Blood and Ice

CHAPTER FORTY

December 18, 9 a.m.

Just as Michael showed up at the infirmary, stomping the snow off his boots, Charlotte came out the door with a finger to her lips. She put her arm through his and guided him back toward the outer door. “Not now.”

“She okay?”

She tilted one hand back and forth while pulling on her gloves. “She's still having a rough time and running a low fever. I've got her on some sedatives and a glucose drip. Best to let her rest.”

Michael found he was even more disappointed than he'd have imagined. Ever since rescuing Eleanor from the whaling station, he'd been haunted by her face, the sound of her voice, the chance to uncover the rest of her story.

“And Murphy stopped by to remind me to keep quiet about her being here.”

“Yeah, I got that memo, too,” Michael said.

“Come on,” Charlotte added, throwing the hood over her head. “What I need right now is a mug of Uncle Barney's industrial-strength coffee.”

Holding on to each other in the gusting wind, they inched their way down the ramp and over to the commons. A fake Christmas tree, strung with tinsel and a few battered ornaments, had been set up overnight and stood forlornly in a corner of the room.

Darryl was already in possession of a table in back, where he was plowing through a plate piled high with fried tofu (Uncle Barney said he'd radio for more on the next supply flight) and mixed veggies. Charlotte slid onto the bench next to him, and Michael sat down with his tray on the other side. With her braids all pulled together onto the top of her head, she looked like she was wearing a pineapple.

The first thing she did was to pour a lot of sugar into her coffee mug, and take a good long drink.

“Just getting up?” Darryl asked. “ ‘Cause if you don't mind my saying so, you look like you should have stayed in bed.”

“Thanks for the kind words,” she said, putting her mug down. “How does your wife not shoot you?”

Darryl shrugged. “Our marriage is built on honesty,” he said, and Michael had to laugh.

“The weird thing is,” she said, “when I was in Chicago, and I had car alarms going off in the middle of the night, and neighbors having parties till four in the morning, I slept like a baby. Here, where the place is as silent as a grave and the nearest car is parked about a thousand miles away, I'm awake half the night.”

“You pulling your bed curtains closed?” Darryl asked.

“Not on your life,” she said, dipping some dry toast in a runny egg. “Too much like a coffin.”

“How about the blackout curtains on the window?”

She paused, chewing slowly. “Yeah, I got up to fiddle with those last night.”

“The idea,” Darryl admonished her, “is to close them before you get in bed.”

“I did, but I could have sworn…” She stopped, then went on. “I could have sworn I heard something outside, in the storm.”

Michael waited. Something in her voice told him what was coming.

“Heard what?” Darryl asked.

“A voice. Shouting.”

“Maybe it was the banshee,” Darryl said, burrowing into his plate.

“What was it shouting?” Michael asked, as casually as he could.

“Best I could make out-and the wind was pretty high-it was something like ‘Give it back.’ “ She shook her head and went back to her toast and eggs. “I'm starting to miss those car alarms.”

Michael could barely swallow his food, but he decided to keep his own counsel for a while.

“Which reminds me,” she said, fishing in the pocket of her overcoat and removing a blood sample in a plastic vial. “I need a full blood assay done on this.”

Darryl didn't look thrilled. “Why am I so honored?”

“Because you've got all that fancy equipment in your lab.”

“Whose is it?” he asked.

“Just one of the grunts,” she said, offhandedly. “No big deal.”

“Well,” he said, dabbing at his mouth with the napkin, “as it so happens, I do have some big news of my own.”

Michael wasn't sure if he was kidding or not.

“You are sitting, my friends, in the company of greatness. In that last set of traps, I captured a heretofore undiscovered species of fish.”

Both Michael and Charlotte suddenly gave him their full attention.

“This is for real?” Michael asked.

Darryl nodded, grinning. “Although it is closely related to the Cryothenia amphitreta, which remained undiscovered until 2006, this specimen is as yet unrecorded.”

