Apocalypse Weird: Reversal (Polar Wyrd Book 1) (2 page)

Soren glanced over his shoulder at Amber and Robert. “Hey, it’s happy hour. Time to come and chill out.” Soren tried to enforce a strict no working between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m. policy. He claimed he had seen enough scientists burn themselves out at the station, and that he was just looking out for everyone’s best interests. Sasha wondered if he just got lonely living up here year round and liked the company.

Robert rose from his microscope, shook his head, and came and joined everyone at the kitchen island. Amber remained glued to her scope.

“Sorry,” Robert said, running a hand through his wisp of dark hair and pushing his glasses up on his nose. “We found the strangest thing today.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?” Soren said.

“Well, polar bears have distinct hunting habits. They can stalk their prey, wait for it, or just be opportunistic. But generally, as long as the prey is plentiful, they are pretty successful hunters. They’ll resort to garbage on occasion, but not often.”

Edie made a friendly “squeaking the rubber chicken” motion with her hand in the air. They were all so used to being university professors that they could get a little longwinded. They all agreed that they would mime the rubber chicken when someone was giving too much background info.

Robert rolled his eyes at her. “Okay, so you know the safety pods with emergency supplies Soren has set up all over this section of the island? Well, Amber and I came across one of those today. It was torn open and the contents were gone, deep claw marks all over the pod, and polar bear prints and scat nearby. But the pods have a double locking system that only something with opposable thumbs can open.” Robert stopped talking and widened his eyes at them, as if expecting a big response.

“So, are you saying polar bears have opposable thumbs now?” Sasha said.

Soren downed the rest of his beer. “Nah, he’s saying that one of the pods must have been faulty. And that the polar bears must be getting hungry to spend their time bothering with the pod so they can get a bit of dried fruit and some jerky.”

Robert frowned. “We never considered that. The pod looked fine. It really looks like the bear opened it.”

Soren shook his head. “There’s no way they could have opened one of the pods unless it was broken. I can barely open those damn things.”

Cal looked up from the pasta pot. “Dinner’s ready. Let’s eat. Edie and I have some stuff to pack up before we head out.”

Amber joined them at the table, her face tight and stormy. She didn’t say anything to Soren, but it was clear that she did not think much of his faulty pod hypothesis. Kyle emerged from his room, his beaky nose red from too much sun a few weeks ago when it was twenty-four hour sunlight, dished up a plate of pasta, and returned to his room. Soren, evidently deciding to make an exception to his “everyone socializes in the evening” rule, said nothing.

They all ate in relative silence, their regular banter subdued.

After dinner, while Sasha did the dishes with her back to the common room, she heard Soren approach Amber. “Look I know polar bears, even the new angry ones. I’ve lived with them, and I’ve had to shoot them for years. I know that they could not have opened one of those pods.”

Amber marched to the lab and snatched up a piece of red plastic and held it out to Soren. “You tell me that these are not polar bear claw marks.” Soren took the plastic and examined it.

“They’re definitely claw marks,” he said. “But could the bear have clawed the pod and then someone came along later and opened it? The two events aren’t necessarily connected.”

“Who else is out here?”

Soren shrugged. “Scientists are out here all the time. They come and go. Some of them are conscientious. Some of them are yahoos, especially the grad students. I’m not always sure what they get up to out there. Maybe someone opened it for something they needed, and forgot to report it.”

Amber did not sound convinced. “Maybe.”

Edie set a duffle bag of supplies on the floor. “Okay, we’re headed off. If we make it as far as the warming hut, we might spend the night there.”

Soren jerked his head up sharply at this. But Edie patted him on the arm. “It’s okay, Dad. We’re adults. We have the radios, food and our bags. The hut’s insulated and I know you keep a stock of wood there. We’ll take good care of your dog.”

Soren’s low baritone rang through the station. “When you’re going that far, I prefer you to be in teams of three.”

