Matthew Reilly - Ice Station

Montana looked to Santa Cruz, who had come over from the pool to look.

"Press it," Cruz said. "If I'm gonna buy it for this fuckin' thing, I wanna see what's inside it."

Montana turned back to face Sarah Hensleigh. She nodded. "Let's see what it does."

At last, Montana said, "OK. Press it."

Sarah Hensleigh nodded and took a deep breath. Then she stretched out with her hand and pressed the button with the red circle on it.

At first, nothing happened.

Sarah Hensleigh lifted her finger off the keypad and looked up at the spaceship above her, as if she expected it to take off or something.

Suddenly there came a soft harmonic tone, and the screen above the keypad began to glow.

And then another second later, a sequence of symbols appeared across the screen.

"Oh, shit" Montana said.

"What the ..." Hensleigh said.

The screen read:

"Numbers?" Montana said.

" English ?" Sarah Hensleigh said. "What the hell is this thing?"

For her part, Gant just shook her head. And as she walked away from the "spaceship" she began to laugh softly.

Schofield and Renshaw lay flat on their backs of the cold hard surface of the iceberg, listening to the rhythmic sound of the waves crashing against the ice cliffs two hundred yards away.

They just lay there for a while, catching their breath.

After a few minutes, Schofield reached around with his hand until he found a small black unit attached to his waist. He pressed a button on the unit.

Beep!

"What are you doing?" Renshaw said, not looking up.

"Initializing my GPS unit," Schofield said, still lying on his back. "It's a satellite location system that uses the Navistar Global Positioning System. Every Marine has one, for use in emergencies. You know, so people can find us if we end up on a life raft out in the middle of the ocean. I figured this wasn't too much different," he sighed. "In a dark room on a somewhere, a flashing red dot just appeared on someone's screen."

"Does that mean they're gonna come for us?" Renshaw asked.

"We'll be long dead by the time anybody gets here. But they'll at least be able to find our bodies."

Renshaw said, "Oh, great . It's nice to see my tax dollars at work. You guys build a satellite location system so that they can find my body . Wow."

Schofield turned to look at Renshaw. "At least I can leave a note attached to our bodies telling whoever finds us exactly what happened at the station. At least then they'll know the truth. About the French, about Barnaby."

Renshaw said, "Well, that makes me feel better."

Schofield propped himself up on his elbow and looked out toward the cliffs. He saw the mountainous waves of the Southern Ocean smash against them and explode in spectacular showers of white.

Then, for the first time, he took in the iceberg around him.

It was big . In fact, it was so big it didn't even rock in the heavy seas. Above the surface, the whole thing must have been at least a mile long. Schofield couldn't even begin to guess how large it was under the surface.

It was roughly rectangular in shape, with an enormous white peak at one end. The rest of the iceberg was uneven and cratered. It looked to Schofield like a ghostly white moonscape.

He stood up.

"Where are you going?" Renshaw said, not getting up. "You gonna walk home?"

"We should keep moving," Schofield said. "Keep warm for as long as we can and, while we're at it, see if there's some way we can get back to the coast."

Renshaw shook his head and reluctantly got to his feet and followed Schofield out across the uneven surface of the iceberg.

They trudged for almost twenty minutes before they realized they were going in the wrong direction.

The iceberg stopped abruptly and they saw nothing but sea stretching away to the west. The nearest iceberg in that direction was three miles away. Schofield had hoped they might be able to "iceberg-hop" back to the coast. It wouldn't happen in this direction.

They headed back the way they had come.

They made very slow going. Icicles began to form around Renshaw's eyebrows and lips.

"You know anything about icebergs?" Schofield asked as they walked.

"A little."

"Educate me."

Renshaw said, "I read in a magazine once that the latest trend among assholes with too much money is 'iceberg climbing.' Apparently it's quite popular among mountaineer types. The only problem is that eventually your mountain melts."

"I was thinking about something a little more scientific ," Schofield said. "Like, do they ever float back in toward the coast?"

"No," Renshaw said. "Ice in Antarctica moves from the middle out . Not the other way round. Icebergs like this one break off from coastal ice shelves. That's why the cliffs are sheer. The ice overhanging the ocean gets too heavy and it just breaks off, becoming"?Renshaw waved his hand at the iceberg around them?"an iceberg."

"Uh-huh," Schofield said as he trudged across the ice.

"You get some big ones, though. Really big ones. Icebergs bigger than whole countries. I mean, hell, take this baby. Look how big she is. Most large icebergs live for about ten or twelve years before they ultimately melt and die. But given the right weather conditions?and if the iceberg were big enough to begin with?an iceberg like this could float around the Antarctic for up to thirty years."

"Great," Schofield said dryly.

They came to the spot where Renshaw had hauled Schofield out of the water after Schofield had destroyed the French submarine.

"Nice," Renshaw said. "Forty minutes of walking and we're back where we started."

They started up a small incline and came to the spot where the French submarine's torpedo had hit the iceberg.

It looked like a giant had taken a huge bite out of the side of the iceberg.

The large landslide of ice that had just fallen away under the weight of the explosion had left a huge semicircular hole in the side of the berg. Sheer vertical walls stretched down to the water ten meters below.

Schofield looked down into the hole, saw the calm water lapping up against the edge of the enormous iceberg.

"We're gonna die out here, aren't we?" Renshaw said from behind him.

"I'm not."

"You're not?"

"That's my station and I'm gonna get it back."

"Uh-huh." Renshaw looked out to sea. "And do you have any idea as to exactly how you're gonna do that?"

Schofield didn't answer him.

Renshaw turned around. "I said , how in God's name do you plan to get your station back when we're stuck out here!"

But Schofield wasn't listening.

He was crouched down on his haunches, looking down into the semicircular hole the torpedo had carved into the iceberg.

Renshaw came over and stood behind him.

"What are you looking at?"

"Salvation," Schofield said. "Maybe."

Renshaw followed Schofield's gaze down into the semicircular hole in the iceberg and saw it immediately.

There, embedded in the ice a couple of meters down the sheer, vertical cliff face, Renshaw saw the distinctive square outline of a frozen glass window.

Schofield tied their two parkas together and, using the two jackets as a rope, got Renshaw to lower him down to the window set into the ice cliff.

Schofield hung high above the water, in front of the frozen glass window. He looked at it closely.

It was definitely man-made.

And old, too. The wooden panes of the window were weathered and scarred, bleached to a pale gray. Schofield wondered how long the window?and whatever structure it was attached to?had been buried inside this massive iceberg.