The water is clear, but it’s not pure. Tiny bits of silt swirl around his boots. Schools of twenty to thirty transparent fish swim past. Occasionally, they examine the black rubberized soles of his boots. He can see a thin spine, intestines, and the flick of a tail.
“They’re blind,” Adrianna says, sitting beside him.
Ripples of water roll away from her boots.
“They can’t see?” he says, surprised. The way they move suggests they can.
“They feel their way through the water. They can sense movement, changes in pressure, electrical impulses, things like that.”
“Huh.”
“Are you okay?” she asks.
Nick asks her, “Have you ever seen something you couldn’t explain?”
“Oh, sure. All the time. That’s the thing about science. It’s not about having answers. It’s about asking questions.”
“But what if you saw something impossible?”
“Everything starts out impossible,” Adrianna says. “For thousands of years, flight was impossible. The Greeks had Icarus flapping a pair of wings, but flying was for the birds.
“As much as we admire the Wright brothers, they flew for a mere twelve seconds. They got twenty feet off the ground, that’s all. They didn’t even clear the sand dunes on the beach. But suddenly, something that had been impossible became possible. The rest is history.
“Can you imagine if they saw an A380 or an F-16? Or a helicopter flying on Mars? I think they’d laugh. To them, such machines would be ridiculous, but it all came from challenging the impossible.”
As well meaning as she is, Adrianna isn’t helping.
Nick moves down a step, dipping his boots once more in the receding water.
Adrianna joins him.
“What do you think’s in there?” he asks.
“In the water?” she replies, clarifying his question. “Oh, lots of organics. Nutrients. Microbes. Plankton. It looks clear, but it’s teeming with life.”
“It sure is,” Nick says, laughing.
With the water at waist level on L3, Jazz pushes past them, wading down the stairs. The air in her suit rushes up as she steps out into the corridor. She’s so buoyant her boots barely touch the floor. Jazz is in danger of keeling over, but she continues on, using her hands to push the water around her.
“Let’s get some more pumps going.”
“On it,” Nick says. He heads down to the L3 maintenance room and sets up another two pumps. Nick shifts the grating and drops them down to L4.
Bodies float past. Yeah, Nick would much rather see a transparent body than a real one. Conflicting thoughts gnaw at his conscience. Whatever that thing in the water is, it was down here when this happened. It caused this. Why the fuck are you waving hello, Nick? If he felt dumb before, now he feels like an imbecile.
Adrianna steers the bodies into an empty room but not before one bumps into the maintenance door. Blank eyes stare up at Nick. A crab emerges from the mouth of a dead scientist. Adrianna grabs him by his shoes, pulling him into the next room. Out of sight/out of mind has always been the best way for humanity to deal with death. Being confronted by a dead body makes Nick uncomfortable, but it’s important. Bear is lying alone in the shadows at the bottom of that damn shaft. He deserves better. So does this guy. But he’s pushed into a room, and the door is closed. It seems the living need to ignore the dead. Stop and think about it too long, and he knows he’ll crumble.
Nick tells himself that if the team can rescue those trapped in the conference room, it’ll mean something for those they’ve lost. It’s a hollow victory for the dead, but it is a victory nonetheless. Passing the light of life on to another is the best anyone can hope for.
Nick has to focus. He takes a mental inventory of the equipment in the utility room. A screwdriver could make for a poor man’s ice ax. A tape measure is useless. Coils of electrical wiring could be used as rope.
Vertical blades of ice have formed on the walls of L3 as the water began to freeze. To Nick, this level looks like the inside of a hive.
“It’s just ice,” he says quietly to himself as he heads back up the stairs to get a few extra lengths of fire hose. Nick wants to extend the pumps from L2, so they reach down to L4. The electrical cords are long enough. Someone somewhere ensured that long before the base was built. He just needs some extra hose. Nick drapes several thick hoses over his shoulder. Brass fittings clink together. Elizabeth hasn’t moved. She’s still sitting on the upper stairs next to the backpacks.
