Outpost (8 page)

She
spilled a few oat flakes on the counter. She carefully gathered them up and
put them back in the porridge box.

Earlier
that morning Jane went to the kitchen to fix a sandwich. She discovered the
refrigerators locked and the food store padlocked. She found herself tugging on
the refrigerator door like a desperate junkie denied their fix.

The
crew ate in silence. Ivan sat with the TV remote and flicked through a series
of dead channels. A dozen different flavours of static. CNN was off air.

Fox
showed the stars and stripes fluttering in slow motion, grainy and monochrome.

BBC
News showed a union flag. 'God Save the Queen' over and over. The location of
refuge centres scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

'One
by one the lights go out,' murmured Ivan.

Ghost
swerved his snowmobile to a halt. Punch drew alongside. They were at the edge
of a wide crevasse. A jagged fissure of blue, translucent ice. It went deep.

They
pulled off their ski masks.

'Shit,'
said Punch. 'We've blundered into a crevasse field.'

'Yeah.'

'Bike
and rider. Nearly quarter of a tonne. We could drop through the ice any time.
We should head back.'

Ghost
spat. He watched the gobbet of phlegm fall into darkness.

'No.
Just as risky to go back as to press on. I'll ride ahead. Anything happens to
me, lower the rope.'

'Okay.'

The
crevasse stretched to vanishing point either side of them.

'Could
be a long detour.'

They
pulled on their ski masks and set off.

Jane
washed the bowls and spoons. She put the porridge box back on a food store
shelf and, on impulse, stole two packets of M&Ms. She wondered how long it
would be before fights broke out over food. She locked the kitchen and gave
Rawlins the keys.

She
returned to her room to get some sleep. She heard paper crumple as she lowered
her head on to her pillow. A note from Punch.

IN CASE I DO NOT COME BACK.

Jane
ripped open the letter.

Jane,
if you are reading this, either I am dead or you have no self-control. If you
have looked in the storeroom lately you may have worked out we don't have
enough food to last six months. I've checked and re-checked. We should have
been resupplied by now. Two freight containers of edibles. As it is, we have
empty shelves and an empty freezer. At the present rate of consumption we will
run out of provisions mid-winter. There simply isn't enough food to go around.
Keep it secret. I don't want to start a panic.

There
is a map in this envelope. Hang on to it. You and Sian might find it useful in
weeks to come
.

The
internal door that connected the heated accommodation block to the rest of the
rig was draped with silver, quilted insulation ripped from an airlock. Jane
zipped her coat. She pulled the curtain of insulation aside and hit Open. The
door slid back. She shone her flashlight into the dark. The corridor walls
sparkled with ice. She closed the door behind her and set off, treasure map
held in a gloved hand.

Jane's
route took her through miles of unlit rooms and passageways. She felt like an
ARVIN drone exploring the silted dereliction of the
Titanic.

Eerie
silence. The hiss and hum of climate control, the constant background to life
on the rig, was absent. No sound but laboured breathing and the grit-crunch of
snowboots on iced deck plates.

Her
torch beam lit gym equipment, vending machines and evacuation signs glazed in
frost. Once the heating had been shut off, the temperature in the uninhabited
sections of the refinery had quickly dropped to minus forty. Any moisture in
the air had condensed to fine dew then crystallised. Ceiling pipes dripped ice.

The
map led her to a dank storeroom on C deck. A vacant space. Nothing but a row of
lockers against a wall. Four of the lockers were empty. The fifth locker had no
back, and was the gateway to a hidden room. Punch had obviously positioned the
bank of lockers to mask the entrance to an adjacent storage space.

Jane
climbed through the locker into the hidden room.

A
dome tent. Guy ropes pegged down with heavy turbine cogs.

Survival
equipment stacked in the corner. Warm clothes, sleeping bags, a hexamine stove,
frozen bottles of drinking water.

An
emergency hide-out. The obvious implication: there isn't enough food to feed
the entire crew until spring. But three people could make it through winter if
they sequestered themselves and let everyone starve.

Jane
opened a box. Torch batteries, protein bars, and three vicious kitchen knives.
A Post-it note pasted to one of the blades.

IN
CASE THINGS GET UGLY.

Jane
returned to her room. She locked the door and took a packet of M&Ms from
its hiding place in her running shoe. One M&M per day. She lay on her bunk
and crunched the little nugget between her teeth. She let the chocolate melt on
her tongue. Then, in a sudden paroxysm of self-disgust, she hurled the bag at
the wall. M&Ms skittered across the floor.

'We
can do better than this,' she told herself.

Punch
and Ghost reached Darwin Sound. They headed for high ground.

They
dismounted the bikes. They took off their ski masks. Punch took a long,
steaming piss while Ghost scanned the shoreline with binoculars. Miles of
rocks and shingle turned blood red by sunset. Ghost took out his radio.

'Shore
team to Rampart, over.'

'Rampart
here
.'
Sian's voice. '
Good to hear from you
.'

'We're
at Darwin. No sign.'

'Nothing?
Nothing at all
?'

'I've
got five-, six-kilometre visibility. No sign of them. How's that storm?'

'
Big.
Still coming
.'

'You've
got fifteen minutes to raise them and get a fix. After that, we're out of
here.'

Ghost
turned to Punch.

