Adam Baker - Outpost

My name is Reverend Jane Blanc. I am chaplain of Con Amalgam refinery platform Kasker Rampart. We are marooned in the Arctic Circle west of Franz Josef Land. We have supplies to last four months. Winter is coming. By the time you read this we may be dead. We have little hope of rescue and we are so far from inhabited land any attempt to sail to safety in an improvised craft would almost certainly fail. I often promise the men we will all get home, but I have no idea how this can be achieved or what horrors might await us beyond the horizon. So I appeal to anyone who may read this note: please do what you can to ensure that one day these letters reach the people for whom they are intended, so that they can know what became of us.

Jane sealed the notes in an envelope and took it to the canteen. She slotted the envelope into the Peli case.

Sudden PA announcement: ‘Mr Rawlins, Reverend Blanc, please report to Medical right away.’

Sian. By the sound of her voice, something was very wrong.

Simon was curled foetal at the bottom of the shower cubicle. He was dead. He held a scalpel in the swollen, blackened fingers of his left hand. He had slashed his wrist. He lay naked in a puddle of pink blood-water and unravelled bandages.

‘Jesus fucking Christ.’

Rawlins shut off the water. Jane helped drag the dead man from the shower.

They carried Simon to the operating table. They watched Sian wash him down. They lifted him into a rubber body bag and zipped it closed.

There was no mortuary on the refinery, so they laid Simon on the floor of the boathouse overnight.

‘He was talking to me,’ said Sian. ‘Reaching out. Screaming for help and I was too stupid to hear.’

‘A person’s life is their own,’ said Jane. ‘It’s not your job to save them.’

Nikki sat in the observation bubble reading a magazine.

‘We’ll be holding the funeral at three,’ said Jane.

Nikki flipped pages like she hadn’t heard.

The crew processed down steel stairs that spiralled round one of the rig’s gargantuan legs. An ice shelf had solidified around each leg. They walked across the ice and congregated at the water’s edge.

Jane turned the pages of her service book with gloved fingers.

‘O God, whose Son Jesus Christ was laid in a tomb: bless, we pray, this grave as the place where the body of Simon your servant may rest in peace, through your Son, who is the resurrection and the life; who died and is alive and reigns with you now and for ever.’

Simon was swaddled in sheets. He lay on a stretcher. Ghost lifted the stretcher and the body slid into the water.

‘As they came from their mother’s womb, so they shall go again, naked as they came. We brought nothing into the world, and we take nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’

The shrouded body floated just beneath the surface. Ghost pushed the corpse away from the ice with a golf club. It drifted away, drawn by the current, a white phantom shape beneath the water.

‘Support us, O Lord, all the long day of this troubled life, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over and our work is done. Then, Lord, in your mercy grant us a safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at the last; through Christ our Lord. Amen.’

The crew walked back to the rig. Nobody spoke.

Jane stood with Punch and looked out to sea.

‘I feel like I’m doing more harm than good,’ she said.

‘Shall we go and find your asteroid?’

‘Yeah. Let’s get away from this misery for a while.’

Jane steered the zodiac. Counter-intuitive: turn the outboard left to steer right.

‘Keep us about three hundred metres from shore,’ instructed Punch. ‘We don’t want to rip the bottom out of the boat.’

They followed the coastline. They hugged a ridge of lunar rock and black shingle.

A milky film in the water. Grease ice. The ocean starting to freeze.

Jane looked back. A rare chance to see the totality of the rig.

The refinery was constructed around three great distillation tanks, each the size of a cathedral. The structure was spiked by radio masts and cranes. The platform floated on four buoyant legs. It was tethered to the seabed by cables as thick as a redwood tree trunk. It looked like something out of a nightmare: a squat spider big enough to crush cities. A million tons of steel. Product of twenty different slipways. Assembled in a deep-water fjord and towed north.

‘Terrifying,’ said Jane.

‘What is?’

‘It’s one thing to sit with our feet up in the canteen, dreaming up plans to sail home. It’s another thing to see it for real. The ocean. The ice. We wouldn’t last a day.’

‘We have time to prepare,’ said Punch. ‘Plenty of survival gear aboard Rampart. And you wouldn’t be out here alone. We would have each other. Ghost is a solid guy. Kind of man you can rely upon in a crisis.’ ‘Yeah.’

‘And we have you.’

‘Sure. When we run out of food I’ll be first in the pot.’

‘I saw a kid on TV a few years back,’ said Punch. ‘He went hiking in the Rockies. He got hit by a landslide. He woke up with his arm pinned by a boulder. He lay there for a couple of days hoping for rescue. Nobody came, so he used his belt as a tourniquet, then sawed off his arm with a penknife.’

‘Good God.’

‘Picked up his canteen and walked back to civilisation minus an arm.’

‘Damn.’

‘This is your moment. You know that, right? I’ve seen you, since this shit kicked off. It’s like watching someone wake from a long sleep.’

‘But what good is it?’ asked Jane, looking out to sea. ‘In the face of this. All our heroism. All our will to live. It’s a bad joke.’

Sian cleared Simon’s room in Medical. She gathered up his dog-tags, his signet ring, his watch. She found a heavily annotated copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations in his coat pocket. She put it all in a plastic box and gave it to Nikki.

Nikki was in the observation bubble staring out to sea.

‘Thanks,’ she said, as Sian handed her the box. She tossed it aside without looking at it.

Nikki spent the afternoon scanning wavebands.

She turned up the volume and put her ear to the speaker.

‘Are you sure you heard it?’ asked Sian.

‘There was a voice. Male. English. It faded in and out. Has done for days.’

She turned the dial.

‘There. You hear it?’

‘…elp… ear us?.. urgent assis..!’

‘Get your coat. We have to boost the range on this thing.’

Nikki found a coil of steel cable in the boathouse. She carried it to the upper deck.

‘What do you have in mind?’ asked Sian.

‘When I was at university I had a crappy transistor radio on my desk. It had a broken aerial. If I let the stub of the aerial touch my anglepoise lamp I got a signal. Maybe we can lengthen the antenna and pull the same trick.’

‘Perhaps we should talk to Ghost. He might be able to help.’

‘Girl, you’ve got to shake off that passive mindset. We’re in deep shit. You can’t constantly rely on Ghost to kiss it all better. You’ve got to start taking care of yourself.’

The short-wave antenna was a scaffold spike four metres tall. Nikki climbed the spike and lashed the cable to the top. She climbed down. She tied the other end of the cable to a balloon pod.

‘Okay. Stand back.’

She pulled the red rip cord. The plastic case split open. Silver balloon fabric spilled, unravelled and began to inflate. An explosive roar as the helium canister discharged. The foil swelled and rose. The balloon lifted skyward taking the cable with it. A silver teardrop shimmering like a globule of mercury. The cable extended the antenna ten metres.