Zodiac Station (26 page)

Suddenly, I heard another noise. A chair scraping back from a desk. I didn’t have time to get back to my room. I ducked across the corridor and slipped inside Fridge’s lab opposite, leaving the door open a crack so I could see.

Quam stepped out. In the dim light, he looked a hundred years old. Shoulders slumped, face lined. He had a slip of paper in his hand.

He walked up the corridor and stopped outside the mess door. I thought he’d go in – maybe he had the munchies – but he didn’t. He just stood there, doing something with the paper. Then he turned around and went back into his office. The chair squeaked, and a moment later the
tick tack
of the toy reset again. Just in case the laws of physics had changed while he was away.

I snuck out of Fridge’s lab and headed for the mess. It was a dumb thing to do, with Quam right there. He could have come out again any moment. But I had to know if he’d done what I thought he had.

On the door, the Daily Horrorscope had changed. Guessing who wrote those things was one of our favourite games at Zodiac, but in all those conversations I don’t think anyone ever suspected Quam. Now that I knew, I kind of wished I didn’t.

There wasn’t much light, but I could read what he’d put up.

The storm is just beginning.

Eastman

Everyone makes it to breakfast on Saturday. It’s waffle day. Somewhere along the line, someone had too much time on his hands and spent the winter making an old-fashioned, cast-iron waffle maker. Every Saturday, Danny wheels it out with little plastic cups of batter, and everyone stands in line to make their own. It even stamps a little Z for Zodiac in the centre of the waffle.

Now, I like waffles as much as the next guy. But that morning, I hardly tasted it. Knowing someone in that room had tried to get me to walk into the gulch the night before kind of put me off my breakfast. I kept on sliding down in my chair, like my body wanted me to keep my head down. I stared at the others: sticky fingers, syrup dribbling down their chins. Some of them caught me, gave me looks that said I was some kind of freak.

I’m the only one here who has a clue
, I said back, in my head.

No one was happy. For some of those people, a season at Zodiac was the high point of their careers. Instead of using it, they were sat there wasting tens of thousands of dollars a day doing squat. But you know what really pissed them off, the one word you heard over and over when you listened in on their conversations?
Internet
. That’s what was driving them crazy: twenty-some people trapped on the Platform, and no Internet. Do you blame them? Captain Scott took a lot of shit, but he never had his web access cut off.

Kennedy joined me at my table. He always poured his syrup so neatly over the waffle. Mine was drowning in it.

‘Did you find anything last night?’ he asked, looking so guilty he might as well have put it on Facebook.

‘Quam was in there all night.’ He hadn’t showed up at breakfast. I wondered if he was still in there, tick-tacking his Newton toy, or if he’d gone to bed.

I looked out the window. The weather was still ugly. Snow devils whipped across the ice; clouds covered the mountain peaks. From my table, I could see the mag hut, and the flag line leading to it. Or where the flag line had been. The poles lay scattered on the ground like someone had been through with a giant lawnmower.

‘Terrible storm damage,’ I said sarcastically.

‘The Internet’s still down, too,’ Doc said.

‘I know.’ I swabbed up some more syrup with a piece of my waffle. Maybe it was because I was sitting under the tinfoil spaceship Greta’d hung for Thing Night – or maybe because someone had tried to kill me – but I felt kind of paranoid.

‘You look anxious,’ said Doc. ‘Would you like something for it?’

I shook my head. Those pills dull your brain; I had to stay sharp. Keep my wits. I didn’t know when, but I knew for sure they’d come for me again. And I was going to be ready.

I strolled down the corridor and knocked on Hagger’s lab. The red skull smiled at me from the door.
HIGH INFECTION RISK OF UNKNOWN DNA
. No one answered, so I let myself in. I dropped the key I’d taken back in one of the drawers, and buried it under some pipettes and tubing, the kind of place it might have gotten lost. Then I had a look around.

The yellow pipe Anderson had been looking at sat in the corner in a tray. The pipe looked pretty ragged, peppered with holes like someone had blasted it with a shotgun. Maybe Malick’s story, the bug munching on his drill rig, had something in it. Hard to see what that had to do with Mine 8. Maybe nothing.

