Whiteout

by Sage Walker

  “We have the craft in sight,” the deck reported.

  The whine of the helo’s rotors faded, replaced by the throbbing hum of the ship’s diesels. Jared duckwalked beneath the helo’s blades into sharp air that tasted of brine and chilled the windward side of his face.

  Saigo Kihara’s smile welcomed Jared aboard. The doc windmilled an arm in a “come forward” motion. Kihara held a square case of shiny black metal, CPR stenciled on its side in blocky white letters. Crewmen were headed toward the bow, and Kihara turned and trotted along behind them.

  Sea legs, Jared remembered as his right foot came down on a deck tilting up. Kihara let Jared catch up with him. He had streaks of gray in his hair, new since Jared had seen him last.

  “They’ve got a lifeboat in sight,” Kihara said. “But I don’t think there’s much for us to do about it.”

  The diesels pounded a different rhythm, slowing the ship. The cold of the steel rail seeped through Jared’s gloves. He bellied up to it and leaned over to watch a man in a black dry suit scuttle down the ship’s ladder toward a scuffed orange inflatable. The raft bobbed empty against the ship’s waterline, circling a fixed point as if held in place by something heavy. The crewman stepped into frozen slush, ankle deep in the raft. He rocked for balance, then stretched for the raft’s slack bowline and clipped it to the ship’s ladder.

  “Ah, very bad!” the crewman yelled. “One helper, please.” He fought to untangle dark blue fabric from the webbing on the raft’s bumper, a sleeve, a human hand in a sleeve that began to sink as the fabric came free. The crewman grabbed the hand and held on tight. A second man went down the ladder.

  “Send down a line!” someone called. Kneeling in the raft, the two men struggled with a corpse, bulky in soaked layers of clothing. They heaved the body into the inflatable. The crewmen passed a line beneath the limp arms and across the dead man’s chest, working in haste and barehanded. “Bring him up,” one of them shouted.

  Hauled sloshing from the raft, the figure spun in its harness, swaying and bumping against the ship’s hull. A boot fell away and splashed short of the raft. A hanged man, Jared thought, an execution. The man’s head was tilted back on his neck and his dead white face stared toward the sky, Caucasian features, a black mustache. The crew let down the hoist and the dripping corpse sank to the deck.

  Kihara had his kit open. The metal chest was filled with precisely arranged emergency supplies, endotracheal tubes, a breather bag, vials of medications.

  “No,” Kihara said.

  Jared nodded agreement. He looked up at a wall of crewmen who circled the corpse, wary but curious. Japanese faces, mostly, but Jared saw a blond woman, a man with a brown beard, a mix of races.

  “He’s quite dead,” Jared said. “There’s nothing to be done.”

  The faces relaxed a little and some of them backed away.

  “We will take the body to sick bay,” Kihara said.

  Cordova came trotting up to the circle of watchers. “Dr. Kihara?” he asked. “You are my return passenger?”

  “Yes,” Kihara said.

  “We should leave soon. A storm is coming in.”

  “I’m packed,” Kihara said. “Perhaps if you would help carry?”

  “I…” Cordova looked around the deck, and he didn’t look happy. A crewman arrived with a gurney. “I think my assistance is not needed. I will unload my passenger’s luggage,” Cordova said.

  Rolled in a tarp, one of the dead man’s knees stayed flexed as if he tried to climb an impossible staircase. Jared locked the wheels on the gurney and helped shift the rigid burden onto it. A lift took them down into the ship, and Kihara led the way, pulling the gurney through anonymous passageways, beneath mazes of pipes and ductwork, past unadorned metal bulkheads common to any working ship. The bulkheads were spotless, sanded smooth under their coats of tan paint.

  The ship’s small sick bay was warmer than the passageways had been. The room held a familiar clutter of equipment and a standard mix of astringent smells. Jared pushed the gurney inside and helped shift the body to a table.

  Cordova dropped Jared’s duffel at the sick-bay door and backed away.

  “Coffee, pilot?” someone called from the passageway. Cordova accepted with an effusive burst of Spanish. Kihara pushed Jared’s duffel aside with his foot and closed the door.

  “We’ll do a surface exam only,” Kihara said. “The forensic procedures can wait for the authorities, whoever they turn out to be.”

