Ice Station Death

by Gustavo Bondoni

  And, like it or not, that was what he had. In certain parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the six RPGs he’d shipped with would have made him quite the warlord.

  He packed a couple of them into a duffel bag. He could have armed them right there in the hold, but he really wasn’t comfortable doing so in full view of witnesses. Part of it was his natural tendency to be secretive, but another part wondered what he’d say when the crew of the icebreaker asked him why he hadn’t shared them once the nature of the threat to the ship became evident. A couple of well-placed missiles would have made a world of difference and probably saved a bunch of lives.

  The answer was complicated, and the Argentines wouldn’t have wanted to hear it: he was there to carry out a mission and, as long as the stuff going on around them didn’t jeopardize that mission, he would not divert a single piece of equipment away from it.

  Yes, the Irizar and its crew were in danger, but it wasn’t his job to save them. He had to shut down and do what was needed in service of a much bigger picture.

  Perhaps losing a ship today might mean saving an entire city from a biological attack tomorrow.

  Unfortunately, most people didn’t see things that strategically. How, they asked, could a soldier with a packful of MREs pass a starving village and not hand them out? How could anyone accept a single life as collateral damage? The truth was that, when taken in the greater context, those villagers, those men and women and children who would only appear in partisan newspapers or tabloid websites as victims of some atrocity, actually were a down payment in blood on lives that could, if the side of the angels emerged victorious, be saved later.

  The true power players knew the score, both in the West and in the countries that opposed the Western way of life. Josef Stalin had once said that a single death was a tragedy but a million deaths were a statistic. He’d known exactly how to leverage both for his own ends. He understood strategy.

  But most people didn’t. That single death, that tragedy, colored and annulled their capacity to consider the bigger picture. They couldn’t think beyond the death of that single innocent… no matter how it was explained to them that preventing that tragedy could have terrible consequences for the lives of many more. They just weren’t built to see beyond it.

  For some reason, Javier was the man he thought of as he headed back to the cabin area. The Colonel should have been ready to make the necessary sacrifices to reach his objectives. Even Argentines must teach their officers the realities of life…

  And yet, the man struck Breen as a bit of a starry-eyed idealist. Competent, certainly. Brave… of that there was no doubt. But perhaps not the kind of man who’d do what had to be done without thought for the price. He didn’t look like a guy who could see past the tragedy.

  That made Breen nervous. He had a feeling in the pit of his stomach that the end of sacrifices was not yet at hand.

  ***

  Javier wasn’t thinking of Breen. He’d fallen asleep nearly immediately when his head hit the pillow in Natasha’s room. He’d actually been relieved when she laid down with all her clothes on, hugged him tightly and closed her eyes. She was a stunning woman, but all he wanted was to get some rest.

  Again, Javier slept without a sense of time. The next thing he knew, someone knocked on their door, and he spluttered to wakefulness, trying to remember where he was. Were they under attack?

  The soft electric light reassured him. It felt safe somehow, civilized.

  He looked down at Natasha. Her fine hair framed delicate features. The contrast between the peace he saw now and the mindless terror he remembered from the first time he’d seen her was striking. She hadn’t heard the knock, but started slightly, muttering in her sleep when the sound repeated.

  Javier disengaged gently and padded to the door. He cracked it open.

  The ship’s surgeon, haggard and sporting a couple of days of beard, stood in the hallway.

  Javier pulled the door open all the way and gave the surprised man a bear hug. “I’m so glad you made it.”

  “Yeah, so am I. It was a close thing, though. I made the silly mistake of trying to pull an injured man across the deck. One of the creatures grabbed my pants and tried to pull me off the ship. If a sailor hadn’t fired on it, I’d be dead now.”

  “And the guy you saved?”

  “He was already dead when I got there. I wasn’t able to do much with the other guys who’d been hurt. The injuries were either scratches or complete dismemberment with not much in between. We set up an infirmary belowdecks, but I’ve only got one patient that I couldn’t discharge after applying a few bandages. Well, two now that you’ve brought that Swedish girl on board. How come every woman you encounter gets brought back to me in terrible shape?”

  “It’s a knack I have.”

  “Well, stop it.”

  Javier was about to continue the banter when he remembered that a couple of other women he’d set out with—and a good number of young men—were never going to return, not even in less-than-mint condition. “What brings you here?” he said instead, lamely.

  “I’m here to check on my other patient. And to ask what you were doing in her bed. She needs to be resting.”

  “She was. We fell asleep immediately.”

  “I know. I listened at the door before knocking. But… it would still be better if you left her alone. She was in surgery just a couple of days ago. She shouldn’t be doing… any kind of strenuous activity.”

  “You should talk to Breen about that. He’s the one who took her off the ship in the first place.”

  “I already talked to him. He says she was safer with him than on a ship being attacked by Godzilla.” The doctor shook his head. “He’s insufferable, but I can’t really say I can fault his logic.”

  “Tell him he can come in,” Natasha said. “I’m awake now.”

