Ices end, p.27
Ice's End, page 27
“What’s he planning to do with this?” Yule asked as he signed.
“He’s instructed me to collect signatures from all the officers, then place it in a cask and throw it overboard.” McCormick said. “He wants some record of our voyage to survive, even if we don’t—and he wants it to look like we were all in agreement, even if we weren’t.”
Yule instantly regretted signing. That old dread he had first felt in Chatham over a year ago crept back. Their lives had become secondary to Ross’s thirst for glory.
“Does he truly think we might not return?” Hooker asked.
McCormick shrugged. “He sees it as a possibility. Time will tell.”
Yule pressed the paper flat and slid it across the table toward Hooker. The assistant surgeon’s hand hovered above it before McCormick placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
“Sign, lad. Our best hope of getting out alive is by keeping our Captain confident. And the best way to keep Ross confident is to have him believe that all the officers support him.”
“Even if we really don’t?” Hooker asked.
Yule’s gaze held steady on Hooker as he gripped the quill tighter.
“Aye,” McCormick said. He lowered his voice. “Even if we really don’t.”
Chapter 29
Ross Sea Coast
Antarctica
July 2123
Chip picked Roscoe up and pointed the track toward Newloon. They both needed a beer.
“Maybe we didn’t use enough dye,” the scientist wondered aloud. “A couple of kegs’ worth of dye dumped into a fucking glacier’s meltwater stream.”
“Yeah, I don’t think we’re gonna get a do-over,” Roscoe said. “Any word from Hamza?”
“Nope. I invited him to come for a beer but haven’t heard back.” Roscoe figured the outside travel ban might still in place—or that Hamza just didn’t want to take any chances.
As Newloon came into view, Roscoe thought it had shrunk—looking about two-thirds as big as last time. Then he realized that the other section was still there, just dark. No exterior bulbs lit the trailers and shipping containers, and no light leaked out from inside. The whole area sat black and empty on the ice.
“What happened there?”
“Fire,” Chip said. “Bad one. Traveled too fast to contain. That entire section got torched before they managed to close the bulkheads and seal off the rest of the settlement.”
“Any idea what caused it?”
“No one’s sure, but everyone has an idea. Burned hot enough to melt straight through containers. Last time anyone saw something like that here was a few nights after Smalls died.”
“They think StarCross started it?”
“Can’t prove that they did, but it sure sends a message, doesn’t it? ‘Don’t cross us, and don’t harbor people who do.’” Roscoe was suddenly glad Chip had brought him a suit from McMurdo—he wouldn’t stand out as an ex-Spigot guy.
Chip parked. “Anyway, I think a beer is worth the risk. Come on, let’s go to Shiduri’s.”
White-hot rage flashed through Roscoe. “I’m never going to that shithole again. Let’s go to Gallagher’s.”
Chip gave him a startled look, so Roscoe elaborated. “She was in on it, Chip. She let StarCross Security hide a mic in there, record us, and doctor our conversation to use as evidence against me.”
Chip unzipped his suit, reached into an inner pocket, and pulled out a mashed wad of plastic and wire, no bigger than a raisin.
“While you and Hamza were getting things ready, I went over to Newloon and told Shiduri what happened. She closed up early, and we swept the whole place for bugs. Found eighteen of these.”
Roscoe sank into his seat, feeling even shittier. “Oh. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” Chip pocketed the dead bug. “Now, let’s get that drink.”
They stepped into a packed Skua Central. Many of the booths had been subdivided since Roscoe’s last visit, making space for an extra tenant.
“So are all the people from the burned section just doubling up?”
“Yeah, subletting counter space by the centimeter.”
“Are they gonna rebuild?”
“Someone will—not until summer, though. Even around here, no one’s desperate enough to try winter construction.”
They reached Wit’s End and made a beeline for Shiduri’s.
“We lost,” Chip told Shiduri. She brought them two Neptune’s Bellows porters and leaned across the counter, giving Roscoe’s hand a squeeze.
