Zodiac Station

One

What the hell is out there?

Carl Franklin, Captain of the US Coast Guard ice-breaking cutter Terra Nova, stared out the wheelhouse windows. A 360˚ field of view — but he might as well have his nose pressed against a painted wall. The clouds had settled after the storm, fusing the sky with the air and the air with the ice to make a perfect blank. Growing up in Maine, he thought he’d seen fog, but this was like nothing else. Even the bow light wasn’t much more than a rumour.

He put his hand against the cold glass, just to touch something solid. Hopefully the crew didn’t notice. In the middle of the Arctic Ocean, a thousand miles of ice around them and four thousand metres of near-freezing water below the keel, he didn’t want them thinking their captain was losing his grip on reality.

He rocked back on his heels, reassured by the mass of sixteen thousand tons of steel under his feet. The Terra Nova was state of the art, the pride of the Coast Guard: an ice-reinforced vessel capable of making a steady three knots through four-foot ice, of smashing her way to the North Pole if need be. She’d already been there twice in her short working life.

A wobbling reflection ghosted up out of the fog. Santiago, the operations officer, an Arizona Latino who’d traded his hot, landlocked state for a frozen ocean. A thing for deserts was how he explained it; a thing for desserts, they teased him back.

Franklin turned. The spooky Santiago in the window became the real deal, six foot two of seafaring muscle, slowly being promoted to fat. By the time he made admiral, Franklin thought, the doctors would be giving him a hard time on his health assessment.

‘The geeks want to go play,’ Santiago announced.

The geeks were the scientists, the Terra Nova’s cargo, and her mission. Thirty-three scientists from all over the world, measuring the water, measuring the ice, measuring the snow, measuring the air. Fifty kinds of cold, Santiago called it. It kept them happy.

‘What’s the ice like?’ he called to the crewman hunched over the satellite chart. A tie-dye swirl of greens, oranges and reds, constantly mutating as the ice shifted.

‘Shitty for fishing, sir.’

Franklin checked his watch. Ten thirty at night, but that didn’t mean anything here. The sun had come up four days ago and wasn’t going to set for five months. Not that you’d know, with that damned fog.

‘They can have three hours.’ He looked out the window again, at the blank grey void that held the ship fast. They’d be lucky to measure their own feet in that.

‘Put an extra man down there on bear guard.’

What the hell is out there?

Boatswain’s Mate (second class) Kyle Aaron hugged the Remington 870 to his chest and hoped he wouldn’t have to use it in a hurry. The gloves made his fingers so fat he could hardly get them round the stock, never mind pull the trigger. Not that the gloves kept him warm, either: the only thing he could feel in his hands was prickling cold.

He shouldered the shotgun and swung his arms to get some blood flowing. Behind him, the geeks did their thing on the ice. Some of them had put up a tripod and were using it to winch a yellow buoy down through a hole they’d bored. Others paced out survey lines, walking backwards and forwards over the snow like they were checking for litter. Aaron, who’d scraped a D in ninth-grade bio, and spent four years of high school avoiding chemistry, wondered why they did it. He stamped his feet and wished they’d hurry the fuck up.

The fog had thinned a little. A ways back, the Terra Nova’s red hull loomed over the ice, her white superstructure dissolving into the cloud. He could hear the rasp of the deck crew scraping off the ice, and the low throb of her engine as the propellers turned slowly to maintain position. The yellow crane arm on her foredeck dangled the gangway on to the ice. He wondered how fast the scientists could run up it if a bear came.

The ground trembled; the ice cracked and growled. The shotgun wobbled in his hands. Growing up in Florida, cold was something you only saw at the movies. If he’d ever thought about the Arctic, the sea ice, he’d imagined it would be like the local skating rink. His first transit with the Terra Nova had set him right. However smooth the ice wanted to be, it sat on top of an angry, heaving ocean. Signs of violence were everywhere: high ice sails, pushed up by the pressure of two plates crashing together; sudden cracks of open water, even at minus twenty, where the ice sheet had suddenly cut apart. Broken chunks of rubble, like the wreckage of a frozen civilisation; and a crust of snow that sometimes froze hard enough to walk on, and sometimes dropped you through up to your knees.

