Ice Station Death

by Gustavo Bondoni

  Before anyone could object, he walked back out into the eternal gloomy light. Even the snow would be bearable, he thought, if only it would get dark.

  Chapter 15

  Camila watched the group approach. She clenched and unclenched her hands as she saw the light tan uniforms and the guns. More soldiers. Sailors from the Irizar, probably sent out to help Javier.

  They hadn’t spotted her yet. In fact, they were looking in the wrong direction because Camila had stopped to study the body of the pilot, and therefore she was in the landing field, well off the direct path between the icebreaker and the base which the men had followed. She’d spotted a dark blotch in the snow as she walked towards the ship—which was where she thought Javier had gone and had decided to detour and see what the mound was, and the trip had paid off. The pilot was long dead, but she’d been happy to discover that the man carried a serviceable knife, wickedly serrated on the side opposite the razor-sharp blade. It was a strange thing for a pilot to have, but she was grateful to find it—the man’s pistol, after all, had been abandoned in the snow far away.

  Then the wind had picked up, and she’d hunkered down, using the slight mound of the pilot’s body to keep at least some of the snow off her. It allowed her to avoid having to close her eyes.

  “You’re keeping me safe even now,” she told the dead face. “First, your gun saved me, and now this. You’re the only man who ever gave me so much.”

  The pilot had nothing to say to that, so Camila continued.

  “You know another thing I like about you is that you’re a man of few words and a lot of action. Of course, if we were together, you’d have to leave the service and get a less ridiculous job. Everyone in the military is a fascist, you know.”

  Silence met her, and she snuggled closer. If it hadn’t been so cold, it would have been perfect.

  “You’re not like Javier. That guy is a bastard. He stole my dream and took it over, and he didn’t bother to tell us that we were walking into a nest of monsters. Look where he got us. You’re dead. So are all my students and the scientists. Those Swedish girls might have looked like models… but they were on track for a Nobel. Now they’re just food for some lizard thing. That shouldn’t happen in the twenty-first century, and it’s all the fascists’ fault.

  “So you’ll need to find a different job. Well, if you were alive, you would. Yes. I’m not crazy, I know you’re dead, and that you can’t change jobs no matter how much I want it.”

  The wind died down slightly. “Look. There are people coming. People! Are they here to take us back to civilization?”

  She stared at them. Disappointment filled her.

  “No. They’re sailors from the Irizar. Just another branch of the oppressors marching us towards their own goals.” Then she brightened. “But I suppose they might be able to tell us where Javier is. Did I tell you what I plan to do to Javier when I find him?” She laughed to herself. “He won’t expect it in the least. It will be funny to see the look on his face, won’t it?”

  She stood, and vacillated. On one hand, she didn’t want to leave the poor pilot alone in the snow, but on the other, he wouldn’t even notice because he was dead. She wondered whether the sailors would be a real part of the problem or whether they were just following orders. Enlisted men often taken from the working classes—forced to serve the very powers that had ground their ancestors and still ground their families under iron thumbs because the alternative was to starve. The true tragedy was that the brainwashing and resignation ran so deep that protest, rebellion against the system, never occurred to them.

  There was so much she could have taught them, had the situation been otherwise.

  But, of course, it wasn’t. On board a ship like the Irizar, there would always be a captain, or a lieutenant or someone looking over her shoulder ensuring that the men couldn’t be influenced. The officers, of course, were from a different class: they had Spanish last names, often street names. The patrician families, of course, had named the streets of every city in the country after their major figures.

  The sailors still hadn’t seen her, so she began to walk towards them. The group soon resolved into three figures hunched against the driving wind. Only when she was almost on top of them did they react. As soon as they realized that she wasn’t some prehistoric monstrosity hell-bent on tearing their flesh from their bones, they ran towards her, waving, shouting, and smiling.

  “You’re Camila, aren’t you? The leader of the scientists?” the young lieutenant who appeared to be in charge asked. They’d told her his name at some point, but she hadn’t been paying attention… after all, officers were interchangeable to her. What difference did the name make when his rank was the only thing that mattered?

  “Yes, Lieutenant,” she replied. “Though the Colonel will likely take exception at your description.”

  If he heard her response, the young man—he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, could he?—gave no indication. “I’m so glad you’re alive. How are the rest of them? Did you reach the base? Did you see any creatures?”

  “We’re scattered all over. I’m afraid that some of us are dead. I think the Colonel is still alive, but I’m not sure where he is… he told me he was going back to the Irizar.”

  That did get an expression from the man: he looked grave. “He never made it.”

  Could it really have been that simple? Was her nemesis dead of nothing more interesting than the big teeth of an animal? Could the universe really hate her that much? All she wanted, her deepest desire, was to be able to take her own revenge on the man who’d casually appropriated and then destroyed her life-long dream and left her wandering forever in that nightless purgatory.

  It couldn’t be. She refused to believe it. It wasn’t right. “He must have turned back to the base,” she said.

  “We hope so. That’s where we’re going to look for them. How is the previous base complement?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Weren’t you at the base?”