Edie looked around the room with a small smile. “Three would be a crowd.” The hut was on the northernmost tip of the island, accessible via a couple hour snowmobile from the station. She and Cal were obviously intending to join the so-called “latitude high” club. Sasha suppressed a snort. The polar air must have a libidinous effect, or maybe it was the lack of anything else to do except research, chat with the same people day in and day out and sleep that caused so many researchers to become preoccupied by sex during their stints up north.

Soren pressed his lips together, and a muscle in his cheek pulsed. “See that you don’t miss the hut. It’s a small object in the dark and up here, declination plays games with you. Go too far, and you’ll end up in the ocean.”

“Got it, Dad. We’ll be safe.” Edie insisted on calling Soren this even though Sasha was pretty sure he was at least five years younger than she was.

“Oh, I’m not worried about you,” Soren said. “I just want my dog and machine back.” He said this, but Sasha knew he was joking. Soren looked out for all the scientists at the station all the time, which was why in all the seven years that he had been here, there had been no deaths or injuries, unlike the tenure of the previous caretaker, during which the Cullen party of four were lost at sea, the Murdocks were eaten by polar bears, and there was a rash of injuries and incidents of hypothermia.

But caring didn’t stop Soren from dishing out some tough love, although even Sasha had to admit his little signs and checklists all over the place, like the one that read “Do you have your @%^# parka?” that was plastered on the side door from the hatch to the outside, were a little funny.

Soren put on his inner layer and followed Edie and Cal out to the bay, no doubt to issue some more suggestions, check on the snow machine, and make sure that they tied Lupin up properly. Sasha put away the last of the dishes and made her way down the narrow bunker-like corridor that led to the east wing sleeping quarters. Although the kitchen and common room had been cozied up a bit with a couch and some rugs, the station for the most part had the cramped metallic feel of cargo ship. It could really use a woman’s touch. And a hot tub. Of course, given the hijinks that people seemed to get up to up here, a hot tub would probably be a bad idea.

Kyle blinked at the bright light in the hall when he answered her knock.

“I was wondering if you wanted to run the sim model based on the new temperature, density, and coverage numbers,” she asked. She could technically run the model herself, but she didn’t like to exclude Kyle, and the ancient computers in the station were a bit tweaky.

Kyle shook his head. “Not tonight. I have other stuff I have to work on.” A chilly breeze floated out of his room, like he had his heat vent turned off. He looked pale and sweaty, and she got the distinct impression that he had been smoking, even though that was forbidden inside the station.

“You okay?” she asked. She and Soren were the station’s first responders, but as a part-time paramedic when she was not traveling for research, she was the most experienced. Kyle definitely looked sick. Like, kind of really sick.

“I’m fine,” Kyle already had the door half shut as he spoke, and the rush of cool air out into the hall was a bit discomfiting. They were practically on a polar ice cap. It was not like it needed to be any colder. Kyle closed the door the rest of the way, and Sasha made her way back to the common room.

Touchy, temperamental Kyle. Everyone in the Oceanography Department knew about his moods and fits of absurd temper over academic slights. She would be far more likely to sleep with him if he wasn’t so cranky all the time. Earlier in the week, she had asked him about the small black dragon insignia on his binoculars and he had nearly taken her head off. She had assumed it had something to do with tae kwon do and that they could chat about it since she had just completed a course in martial arts. It wasn’t as if they had an abundance of things to talk about while out drilling holes in the ice.

She decided to run the chemical analysis on the seawater that they had collected near some of the thicker pack ice collections. That was another weird thing—the ice was starting to collect in places where it had not historically, suggesting unusual upwellings, changes in ocean currents, or something. She wished university budgets hadn’t been slashed as a result of the economic correction, or “mini-depression” as everyone was calling it, and they could afford a real research team. She wondered if Soren was even getting paid anymore. At least his beer was still getting brought in.

Soren came back into the common room, apparently satisfied that Edie and Cal had prepared sufficiently for their trip. He caught her looking at him and flipped her one of his intense looks punctuated by a wink. She never knew what the winks meant—an invitation, a shared secret, a reflection of his opinion of her as a cute little inconsequential thing, an inoperable eye twitch… She had no idea.

She refocused her attention on the chemical analysis. Ocean ice lost its salinity as it aged and the number of pockets of brine could help tell how fast the ice developed and the degree of melt over the course of the year.

