Matthew Reilly - Ice Station

Cameron got Alison back on the phone.

"Quick, send it through now," he said.

"All right. All right. Just hold on a second, honey buns," Alison said. Cameron heard the clicking of computer keys at the other end of the line.

"OK, I'm sending it through now," Alison said.

On the far side of the living room, Trent flicked on his computer. He clicked through several screens, came to his e-mail screen.

A small information bar at the bottom of the screen blinked:

YOU HAVE NEW MAIL.

Trent clicked on the "Open" icon.

A list appeared immediately on the screen:

ALL-STATES LIBRARY DATABASE

SEARCH BY KEYWORD

SEARCH STRING USED:LATITUDE -66.5°

LONGITUDE 115° 20' 12"

NO. OF ENTRIES FOUND: 6

TITLE

AUTHOR

LOCATION

YEAR

DOCTORAL THESIS

LLEWELLYN, D. K.

STAMFORD, CT

1998

DOCTORAL THESIS

AUSTIN, B.K.

STAMFORD, CT

1997

POSTDOCTORAL THESIS

HENSLEIGH, S. T.

USC, CA

1997

FELLOWSHIP GRANT RESEARCH PAPER

HENSLEIGH, B. M.

HARVARD, MA

1996

THE ICE CRUSADE: REFLECTIONS ON AYEAR SPENT IN ANTARCTICA

HENSLEIGH, B. M.

HARVARD, MA

1995AVAIL: AML

PRELIMINARY SURVEY

WAITZKIN, C. M.

LIBCONG

1978

It was the list Alison had got from the All States Database. The list of every work that referred to latitude-66.5° and longitude 115° 20'12".

"All right," Pete said.

"What are you going to do with it?" Alison's voice said over the speakerphone.

"We're gonna use this list to find their addresses," Trent said, typing quickly at the keyboard. "The e-mail addresses of the academics down in Antarctica, so we can send a message to Schofield."

"We figure that most university professors have e-mail," Pete said, "and we're hoping that Wilkes Ice Station is patched in to a satellite phone so that the message can get through."

Suddenly Trent said, "All right, I got one! Hensleigh, Sarah T. The e-mail address is at USC in California, but it's been routed to an external address: sarahhensleigh@wilkes.edu.us. That's it!"

Trent typed some more.

"All right ," he said a minute later. "Excellent. They've got a universal address down there: allwilkes@wilkes.edu.us. Excellent . Now, we can send an e-mail to anyone who has a computer at that station."

"Do it," Cameron said.

Trent typed a message, then did a quick cut-and-paste. When he was finished he practically slammed his finger down on the send button.

Libby Gant stood in front of the heavy steel door set into the small ice tunnel.

It had a rusty pressure wheel attached to it. With some difficulty, Gant turned it. She rotated it three times.

And then suddenly she heard a loud clunking noise from within the great steel door, and the door creaked open a fraction.

Gant pulled the door wide and shone her flashlight beyond it.

"Whoa," she said.

It looked like an airplane hangar. It was so big, Gant's flashlight wasn't even strong enough to see the far end. But she could see enough.

She could see walls.

Man-made walls.

Steel walls, with heavy reinforcing girders holding up a high aluminium ceiling. Huge yellow robotic arms stood silently in the gloom, covered in frost. Halogen lights lined the ceiling. Some metal girders lay at awkward angles on the floor in front of her. Gant saw that several of them had jagged marks at their ends?they had been broken clean in two. Everything was covered in a layer of ice.

Gant saw a piece of paper at her feet. She picked it up. It was frozen solid, but she could still read the letterhead. It read:

ENTERTECH LTD.

Gant walked back to the small tunnel that led to the main cavern. She called to Montana and Hensleigh.

A few minutes later, Montana rolled through the horizontal fissure and walked with Gant into the giant subterranean hangar.

"What the hell is going on here?" he said.

They entered the hangar, their flashlights creating beams of light. Montana went left. Gant went right.

Gant came to an office-type structure that seemed to be overgrown with ice. The door to the office opened with a loud creak, and slowly, very slowly, Gant stepped inside.

A body was lying on the floor of the office.

A man.

His eyes were closed, and he was naked. His skin had turned blue. He looked like he was asleep.

Gant saw a desk on the far side of the office, saw something on it. Moving toward the desk, she saw that it was a book of some kind, a leather-bound book.

It just sat there on the desk all by itself. The rest of the desk was bare. It was almost, Gant thought, as if someone had left it there deliberately , so that it would be the first thing a visitor found.

Gant picked up the book. It was covered in a layer of frost, and the pages were hard, like cardboard.

She opened it.

It appeared to be a diary of some sort.

Gant read an entry near the beginning:

2 June 1978

Things are going well. But it's so cold!! I can't believe they brought us all the way down here to build a fucking attack plane! The weather outside is terrible. Blizzard conditions. Thankfully, our hangar is built below the surface, so we stay out of the weather. The sad irony is, we need the cold. The system's plutonium core maintains its grade for longer in the colder temperatures....

Gant jumped ahead to a page not far from the end of the diary.

15 February 1980

No one's coming. I'm sure of it now. Bill Holden died yesterday, and we had to cut Pat Anderson's hands off, they were so frostbitten.

It's been two months now since the quake hit, and I've given up all hope of rescue. Someone said Old Man Niemeyer was supposed to be coming down here in December, but he hasn't showed.

When I go to sleep at night, I wonder if anyone but Niemeyer knows we're here.

Gant flipped back some pages, looking for something. She found what she was looking for around the middle of the diary.

20 December 1979

I don't know where I am. We were hit by an earthquake yesterday, the biggest motherfucking earthquake you have ever seen. It was as if the earth opened up and just swallowed us whole.

I was down in the hangar when it happened, working on the bird. First the ground began to shake and then suddenly this massive wall of ice just thrust up out of the ground and ripped the hangar in half. And then we just seemed to fall. Fall and fall. Massive chunks of the ice shelf (each one the size of a building, I estimated) caved in on either side of us as we were sucked down into the earth?I saw them make enormous dents in the roof of the hangar. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! The quake must have ripped an enormous hole underneath the station and we just fell down into it.

We just kept going down. Down and down. Shaking and falling. One of the big robot arms fell on Doug Myers, crushed him to death....

Gant was stunned.

This "hangar" had been an ice station. An ice station that had been set up in the utmost secrecy to build a plane of some sort?a plane, Gant noticed, that used plutonium. But this station, it seemed, had originally been up on the surface?or, rather, buried just underneath the surface like Wilkes Ice Station?until an earthquake had hit it and sucked it underground.