A noise crackled around his head and jerked him back to life. The intercom whined and then settled to the sound of grunting and straining. It seemed unbelievable, little short of a miracle. “Jack, can you hear me?”
“Costas.” Jack’s voice sounded peculiar, oddly distant to his own ears, and then he remembered the trimix contained helium. “Where the hell are you?”
“I can see you, but you can’t see me. Try to turn over. You have to get yourself out of the water, otherwise we’ve had it for good this time.”
Costas’ voice was a reassuring measure of reality, calm despite the desperate situation. Jack marshalled all of his energy and heaved himself up on his elbows. He could swivel his torso slightly to the right and his arms were free, but his feet and lower legs were nearly frozen into the ice. It was like fighting against clinging mud, and each time he pulled he only seemed to embed himself further.
“It’s no good,” he panted. “I can barely move my legs.”
“Can you reach your cylinder pack?”
“Just.”
“Okay. Pull out that axe and lay it on the ledge beside your head.”
Jack did as he was instructed, laboriously extracting the wooden haft of the axe hand over hand from where he had slid it behind his cylinder straps. He could scarcely register what he was holding, a Varangian battle-axe from a Viking longship, a discovery that now seemed pure fantasy. By the time he had finished withdrawing the axe the surface of the slurry had frozen solid around his waist, and the moisture in his exhaust had caused a sheen of ice to form over his visor.
“I can’t see any more,” he exclaimed, trying to remain rational, to stave off panic. “The pressure’s going to build up in here now that there’s no more water to displace, and the moisture from my exhaust is freezing my upper body too. This could be over quicker than I thought.”
“Lie back and push the shaft of the axe as far as you can above your head. The ice-borer’s embedded in the cavity, and I can see the filaments of the coil frozen in the ice below you. If we can reactivate the battery then we might be able to melt you out.”
Jack held the bit of the axe and pushed it as far as he could along a shelf of ice that angled slightly upwards above the slurry. At first he felt no resistance, but at the limit of his reach the base of the haft hit something solid.
“Okay. That’s it,” Costas said. “Now try about six inches to your left.”
Jack strained again and prodded the haft along. Suddenly he felt something depress, and a green aura became visible through the ice on his visor.
“Good. You’ve done it. The main element of the corer was crushed when things went haywire back there, but the coil is operated from a separate battery pack that looks intact. All we have to do now is wait.”
“How are you doing?” Jack spoke as he slumped back, forcing himself to think beyond his surroundings.
“Just great. Trapped in the Ice Age. Follow Jack Howard and see the world.”
“Seriously. I can’t see you.”
“At first I couldn’t work it out. If the berg had flipped we’d be hundreds of metres deep, crushed to oblivion. Then I saw the ice probe and realized. We’ve rolled a full three hundred and sixty degrees and come back upright again. Whatever force was behind this thing made the berg somersault right over on the threshold. My guess is it’s still stuck on the outer edge of the sill, but has slid down deeper than its original position. My depth gauge reads one hundred and twenty-three metres, just about the limit for our trimix gas. If the berg was floating out to sea it would have flipped again and we’d be way beyond that depth, gone for good. That could happen any time.”
“A reassuring thought.”
“Before we rolled. Did you see what I saw?”
“It was Halfdan. The guy whose runes are on the battle-axe. We were directly over the bier in the centre of the longship, where his body was meant to be burnt. We must be the only people alive to have seen a Viking warrior in the flesh. Fantastic.”
“Yeah, fantastic. It spooked me. Let’s hope we’re not joining him.”
“Got any plans?”
“Let’s do this step by step. The first thing is to get thawed out.”
In the lull that followed, Jack noticed the utter stillness of the berg, broken only by the noise of their breathing, in contrast to the deafening cacophony of a few minutes before as the ice sundered and cracked. Somehow the stillness accentuated the sepulchral quality of the chamber and brought home the full enormity of their situation. They were trapped deep inside an iceberg, hemmed in by a million tons of rock-hard ice, at the limit of their survivable depth and with every prospect of a fatal tumble into the abyss. Jack began to feel unnerved, and as he stared at the ice only inches from his head he began to feel the old claustrophobia nagging at the edges of his consciousness. Lurking beneath the surface was a fear that he would be gripped by panic, as had so nearly happened when Costas had kept him going in the tunnels of Atlantis six months before. He knew Costas’ banter had kept his mind focussed, that his friend knew him too well, and he forced himself to concentrate on little things, on the small steps that might eventually lead to their salvation.
“I’ve got movement,” Jack said. “I can move my feet.”
“Excellent. Try to swivel round in my direction.”
The sheen of ice on Jack’s visor was beginning to drip away, and he could now see the slurry more clearly. The coil of microfilaments from the probe was doing its work, and the surface was beginning to liquefy. He arched his back and flexed his legs, causing a stab of pain and a sudden spasm of shivering. For the first time he inspected the injury in his left thigh, the embedded spear of ice just visible through the rent in his E-suit. The ice had numbed most of the pain and staunched the bleeding, but even so the blood loss had left him dangerously vulnerable to the cold. He heaved himself sideways, pulling his legs out of the water and hauling himself as far as he could go up the shelf, then wiped his visor and looked into the jagged wall of ice that had lain behind him.
The sight that confronted him was surreal. He could see Costas, yet it was an image that defied sense. He seemed to be lying within easy reach, yet was separated by a wall of transparent ice. With each tiny movement Costas seemed to fragment into myriad shapes, refracted through numerous planes in the ice. Jack suddenly caught sight of Costas’ face, the yellow helmet at first appearing grotesquely elongated but then compressing to some semblance of normality.
“I’m about a metre from you,” Costas said. “When I recovered consciousness I was floating in a fissure. I tried to reach you, but this is how far I got. I’m as near as I can get to being frozen without actually being solid. It’s all meltwater ice, from that crevasse above the longship. It should be easier to hack through than glacier ice. How are you with an axe?”
Jack suddenly saw a ray of hope. “You know, it’s my main occupation during the off season when I disappear into the woods. When I tell everyone I’m writing. It makes me forget all this.”
“Good enough. Let’s see what you can do. If you can break through, then the water from your side should get in and do the trick. The coil won’t melt glacial ice, but it should keep this slush liquid. There’s about a six-inch air pocket around me from my exhaust.”