“I’m sorry, hon. Really, I am. I’ve seen StarCross fuck over a lot of people, but no one this bad.” A tear ran down one of the nicotine wrinkles around her eyes.
“Thanks, Shid.” Roscoe said. “And thanks for helping. Chip told me what you did.”
She nodded. “She looked nice, the gal you were talking to. Used to think I could spot a sweet-talker a mile away, but I never would’ve guessed she was pulling one over on you. Guess I was wrong.”
“Well, that makes two of us,” Roscoe replied, trying to push Jen’s anguished gaze, the brush of her fingers, out of his head. She was lying the whole time, he told himself.
Shiduri went into the kitchen and returned with a basket of corn chips, piled high around the bowl of trembling vat-grown seal blubber. “On the house. I don’t know if this’ll fix anything, but maybe it’ll take the edge off.”
“Thanks, Shid,” Chip said, already reaching for a chip.
Shouts erupted from the pool table. Shiduri rolled her eyes, drew her stun gun, and stepped away.
“If there’s one thing Shid takes a hard line on, it’s privacy,” Chip said, using a chip to scoop a sliver of blubber into his mouth. “If people know they’re getting listened to in here, well, she won’t last long.”
Roscoe nodded and took a long swig of beer, drowning his guilt in porter. He’d drained the bottle by the time Shiduri returned and ordered a Blood Falls Red Ale.
Desperate to shift topics, Roscoe looked up at the menu. “Blood Falls … Neptune’s Bellows—where the hell do they get these names?”
“South Shetland names all their beers after places in Antarctica,” Chip explained. He took another bite of blubber and chewed before continuing. “Neptune’s Bellows is a channel in the South Shetlands. Cliffs on either side. When sealers first discovered it in the eighteen hundreds and heard the wind howling through it, they named it Neptune’s Bellows—and the name stuck.”
“And Blood Falls?” Roscoe asked, studying the label, which showed a glacier face oozing red streaks like a giant’s bloody nose. “Don’t tell me that thing’s real.”
“Oh, it was,” Chip said. “Near the McMurdo Dry Valleys.”
“What was it?”
“Millions of years ago, that glacier trapped a pool of liquid seawater, microbes and all. Some of them managed to survive, using iron compounds for nutrients. At some point, the glacier couldn’t handle the seawater’s pressure anymore, and water started pouring out. The iron reacted with the air, forming iron oxides, better known as rust. That was Blood Falls.”
“Is it still there?”
“Nope,” Chip crunched another chip. “StarCross prospected up there—maybe thirty years ago. The microbes survived down there but couldn’t make it on the surface. It’s all gray now.”
“So microbes survived without sunlight but couldn’t survive on the surface?”
Chip nodded. “Millions of years in a sealed-off petri dish, living off iron. No reason to adapt to anything else.”
“That’s amazing,” Roscoe said, drinking more and forgetting how little he knew about science. “You don’t think microbes caused the freshwater plume?”
Chip toyed with his beer tab, spinning it between his fingers. “Maybe. Back in the early twenty-first century, they developed microbial desalination cells—colonies of microorganisms, basically, that made seawater drinkable.”
Roscoe ate another bit of blubber and washed it down with a swig of Blood Falls. “You mean we didn’t need Spigot?”
Chip nodded. “There were other options too. The Israelis and Saudis had desalination technology. But that all took lots of energy, which was already becoming a pretty precious commodity. The microbes they used in the desalination cells, called geobacter, were pretty low-maintenance by comparison.”
Roscoe ate a chip straight. “So they had these desalination cells using microbes—why haven’t we heard of them? Why does everyone need Spigot?”
“Because the cells don’t work anymore,” Chip explained, pausing to sip his beer. “They got some pretty big ones up and running all over the world, but by the fifties, they broke down one by one.”
“Why?”
Chip leaned back and wiped his fingers with a napkin. “No one’s really sure. The oceans were pretty acidic by that point. Maybe it was more than the geobacter microbes could handle. Or maybe all the microplastics building up in the oceans finally did them in.”
