Ice Station (4 page)

Sarah Hensleigh stared out over the central shaft of the station, deep
in thought. Schofield looked at her. She was an attractive woman,
about thirty-five, with dark brown eyes, black shoulder-length hair,
and high arching cheekbones. Schofield noticed that around her neck
she wore a glistening silver locket on a chain.

At that moment, the little girl came out onto the catwalk. Schofield
guessed that she must have been about ten. She had short blond hair, a
small button nose, and she wore thick glasses that hung down awkwardly
over her cheeks. She looked almost comical in the bulky pink parka
that she wore—it had a terribly oversize wool-lined hood that
flopped down over her face.

And behind the little girl, loping out onto the metal catwalk, came
the seal.

“And who is this?” Schofield asked.

“This is my daughter, Kirsty,” Sarah said, putting her hand
on the little girl's shoulder. “Kirsty, this is Lieutenant
Schofield.”

“Hi there,” Schofield said.

Kirsty Hensleigh just stood there for a moment and stared up at
Schofield, taking in his armor, his helmet, and his weapons.

“Cool glasses,” she said at last.

“Huh? Oh, yeah,” Schofield said, touching his silver
anti-flash glasses. Combined with his snow fatigues and his white-gray
body armor, he knew the reflective single-lens glasses made him look
particularly icy. A kid would like that. Schofield didn't
take the glasses off.

“Yeah, I guess they are pretty cool,” he said. “How old
are you?”

“Twelve, almost thirteen.”

“Yeah?”

“I'm kind of short for my age,” Kirsty added
matter-of-factly.

“Me, too,” Schofield said, nodding.

He looked down as the seal flopped forward and started sniffing at his
knee. “And your friend here. What's his name?”

“She's a girl, and her name is Wendy.”

Schofield reached down and let the seal sniff his hand. She wasn't
very big, about the size of a medium-sized dog, and she happily wore a
cute red collar.

“Wendy. What kind of seal is she?” Schofield asked as he
began to pat Wendy on the head.

“Arctocephalus gazella,” Kirsty said.
“Antarctic fur seal.”

Wendy started winding her head around in Schofield's hand, forcing
him to pat her behind her earflap. He did, and then suddenly Wendy
dropped to the ground and rolled over onto her back.

“She wants you to rub her tummy,” Kirsty said, smiling.
“She likes that.”

Wendy lay on the catwalk, on her back, her flippers held out wide,
waiting to be patted. Schofield bent down and gave her a quick rub on
the stomach.

“You just won yourself a friend for life,” Sarah Hensleigh
said, watching Schofield closely.

“Great,” Schofield said, rising.

“I didn't know Marines could be so friendly,” Sarah said
suddenly, taking Schofield slightly off guard.

“We're not all heartless.”

“Not when there's something here that you want.”

The comment made Schofield stop and look at Sarah for a long second.
Clearly, she was no fool.

Schofield nodded slowly, accepting the criticism. “Ma'am, if
you don't mind, if we could just get back to what we were
discussing before, you know two of them, and you know of one
of them, right?”

“That's right.”

“What about the fourth one, Cuvier?”

“Never met him.”

Schofield moved on. “And how many did they take back to
d'Urville?”

“They could only fit six people in their hovercraft, so one of
their guys took five of our people back there.”

“Leaving the other four back here.”

“That's right.”

Schofield nodded to himself. Then he looked at Hensleigh. “There
are a couple of other things we need to talk about. Like what you
found down in the ice. And the Renshaw ... incident.”

Sarah understood what he was saying. Such matters were best discussed
in the absence of a twelve-year-old.

She nodded. “No problem.”

Schofield looked at the ice station around him: at the pool down at
the bottom, at the catwalks set into the walls of the cylinder, at the
tunnels that disappeared into the ice. There was something about it
all that wasn't quite right, something that he couldn't quite
put his finger on.

And then he realized, and he turned to face Sarah. “Stop me if
this is a stupid question, but if this whole station is carved into
the ice shelf and all the walls are made of ice, why don't they
melt? Surely you must generate a lot of heat in here with your
machinery and all. Shouldn't the walls be dripping
constantly?”