“How can you be sure?” Charlotte asked.

“I've consulted the definitive sourcebook, a little tome called Fishes of the Southern Ocean, and it's not there. Its head morphology alone is like nothing I've ever seen. It's got a bifurcated ridge above its eyes, and a purple crest.”

“That's fantastic,” Michael said. “What are you going to call it?”

“For the time being, I'm calling it Cryothenia — which means, ‘from the cold’- hirschii.”

“That's modest,” Charlotte said with a laugh.

“What?” Darryl replied. “Scientists name things after themselves all the time-and it will truly piss off a guy named Dr. Edgar Montgomery back at Woods Hole.”

“Then I say go for it,” Michael said.

“Now, what I'd really like to do,” Darryl said, “is catch a few more of them fast; there might be a whole school in the vicinity. The one I've got I'll need to dissect, but it'd be great to have a few spares that I could keep intact.”

“Maybe you'll get lucky,” Michael said.

“Murphy's ordered everyone to stay on base until the storm clears, but if I can get permission to go just as far as the dive hut, I'm going to drop some more nets and traps. You're welcome to come along-both of you. You could tell your grandchildren that you were there while history was being made.”

Charlotte blotted up some more yolk, and said, “Much as I'd like to freeze my butt off fishing, I think I'll take a nice long nap instead.”

But Michael, jumping at the opportunity to get off the base any way he could-especially since Eleanor was off-limits-said, “I'm game. When do you want to go?”

One hour later, they were cruising across the ice on a snowmobile, with Michael driving and Darryl hanging on in back. Michael had been riding snowmobiles for years, and normally he'd found the experience exhilarating, but snowmobiling in Antarctica was something else. The air was so blisteringly cold that any inch of skin that was exposed could burn like fire, then go totally numb, in a matter of seconds. He had to keep his head down over the handlebars, with his ski mask covering his face, his goggles over his eyes, and his fur hood gathered tight around his head.

It was a blissfully short ride to the dive hut, squatting out there on its cinder-block legs, and Michael let the vehicle glide to a slow stop at the foot of the ramp leading up to the door. The moment the sound of the motor died away, the roar of the wind took over. It whipped around them, nearly knocking Darryl over. Michael grabbed him by the shoulder to steady him, then helped carry the gear inside. Just getting the door closed again was a fight in itself, the gusting wind threatening to tear it right off its hinges.

“Jesus,” Michael said, collapsing onto the wooden bench and brushing his hood back with his mitten. The hut, with its gaping hole in the middle of the floor, was not much warmer than it was outside, but at least they were protected from the wind. Darryl flicked on the heaters, and they both simply sat, shivering, for a minute or two before trying to do anything at all. As the heaters worked, a fine mist rose up off the water below and hung like a pall over the diving hole.

“Got a lot of ice clogging up the hole,” Michael observed. “We're gonna have to break that up before we try to lower anything.”

“Why do you think I invited you along?” Darryl said as he tried, without removing his thick gloves, to fasten his nets and traps to the long lines.

“I should have known.” Michael looked around at the racks of tools and equipment fixed to the wall or lying on the floorboards. Ice saws, steel cables, spearguns. The most likely candidate was a sharp-tipped spade, but he found it impossible to hold without taking off his mittens; reluctantly, he did so. He still had glove liners on underneath, but at least they were slim enough that he could slip his fingers through the handle.

The water, covered with a thin film of fresh ice, lay a couple of feet below, and it was awkward work to plunge the tip of the spade down, crack the ice, then pull the spade back again for another strike. It reminded Michael, inevitably, of shoveling the driveway after a big storm when he was a kid. His dad was always telling him to get out there and do it now-”it won't get any easier when it's had time to freeze over”-and Michael remembered well the peculiar pain, the one that would travel right up his arms, when he drove the tip of his shovel into what looked like loose snow but turned out to be hard-packed ice. The shudder would course down the length of his entire spine and even his teeth would ache. He was getting to relive that sensation, only over and over, and the shoulder he had dislocated in the Cascades began to complain bitterly.

