The Kingmaker

Now this. I feel trapped here with my frigid grief and icicle fear, and the thing I don’t often allow myself anymore, but for Maxim, I must find.

Hope.

29

Maxim

“It’s too dangerous.”

I say the words to the entire group, but Dr. Larnyard is the one I pin my hard stare to.

“What do you suggest, Kingsman?” he snaps. “We stay on a sinking ship and die in the ocean?”

A few of the university students gasp at the word “die.”

This motherfucking idiot.

“We’re not going to die,” I reassure them, taking a moment to look directly at the youngest students. “I won’t let that happen.”

Grim meets my eyes with raised brows. His message is clear. How you gonna keep that promise?

“We’ve been hit,” Dr. Larnyard reminds us unnecessarily. “We were three degrees to the right yesterday, and now we’re how many, Captain?”

Captain Rosteen glances from his tilt meter to me. “Five degrees now.”

“Two degrees in a day is significant,” Dr. Larnyard says. “We need to get off this ship. Some of those ice floes are a full acre. We can take rafts to those and wait there to be rescued.”

“Except no one can make it to us right now,” I say. “And we don’t know when they’ll be able to. You’d have us in tents on an acre of ice in the middle of a blizzard?”

“It’s the best of two evils.”

“The best would have been if we’d listened to Kingsman in the first place,” Grim snaps. “And stayed ashore where our chances would have been better.”

“There’s nothing we can do about that now,” I cut in. We have enough we’re fighting without fighting each other, but I have to talk some sense into Dr. Larnyard before he actually convinces anyone to follow him into a deadly storm. “We need to find the best way out of our current circumstance, and I cannot endorse leaving this ship in a storm this bad.”

“And I cannot endorse staying on a ship sinking into the Southern Ocean,” Dr. Larnyard fires back. “This is your first Antarctic expedition, Kingsman, yes?”

“Yes,” I grit out. “You know it is.”

“Well it’s my fifth,” he says. “And I’ll be damned if I let some amateur with a superhero complex lead our team into a death trap.”

“Him lead us into a death trap?” Grim asks, anger imprinted on his usually stoic features. “You were the one who—”

“Grim,” I snap. “Shut the hell up. That’s not helping.”

There’s a brief silence while our angry eyes clash in the tension filling the ship’s meeting room.

“I’m leading this expedition,” Dr. Larnyard says. “It’s my call to make, and I say we take our chances while we can. If the storm worsens, it’ll only make it harder for us to leave later and get to safety on one of the nearby ice floes. It’s now or maybe never.”

His dire words spark a flurry of concerned murmurs from the team, just shy of panic.

“I’m staying with my ship,” Captain Rosteen says. “I’m not saying it’s the safest option. I’m saying this is my ship and I won’t abandon it until there is no choice left to me.”

“I’ll go with them,” one of his crew members offers, his dark eyes anxious when he glances out the porthole to the howling storm beyond.

“I’m not leaving either,” Grim states firmly. “It’s not the smartest option.”

“I’m staying,” I add, hoping reason will prevail if enough of us push for it.