Matthew Reilly: Ice Station

"Are you going to take us home?" Kirsty said suddenly from behind him.

For a long moment Schofield continued to watch the four French scientists in the dining room. Then he turned to face the little girl.

"Not just yet," he said. "Some other people will be here soon to take you home. I'm just here to take care of you until they do."

Schofield and Hensleigh walked quickly down the wide ice tunnel. Montana and Hollywood kept pace behind them.

They were on B-deck, the main living area. The ice tunnel curved around a wide bend. Doors were sunk into it on either side: bedrooms, a common room, and various labs and studies. Schofield couldn't help noticing one particular door that had a distinctive three-ringed biohazard sign on it. A rectangular plate beneath the sign read: biotoxin laboratory.

Schofield said, "They said something about it when we got to McMurdo. That Renshaw claimed he did it because the other guy was stealing his research. Something like that."

"That's right," Hensleigh said, walking fast. She looked at Schofield. "It's just crazy."

They came to the end of the tunnel, to a door set into the ice. It was closed and it had a heavy wooden beam locked in place across it.

"James Renshaw," Schofield mused. "Isn't he the one who found the spaceship?"

"That's right. But there's a whole lot more to it than that."

Upon arriving at McMurdo Station, Schofield had been given a short briefing on Wilkes Ice Station. On the face of it, the station seemed like nothing special. It contained the usual assortment of academics: marine biologists studying the ocean fauna; paleontologists studying fossils frozen in the ice; geologists looking for mineral deposits; and geophysicists like James Renshaw who drilled deep down into the ice looking for thousand-year-old traces of carbon monoxide and other gases.

What made Wilkes Ice Station something special was that two days before Abby Sinclair's distress signal had gone out another high-priority signal had been sent out from the station: This earlier signal, sent to McMurdo, had been a formal request seeking the dispatch to Wilkes of a squad of military police.

Although the details had been sketchy, it appeared that one of the scientists at Wilkes had killed one of his colleagues.

Schofleld stared at the barred door at the end of the ice tunnel and shook his head. He really didn't have time for this. His orders had been very specific:

Secure the station. Investigate the spacecraft. Verify its existence. And then guard it against all parties until reinforcements arrived.

Schofield remembered sitting in the closed briefing room on board the Shreveport , listening to the voice of the Undersecretary of Defense on the speakerphone. "Other parties have almost certainly picked up that distress signal, Lieutenant. If there really is an extraterrestrial vehicle down there, there's a good chance one of those parties might make a play for it. The United States Government would like to avoid that situation, Lieutenant. Your objective is the protection of the spacecraft, nothing else. I repeat. Your objective is the protection of the spacecraft. All other considerations are secondary. We want that ship ."

Not once had the safety of the American scientists at the station been mentioned, a fact that hadn't gone unnoticed by Schofield. It obviously hadn't slipped past Sarah Hensleigh either.

All other considerations are secondary.

In any case, Schofield thought, he couldn't afford to send any divers down to investigate the spacecraft while there existed the possibility that one of the residents of Wilkes might be a source of trouble.

"All right," he said, looking at the door but addressing Hensleigh. "Twenty-five words or less. What's his story?"

Sarah Hensleigh said, "Renshaw is a geophysicist from Stanford, studying ice cores for his Ph.D. Bernie Olson is? was ?his supervisor. Renshaw's work with ice cores was groundbreaking. He was digging core holes deeper than anybody had ever dug before, at times going nearly a kilometer below the surface."

Schofield vaguely knew about ice core research. It involved drilling a circular hole about thirty centimeters wide down into the ice shelf and pulling out a cylinder of ice known as a core. Held captive within the core were pockets of gases that had existed in the air thousands of years before.

"Anyway," Sarah said, "a couple of weeks ago, Renshaw hit the big time. His drill must have hit a layer of upsurged ice?prehistoric ice that has been dislodged by an earthquake sometime in the past and pushed up toward the surface. Suddenly Renshaw was studying pockets of air that were as much as three hundred million years old. It was the discovery of a lifetime. Here was a chance to study an atmosphere that no one has ever known. To see what the earth's atmosphere was like before the dinosaurs." Sarah Hensleigh shrugged. "For an academic, something tike that is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It's worth a fortune on the lecture circuit alone.

"Only then it got better.

"A few days ago, Renshaw adjusted his drilling vector slightly?that's the angle at which you drill down into the ice?and at 1500 feet, in the middle of a four-hundred-million-year-old section of ice, he hit metal ."

Sarah paused, allowing what she had just said to sink in. Schofield said nothing.

Sarah said, "We sent the diving bell down, did some sonic-resonance tests of the ice shelf, and discovered that there was a cavern of some sort right where this piece of prehistoric metal was supposed to be. Further tests showed that there was a tunnel leading up to this cavern from a depth of 3,000 feet. That was when we sent the divers down, and that was when Austin saw the spacecraft. And that was when all the divers disappeared."

Schofield said, "So what does all this have to do with Bernard Olson's death?"

Sarah said, "Olson was Renshaw's supervisor. He was always looking over Renshaw's shoulder while Renshaw was making these amazing discoveries. Renshaw started to get paranoid. He started saying that Bernie was stealing his research. That Bernie was using his findings to write a quick-fire article himself and beat Renshaw to the punch.

"You see, Bernie had connections with the journals, knew some editors. He could get an article out within a month Renshaw, as an unknown Ph.D. student, would almost certainly take longer. He thought Bernie was trying to steal his pot of gold. And then when Renshaw discovered metal down in the cavern and he saw that Bernie was going to include that in his article, too, he flipped."

"And he killed him?"

"He killed him. Last Friday night. Renshaw just went to Bernie's room and started yelling at him. We all heard it. Renshaw was angry and upset, but we'd heard it all before so we didn't think much of it. But this time, he killed him."

"How?" Schofield continued to stare at the locked door.

"He?" Sarah hesitated. "He jabbed Bernie in the neck with a hypodermic needle and injected the contents."

"What was in the syringe?"

"Industrial-strength drain-cleaning fluid."

"Charming," Schofield said. He nodded at the door. "He's in here?"

Sarah said, "He locked himself in after it happened. Took a week's worth of food in with him and said that if any of us tried to go in there after him he'd kill us, too. It was terrifying. He was crazy. So one night?the night before we sent the divers down to investigate the cave?the rest of us got together and bolted the door shut from the outside. Ben Austin fixed some runners to the wall on either side of the door while the rest of us slid the beam into place. Then Austin used a rivet gun to seal the door shut."