Sasha let herself become absorbed in the tables and the numbers and preparing graphs for each of the floes they sampled.

She was so engrossed that she almost didn’t hear Soren and Robert talking in low voices in the kitchen.

“Look, Amber is really spooked about the bears. We’d like to head out early.”

Soren shrugged. “Earliest flight out is the supply drop in two weeks, and they can only land if the conditions are good. So you’re stuck until then at the earliest, unless you have enough money to charter your own flight.”

“There’s nothing you can do?”

“You mean like what, dog sled you four hundred miles to Grise Ford, where you’ll have to wait for a plane or a boat anyway? Sorry. The Transporter went down last week.”

Sasha suppressed a snort of laughter at Soren’s joke. Robert was a bit of a delicate fuddy-dud, more of a desk scientist than a field one.

Robert moved away from Soren wordlessly and returned to his and Amber’s room. He shut his door tightly. Soren raised his hands palms up at Sasha as if to say he had no idea what to do, and then sat at his own desk, wrote a few notes in his log, and said goodnight.

Sasha finished up with her graphs and hit save. She wondered if the recent acceleration in the changes in the magnetic North Pole had any influence on ocean currents and could be accounting for the shifts in the locations of the greatest ice cover. What she knew from Edie was that magnetic declination, or the variation between true north and magnetic north, had shifted by a few degrees annually throughout history. The rate of change had been accelerating over the past century and even more so in the past few years. The directionality of change, which was usually consistent for long periods of time, had also started to fluctuate annually, which was considered very unusual. She knew that Edie and Cal thought that the changes in the aurora borealis were related to these fluctuations in the magnetic North Pole. She made a note to ask them about it.

She padded quietly down both sleeping quarter halls, checking to see who was awake. She and Soren were alone in the west wing, while the others occupied the newer east wing. With the tightly-fitting hatch doors it was impossible to tell whether the others had their lights on or not, but all seemed quiet. Satisfied, Sasha made her way back to the main door to the bay. She opened it a crack and peered out. The dogs had retired to their kennels and the air in the bay was a brisk minus fifteen. She picked her way carefully through the plastic huts until she got to Timber’s. She patted his head, and the old dog roused himself and made his way out. He was the oldest of the sled dogs, and at eight was already retired from active duty. Cedar, the pup of the pack, bounced out after Timber. Cedar head-butted her and she gave him a noogie between the ears. His mother, Talia, had been killed by a polar bear just a couple months earlier, and Cedar had adopted Timber as his new mother. Sasha bubbled with laughter every time she saw Cedar leaping all over the infinitely patient and stoic Timber.

“Not you, little one,” she said. “Your owner would have my head.”

Timber followed Sasha back into the station without question or sound. She had been doing this for several nights now—letting him sleep in her quarters. Soren would be apoplectic if he knew, but Timber just seemed too old to be sleeping out in the icy bay, and since he was no longer used for sledding, she didn’t see the harm. That’s how she rationalized it anyway. She always made sure she was the first person up in the morning to escort him back to his kennel.

She shooed Timber into her quarters and closed the door. He settled immediately on the small carpet at the end of the bed and let out a satisfied sigh as he extended his long limbs. Sasha knelt to bury her face in his fresh smelling fur. She adored him already. How was she going to leave him behind in six months? She rose, changed in to her flannel pajamas, and climbed into bed.

Sasha awoke with a start from the knocking on her door. It was kind of a cross between a pound and a rap, as if the knocker were somehow a tiny bit uncertain, but determined.

She opened her eyes and heard the jostle of Timber moving position. Crap. Soren had figured out that she had smuggled the dog into her room.

“Sasha, Sasha. Is this your room? Please open your door. There’s a problem. Immediately.” Soren’s voice. His voice was strangled and strange. Why was he asking if this was her room? What was going on? Sasha bolted up in bed, and realized that her eyes were registering a strange sensation of nothingness. The glow of her bedside clock was absent. The power must have gone off. That was probably what the problem was. She could hear the thrash of a violent polar storm outside the station.