“No one researched it?”
“Nope.” Chip scraped the last bit of blubber from the bottom of the bowl. “Once Spigot opened up, they flooded the market.” He rolled his eyes. “Pun intended. No one was going to make a buck researching how microbes could do it—or how we could help them do it. Governments wouldn’t gamble on that kind of research either, not when they had a ready water source and people were getting desperate.”
“Maybe the microbes in Yule Bay—if there are any down there—found a way to desalinate the water anyway.”
Chip nodded. “But even if they did, we have no way of knowing right now. We’d need to collect a sample from the seafloor and get it to someone to study it.”
“You mean, like the people who gave you a bunch of algae to run a test even after you told them it wasn’t going to happen.”
“Yeah, like them.” Chip paused and knocked back the last of his beer. “But don’t forget, whatever’s down there is going to get nuked to hell in a month or two. We’d need to do it before then. And ideally, we’d need to show the rest of the world that there’s fresh water down there and force StarCross to explain why they’re about to destroy what they’re supposed to be providing.”
They grinned in unison.
“All right,” Roscoe said, brushing crumbs off his lap. “Sounds like we have our work cut out for us.”
Chip waved Shiduri over and ordered another round, then grabbed a nearby napkin and clicked a pen.
They spent the next hour sketching out plans, pausing only to drink beer and pick at the chips. Once they were both satisfied, Chip headed over to the red London-style telephone booth in the corner. It was, he explained, a privacy phone—soundproofed, with calls encrypted and relayed north on a string of non-StarCross pirate satellites.
Chip emerged after twenty minutes and flashed a thumbs-up. They were on.
Chapter 30
H.M.S. Erebus
Unnamed Sea
February 1841
The ships sailed alongside the barrier, their hulls holding firm against the pack ice. Yule and Tucker tracked their progress and sounded the bottom, pulling up soft green mud, stones, and clay from the seafloor. McCormick busied himself studying the bird life; using nets and snares, he and Hooker lured a penguin from the pack ice onto the ship’s deck, where the great bird met its end at the barrel of McCormick’s shotgun. After one kill, the surgeons deemed the penguins’ meat too fishy to warrant future harvests.
None of this improved Ross’s mood. Mile after mile of ice cliff stretched before them, and no southward passage appeared. Ross emerged from the Great Cabin less and less. Hooker, Yule noted, had started avoiding it.
But the sight of a gap, six days after they tossed the cask overboard, drew Ross on deck within minutes. “Hand me your spyglass, Master Yule,” he said. After a quick look, Ross turned to his crew. “We have our channel! Set a course for the opening at once!”
Taking the spyglass back, Yule could see that the ice cliff ahead curved inward. Their angle of approach hid the opening’s width—and whatever might lie beyond.
The ships ground through the pack ice toward the point where the wall curved in. Yule again felt the dread of being crushed—not crushed from below this time, but from above. Stalactites like tree-trunks and slabs like houses hung from the shelf’s edge, poised to break free and splinter any ship venturing too close.
The Erebus, then the Terror, rounded the bend. The ice overhead held firm, and the able seamen kept the ships under open sky. But when the prow swung hard to starboard, Yule grabbed the gunwale for balance. Ahead lay more ice.
This was no channel; it was a bay. The ships could proceed a mile at most before encountering another ice wall.
“Shall we turn back, Cap’n?” an able seaman asked Ross.
“No. Let us sail closer to the ice. Perhaps another gap will reveal itself.”
The crew trimmed the sails and raised signal flags. Yule looked at Ross and bit his lip. Any channel leading onward from this bay would be narrow, forcing the ships directly under the overhanging ice—and Ross would doubtless order them to enter it. Yule looked back at the open water, unsure if he’d leave this bay alive.
The ships pressed forward. Yule again got the sense that the Antarctic had fortified itself against human intrusion. Frozen spray slicked the decks, and the hulls groaned as pack ice ground harder against them. Ahead, rising higher than any rampart Yule had ever seen, loomed the ice wall.
