Black Ice (23 page)

‘So these are new to science?'

‘New to the planet, to be more accurate. There's even the possibility that these creatures may have an extraterrestrial origin, that they came to earth on a meteorite or other space debris, got locked into the lake and never looked back.'

‘And where will this discovery lead?' Mel asked.

‘That's the really interesting part. The sample we're dealing with here comes from the very top stratum of the lake, the furthest from any volcanic energy source. The next step is to come back with a more sophisticated probe, a robot submarine, and explore the sediment layers which we know lie at the bottom. Then we might be talking big drama, and possibly big creatures too. The fact that there's more than one species of silicon-based diatom means there's competition for resources. Where there's competition, food chains evolve, and the closer to the energy source we can get, the more chance we have of finding significant macrofauna.'

‘Silicon-based macrofauna?'

‘Precisely.'

‘Hold it right there,' Sean laughed. ‘Are we talking big scary monsters? I mean, I don't want to be a sceptic or anything, but just because you found a few microscopic creatures, that doesn't mean you're going to find anything bigger.'

‘Want to bet?' Lauren responded. ‘How many links in the food chain do you think separate the single-celled diatoms that float around the oceans of the world, and a one-hundred-and-twenty-ton blue whale?'

‘I have no idea. Hundreds, I guess.'

‘The answer is one. The Antarctic krill,
Euphausia superba
. Krill eat diatoms, blue whales eat krill. That one-centimetre-long creature is the only link between the smallest and biggest beings on the planet. So it's not the least bit unlikely that there could be significant macrofauna down there in that lake. All we have to do is get a robot sub in there and find it.'

‘How much would that cost?' Frank asked.

Lauren hazarded a guess. ‘It's big, complicated science. I doubt you'd get much change from fifty million for such a project. Capricorn would have to be quadrupled in size to pull something like that off, and we'd need a far bigger team.'

‘Think you'd find the money?'

Lauren held up one of the test-tube samples. ‘With these samples we can raise any amount of money we like. We've pulled off something amazing here, and there'll be no shortage of money to extend the science. I think we've guaranteed the life of this research base for at least the next five years … and for me that is just a dream come true.'

‘I get the feeling this might be an excuse for a few beers,' Murdo said, his face beaming at the prospect.

The party began after the evening meal, the tables pushed back in the mess room to create an impromptu dance floor. Murdo pumped up the stereo as high as he dared without blowing a speaker while Mel dragged one protesting victim after another onto the floor for dancing exhibitions which had them all in stitches.

Frank won the prize for worst dancer of the night, his enthusiastic gyrations to a fifties rock classic managing to beat even Murdo and Lauren's hilariously uncoordinated attempt at a tango.

Fitzgerald was the only one who didn't participate in the festivities. He sat at the bar all evening, downing one can of Guinness after another and making little attempt to converse with anyone else, or even to acknowledge their existence.

‘Don't you think it would be better for everyone if you joined in?' Lauren challenged him.

‘Not really,' the explorer replied, not bothering to look her in the face.

‘And while you're about it,' Murdo chipped in, ‘don't forget those Guinnesses you're drinking come from my allocation. Every one of those you down comes out of my stash for the winter.'

Fitzgerald reached behind the bar and pulled out another can. He clicked back the ring pull and began to pour the black liquid into his glass.

‘That's it, you bastard,' Murdo screamed. ‘I'm going to teach you some fucking manners.'

The chef launched himself towards Fitzgerald, fists raised to strike as Lauren and Sean piled in to restrain him. The scuffle went on for a few seconds before they had Murdo under control.

‘Forget it, Murdo,' Sean shouted at him. ‘He's not worth it.'

Fitzgerald took his beer and retired to his room.

47

‘I've prepared the press release,' Lauren told Frank as she entered the radio room. ‘It's time to tell the world what we've found.'

Frank was consulting a technical manual at the bench, a puzzled expression creasing his face. ‘Not right now you won't. The satellite unit's down.'