  “Yes, but there was no sign of anyone. Either they ran off when the creatures appeared, or…” she left that in the air. There was no need to belabor the obvious.

  “We’ll look for them, then. I’m glad you’re all right, though. In these conditions, anyone being alive is a blessing.” He gave her a genuine smile.

  She smiled back, and hoped he couldn’t tell it was faked.

  They started walking towards the base. Visibility had gotten so bad that the lieutenant was trying to get his bearings with a compass.

  “This thing is useless,” he shouted in frustration.

  Camila laughed. Soldiers were all the same. None of them had any brains. “That’s because we’re too close to the pole. The needle will always point directly away from the magnetic south pole, no matter where we go in Antarctica.”

  “So… how does that help us?”

  “Do you know the exact location of the pole?”

  “No.”

  “Then it doesn’t.”

  He looked so dejected Camila almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  She went on. “I can tell you how to get there, though.” She was reasonably certain she could give them the right bearing. She was normally very good at not getting turned around. “That way.”

  He smiled again and they set off, obviously assuming that she would walk with them. After only the briefest hesitation, Camila did so, lining up behind the two enlisted sailors. Her original plan had been to return to the Irizar and seek Javier out there, but that had been scuttled.

  As she walked, she wondered about the man in front of her. He was a short, wiry fellow—at least as far as she could tell through the voluminous uniform jacket, also tan—who struggled through the snow. By his facial features and slightly darker skin, he was obviously not descended from Europeans, or at least not of pure European stock. Unlike most countries in South America, Argentina’s native population had essentially been wiped out in the wars of colonization. Criminal colonis
ts had killed without second thoughts, hiding behind the excuse that the natives had been hostile and murderous from the first.

  It might even have been true… but anyone, upon seeing themselves displaced from their ancestral homes by strange invaders, would have reacted violently. Argentina’s shame was that the desert campaign in response was not a war of pacification, but a war of extermination.

  Most of the native survivors had been in the north of the country… a population that had been continually supplemented by immigration from neighboring Bolivia and Paraguay. She guessed that the man ahead of her had probably come from those, not from among the few survivors left in Patagonia.

  Northern Argentina was a warm place, a place of deserts and near-tropical jungles. Like many such areas around the world, its inhabitants were poor… and, for them, like for so many poor people in other places, the armed forces were a quick path to respectability.

  But even if that man—he looked to be about forty—had seen every expectation that he’d had upon enlisting fulfilled, it was still cruel to send him to a place where the summer wind could cut through heavy jackets and fling snow into the air.

  Camila wished she could explain the error of his ways to him. After all, the political implications of his situation were probably lost on the sailor. But this wasn’t the right moment. Camila reflected, as she followed him, that there truly was such a thing as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. At any other period in her life, Camila would have tried to awaken the righteous political anger that should have been his. Any other time, she would have saved him from himself.

  But not that day.

  She closed the distance between them and drove the point of the knife deep into the exposed side of the man’s neck. His gasp was swallowed up by the wind and the other two men never realized their companion was gurgling to his death, already a dozen paces behind.

  The warmth on her hands only lasted for a few seconds. Soon, in the wind, the blood turned cold… cold and slick. The temperature wasn’t quite low enough to freeze it, but it was most certainly sufficient to turn the warm essence of a comrade, the essence of human companionship, into an uncomfortable reminder that she’d just snuffed his light like a covered candle.

  The next man ahead had to die as well, another common sailor. She didn’t want his blood on her hands, neither figuratively or literally but, like so many others before her, sacrifices needed to be made in the name of a greater cause.

  So she hesitated and wondered about this man’s life story. He, unlike the other, sported the pale skin of the invader. Of course, an enlisted man was still one of the oppressed, even if he acted as a cat’s paw and looked similar to the people who ran the country.

  He walked with a slight limp, so she concentrated on that. The walk to find Javier was one of those missions that screamed “volunteers only”. She imagined that he’d signed up for it despite that pain. The agony was likely made even worse by the cold and humidity. She cried as she thought of him, a wounded warrior, volunteering out of concern for his fellow man.

  Camila stabbed him in the right kidney, the razor-sharp point making short work of several layers of fabric. She pulled the knife away quickly to avoid getting more blood on him.

  That was lucky. The man grunted, but didn’t fall. He turned towards her with a confused look and she was able to slash at his neck. Now, he fell, but the cost was that Camila ended up spattered with gore.

  She cursed under her breath. It was almost as if the karma of having murdered the man couldn’t be expressed without the physical manifestation of the crime.

  They walked on and, without warning, the wind died down. The ice crystals suspended in the air settled slowly and the base came into view, fifty meters to their left.

  The lieutenant turned back, a smile on his face. “You were right. We’re almost on top of the base.” Then he stammered to a stop. “What happened to you?”

  There was little need to fake the fear. She knew the lieutenant would shoot her if he found out what she’d done. “It happened so fast,” she said. “Two of those… creatures came out of the snow. They attacked us before we could react. They took your men.”

