Zodiac Station

Twenty-four

Flying into Zodiac, we could see the wrecked Twin Otter at the end of the runway. Christ knew how long before they got it out: might be a hundred years.

I was busting to get back to Vitangelsk right away. I grabbed some coffee and cereal from the mess, then found Greta in the shop. She kept that place like your granddad’s basement: tools hanging on nails on the walls, hardware spilling out of plastic boxes, smell of oil and fried metal in the air. She was working on a busted snowmobile, stripped down to her tank top, hair braided back.

‘You look good,’ I told her.

She gave me a look like she could care less.

‘Do you have any bolt cutters I could borrow?’

She took a heavy-duty pair of long-handled bolt cutters off a peg on the wall and gave them to me. You could break into Fort Knox with those things.

But I wasn’t taking a chance. ‘You don’t have something like a portable gas-cutting torch too, do you?’

Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t say anything — but for some reason I felt I had to explain myself.

‘One of the struts buckled on my radio telescope. Crushed the cable; I need to get it out.’

‘I can help.’

Was that a straight offer? Or was she calling my bluff?

‘I’m good.’

‘Be quick. There’s a storm coming.’

‘All staff,’ said the speaker on the wall.

I’d spent a night in the cold, no sleep: I was twitchy as hell. The voice coming out of the speaker almost made me jump into Greta’s arms.

‘All staff, please report to the mess for an urgent briefing,’ Quam said over the intercom.

The Horrorscope on the door said Your future is stormy. Inside, everyone was sitting on the couches — like movie night, only without the entertainment. Anderson had gotten out of bed, I noticed, though Trond the pilot wasn’t there. Ash sat on the end nearest Quam. I wondered if this was about him.

‘I have an announcement to make,’ Quam said. Guy couldn’t open his mouth without telling you he was a pompous ass. ‘Following a consultation with Norwich, it’s been decided that all Zodiac personnel will be confined to base until further notice.’

The room erupted. Quam looked surprised, though he was an idiot if he hadn’t seen it coming. He took a step back, pressed up against the TV like a prisoner facing the firing squad.

‘Did the penguins make that decision?’ someone asked sarcastically.

Quam held up his hand for silence, like an elementary-school teacher with a rowdy class. It was a while before everyone quieted down enough for him to speak.

‘We can’t afford any more accidents. With the Twin Otter out of commission, we’re terribly exposed. If anything else happened, there’d be no way to get us out.’

I didn’t think that would improve morale any. I kept quiet, and watched the others. They’d started shouting again. Ashcliffe said something like ‘health and safety gone mad’; Annabel was listing all the people who funded her research. Show-off.

‘I’ve got instruments collecting data up on the mountain,’ said Fridge. ‘Am I supposed to forget about that?’

‘Use the data link.’

‘The data link is fucked.’

‘What about Gemini?’ Annabel said.

‘Gemini’s off-limits.’

‘My funding body pays a fortune to keep me here so I can do science.’

‘Violating this policy will put you in breach of the contracts you signed,’ Quam said. He sounded desperate.

‘So what?’ Fridge demanded. ‘You can’t send us home. Will you throw us out into the snow like fucking Captain Oates?’

‘That would be a breach of contract,’ Ash said. Heavy with sarcasm. He must have forgotten he was going home anyway.

I raised my hand. Quam pointed to me, grateful for that gesture of respect.

‘Did the assholes in Norwich consider that someone’s more likely to end up dead if we’re all locked in together like this?’

‘Enough!’ Quam thumped the TV so hard I thought he’d broken it. Then he really would’ve had a mutiny. ‘I didn’t make this policy, but we all have to stick with it. For our own protection.’

‘Who do we need protecting from?’ Anderson asked. If Quam heard that, he ignored it.

‘As a positive,’ said Quam, breathing hard, ‘I’d like to announce that this Saturday will be Thing Night.’

That earned him an ironic cheer. Everybody loves Thing Night.

Quam went and shut himself in his office. I guess he was regretting not fitting locks. I sat down in my room and thought about what had happened.

Kennedy’s story was crazy, but it wasn’t the craziest thing that had happened at Zodiac that week. If he wanted to lie, there were easier ways to do it than almost freezing to death in a mining car. And I’d seen the extra set of footprints around the tower. I wished I’d have followed them.

So who was the guy in the yellow parka? He had to be DAR-X, protecting whatever they had locked in the HQ building where all those wires led. I had to get back there.

Of course, I wasn’t allowed off base, but I wouldn’t let Quam’s BS regulations stop me. And while I was going off the reservation, I might as well kill a few birds.

I got out my laptop and wrote an email to a colleague of mine, physicist at Rutgers called Guy Roache.

Getting some interesting results from my probe at Vitangelsk. Levels ~ 1400.

