We had radioed Fram. Thor had refused to believe our story, and had insisted on coming aboard himself. I’d ordered anyone on deck to stop him doing so, on the grounds that we should stop any more of our friends and shipmates getting infected.
Right now, J”rgen was the only one in the doctor’s surgery apart from myself. It was still light, as it always was in the Antarctic winter, but the sun was low on the horizon—less a midnight sun than a continual twilight one.
“You stopped yourself earlier on,” he said. “You have not said everything you were wanting to.”
I nodded.
“At the end of the last century, a number of dead men were discovered in what had been a coalmine in Spitzbergen. There used to be a lot of heavy coalmining in Spitzbergen, you know that?”
He nodded. “They wanted to mine down here too, up in the Transantarctics. It seemed that they would be getting permission, too, before the US and the Russians started to play hardball.”
“Mining in Spitzbergen stopped in the last century. But these corpses were special. They’d died of Spanish ’Flu, a disease which killed 20 million people just after the First World War. Twenty million. And you know what? The disease organisms were still alive inside them. Half the epidemiological world were overjoyed that they now had samples of a deadly virus to study and make vaccines against, and half of them were terrified. Because the reason why the bodies got found was that they’d originally been buried in an icefield. By the end of the century, the icefield had retreated—not due to global warming, oh, no, perish the thought—and the bodies were uncovered. And if that could happen in Spitzbergen, it could happen anywhere across the entire extent of the ice sheet. Any and every plague that swept Europe, Asia and North America throughout recorded history and beyond could come out of the tundra at us. In the 6th century AD, a sizeable percentage of the Eastern Roman Empire died of the Plague of Justinian, a mysterious infection from the East. We still have no idea what the plague organism was. In the fourth century AD, a plague that killed millions crossed China from west to east, and academics are still arguing whether that was smallpox or measles. Hantavirus has been in North America ever since Amerindians can remember …”
He frowned. “Are you saying this could be a disease that was buried in the ice sheet, then uncovered?”
I wagged my head, trying to shake off answering the question. “Maybe. There’ve been Little Ice Ages and Little Interglacials all through human history. Maybe the Yaga Indians from Patagonia colonized the Antarctic Peninsula during a Little Interglacial early in their history, just like the Vikings colonized Greenland. Who knows? Certainly there’s not many Yaga Indians left alive for us to ask. I read a book on them once. There are two of them left, and they’re both nuns.” I tapped the porthole glass. “There could be lost Indian cities aplenty under the ice, with diseases we’ve never even seen before.”
He was listening, but I couldn’t tell whether he thought I was crazy or not. “Some sort of frozen Indian burial site, you think.”
I looked at the screen. “They found something. Found it when they were on that trip to the Dry Valleys. The log just refers to it as ‘the Chassignite’.” I nodded to a shelf in the corner of the room. “I saw a Bible up there earlier on. Flip through it and see if you can find out who the Chassignites were.” I shifted a heavy rock encased in resin which the doctor had evidently been using as a paperweight off the sheaf of crabbily handwritten notes he’d left in addition to his computer records. The rock was sealed in a plastic bag, as if someone had collected it as a geological sample. “I just wish the bastard hadn’t seen fit to write the most important bits of his log in riddles.”
Then Mr Bang poked his big blond head into the surgery. “Scott, J”rgen—you should come upstairs right away.” Then the head was gone.
I called after him. “Hey, wait a minute! Why? Why should we come right away?”
By the time we arrived at the ballroom, all three of the others were there, standing around the girl. Around the girl, and a long way from the girl.
“It’s spread to her shoulders,” said Meddy in revulsion.
Sure enough, the thin and red raw line that separated dead grey skin from dead blue veins and muscles had spread down to fill the golden line of the girl’s necklace. Even in death, the unseen thing was dining.
Then J”rgen put a finger to his lips, and cupped another round his ear. I stopped and listened, and then I heard it. The noise of rotor blades.
