Overlord

3

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 their 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 ride 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?”

And Jeff Gray is gonna Jeff Gray, Aston thought. He shook his head. “Just mountains, buddy. Just rock.”

Gray laughed, slapped Aston’s shoulder again. “Suuuuure! And the Lake Kaarme monster was just a floating log.” He dropped heavily back into his seat, still chuckling.

Aston wondered if these were the same peaks that had caused the internet stir, or new ones. It was entirely possible there were a number of similar formations to be discovered. He supposed it didn’t matter. After another hour, dark marks against the snow became visible, beneath the shadows of the peaks. Soon enough the base was right in front of them, and it turned out to be far more impressive than Aston had anticipated.

He had expected wooden buildings and corrugated iron huts, maybe something like the set from that Carpenter movie, The Thing. Instead he saw sleek, aerodynamically designed buildings on crisscrossed stilts. Single story, olive green wedges with narrow vertical windows splashing warm orange light onto the snow outside. Solar panels adorned the roofs, wind turbines stood in ranks on low ridges behind, turning in the stiff breeze. Surrounding the modern buildings were the tin sheds he had expected, and ranks of gas bottles and oil barrels in cages, wooden shacks with Ski-doos and all-terrain vehicles parked inside. The whole place was ordered and well-kept, and he presumed it was newly set up. Had SynGreene financed all this? They must be pretty confident about their discovery, and about getting permission to mine it, if they had.

Sol led the team up steel steps into the largest of the dark, futuristic buildings and Aston was even more impressed with the interior. Everything was modern, new-looking. Modular lounges and glass-topped tables, sleek marble bars and chrome-legged chairs. Obviously SynGreene had poured a lot of money into the place and Aston wondered just what they hoped to get back. Their expected return on investment must be huge to justify this level of commitment and expense. A few armed men wandered here and there, calm but serious, all casually carrying weapons, sidearms at the hips. Other staff moved busily around, presumably there to cook, clean, and maintain the base.

“What’s with the security?” he asked Sol. “The polar bears particularly aggressive near here?”

“No polar bears here, Sam. Just birds and seals. You’re thinking of the Arctic.”

Aston rolled his eyes. “I know that. I was being facetious. But it’s more than just birds and seals.” Sol frowned and Aston was pleased to have turned the tables. He was the biologist, after all. He wouldn’t be condescended to by this guy. “Yeah,” he said. “You can’t forget the ATIs.”

Sol quirked an eyebrow. “What’s an ATI?”

Aston grinned. “Antarctic Terrestrial Invertebrate.”

“You’re kidding me. What even is that?”

“Nope, not kidding. Nematode worms, mites, tardigrades, springtails, stuff like that.”

Others in the group had gathered to listen and Jahara Syed took up the point. “He’s right, it’s pretty fascinating. There are sixty-seven species of insects recorded here, which is nothing compared to the millions on all other continents, but significant for a place where until very recently people thought nothing could live.”

“They respond to temperature,” Aston said. “They might be awake for a few hours, or even less, then dormant, sometimes actually frozen, for days or weeks or even months, before they thaw out and go about their business again.”

“Well, that’s just creepy as can be,” Marla said quietly.

Aston was pleased to see that even Slater was paying attention, her fury momentarily forgotten.

“But we’re talking microscopic, right?” Jeff Gray asked.

“Like his package,” Marla whispered, just loud enough for Aston to hear.

“Not entirely,” Syed said. “But the biggest of them is a wingless midge that reaches a maximum of about thirteen millimeters in length.”

“So not likely to eat us in bed,” Jeff said.

“Nor is anyone else,” Marla said. “God, the jokes write themselves with this tool.”

“Well, if they did eat you, it would happen incredibly slowly,” Aston said with a grin, trying not to let Marla distract him too much. “Even so, they’re among the toughest creatures on the planet.”

Marla shook herself. “Bugs. I can’t believe that even down here we have to deal with damned bugs.”

“Bugs own the planet, really, but that’s a long series of lectures we don’t have time for,” Aston said. He turned back to Sol. “So, back to my original point. Why all the armed guards?”

