Antarctica (56 page)

“Well, you have to look out for that, but if you stay above them you’re fine. These are great machines. Top speed of three hundred k an hour, so even if you have to go straight into a full-force gale you can make progress, usually. Turbulent, as you saw, but not impossible. No, blimps are the only way to go down here. Getting around on foot is just too hard, as you must know. The air is the way. But planes and helos are too much of a hassle. Much more dangerous than these.”

“Who makes them?” X asked.

“A Japanese company.”

“How do you pay for them?” Wade asked.

“Money.”

“But how do you make the money? You’re not selling mawsoni cutlets and seal fur coats.”

“No. Some of us winter in the world and make money there. Some of us do northern jobs from here, just like any other telecommuter.”

“Is that what you do?” Wade asked.

“Me? No, no way. I’m no telecommuter. I’m all right here. Real time real space, twenty-four hours a day.”

Then she tilted the blimp down. Wade saw out the windows that there were other blimps ahead and behind, dropping just as fast as they were. He sat back in his seat and extricated his wrist phone from his headset.

“Did you catch any of that, Phil?”

“Some of it—I couldn’t hear you, but I heard some of the others. But it’s pretty windy there, hey? There’s quite a background noise.”

“Yes. Hey Phil, we’re back in the cloud, on our way down. Do you want to stay on the air or not?”

“Oh on, on! Just keep the line open, this is great!
What I want to know is why these folks have factionalized, I mean that’s really the problem, isn’t it, you have people of like mind and they still end up at each other’s throats, I can never understand that—”

“Hey Phil, sorry, we’re, it’s getting kind of busy here, I can’t really focus—”

“Oh hey you do what you need to, I’m just thinking out loud here!”

The blimp was being driven down by its big fan, and it jounced up and down on gusts. Addie began arguing with the wind again. Wade was starting to feel a bit airsick when suddenly the blimp was rushing down at a blue glacial slope, firing its harpoon anchors into it and then reeling itself down in a final convulsion. As soon as they were secured Addie took off her headset and opened her door and leaped down. “Wait here a minute,” she shouted at them, and was off running toward a big clear-roofed gap, cut into a giant lobe of glacial ice—no doubt a refuge like the one they had left earlier. Several other blimps were already anchored, and their crews were out standing in front of this refuge, pointing some kind of instrument at it. “What are they doing to them!” Val exclaimed, and she was opening her door when X grabbed her arm.

“Look,” he said, pointing to the side. “Whatever they’re doing they haven’t got all of them in there, see?”

“Wade, you watch out,” Phil’s tinny voice said from his wrist, “you keep your eye peeled, I don’t like the sound of this, watch out all directions, that’s what I always say….”

White slips of movement; tiny black dots against a field of blue seracs; those were darkened sunglasses, Wade saw, and realized that their ferals were being ambushed, perhaps by people from the refuge who had slipped outside.

“Come on,” Val said, and opened her door and jumped down. X followed, and after a split second’s scared hesitation, Wade too jumped out of the blimp.

Val ran to one of the blimp’s anchors and picked up two big chunks of ice lying beside it. She tossed one of them at the ferals outside the refuge entrance, to get their attention; the other she fired at the white figures coming up on them. This drew the attention of the white figures, and one of them pointed their way—aiming guns at them, Wade saw with a jolt. In a panic he ran forward and dove into Val and X at the ankles, knocking their feet out so that they fell on him. Little snapping sounds in the wind caused his stomach to shrink to the size of a walnut; gunshots! He hugged the ice, looked up in time to see the ferals at the refuge entrance turn their odd-looking weapon on their ambushers. The figures in white staggered spastically, fell like marionettes whose strings have been cut.

For a moment nothing moved but the wind. Phil’s voice chirped from Wade’s wrist like a cricket. Only a few moments had passed but to Wade time had distended, ballooned by his panic; he could have given a long and detailed account for every second that had just passed. His heart was pounding like the fastest tympani roll in the Maestro basic sounds set.

Val and X were getting off him. They were both big people.

Finally there was movement at the front of the refuge’s clear tent. Mai-lis and Addie emerged and walked over to the latecomers. Wade put his wrist to his mouth. “Listen to this, Phil.”