Someone—either the Americans or the Russians—had found us.
I was glad that it was an American helicopter. Only Thor and one of the Swedes spoke Russian, and they were back on Fram. Besides, I had a westerner’s unreasoning mistrust of Russian soldiers. We stood on deck, watching the chopper circle.
“Why doesn’t he come in to land?” said Meddy. “There’s a helicopter landing area.”
Dirty bootprints on a ballroom floor —
“He’s not landing,” I said. “He knows what’s down here. He didn’t find us. He’s been here already.”
The chopper was turning, centering itself in a fjord broadside-on to the ship.
“We fucked up his plans last time. The ship was supposed to hit the ice. The evidence was supposed to have been destroyed —” I was backing away towards the steps up to the bridge. Then I started running. The chopper kept on coming. I burst into the bridge behind a bemused Mr Bang, fell onto the radio set and began twirling the dials. Nothing but static. If there was traffic out there it was digital and encrypted. I found the Mayday channel, and yelled into it at the top of my voice, as if it made the goons in the chopper more likely to hear me, that we knew what they were up to, we knew they had tried to sink the ship, and above all, we knew about the Chassignite, and that if they tried to put a hole in our hull there were functioning radio transmitters on board this ship and we’d broadcast their dirty little secret all the way from Rio Di Janeiro to Perth.
The helicopter rose up out of the fjord, flew over the ship, and carried on flying high into the sky.
The other members of the crew looked at me as if I’d had a seizure.
“It’s something they don’t want anyone else to have,” I said. “Something they’ve found under the ice sheet too. That’s why they’ve come over all green and whale-friendly.”
“One of your Indian diseases,” said J”rgen.
I shrugged. “Something. Or something they cooked up themselves. Something that kills quickly enough and unstoppably enough for them to be interested in it, anyway. We already know that part.” I sat back into one of the few seats in the room. It wasn’t comfortable. I realized, too late, that Haakon and Meddy had followed us into the bridge. They’d heard everything we’d said.
Haakon was wide-eyed immediately. “You think the people from the Crux have walked into a military test area?”
“Chemical warfare?” said Meddy. It wasn’t as stupid an idea as it sounded. The Yellow Rain used by the Soviets in Afghanistan produced skin lesions; vigorous washing would remove it, though. It wasn’t quite this single-mindedly deadly.
I shook my head. “Something similar, though. A really fast-acting virus, maybe. Tetanus, rabies and lots of other diseases can produce uncontrollable muscle spasms. But this isn’t any disease that was in my textbooks.”
“They’re experimenting?” Meddy was poised on the edge of the handle, ready to take flight. “They’ve made a green sanctuary out of the whole of Antarctica just to test weapons?” He banged a console theatrically. But I felt the same way he did.
“They are not just experimenting,” said J”rgen. “They’ve fucked up. The bug they’re testing has escaped, and maybe it’s more dangerous than they think, or they would have not cordoned off the entire continent.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Meddy, “and warn everybody.”
“That’s just what we’ve not got to do,” said J”rgen. “We’re travelling in a plague ship, remember?”
“Well, what shou
ld we do? Just sit here and die like they want us to?”
Abruptly, the radio crackled. I had left it on Mayday frequency, and someone was answering back.
“— military flight from USS Tarawa calling SS Crux Australis, over. Anyone alive down there? You sure were making some racket a couple of minutes back, over.”
Carefully, I picked up the mike, as if handling a live snake. “This is Crux. Yes, there are live people on board here. Four of us, over.”
“Sure as hell didn’t find you on our last visit. Where were you hiding, over?”
I tried to think of a suitable hiding place. “Meat locker. Meat locker is airtight, and quite warm if you switch on the defrosting heaters, over.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. I could have sworn we checked the meat lockers.”
The voice waited for a moment, as if allowing the fact that it knew perfectly well I was lying to sink in.
