Gillian Anderson - A Dream of Ice

“And magnetized rocks,” Siem said.

“Everywhere,” Mikel answered. He waited a moment, did not want to seem too eager. “Actually, that’s one reason I want to look at the site of—the incident.”

Siem lost interest in his food. He pushed his tray away and tended to his nose.

“Sorry,” Mikel said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have—”

“No, I’ve been wanting to do the same,” Siem said. He looked around. “It’s been very frustrating. Everyone here has been avoiding it because it’s so horrible. Strange.”

“Which one of the two are you replacing?” Mikel asked, loading his voice with kindness.

“The woman,” Siem said, lowering his eyes.

“The missing one.”

Siem nodded.

“Do you mind talking about it?” Mikel asked, just to be sure.

Siem shook his head slowly.

“I heard they haven’t found a trace of her,” Mikel said.

“Nothing,” Siem replied. “They checked for a couple miles around her Ski-Doo. There were no crevasses, no piled snow or ice. Just—nothing.”

“Any idea what happened to the other one? Sorry, what was his name?”

“Fergal, I think.”

“Right, right,” Mikel said, subtly collecting as much information as possible. Familiarity helped to construct subterfuge. “His Ski-Doo flipped, right?”

Siem nodded. “He broke his neck. During the briefing in Stanley, they said he was probably careless, maybe racing to the woman.”

“Yes, but it’s strange. Ski-Doos only flip on rough ground. They’re hefty objects; they don’t turn over for just anything. Wasn’t he on a smooth surface?”

“Yeah, I’m supposed to get out there and look at that,” Siem said. “They have big fat holes in their reports. They’re also having a problem with the GPS unit, which stopped working again. My first job is going to that site later today with one of the researchers.”

Siem took another bite but he was force-feeding himself now.

“What do you think you’ll find there?” Siem asked.

“Sorry?”

“At the accident site?” Siem said. “You’re not going to find rocks. Steam vents or something?”

Mikel chuckled. “Who knows, right? Vents would leave a molten residue but—I was actually wondering if all of this could have something to do with the edge where that berg dropped a week ago.” Finally he’d found a chance to sneak in his real question. “Did they tell you about that calving?”

“I saw something mentioned about it,” Siem told him. “But that was dozens of kilometers away.”

“True, but I was thinking that underground liquefaction might have impacted the site where the woman went missing.”

“Huh. You mean a kind of quicksand effect—with snow? When they went looking for her, the surface was undisturbed.”

“I’ve been around all kinds of primordial geologic events that destroyed societies and buried all trace of them. In Pompeii, for instance. People just evaporated. It might be worth getting over to the source, see if there’s anything that compromised the underlying landmass.”

“That’s a little outside of my job description,” Siem admitted.

“Of course,” Mikel said. “Hey, do you see any problem with me tagging along today?”

“I don’t see why not,” Siem replied, shrugging. “The Survey’s anxious for answers. The more minds working on it, the better for everyone, right?”

“Exactly.”

“You had better check with the boss of field ops, though,” Siem added.

“And that would be…?”

“Dr. Albert Bundy, a.k.a. Dog Alpha. He was the one who ignored us most on the flight.”

Mikel smiled. Flora had furnished him with a list of personnel being rushed to the station.

Outwardly, Mikel started up a conversation about survival skills. But inwardly, he was smiling with satisfaction as he neared accomplishing one of his goals. After this short trek with Dog Alpha, it would be that much easier to tag along on future trips to the ice shelf edge. His other goal—getting forty miles inland and then through the ice to the ground—was exponentially tougher. But he figured that after a few days here he could steal a Ski-Doo…

When Siem left to take a pre-excursion nap, Mikel approached Bundy about the reconnoitering mission. The deal was easily sealed and the run was set for two hours hence. Mikel spent some time refamiliarizing himself with extreme-weather gear and a climbing harness, and asked Ivor to reacquaint him with snowmobiles.

At zero hour Mikel tied himself to his Ski-Doo and tied his Ski-Doo to Siem’s. Siem’s machine was tied to Bundy’s, so that if any of the machines fell through a suddenly breaking snow bridge, the snowmobile—and the man—would only dangle instead of plummet. As this was Bundy’s seventh summer at the base, he led their small convoy southwest across the ice.

They traveled in sharp sunlight; at this time of year the Brunt Ice Shelf saw only an hour of darkness per day. Once watching for cracks in the white surface had become automatic, Mikel’s mind began to drift. The vast blue and white landscape could not hold his attention; landscapes never did. That was one of the major reasons he got out of Pamplona, with its big skies and endless plains. Even as a child, Mikel had chafed against the place. The only two mildly interesting things about the region were the fact that the residents of Navarre wind-farmed the hell out of it, beating even the Germans at renewable electricity, and a strange blip of mountainous desert that looked like it had been airlifted from the American West. Mikel had done a fair bit of rock climbing there but not to enjoy the landscape. Choosing the right grip on a cliff face was an intellectual game for him, high-stakes chess.

His thoughts were interrupted when he noticed Siem waving at him. Mikel was slightly off course and if he kept going in this direction the rope would jolt his Ski-Doo. He veered. Siem continued to wave his arm—now he was pointing in the distance, toward the left. Mikel saw a collection of vertical sticks that would have disappeared in a landscape less stark. There was motion at the top of one of the sticks. He squinted and caught sight of the turning blades of a windmill.

Didn’t Siem say the GPS station was broken? Why are they turning?

The next instant, Mikel was looking at the sky as he fell backward. The seconds that followed seemed slow and endless. The whine of the Ski-Doo surged into a scream as it lost its grip on ground. The surface beneath the rear of the snowmobile vanished and as the machine slipped backward, the snow dropped from under the front as well. At once, Mikel felt the Ski-Doo fall out from between his legs. He lost his grip on the handlebars and the Ski-Doo crashed against the sides of the crevasse. The shocks traveled up the cable catching him, while the nose of the Ski-Doo pointed to the sky, which was a now a fathom away and very, very small.

Mikel slammed against the dangling Ski-Doo as the rope to Siem’s snowmobile jerked taut. He tried to grab it but he tumbled over it instead and fell away from the Ski-Doo as his own screams echoed in his ears. Flailing at the walls of the crevasse, his thickly gloved fingers clawed uselessly. The vertical cliffs were far beyond his reach; this was a big goddamned hole. Then the ropes wrenched at his waist and groin and jerked him backward till his feet flipped higher than his head.

Mikel swung on his back, gazing at the undercarriage of his machine. Far beyond that, against the tiny patch of sky, he could see a black object intruding on the light like a partial eclipse. The back of Siem’s Ski-Doo had nearly dropped into the crevasse as well, prevented from doing so by a swift turn.

Mikel had to force himself to stop hyperventilating lest he pass out. And then there was silence—pure blue silence, for that was the color all around him. An impossible blue, ethereal and hollow.