Sarah said, “It's not a stupid question. In fact, it's a
very good question. When we first arrived here, we found that the heat
from the exhaust of the core-drilling machine was causing some of the
ice walls to melt. So we had a cooling system installed on C-deck. It
works off a thermostat that keeps the temperature steady at
—1° Celsius no matter what heat we produce. The funny thing
is, since the surface temperature outside is almost thirty below, the
cooling system actually warms the air in here. We
love it.”

“Very clever,” Schofield said as he looked around the ice
station.

His gaze came to rest on the dining room. Luc Champion and the other
three French scientists were in there, sitting at the table with the
residents of Wilkes. Schofield watched them, deep in thought.

“Are you going to take us home?” Kirsty said suddenly from
behind him.

For a long moment Schofield continued to watch the four French
scientists in the dining room. Then he turned to face the little girl.

“Not just yet,” he said. “Some other people will be
here soon to take you home. I'm just here to take care of you
until they do.”

Schofield and Hensleigh walked quickly down the
wide ice tunnel. Montana and Hollywood kept pace behind them.

They were on B-deck, the main living area. The ice tunnel curved
around a wide bend. Doors were sunk into it on either side: bedrooms,
a common room, and various labs and studies. Schofield couldn't
help noticing one particular door that had a distinctive three-ringed
biohazard sign on it. A rectangular plate beneath the sign read:
biotoxin laboratory.

Schofield said, “They said something about it when we got to
McMurdo. That Renshaw claimed he did it because the other guy was
stealing his research. Something like that.”

“That's right,” Hensleigh said, walking fast. She looked
at Schofield. “It's just crazy.”

They came to the end of the tunnel, to a door set into the ice. It was
closed and it had a heavy wooden beam locked in place across it.

“James Renshaw,” Schofield mused. “Isn't he the one
who found the spaceship?”

“That's right. But there's a whole lot more to it than
that.”

Upon arriving at McMurdo Station, Schofield had been given a short
briefing on Wilkes Ice Station. On the face of it, the station seemed
like nothing special. It contained the usual assortment of academics:
marine biologists studying the ocean fauna; paleontologists studying
fossils frozen in the ice; geologists looking for mineral deposits;
and geophysicists like James Renshaw who drilled deep down into the
ice looking for thousand-year-old traces of carbon monoxide and other
gases.

What made Wilkes Ice Station something special was that two days
before Abby Sinclair's distress signal had gone out
another high-priority signal had been sent out from the
station: This earlier signal, sent to McMurdo, had been a formal
request seeking the dispatch to Wilkes of a squad of military police.

Although the details had been sketchy, it appeared that one of the
scientists at Wilkes had killed one of his colleagues.

Schofleld stared at the barred door at the end of the ice tunnel and
shook his head. He really didn't have time for this. His orders
had been very specific:

Secure the station. Investigate the spacecraft. Verify its existence.
And then guard it against all parties until reinforcements arrived.

Schofield remembered sitting in the closed briefing room on board the
Shreveport, listening to the voice of the Undersecretary of
Defense on the speakerphone. “Other parties have almost certainly
picked up that distress signal, Lieutenant. If there really is an
extraterrestrial vehicle down there, there's a good chance one of
those parties might make a play for it. The United States Government
would like to avoid that situation, Lieutenant. Your objective is the
protection of the spacecraft, nothing else. I repeat. Your objective
is the protection of the spacecraft. All other considerations are
secondary. We want that ship.”

Not once had the safety of the American scientists at the station been
mentioned, a fact that hadn't gone unnoticed by Schofield. It
obviously hadn't slipped past Sarah Hensleigh either.

All other considerations are secondary.

In any case, Schofield thought, he couldn't afford to send any
divers down to investigate the spacecraft while there existed the
possibility that one of the residents of Wilkes might be a source of
trouble.

“All right,” he said, looking at the door but addressing
Hensleigh. “Twenty-five words or less. What's his
story?”

Sarah Hensleigh said, “Renshaw is a geophysicist from Stanford,
studying ice cores for his Ph.D. Bernie Olson is—
was—his supervisor. Renshaw's work with ice cores
was groundbreaking. He was digging core holes deeper than anybody had
ever dug before, at times going nearly a kilometer below the
surface.”

