“Three minutes? Tha’s barely enuff water tae clean my pecker. The bloody place is surrounded by ice. Why don’ ye jis melt it?”
“We have to conserve fuel. There’s a bar in the Rec Room across from the mess hall. Why don’t you let me buy you gents a drink when I’m through checking in guests?”
“We’re only staying the night,” I said, stepping between Kyle Trunk and True. “Our destination’s Vostok.”
“Change of plans. We have you scheduled to stay at Davis for two weeks. Captain Hintzmann’s orders.”
I found Ben Hintzmann in the mess hall eating lunch, the chin hairs of his beard specked with cream drippings from the bowl of New England clam chowder he was gulping down.
“Hey, Doc! Welcome to the ice. You look ‘episched.’”
“Episched?”
“Sorry, I’ve been out here way too long. ‘Exhausted, finished, dead and done for.’ It’s Antarctic slang. Hope that transport you rode in on was carrying fresh fruit and veggies. We had none of it this winter, and yours was the first plane of spring. I’d kill for boiled potatoes and carrots.”
“The dude with the clipboard and attitude said we’re not flying out to Vostok for two weeks. Why not?”
“Consider it a blessing. The weather out there makes Davis look like a fall day in Manhattan. There were delays in erecting the dome, plus the crates with the Valkyrie units only arrived two days ago. While Ming organizes her team, I’ll teach you how to pilot the Barracuda here in Prydz Bay.”
“The Barracuda? Is that the name of our submersible?”
“That’d be her, a narrow three-man acrylic vehicle featuring two Valkyrie lasers, one mounted on each flank. The generators necessary to power those puppies will remain on the surface, attached by fiber-optic cable, but the Barracuda will house miniature fuel cells capable of powering one four-hour laser burn — enough to get us topside in case of an emergency. Feel better now?”
I smiled. In fact, I did feel better… a lot better. The possibility of having our sub detach from the Valkyries’ power supply unit had been among my worst fears. Apparently, Hintzmann’s too. He had addressed it, and now I could rest more easily.
“I’m feeling episched, so I’m going to bed. Wake me in a day.” Stealing Ben’s soup, I raised the bowl to my lips and drained it, then headed off to my living quarters, a private room negotiated by my Highland “lackey.”
Thirty hours later, True, Ben, and I stood on the frozen waters of Prydz Bay beneath “manky” skies. Manky was Antarctic slang for overcast weather, apparently a common occurrence along the coast. A team of Chinese technicians from nearby Zhongshan Station used six-foot-long bog chisels to test the thickness of the sea ice before bringing out the Barracuda. “More than three whacks to get through and it’s safe to walk on,” Ben informed us. “Less than three and you double-time it back to where you came from.”
After ten blows the ice failed to crack open, forcing the Chinese to use their chainsaws to open a twenty-by-fifteen-foot hole to access the sea.
Ben expected our days inland at Vostok would be “dingle”—good weather, good visibility. “On a dingle day it’s time to play; wake up to a mank and the day will be dank.”
Worse than a mank was a “hooley”—an Antarctic blower, also known as a katabatic wind. Formed when cold air descends onto the ice cap, it spreads along the ground like a relentless snow-blowing storm and can last for days.
I wasn’t particularly excited about meeting a katabatic, but I rather enjoyed the Antarctic slang, which was far different from the Highlander vernacular, yet just as alien. Created by the OAE’s (Old Antarctic Explorers), the vocabulary attempted to simultaneously label and judge everything Antarctic, from the extreme conditions to the people who visited.
I learned quickly that rookies were chastised until they earned respect, and respect translated into time on the ice. Summer visitors earned far less respect than winterers, and as such, True and I were identified as “hordes”—less than welcome newbies.
Before he had gone to bed in his “pit-room,” True had stopped by the bar for his promised nightcap. The general rule at bases is that you only drink what you bring, but Kyle Trunk was treating. Exacting his revenge, the flag officer offered the big fella a vodka on the rocks, the rocks being natural Antarctic ice, a substance that dates back hundreds of thousands of years and contains captured bubbles of environmental gas that, when warmed with alcohol, pop. Hangovers induced from “poppies” were particularly onerous, and when True awoke he had a bear of a headache. Seeking caffeine, he found his way to the mess hall where another officer presented him with a mug of coffee known as a “grumble bucket.” It seemed like a nice gesture until True drained the cup to find a lurker at the bottom of the unwashed container.
Welcome to the ice, ye Summer Jolly Merchant!
Ben was classified a “fidlet,” a winterer entering his first summer. On our jeep ride out to the bay, he taught us two new words he had learned his second week on the ice.
A “slot” was a crevasse formed when a glacier, moving over the underlying bedrock, cracks open from the top down to form a pie-shaped wedge. Being “slotted” is what happened to Ben’s Australian guide when the man stepped onto a bridge of wind-blown snow that collapsed into a twenty-foot-wide crevasse.
“It happened so fast,” Ben said. “One minute he was walking back to the sled to grab a pair of binoculars, the next he was gone. I heard him scream a full thirty seconds before his body slammed into a tight wedge a mile and a half down — a nightmare known as “corking in.” Poor bastard died down there, all busted up in the darkness while we tried to reach him. Slots scare the hell out of me. Everyone’s got to be roped in on the open ice. And don’t think you’re safer in a vehicle either; jeeps get slotted, too.”
Standing out on the frozen waters of Prydz Bay eliminated the risk of being slotted, but not the risk of freezing to death. Ben informed us that Antarctic seawater averaged twenty-seven degrees, a sub-freezing temperature made possible due to the high salt content, which lowered its freezing point several degrees. “The human body can withstand about thirty seconds of exposure in water that cold before the muscles seize and cease to function. You’ll survive fifteen minutes if you are bobbing in a life vest. Either way, your blood feels like it’s turning to lead.”
It was into these sub-freezing waters that Ben and I would be taking the Barracuda on its maiden voyage. With all the ways one could die in Antarctica, we were about to toss the dice on another — an untested machine.
Even so, the moment the tarp was removed from the submersible I couldn’t wait to get started.
Ben was right; the Barracuda was nothing like the three-man sub I had drowned and nearly died in two years ago. Sleek and torpedo-shaped, the watercraft reminded me of something you’d find on the Bonneville Salt Flats, only with a windshield that extended all the way to its front bumper. Inside this four-inch-thick acrylic pod were three rotatable seats, placed in tandem with their own command centers. I was assigned the forward position, Ben the center, and Ming in back, allowing her to control the sub’s collection tubes and grabbers. The two Valkyrie units were mounted along either side of the vessel like missiles, the collector arms and storage bins located aft of her wings, folded out of the way by her keel. The bow was reinforced, narrow, and hydrodynamic, the outer chassis surrounding the cockpit painted dark neon blue, rendering her invisible in the deep blue sea.