James Cobb - The Arctic Event

Smith was pleased with this mechanism. Team building was not purely an aspect of training and discipline. It was a matter of the components learning one other. How they thought. How they acted and reacted. Minutiae down to how they liked a cup of coffee. It all accumulated into a projection of how this individual might react in a given crisis. Precious information.

Fragment by fragment, he was expanding his mental files.

Randi Russell: She was one he had known before. He had a base to build on with her. She was solid, inevitably solid. But out on the edge of perception there was always that faint, frightening whiff of don’t-give-a-damn. Never about the mission, but only about herself.

Gregori Smyslov: Clearly a good soldier, but also a man thinking a great deal. And from the moods Smith caught on occasion, he wasn’t happy with his thoughts. The Russian was working toward a decision. What that decision might be was something for Smith to think about.

Valentina Metrace: She was something else to think about. Specifically, just what lurked inside the history professor’s vivacious, smoothly polished shell. There was some other entity in there. In his lengthening conversations with her he had caught only the slightest flavor of this alternate being. It wasn’t the slipping of a mask so much as the tracing of the camouflaged gun ports of a Q-ship. “Weapons expert” could mean any number of things.

Not that her overt personality wasn’t interesting in its own right.

The cabin’s overhead speaker clicked on. “Wardroom, this is the bridge. Pick up, please.”

Smith rose and crossed to the interphone beside the hatchway. “Wardroom here. This is Colonel Smith.”

“Colonel Smith, this is Captain Jorganson. You and your people might want to come on deck and have a look to port. We’re passing what you might call a local landmark.”

“Will do.” Smith returned the interphone to its cradle. The others looked up at him from their places at the mess table. “The captain suggests we have some sights to see, people.”

The wind on deck was piercing now, numbing exposed flesh in only a matter of seconds. Piercing also was the gunmetal blue of the sea and sky, the latter marred by only a few streaming wisps of cirrus cloud. It made a vivid contrast to the stark white castle shape drifting slowly past the cutter’s quarter, the bulk of the iceberg showing as a wavering green mass below the ocean’s surface. This was only the first outrider of the pack. To the north, off the bow, the horizon shimmered with a hazy metallic luster, what the arctic hands called “ice blink.”

Smith felt someone brush lightly against his elbow. Valentina Metrace was standing close by at his side, and he could feel her shiver. Dr. Trowbridge had emerged from the deckhouse as well and stood at the rail a few feet away, not speaking or looking at Smith and his team. Other members of the cutter’s crew were also coming topside, watching the passage of the pallid sea specter.

The first enemy was in sight. Soon the battle would begin.

Wednesday Island

“Core water samples, series M?”

“Check.”

“Core water samples, series R?”

“Check.”

“Core water samples, series RA?”

Kayla Brown looked up from where she knelt beside the open plastic specimen case. “They’re all here, Doctor Creston,” she replied patiently, “just like yesterday.”

Dr. Brian Creston chuckled and flipped his notebook shut. “Have patience with an old man, child. I’ve seen Mr. Cock-up drop in on many an expedition at the last minute. There’s no sense in getting sloppy in the home stretch.”

Kayla snapped the latches on the case and tightened the nylon safety strap around it. “I hear you, Doctor. I don’t want anything to come between me and that beautiful, beautiful helicopter tomorrow.”

“Really?” Creston reclaimed his pipe from the cracked chemistry retort he’d been using for an ashtray, and bent down slightly to peer through one of the laboratory hut’s small, low-set windows. “Actually, I’ll rather miss the place. I’ve found it…restful.”

For the moment there was a hole in the weather over the island, and the low-riding sun struck white fire off the drifted snow outside. The Wednesday Island Science Station consisted of three small, green prefabricated buildings: the laboratory, the bunkroom, and the utility/generator shack, set side by side in a row and spaced some thirty yards apart to eliminate the risk of a spreading fire.

Established near the shore of the small frozen bay at Wednesday’s western end, the station was protected from the blast of the prevailing northerlies by a shoulder of the Island’s central ridge. Thus, each flat-roofed hut had been only half-buried in drift.

Kayla Brown stood up and brushed off the knees of her ski pants. “It’s been a great experience, Doctor, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, but like we say back home, ‘Can we please stop having fun now?’”

Creston laughed. “Understood, Kayla. But aren’t you going up with the crash investigation team when they arrive? After all, you were the one to first spot the wreck.”

The young woman’s face fell. “No, I don’t think so. I’ve thought about it, and it would probably be interesting, but…the men aboard that plane might still be up there. I’m willing to give that a pass.”

Creston nodded. Leaning back against the big worktable in the center of the laboratory, he began to lightly fill his pipe from the dwindling stock in his tobacco pouch. “I quite understand. It might not be the most pleasant of experiences. But I must confess, I’m getting bloody curious about that old bomber, especially given how they keep ordering us to stay away from it. It makes a person suspect there might be a bit more to this story than’s being let out.”

Kayla Brown braced her hands on her hips and rolled her eyes in feminine practicality. “Oh, come on, Doctor! You know how historians and archeologists are. They hate to have amateurs fumbling around a dig, jumbling things up. You wouldn’t want someone messing with your core samples or radiosonde balloons, would you?”

“Point taken.” Creston struck a wooden kitchen match. Holding it to the bowl of his pipe, he puffed experimentally. “But trust a woman to squeeze all the mystery out of things.”

At that moment Ian Rutherford slid open the accordion door in the partition that separated the main laboratory from the little radio room that took up one end of the hut. “Got the latest met gen, Doctor,” he said, holding up a sheet of hard copy.

“How’s it look, Ian?”

The young Englishman grimaced theatrically. “I suppose you could say mixed. We’ve got a mild front moving in. It might hold off through tomorrow, but for a day or so after that we’re going to be spotty.”

“How big a spot, lad?”

“Variable northerly winds up to force five. Low overcast. Intermittent snow squalls.”

Kayla rolled her eyes once more. “Oh, nice! Perfect flying weather!”

“And that’s just the start,” the youthful Englishman went on. “We’ve been put on a solar flare warning. Commo’s going to be dicky as well.”

“Dear me.” Doctor Creston sighed a cloud of aromatic smoke. “Someone put the kettle on. I think I hear Mr. Cock-up coming up the walk.”

“Oh, come on, Doc,” Rutherford grinned. “It won’t be that bad. Ops should only be bitched for a day or two at the most.”

“I know, Ian, but just remember who’ll be waiting for us on the ship. Dear old Count-the-Pennies Trowbridge will be certain I deliberately brewed up a storm during extraction just to put him over budget.”

There was a shout from somewhere outside the lab building, muffled by the thickly insulated walls. Boots pounded in the snow lock entryway, the inner door crashed open, and Stefan Kropodkin pushed through into the laboratory, crumbs of compacted snow spraying off his Arctic gear. “Did Doctor Hasegawa and Professor Gupta get in?” he gasped, tearing back the hood of his parka.