Frozen Solid: A Novel (17 page)

“Why them?”

“More likely to know anatomy than a forklift driver.”

“We don’t have much time,” Barnard said.

“Won’t take much.”

Barnard walked him to the door. “Wil—if anything happens to Hallie because of me …” He stopped, had to look away.

“I understand,” Bowman said. “Believe me, I understand.”

HALLIE COULD TELL BY THE INCREASING PRESSURE IN HER EARDRUMS
that she was sinking. With miles of freezing black water beneath. If she went too deep, or her descent rate exceeded her equipment’s ability to counteract it, she would just keep going, accelerating all the while.

She valved more gas into her dry suit and started to rise again. The new pinhole grew more quickly than had the first. By now the water was almost to her knee in one leg, over her foot in the other.

Twenty feet. Two minutes.

Losing buoyancy again, she valved still more argon gas into her suit and started finning as well to keep ascending. She could feel her hypothermia worsening—hard shivering now, her teeth beginning to chatter.

Ten feet. She could see the bright circle of the shaft’s top. Water over her knee in one leg, up to mid-calf in the other. The pain threatening to drive coherent thoughts from her mind. The only good thing was that the higher she went, the more buoyant she became.

Finally breaking the surface, she saw Merritt and Guillotte standing
by the hole. They would have been monitoring her bubbles, once she was in the shaft.

“I ha-ha-had a dry-suit failure,” she stuttered. “Lower half flooded. Need help ge-ge-getting out.”

Guillotte yelled for more men. With two holding each arm and him pulling on the tops of her tanks, they hauled her out. She flopped onto her belly. Freezing water flowed through the suit, soaking her torso.

“He-he-help me doff. Can’t do myself. Too cold,” she said, through shivers and chattering teeth.

When they finally peeled the drysuit off, she had to get out of the wet dive underwear. Extra sets hung from one wall. She went to them, turned her back to the men, stripped naked, and pulled on dry ones. She donned all the rest of her ECW gear and drank a full thermos of hot chocolate given to her by one of the Draggers.

Once Hallie had just about stopped shivering, Merritt asked, “What happened down there?”

“Very strange,” she said. “Suit failure on both knees. I don’t ever remember—”

Merritt spun on Guillotte. “You let her dive in a suit with
defects
? She might have died. We could never replace her now!”

Guillotte’s cheeks reddened. “I inspected every piece of her gear. Including the suit. There were no visible defects.”

“But there
were
defects!” Merritt snapped.

“Aggie, wait,” Hallie said. “I don’t think Rémy missed anything. I inspected the suit, too. I was halfway through the dive before it started leaking.”

Merritt took a deep breath, stepped back. “Okay. Sorry if I flew off the handle. It’s just that with Emily gone, we can’t afford to lose you, Hallie. Can we, Rémy?”

“Of course we cannot.”

“I have to get back to the station. Rémy, you can transport Hallie after you’ve secured her gear.” Merritt turned and started for the door.

“Hey,” Hallie said.

“Yes?”

“I got the extremophile. There’s a biosample in the Envirotainer.”

“Oh,” Merritt said. “Right. Good work.”

And she left.

AFTER RIDING BACK TO THE STATION WITH GUILLOTTE, HALLIE
went straight to her room and fell asleep. The ringing phone woke her an hour later.

“It’s Aggie. Have you seen Doc yet?”

“Not yet. The dive was—”

“Please do it as soon as possible. He’s waiting to hear from you.”

She hung up and lay there trying, without success, to sleep. The dry-suit failure had been frightening, but she’d handled worse diving emergencies. A good dive was one you walked away from, and she had walked, this time.

She wanted to hear from Wil so badly it was like a physical ache. To stay quiet this long, he must have been very angry. But, remembering the scene at the airport, she didn’t think he’d looked angry. More sad than anything. Why would what she said make him sad? And what on earth had he meant:
There are things you don’t know about me
. Really? After a year together?