‘What's new?' Lauren wasn't initially concerned. Radio telephone links from Antarctica rely on connections with satellites which lie barely above the northern horizon, and a medium-sized storm can disrupt signals for days. There had been many occasions that winter when the base had been unable to reach the outside world for twenty-four hours or more. Privately, Lauren had quite welcomed these brief interludes of peace—at least it kept her troublesome sponsor off her back.

‘I don't mean a weather problem,' Frank told her. ‘I mean the whole system is dead. I can't even get it to power up.'

‘Antarctic gremlin?'

Frank switched the unit on and off. ‘Listen to the speakers: there's not even any static. It's most peculiar. I've had the fuse board out of the front panel, but they all seem intact.'

Lauren checked the five fuses and agreed they were fine.

‘I've got the manufacturer's fault-finding guide here,' Frank tossed the pamphlet on the workbench, ‘but it's as good as useless. It's limited to the basic stuff and pretty much says, if it's anything more than a fuse or a switch falling off, return it to the manufacturer under warranty.'

‘Great. Have you had a go with the voltmeter?'

‘Sure. I've been checking the circuitry through as far as I can, but my electronics only goes so far. If it was a standard radio, or even if I could recognise a transistor or two, I'd be in with a fighting chance, but we're talking rows and rows of chips, and to be honest I'm not at all confident I know what I'm doing in there.'

‘So what can we tell?'

‘OK … there's power going into it. But there's nothing coming out. Something's gone wrong with the circuitry. I guess one of the components failed.'

‘You're sure it's not the satellite dish? Maybe it got dislodged or iced up?'

‘The dish is fine. First thing I did was to check it.'

‘How's the back-up radio if we have an emergency?' she asked him.

‘Well, it's there if we need it.' Frank gestured to the ancient longwave transmitter they had brought as a standby for just this eventuality. ‘But you know how fickle it can be.'

‘Let's have a look at the guts of this thing.'

Frank pulled back the front fascia of the satellite transmitter and they peered without much hope at the many circuit boards which were stacked within the instrument panel.

‘See what I mean?' Frank said. ‘We're talking chip city.'

Lauren sighed as she contemplated the workings; like Frank, her electronics was good—but not this good. ‘We'll just have to test the power output of each chip,' she said. ‘Put the fine probe on the voltmeter, and we'll see if one of these babies has died on us. Do we have any spares?'

‘I checked in the electronics reserve kit. We've got duplicates for most of these chips, thank God, so if we do find a dead one we can probably replace it.'

‘While you're doing that, I'll get on the back-up and see if I can raise a ground station while the weather's still good enough to get one. We should let our sponsors know we have a comms problem or they might start to worry about us if we go completely dead.'

Lauren left Frank to his task and played with the radio transmitter for ten minutes or so before she managed to raise a ground station through the waves of static. The receiving operator was sitting in a New Zealand base at the edge of the continent almost twelve hundred miles away, and the connection was so distorted and faint that Lauren had to shout to make herself heard. Finally, she got the message through, along with Alexander De Pierman's office number in London and the e-mail address of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge.

‘Tell them we're working on a problem with our satellite comms. We've only got the standard radio operational right now,' she yelled, ‘so not to worry if they don't hear from us for a while. It might take us a week or more to get this sorted.'

‘Roger that,' came the response. Then the connection faded completely.

Lauren returned to the workbench and assisted Frank with his task. They attached the voltmeter to the chips on the motherboard one by one, registering positive output for them all.

‘These all seem to be powered up,' Lauren observed. ‘Do we have a circuit diagram to try and work out what their functions are supposed to be?'

‘I was hoping it wouldn't come to that,' Frank said, ‘but we do have one, yes.'

While Lauren continued with the voltmeter, Frank began to consult the circuit diagram, patiently ticking off the components as listed against the circuit boards installed and trying to make some sense of the design.

For the length of the afternoon they worked side by side, getting more and more frustrated by the task.

