Dry Ice

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  “Certainly, they all know what an asshole he is. They may well be glad he’s gone.”

  Tess responded with a short laugh. “Well, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like there was a confetti parade when he made the announcement, but I didn’t see any tears, either. Everyone kept a stiff upper lip, at least in front of me. But you’d think that since he’s been the heart and soul of the place and his departure was such a surprise, things would be a little … disordered for a while. But everything seems fine. When I was making the rounds to meet everyone, they seemed okay with the transition. It’s creepy.”

  “Were you expecting an armed insurrection? They’re all professionals and it’s a business decision. And they’re probably giving you a honeymoon. Enjoy it while it lasts. If there’s a reason they’re not upset by his departure, you’ll learn it in time. Have you hooked up with Nik Forde?”

  A minuscule pause built before she answered and Gianni winced at his bad turn of phrase. He’d forgotten that they’d been rumored to be an item at HAARP.

  “Yes. Nik’s been very helpful. Funny. Same as ever, really. But very helpful.”

  “So, Tess, is everything good?”

  “Yes.”

  Gianni frowned at the slight hesitation in her voice.

  “Yes, it’s all good,” she continued. “I’ll have a better grip on it when I’ve been here a few days.”

  He could still hear doubt in her voice and chose to ignore it. “I’m glad to hear it, Tess. I knew you were the right person for the job. Keep in touch, even if it’s just a quick text, okay? Just until you settle in. Let me know if you have any other concerns about what you see or hear.”

  The silence on the other end of the phone stretched a little longer than it should. “I can’t shake this feeling that there’s something you aren’t telling me, Gianni.”

  “You’re probably just nervous because you’re finally running a multi-million-dollar baby,” he said, forcing levity into his voice as he stared out at the harsh, bright Connecticut sky. “Stay in touch, Tess.”

  * * *

  Tess ended the call feeling less confident than when she’d placed it. But maybe Gianni was right. Greg was gone and she was in charge of TESLA and all the people who made the arrays and the installation work; that was enough to induce nerves in anyone. Of course, she thought as a huge yawn took her by surprise, it could just be that she was hungry and exhausted and more than a little overwhelmed by everything that had transpired in the last few hours—and weeks.

  Enough introspection. There’s hot water waiting for me at the end of the hall.

  She wasted no more time and quickly settled into her new digs. Inside of ten minutes, her bags were emptied and her belongings put away. Then she gathered her toiletries and towels and headed for the showers. Given the tight water ratios every Antarctic base had to endure, she could take only a standard military three-minute shower—strip off, get in, turn the water on and wet down, turn the water off, soap up, water on, rinse, water off, get out—but it would be a shower. And, right now, that sounded awfully close to heaven.

  * * *

  Tess dressed in a hurry, pulling on the most sober outfit she had with her, though she knew it would generate looks and comments. It wasn’t exactly standard Antarctic fare; nothing you could buy in Paris was. The fine black wool trousers fell in a long, slim line to the top of her low-heeled slingbacks and the loose, royal blue angora sweater draped over her curves. In Paris, Tess always wore a scarf with this outfit, tossing it artlessly over her shoulder, but she knew it would be way too much at TESLA. Nearly everyone she’d met was in jeans and T-shirts—two items she’d purged from her wardrobe when she’d headed across the Atlantic several years ago.

  Grimacing as she looked in the mirror, Tess gathered her hair into a ponytail, gave it a few clever twists, and secured it with clips at the back of her head. It was a little messy and a little sexy, but mostly it was out of her way, which was the point. Then, she grabbed her laptop and headed for the dining room.

  Since everyone at TESLA kept their own hours, food was always available, but the chef did what he could to maintain some semblance of normality by preparing meals appropriate to the time of day. Tess was just finishing up a quick, solitary breakfast of coffee, granola, and yogurt when Nik strolled into the room.

  “Perfect timing,” she said, setting her napkin on the table. She stood and brushed the creases out of her slacks.