That led her to wonder if there were things he didn’t know about her. Important things, not who she’d dated in high school or why she disliked French food. No, she decided, he did know the important
things. She’d held nothing back. Nothing had warranted holding back. Which made his own comment all the more mysterious—and troubling.

The next morning was Wednesday, the start of her third day at the Pole. She had set the alarm on her phone for seven. The station PA system woke her at six-thirty.

“Attention the station. Attention the station. All hands meeting in the galley at zero seven hundred. Repeat, all hands meeting in the galley at zero seven hundred.”

“I called this meeting to talk about the recent fatalities,” Graeter said, standing up front, near the serving area. Hallie had arrived early, hoping to see Fida again, but he hadn’t appeared. Agnes Merritt sat with her, and Rémy Guillotte joined them just after Graeter started speaking.

“As I’m sure everyone knows, Dr. Harriet Lanahan passed away on Monday, Dr. Diana Montalban Tuesday. If anyone has questions or concerns, this is the time.”

“How about, like, what the hell happened?” a gruff male voice asked from somewhere back in the gloom.

“Doc?” Graeter said.

Morbell came forward, wearing a white lab coat and the dark glasses. He seemed to shrink under scrutiny.

“Well. Ah, yes, I can offer something in the way of explanation. Wound dehiscence. Harriet Lanahan had an esophagectomy last year. Diana Montalban had undergone a C-section delivery two years earlier. I believe that their surgical scars ruptured—”

“Wait a minute,” a woman from the audience interrupted. Short, red-haired, combative. “You’re talking about incision sites, right? That’s just skin and subcutaneous tissue. It wouldn’t cause bleeding like that.”

“As I was about to say,” Doc continued, “major veins and arteries were involved in both operations. Some must have ruptured.”

“Why now, and why two so close together?”

“Many kinds of stress can cause dehiscence. A condition called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is sometimes at fault. Pole is cruel. I don’t have to tell you that.” He shrugged, held up his hands.

“I was a surgical nurse once upon a time,” the red-haired woman said. “So I know about dehiscence. It almost always happens soon after surgery. This long after—very rare.”

Hallie could see Doc’s jaw clenching. Graeter stepped forward. He said, “All due respect to nurses, Doc is the physician here. Anyone else?”

For a moment no one spoke. Than another woman stood. She had very white skin, even for a Polie, and shining black hair, and deep purple circles under both eyes. “Yeah.” She pointed straight at Hallie. “What about her?” Every head in the room turned to stare.

“What about her?” Doc said.

“She comes in and people start dying.” She looked at Doc. “What about
that
?”

“I told you what I think caused the deaths. I don’t believe Dr. Leland had anything to do with them.”

“Would you be saying that if she was a Dragger?” the woman asked, and murmurs of agreement came from the crowd.

“Of course,” Doc said.

“I’m not so sure,” the woman retorted. “We don’t—”

Graeter stepped forward. “Doc answered your question. Are there any more
reasonable
ones?”

The woman colored, but she sat without saying anything else.

“Thanks for coming,” Graeter said. “Let’s get back to work.”

People started filing out through several exits. Hallie saw a number of stares directed her way. A few people whispered and pointed.

She left the cafeteria and headed for Doc’s office, moving along in her bubble of light. She kept looking over her shoulder, unable to shake the feeling that someone was following her, but every time she looked, there was only the darkness.

DOC WAS WAITING IN HIS OFFICE WITH A STETHOSCOPE HUNG
around his neck. There was enough light, barely, for her to see his strange pink eyes.

“No glasses?” Hallie asked.

“Here I can adjust the light,” he said. “My condition is of the oculocutaneous variety. Too much light is not only painful, it makes everything I see look washed out and blurry. Like a badly overexposed photograph.”

As Hallie’s own eyes adjusted to the gloom, Doc took on a ghostly white glow. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Someone who can’t see must be a lousy doctor.”

“Actually, I was thinking how hard you must have worked, given your condition, to become a doctor. And how admirable that is.”

He blinked. “Oh.” Clearly it was not the response he was accustomed to. “So how have you been feeling?”

“Exhausted. Sore throat. Some rumbling in the gut. Other than that, okay.”

