Ices end, p.18
Ice's End, page 18
Because all StarCross cares about is keeping the water flowing—not who manages it. StarCross Silence kicked in and kept Roscoe from saying that out loud. Instead, he asked, “What about the reservoir level dropping? Did they say anything about that?”
Hamza paused. “I dunno. One guy was watching a surveillance-camera video of the reservoir level dropping, and he sounded surprised. Said he’d never seen the reservoir ‘Goldilocks’ that fast. Dunno what he meant by that.”
Just then, their position dot converged with another on the screen. “We’re here,” Hamza said, pulling the track off the travel lane, but still within the line of flags marking the road’s edge.
Roscoe adjusted his mask, turned on his headlamp, and got out of the track. They had stopped on a hillside. In the cone lit up by his headlamp, Roscoe saw patches of brown mottled with white sloping down to the sea; Antarctica had a solid collar of sea ice, a few meters wide, by this point in the winter. There was no drone in sight, and Roscoe wondered how they’d get it back.
Hamza was already outside. Roscoe followed him around to the back of the track, and found him pulling what looked like a thick, rolled-up, rubber mat, the same shade of red as the track.
“I’m not the first guy this has happened to,” Hamza said over the headset. He unlocked the track’s winch, clipping the cable’s carabiner to a metal loop on the mat. “We call these things grabbers. C’mon, we gotta get it down to the ice.”
Roscoe looked up and down the road, wondering how much traffic to expect between Spigot and Newloon on a Sunday morning. For now, the coast was clear. Taking one side of the mat, he and Hamza picked their way down the rocky slope, the cable trailing behind them.
They reached the ice’s edge and set the grabber down. Hamza unrolled the mat, pinning it flat against the ice with his feet. “All right, watch this.” He began tapping the screen projected through his suit’s clear band with gloved fingers. The grabber hummed to life and started sinking into the ice. Hamza stepped off once it was flush with the frozen surface. As it kept sinking, Roscoe realized this strange mat was melting the ice beneath it. In less than a minute, it had burned a dark pool into the frozen sea and sunk out of view, pulling more winch cable into the abyss.
A minute passed in silence, as Roscoe watched the cable sweep across the hole, probing the depths like a fishing line. Finally, Hamza spoke. “All right, we’re locked onto the drone.” A few taps on the controls, and the winch cable went taut. Moments after, the grabber bobbed to the surface, wrapped around a torpedo-shaped drone.
The meter-wide pool seethed as the subdrone lurched out of the ice, just onto the edge of the hole. Roscoe could now see that it was a little shorter than he was tall, with a bulbous front made from some kind of Plexiglas and a lime-green body. Spigot’s droplet had been stenciled on the back fin.
Hamza punched the air. “Almost there! Now we just gotta walk it up to the track.”
“Wait—this thing got itself out of the ice. Can’t we just fly it back up?”
“Nah. The grabber doesn’t have enough power for that. The thrusters are really only good for underwater steering and lifting it out of the water. C’mon, let’s get under it and pick it up.”
Positioning themselves on opposite sides of the subdrone, Roscoe and Hamza squatted down, wrapped their arms around the underside, and stood. To Roscoe’s surprise, the dripping cylinder they held at their waists was light. Hamza looked at its tail. His headlamp illuminated a clump of gray netting hanging from the fins, with flecks of blue, yellow, and red glinting in the plastic strands. “Guess that’s why I couldn’t steer it. Damn microplastics.”
The net held something else: a small but heavy cylinder. Roscoe barely had time to get a good look at it when Hamza led him back up the slope. They were almost to the track when Roscoe felt an odd tightness around his ankles. Looking down, he saw both he and Hamza had gotten their feet tangled in the winch cable.
He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, they tumbled onto their sides, the cable binding their feet. The subdrone rolled from their grasp, down the slope and onto the ice, coming to rest about two meters from the hole.
Then, Roscoe heard a puff.