  “You clean up well,” he said as he gave her a once-over.

  She raised an eyebrow, not entirely pleased with the comment but deciding to ignore it.

  “Thanks,” she replied crisply. “I feel like a new person. I’d like to continue with the introductions. I think I’ve met all the ops and admin staff. That leaves the programmers and the science team.”

  Nik nodded, said, “You might have missed a few,” then reached into his pocket and pulled out a walkie-talkie and a folded piece of paper. “This first line is your username. The rest are passwords, a different one for each system. You should change everything once you log in.”

  Glancing down at the list, Tess let out a soft laugh. “Power system: Bosslady01. Comms: DingDongGregIsGone!! Arrays: WeWillAlwaysHaveMoscow2008. God rights: HairyWart-on-satans-ass95.” She looked up and met his grin. “You put a lot of thought into these.”

  “I wanted to make them easy for you to remember.”

  “Well done. They’re unforgettable,” she said, returning to her seat and turning on her laptop. “Let’s see how well they work.”

  Nik sat down across from her. “That was what you called him, right? A hairy wart on Satan’s ass?”

  “I think it was actually an oozing wart on Satan’s hairy ass, but that’s just semantics.”

  “Is your room okay?”

  “Wonderful. Luxury digs for an Antarctic outpost,” she replied, her eyes on her screen.

  “As I said, Greg didn’t skimp on anything.”

  “Okay, so here goes. Power system,” she murmured, and typed in her user name and password at the prompt. “Well done, I’m in. Give me a sec while I change it to something nowhere near as creative. There. Arrays.” She glanced at the paper and keyed in the words, then glanced at the screen. “Okay, I’m two for two.” She tapped a few more keys. “Comms. Done. Oooh, baby. Now we’re cooking with gas,” she finished with a laughing flourish.

  The lights flickered so quickly that Tess blinked, and wondered if she’d imagined it. Then she saw the frozen look on Nik’s face and knew she hadn’t.

  “Does that happen often?”

  “No. That’s the second time in four years. I think we’d better head to the sandbox—” His voice was clipped and his radio already in his hand when he was interrupted by a beep from the unit. It competed with a roar from the corridor outside the dining room.

  “God damn it.” The voice was male, Irish-inflected, and loud enough to make Tess jump. She spun around to see a large, long-haired, blue-jeaned, T-shirted man come crashing through the doorway nearest them. He charged at Tess and Nik, who were already on their feet, and came to a panting halt a foot away from them.

  “Something wrong, Dan?” Nik’s soft sarcasm made the other man suck in a loud, annoyed breath. “I’m not sure that you’ve met our new fearless leader, Dr. Tess Beauchamp. This is Dan Thornton. His official titles are base pilot and chief mechanic, but in reality, he pretty much keeps the physical plant running.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you,” the Irishman said gruffly, then turned his gaze back to Nik. “Ay, I’d say there’s something gone amiss, lad. That blip. What the fuck was that about?”

  Tess’s eyebrows rose at the man’s vehemence, but she said nothing. Several people had gathered in the doorway and were watching the three of them intently, their faces tense and concerned.

  “I don’t know. We were just heading to the sandbox to ask the same question,” Nik replied.

  “What could it be, Dan?” Tess asked.

  The Irishman looked a
t her. “It could be anything—a software glitch, hardware malfunction, something mechanical. I couldn’t tell you. But we’d better get started looking for the answer.”

  “Radio the plane to ask—,” Nik began, and Tess winced.

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” she said as Dan replied, “It’s well out of range already.”

  “Dan?” A female voice entered the conversation via their walkie-talkies.

  “I’m here.”

  “It’s Pam. I need you to go to the ground station.”

  “The what? Why?”

  “The external comms just went down.”

  “What?”

  “The external comms network just gave up the ghost,” the woman repeated calmly and Tess’s heart skipped a beat.

  The worst thing that could happen at TESLA, at any Antarctic station, was for fire to break out. The second was a loss of contact with the outside world. For TESLA, in its remote location, the latter was particularly dangerous.