“You aware that you’re still sitting on top of a serious health hazard? And also, incidentally, your ship’s in violation of the Antarctic Treaty, 2007, over?”
“Only too aware, Tarawa. Can you come in and take us off, over?”
Voices hissed to left and right of me. “No! Don’t bring them down here with us!”
“I’ll do what I can, Crux. And I’m afraid by the powers vested in us, we are going to have to arrest you. Don’t be too scared if our guys come out in big rubber suits, over.”
“We’ll try to keep calm.” I switched off the radio.
“What the fuck are you trying to do? They’ll drop some marines down here and kill us!” This was Meddy, naturally.
“Better down here than up there,” I said. “They had rockets on board that thing.”
“And they’ll have guns when they get off it! They aren’t going to take us away—that’s why we thought this disease had 100% death rate, they, they probably threw any of the passengers they found still alive over the side!”
I frowned. I hadn’t thought about that. “But they’ve already shown they won’t shoot us if we can realistically threaten to get word out to the outside.”
He threw his arms wide. “So they send troops down here, disable the radio, and shoot all of us, Einstein.”
Haakon cut in. “He may be right. Let’s send a radio message out now.”
I considered it. “It might do some good. Maybe we can try it. But they may be jamming the signal by now anyway. And that pilot asked me where we’d been hiding. He sounded very interested in it. Remember, he knows that we must have come either from off the Crux, or from some other ship. Once he knows that other ship exists and where it is, he knows he only has to blow it and us out of the water to wipe out any proof we were ever here. But it could be 100 miles down the coast for all he knows. Guys, I don’t think he saw the Fram when he flew past. It may take him a good few minutes to double back on himself if he doesn’t want to waste too much fuel, which he might not, over the Antarctic. It’s our duty to signal to Fram to get the hell out of here in the meantime. And it may be the only way for us to stay alive.”
It convinced them. They started running and yelling at each other in Norse.
It was not a naval helicopter. It was not painted blue with big garish stars and stripes. Its operators hadn’t had time to recamouflage it from a deep, businesslike green. Maybe those rockety things might have been drop tanks after all, but those machine guns were, well, machine guns.
The well-dressed American soldier was wearing rubber this winter. Five infantrymen (I counted) came out of the helicopter, all of them holding M16’s in both hands. We were uncomfortably aware of the fact that we had not so much as a flare pistol among us.
We were standing outside on deck. When they got to maximum conversation distance, the leader walked up close, giving us a look at him through his faceplate. He was a she.
“Hi there. Nice to see you all wrapped up warm. Those clothes aren’t exactly standard issue.”
J”rgen smiled. “You have been in the army too long. There is no standard issue on a civilian ship.”
She might have smiled back, but it was difficult to tell. I would not have been convinced of her sincerity in any case. “I’m not in the army, sir. I’m a doctor in the United States Marine Corps. I believe you’re already aware you may have contracted an extremely virulent infection. To date, that infection has been 100% fatal. Now, let’s cut the bullshit. None of you gents came off this ship. There’s a possibility that other crewmen on board your own ship may also be infected. We need to know the current position of your ship, or people on board it may die.”
J”rgen nodded to me in acknowledgement. You were right. “We are passengers on this ship. We hid ourselves before, because we are not used to soldiers with machine guns. We are sorry if this was an inconvenience.”
Then she shot J”rgen.
She shot him to kill. He must have died instantly. Then, as if she were talking to students at an autopsy class, she stood over the body and carried on talking. The sound of the shots echoed back off the ice walls all around us like a great invisible snake writhing round the horizon.
“Next man to try and feed me a line of bullshit gets the same treatment. Where’s your ship?”
“They took us on board at Lake Ryxell,” I said. “Some of us were already sick. We weren’t, and still aren’t. We’re poachers. Our ship left us there to pick up penguin eggs. We’ve already used the Crux’s radio to tell our ship where we are, and tell it to call for medical help. And that means, lady, that you are in a lot of trouble.”