It stood perhaps half a mile ahead now. No channel appeared. The ships were running out of space to turn around.
“Are you mad?” shouted an officer, muffled by his scarf. “There is no channel here, Captain! Turn around!”
Ross said nothing. His hooded figure stood fixed, spyglass in hand, as though he could will a passage into existence. The officer ripped it away from Ross’s hands.
“Captain! Your crew will die!”
Ross lowered his scarf, raised his whistle to his lips, and ordered the Erebus to turn around. The able seamen, as sure-footed as ever, complied. Little by little, the prow shifted away from the ice wall, and the fearsome barrier moved to starboard, then astern. The Erebus and Terror were on their way out.
But not for long.
This deep in the bay, the wind had dwindled, and the pack ice thickened until the ships could barely move. The able seamen could not coax enough strength from the sails to break through, and soon the Erebus and Terror ground to a halt, trapped in the ice.
Ross blasted on his whistle. “Every man not manning the sails, out on the ice! We shall break our way through.”
And so, Yule found himself beneath Erebus’s prow, swinging a pickax and wondering who might be the next to suffer Hooker’s fate. By some miracle, none did. After an hour of picking and digging, the ice yielded. With a mighty crack, the Erebus, then the Terror, lurched forward. Yule followed the others up a rope ladder, his boots slipping against the frozen rungs as ice stung his face like wasps.
No one cheered when the ships emerged from the bay. They had known their vessels could withstand crushing by pack ice. Now they understood that this ice could still entomb them, and that a chunk of the cliffs could destroy them from above.
As the ships resumed their eastward course, another sharp crack drew the crews to their sterns. Yule watched an ice slab, just visible inside the bay, tumble into the icy water, sending a wave of ice toward the ships. Only the bay’s lip shielded them from disaster.
“No God below fifty degrees south, that’s for sure,” Yule heard one able seaman mutter to another. “This can’t end well.”
The expedition’s man of science agreed, Yule learned that evening.
“We can’t go on like this,” Hooker said at supper, huddled over his soup for warmth. “Ross will get us all killed.”
Yule nodded but said nothing. He still hoped to see Ross hang, but for the moment he dared not speak ill of the captain.
“Could the officers somehow override his decision?” Hooker asked.
Yule didn’t answer, just shook his head and pressed his finger to his lips. He rose from the table, stepped quietly to the doorway of the officer’s mess, and glanced out. No one lingered nearby; he sat back down.
Hooker lowered his voice but kept on. “Come now, there must be some way—”
“Silence!” Yule hissed, leaning in as Hooker flinched, trembling. Yule decided against telling him they both could hang for taking this talk much further. Instead, he reminded Hooker what their mutual friend had told them. “Remember what Doctor McCormick said. Captain Ross must believe we all support him.”
Hooker nodded, staring down at his plate. “Aye. But then why would he place that note in a cask and throw it overboard?”
“So that a record of our voyage might survive, even if—” Yule paused, catching Hooker’s eye, unable to finish.
“Ross wants the world to think we all consented to continuing along the ice shelf.”
“Aye. He wants to be remembered as a good captain, not—” Yule bit his tongue.
“A good captain?” Hooker muttered, eyes fixed on the table, shaking his head. “I know better—”
His voice faltered, and Yule, desperate to distract Hooker from Ross’s abuse, started listing the captain’s failures, one by one, consequences be damned. “He certainly isn’t a good captain. No good captain would have sailed into that ice bay. He’s neglected our magnetic observations in his mad quest for the pole. He’s out to please the Admiralty, but he’s treated me like an ass every day since leaving England.” Little by little, the pain left Hooker’s face as Yule stripped Ross of the aura that had surrounded him as a Captain of the Royal Navy.
Before Yule could continue, a commotion drew them out of the officer’s mess. It was Cunningham, one of the Marines, rummaging through Tucker’s bunk.