  “I’ll check it out,” Dan growled into the radio unit, and looked at Nik, then Tess. “Now I’ve got to get back into all that fucking ECW gear I just shucked off, to go out to the fucking ground station to see what’s wrong.”

  Tess cleared her throat. “You think something happened to the uplink?”

  He stared at her, his blue eyes blazing, his face flushed, and she could tell he was trying to rein in his temper. “That might be part of it. I’d appreciate it if you would get the lads in the sandbox to start their diagnostics in the power system and the comms before I haul my arse back into the cold.”

  She met his eyes with a chilly look of her own. “Naturally, Dan. But while they’re running diagnostics on the software, I think it’s important to rule out that something physical happened to the power station. I’d like you to go take a look at it.”

  He let out a harsh breath. “Four fucking years into this party and when the lights go out, the first thing anyone can come up with is that my wires are suddenly shaking loose. In me arse they are. If you need me in the next ten minutes, I’ll be in the ready room. And after that, outside.”

  Tess watched him turn around and walk toward the door, annoyance radiating from him.

  Such fragile egos.

  She turned to look at Nik as the two of them followed Dan out of the room at a slight distance. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t the external comms network include everything that connects to something outside of these few square miles of ice?”

  “Yup.”

  “And all of it just went black?”

  “Seems that way.”

  “You’re very calm.”

  “There’s no point in panicking. We’ve got layers of backups,” he said, then brought the radio to his mouth. “Pam?”

  The same voice that had announced the failure came on line. “Yes, Nik?”

  “The backups kicked in, right?”

  “No, actually they didn’t.”

  He came to an abrupt stop. “What?”

  “We’re working on it, Nik.”

  “Thanks. We’ll be there in a minute.” He looked at Tess. “Are you okay?”

  “Of course. There’s a reason this happened, and we’ll find it and fix it,” Tess replied coolly, and took a deep breath to ward off the sensation of her stomach dropping to her weakening knees. There was nothing that would stop her racing heart.

  They resumed walking and smiled reassuringly as they moved past the small clutch of concerned staffers. But as they began ascending the twisting stairs, Nik said in a low voice, “I’m not much of a believer in conspiracies, Tess, but I also don’t believe in coincidences.”

  “I’m glad I’m not alone in that. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that the power blip is connected to the comms situation,” he said, and paused. “I also think we can start looking for a causal relationship to that big old Ilyushin moving out of comms range.”

  “You think Greg did this?”

  He said nothing for a minute, then met her eyes. “I don’t like jumping to conclusions, but the timing is suspicious.”

  “But it’s too perfect. He wouldn’t have known exactly when the plane would take off, or when it would be out of range.”

  “True, but I think he also would have figured that even if he were still on the ground, you wouldn’t have asked for his help.”

  Stung by the implication, Tess stiffened her back and ignored the comment. “I reviewed the comms systems on paper and saw the copy of the system they keep at HQ, but refresh my memory.”

  “We have two identical backups for every system. One goes to the vault—” He glanced at her. “You know about the vault?”

  Tess nodded as they reached the top of the stairs and began to move down the hall. “In the ice beneath the installation, lead-lined, blast-proof, cipher locks.”

  “Right. The other backups are uploaded to one of our satellites and downlinked to a facility in Connecticut. Both sets of backups are heavily encrypted and streamed in real time. So if the uplink is gone, the vault copy is still running.”

  “So, everything can’t be down, Nik.”

  “Everything external could be. If the backup had come on line, Pam would have said so.”

  “So we’ve lost the external network, the phones, the satellite links—what else?”

  Nik frowned at her. “That’s not enough? Tess, the communications system is a silo, deep but narrow for security purposes.”

  “Which is one reason I’ve never liked the silo model. Being capable of losing everything at once is what I call one whopper of a vulnerability, Nik. That’s not security, it’s insanity,” she snapped. “I know we have old-fashioned radio equipment for emergencies, and that wouldn’t be affected by any network glitches. Tell me about that.”