Anderson arrives, Hagger dies.
Couldn’t be coincidence. I wished I could have had a look at the notebook, but I didn’t find it. Nothing in the fridge except a can of Coke. Nothing on the benchtops except instruments, and a paper printed off from about ten years ago. Anderson, Sieber and Pharaoh, ‘Pfu-87: A Synthetic Variant on the Pfu-polymer Enzyme and …’
blah blah blah …

The door crashed open. There’s only one person who bangs a door that hard at Zodiac. I turned around and saw Greta behind me. All dressed up in her coat and snow pants, and the cutesy hat with the strings down the side.

‘How you doing?’ I asked – mainly because I could see she looked furious.

‘If one more person tells me that the Internet’s down …’

‘The Internet’s down.’

She made a kind of growling noise. Without really thinking about it, I found myself backing off a couple of paces.

‘I was looking for Tom,’ I said.

‘He’s working in Star Command.’

‘I didn’t know he was interested in astronomy?’

She gave me one of those Greta looks that says it’s none of your business and she could care less anyhow.

‘Help me fix the Internet? You’re the radio man.’

‘Sure thing.’

You’re the radio man.
What did she mean by that? Maybe nothing. Or maybe she was thinking of that big antenna strung across Vitangelsk, and the cable carrying the signal to Mine 8. Her face, like always, could have meant anything.

I got on my gear and headed for the laundry room. The temperature dropped about fifty degrees the moment I went in. There’s a hatch in the ceiling that opens on to the roof. It stood wide open, with a ladder going up and Greta’s boots on the top rung.

‘Shut the door,’ she told me.

‘Already have.’

I climbed up after her and clipped in to the safety rope she’d fixed. The storm was still kicking around, and the roof was an ice rink.

‘Safety is job number one,’ I said, wriggling into the harness. Hard to do when you’re wearing three pairs of pants.

‘Too many accidents,’ Greta agreed.

‘Quam must be shitting bricks.’

That got me one of her twitchy half-smiles. Though I never knew with those if it was what I’d said, or if there was something else completely going on inside her head, and the smile just happened to pop out at the same time. Often, with Greta, I felt like
I
was the joke.

I’d been at Zodiac a month and I still hadn’t worked her out. She wasn’t gorgeous, exactly, but she had something that meant she stuck in your mind. Like a lyric in a song that makes no sense, you spend hours trying to think what it means. Oftentimes, I found myself wondering what it would be like to fuck her. And it’s not what you’re thinking. Like I said, I’d only been there a month.

‘You think Quam seems stressed out at the moment?’ I tried.

Dumb question. ‘Always.’

We crawled across the roof to the main satellite dish that gave the Internet hook-up. You didn’t have to be a mechanic, or even the ‘radio guy’, to see what had gone wrong. The dish was dinged up like someone had taken a hammer to it. Worse, the feedhorn hung off of its bracket like a broken arm.

‘You won’t get that working any time soon,’ I said.

‘There’s a spare in the store.’

I didn’t really hear her. The feedhorn’s mounted on a big steel bar bolted right through the back of the dish. I was trying to imagine how big a piece of ice you’d need to break it like that. I remembered the noises coming through my office roof the night before. Almost like footsteps.

‘We need to shut down all comms to do the installation,’ Greta said.

I rubbed my eyes with my mitt. No comms. No plane. One by one, our links to the outside world were getting cut off.

Greta must have thought the same thing. She nodded to the safety rope.

‘Better hold on tight.’

We unscrewed the broken dish and lowered it to the ground. Between us, we carried it to the shop. Halfway there, she turned and looked back. Her nose wrinkled up.

‘Those oil drums shouldn’t be so close to the Platform. It’s a fire risk.’

‘Not a big risk at twenty below.’

‘I’ll move them.’

‘Can we do it later? This dish is killing my arms.’

Inside the shop, everything was shipshape in that obsessive Greta way. Weirdly, it reminded me of being in a church: the light coming in through the windows, the dust in the air, the smell of burning. The broken-down snowmobile under the tarp could have been a coffin set out for last respects.

We laid the dish in a corner. Greta went to the store to dig out the backup; while I waited, I eyed up the tools on the wall. She had everything there. A couple of big sledgehammers, for example, that could make a nasty dent in a piece of steel.

Maybe I was crazy. I’d heard the wind outside last night. If anyone had gone out on that roof, he’d have been blown into the mountainside at a hundred miles an hour. You couldn’t stand up, never mind swing a hammer.

