Читать онлайн «Zodiac Station»

One

What the hell is out there?

Carl Franklin, Captain of the US Coast Guard ice-breaking cutter Terra Nova, stared out the wheelhouse windows. A 360˚ field of view — but he might as well have his nose pressed against a painted wall. The clouds had settled after the storm, fusing the sky with the air and the air with the ice to make a perfect blank. Growing up in Maine, he thought he’d seen fog, but this was like nothing else. Even the bow light wasn’t much more than a rumour.

He put his hand against the cold glass, just to touch something solid. Hopefully the crew didn’t notice. In the middle of the Arctic Ocean, a thousand miles of ice around them and four thousand metres of near-freezing water below the keel, he didn’t want them thinking their captain was losing his grip on reality.

He rocked back on his heels, reassured by the mass of sixteen thousand tons of steel under his feet. The Terra Nova was state of the art, the pride of the Coast Guard: an ice-reinforced vessel capable of making a steady three knots through four-foot ice, of smashing her way to the North Pole if need be. She’d already been there twice in her short working life.

A wobbling reflection ghosted up out of the fog. Santiago, the operations officer, an Arizona Latino who’d traded his hot, landlocked state for a frozen ocean.

Franklin turned. The spooky Santiago in the window became the real deal, six foot two of seafaring muscle, slowly being promoted to fat. By the time he made admiral, Franklin thought, the doctors would be giving him a hard time on his health assessment.

‘The geeks want to go play,’ Santiago announced.

The geeks were the scientists, the Terra Nova’s cargo, and her mission. Thirty-three scientists from all over the world, measuring the water, measuring the ice, measuring the snow, measuring the air. Fifty kinds of cold, Santiago called it. It kept them happy.

‘What’s the ice like?’ he called to the crewman hunched over the satellite chart. A tie-dye swirl of greens, oranges and reds, constantly mutating as the ice shifted.