At first, I thought she was going to shoot me. But, I realized, I’d fed her something credible, and made us into something useful—human subjects who might have been exposed to the sickness without being infected.
She gestured with the gun. “There’s a sealed container in the back of the chopper. Get into it. Don’t touch anything when you get in.” She smiled again. “You’re about to enter the wonderful world of the experimental subject. There’s a lot of all of you, which is good. Plenty of beef on the bone for tissue samples. Now move.”
We moved.
My personal physician was back in the room, checking on how quickly I was dying. I was busy myself, checking through tissue samples taken from two victims who had been notified to me only as Subjects X and Y in my own miniature laboratory on my side of the glass. My laboratory had been carefully audited to include no heavy objects, no sharp objects, and no objects that could be mixed into concoctions that could hurt tiny US Marine hands. I was fairly sure that Subjects X and Y were Meddy Pedersen and Haakon Bang. They were dying far more rapidly than I was.
“I assume this cubicle I’m in has its own self-contained air recycler, like a space suit,” I said.
He didn’t look up from what he was doing. He was far too interested in a flap of skin he’d cut from my arm. “No, it’s filtered from the air in here. The contents of the air are passed through radioactive, freeze-drying, and thermic sterilizers.”
“That won’t do any good. You need to open the air filter and check through it.” He looked blank. “This organism is airborne, right? The air filters in these cells are sucking out all our air and concentrating it, right? So the organism goes into the air filters too. There might be more of the organism in there than there is on your patients. You shouldn’t be sterilizing the air. You should be collecting it.”
I could see by his expression that I had him hooked.
“But what would we collect it in?”
Just at that moment the door opened and Marine Girl walked back in wearing a paper mask, stared at me through the glass, maybe for tell-tale signs of the disease, frowned as if she were disappointed I didn’t have any yet, and then left, making a note on her all-important clipboard. The doctor’s eyes followed her down the corridor.
“One of your colleagues just died. It had reached his chest before he passed out,” he confided.
I didn’t ask him which one. It didn’t really matter.
“Saturate the filter in
water,” I said. “Water will contain any airborne dust component, and you’ve got plenty of water available; but it’s unlikely to kill the organism. Take a slide and dab some of your water on it with a pipette, and you’ve got a microscopy sample. Remember, you’ve got to keep the organism alive, or you’ll never be able to study it properly.”
He nodded vigorously. Maybe laboratory work wasn’t his strong point.
My hand moved up to scratch an itch on my chin that I had been ignoring in the hope that it was psychosomatic.
“That’s how it starts,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
He went out.
He was very interested in his slides, and made many of them. He kept them out of the sight of Marine Girl, who I suspected was his superior and would disapprove. He studied the effect his slides had on samples of suspiciously nordic-looking skin and muscle tissue.
Then, on the second day, he began scratching his chin. By this time, you understand, I was in real pain, feeling as if the lower part of my face were already being cauterized down to the bone, at which point I began to understand how the ancient Romans, if they had indeed contracted this disease, had felt justified in resorting to such extreme measures. Needless to say, no curative procedures of even that drastic nature were attempted on me. They wanted a live specimen for as long as it took for one to die.
They began making what they called “firebreak incisions,” skinless areas through which the disease would not spread. This was successful in channelling the infection into a long, narrow strip of skin that spiralled out from the point of initial infection on the chin. Later on, they said, they would make similar cuts around my neck and chest to stop the pestilence spreading lower than the head. That wouldn’t stop it spreading entirely, of course—they had found from previous cases that a point of escape was needed for the infection in order to prevent it from spreading upwards. Victims whose entire heads were affected suffered such pain that they had frequently driven their heads against the walls of their cells, I was told. That, of course, would never have done. We had to be made to live out our usefulness to medical science to the full. When I say ‘they’, of course, I still mean only the two doctors I had seen to date; since we had been marched out of our secure container below decks, I had not seen another living soul besides those two.
The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003 Page 95