By the time Mai-lis and Addie got to them everyone was standing again. Angrily Val exclaimed, “You said this wouldn’t be dangerous! What the fuck were you doing?”

“Sorry,” Mai-lis said shortly, with a glance at Addie that Addie ignored. “You weren’t supposed to get here until the operation was over. Thanks for helping us.”

Others from her group were collecting the fallen figures, hauling them unceremoniously across the ice to the largest blimp. More people, unconscious or paralyzed, were dragged out of the refuge itself. Perhaps a dozen or fifteen all told. The blimp they were being loaded into was considerably bigger than the others, but still, it would be stuffed.

Addie’s face was flushed bright pink. “That’s a lock-able gondola,” she explained to Wade and Val and X. “There’s nothing they can do in there. It’s a remotely operated vehicle, and this one’s programmed to fly to a base in the Peninsula, refuel, then fly across the Drake Strait to Chile.”

“What did you do to them?” Val said.

“We shot ’em with a thing made for Japanese banks that get robbed or whatever. It messes up muscle control, with ultrasound or taser, I don’t know. A stun gun.”

“That’s not what they were using,” X pointed out.

“No, those were real guns they were shooting! Glad they didn’t get you! Nice move there on the senator’s part. Here, come on over, Mai-lis is going to pronounce the verdict and send them on their way.”

Around the big blimp the whole group had gathered. Carlos was shouting abuse at the people locked behind the gondola’s windows, shaking a finger at them. As they walked over Wade said into his wrist, “Getting this, Phil?”

He put the phone to his ear. “Hard to hear, Wade, but stay on the air.”

Some of the captured outlaws had recovered from their neuromuscular incapacitation, and were standing
at the windows shouting down at Carlos and the others, red-faced and furious; one crying; one screaming; one pounding the window as hard as she could—she would have put her fist right through the glass if she could have, and damn the consequences. And all unheard through the glass, in the wind and the sound of the blimps’ fans.

“That’s Ron!” X exclaimed, pointing at the gondola window. “That’s Ron Jasper in there! He joined the ice pirates!”

Mai-lis was now using a handset walkie-talkie, presumably to speak to those inside on their radio. Wade hurried to her and put his wrist phone right up next to her walkie-talkie’s mouthpiece. Mai-lis nodded at him as she continued to speak.

“—ninety percent voted on exile, and exile it is. You are not to return on pain of death. Remember this lesson in your new life in the north.” She stared up at them. The look in her little Sami eyes was cold. She made a gesture, and one of her group manipulated another handset, and the big blimp cut away from its anchors and shot up on the wind, spinning its prisoners into the clouds.

After that Val and X and Wade and Carlos were led inside the pirate’s lair, as Addie called it. It was much deeper than the refuge they had been taken to, extending far back into the ice, in a gigantic tunnel of the purest blue. There they found box after box stacked against the walls, and gear of all kinds. At the rear of the tunnel squatted a big yellow vehicle that reminded Wade of a road construction earthmover.

“That’s it!” X yelled. “That’s my SPOT train’s caboose!”

“Told you,” Addie said. “Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ll give you the GPS coordinates for this place, so Mac Town can recover this stuff.”

When they were airborne again she said over the intercom, “Whew! I’m glad that’s over! Thanks for helping us out. Sorry to get you there early, but I wanted to be in on it to tell you the truth. I hate those bastards, them and their obtainium. As if they could do whatever they wanted.”

“So will you kill them if they return?” Wade asked.

“Nah. Unlikely. I suppose it could happen, but in reality we’d probably just try to zap them and ship them out again. The truth is they probably won’t come back. They wouldn’t get any help from anyone else, and you need to be part of the whole feral scene down here to make a real go of it. So even if they did come back they’d just be like those trekker guys, out wandering on their own. It’s not the same as making your living down here.”

“But I don’t see how you do it,” Wade insisted. “The gear you have here must cost a lot more money than you can make.”

A long pause, filled by the sounds of the wind and the fan’s buzz. “Well, you know,” Addie said. “We have our audiences, just like most of the groups down here. Sponsor audiences I mean. Weren’t any of your clients sending out reports on their trek?” she asked Val.

“Yeah sure,” Val said. “Ta Shu was. Still is, I suppose, if he can transmit.”