Sol laughed. “Just company policy. Besides, it’s never a bad thing to have a few peacemakers around, don’t you think?”

To make peace between which people, Aston wondered, but kept the thought to himself. Slater glanced back at him, caught his eye. He gave a little shrug, but her expression remained neutral. She had been checking though, looking for his reaction to Sol’s casual dismissal of the armed guards. It made him happy that she was paying attention to what he thought of things. It boded well for a possible thawing of their own relationship. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking on his part.

Sol led them into a large conference room, those tall narrow windows all along one side looking out over the frozen expanse of Antarctica, away from the sea, invisible some two hours away in the other direction. Slater wouldn’t meet Aston’s eye again and took a seat at the far end of the oval table, as far from him as she could get. To his annoyance, Jeff Gray sat right beside him. Did the man think they were friends now?

Aston looked around the table once everyone was seated, trying to guess what was happening here. Apart from himself, and Slater with her crew of Jeff and Marla, there was Sol Griffin, supposedly a physician, but obviously much more. To Aston’s left sat Anders Larsen the geologist, then Jahara Syed, the biologist. Next to her was Dig O’Donnell, an archeologist. And that gave him pause. He hadn’t thought about it before, but archeologists were experts in ancient civilizations. What use was there for that knowledge down here? The door, he presumed, which he still had trouble accepting as real. Still, if he put that concern aside, it was a pretty standard scientific crew, he supposed.

“Sorry, I’m late. Getting the squad to bunks.”

Aston turned at the voice, a strong Boston accent. The man who entered was African-American, a beast of a guy, well over six feet tall, muscles stretching his arctic camo outfit, bald head shining under the fluorescent lights. Clearly ex-military of some sort. He had a pistol holstered at his hip.

Sol smiled. “Just in time, Terry.” He raised a hand to introduce the man to the rest of the team already seated. “Ladies and gents, this is Terence Reid, head of security both here at the base and for the expedition in general.

“Good to meet you all,” Terry said. “No need to introduce yourselves, I know you all from your files.”

His grin was wide and friendly, but Aston thought it slightly disturbing the man had files on them all. He supposed some standard procedure was at play there, but he found it discomforting nonetheless. He watched Slater down the length of the table. She scrutinized Reid for several seconds, then looked at Aston. He raised an eyebrow, but she winced, seemingly annoyed that he’d seen her look his way. With a sigh, he turned his attention back to Sol.

Sol Griffin fired up a screen, but it remained blank as he addressed the gathering. “Well, you’ve all signed your NDAs, so now you get the full story. Any guesses?”

Aston wasn’t surprised when Jeff spoke up beside him. “I’ve been giving that a lot of thought. I doubt it’s just new energy sources. Especially given the team here. So here are some ideas.” He glanced around the table, oblivious to the frowns and impatient stares. They would all rather Sol got on with it, but it seemed Jeff was determined to answer the man’s obviously rhetorical question. “So much weird and unexplainable stuff has been found down here,” Jeff went on. “The blood falls, you heard about that one? From a lake under the ice that won’t freeze, but leaks blood red water out into the sea. Or the Antarctic pyramids, that are supposedly just mountains, but they’re so regular, I find that hard to believe. A lot of people are thinking aliens, or Atlantis, or Russian space experiments. For that matter, we know there was once a secret Nazi base here.”

Aston winced at the mention of Nazis, remembering the disturbing cave under Lake Kaarme. Then again, it had saved their bacon more than once. “Just let Sol talk, Jeff,” he said.

“What? You don’t think that stuff is fascinating?”

Aston sighed. “I’m a marine biologist, Jeff. I know the science of this stuff, not the nonsense. The blood falls, for example. It’s not weird and unexplained at all, some people just like to pretend it is. It’s actually the outflow of an iron oxide-tainted plume of saltwater. You know what that is? Iron-rich, hypersaline water intermittently emerges from small fissures in the ice from a subglacial pool under about 1,300 feet of ice. It was discovered over a hundred years ago, by an Australian geologist, as it happens. We’re good at discovering stuff. His name was Griffith Taylor, and the valley still bears his name. He thought it was caused by red algae, but it was later proven to be due to iron oxides. Science!” His hard stare dared Jeff to challenge him.