Hamza’s wrist had been pressed into the ground when they fell, activating the grabber’s thrusters. Unable to lift the subdrone, the air jets scraped it across the ice. The subdrone swung back and forth like a wayward compass needle. Each sway yanked on the winch cable clipped to the grabber, pulling Roscoe and Hamza further downhill. The subdrone moved toward the hole in the ice, toward the water that could kill in seconds.
Roscoe’s trussed-up feet pointed uphill, preventing him from digging his boots into the ground like he had at Vanda. Here, he could only shout at Hamza. “Turn it off! It’s gonna pull us under!”
Hamza raised his wrist, but no shimmer of a screen appeared. “Shit! Suit band’s messed up!” Roscoe watched helplessly as his friend tugged his suit’s zipper, struggling to free his sleeve. Through his headset, he heard Hamza mutter “No fucking voice commands on this thing?” as the subdrone edged back toward the hole. One swing sent it onto the ice; the next had it teetering on the hole’s edge. Then, with a glug, it plunged beneath the surface.
For a moment, their descent halted—then, they were moving faster than before. Hamza had said the thrusters were for underwater maneuvering. Now that they were submerged, they were firing hard. Roscoe watched the gap between them and the ice close. He squeezed his eyes shut and waited.
He felt himself slide another meter, then stop.
Roscoe opened his eyes to see Hamza’s face lit by the wristband screen; he had freed his left arm, letting his wristband project again.
Still pinned on his side and tangled in the cable, Roscoe watched as Hamza made a few stiff taps on his wristband screen. Moments later, the tightness around his ankles eased. Hamza had reactivated the thrusters and reversed the grabber’s direction. Within seconds, the subdrone rose, tail-end first, out of the hole.
“We gotta pull it out!” Hamza shouted. He shoved his arm back in his sleeve and started wriggling downhill. Roscoe followed his lead. A few more minutes later, the subdrone was back on the ice.
They spent several more minutes wriggling downhill, unclipping the grabber, and untangling themselves. Once they were free, Hamza tapped his wristband screen again. The cable that had almost killed them slithered back uphill to the winch and the track.
Hamza lowered his wrist, and Roscoe felt his grudge slip away. “Damn good sailing, or driving, or whatever the hell that was.”
“Thanks. They told us how to use those things, but never said to unclip them.”
Now free of the cable, they walked the subdrone back up to the track.
“All right, I guess we’re even,” Roscoe said, surprising himself with his own humor.
“Still want those showers?” Hamza asked.
“Oh yeah, I might even want a third.” With the subdrone’s body no longer wrapped in a grabber, Roscoe noticed lettering on the side: Rangiora—Hamza T.
“So you guys name your drones?” he asked as they climbed back in the cab.
“Yeah,” Hamza replied. “It’s a tradition since each of us is assigned one. Maybe it also helps their AI spy on us.”
“What’s Rangiora?”
“A Polynesian story my dad told me,” Hamza said as he searched his suit’s pockets for the key. “Hui Te Rangiora was a navigator from Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, just like us.” He gave his carved wooden necklace a fond squeeze. “He and his men traveled far enough south to see icebergs, all in an open canoe, following the stars, wind, and currents. Real badass.”
Roscoe was about to ask Hamza if he believed the story when his friend found the key, slid it into the ignition, and turned it. The electric motor hummed briefly, then fell silent. One by one, the cabin’s lights flickered off. The battery was dead.
Chapter 17
“Try again, dammit!”
Hamza jammed the key a second time. Still nothing.
“If the battery’s dead,” Roscoe asked, “why can’t we download electricity from Lagrange-2? Does this thing have an energy receiver?”
Hamza sighed. “It might get us into trouble, but I don’t know what choice we have.” He tapped a few buttons on the dashboard. Something whirred in the trunk and then fell silent.
They both turned and saw the REC receiver dish, motionless in its cradle. They were cut off from StarCross and its energy, as if they’d been thrown back to the Blackout Years.
“Shit,” Hamza muttered. “I’ve heard about this. Portable receiver dishes are tricky in the cold. Their electronics freeze up sometimes.”