  “Well, yeah, okay, we can transmit scrambled or open messages on all the bog-standard long-range frequencies, but I can’t tell you the last time we used them for anything other than talking to incoming planes or people out in the field.”

  “So let’s fire them up now,” Tess replied as they reached the top of the stairs. “That’s what they’re there for. Get someone to dust them off and test them.”

  “Why? To send out distress signals?” Nik snorted. “Announce to the world that there’s trouble in paradise an hour after Greg leaves? Do you have any idea what that would do to—”

  Tess stopped and turned to face him. “Nik, when I was in his office earlier, Greg said to me that TESLA couldn’t function without him. I’m beginning to wonder if he meant that literally rather than metaphorically. Did he ever say anything like that to you?”

  Nik looked at her curiously. “Why would he have? I had no idea he was leaving.”

  “I’m just asking. Did he ever say anything like that to you?”

  “No. He never gave any hints or indication that he was critical to the operation of the facility,” Nik snapped, folding his arms across his chest.

  “Thank you.” She paused and looked him straight in the eyes. “Look, Nik, I didn’t appreciate your comment that I wouldn’t have gone to Greg for help even if he’d still been on the ground. I’d like to set something straight. I have different priorities than Greg does, and my ego has a whole different set of drivers. I won’t compromise TESLA for anything short of a full-blown and imminent catastrophe, but if that’s what this becomes—and I don’t think it will—the people here come first. Got that? The personnel are more important to me than the arrays or this building or Croyden Flint’s corporate paranoia. So, if I determine that we need to issue a Mayday call on a short-wave frequency to get help, we’ll do it.” She paused. “I want us to walk into that sandbox presenting a united front. Is there anything else we need to discuss before we do that?”

  She could see in his eyes that he was furious at being dressed down. Too bad.

  “We’ve got radios in the planes,” he said stiffly. “If all else fails, we can use those.”

  “Let’s keep them in mi
nd,” she said, and resumed walking.

  CHAPTER 12

  Nik had somehow kept his jaw from dropping open as he saw Tess sitting there in the dining room. In this community where pressed khakis constituted formal dress, Tess was a vision. Her hair was up and sort of puffy, with little wispy strands dangling here and there. It was soft and feminine. The rest of her was pure dynamite. Her blue sweater was soft-looking, fuzzy, and clingy enough to show off the goods without looking slutty. It was begging to be touched—and would be, if he could arrange it. Then, when she’d stood up, he’d seen the rest of the package: dark pants that hugged every long, smooth curve just right. But her clothing, apparently, was the extent of the illusion of her softness.

  “Okay, Nik, what do you keep looking at?” Tess asked as they approached the end of the hall. The door to the sandbox loomed ahead of them.

  Startled, Nik brought his gaze to her face.

  Before he could say anything, she rolled her eyes. “Listen, get over it. Quit pouting. And while you’re at it, quit staring at my boobs and give yourself a raincheck on the flirting.”

  You make me want to bay at the moon. “For Christ’s sake, Tess, I’m not pouting. Or flirting,” he growled, then ripped his card through the sensor on the wall outside the door and waited. Instructions flashed onto the small screen and, obeying them, Nik pressed his left palm against the biometric reader. Sometimes he only had to press a specific fingertip to it, sometimes it required a retinal scan, sometimes a voiceprint. Sometimes a combination of several authentications. The infrequent visitors to the installation were inevitably frustrated by the protocols, but the security didn’t seem cumbersome to the residents.

  After all, they were entering C4—the command, communications, and control center for the array, the guts and brains of TESLA, and this was just part of the reality of their existence. His identity established, the door slid open with a soft shush.

  “Hey, kids. Anybody hit paydirt yet?” Nik asked out loud, his voice like a shout in the hush. He let Tess precede him into the large, brightly lit room that was humming with low conversations and dozens of computers.