With a firm hand sliding along the rail, Nick heads back down to L3. Adrianna and Jazz are nowhere to be seen. A transparent figure stands beside the utility room, waiting for him. As Nick is coming down the stairs, he expects the watery man to look up at him, but the position of the transparent head remains the same. As soon as Nick’s boots touch the floor, the alien walks toward him. Nick backs up, slipping into the utility room. The only ripples are from his boots. Seemingly crystalline legs move through the water, but there are no corresponding waves.
“W—What do you want?” Nick asks with a trembling voice. He’s standing knee-deep in water. “What do you need?”
Nick’s trying to recall the hierarchy Adrianna described in the conference room, but his mind is blank. The watery man holds up his hand just as Nick did on L2. Nick copies him, noting the roles are reversed.
“You want us to understand,” he says. “But we need you to understand us. You may thrive here in the water. We can’t. We have to rescue our people.”
Nick points at the next set of submerged stairs.
“We have to go down there. Our people are trapped down there.”
He lowers his hand, taking a good look at the transparent figure. The alien is bald, but he has eyes, a nose, ears, and a mouth, or at least the faint outline of them. Grit floats in the water, moving as though stirred by an unseen current.
The aquatic man points, but on a different angle. He’s pointing in another direction down on the lower level. It seems he understands at least part of what Nick is saying.
“What the hell are you?” Nick asks from behind the safety of his mask and his hazmat suit.
“Have you got those pumps going?” Jazz calls out, sticking her head out of a room further along the corridor.
Nick turns, saying, “Almost.”
Although the inflated hood on his hazmat suit is clear, the sides aren’t. He loses sight of the creature. When he turns back, the watery man is gone. Ripples undulate across the surface of the water. If there’s one thing alien movies have taught him, it’s to be afraid of the unknown. Nick feels on edge. Why him? Why isn’t this thing appearing to Adrianna or Jazz? Why doesn’t it appear when they’re all present? What is it trying to accomplish? It’s not trying to stop him, even though he’s restricting its movement by draining the base.
Nick turns off the pumps, extends them with the extra hoses, and drops them down to the next level. He hooks up the electrical system and starts pumping. Now, he’s running four pumps. Two go into the drainage pipe, the other two into sewage.
“And we’re good,” he says as the others join him by the next set of stairs. The water recedes at a steady rate. “Did you figure out what jammed the elevator?”
Adrianna says, “A body.”
Not a scientist or an engineer.
Not a man or a woman.
A body.
Rescue
With the water receding, Nick hauls the medical pack down to the lowest level within the base—L4. Ice clogs the corridor. It’s grown in wings, forming baffles that reach out from the walls, choking the walkway.
“I found the leak,” Adrianna says, wading toward him. “Over by the airlock. It’s iced-over so we won’t be fighting more incoming water.”
“That’s good to hear,” Nick says.
“Which one’s the conference room?” Jazz asks.
Adrianna replies, “Oh, on this level, they’re all conference rooms.”
“What?”
“Wait,” Nick says. He points along the corridor at one of the rooms down to their left. Mentally, he’s tracing the line shown to him by the creature in the water. “They’re in that room over there.”
“What?” Adrianna says.
“How do you know that?” Jazz asks. “That’s skipping three or four other rooms.”
“I—I can hear them,” Nick says, lying. “They’re banging on the walls.”
The two women stand still. Water drips from the ceiling. Ice groans as the water level drops. Pumps hum in the background. They look at each other.
“Damn, you’ve got good hearing,” Jazz says, wading forward. Water sloshes around her. She positions herself several doors down and points, asking, “This one?”
“Yes. I think so.”
She begins chipping away at the ice. “This is going to take a while.”
“We’re getting low on oxygen,” Adrianna says. “Forty-five minutes left. We need to get in there. Quick.”
“I’ll see if I can find something we can use for leverage,” Nick says. He leaves the women in the corridor and tugs on the door to the utility maintenance area. Sheets of ice fall free, splashing in the water. Behind the cabinet, he finds a length of three-quarter-inch steel pipe. As it’s painted red, it must be leftover from the installation of the fire suppression system. It’s five feet in length. It’ll work nicely as a crowbar.