Even if you wore a safety line? Greta had looked pretty nimble up on the roof just then.

She came out of the store empty-handed. As much as you could ever tell, she seemed puzzled.

‘No joy?’

‘It’s not there.’

I guess I didn’t look too surprised. ‘You know how pissy this is going to make everyone,’ I warned her.

She rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t even tell me.’

She stepped towards the door – and found me blocking her way. I wanted to get some things straight while I had her alone.

‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘You knew Hagger as well as anyone.’

She gave me an
Oh, please
look.

‘Did he ever say why he brought Tom Anderson up here?’

‘Ask Tom.’

I didn’t like her tone. ‘I’m asking you.’

I was standing closer to her than I’d realised. In the sunlight, I could see the tiny soft hairs on her cheek. I had a powerful, stupid urge to kiss her.

‘You and Tom seemed to hit it off pretty fast,’ I said. ‘Soon as he gets here, you’re racing off together. Maybe you wanted to trade Hagger in for a younger model. Maybe Hagger got in the way, and Anderson got rid of him.’

‘Fuck you.’

Something inside of me snapped. I only meant to grab her, but suddenly, not even thinking, I was kissing her, pressing my mouth against hers. She struggled, but I had her pinned against the wall. And I was hard.

I tasted blood in my mouth. The bitch bit my lip. I pulled back, ready to slap her. That was what she wanted. Before I knew it, she’d grabbed a crescent wrench from its hook on the wall and swung it against my elbow. Christ, it hurt.

Greta was breathing hard, her cheeks red.

‘Is that what you did to the satellite dish?’ I gasped. I wanted to hit her back, but there wasn’t anything in reach. And she was holding that wrench like a morning star.

‘Get out,’ she said.

Truth is, I was so hopped up on adrenalin, I didn’t know what I’d do next. If I’d slap her, or get her down on the floor and fuck her, or what. I stared her in the face.

‘If you ever do that again, I’ll feed your balls to a seal,’ she said.

I left.

I knelt down in the snow outside. My legs were trembling; I wanted to puke. I blamed it on the pain in my elbow. I didn’t know what came over me in there. She was dangerous.

I rubbed snow on my face to cool off. I took some breaths. It felt like a jackhammer was pounding against my skull, harder and harder, until I clocked it was coming up from the sky. A helicopter flew over the station: big, ugly-looking thing with a double-bubble nose. Must be DAR-X heading home. Too high to see if Malick was in there waving.

I went over to Star Command. The crucified Buzz Lightyear smiled down at me as I reached the caboose. I went in without knocking. Anderson was inside, still wearing his coat and hat, looking at a readout on a monitor. Three machines that looked like laser printers sat on a tabletop, humming and clicking.

‘What’s going on?’ My voice sounded loud and fake, even to me. Did he look guilty – or just surprised someone had burst in on him? I admit, everyone looked guilty to me that day. Someone had to be.

Anderson waved a plastic Baggie at me. All I saw inside was water. ‘Analysing Hagger’s samples.’

‘I heard they were bullshit. He doped the data.’

He didn’t ask how I knew. ‘I don’t think he did. If you look at the notebooks, he knew the samples were dodgy but he didn’t know why. That’s what he was looking for.’

I didn’t buy that for a second. Hagger knew exactly what he was doing. I pointed to one of the machines.

‘What’s that?’

‘A mass spectrometer. It gives you the mass of the elements in a sample, so you can guess what’s in it.’

‘And this one?’

‘DNA sequencer.’

‘I didn’t know we had those here.’

‘Hagger must have set them up.’

Far away from where anybody could see them. They looked good, but who knew what was inside them. ‘Do they work?’

‘Perfectly.’

Was he covering for Hagger? Time to show a little more leg. I pulled out the sheet of paper and showed it to him.

‘I got another reading on that interference. Looks like it’s coming from near Vitangelsk.’ I watched him like a hawk as I fed him the bait. If it meant anything, he hid it well.

‘Up by Mine Eight,’ I threw in.

He read the numbers. ‘It’s the same as before.’

‘If only we could unlock it,’ I deadpanned. ‘You know, with a key.’

His eyes flicked up at me. Only for a second, but my senses were white-hot and I caught it. He knew. He fucking
knew
.