Polar Vortex

Chapter 5

Earl was in the machine hut, checking the instruments, when he heard the snowmobile engine. A common noise, part of the soundtrack of life in the facility — he didn’t think anything of it. If he had, he might have remembered that no-one was supposed to be off site that day.

But he was concentrating on the instruments. They were all out of whack. There’d been a tremor in the night — he’d felt it in his bunk — and that worried him. If the drilling had started to collapse the seabed, all the environmental impact statements and greenwash bullshit in the world wouldn’t save them.

He remembered the conversation from breakfast. If those Greenpeace pukes who’d stormed Prirazlomnaya had any idea what DAR-X were really doing on Utgard …

The pipe pressure was way down too, but that was nothing new. It had been that way for months. He’d have to go to the pump room to tighten the valves.

He opened the door, and saw something unexpected. The door to the tech hut opposite was swinging open, which it shouldn’t have been; a girl in a green coat darted down the steel steps and disappeared around the corner.

There were three things weird about that.

First, he didn’t recognise her.

Second, she was wearing a green coat, not the yellow jackets all the DAR-X staff wore.

Third, she was a woman.

His gun was leaning against the door. He picked it up and strode out after her.

A clatter echoed around the bay, metal on stone. He picked up the pace a notch. Came around the corner of the supply tent to where the rig was parked — and stared.

Bright graffiti. So fresh, the paint — or whatever it was — still dribbled down the sides of the gas tank. Messy letters, shocking pink, spelling out ‘#SAVETHEARCT’.

Earl wasn’t a complex man. He had no idea there existed such a thing in the world as a hashtag; ‘Tweets’ and ‘Likes’ were a mystery to him. Looking at porn, and Skyping home to his kids once a week, was about as far as he went with the social side of the Internet. But he knew some granola-eating crunchy had pissed on his lawn, and that made him mad as hell. He hefted the Supernova.

Mac knew he shouldn’t look back, but he couldn’t help himself. Then he wished he hadn’t. A big man in a yellow jacket had followed them out from the camp. He was shouting at them, though the only words Mac could make out were curses. And he was carrying a shotgun.

Three months on Utgard had got Mac reasonably used to having guns around. They took their rifles everywhere, in case of polar bears. Unfortunately, Spoons had been carrying it that day.

But he’d never — ever — had one pointed at him in anger. He ran faster, threw himself onto the snowmobile and yanked the starter cord so hard he almost ripped it in two.

The engine was still warm; it started at once. Louisa jumped on behind him. He jammed on the throttle and was thrown back into Louisa as the machine leaped forward. Snow cover was thin, here: patches of bare ground, and the crunch of pebbles under the treads.

The snowmobile feeds snow through the engine to cool it, they’d told him at the induction. If there’s no snow, it’ll overheat.

In the rush to escape, he’d forgotten his helmet and goggles. That made it almost impossible to drive: he had to squint into the freezing wind. Ice pellets peppered his cheeks, flaying them raw. Tears whipped down his face and froze. It was a calm day, but on the snowmobile he was caught in a storm. And he couldn’t stop.

A crack cut through the wind and the engine roar. Automatically, he slowed his speed. Had he hit a rock? Broken something in the engine?

Louisa leaned forward and screamed in his ear. ‘They’re shooting at us!’

Earl cursed. The slug gun was a good stopper when a bear charged you, but a moving target at nearly a hundred yards was a stretch. He shouldered the weapon and headed for the snowmobile lot. He wasn’t especially worried. He could see a helmet lying in the snow, which told him the vandal asshole couldn’t go too fast and keep his eyes open. Plus, so far as he could see, it looked like he was riding a 600cc machine. DAR-X drove 1200.

But he was mad, and he didn’t want that prick even thinking he could get away. He got on the snowmobile and revved the engine.

This was going to be fun.

Mac stopped the snowmobile and wiped his eyes. He couldn’t keep going like this. He pulled his neck warmer as high as it would go, over the tip of his nose, and tugged down his hat so they almost met. He pulled the hood of his coat tight around his face. He scrabbled in his pocket for his sunglasses, the best he could do for his eyes. He looked back.

He hadn’t gone as far as he’d thought — certainly not as far as it seemed when he was driving with the wind in his face. Echo Bay was no distance away at all.

And someone was coming after them.

He started again. For the time he’d lost trying to protect his face, he might as well not have bothered. The dark glasses wiped out any sense of the terrain, making every bump and rut a surprise. The wind whistled around the lenses; it cut through the gaps in his clothing so viciously he couldn’t keep his head up. He was driving almost blind.

The snowmobile shuddered and veered up on one ski as the front hit a rock. Mac threw out his leg, and remembered too late it was the wrong thing to do. If two hundred and fifty kilos of metal is tipping over, your leg won’t stop it; it’ll get crushed, they’d told him. For a moment, the whole machine seemed to stand on a knife-edge. It had to go over.

Louisa threw her body sideways, against the roll. The snowmobile landed back on its feet with a thump. Mac remembered to breathe again.

But it was a stay of execution, not an escape. Glancing back, he saw the man behind gaining on him. Face hidden, standing easily on his machine like a jockey in the stirrups. Shotgun in a holster tied to the cowling.

I can’t believe this is happening.

He hunched himself double, trying to get his head down behind the low windshield. It didn’t make much difference. His thumb felt like it would snap off from the effort of holding the throttle, but each time he looked back, the faceless figure was closer.

And then something seemed to go wrong.

The warning light came on a second before the engine died on Earl’s machine. Some fucking warning. The snowmobile slewed to a stop. Blue smoke poured out of the nose cone.

Earl tried to restart it but the engine was locked. He popped the hood, and almost choked on a cloud of vaporised antifreeze. Nasty. Must have blown on o-ring or something. He’d have to walk back to base. Lucky, in a way, it hadn’t happened fifty miles out on the ice dome.

He could fix it. It would take time, but that didn’t bother him. Working on the Arctic oil fields, you got used to things not going right first time. All it took was patience and perseverance. And, sometimes, the intelligent application of violence.

They wouldn’t escape on Utgard. You could run as far as you wanted, but there was never really anywhere to go. And everywhere you went, you left a track to follow.