Nick and Jazz work together, hacking at the ice.
A dim light shines through the ice, coming from a window in the door. Someone’s banging metal on metal on the other side.
“Goddamn,” Jazz says, turning and looking at Nick. “They’re in there, all right.”
Nick wedges the pipe into a crack and pulls, breaking a section of ice free.
“Anni?” Jazz calls out. “Anni Azizi? Stay where you are. We’re coming.”
The water is still waist-deep, but there’s so much ice the volume of water in the corridor is dropping fast.
Jazz targets the window, clearing the ice away from the glass. Anni smiles from the other side. She’s an elderly Asian lady wearing a traditional headscarf. Her weathered face speaks of a harsh life working on a farm. Like Nick, she shouldn’t be here in Antarctica.
“We’re going to get you out of there,” Jazz yells. “Hold tight. We’ll have you topside within the hour.”
Anni jumps for joy, pointing at the others. Nick cranes his neck. Bodies lie on the boardroom table. Some of them sit slumped in chairs.
“Are they dead?” Adrianna asks.
“Father says they’re alive,” Jazz replies.
Nick hacks at the ice, but he’s exhausted. His muscles ache. Sweat drips within his hazmat suit. It’s frustrating not being able to reach up and wipe it away.
Jazz is also tiring. Her blows glance off the ice. Adrianna takes over with the ax, giving Jazz a break, but she barely scratches the thick slabs that have grown around the edge of the door.
Nick widens his stance, throwing his strength behind each blow. The ice is like granite. With each strike, the pipe shudders, jarring his hands. Pain shoots up his arms and into his shoulder. The wahaika hanging around his neck swings wildly. It’s heavy, resisting the impulse to move, reacting to each strike.
Why the hell didn’t he leave that goddamn trinket topside? It’s annoying. Its motion, though, causes his mind to cast back to the Te Kaha. Hah! This is what Eddie meant by mana. Nick can still hear the growl with which Eddie pronounced the word as mun-nah.
In Nick’s mind, he’s alone—and yet he’s not. Eddie knew. Everyone stands alone, and yet they don’t. Nick isn’t here in Antarctica representing some nebulous concept of The World. It’s about people. He’s here for Commander Simonds, Ensign Temuera, Eddie, and everyone else he met on the Te Kaha. Damn it, he’s here for Dmitri and Bear.
Mana.
Mun-nah!
As much as he wouldn’t admit it while he was on the Te Kaha, for Nick, mana was hokey Maori bullshit. Oh, he respected it as important to their culture, but it was meaningless to him. Like any other indigenous group, Nick thought of the Maori as outdated and archaic. To his mind, mana was a relic of past glory. Mana was overwhelmed by European conquest. Mana might as well be a Greek tragedy or a statue of the Virgin Mary from the fifth century. It’s history. Nothing more. Now, though, he feels it in his bones. Mana is the strength of everyone that brought him to this moment. It’s humanity stripped bare. For Nick, mana is—us, not me. With that, he grits his teeth and strikes at the ice with renewed strength. Pain is nothing. Fatigue is an imposter. All that matters is the precision of his strike.
The wahaika hanging around his neck fights the ice. It swings in response to each blow, refusing to relent. Nick finds his rhythm. The motion of the wahaika drives him on, counteracting the stubborn ice, giving him resolve. He settles into a steady pace. Jazz and Adrianna step to one side, sensing the vigor in his stride. They’re silent. They don’t want to break his concentration. For once, Nick’s not dreaming of heroics. He’s a warrior.
Nick uses the pipe like a spear to chip at the ice. When cracks appear, he uses the length of pipe as a crowbar to break off large chunks. What seemed impossible is now inevitable. Sweat is a reward. Aches are a matter of pride. Nothing can stop him. Nothing will.
By the time he’s cleared around the door, the water is lapping at his ankles.
