Gray gave him a condescending smile, ruined by the crumbs on his shirt and the speck of mayonnaise clinging to his lower lip. “You’d have to work in television to understand. A producer friend bailed me out and hooked me up with a job on Slater’s show, supposedly until I could get a new project up and going. But, you know what happened to her show, right?”
“Yeah. Hopefully it’ll get resurrected here. With you on camera, I guess that’s a new start.”
Gray’s laugh was a high-pitched giggle, incongruous with his oversized body. “Talk about back to basics, huh? How the mighty have fallen. Still, I’m not complaining. I’m glad to be working.”
Aston wondered what this guy’s story really was. It seemed the man had glossed over some significant details. Marla stood back a little, listening in, but saying nothing. She flicked a little smile to Aston when he glanced at her and rolled her eyes. He smiled back. He had decided immediately upon meeting her that he liked her. She seemed like the sort of person he could get along with. He and Marla had enjoyed a few conversations on the voyage, while Slater wasn’t around. But the young sound engineer always seemed a little guilty, like she was maybe betraying Slater by talking to Aston at all. Regardless, he liked her. Smart and interesting. Unlike the generally unpleasant Jeff Gray. “Well,” he said. “I guess we’re all lucky to be working.”
“Was it all a bunch of crap?” Gray asked suddenly.
Aston raised his eyebrows, surprised the man would question him about that. “Kaarme?”
Gray nodded.
“No, it wasn’t. It was all true.There were no special effects in Jo’s film. We lost a lot of good people.”
“Whoa,” Marla whispered. In all their conversations over the past week, she had never brought it up. Gray just stared, momentarily motionless. Aston wondered if the man was trying to decide whether to believe him or not.
“Anyway,” Aston said. “When we get back from this trip, I plan to go public and make sure everyone knows that. If Jo will let me.”
“I think that ship may have sailed,” Marla said, coming to join them at last. “People pretty much have their minds made up. And you coming back, after all that stuff about you dying there? It’ll only make people more certain that Jo made everything up.”
Aston hadn’t thought of that and it annoyed him. She was dead right. It had been an olive branch he intended to offer Slater, to try to make things better. But maybe it would do more harm than good. What a mess. The phrase kept rolling around in his mind like a mantra.
“Oh well,” he said. “I guess I’ll ask Jo what she’d prefer I do. If she ever talks to me again.”
Marla laughed. “She’d like you to jump overboard into the freezing ocean, I think. Preferably with something heavy tied to your ankles.”
Aston smiled, infected by Marla’s easy confidence. “Yeah, I reckon you’re right.”
“I love your accent.”
Aston looked down at Marla, a good foot shorter than him, looking up through her sandy fringe. “Really?” She hadn’t mentioned it before.
“That wasn’t a come on, by the way. I just really dig it.”
Aston was slightly disappointed by that comment, but did his best to hide it.
“Australian, right?” Jeff Gray said, clearly trying to re-insert himself into the conversation.
“No, you damn Martian!” Marla said. She rolled her eyes again, grinning, and strolled off in the direction Slater had gone.
“I knew it was Australian or some other kind of British. You can’t really tell the difference between your accent, and South Africa or Scotland. All the same.” Gray made a single, sage nod.
Aston stood uncomfortably with Gray, a smile tugging his lips. Gray made to say something else, but was cut off when Sol’s voice came over the PA. “Team, gather your things, please. Meet by the forward starboard ramp in ten minutes.”
“Here we go then,” Aston said, and headed back below decks, glad to be away from Jeff.
They disembarked a little while later to meet a snowcat waiting for them. Like a large bus on four huge tracks that left ladder patterns in the snow. Aston was struck again by just how white everything was. Though he wore sunglasses to cut the glare, the uniformity of the landscape was disturbing.
“All aboard,” Sol said. “This is our ride to Alpha Base. It’ll take a little while.”
The journey was rough, and noisy with the engine roaring and the tracks crunching the ice and snow. They plowed through the seemingly endless, unchanging landscape and Aston felt a sense of isolation settle over him. The idea that the ship would take him back if he changed his mind shrank the further from the ocean they got. After an hour they rose over a low ridge and saw a much higher range of mountains in front of them, still a long way out. Some peaks seemed edged, almost geometrically regular.
Jeff Gray leaned over the seat from behind and slapped Aston’s shoulder. “Pyramids!” he declared, wide-eyed, his voice loud over the background noise. “Giant ones!”
Aston knew the legends. Only a year or two before, a screenshot from Google Earth had shown a set of near-perfect pyramids, partially covered by snow, and the internet went into meltdown. It turned out the “pyramids” had been discovered over a hundred years before and geologists hadn’t made much of it, kind of an open secret. But then Google sent the internet truthers into a new frenzy. But they were just mountains. Aston even remembered the type, because he thought it was a cool word. A nunatak was a peak of rock sticking out above a glacier or ice sheet. And the shape was apparently pretty common. Even the Matterhorn in the Alps, one of the most famous mountains in the world, bore the same geometry. But the internet’s gonna internet, Aston thought with a smile.
“What do you think?” Gray asked. “Aliens or ancient races?”
And Jeff Gray is gonna Jeff Gray, Aston thought. He shook his head. “Just mountains, buddy. Just rock.”
Gray laughed, slapped Aston’s shoulder again. “Suuuuure! And the Lake Kaarme monster was just a floating log.” He dropped heavily back into his seat, still chuckling.
Aston wondered if these were the same peaks that had caused the internet stir, or new ones. It was entirely possible there were a number of similar formations to be discovered. He supposed it didn’t matter. After another hour, dark marks against the snow became visible, beneath the shadows of the peaks. Soon enough the base was right in front of them, and it turned out to be far more impressive than Aston had anticipated.
He had expected wooden buildings and corrugated iron huts, maybe something like the set from that Carpenter movie, The Thing. Instead he saw sleek, aerodynamically designed buildings on crisscrossed stilts. Single story, olive green wedges with narrow vertical windows splashing warm orange light onto the snow outside. Solar panels adorned the roofs, wind turbines stood in ranks on low ridges behind, turning in the stiff breeze. Surrounding the modern buildings were the tin sheds he had expected, and ranks of gas bottles and oil barrels in cages, wooden shacks with Ski-doos and all-terrain vehicles parked inside. The whole place was ordered and well-kept, and he presumed it was newly set up. Had SynGreene financed all this? They must be pretty confident about their discovery, and about getting permission to mine it, if they had.
Sol led the team up steel steps into the largest of the dark, futuristic buildings and Aston was even more impressed with the interior. Everything was modern, new-looking. Modular lounges and glass-topped tables, sleek marble bars and chrome-legged chairs. Obviously SynGreene had poured a lot of money into the place and Aston wondered just what they hoped to get back. Their expected return on investment must be huge to justify this level of commitment and expense. A few armed men wandered here and there, calm but serious, all casually carrying weapons, sidearms at the hips. Other staff moved busily around, presumably there to cook, clean, and maintain the base.