He’d joined the Coast Guard to bust drug smugglers, and rescue beautiful rich women from drowning in the Gulf of Mexico. Not to freeze his ass off guarding geeks who wanted to count polar-bear shit.

The ice trembled again. He heard a howling sound, not the wind — there was none — but the agony of the ice being torn apart by the sea below. Unless it was a bear. He peered into the fog. Shadows spun inside the cloud: changing light, changing ice. Was there something else? Something moving?

If you think it’s a bear, it’s a bear. That’s what they taught you. He lifted the gun and thought about firing a warning shot. If he was wrong, he’d have some pissed-off scientists. But let it get too close and he’d have to kill it — and you didn’t make rank in the Coast Guard by shooting endangered species.

You didn’t make rank by letting geeks get eaten, either. He chambered a slug. The shadows swirled like stirred paint, spots in front of his eyes. He couldn’t see a fucking thing. No distance, no definition.

But one of the shadows wasn’t moving like the rest. It stayed in its place, slowly swelling out of the fog. Coming towards him.

He tugged off his Gore-Tex glove. If he hadn’t been wearing liners, the metal trigger would have stuck to his skin. He aimed the gun up.

If you think it’s a bear, it’s a bear.

The shot echoed across the open ice — maybe all the way to the North Pole. It certainly got the scientists’ attention. The ones who remembered the drill ran back to the gangway, dragging equipment; others, reluctant to let a $100,000 probe sink to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, hesitated by the borehole. Everyone was shouting.

Aaron didn’t hear them. The shadow hadn’t stopped moving. Now it was so close it had started to take shape. He could see legs, the bulge of a head. It didn’t look right for a polar bear — too tall, too thin and too dark. Maybe a reindeer? He’d heard they could float out on the sea ice way off from land.

No one was going to chew him out for shooting a reindeer. He fired another shot into the air, scattering more scientists, then put the Remington to his shoulder and aimed at the shape in the fog. Even in the liner gloves, his fingers had got so cold they felt swollen fat. He squeezed the trigger again.

The mechanism clicked on a spent shell. He’d forgotten to chamber the next round. He pawed at the pump, ejected the shell and slammed in another round. Pulled the trigger.

It was a lousy shot. His finger wouldn’t bend, so he had to jerk the trigger with his whole arm, pulling the shotgun wide. Did he miss? The bear was still coming at him. He fumbled with the pump again, but his hand was so cold he couldn’t work the action. Fuck.

He looked up to see if he was going to die. The cloud shifted, like someone opening the drapes, and just like that he saw it clearly. Not a bear, or a deer. It was a man. Skiing over the ice in jerky, broken movements: lunging up, shuffling forward, then slumping down again, using the ski poles like crutches. He wore a red coat and black ski pants; a red fur-trimmed hood was zipped up over his face.

I nearly shot Santa Claus.

It must be one of the geeks gone off the reservation, lost his way in the fog. But the geeks didn’t ski. And they wore red pants, not black.

The man stopped as if he’d skied into a brick wall, almost falling over in his bindings. He threw out his arms and flailed his ski poles frantically; maybe he tried to say something, but either his hood muffled it or his voice was too weak. Without the poles to hold him up, he lost his balance and toppled smack into the snow.

Aaron laid down the gun and ran over. There was a name badge sewn on the jacket, Torell, and under it an insignia he didn’t recognise. A twelve-pointed star with a roaring polar bear in the middle. Next to it, blood leaked out from a nickel-sized hole punched through the fabric, crystallising almost as soon as it hit the snow.

Oh shit.

Footsteps floundered through the snow behind him. Lieutenant Commander Santiago, the ops officer, still in his ODU pants and a jacket he’d pulled on in a hurry. He stared at the figure on the ground.

‘Where in this godless white fucking hell did he come from?’

The man stirred; feeble clouds of air puffed off his lips as he tried to speak. Aaron put his head close. The fur tickled his cheek.

‘What’d he say?’ Santiago demanded.

Aaron looked up.

‘It sounded like Zodiac.’