Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

The next time the door opened, Edith and Hilario came out. Edith’s eyes were red-rimmed and staring. “I can’t believe it!” she was saying, her voice tight with sorrow. “It’s just awful!”

Valena cleared her throat.

Four more heavy equipment operators came outside, shuffled a few feet away from the door, and stopped. Stared at the ground.

Edith began to cry. One of the men put his arms around her and hugged her.

“What is it?” Valena asked.

Hilario looked up and turned toward Valena. His eyes were dark with anger. “Steve’s dead,” he said.

BRENDA UTZON HEADED DOWN THE RAMP IN CRARY Lab. She had news, and she knew just who she wanted to share it with. She would tell Michael. She hurried to his door and knocked, but he did not answer.

She started back up the ramp toward phase 1 and her office. As she passed the middle of the ramp, where phase 2 branched left and right, she heard someone call her name.

She turned to see who it was. James Skehan was ambling toward her. She said, “Oh, hi there, Jim.”

“Hello, Brenda. You look like a woman with a purpose.”

Brenda blushed. “Well, I am. I was just looking for Michael to tell him the news.”

Skehan raised his eyebrows to indicate interest. “Ah?”

“Well, it’s about Valena Walker, so I suppose you already know, being both from DRI and all.”

“She’s with Emmett’s project.”

“Right. Oh, so you don’t know?”

“I offer you a visage devoid of knowing. So tell me, what is new that is about Valena Walker, pray tell?”

“Oh, she’s gotten on with Fleet Ops for the moment. That’s very good news, because she was so disappointed to have to come all the way down here and not see anything of Antarctica.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Yes, just imagine, it must have been crushing. She has always, always wanted to come here.”

“So Fleet Ops took her on? How was that accomplished so quickly?”

“Well, they’re just borrowing her, what with Steve hurt and all. You heard that they flew him out to Christchurch. We’re waiting for an update.”

They heard the inner airlock door open at the end of the hallway. Michael stepped slowly through it. He was staring at the floor.

“Michael!” said Brenda. “I was just coming to tell you about—” She put a hand to her lips. “Something’s happened.”

Michael looked up slowly. “Steve’s dead, Brenda. I just came from the Chalet. He was dead when they landed in New Zealand.”

Brenda felt a sickening sense of compression.

Michael put a hand on her shoulder. “I guess that injury was worse than we thought.”

Skehan said, “Injury?”

Brenda found her voice. “His head.”

Skehan’s voice deepened. “And how did this injury occur?”

Brenda said, “They figure he slipped off the bottom step of his tractor.”

“In the middle of that storm, he was on his tractor?”

“I don’t know how it happened. Cupcake found him.” Brenda felt herself trembling and wondered if she was going to be sick. “So they asked Valena if she’d go, and she said yes. That’s what I was coming to tell you, Michael.”

Skehan’s eyes widened. “Valena’s driving to Black Island?” With urgency, he added, “Brenda, do you know where I can find Dorothy?”

“You know Cupcake?”

“She once assisted me with some field work.”

Michael said, “I just saw her walking toward Berg Field Center.”

“Poor Steve,” said Brenda. She spoke unevenly, trembling giving way to silent tears.

Michael slid his arm around her shoulder and brought her up against his chest.

Without saying good-bye, Skehan strode toward the door at the end of the hall and through the outside airlock door, heading in the direction of Berg.

NATHANIEL LANTHROPE—THE PENGUIN GUY—FINISHED stowing the five-gallon water containers that he and his assistant had just brought in from their short helicopter ride from McMurdo. He adjusted the spigot, put a mug underneath it, and poured himself a drink, to which he added a couple of tablespoonfuls of Raro, New Zealand’s answer to Tang. He favored the mango flavor.

Water was the limiting factor out here at Cape Royds. Satellite phone they had, and high-speed Internet, a busy colony of penguins, no dearth of volcanic rock, and millions of square miles of sea ice, but no potable water beyond these five-gallon jugs. The last patches of the winter’s snows, which were in any case quickly melting on the sun-absorbent black rock, were full of salt from the mists that rode in from the ocean’s edge a hundred yards away.

He walked out to a promontory from which he could survey the entire cape. He could see his assistant picking her way down the trail toward the Pony Lake and the penguin colony beyond. Summer was arriving in Antarctica, but the ocean was still frozen. Far below him on the rocks just above the frozen sea, fifteen hundred pairs of penguins had gathered, and he could hear their ruckus a quarter mile away. They had just completed their mating rituals and were beginning to lay their eggs, the meaning of their odd rr-churring sound shifting from “Hey baby!” to “Get off my nesting space, and gimme back that pebble.”

The colony was struggling, still recovering from a five-year period during which the ice in McMurdo Sound did not break up. An iceberg the size of Connecticut—the infamous and mammoth B-15 berg—had broken off the Ross Ice Shelf and had grounded just north of Ross Island, blocking the two main agents that usually cleared the winter’s ice from the sound: the warm summer ocean currents that usually melted the ice from below, and the ocean swells that flexed the thinning ice, shattering it so that a hard wind could blow it out to sea. Hence, the little Adélie penguins who congregated on Cape Royds each spring and laid their eggs and raised their broods had had to walk sixty kilometers across the ice to find the krill that formed bulk of their diet instead of a few meters. This had limited their rate of success in raising their chicks. The breakup of the Ross Ice Shelf thus provided the basis for his study of population response to climate change.

Nat drank his fill, then put on his jacket to protect himself from the incessant Antarctic wind, picked up his waterproof Rite-in-the-Rain notebook, and started down the hill. He knew the route through the odd mounds of volcanic rock by heart, so many summers had he worked here, watching the penguins, observing their births and lives, documenting their deaths. The crumbled rock that formed the path gave softly under his boots.

He descended past the camp where the New Zealand archaeologists were working to conserve the artifacts in and around Shackleton’s hut. The little structure had been built in 1907 but looked remarkably fresh. He stepped past the dump where Shackleton and his men had thrown their disused bottles and other trash and continued past the little pond where they had watered their Siberian ponies. The Pony Lake was just starting to show some melt water around the edges.

The din of the penguin colony filled his ears now, waves of k-kuk-ker-er-errr and err-kuk-err , a raucous symphony of avian communication. They lay on their little piles of pebbles, staring into the wind. The watermelon-sized black birds with their guano-streaked white bellies lifted their heads and stared at him through emotionless eyes. A crescendo of warning sounds lifted from the nests as he came closer.

“Hey, something’s strange here!” called his assistant.

He turned to see what had caught her attention. She was crouched near a group of nests inside a plastic snow fence that encircled them. They had erected the fence a week before. It did not prevent the birds from leaving the area, but did funnel them over glorified bathroom scales that recorded their weights as they left and returned from feeding. A small archway over the scales held an electronic reader that identified each bird from a small chip that had been inserted under its skin. “What’s up?” he called.