BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

“And pull the wire?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t answer for so long that Keats thought she must not have heard him.

“And pull the wire?” he repeated, more insistently this time.

She shook her head. “Not yet, Noah.”

After that she wouldn’t look at him.

The other person making an interesting discovery was Imelda Suarez. Lieutenant Imelda Suarez, dammit. Hopefully there was an extra paycheck to come with that.

The Celadon, the mother ship, had dropped anchor six miles out from Cathexis Base, hundreds of miles from McMurdo. The ice was thick and crusty here, and no way the ship could edge up to the dock, not for another month at least. She had gone ashore in the Jade Monkey, running easily up onto the beach and roaring along until the LCAC found its home, a hangar and refit facility they all called the Blower Barn.

As soon as she’d done the inevitable paperwork, Suarez headed toward the Office—the administrative building. Things at Cathexis Base tended to be named simply, usually by function, but with an occasional touch of wit: the Blower Barn, the Chiller (a poorly heated dorm), the Toasty (the newer, warmer dorm), the Club, the Link (the satellite dishes), the Office.

In the center of the base, acting as a sort of central park, was a glass dome raised up on a skid-mounted platform. It was seldom transparent—condensation saw to that—but it clearly housed green, living things, ranging from small elm trees to tall grasses to irises and roses. But for the most part the Andalite Dome, or AD, as it was called for some obscure reason, was more practically planted with cabbages, broccoli, romaine lettuce, carrots, and onions.

The produce wasn’t anything like enough even to feed Cathexis Base, but it helped, and it was the place to go when you felt the ice start to close in on you.

As Suarez did now. Seeing the smudge of green inside the sweat-dripping bubble, she felt herself drawn to it, and decided checking in at the Office could wait. Getting into the dome was a process—you had to shed your gear and walk in wearing a T-shirt and pants alone. And you had to pass through a double airlock.

It was while in the airlock that she ran into Charlie Bronk.

“Coming or going?” he asked her.

“Just got in,” she said. Bronk was a small man with a too-tough name. He was a mechanic who often worked with Suarez. They weren’t friends, but they were cordial.

“I’m supposed to head out to Forward Green,” he said. “One of their cats is wonky, needs a new fuel injector.”

“There’s no one out there can do it?”

Bronk laughed. “At Forward Green? Pff. Those are scientists and God knows what all out there. Sally Wills is the only one can turn a screwdriver, and she’s on an evac to Wellington.” He lowered his voice. “A psych thing. She lost her shit.”

“Damn. Sally Wills? The redhead?”

Bronk nodded. “I don’t suppose … I mean, I wouldn’t ask, but it’s my son’s bar mitzvah and I’m missing it. I was going to Skype.”

“You can’t Skype from Forward Green?”

“There’s no communication in or out of Forward except to here. Security.”

She was on the verge of asking him why there would be secrecy, but thought better of it. That was the kind of question that might be thrown in your face some day if there was a problem. Cathexis Inc. might not be military, but when it came to secrecy, they sometimes went the military one better.

“I could do it,” Suarez said with a shrug. “Of course you’ll owe me. And I don’t mean you cover for me on cleanup. I mean something more like you pull a shift. Three shifts.”

They agreed on one shift and a round of clean-up duty. And that was how Suarez ended up on a loud chopper heading almost due south. It was a hellish ride. The wind had come up. In fact, at the halfway point the pilots discussed turning back. Antarctic weather wasn’t something you took risks with.

But satellite imagery gave them a nominally clear hour before the hammer came down, so they went forward.

If Cathexis Base was businesslike and humane, Forward Green was a bizarre cross between survivalist compound and Ritz-Carlton resort. From the frosty window of the chopper she could see that the buildings were arranged in a sort of diamond around what was very certainly the only swimming pool on the continent. The pool was covered of course, and as sweaty as the Andalite Dome at Cathexis Base. It was an ostentatious symbol of wealth, because water—actual, liquid water—was one of the rarest and most expensive of commodities. It spoke of a profligate use of power—the heat to keep the pool warm, the light to make it shine, the lift capacity to bring it all together in this place.

It was built aboveground, of course—the shifting ice would have crushed anything cut into it. It was covered by a plastic roof that formed three peaks, vaguely reminiscent of the Sydney Opera House.

Suarez guessed that the power source had to be a nuclear reactor. But how had that been approved? The green movement had made peace with nuclear power, but here? On the ice?. And in private hands?

Once she’d looked beyond that eye-popping artifact of another world, Suarez took in the rest of the place. The buildings were identical—seven three-story ski-mounted structures, with an empty slot where an eighth building might go someday.

The windows aimed out toward the ice were small, with metallic shutters that could be mechanically closed against the wind. The windows facing in, toward the pool, were larger than anything she’d ever seen before in energy-conscious Antarctica. Though they, too, were equipped with strong steel shutters.