The heavy realization sank in: they were stuck. Roscoe’s heart pounded out a few hard beats. Just then, a pair of headlights crested the next hill.
Hamza pointed. “We could flag them down and see if they’ll tow us.”
“Worth a shot,” Roscoe replied. “If they’re heading from Newloon to Spigot, we’re probably partners in crime. Let’s just say we’re out for a day trip.”
They lowered their goggles and pulled up their masks and hoods, and stepped into the headlights’ growing glare, waving their arms. The track ground to a halt, and as Roscoe stepped closer, he saw that it was olive green, not Spigot red. A figure rolled down the window, and Roscoe’s heart jumped when he recognized the driver’s piercing amber eyes.
“Chip?”
The amber eyes squinted from behind the goggles. “Roscoe? Hamza? What the hell are you guys doing out here?”
Roscoe stumbled around to the passenger side, climbed in, and explained their predicament. When he finished, Chip nodded and asked, “Any chance you saw a little probe out here? About the size of a beer can?”
As Roscoe gasped, Chip immediately climbed out of his track and moved to the back of their disabled one, popping open the door. Moments later, he returned clutching the net. Through it, Roscoe got a clearer look at the cylinder, which had several pinhole openings on one end. On its side was an emblem: a yellow wedge like a pie slice, with three spikes on the curved side.
Chip pointed at it. Roscoe realized it was a wedge of the Sun. “That’s the Griquas’ symbol,” he explained. “Built this for them. They wanted to test a few monitoring ideas and sent specs with some WECs for parts. I broke through the ice and dropped it here a few days ago, then figured I’d check on it when it stopped sending data. I’m heading back to McMurdo—I can drop you guys off on the way.”
Ten minutes later, Roscoe and Hamza were squeezed into Chip’s track, inching forward while their disabled track rolled behind them, clipped to Chip’s winch. He made sure they knew his track’s capabilities. “When you’re on your own down here, you gotta invest in your ride,” he said, patting the dashboard. “Doubt one of your Spigot models could pull this load.”
Roscoe wasn’t impressed. Chip’s track could only pull theirs at a slug’s pace. As they inched down the row of signal flags, he wondered if their absence would be noticed in the time it took to reach Spigot. His mind raced for something to distract itself.
“How are the other probes doing?” Roscoe asked.
“Working like a charm all the way north. Turned around today, should be entering the Drake Passage right about now. The Griquas have a second sub that takes a longer route around Antarctica, trading with all the settlements along the coast. It docked at Newloon today. I was just there setting a probe up on that one.”
“What do they want the data for?” Hamza asked.
“Nothing specific for now. Earth Science funding’s been pretty much dry for fifty years, ever since StarCross convinced everyone that the future’s in space. So no one knows what the Southern Ocean’s like these days. That’s a problem if you’re trying to make a living down here without selling WECs or RECs to StarCross.”
“The Griquas don’t sell anything to StarCross?” Roscoe asked.
“Oh, they definitely sell something,” Chip replied. “They were buying sub parts with RECs, so they must be cranking out energy that StarCross will take. Got no shortage of wind or tidal power in Patagonia, that’s for sure. But they want to do more. They’re hoping research like this can get them a clearer picture of what’s out there.”
“What else could they do?”
Chip tapped the brakes, slowing the track even more as it rattled over a patch of uneven ground. “Fuck if I know. Like I said, they started out with fishing but now they want to move into biotech, aquaculture, other higher-tech stuff. Whatever they want, they seem to think a washed-up scientist on Antarctica will help, so I’m not complaining.”
Hamza leaned forward, bracing himself as the track jolted. “Hey, Chip, you ever done much work around Yule Bay?”
Roscoe’s ears perked up. Yule Bay—the place from Ross’s map.
“Yeah, I did my dissertation research up there, just before the NSF stopped sponsoring Earth-based PhD students. What about it?”
Hamza paused, glancing at Chip before continuing. “I was surveying the seafloor there last week and picked up something weird on sonar. Some kind of structure that kept changing shape with each sonar sweep.”
