Adam Baker - Outpost

‘Probably looks worse than it is,’ lied Ghost. ‘Skin will grow back in time.’

He helped Simon dress.

‘Take it easy, all right?’

Ghost picked up the trenching spade.

‘I’m going outside to dig us out. Don’t want to suffocate.’

He stepped outside into the wind and snow. He shouted into his radio.

‘Shore team to Rye. Shore team to Rye, do you copy, over?’

Jane knocked on Rawlins’s door.

‘They reached the cabin,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d like to know. Couldn’t get much out of them. Bad atmospherics. Imagine they will push for the coast at daylight.’

‘Everyone all right?’

‘Punch and Ghost are okay. But only two members of the Apex team made it.’

‘What happened to the third guy?’

‘Like I say, bad reception. I could barely make out a word. But there were three of them. Now there are two. Maybe the cold got him.’

‘Christ. There will be a bunch of tears when they get back. A bunch of guilt. Well, that’s your problem. Pastoral care. Ghost and Punch are okay, yeah?’

‘We’ll hear more when they reach the bunker.’

‘Take a look at this.’

Rawlins had stapled an Arctic map to the wall. The island and surrounding ocean were dotted with red pins.

‘These are all the installations in our sector, as best I can remember. Mostly Gazprom. A couple of Occidental. I suppose most have been evacuated. But if they cleared out in a hurry they might have left some useful supplies. Food. Fuel.’

‘What’s that?’ Jane pointed to a pin tacked to the northern shore of the island.

‘Kalashnikov. A cluster of cabins built by whalers. Survey teams use it as a stop-over. There might be a cache of food, if we’re lucky.’

‘There’s a town called Kalashnikov?’

‘A Hero of Socialist Labour. He got a patch of ice named after him.’

‘So we take the snowmobiles and travel up the coast?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Our route would pass within a couple of kilometres of that impact site,’ said Jane. ‘A person could walk inland and take a look.’

‘Depends on the weather, but yeah.’

‘This time I go, all right? If the boat goes out I want to be on it. I need to get off this damn rig.’

Jane sipped coffee. Sian hurried into the canteen.

‘It’s Rye. You better talk to her.’

She handed Jane a radio.

‘Go ahead.’

‘We’re at the bunker. We’re heading back in the boat. I need you to boot-up Medical .’

Jane flipped a wall switch. Strip-lights flickered.

The medical bay was a wide, white room with an operating table at the centre.

Sub-zero. Jane’s breath fogged the air. She set convection heaters running.

‘Okay. What do you need?’

‘The resuscitation trolley. Plug it in. Get it charged .’

‘Done. ’

‘An instrument pack from the wall cupboard. It’s on a plastic tray, vacuum sealed in plastic .’

‘Got it. ’

‘Bottom shelf. There’s a blue nylon bag. It’s a hypothermia bath .

Inflate it. Don’t fill it, though. I’ll need to adjust water temperature myself .’

Jane unrolled the rubber bath. It was shaped like a coffin. She recognised it from the survival skills training day Con Amalgam insisted she attend before getting shipped north.

She released the valve of a little C02 cylinder. The bath inflated like a child’s paddling pool.

‘Done.’

‘Go to the refrigerator. Get a bag of saline and a bag of Haemaccel. Unlock the drug store and fetch pethidine .’

‘Who’s hurt?’

‘Simon, one of the Apex team. Big-time frostbite. Oedema. Possible septic shock .’

‘Shit.’

‘Meet us on the dock. He’s fading fast. We’ve got to get him in a hypothermic bath and raise his core temperature or we are going to lose him .’

Jane and Sian waited on the floodlit dock with a stretcher. Jane had binoculars.

‘Here they come.’

The zodiac came in fast. Ghost killed the engine and threw Jane a rope. Simon lay on the aluminium floor of the boat. Jane helped drag him from the boat. They laid him on a stretcher, put it on a cargo trolley and wheeled it to the freight elevator.

The stretcher buggy was parked at habitation level. Rye drove Simon to Medical. Jane and Sian jogged behind the little electric car as it hummed down dark corridors.

They moved Simon on to the operating table.

‘Cut off his clothes,’ said Rye. ‘Get him under the shower.’

Jane and Sian hacked through Simon’s clothes with trauma shears. His genitals were so shrivelled by cold he looked female. Nothing between his legs but a tuft of pubic hair.

There was a bathroom at the back of the bay. They dragged Simon to the shower and stood him under a jet of hot water.

Rye stripped out of her survival gear and filled the hypothermia bath, tested it to forty-six degrees.

‘All right. Let’s get him immersed.’

They laid Simon in the bath.

‘Keep his hands and feet out of the water.’

She shone a penlight into his eyes.

‘Ideally I would like to test rectal temperature, but we’ll spare him that indignity for now.’

‘His hand is fucked.’

‘We’ll see how his condition develops as we restore circulation. Of course, that’s when the pain will begin.’

Jane jogged a kilometre circuit of C deck. She was joined by Sian. ‘Spoken to Ghost?’

‘Briefly,’ said Jane.

‘What did he say about that Apex guy? The one who didn’t make it back.’

‘He refuses to talk about it.’

They trotted down unheated corridors. Each puffing exhalation was a great plume of steam-breath. They both wore three tracksuits. The metal floor was slick with ice so they ran in snow-boots with thick rubber tread. Their route was lit by weak daylight shafting through the corridor windows.

Jane ran fast and lithe. She had lost four kilos. Her clothes felt loose. Sian struggled to keep pace.

Jane had been fat all her life. Her body had been nothing more than a sweating, aching encumbrance but now she felt an intimation of what it would be like to be supple and strong.

‘What’s the deal with you and Punch?’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Sian.

‘Both young, both bright. An obvious match.’

‘I always thought Nail and Ivan seemed like a happy couple. Pumping. Preening. Oiling each other down.’

‘Nice deflection.’

They ran the kilometre circuit then ran it again.

Sian returned to her room to shower.

Jane walked past Medical on her way back to the accommodation block. Dr Rye was packing packets of drugs into a box. Jane felt obliged to offer help.

‘Happy pills,’ said Rye. ‘Seroxat. Triptafen. You’ve got to expect depression in a place like this. No daylight. Nowhere to go. There will be plenty of demand, now night is closing in.’

‘How is Simon?’

Rye gestured to a side room.

‘Stable. Sleeping. Infection: that’s my chief concern. This is a first aid station. Serious injuries are supposed to get a priority airlift. We don’t have enough antibiotics for long-term treatment.’

‘Right.’

‘I probably shouldn’t mention it, but what the hell. You might need to know. Nikki? That girl we pulled off the ice? She was pretty distraught about the man they left behind. She blames herself. It should have been me, blah, blah. I dosed her with Anafranil but it takes a few days to kick in. She’ll need a shoulder, someone to coax her through the next few days.’

‘Okay.’

‘The crewmen are smoking weed and hoping for a ship, but once the sun has set for good the mood will quickly head downhill. There are black days ahead. Thank God we don’t have guns on board.’