Schofield vaguely knew about ice core research. It involved drilling a
circular hole about thirty centimeters wide down into the ice shelf
and pulling out a cylinder of ice known as a core. Held captive within
the core were pockets of gases that had existed in the air thousands
of years before.

“Anyway,” Sarah said, “a couple of weeks ago, Renshaw
hit the big time. His drill must have hit a layer of upsurged
ice—prehistoric ice that has been dislodged by an earthquake
sometime in the past and pushed up toward the surface. Suddenly
Renshaw was studying pockets of air that were as much as three hundred
million years old. It was the discovery of a lifetime. Here
was a chance to study an atmosphere that no one has ever known. To see
what the earth's atmosphere was like before the
dinosaurs.” Sarah Hensleigh shrugged. "For an academic,
something tike that is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
It's worth a fortune on the lecture circuit alone.

"Only then it got better.

“A few days ago, Renshaw adjusted his drilling vector
slightly—that's the angle at which you drill down into the
ice—and at 1500 feet, in the middle of a
four-hundred-million-year-old section of ice, he hit
metal.”

Sarah paused, allowing what she had just said to sink in. Schofield
said nothing.

Sarah said, “We sent the diving bell down, did some
sonic-resonance tests of the ice shelf, and discovered that there was
a cavern of some sort right where this piece of prehistoric
metal was supposed to be. Further tests showed that there was a tunnel
leading up to this cavern from a depth of 3,000 feet. That
was when we sent the divers down, and that was when Austin saw the
spacecraft. And that was when all the divers disappeared.”

Schofield said, “So what does all this have to do with Bernard
Olson's death?”

Sarah said, "Olson was Renshaw's supervisor. He was always
looking over Renshaw's shoulder while Renshaw was making these
amazing discoveries. Renshaw started to get paranoid. He started
saying that Bernie was stealing his research. That Bernie was using
his findings to write a quick-fire article himself and beat
Renshaw to the punch.

“You see, Bernie had connections with the journals, knew some
editors. He could get an article out within a month Renshaw, as an
unknown Ph.D. student, would almost certainly take longer. He thought
Bernie was trying to steal his pot of gold. And then when Renshaw
discovered metal down in the cavern and he saw that Bernie
was going to include that in his article, too, he
flipped.”

“And he killed him?”

“He killed him. Last Friday night. Renshaw just went to
Bernie's room and started yelling at him. We all heard it. Renshaw
was angry and upset, but we'd heard it all before so we didn't
think much of it. But this time, he killed him.”

“How?” Schofield continued to stare at the locked door.

“He—” Sarah hesitated. “He jabbed Bernie in the
neck with a hypodermic needle and injected the contents.”

“What was in the syringe?”

“Industrial-strength drain-cleaning fluid.”

“Charming,” Schofield said. He nodded at the door.
“He's in here?”

Sarah said, “He locked himself in after it happened. Took a
week's worth of food in with him and said that if any of us tried
to go in there after him he'd kill us, too. It was terrifying. He
was crazy. So one night—the night before we sent the divers down
to investigate the cave—the rest of us got together and bolted
the door shut from the outside. Ben Austin fixed some runners to the
wall on either side of the door while the rest of us slid the beam
into place. Then Austin used a rivet gun to seal the door shut.”

Schofield said, “Is he still alive?”

“Yes. You can't hear him now, which means he's probably
asleep. But when he's awake, believe me, you'll know it.”

“Uh-huh.” Schofield examined the edges of the door, saw the
rivets holding it to the frame. “Your friend did a good job with
the door.” He turned around. “If he's locked inside.
That's good enough for me, if you're sure there's
no other way out of that room.”

“This is the only entrance.”

“Yeah, but is there any other way out of the room? Could he dig
his way out, say, through the walls, or the ceiling?”

“The ceilings and the floors are steel-lined, so he can't dig
through them. And his room's at the end of the corridor, so there
aren't any rooms on either side of it—the walls are solid
ice,” Sarah Hensleigh gave Schofield a crooked smile. “I
don't think there's any way out of there.”