The cameraman shifted uncomfortably, clearly annoyed at being schooled in front of everyone. “What about the other stuff?”

“Equally bullshit, Jeff! I don’t have time to debunk every conspiracy theory you’ve ever read about. That’s the trouble with bullshit. You ever heard of Brandolini’s Law? It states the simple truth that the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. Which is why it’s so hard to make people see truth when the nonsense is so easy. You need more critical thinking, mate.”

Sol laughed. “Well, enthusiasm is good. But let’s not get carried away. I’ll begin with some history. In the early twentieth century, an expedition set out in this region. Two men got lost, separated from their fellows in a sudden blizzard, and found their way into an underground cavern. Only one survived, but what he saw down there was remarkable.” Sol passed out manila folders, one to each team member. Inside was a text summary followed by lots of color photos. “Read the details later, but for now just have a look at the pictures,” Sol said.

The shots showed a massive cavern, an underground lake, lots of odd, glowing fungi, strange rock formations.

While the team thumbed through their folders, Sol set a slideshow going on the screen of the same photos. “There’s a lot of underground volcanic activity in the area,” he said. “Geothermal vents, rising spring water, stuff like that. It creates a warm, comfortable environment down below, which gets warmer the deeper you go. We’re not looking for uranium or anything like that, but an element previously unknown to humankind.”

Aston looked up. “Wait. For one, where is this place you’re talking about? And how do you know about it now if it’s previously unknown?”

“Remember the old expedition I mentioned? Well, the explorer who escaped had a chunk of it on him. It was lost to science for decades, but SynGreene recently acquired it. Its properties are amazing and our top scientists are convinced it can be a powerful new source of clean energy.”

“Does this stuff have a name?” Syed asked.

Sol gave her an apologetic smile. “Not officially, but SynGreen refers to is as greenium.”

“Are you serious?” Syed asked, eyes wide.

Mirth rippled around the table and Sol shrugged. “I’m afraid so. It’s a kind of working title, because its properties are still being explored. But Arthur Greene of SynGreene is no stranger to celebrating himself in his work.”

“Quite the case of nominative determinism,” Aston said.

“Indeed.”

“You didn’t answer the other question,” Aston said. “Where is this place?”

Sol pointed at his feet. “We’re right on top of it. Well, not quite.” He gestured to the windows. “It’s about a hundred yards that way and extends away from the base.”

“Under the mountains?” Digby O’Donnell asked.

“I guess so. That direction, certainly.”

Dig nodded, smiling.

“So where does this team fit in?” Slater asked. “If you’ve got a sample and you’ve found the location, what are we for?”

Sol grinned. “Good question. We’ll need a complete survey first. Flora, fauna, geology, anything that needs to be studied and preserved or protected. We have to put together all kinds of dossiers for all kinds of government agencies. And we’re thinking the whole thing needs to be documented well anyway, because if we have discovered a new energy source here, your documentary on its emergence will be invaluable in educating the world. That’s why you, specifically, are here.”

Slater’s eyes narrowed, but she said no more.

“What if we find something?” Jahara Syed asked. Aston was glad the biologist had raised the question, because it had been his first thought, too. He had a feeling SynGreene had invested too much money already to let an environmental protection order get in their way.

Sol raised his palms. “Who knows what we’ll find. But make no mistake, we will extract the resources one way or the other. We simply want…”

“Deniability,” Aston said, anger beginning to boil low in his gut.

“We want to be able to demonstrate that we made every effort to do things the right way,” Sol finished.

Slater laughed. “Still sounds like we’re to be your cover story.”

“If you wish to see it that way, but I assure you, we intend to do the right thing here. By everyone. It is possible, if we’re all honest and diligent.” Sol’s face remained friendly and open, as it always seemed to be, but his eyes had hardened. Aston didn’t trust the man as far as he could throw him.

“Some of us don’t seem to have skills that fit the purpose of your expedition,” Aston said.

Sol hesitated for a fraction of a second before he spoke. Aston wondered if anyone else had noticed it. “Let’s just say we want to be prepared for any contingency,” Sol said.