by Sage Walker
“Should we head there? To McMurdo?” Signy asked.
Trent sighed and wiggled his shoulders. “Nah,” he said. “We’ve got a little more light to use up before we have to quit. I hate to waste it.”
Trent wouldn’t put them all at risk; Signy had to believe that. And anyway, she didn’t want to land and find a “Game Over” message from Tanaka.
Icy shores, glaciers forcing the land down as they made their way to the sea, glimpses of high mountains; what had been beautiful just hours ago now looked terrible, merciless; the land sent a monotonous message of barren danger. The rich life of the southern seas? How could anything live here? Jared, unless someone sheltered him, had to be dead by now. It would be easy to say—I give up. Let’s go back. It would be so easy to say that, and end this noisy, fearful journey into nowhere.
* * *
Unsought, a construct made of her wishes and terrors, Signy felt a heavy pressure against her left side, the bulk and weight of a human form with the knob of a sharp elbow against her/his ribs, and the sensation of her/his muscles tensed and shuddering.
* * *
It couldn’t be. Signy was dreaming this, bringing Jared’s presence alive out of wishes and desperation.
“Jared?” Signy whispered.
“Anybody home?” Jared asked. “Thought I’d check in.”
“Where? Where are you?” Signy yelled the words over the noise of the helo, forgetting that she was hooked into the cabin’s mikes. “I got him! I got him, he’s on-line; he’s out here!”
Anna tugged her earphones away from her ears with a wince, but it was followed by a grin.
“All right!” Trent bellowed. Alan whooped. She shushed them with a frantic wave of her hands.
“Where are we, Psyche?”
“Backdoor Bay,” a woman’s voice said. “We are near the Erebus glacier tongue.”
Signy could see Jared’s cameras focused on a human face, a blurred outline that appeared in an everyday, nothing-special view on her tiny heads-up screen. She switched the visuals to cover the full screen of her headset, letting Jared’s perceptions fill her world, letting the helo’s cabin become a distant thing, a secondary concern, accepting Jared’s motions, the feel of him, the strange absence of sensations from his hands. Jared watched the woman tucked against his side, her shadowed face, her cracked, pale lips.
“Backdoor Bay?” Signy asked. “Trent, can we get there?”
Signy’s body grew heavy against the seat as Trent torqued the helo around and headed inland toward a thick wall of cloud. “It’s pretty sloppy over there,” Trent said. “We’ll see.”
“Pilar? You want to come in with me, I think. We got a transmission here,” Jimmy’s voice said. Signy heard him, and she heard Pilar’s voice yelling for Janine.
“We’re on our way, Jared,” Signy said.
“Who’s we?”
“Me, Anna, Alan. And Trent.”
“Okay. You came south, Signy?”
“Jared? Jared, is it really you?” Paul asked.
“Yes, it’s really me, you skinny-assed shyster.”
“Trent, how far is it? How long will it take?” Signy asked.
“Twenty minutes if the weather holds. If this cloud cover gets too thick out here we’ll have to go into McMurdo, refuel, and sit it out,” he said over Paul’s “You bastard. You asinine overmuscled mock-up of an…”
“Jared, did you hear that?” Signy asked.
“… overgrown Canuck jock.”
“Paul! Shut up!” Signy hissed.
“I love you, too, Paul,” Jared said. “Yeah, Signy. I heard you say you’re on your way. I’m just sitting here, girl. Take your time.”
* * *
Sometimes it seemed that Kaziyuki Itano knew everyone in Lisbon. Kazi had managed to get Janine seated next to him, but then he chatted with the woman at his left, deliberately keeping his conversation directed away from Janine’s questions.
Janine toyed with her appetizer plate, an arrangement of pastries and pickled things. The pastries smelled of butter.
“Janine! Jared’s on-line.” Pilar’s shout in Janine’s ear speaker startled her; she jumped. Kazi looked up, frowning. Janine pushed her chair away from the table and threw her napkin onto her oily plate. She needed a full rig; a notebook wouldn’t do for this—
Janine, running, zigzagged through the tables. A waiter carrying a fat silver tureen dodged out of her way, hissing as hot soup stung his fingers. Janine’s boots clattered on the stone floors and disapproving faces turned to look as she passed. She skidded around a corner and ran down the long hallway, past blue and white tile inlays that featured innocent scenes of sea creatures and fruit.