  “Right,” Jared said. He waited while Kihara pulled a postmortem form to his sick-bay screen, waited while Kihara pronounced the time and date in a flat, careful voice and gave his name, his degree, the location, and circumstances of the exam.

  “Estimated time of death?” the screen asked.

  “I’m no pathologist,” Kihara said. “Jared, any ideas?”

  “In this cold? In salt water? Hell, no.” And why was the man alone in that raft? Was this poor sod an explorer, a lost fisherman, a saboteur? Tell me when the Tanaka ship went down and I’ll make a guess, or I’ll let Paul guess for you. Jared looked at the indicator lights that circled his wrist. Paul wasn’t on-line.

  “We are unable to estimate the time of death. And, screen, please note that I am assisted by Dr. Jared Balchen.”

  “Noted,” the screen said.

  “Kihara, I need to access the ship,” Jared said.

  “Eh? Oh, sure.”

  Jared hooked his transmitter into the ship’s power, off the battery pack, and set it for real-time recording. He could dump the suit’s storage later.

  Kihara took exam gloves from a box on the counter and offered the box to Jared. His hands secure behind familiar powdered barriers of thin polymer, Jared folded the crackling blue tarp away from the still white face. The body smelled faintly of death, strongly of the sea.

  Jared stared at the dead man’s face, its contours and textures fascinating in their utter immobility. Why is it, he wondered, that dead faces, even more than photographs, permit, no, demand, such scrutiny? Ice formed lenses in the space between black thick eyebrows and gaunt cheekbones; its clarity brought out the contours of the half-closed bluish lids and the frozen black eyelashes. Part of the left eyelid was missing, gnawed away by some predator. The irises were brown. Mid-thirties, the man looked to have been. Salt crystals had dried on one sleeve of the man’s sodden dark blue parka. His right hand was oddly twisted, the hand that had been tangled in the safety strap on the raft’s inflatable bumper.

  Above the rasp of Kihara’s breath, and his own, Jared heard water dripping, falling onto scrubbed white tile. Kihara cut away layers of sodden coverall, sliced through a padded red and black flannel shirt, through a thermal undersuit. White skin wrinkled across the man’s chest; a scant web of black hair curled across the indentation of his sternum.

  “Help me roll him,” Kihara said. In a hip pocket, Kihara found a stiff leather wallet and pried it open, retrieving a credit card that he carried to a sink and washed and dried carefully. Kihara went to his desk and called the bridge. “Mihalis Skylochori is his name,” he said. “We have ID.”

  “We’ll send someone to get it.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Kihara followed the screen’s prompting and gave what answers were available from the exam. There wasn’t much to report. No marks or scars, except for the deformity in the right hand, no apparent external trauma other than that.

  “The right hand is twisted,” Kihara said. “Jared, are there fractures?”

  Jared explored, gently, the textures of Skylochori’s fingers, the contours of his palm. Jagged edges grated beneath the tendons on the back of the hand. “Closed fractures are palpated in the third, fourth, and fifth metacarpals. I don’t find any others.” Frozen and thawed in salt ice, the skin had gathered into ridges and felt like wax. Ice coated each of the blue-tinged nails.

  There were no other signs of trauma. Kihara got out a body bag. Accidental drowning was the obvious answer for Skylochori’s
death; nothing suggested otherwise. So why, Jared wondered, were the hairs rising on the back of his neck? Kihara was calm and businesslike about this; death could not be a stranger here in this violent sea. Something else felt wrong. Sleep disturbance, climate change, an awareness of stresses at home, any of those things could be feeding Jared’s perceptions of danger. Stop it, he told himself, and brought his attention back to the task at hand. Jared helped Kihara load the corpse and the clothing into the bag and zip it shut.

  Wax. A phrase nudged at Jared’s memory, a Latin phrase used to describe catatonia in the living.

  Kihara went back to the sink and Jared waited his turn, wanting hot water and soap to wash away the cold salt-soaked feel of dead flesh.

  “Your pilot is anxious to leave,” the screen reported.

  “Acknowledged.” Kihara shrugged and turned to Jared. “It seems I must hurry away,” Kihara said. “The sick bay is standard, so are the complaints. There is little I could show you and nothing I could teach you if I were to stay.”