“Well, we do a bit of that too. And some of the companies that make this stuff like the prototypes tested hard. So we have some alliances.”

“But the Antarctic Treaty,” Wade said again. Once again he had his wrist phone wedged between his right
ear and the headset, and he was trying to imagine what Phil would want to ask. He supposed Phil could even have asked his own questions, but he was keeping quiet, and Wade could see how that might be the easiest way to do things.

“Yeah yeah, the Treaty. In suspension now, right? And even when it was active it was only paper. Its values were so pure because the stakes were so small! As soon as oil exploration’s become economical, non-Treaty nations are down here sniffing around, and the Treaty governments are jockeying for position above them. There was never any enforcement to the Treaty, see? No one was going to come down here and zap offenders and ship them out like we just did. The French, they signed the Treaty and then bulldozed a big airstrip right through a penguin rookery near their station. Greenpeace went down there and stood right at the bottom of the slope where the bulldozers were pushing rocks, and the bulldozer drivers just kept on driving. Nearly killed a few Greenpeacers. That was the most dangerous thing they did, I think, worse than driving Zodiacs in front of those Japanese mama whalers. Greenpeace did some great things down here if you ask me, they really made a difference. And without blowing people up, like these whoevers we’re dealing with now. But they couldn’t do it all, because everyone was breaking the Treaty. The Russians broke the treaty, the Poles broke the Treaty, the Americans broke the Treaty, you should see the bottom of the bay off McMurdo! We were as bad as anybody until Greenpeace went down there and poured trash from the dump onto the floor of the Chalet right in the middle of a big meeting. That was so great. The NSF rep went nuts and forbade any of us from talking to any Greenpeacer, and retired end of that season. But it got NSF to think things over. And
at the same time the Environmental Defense Fund was suing them back in Washington for breaking NEPA. It was a pincer attack, really. So NSF got religion then, but it was Greenpeace that did it, Greenpeace and EDF. No, the Treaty’s been abused, you take my word for it! There was too much else going on in the world for anyone to risk making anyone mad over a little thing like Antarctica. So the Treaty was there, but no one paid much attention to it except for when it suited them. So, you know. Mai-lis keeps us in compliance with the Treaty like a kindergarten teacher, better than most countries when you actually look at what the thing says. We register all the animals we kill for food and do science on them so we’re no different than the scientists really, except we eat the data when we’re done with it. And Art Devries does that too. So, you know. You can’t expect us to take the Treaty too seriously.”

“Unless it gets you kicked off the continent.”

“Ain’t that the truth.” She shook her head. “That’s why these bastards we shipped out, and whoever it was blowing up the oil stations and messing with coms …” A gust of wind swirled the blimp around, and Addie wrestled with the controls and did not finish the thought. “Come on.”

“What brought you down here?” Wade asked her.

“Airplane.” Another laugh. “No no, I know. I’m from Alabama, right? I never had a thought about Antarctica in my life. If you’d of asked me I’d have said it was some kind of radiator fluid. But I was selling some land, and a man came to look at it, we talked for a while. I’ve been a plumber since I was ten, and a carpenter, electrician—my daddy was a contractor, and I did it all. And then after my Army days I was flying helos for Louisiana Pacific. So I was telling this man
about all that, and showing him a well and pumphouse we built, and telling him about us, and he said, Did you ever think of working in Antarctica? And I said, Why no—I never did.” Laugh. “It turned out he was from ASL, and he thought I’d make a good Carhartt. Which I did, for a while.”

“In McMurdo?” X asked.

“And the Pole. Five summers and two winterovers. Then my second winter at the Pole, I was shown some things….”

“Like the water slide?” Wade asked.

“Yeah, how do you know about that? Who are you again? Oh yeah, the senator.”

“I’m not actually the senator.”

“Water slide?” X said. He and Val were looking around at Wade.

“So you went feral,” Wade prompted Addie.

“Yeah. One day I was out emptying a Herc, completely toast, and I looked up and there was a skua flying around. They get blown in to the Pole occasionally, but I didn’t know that then, and when I saw it I thought it was, I don’t know. God. And that very night Herb asked me if I was interested in lighting out for the territory, and I thought of that skua and said you bet, and never looked back.”