A Vision of Fire

EPILOGUE

Mikel Jasso peered over the starboard-side railing of the Captain Fallow. The soft fringe of his hood blew against his cheek, protecting it from the sharp wind. The ship was running along the eastern stretch of the Weddell Sea, prevented by the ice pack from approaching the north coast of Antarctica. Presently they were skirting a blocky iceberg that towered hundreds of feet above their heads, gleaming the purest white except where it blushed turquoise blue at its base—but no one was admiring the pale giant. Like the other crew members and scientists crowded along the rail, Jasso was watching the mass of emperor penguins swimming north across the sea.

The number in the migration was unprecedented, as far as veterans of these seas could remember, and it was a month before the penguins’ breeding season was supposed to finish. And there was something else, several crew members noted. There was no playfulness in the movements of the penguins, no cautious reconnaissance along their flanks; they did not even bother to swim around the ship, simply propelling themselves beneath it to the other side. Mikel observed them with a careful eye, remembering the flight of the albatrosses. There was the same kind of urgency here, not the haste to get somewhere but a kind of single-minded need to get away from something.

Why now? Jasso wondered.

The question of the albatrosses and the rats had not been far from his mind when he arrived back in the Falklands and saw an unusual number of vessels heading out to sea.

“A lot of fish heading north,” a seaman had explained to Mikel.

So now it’s fish, Mikel had thought as he tracked down the Captain Fallow and financially induced her captain to welcome him aboard. Mikel’s forged geology credentials would not bear intense scrutiny, but they held up under the general disinterest of a captain all too happy to receive a surprise “bonus” this year.

The ship had sailed east past the ancient submerged volcanoes of the Scotia Sea, curving south when the ice pack allowed, and the trip had been singularly uneventful with few stops. Mikel spent a great deal of time with the geologist he’d robbed weeks ago while the man slept. Together they watched the fathometer, the GPS, the seismometer, and other equipment. He’d had plenty of time to wonder why the stone he’d acquired had killed Arni now when other stones had been in the Group’s possession for over two years. And then, an hour before the penguins began their strange exodus, Mikel had checked his e-mail on one of the ship’s computers. Flora had sent two messages, the first a query about a woman in some handheld video from Haiti.

Who is this? Flora asked.

But Mikel had neither the bandwidth nor the patience to inspect the video. He told her he would have to watch it some other time.

Flora’s second e-mail was much more interesting—and immediate.

The stones melted the ice in the freezer, she wrote. I transferred them to another freezer; same thing.

That, too, was new and presently inexplicable.

What is happening? And why now?

As the penguins continued their departure, Mikel noticed a change in the wind. But it wasn’t the wind that had shifted. He pushed from the railing and shouldered his way to the bridge. As he entered the warm, cramped room he asked, “Where are we going?”

“We’re following the penguins,” the captain snapped in his thick Maine accent.

“Why?”

“Because we just picked up transmissions from research stations McMurdo and Dumont d’Urville,” he replied. “It sounds like every damned penguin in Antarctica is checking out. No one knows why. I’m putting some space between us and the continent.”

“What do the brain trusts think?”

“The same thing us nonbrains think—that something’s scaring them. My guess? Could be some kind of massive ice calving. No one knows.”

Mikel was about to ask if the satellites showed any preliminary breakage when a massive crack echoed across the ship.

He grabbed a pair of binoculars from a locker and raced back to the railing. Another crack turned his knees to water but he steadied himself and fixed the binoculars on the iceberg. He felt bodies press around him as the sightseers switched their attention from the penguins to the block of ice—which was splitting in half. But as the awed cries of the veteran sailors suggested, it was like no phenomenon any of them had ever witnessed.

Seawater surged around an ice tower newly separated from its mother berg, swirling like an inverted whirlpool and in slow motion. Mikel swore and shoved his face harder against the binoculars, struggling to accept what he was seeing. It was there for only a moment before that side of the new iceberg turned away from the ship.

The sheared face of the massive chunk of ice had not been purely white or blue. It had held something no living person had seen in Antarctica, an object that would make sense only to someone who had seen it before—and Mikel had.

“What the hell?” he heard someone murmur. “Was something out there?”

“I don’t know,” said another as the vessel chugged away.

A third person tried bravely to take a video but Mikel artfully inserted himself between the passenger and the object, pretending to slip on the icy deck. By the time the phone was turned back to the calving iceberg, there was nothing to shoot.

Mikel didn’t listen to any of the speculations. He had seen the vast brown ovoid marked with black crescents, and below its lowest curve, a smaller, rectangular projection. He had already formed his own hypothesis, rejected it as impossible, then embraced it again—for Mikel had seen this image on a shard of barnacle-crusted pottery.

It was an airship from the lost world of Galderkhaan.