Chip’s eyes narrowed. “Where was it?”
“Right at the mouth of the bay.”
“How big was it?”
“A-a meter or two long and a meter high,” Hamza answered. “I didn’t get the exact dimensions, but I remember it changed with each sweep.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“No.”
Chip kept one hand on the wheel and thumbed the console to dim the track’s dashboard lights. “Good,” he exhaled, looking relieved.
“Do you know what it was?” Hamza asked.
“It was a freshwater plume.” Chip gave the accelerator a gentle tap as the road smoothed out. “Changes in ocean salinity affect sonar. That plume’s not on any charts, so the software doesn’t correct for it. That’s probably what you picked up.”
Roscoe’s mind spun as he processed what Chip was saying. “There’s fresh water down there? How did you find out about it?”
“I picked it up myself during my dissertation research. After I finished my PhD, I asked Jahnford for help researching it.”
“What did you think it was?”
Chip eased the track around a sharp bend, his eyes flicking between the road and the rearview display. “My hypothesis was that some kind of fissure in the seabed channels meltwater away from Taylor Glacier, all the way under the seafloor to Yule Bay, where it finally bubbles up.”
“From Taylor Glacier to Yule Bay?” Hamza asked, incredulous. “That’s hundreds of kilometers!”
“It’s strange, sure, but not unheard of.” Chip adjusted the heat, clearing the fog forming on the windshield. “There’s a river that flows underground for a hundred and fifty klicks in Mexico. Based on the chemical makeup of the water, Taylor Glacier seemed like the most likely source. And if I recall correctly, you guys have been melting lots of water from that glacier and shipping it north. That means the bedrock underneath suddenly has a lot less weight on it. Things can shift. Cracks can open up.”
“Did you have a way to find out for sure?”
Chip nodded. “Wanted to run a dye test.”
“How so?” Roscoe asked.
“You’d get a ton of dye—biodegradable, nontoxic—all that good stuff. If there is a fissure, I have a pretty good sense of where it starts—under one of the meltwater channels Spigot’s melters have opened up on the underside of the glacier. A subdrone takes the dye there and lets it fly. Meanwhile, another subdrone’s camera is trained on the plume site near Yule Bay watching for the dye to show up.”
Chip slowed the track as they hit another stretch of uneven ground. The suspension creaked under the load. Hamza braced himself against the door while Roscoe gripped the handle above his seat; he could swear this low speed made the jolting worse.
“And if the dye shows up there,” Hamza said, leaning forward as the track jolted, “then there is some kind of connection, under the seafloor, between Taylor and Yule Bay.”
“Bingo.” The road smoothed out, and Chip added speed.
“But Jahnford wasn’t onboard with doing this. Why?” Roscoe asked, checking the time on his wristband again. “His job is to keep the water flowing. Wouldn’t he want to know if he’s losing a bunch of it out a fissure?”
“Not exactly,” Chip chuckled, shaking his head and adjusting the rearview display. “In retrospect, I was stupid to even ask for his help. Put yourself in Jahnford’s shoes. When I came along, he’d just gotten the job on Eatonson’s recommendation. He was not the Residents’ first choice, but Eatonson convinced them that his cult would keep the indents in line. Now how do you think he’d look if it turned out he was losing the water from one of Spigot’s main glaciers? He’d look incompetent, even if he was just the messenger.”
Chip had cranked up the track’s heat again to clear the windshield, while Hamza wriggled out of his suit’s sleeves. “But wouldn’t he want to locate the fissure anyway, rather than letting you or someone else discover it by accident?”
“Maybe, but my guess is that Jahnford doesn’t think so. He must be praying that he can retire and leave someone else holding the bag before that happens.”
“Do you think you could do the test without their permission?” Hamza asked. “Maybe drill a hole straight through some untunneled section of the glacier to release the dye?”
Suddenly, another fireball lit up the Asgard Range. Chip chuckled again, bringing the track to a stop. “Not if I don’t want to meet one of those up close,” he said. Together, they all watched as the rocket arced into the sky, away from the coast.