Finally, Frank exclaimed: ‘Look at this connector—it's empty.'

Lauren looked at the space he was pointing to, not noticing anything odd about it.

‘So? There's always empty connectors in a complicated circuit system like this one. Look, there's empty gaps on the other boards too.'

‘I know,' Frank said patiently, ‘but I've checked them all off against the circuit diagram, and there's definitely a chip missing from this one.'

‘No way.' Lauren looked at him in amazement.

‘Believe me.'

‘Which means what, exactly?'

‘Someone removed it. To disable the comms.'

‘My God,' Lauren whispered. ‘Someone in the base opened this thing up and
stole
one of the chips?'

‘Seems bloody hard to believe, but, yes, that's about the sum of it.'

Lauren shook her head. ‘Who in their right mind would do that? You must have made a mistake. Check the circuit diagram again.'

Frank consulted the pamphlet once more.

‘One hundred per cent sure,' he said emphatically. ‘There should be a chip sitting right there. And now there's not.'

‘Which chip is it?'

‘A D47K887.'

‘Do we have a spare?'

Frank checked the spares kit, his expression of gloom deepening as he compared the contents against an inventory.

‘There should be one,' he said, perplexed, ‘but it's vanished.'

‘Whoever did this was being pretty damn sly,' Lauren observed. ‘If we hadn't had the circuit manual, we would never have spotted it.'

‘That's what's so frightening.'

Lauren crossed to the window and looked out into the night. ‘Who asked for access today? Was there anything special happening?'

‘Sean had a couple of e-mails to send, so did Mel. Oh, and Carl was going to send a chunk of his book to a publisher he's got interested. He brought me the disk last night, but the satellite connection was playing up with some bad weather. I was planning to do it this morning.'

Lauren picked up the floppy disk. It had ‘First draft synopsis and 50,000 words' written in pen on the label.

‘Did you leave this disk on the desk like this?'

Frank looked a little guilty. ‘Well, Carl did ask me to keep it hidden, but I may have left it out overnight by mistake.'

‘So Fitzgerald could have seen it, could have known that you were about to send it. Has he been in here?'

‘Not that I've seen.' Frank shrugged.

‘Could he have been in here during the night?'

‘Well, this door's never locked; why should it be?' Frank paused, then: ‘You think he sabotaged the unit?'

Lauren closed the door and dropped her voice. ‘Listen. I don't want anyone else on this base to know that we discovered the missing chip. As far as we're concerned, the satellite's got some electrical gremlin in the works, and you're in the process of identifying it. If anyone asks, tell them it'll be up and running in a couple of days. OK?'

‘OK.'

Lauren opened the door to leave.

‘Hey,' he called after her, ‘what are you going to do about this?'

‘I'll sort it,' Lauren told him. ‘Just give me a bit of time.'

‘Well, be careful. For God's sake.'

48

Lauren waited until Fitzgerald was well into his nocturnal weight-training session before making her move, her bare feet making no sound on the carpeted floor. She passed Mel's room, then Murdo's, the muffled sound of the chef's distinctive snore just audible through the insulated door.

Fitzgerald's room was at the end of the accommodation block, and, as she had expected, it was locked. Lauren took the replacement key from her pocket and quietly opened the door. She entered the room, leaving the door open a crack in case she needed a fast exit.

As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she began to pick out the details of the room. Like all the others on the base, it was a three-metre-square construction with a sink in the corner and a low chest of drawers for clothes and personal belongings. Some of Fitzgerald's personal survival gear was heaped in the corner, and the laptop sat on the desk.

Lauren thought about turning on the light, then decided against it. There was always the chance that Fitzgerald might leave the weights room for some reason, and the last thing she wanted was to alert him to her presence in his room.

Now. Where to search? Lauren thought about the options and decided to check the most obvious places first. As far as she knew, Fitzgerald would be assuming that no one had discovered his secret piece of sabotage, so there was always the chance he had not taken too much trouble to hide the chip.