In case you’re wondering, there actually is a physicist at Rutgers called Guy Roache. Except, he spells his name without an ‘e’. The email address I used was a good-looking fake set up by my buddies at Fort Meade. The messages went all the way to New Jersey, then bounced right back to Echo Bay to set up a meet with Bill Malick. Vitangelsk was the place, 14:00 was the time. The tilde meant ‘today’.

You’re probably thinking it’s kind of dumb. But we had to be careful. Rumour at Zodiac was that Quam used his administrator privileges to read other people’s mail. If he’d caught me giving out data, he’d have had me on the first plane out of there.

Not that that was a problem now, with the Twin Otter trashed.

I still wanted to know what Hagger could’ve found up there. For starters, it might explain some things I needed to know. For another thing, it might have gotten him killed. If I was going to meet Malick in Vitangelsk, I had to be prepared.

I let myself in to Hagger’s lab and found someone already there. Anderson was on a stool, squinting into a microscope. A green notebook lay open on the bench beside him. Beside that, like he’d just taken it out of his pocket, lay a key on a teddy-bear key ring.

‘Feeling OK?’ I asked, like I’d come to see how he was doing. I tried not to stare at the key too obviously.

‘Better, thanks.’ He smiled. ‘It’s very strange, missing two days of your life. You go around the whole time with that feeling you’ve forgotten to turn off the gas.’

‘And back at work already.’ Edging closer, I could see it was a Yale key. And under the microscope, he had a section of yellow tube that looked like the pipes at Echo Bay.

‘I’m trying to tidy up a few things Hagger left behind.’

‘Whatcha got?’

‘Nothing I can understand.’ He picked up the notebook and pulled a loose-leaf sheet from between the pages. A computer printout, covered in a grid of zeros, ones and twos. ‘This, for example. I can’t make head nor tail of it.’

I’d wondered what Hagger did with that. I thought about telling the truth, and couldn’t see any reason why not.

‘It’s mine,’ I said. ‘I gave it to Hagger. I was getting interference with my instruments. One day, I was playing around with frequencies trying to figure it out and I picked up this fragment. Nothing else, just a series of numbers. I showed it to a few people at Zodiac to see if it had anything to do with their work. Hagger didn’t know, but he was interested. He liked crossword puzzles; said he’d see if he could do something with it.’

Anderson looked it over. ‘The twos are what make it odd.’

Smart cookie. ‘That’s what we thought. Zeros and ones could just be any kind of binary, what you’d expect. The twos make no sense.’

‘And this is all you managed to get?’

‘Yeah.’ I gave him back the paper; it was only a copy. ‘Did you ever find out what Hagger wanted up on the Helbreen? I mean, his major work was on sea ice, right?’

‘It’s possible Hagger had traced some sort of chemical in the sea ice. He thought it might be coming off the glacier in meltwater.’

I dismissed that. It might have been what he was looking for, but it wasn’t what got him killed. ‘Nothing about DAR-X in the notebook?’

‘That was a different project.’ He slid off the stool so I could take a look through the microscope. ‘Some micro-organism in the water was corroding their pipes. They asked Hagger to analyse it.’

I was more interested in the pipe than the bugs in the water. I hoped I’d find something inside it, fibre optics or antenna cable. So far as I could see, it was just a hollow tube.

‘How about that key?’ I asked. Casual as I could. ‘Last I heard, we didn’t have any locks at Zodiac.’

A strange look crossed his face, like he wished I hadn’t seen it. I could see him thinking about what to tell me.

‘I found it where Hagger died, by the crevasse. It must have fallen out of his pocket.’

That got my attention — if it was true. ‘Did Hagger have a filing cabinet, or a desk drawer he kept locked?’

He waved his hand around the lab. ‘I’ve looked everywhere. As you say, there aren’t any locks at Zodiac.’

‘No secrets among friends,’ I said cheerfully.

‘Maybe it was his house key and he forgot it was in his pocket.’

‘Maybe he had a secret liquor cabinet chilling in the glacier.’

We both laughed.

‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘Need to check my emails. Let me know if you find anything.’

‘Right away,’ he promised.

I could tell he wanted me to leave, so I didn’t linger. I went straight out in the corridor. Of course, I left the door open a tad. The corridor’s so dark, you wouldn’t really see someone watching you through the crack.

As soon as I was gone, Anderson took the key off the bench and hid it in a drawer. I guess he wished he could have locked it away safe — but there are no locks at Zodiac. Nothing to stop a guy going into a lab at night and taking something out of a drawer.

Back in my room, the reply had come in from Malick.

I’m in meetings all day, but hopefully can get to it tomorrow. Levels >1400 definitely something worth talking about.

He couldn’t make it until tomorrow. I remembered what Greta had said and called up the weather forecast. It didn’t look good. A polar low was heading our way from Greenland: I could see the comma cloud coming together on the satellite, the long tail starting to turn. Those things move almost as fast as a hurricane. When it hit, it was going to get ugly.

But I had to get back to Vitangelsk, and see if the key fitted the lock.