  The doctor entered and gave the arm a quick but thoroughly professional once-over. “Have you felt any pain?”

  “No.”

  “Have you had to do anything strenuous?” He raised an eyebrow at both of them as he said this.

  “We fell off a snowmobile. I suppose we were going… maybe twenty-five or thirty kilometers an hour…”

  “Please tell me she’s kidding.”

  “I was there. It’s true. But we also fell into a hole. The impact killed the Swedish woman’s sister.”

  The doctor nodded gravely. “Did you hit anything?”

  “No. I think I kind of slid along and landed on Javier. Everyone else hit much harder than I did, and Breen and Clark took a huge impact.”

  “Clark… The Australian? Did he…”

  Javier shook his head. “He didn’t make it. But Ingrid is only here because he wouldn’t let the creatures back there keep her. He died getting her out of there. How is she?”

  “She has some beautiful puncture wounds which are going to take some time to heal. Did she hit her head at any time?”

  “No? Why?”

  “Because she was crying uncontrollably, even after she got on board. Not just crying, either, but screaming and punching and kicking out. It didn’t seem like the composed and calm young lady I remember. So I wanted to know if she might have suffered a concussion at any time.”

  Javier shrugged. “She might have suffered just about anything. She got snatched by one of those things and dragged five hundred meters. We all thought she was dead, disemboweled and probably eaten. We didn’t even ask her about bumps in the head.” He laughed bitterly. “In my opinion, she probably just realized everything that happened to her. Hell, I’d be more worried if she was acting rationally. Can we see her?”

  “Well, I’ve got her under sedation downstairs. She should be asleep for a few hours. I hope she’s not as aggressive when she wakes. You can come then.”

  The doctor wandered off. Javier got the sense that he didn’t have too many places to be, and was just wandering the ship trying to find evidence that the last twenty hours or so—what time was it, anyway?—had be
en a bad dream.

  Javier faced Natasha. He grinned. “I guess it’s just you and me, now.”

  She blushed. “Yes.”

  “Are you having regrets?”

  “No. None. You?”

  “Only that your arm is broken and the doctor has ordered me not to make you do anything strenuous.”

  “Forget the doctor.”

  Their lovemaking this time was more measured, less desperate, and when they were done, Natasha fell asleep again.

  Javier wanted nothing more than to join her and he found himself exhausted… but unable to sleep. He contented himself with just watching her breathe.

  He wondered what this meant… if it meant anything. A small part of him was still convinced that she would come to her senses and realize that whatever she thought she felt for him was just the stress of the past few days. Was she just lost and confused, looking for something, anything, to anchor to?

  Then he felt ashamed at the thought. Natasha had been a rock through the whole ordeal, there was no reason to suppose that she would need to cling to some random guy just to get through, with the intention of dropping him like a hot potato when she got out the other end.

  Those were his own insecurities speaking.

  His entire upbringing had revolved around family values, with the married couple as the axle around which the entire world revolved. His parents had been that way, and the fact that his father worked for the defense ministry offered stability and a respectable framework. They’d only moved once, when he was seven, to the interior of the country, but even that had only meant living in Córdoba for a couple of years—a city of a million people, and not a huge sacrifice by any measure.

  But when he’d gotten out of officer school, his first assignment had been in Misiones province, well up in the northern part of the country, and his girlfriend of the time had flatly refused to come with him. On his first leave, he’d returned to Buenos Aires to try to talk her around, but she’d moved on… and told him so in no uncertain terms.

  Relationships had come and gone after that, following a similar pattern. No one he was interested in appeared to want a relationship with a man stationed in far-off places, and though the girls in the places he was posted to would have been perfectly content to put that right, he also found that they were much too provincial. Their world tended to be limited to a very small subset of interests, all intensely local, while his own, perhaps privileged, upbringing meant that he found those limits unpalatable.

  It was a cycle he’d never managed to break. He cycled through posting after posting and, by the time he returned to Buenos Aires as a major, he’d pretty much believed that he was destined for eternal bachelorhood.

  The fact that he was now lying beside a beautiful, successful, smart woman who, if she wanted to, would have his heart wrapped around her little finger when they got back to civilization.

  If she wanted…

  Hard experience had taught him that she would take one look at his life and decide she wanted no part of it, disappearing to wherever the rest of them had gone off to. And, really, he couldn’t blame her. He’d do the same in her position.

  Javier plugged his phone into the wall and got a black screen… he didn’t even have enough charge to use it while it began to come back to life.

  He really wanted that phone working again. Not knowing what time it was had been driving him nuts. He made a mental note to buy a watch—a good one like all the other senior officers wore—as soon as he made it back to Buenos Aires.

  The memory of being out on the ice, with that eternal soft sunlight falling on his head made him shudder. It was enough to drive anyone insane.

  Chapter 20

  The ARA Almirante Irizar was a wounded beast, and Camila mourned. Torn metal jutted from it in several places, particularly around the upper levels of the command area. She didn’t know the names of ship parts, but there was no mistaking the destruction.