  The lieutenant looked down at her hand and she followed his gaze. She put the bloody knife in front of her as if she were seeing it for the first time. “I must have managed to hit one of them. I… never even realized what I was doing.”

  The lieutenant’s eyes went wide. “That’s amazing. I’ve seen men run away at the mere sight of one of them… even the small ones. And you attacked one with a knife? You’re incredible.” He nodded in respect. “But come on. We should be able to see them escaping.” He did something to the big automatic rifle he was carrying. “This time they won’t catch us by surprise. And maybe the boys are still alive.” He peered into the snowy landscape and pointed in the direction the second man had fallen: “There. I think I see something. Come on!”

  He ran off in the direction of the murdered man, and Camila rushed behind him. “I think it’s José!” the lieutenant said.

  He was too far to stab in the back, and would certainly reach the dead man before she could catch up. Her only hope was to be right there, right beside him when he reached the corpse, so he wouldn’t be able to react before she did. This one, she had no qualms about killing. This one deserved it.

  He reached the body and fell to his knees beside it. “Dammit,” he said. “They killed him. Tore out his throat. Poor man.”

  The lieutenant reached out and closed José’s eyes. He bent his head and said a prayer over his lost sailor.

  Sometimes the oppressors can fool us, Camila thought, perhaps remembering some long-past political science class, perhaps just reminding herself of what she knew to be true. Sometimes they almost seem human. It’s important to stay strong, to know that the fight is more important than anything else.

  And yet, she couldn’t bring herself to stab this man in the back.

  This man will defend Javier from you.

  That thought, apparently out of the blue, galvanized her. She struck without thinking any further, and this time without mistakes: the neck was the right place to attack, and a sweeping, untidy blow from behind hit the lieutenant just below the right ear.

  Though it was a messier strike than the others, and spilled much more blood, the man didn’t die immediately. He desperately tried to hold his blood in as it began to spray, and then he collapsed onto his side. But he still wasn’t dead. His hands opened and closed around his neck.

  She sat beside him and pulled off his hat. He had thin black hair, which was a pleasure to run her fingers through, even though the blood from her hands matted it.

  He’d stopped trying to put his neck back together and now was just letting her stroke his head and sobbing into her clothes.

  The crying got softer and softer until it finally stopped and he died.

  Camila stood up and looked around. The sun, now that she could see it, was still up, even though her body told her that it must be about three in the morning. She didn’t know. Her cell phone had died long ago, so she had no clue what time it was.

  She sat there, unsure of what to do next. Was Javier even alive? Had he turned back to the base for some reason?

  In the distance, a man walked, zombie-like towards the coast. It was a strange direction in which to be walking: neither towards the Irizar or towards the base. Then she remembered that the men in black had been going in exactly the same direction. There must be something there.

  She smiled as she recognized the man. It was Clark Smith, the Australian geologist. And if Smith was still alive near the base, that meant that Javier’s team had come back.

  “Javieeeer,” she called softly into the cold air. “I’m coming for you…”

  Chapter 16

  “Where’s Clark?” Javier had returned to the cafeteria after a long, frustrating struggle with the radio. All he wanted was to lie down on a table and sleep for a week. If he was killed by some prehistoric mo
nster while he was asleep… well, c’est la vie.

  Breen looked around sharply. “He was here a few minutes ago. I thought he’d bunked down in back, but he must have slipped out when I went to the bathroom. Natasha?”

  “I must have dozed off. I didn’t see him leave.”

  They searched the cafeteria, but that only confirmed what they already knew: he wasn’t under a table or sitting in one of the microwaves.

  “Damn. Where’s he gotten himself off to?” Breen said.

  “You think he left on his own?” Natasha asked.

  “Unless those things have learned to open doors without tearing them down, he left on his own.”

  “I didn’t see any sign of nothosaurs outside, either,” Javier added.

  They opened the door and looked out into the snow. The wind was dying down.

  Natasha pointed with her good hand. “Look. Over there!”

  A tiny figure headed away from them, in the same direction they’d arrived from.

  “Oh, God,” Javier said. “He’s going after her.”

  “Too bad.”

  “What do you mean? We have to bring him back.”

  “Really? Are you suggesting we should take Natasha back into that nest with us? A woman with only one good arm? Or would you rather leave her here alone? We already saw how that works out for unarmed people.”

  Javier barely thought about it. “You stay here with her, and I’ll go get him. No, don’t try to talk me out of it, you should know it’s useless by now.”

  “Yeah, I’d gathered that. You’ll want this.” They swapped weapons, Javier took the FAL and Breen, reluctantly, accepted the Colonel’s Browning.

  Two minutes later, Javier was slipping and sliding on the snow as he followed the wayward Australian. Though convinced that Clark was heading towards the nest, he didn’t want to lose sight of the speck in the distance.

  He jogged as fast as he dared, with his head on a swivel searching for the nothosaur that would appear out of nowhere to tear him to pieces, but none presented themselves.