“He flew to the South Pole station this morning,” someone said.
“Radio him. Hammond, take care of it.”
“Yes, Corporal.” Hammond trotted over to a golf cart, got in, and zipped up the tunnel.
Pete stared down at a broken-off blade of metal jutting from a chunk of ice as big as a man’s torso. Under the bright arc lights, the blade gleamed silver. One side curved at a mathematically precise angle. Part of something round?
“That looks machined,” he said.
“Yeah,” Menendez said. “Definitely machined.”
Pete tried to visualize it whole. It might have been eight or ten feet across.
“Give me your pick, Smitty,” Menendez said.
Pete held his breath as Menendez knelt, accepted a hand-pick from one of the other engineers, and struck the block of ice as hard as she could—once, twice, a third time. Chips flew. Finally, with a sound like cracking knuckles, the block split in half.
Menendez dug gloved fingers into the gap and flipped the two halves apart, revealing more of the blade. The curved section extended another foot, then ended in jagged, twisted metal. Using the pointed end of the hand-pick, she pried it loose.
Standing, Menendez turned the blade over, examining it carefully,
“Well?” Pete finally demanded.
“I’ve seen damage like this in war zones. There must have been an explosion—a big one.” She looked up. “There’s probably wreckage all through the ice. But the weird thing…” She paused, swallowed hard. “The weird thing is, it feels like it doesn’t weigh anything at all. Look!”
She dropped it—but instead of thudding to the ground, the metal settled slowly, like a feather drifting to earth. She picked it up and passed it to the next man, who repeated the experiment.
So it went around the circle. Pete got it last, after Clay—and just like Menendez had said, it felt like it weighed nothing at all in his hands. But it was strong and hard and cold. He couldn’t bend it.
He returned it to Menendez, who hefted it, then used the blade of her hand-pick to try to scratch it. Other than a blood-chilling scree-ee-ee, her efforts had no effect.
“Not even a scratch,” she murmured.
Silence fell. Everyone stared—at the corporal, at the broken blade of metal, at each other.
Pete asked, feeling his heart skip a beat, “Is it man-made?”
“Not…man,” said Menendez slowly. “This is nothing I’ve ever seen before. Like nothing on our planet.”
Pete barely contained a whoop of triumph. Not a meteorite. Not a frozen giant whale. It had to be a spaceship!
He slapped Clay on the back. “It’s real, man! We found aliens! We’re gonna be famous!”
Then suddenly everyone was talking at once—babbling about aliens, spaceships, the piece of metal.
“Quiet down, quiet down!” Menendez yelled. Silence fell like a switch had been thrown. “We don’t know anything at this point. It’s just a piece of metal—nothing else. Don’t get ahead of yourselves.”
“Are there more pieces?” Pete asked.
“There have to be,” Menendez said. “It must be part of a debris field.” She gestured at the wall. “Everyone—spread out and look.”
Her men began unclipping flashlights from their belts. Pete remembered that he had one, too, and fumbled it out. The engineers pressed the lenses against the wall, playing the beams through the ice, casting weird shadows that bounced from fracture mark to fracture mark.
“I’ve got something!” one man called.
“Me too!” said another. “Looks like more metal.”
“And here!” Clay shouted.
Six inches into the wall, Pete’s beam came to rest on something large and dark. He squinted. What was it? Not metal. A strange, black, vaguely fuzzy outline of…something.
He slid the beam up, around a shoulder-like curve, to what might have been a head…and then up and over to a single red eye, frozen open, that glared out at him from the depths of the ice.
CHAPTER TWO
Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station
Antarctica
Welcome to Hell, Jason Cosgrove thought.
A biting late-summer wind swept across the Antarctic Plain and hissed through the buildings of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. According to the pilot of the airplane that had just dropped him off, local temperature was a balmy 12° Fahrenheit. Jason already felt a chill penetrating his coat, sweatshirt, and T-shirt. Three layers weren’t nearly enough.
Around him, the wind made a faint, whispery sound somewhere between the screech of fingernails on slate and the hiss of snake-scales on glass, broken only by an occasional shout from the direction of the plane. Twelve different national flags, planted in front of the station’s main building, snapped and cracked like whips. A few stray snowflakes swirled down from a leaden sky.
Jason dropped his two overstuffed satchels onto hard-packed snow, turned from the Basler BT-67 that had shuttled him here from Christchurch, via McMurdo Station, and stared out across what seemed an endless expanse of white. Only a lone black windsock and what looked like a couple of distant storage sheds broke the unending white of the landscape. An old joke popped into his head: What’s white and white and white? A polar bear eating ice cream in a snowstorm.
He snorted and rubbed his eyes. Too long without sleep. He hadn’t even gotten the usual layover in Christchurch. Now he was getting punchy.
A thousand miles of ice-desert stretched in every direction. Pictures online didn’t prepare you for it. The huge, unending bleakness of it all. Even the sky seemed faded and dull by New York standards. The true ass-end of the Earth.
Shouldn’t there have been someone waiting to meet him? He glanced back at the sleek mid-sized plane that had disgorged him minutes before. Its props still turned with a steady whump-whump-whump, as men and women in parkas bustled around the open door in its side. Supplies out, baggage in. And people. There had to be thirty-five or forty scientists and researchers waiting to board. Going back to civilization before the six-month-long Antarctic night overtook the Amundsen-Scott Station. He alone had gotten off.
He turned toward the low sun, white as the snow and dazzling without the haze of pollution to filter it. Only a few more days until the sun dipped below the horizon, dropping the temperature and cutting off all the Antarctic bases from the outside world until spring.
“Dr. Cosgrove?” a man’s voice called from his right.
Jason turned, eyebrows rising. “Here!” he called.
A tall, stocky man with a scraggly black beard jogged toward him. Unruly curls stuck out from under a green stocking cap, and he wore a puffy red coat zipped to the neck. He thrust out a gloved hand, which Jason took. The fellow had a crushing grip.
“I am Milos Pappas.” He pronounced it MEE-los PAH-pahs. His breath puffed visibly in the air. “I am the chief greeter for the station, and also dinner cook. Very pleased to meet you, Doctor,” he said.
“Call me Jase,” Jason said. Everyone did.
“Jase, yes. I trust your journey was good?”
Jason tried to laugh, but the sound came out like a crazy bark. He bit it off.
“No,” he said, “everything was horrible. I hate to fly, and I’m here under protest. I’ve had maybe two hours of sleep in the last three days. I’ve been bullied into this, and—”
Milos raised his hands. “Not me! I am—how you say—only the messager?”