'We
gave it our best shot. Nobody can say we didn't try.' He pulled back the cuff of
his gauntlet and checked his watch. 'Ten minutes, then we head home.'

They
shared a protein bar.

'Personally,
I'd do a Captain Oates,' said Punch. 'If it came down to frostbite and
starvation, I'd take a long walk in the snow.'

The
twilight sky suddenly brightened, like someone flicked a switch and made it
noon.

'What
the fuck?' said Ghost.

They
both looked up. Something bright at high altitude, behind the cloud, moving
fast.

'A
plane?' said Punch. 'A burning plane?'

'Too
white. Too constant.'

Later,
when he was back aboard the refinery, Punch tried to describe what he saw to
Jane.

'It
was like time-lapse footage. The sun zooming across the sky, dawn to dusk. It
did crazy things to our shadows. I totally lost balance.'

The
fierce glow crossed the sky accompanied by a high whistle. Punch pulled down
the hood of his parka so he could hear.

'It's
coming down,' said Ghost. 'It's going to hit.'

The
white glow sank below the western horizon. Seconds later they heard the impact.
Deep, rolling thunder.

'Now
what in God's name was that?'

Simon
woke.

He
studied the blue polypropylene weave of the tent fabric. Somewhere a voice was
calling.

'Apex,
this is
Rampart,
over. Apex, this is
Rampart.
Can you hear me
?'

He
had lost a glove. His right hand was bare.

I'm
dying, he thought. I'm dying, and I can barely remember who I am.

He
looked for the glove.

Simon
woke.

He
turned his head. Alan lay sheathed in three sleeping bags, unmoving, lips blue.
Nikki had wrapped herself around him to impart warmth. Her head rested on his
chest. She was unconscious, mouth open, a patch of frost on the sleeping bag
where her breath had condensed and frozen.

Simon's
fingers were numb. He looked for the glove.

Simon
woke.

Semi-darkness.
Daylight outside, but the tent was half buried in snow.

'Apex,
this is
Rampart.
We need your location. We must have your position, over. There are men at
Darwin, but they can't stay long. This is your only chance, Apex. If you don't
respond you will be left behind
.'

Simon
picked up his radio but was too disoriented to work the buttons. 'Hello?
Hello?'

He
turned the frequency dial. Nothing but feedback. His fingers were swollen. He
dropped the radio.

He
scrabbled at the tent zip and stumbled into the snow. Weak sunlight. Intolerable
cold. He fumbled in his pocket without understanding what he was looking for.

Ghost
swerved and brought his snowmobile to a skidding halt. Punch copied the move.

'There.'
Ghost pointed east. A red flare slowly drifted to earth two miles distant. They
gunned their engines and set off at full speed.

They
found Simon face down in the snow. They rolled him. Ghost stabbed him in the
thigh with a syringe pre-loaded with epinephrine.

Simon's
right hand was blue.

'Give
me a spare glove,' said Ghost.

Punch
took a glove from his backpack and threw it to Ghost. 'He's going to lose
fingers for sure.'

Ghost
threw the unconscious man over the saddle of his snowmobile.

Punch
slit open the tent with a lock-knife. He injected Nikki and struggled to drag
her to the bikes.

They
strapped Alan to a sledge still covered in sleeping bags. Ghost hitched the
sledge to the back of his snowmobile.

'Think
he's dead?' asked Punch.

'Won't
know until we get him unwrapped.'

Ghost
slapped Simon and Nikki awake.

'You're
both riding pillion, got it?' he shouted in their faces.

'All
you have to do is hang on.'

Ghost
pulled out. Simon sat in the saddle behind him. Alan was towed on the sledge.

Punch
pulled away. Nikki clung to his back. They followed their own tracks. They
drove fast, spewing slush. They checked the sky for the coming storm.

Jane
sat with Rawlins in his office. They rewound radar footage. Jane pointed at the
time code in the corner of the screen.

'Fourteen
forty-six. Any second.'

'You
didn't see it yourself?'

'Out
of the corner of my eye. I was sitting in the bubble. The sky lit up.'

The
radar sweep showed miles of empty ocean, the edge of the island, and the haze
of the approaching ice storm.

'It
fell to earth north-west of their position. That's what they said. It hit
land.'

A
sudden white flare, just out of frame.

'Jeez,'
said Rawlins. He leaned forward. 'The debris plume must be half a kilometre
wide. Stuff in the air for twenty, twenty- five seconds.'

'A
meteorite?'

'Possibly.
It wouldn't be the first up here. There have been a couple of strikes in
Ontario and Troms. Chunks of asteroid the size of a football.'

'Yeah?'

'Back
in '78 a Soviet reconnaissance satellite re-entered over the Northern
Territories. Chunks landed in deep forest. The Canadian Army spent months
looking for a plutonium power cell.'

'I'd
love to take a look.'

'If
things were different, I'd be out there right now with a rock hammer collecting
a souvenir. But we only have two Skidoos. We can't risk them for a joyride.'

'I
suppose.'

'Still
manning the radio?'

'Calling
for help at the top of every hour. Rest of the time we broadcast
Queen's Greatest Hits.
Let people know we have an
active transmitter.'

'Good
idea.'

'Sian
thinks she heard a voice a few days back. A man's voice. Brief. Very faint.'

'What
did he say?'

'Couldn't
make out.'

'Well,
keep on it. We can't be the only people stuck out here.'