  “Do you have an assistant who knows the routines?”

  “Her name is Anna de Brum. She’s good. Sick call is at 0800 and Anna will stay with you.” Kihara pulled a small red duffel from a cabinet. Packed and ready to go, was he? Kihara’s anticipation of shore leave made Jared wonder what delights awaited him in Punta Arenas.

  “Is there anyone I should watch out for?” Jared asked. A chronic patient, a ship’s officer with problems?

  “No. The Siranui runs with efficiency. The tours are short; people don’t stay on long enough to get really crazy. It’s not a bad ship.” Kihara’s readiness to leave was a palpable thing, but it seemed to be all anticipation, not a desire to escape. “I thank you again for your offer,” Kihara said. “You could have worked your assignment here and not taken on my duties as well. Though they are usually scant. This is a young and healthy crew, by and large.”

  “I’ll be here anyway,” Jared said. “And I still owe you for Coppermine.” Saigo Kihara had signed on, five years back, for a wilderness tour Jared was running. Kihara had waited on the river, nursing a man with a hot appendix, while Jared raced a raft to the nearest town and sent back an air ambulance.

  “You gave me back my expenses,” Kihara said.

  “Actually, I didn’t. The Texan did. Out of what he paid me.”

  Kihara smiled but he was moving fast.

  “Saigo, old friend, do you have cabin fever?” Jared asked.

  Kihara dried his hands and moved away from the sink. “I have a cure for cabin fever. It is to leave the ship whenever an old friend offers the opportunity.”

  Jared thumped the body bag, lightly. “Where does this go?”

  “Until the bridge decides what to do with it, it goes to cold storage. On a harvester, there is little problem with that.”

  Cerea flexibilitas. Waxy flexibility, Jared remembered.

  Someone knocked at the door. Kihara turned to answer it. Jared picked up the dead man’s credit card, reached into the bulky flotation suit that he still wore, and zipped the card across a sensor at his belt. Kihara opened the door and Jared put the card back down and shrugged out of the shoulders of the flotation suit in a continuation of the first motion. A stocky young woman, frank curiosity on her flat Polynesian features, looked at the zippered black body bag while she made a small bow to Kihara. “Your pilot wishes to leave,” the woman said. “And the captain has sent me to bring the ID card.”

  Jared kicked the flotation suit down toward his ankles, stepped out of it, and handed it to Kihara. “You’ll need this,” he said. “Cordova insists.”

  “Thank you,” Kihara said. He retrieved the ID card from the desk, handed it to the woman, and draped the flotation suit over one shoulder.

  A click sounded in the speaker behind Jared’s right ear.

  “Anna de Brum is a Marshallese Islander; she has some impressive degrees in marine biology,” Janine told him.

  “That’s all the ID the man had?” Pilar asked. Paul’s voice came in right after hers. “This is a transfer card, a discreet one. Account with Warburg-Paribas. Bloody Swiss security, we may not get much—”

  Jared tapped his left wrist twice with his right forefinger to shut them up while Kihara introduced Anna. Four pips were embedded in the wristband of the skinthin, indicators that glowed to mark Jared’s unseen listeners. Three of them were lighted: Paul, Janine, Pilar. Not Signy.

  Jared’s new corpsman—Anna—called for someone to take the body into storage.

  “Come with us,” Kihara said. “And then Anna will show you to my quarters. Yours, for a week.”

  Wind howled outside. Cordova lifted the helo from a tilting deck as soon as Kihara climbed aboard, and turned sharply away from a solid wall of cloud. Snow gusted in front of the storm and the decks emptied, every human headed below to relative safety. The temperature had dropped to well below freezing. The birds had vanished, and the pancake ice as well, replaced by a charcoal sea, white-capped. Mountains of ice, silent bergs with shattered peaks and looming valleys, traveled their inscrutable courses. The sight of them chilled something inside Jared, chilled the warm soft middle of him, where a vulnerable small beast whimpered tales of giant’s teeth, of danger, of cold.

  The storm reached them and the horizon vanished. A solid wall of snow, a whiteout, hid the icebergs in an instant, unseen now, treacherous and waiting.

  The ship has sonar, Jared told himself, and radar. The ship knows how to dodge. Except icebergs are the same density as seawater, more or less. They must use some other system to stay out of the way. I hope.

