’t really tell the difference between your accent, and South Africa or Scotland. All the same.” Gray made a single, sage nod.
Aston stood uncomfortably with Gray, a smile tugging his lips. Gray made to say something else, but was cut off when Sol’s voice came over the PA. “Team, gather your things, please. Meet by the forward starboard ramp in ten minutes.”
“Here we go then,” Aston said, and headed back below decks, glad to be away from Jeff.
They disembarked a little while later to meet a snowcat waiting for them. Like a large bus on four huge tracks that left ladder patterns in the snow. Aston was struck again by just how white everything was. Though he wore sunglasses to cut the glare, the uniformity of the landscape was disturbing.
“All aboard,” Sol said. “This is our rid
e to Alpha Base. It’ll take a little while.”
The journey was rough, and noisy with the engine roaring and the tracks crunching the ice and snow. They plowed through the seemingly endless, unchanging landscape and Aston felt a sense of isolation settle over him. The idea that the ship would take him back if he changed his mind shrank the further from the ocean they got. After an hour they rose over a low ridge and saw a much higher range of mountains in front of them, still a long way out. Some peaks seemed edged, almost geometrically regular.
Jeff Gray leaned over the seat from behind and slapped Aston’s shoulder. “Pyramids!” he declared, wide-eyed, his voice loud over the background noise. “Giant ones!”
Aston knew the legends. Only a year or two before, a screenshot from Google Earth had shown a set of near-perfect pyramids, partially covered by snow, and the internet went into meltdown. It turned out the “pyramids” had been discovered over a hundred years before and geologists hadn’t made much of it, kind of an open secret. But then Google sent the internet truthers into a new frenzy. But they were just mountains. Aston even remembered the type, because he thought it was a cool word. A nunatak was a peak of rock sticking out above a glacier or ice sheet. And the shape was apparently pretty common. Even the Matterhorn in the Alps, one of the most famous mountains in the world, bore the same geometry. But the internet’s gonna internet, Aston thought with a smile.
“What do you think?” Gray asked. “Aliens or ancient races?”