Jared kept the bitter away; that was what he did. Janine was the newcomer in Edges, the youngest, but Jared had always smoothed the rough spots, told her what she needed to know before she made some horrid gaffe. For a while, she’d been afraid to speak up. Jared had nudged her into interactions, and Pilar was less aloof when Jared was around. He had a way of defusing Pilar’s fear of love, somehow.
When Jared got home, the world would feel normal again. To see him, to get as close as virtual would let her get—to tell him he was missed—
Three more doors—Janine searched in her pockets for her headset. Her headband rig wouldn’t give her a full visual and she wanted one. Behind the control booth’s door, the tech from Milan munched on salted nuts and watched the empty stage. He turned in his chair and raised an eyebrow as she came through the door at full speed.
“I need a link,” Janine said. She had her headset in place before she sat down.
* * *
Surrounding Janine’s visual field, blessedly present in sound, touch, and light, Janine saw and felt the thin woman cradled in the curve of Jared’s arm. Wind howled in the background. The scene was dusky.
“We’ve got company. Someone’s tapped in with us,” she heard Jimmy say.
“Umm, nice work.” Real time in the Lisbon control booth, startling, the tech’s words intruded. Janine lifted her headset. The tech stared down at the center stage of the great hall, his chin propped in one hand.
—a woman’s face appeared to float above the stage of the Palacio. Jared’s headband cameras panned the interior of a sort of tent, giving the watchers a view of the interior of his little shelter of stretched fabric. He was nested in boxes and clutter piled on the bottom of a beached Zodiac.
* * *
Sitting beside Janine in Lisbon, the tech filled in macros, humming while he worked, and framed Jared’s face in shadows.
“Do you have a face shot on this guy? I could add it in,” the tech said.
“Shit!” Janine whispered. “Shut that off!”
—Jared and the unknown woman huddled center stage. Jared’s gloved hand lifted a corner of the fabric that sheltered them. He looked out at a blinding white expanse of snow, at a dark sea where ice tossed on giant waves.
The tech projected the landscape to the walls, a full 360 degrees of storm in blue-grays and cold whites. “I’m using some of the stuff you put in the Tanaka suite,” he said. “It fits right in.”
—The roar of an Antarctic wind filled the hall in Lisbon. It boomed out over the room’s ranks of seats, empty except for a few stray delegates who had wandered in. They were the quick eaters, maybe, or the ones who were not interested in lunch. They looked up, idle watchers at a drama that could have made little sense to them.
“Turn it off. The projection, please, turn it off,” Janine begged.
“No, let it run,” the tech said. “It’s from Antarctica, isn’t it? That’s why we’re here, after all.”
* * *
Signy could hear the whining of the wind outside the flimsy shelter where Jared and the woman named Psyche huddled, their backs against a gray plastic crate marked with serial numbers and cyrillic characters in black. The woman twisted around and rummaged inside it. She brought out a quilted felt mat, the kind movers used to protect furniture for sto
rage. Jared and Psyche shifted in the small space, making a cocoon of the thing. Psyche hugged Jared tight and pressed her lean frame against his side.
Jared had stopped shivering. He wasn’t moving much at all. He held Psyche, his hands locked together across her back. She jerked, and Signy could see Jared’s hands pat her, as if she were a baby. Psyche sobbed once more and then held him tighter.
“My friends are coming,” Jared said. “Psyche, we’ll be out of here in a little while.”
“What of Nikos? Of Mus?”
“Your two buddies?”
“The woman wants to know if we can pick up her friends,” Signy said.
“We can’t carry everybody,” Trent said. “If we can sight ’em, we’ll tell McMurdo where they are.”
The helo rose over a ridge and flew along a wall of glacier.
“Hi, Jared,” Janine’s voice said.
“Hello, engineer. Now we’re all here, right? Psyche, don’t worry; somebody will pick up your buddies.”
Signy listened to Jared’s breathing. She heard Janine enter the virtual, but Janine didn’t say anything after her first hello. Janine waited to catch up, and apparently sensed from the silences, the tensions, that things were moving fast. Quick reflexes, Janine had.