“Damn,” Jazz says as Nick finally steps back, kicking fallen ice away from the door. “Nice work.”
Nick leans on the steel pipe, pushing it hard against the floor as he bends over, catching his breath.
Jazz tugs on the frozen handle, pulling at the door. Anni pushes from the other side. Adrianna prepares a couple of bottles with an electrolyte drink to help revive those inside. The door opens in starts, moving a few inches at a time until it’s wide enough to squeeze through. Jazz is in danger of popping her hazmat suit as she shimmies inside the room. Nick uses the pipe to pry the door open further.
Water pours in through the door, flooding the floor to a depth of a couple of inches. The pumps, though, are doing their job.
Rousing the jurors from their slumber is an arduous process. Some of them respond like they’re drunk, slurring their words.
“We don’t have time for this,” Jazz says. “Get them mobile and get them into that goddamn elevator. The medics can deal with them up top.”
“Understood,” Nick says, walking them in twos toward the elevator. His muscles ache, but pain has never felt so good. Elizabeth helps him, holding the elevator door open.
“You? Did you see him?” Anni asks as Nick escorts her to the elevator. Given she’s barely five foot four, and he’s in an oversized hazmat suit, it’s difficult to hear her. It’s the rubberized plastic. It squeaks and squishes with each step.
He leans forward. “The crystal man?”
“Yes. He saved us.”
“I don’t understand,” Nick says, coming to a halt in front of the elevator.
“He herded us into the room.”
“Okay, we’re ready to go,” Adrianna says, brushing past Nick in her hazmat suit. She helps the last person into the steel cage. Several jurors slump to the floor. They sit on the grating in a daze. They’re still waking from their slumber.
“I’ll take the next one,” Jazz says.
“We’re out of oxygen,” Adrianna says. “We should all go together.”
Jazz has tears in her eyes. She’s emphatic. “I said, I’ll take the next one.”
She’s standing in front of a flatscreen panel beside the elevator. Father’s displaying stats on the underground research center.
A week ago, Nick wouldn’t have cared. Bravado makes for a nice cliché etched into
a tombstone. Back then, he would have waved goodbye, pushed the button, and ridden to the surface without any regret. If asked, he would have said she’s got her own free will. Jazz is an adult. She knows what she’s doing. She’s a soldier. Now, though, something breaks inside him. He can feel it—her grief. He may not understand why, but mana. Clichés be damned—they’re all in this together.
Nick steps out of the elevator knowing he only has a few minutes worth of clean oxygen in his tank. Nick, you’re a fool.
“Take care of them,” he says to a bewildered Adrianna standing beside Anni. Nick leans in and slaps the button for Vincennes. The doors close as he steps back onto L4.
“What? No way,” Adrianna says, jumping out into the corridor. The doors close, and the elevator rises.
“You should have gone with them,” Jazz says.
“What’s wrong?” Adrianna says, seeing the tears streaming down Jazz’s cheeks.
Jazz points at the wall screen.
Adrianna says, “I don’t understand.”
Nick scans the list of names. Father’s highlighted those that went into the chamber during the outage. Beside each name is the term deceased. One name catches his attention—Jon Danes.
He taps the screen. “Jon was her fiancé.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Adrianna says.
“He wasn’t supposed to be here,” Jazz says, fighting back more tears. “Jon was supposed to be on rotation. He was supposed to be on R&R visiting his folks in England. He knew I was wintering here. He must have shuffled the schedule so we could be together.”
“Jazz,” Adrianna says. “There’s nothing you can do.”
“Oh,” she replies, laughing through her tears. “You really don’t know me, do you? There is something I can do, all right. I can end this.”
“What?” Nick says. “No!”
Jazz ignores him. She grabs at the zip running diagonally across her hazmat suit, pulling it from her left shoulder to her right hip. The suit deflates. Jazz rips the mask from her face. She swings the oxygen cylinder from her back, dumping it in the ice and slush on the floor. Unlike Nick, she’s wearing her boots beneath her suit, allowing her to walk away through the water.
Jury Duty (First Contact) Page 24