  “Paul?” Jared spoke to the wind, to the mike taped to his neck. “I’m spooked. Find out about that dead guy, would you?”

  “What’s the problem? What’s bugging you, Jared?” Janine answered, not Paul.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re tense all over,” Janine said. “I’m getting the willies just from monitoring your muscle tone.”

  “Relax, intrepid explorer,” Paul said. “We need the money you’re making us. Get spooked on the next job, okay?”

  “Yeah, right.” Fatigue, cold, ship-crushing ice monsters, and howling winds; they were plausible reasons, all of them, for his discomfort. Still—

  A hatch creaked open behind him.

  “Come inside,” Anna de Brum shouted. “It’s midnight.”

  Jared struggled uphill toward her. There is no man-overboard drill in Antarctic waters, he remembered. Where, in this half-lit sphere of wind and snow, where was night?

  SIX

  Late in the day, tired from the flight back from Houston, Signy shuffled toward the house at Taos through a light, fresh snowfall. The dry winter air gave her a few minutes of false energy. She contemplated shoveling the walks and didn’t.

  In the bedroom, she dropped the equipment bag and her duffel in the corner, a platform for her parka. She shrugged out of her red silk jacket and rolled it into a loose bundle to send to the cleaners.

  Something hard in the inseam pocket thumped against the dresser. Susanna’s chip, and Jimmy McKenna’s gift. Signy had forgotten about that little puzzler. What whim had caused that quiet boy to give her this?

  In the studio, Signy sat at her console for a little while, looking at the pale soft-plastered walls and the ashes she’d left in the fireplace. She felt tired, but it was an honest, pleasant tired, an aftermath of hard work and physical pleasure. Her body sent her the tiny sweet discomforts that resulted from enthusiastic sex. To be alone in the house was unusual and it felt good. Signy stretched and smiled.

  Sex with Jared was a good and wonderful thing, always. Sex with Alan had, as promised, carried the spice of the unexpected, the delightful uncertainties of someone different. If work brought Alan back into her real-time space, yes, she would find another taste of that complex man worthwhile. If not? She’d had a good night. Signy hoped Alan had. Simple pleasures were a gift not to be rejected, or denied, or analyzed to death.

  The Tanak
a contract waited. Some of the delegates had already set up their territories in Lisbon, beginning the process of feeling each other out, testing each other for agreements and oppositions, looking for ways to build coalitions, blocs, alliances. There wasn’t much time for Edges to catch up and get ready to help Tanaka do its own modeling and nudging.

  Why did everyone in the whole damned world want everything yesterday? The Antarctic Treaty Commission met every thirty years. So Tanaka had given them less than a month to get a complex job ready. It figured. Signy punched keys and woke the system.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  She got typescript, not a voice.

  [Paul] Signy, scan Jared the minute you get in.

  Followed by Jared’s current address in a subdirectory of a ship called the Siranui.

  Signy found him. Jared lay on his back, in bed, most likely, sending no visuals. Jared slept well, or so she could hope. Signy fast-scanned his suit’s transmissions for the past hour. Jared had hooked his right arm around something solid. The sensors showed a flex and release at his elbow, a pattern that might reflect sleep responses to a tilting bed.

  [Signy] Paul, Jared’s asleep. Talk to me.

  The intimate space behind her headset became Paul in his study, slouched in his leather chair, with his laptop perched on his knees. A lock of his black hair fell across his forehead, a forehead that was higher than it used to be.

  “Oh, sure,” Paul said. “Jared’s dead man has been a real problem. Have you looked at the exam?”

  “Dead man? Paul, I just walked in the door.”

  “Well, catch up with us, Signy, my sweet. There’s a problem with Skylochori.”

  “With what?”

  “The dead man.” Janine’s voice answered. The screen split and Janine appeared next to Paul, Janine in the Seattle studio, backlighted by the tall bay window where sometimes Mount Rainier could be seen.

  Talking to them both in the same setting was easier on Signy’s sense of rightness, so she switched Janine back to the New Hampshire study, to Paul’s familiar and convenient macros of a room that Signy knew well, and liked. Janine wore bulky gray sweats and hadn’t bothered with makeup.