  Her sadness was tempered with fury. It was becoming more and more obvious to her with every passing moment that the government had known it was sending the lightly-armed Irizar and its crew into a dangerous place. That was why command of the science project had been assigned to the inadequate Colonel Balzano, and, much more tellingly, that was why there was an American spy along for the ride. It was obvious to anyone with eyes to see.

  Still, they hadn’t hesitated. In a way, it was no surprise that the neo-fascist government had bent over for the Yanquis. They might call themselves centrists, but everyone knew that centrists were just fascists who were too ashamed to admit it. Centrism was for those without conviction.

  Look where it had gotten them. Argentina’s only icebreaker, a hero ship which was the pride of the nation’s navy, torn to pieces by some Monsanto monstrosity.

  She knew exactly what had happened: the Americans needed to see what the new monster they’d created could do, so, instead of testing it in the desert in Utah or someplace where it might put American lives at risk, they’d hatched this plan. Of course, getting the Argentine government to agree would have simply been a question of allowing them a loan at a decent interest rate. The government was always short of funds, even though these right-wingers spent most of their time cutting subsidies from the poor families who needed them most.

  Of course, one couldn’t just send out a couple of warships to test the thing. That would be too obvious; the Americans probably wanted to keep their pet creatures secret. So what to do? She was looking at the answer: neglect to warn an already scheduled mission into the area, complete with civilians, about the danger and then sit back and watch the carnage. Everyone would believe that it had been an unfortunate turn of events—no one would suspect that the crew had been deliberately sacrificed.

  But that was because most outside observers didn’t know how fascists thought. Camila knew better.

  She scanned the decks of the Irizar, trying to pick out Javier or his slut. It was difficult. She was hidden from view by some broken pieces of sea ice pushed aside when the ship had come in, so she could watch without risk, but she was nearly a hundred meters away and behind the ship, which made positive identification of the small figures on deck extremely difficult.

  She would know as soon as he appeared, though.

  What would be the best way to deal with him once she spotted him? Getting aboard the Irizar without being noticed would be damn-near impossible, and there was no question of waiting for nightfall. It was obvious that they were trapped in a spirit world into which night would never come again.

  However, even this place had rules. The rules of a mad underworld, perhaps, but rules all the same, and she knew that, when the time came, an opportunity would present itself. That was how things worked.

  Her knife made her happy. How fitting that she would do away with the agents of the empire with nothing more than a bit of sharpened metal. The tools she needed had fallen to hand, and so would the chance to slip aboard unseen.

  The ice below her began to tremble violently, in a way that could only mean one thing. Camila smiled.

  Yes, things were falling into place.

  ***

  This time, Javier knew that they were going to be hit even before the sound of tortured metal reverberated across the ship.

  “Come on,” he said, shaking Natasha. “We need to get out of bed.”

  “Whaaaa?” her voice trailed off and she tried to turn back around and return to sleep, but he shook her a little more vigorously.

  “The monster. It’s coming.”

  That got her attention. “How do you know? I can’t hear anything.”

  He was dressing quickly. “Everything’s shaking. The only thing I can think of that might cause that is something big pushing ice away near us. That or an earthquake. Either way, we’re going to want to be dressed when it hits.”

  She grumbled, still half-asleep, but moved to replace her panties and the thick Antarctic-weight pants. Her socks had remained on her feet throughout.

 
Javier helped her with her boots and then they raced out onto the deck. Men were already running along, towards the front of the ship.

  “Stay here,” he told Natasha, and ran after them.

  About ten steps in, he realized that the infuriating woman had ignored him and was only a few steps behind. She moved well considering her broken wing, but what use she thought a wounded civilian would be in the upcoming fight, he had no idea.

  In fact, he was skeptical about how useful he, himself, would be. He was armed only with a Browning pistol. If the big one appeared, the gun would be just as useful as spitting, or, in a pinch, attacking it with his fists.

  A patch of ice ahead of the ship lifted, a clawed forepaw the size of a car emerged and, with much groaning and the snapping of ice ringing like rifle shots through the cold air, the creature’s head emerged from under cover.

  It roared, whether in anger or triumph, Javier didn’t know, but the sound shook the ship.

  Pandemonium. A sailor ahead of him opened fire. Another, in an inexplicable move, threw himself, screaming, over the rail. All he achieved was to land on the ice a few meters away, yelling in pain, probably from multiple fractures to his legs. Everyone seemed to be running somewhere.

  Cooler heads had thrown rope ladders from the front of the Irizar and were already climbing down onto the ice to attempt to keep the monster from reaching the icebreaker. A man standing beside the ladder handed Javier a rifle as he disembarked.

  Javier turned, caught Natasha’s eye and repeated: “Stay here. There’s nothing you can do down there. Here, take my phone. If I don’t come back and you do, call my parents. Tell them I love them.” Then he descended.