Eventually, he had reduced the ice at the bottom of the hole to a slushy mush, though he knew the ice would quickly start to knit itself together again.

“You about ready?” Michael asked, feeling a rivulet of sweat running down the small of his back.

“Almost… there,” Darryl said, testing the clamp on a trap shaped like an hourglass. The line was like a giant charm bracelet, looped and coiled around the baseboards of the hut, with nets and lures tied to it at various spots. Darryl crawled toward the hole on his knees, and at its very rim he leaned over to drop the weighted end of the cable into the water.

“Clear away?” he asked, and Michael used the spade to spread the slush to one side. Darryl fed the line into the hole, and the lead weight at its end pulled it straight down. The winch, to which it was attached, hummed as the line dropped, carrying several of Darryl's devices into the depths of the polar sea.

Michael used the spade to keep the ice shards away, until it was suddenly jerked, mysteriously, from his grasp, and rattled down the ice hole like a log shooting down a flume.

“What the hell?”

Darryl laughed and, looking up, said, “Murphy's going to charge you for that.”

Michael started to laugh, too, but then Darryl plunged forward, too, headfirst, into the hole. Michael thought he must have been snagged by the cable somehow, and instinctively he stamped his foot on it to keep it from playing out, but the line simply burned beneath his rubber boot and kept on unspooling

And it wasn't the cable, anyway.

A big beefy hand, cobalt blue, was reaching out from under the floorboards of the hut and wrestling with the collar of Darryl's parka. Darryl's feet were kicking wildly, and he had one arm in the water and one flailing at his attacker.

Michael grabbed at his boots and struggled to pull him up.

A head, too, appeared now, from the space between the floorboards and the ice. A big head, with a frozen beard, and crazed white eyeballs.

Danzig.

His eyes locked on Michael, and like a lion distracted by more appealing prey, he loosened his grip on Darryl and started to haul himself up into the hut.

Michael kicked him in the chin-it was like kicking granite- and pulled again on Darryl, who had managed to push himself up from the funnel. Ice crystals sprayed around the hut, and Darryl was screaming for help.

Michael couldn't offer any. Danzig, covered with a silver sheen of ice, had propped both of his arms on the floorboards and was lifting himself like Poseidon rising from the deep.

“Give… it… back,” he snarled, through what remained of his ravaged throat, and Michael kicked out at him again. Danzig grabbed at his boot, but it was wet, and it slipped right through his fingers.

Darryl had backed up out of the hole and rolled under a bench, where he was scrubbing the frozen water from his head in a panic. He still looked like he didn't know what had hit him or what was happening.

But Michael did, and Danzig was on his knees now, lumbering to his feet, icy water streaming off his soaking flannel shirt and jeans. Michael whirled around, scanning the walls, and his eye fell on the speargun normally used in defense against the leopard seals. He leapt over the wooden bench and yanked it from the wall. Danzig stumbled over the cable line and nearly fell, and Michael just had time to prime the gun and point it at the hulking creature coming at him. There was barely enough room to extend it between them before he pulled the trigger and the triple-pronged barb exploded into Danzig's heaving chest. The force of the thrust sent him reeling, backpedaling on the wet floor, until he managed to stop himself at the very edge of the gaping hole, his fingers clutching at the spear embedded in his flesh. His mouth opened wide, then, as he looked up in shock, Michael put out a boot and sent him tumbling backwards into the icy funnel. There was a loud splash, and a gurgle, a crackling of ice… and then, apart from the hum of the heaters, silence.

Darryl was moaning and shaking the frigid water from his head, as Michael dropped to the rim of the hole, still holding the speargun, and looked down.

There was nothing to see but the taut, steel-reinforced cable holding Darryl's traps, and a shimmering tracery of blue-white ice, already weaving itself together again above Danzig's watery grave.