Tom Clancy, Martin Greenberg, Jerome Preisler
Cold War
ONE
They heard the copter long before it came into sight, cresting the frozen peaks of Olympus on a southerly course toward Asgard.
Its pilot approached from the rear, nosed down a little, and hailed the team below as he flew past. Some cheerful words over his PA, a flap of a red-sleeved arm behind his windscreen. His large Bell 212 was identical to the aircraft that had dropped them into the valleys, but its National Science Foundation decals showed it wasn’t one of theirs.
Scarborough’s foot party was no less appreciative of the human contact. They were starting their first full day out of Cold Corners, and if mutual reliance made for good neighbors, this qualified as the most neighborly spot on earth.
All three returned the pilot’s wave, their own bright red coat sleeves upraised. Then they watched him level his bird in the crystal-clear sky, skirt the rim of Valhalla glacier, and vanish over the crooked spine of mountains running toward the coast. Away and gone with due haste. The fixed landing and refueling pad at Marble Point was some thirty miles off along his flight path, and he’d want to reach it in time for the early shift change.
Minutes later, Scarborough could still hear the chop of rotors echoing between the scoured brown walls of the pass.
The most neighborly spot on earth, and its quietest, he thought. The polar desert’s only native inhabitants were primitive invertebrates. A handful of tiny worms and insects on land, anaerobic microbes under the hardened lake surfaces. There would be no noise pollution from them. Nothing to dent the silence except for the occasional beating of wind against the valley walls and far rarer sounds of human intrusion.
Now Scarborough freed a hand from its clumsy pile mitten, leaving on his thinner polypropylene glove liner, adequate short-term protection on all but the worst summer days. The temperature had been 16° Fahrenheit when his group left camp that morning, torrid by local standards even with a chill factor of—20°, and he would need just a few moments to check his bearings.
Scarborough extricated his GPS receiver from his parka and pressed a keypad button. A topographic satellite image of the valley system north of the Asgard range filled his display, its contours reminding him of an old-fashioned ship’s anchor. Next, he scrolled down his menu to the “Navigate” option. A color icon representing the object of his search marked its last known coordinates near the deep, craggy notch at the pass’s junction with Wright Valley.
Scarborough studied the display a bit longer, his fur-trimmed hood pulled up, his balaclava covering the gray-flecked scruff of beard that would soon grow out into a winter forest. He wore dark polarized snow goggles over the mask’s eye slits, heavy-duty wind pants, and neck and leg gaiters for optimal retention of body heat. Here at the bottom of the globe, life was bounded by the cold, shaped by the cold, its limitations defined by how well you adapted to the cold. The threat of hypothermia meant bundling into innumerable layers of gear and apparel before you ventured outside, a tedious routine that packed on thirty pounds of added weight and was the cause of persistent, some might say epidemic, crankiness at the station.
As with so many aspects of existence in Antarctica, you either kept a sense of humor about it or went crazy, Scarborough thought. Thankfully most did the former. A wicked hand with a felt-tip pen, his dorm mate had even graced the front of their clothes closet with a masterpiece of graffiti that portrayed them as a couple of sullen, mopish genies who’d been sealed away inside a giant Coca-Cola bottle wearing only their waffle-knit longjohns, a visual pun on the fact that modern polar fleece outer garments were made of a synthetic fabric derived from recycled plastic soft-drink containers. Written above it was the title “PRISONERS OF FASHION.” Though this king-sized editorial cartoon had been unveiled months before, their Friday night poker regulars still got a sort of rueful kick out of it, using it as a springboard for their own wardrobe laments. Not that Scarborough could recall hearing anyone grouse about being overdressed out in the field.
His location established, he pocketed the GPS unit and glanced across the moraine at Bradley and Payton, who had wandered ahead of him seeking any trace of the rover. Though he’d been careful to stay mum about it, Scarborough shared a measure of their anxiousness. Developed under exclusive contract with NASA, the Scout IV remote interplanetary vehicle was the product of a tremendous investment in dollars, labor, and prestige for UpLink International. Its sudden and complete signal failure during late-stage field tests had everyone involved with the project on edge, and hoping what had gone wrong was something like a defective microprocessor, a programming error, maybe a radio transmission mast that failed to deploy.
Something simple, in other words.
In Scarborough’s opinion, however, those scenarios were limp noodles… as were the many similar theories being floated at Cold Corners. Scout’s critical systems had been designed with multiple redundancies, none more key to its performance as a lab-on-wheels than the telecommunications packet. Information compiled on the Martian surface was worthless if it couldn’t be beamed across the void to Earth, making successful data transfer a baseline requirement. The notion that a minor snafu could knock out the rover’s entire gamut of backup relays seemed dubious at best, and hinted that accountability for its possible failure was about to become a bouncing ball.
Scarborough’s mouth turned down in a private frown under his balaclava. Shevaun Bradley and David Payton were robotics experts who had been on the ice just over six weeks and planned to leave before final sunset, winging off to civilization aboard a Hercules LC-150 ski transport. Not so for Scarborough. Well into his second eighteen-month hitch with the station’s winter-over support crew, he had learned from unpleasant experience that tensions could build fast in shared isolation. The stickiest situations often occurred between habituated polies and summer personnel contingents, and part of his role as expeditionary guide was to lubricate the gears, so to speak. He knew Bradley a little and didn’t think she’d be a challenge on that score. Payton was another story.
Scarborough made his way toward the techies over wide beds of gravel and patches of bare bedrock that had been scrubbed to a shiny smoothness by time and weather. Stone chips crunched beneath the rubber soles of his boots. Boulders were scattered everywhere around him, many of knee height or smaller, some dwarfing the group’s transportable apple hut. The most imposing rocks Scarborough had seen lay back in the direction of camp, a tumbled expanse that had proven sheer murder to negotiate. Carved out of the highland plateau by monumental glacial flows in the Paleozoic, bereft of rainfall for an estimated two million years, the entire landscape might have been transported from another world in some weird cosmic version of a skin graft… which, of course, was precisely why it was chosen as the site of the rover’s trial run. According to planetary geologists, no place on Earth bore a closer resemblance to Mars.
Scarborough stopped beside Payton, waited to be acknowledged, and was ignored.
He made a loud affair of clearing his throat. “Any luck? We’re close to where Scout fell off our screens.”
Still examining the ground, Payton merely shook his head.
Bradley was more responsive. “We weren’t expecting much,” she said. “Scout traversed the area. I’m certain from the feeds it sent before our link broke. But its wheels probably couldn’t have left imprints in this stony surface.”