“Are you hurt? Are you injured, either one of you?” Signy asked.
“My hands are frostbitten,” Jared said. “Psyche’s okay; no injuries.”
Signy looked out of the helo’s windows at the glacier rolling past, its heights hidden in thick cloud cover. Seaward, broken ice rolled on whitecaps. The helo passed through a wisp of cloud.
“Are you cold?” Signy asked.
“Hell, yes, I’m cold,” Jared said. “We’re cold. Yes.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t want you to be cold; I don’t want anyone to be cold, ever.”
“Signy, you’re burbling,” Pilar said.
“I love it when you burble,” Jared said. “Pilar? Janine? I love you, too.”
The helo crossed a ridge. Beyond the ice wall, sheltered by a tongue of rock that jutted into the sea, a small islet held a battered-looking green tent, a banal man-made intrusion in the day’s silent vistas of ice.
“There’s somebody,” Trent said.
“They aren’t ours,” Signy said. “Trent, go on. Jared’s not with them.”
Two men erupted from the tent. They stretched out their arms and waved frantically. Their opened mouths shouted unheard dark pleas from the sunburned ovals of their faces.
“They’ll just have to worry for a while, then. We’re close now, Signy.” Trent dipped the helo and waved at the men, and then pulled up again, while he spoke to McMurdo, giving the location and landmarks of the little island.
“Sorry, guys,” Trent said.
The men ran after the rising helo for a few desperate steps. Then they stopped and walked back toward the tent.
“Those idiots have a support vessel somewhere. They didn’t just cruise to Antarctica in a Zodiac,” Trent said. “Maybe their boat could pick them up.”
“Jared, did you hear?” Signy asked.
For an answer, Jared hugged Psyche a little tighter to his chest. “You had a story to tell, Psyche,” Jared said. “You haven’t told me all of it. Where is your ship? You have one, don’t you?”
“The Sirena,” Psyche said. “It belongs to Mihalis and his brothers. It waits, near the glacier.”
“How did you get into this mess?”
“We fished with the Chilean fleet last season. Another trawler—the Noche Blanca—we partnered up with her. We had friends on that boat.”
Jared rocked the woman in his arms, waiting.
“They are dead now,” Psyche said. “We found a good spot; we were pulling up krill faster than we could let them fall into the hold. We got too close to the Japanese trawlers. They were already there in that place but we hadn’t seen them. We didn’t know.…
“The Japanese shot the Noche Blanca out of the water.”
* * *
Pilar opened a window to Janine. “Wasn’t that what Argentina told Kazi about?”
“Yep,” Janine said. “Shh.”
They both switched their attention back to Jared, to the woman in the tent.
* * *
“You aren’t saboteurs,” Jared said.
“No. At McMurdo, at the Hotel California, we were offered a job,” Psyche said. “To cripple a Japanese boat. To show that all the fleets harass each other, they said to us. The woman—the Tanaka woman—said this would help stop the shooting. That the publicity would make the seas safer, that if the treaty countries had to stop turning their eyes away from these violences, then they would become too expensive to continue, and the shooting would stop.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Signy said. “They actually planned a media event? Lots of smoke and thunder, and plenty of camera angles?”
“Sounds like it,” Paul said.
“Mihalis convinced the woman that we could do this thing. He was good with women, Mihalis,” Psyche said. “We waited in Ushuaia. The woman sent us credit, and Mihalis bought plastique. It was—potent? Is that what you say?”
“Yes,” Jared said. “Potent.”
“When the fleets came back in October, we slipped up to the Oburu in the night. You must remember, these people had killed our friends.” Psyche looked up at Jared’s face.
Jared smiled at her, or nodded; Signy could feel his head move. The woman blinked and continued. “Mihalis made charges to set at the waterline. The trawler sank.”
Signy, in real time, caught a view of a solid wall of cloud. The helo buzzed its way toward it. We shouldn’t go in there, Signy thought. If we were sane, we would not fly into those clouds.
“That’s how your husband died?” Jared asked.
Psyche’s hands tightened their grip on Jared’s arm. She had her head tucked down against his chest and she did not look up. “We searched. We did not find him. We did not find anyone alive.”
Paul’s voice came through Signy’s mike, an unwelcome intrusion. “No interview potential without survivors. No wonder they got stiffed on the bill.”
“It comes from hiring amateurs,” Pilar said. “Stick with pros, I always say.”
“Hush,” Signy said. They hushed.
“Did you know her name?” Jared asked. “Who was she, Psyche?” Jared’s voice faded. A whine of feedback obliterated the woman’s answer.
“Trouble,” Jimmy McKenna said. “We’ve got heavy shit line noise here.…”
Trent’s voice intruded, talking to McMurdo. “Roger,” he said. “We are advised.”
“What?” Signy yelled. She heard static in her ears and her visuals gave her a mosaic of broken points of light, Jared’s face vanishing in their dancing complexities.
“McMurdo says the storm is going to hang here for three—four days. Can your boy last that long?” Trent asked.
“Jared, do you have food? Any heaters?” Signy asked.
There was no answer.
“Jimmy, get him back!” Signy pleaded.
“I’m trying. I’m trying, okay?”
Signy ripped her headset away from her face. The bubble of the helo floated in a gray nowhere. She felt it tilt. A quick blur of black broke the colorless expanse around the helo, a line of boulders between sea and sky, and then the sight of solid ground vanished again.
“Jared?” she asked.
“No food. No heat.”
“Trent, they won’t last. The support boat is called the Sirena. It’s near the glacier. Tell them to try and pick them up. Jared, or those men, whoever they can reach. Tell them to try.” Signy shoved her headset back over her eyes.
Trent spoke to his mike, asking McMurdo to send a message to the trawler.
“Jared? We’ll be there as soon as we can. Jared, can you hear me?” Signy asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
Signy couldn’t see him; the view in her headset was an array of shattered colors. The colors swirled and coalesced, following
complicated rules Signy could not define.
—A woman’s face formed from the chaos; not Psyche’s.
She is starving, Signy thought. She is very young, in late adolescence at most, but her eyes look much older than her face. Asian, but a strange mixture; her features are not classic Japanese. I know her name.…
“Signy Thomas, your pilot is very brave and very foolish. You are flying into an area of high winds and poor visibility. You should have turned back by now.”
“San-Li,” Signy said.
“Evergreen,” she heard Jimmy whisper.
“Cordova is in the air and very close to Psyche Skylochori and Dr. Balchen. Cordova will pick them up and take them to the Kasumi. They will not be harmed.” The thin girl-child formed her words carefully, her lips moving as if she were lip-synching—moving before Signy heard the words. As if she were a simulacrum.
“Paul?” Signy asked.
“Let her do it, Signy.”
“She’s not lying about the storm,” Jimmy said. “McMurdo’s calling everyone in.”
The San-Li figure broke and faded, replaced by a crystalline input from Jared, a clear view of the interior of his little shelter and an increase in his muscular tension, an awakening to some stimulus or other.
“Jared, did you see her?” Signy asked.
“I heard her. Signy, I’ll take any ride out of here. We’ll sort it out later.” Jared stood up. Signy felt the sure motions of his body as he reached for the tarp and threw it aside. He tilted his head back, seeking the location of the buzzing sound of an incoming helo. Signy felt him relax when its outline appeared. Its dragonfly shape swooped toward the Zodiac, coming in from the sea.
“EEE-HAH!” Jared yelled. He leaned back on his heels and waved with both arms. Beside him, the woman stretched her arms up as if she would pull the helo out of the sky. She was very short, Signy realized; she was a tiny little thing.
The helo flew overhead and landed about fifty meters from the Zodiac. Jared and the woman ran for it. The pilot was Cordova, recognizable from the droop of his mustache. He cut the rotors, held up his palm to ward them back, and frowned until the speed had died down. Then he motioned them forward to the open door.
“Hello! Hello, my friend. It’s damned good to see you!” Jared yelled over the engine noise. He grabbed Psyche by the waist and heaved, lifting her from the snow to the helo’s safety in one motion. Psyche scrambled for the backseat and Jared hauled himself into the helo, his hand outstretched for Cordova’s. They punched at each other for a grinning minute, even while Jared settled into the upholstered seat, into the warm, intimate safety of the helo’s cabin.