“Par for the course.” He checked her pulse, temperature, blood pressure. While he was working, she looked around with something
like wonder. Even in the dim light she could see immaculate beige walls, gleaming stainless steel cabinets, a gurney with crisp white sheets. An exam area with a hospital bed and a privacy curtain. Counters with neatly arranged trays of instruments, swabs, wipes. Disposal containers for sharps and biohazards. The cream-colored floor was clean and waxed to a shine. The room smelled good, too, like alcohol and pine-scented disinfectant.

“My compliments,” she said. “This is the cleanest place I’ve seen here.”

“We make sure it gets special attention.” Agnes Merritt had been sitting on a stool near one corner of the shadowy room.

“I didn’t know you were here. Are you sick?” Hallie asked.

“No. I didn’t want to get in the way. SORs require that a female be present when another female is being examined by a male physician. We don’t have any registered nurses, so sometimes I fill in. Don’t I, Doc?”

“Yes, yes. That’s true. Agnes does help out on occasion.” He directed Hallie to an exam table. Merritt followed. He drew the privacy curtain.

“Dr. Leland, I’ll need you to disrobe on top to your underwear, please.”

She stripped down to her sports bra. He asked the usual questions and performed the usual checks, listening to her heart and lungs, percussing her back and chest. After asking her to lie down, he palpated her abdominal area.

“All just fine,” he said. “I’ll draw some blood and do a throat swab. You can leave a urine sample on your way out.”

“I get the blood and urine,” she said. “But why the swab?”

Merritt answered: “People come here from all over. We like to know what they bring in. It can help if there’s a serious outbreak. Right, Doc?”

“Yes, exactly,” Doc said.

He directed Hallie to a blood-drawing chair against the wall, sat in front of her on a wheeled stool. He arranged her arm correctly, straight line from hand to shoulder, applied the rubber tourniquet
four inches above the draw site, tapped inside her elbow several times.

“Good veins,” he said.

“I bet you say that to all your patients.” She knew how trite that was, but she hoped to settle Doc down a bit. He had seemed nervous when she’d arrived and had become more so as the exam had progressed. His hand was unsteady as he swabbed the draw site with an alcohol pad. When he brought the syringe toward her arm, he couldn’t make the proper alignment, needle parallel to vein. He sat back, took a deep breath.

“Are you all right?” Hallie asked.

“Sorry. Too much coffee this morning, on an empty stomach. Let’s try that again.”

He got it on the second try. He filled three Vacutainers, slipped the needle out, and covered the venipuncture site with a cotton ball and a piece of medical tape. Merritt, Hallie noted, had watched the whole draw very closely.

“Just one more thing and we’ll be through,” Doc said. He examined her eyes and ears, then put a tongue depressor into her mouth. “Say ahhh.”

She did.

“Say ahhh again and look up this time. Here comes the swab.”

She did that, too, and with his other hand he stuck the swab’s cotton tip down her throat.
Way
down her throat. She had performed throat swabs herself and knew that the tip was supposed to contact the tonsillar columns on either side of the uvula. Doc’s swab went deeper. She gagged, violently. He pulled the swab out and secured it in a sterile container. “Quite a gag reflex you have there,” he said.

“My gag reflex is actually minimal,” she said.

“How would you know?”

“I’m a technical diver. Stuff gets down there. I know. You went pretty deep with that.”

“We go deeper here at Pole because some pathogens thrive only beyond the tonsillar/uvular region. Can’t have them slipping through the net, can we?”

She stood up. “Are we finished here, Doctor?”

Merritt walked over. “Glad to have that out of the way.” She patted Hallie’s shoulder.

“I can give the urine sample now,” she said.

Doc and Merritt exchanged glances. Merritt waved a hand. “You know what? Enough for one day. Go grab a coffee. Or rest.”

Halfway to the galley, she stopped. Something was bothering her about the exam, and she couldn’t decide what. The procedures Doc had performed had been just like those done by countless doctors throughout her life. His hand had been shaky for the blood draw, but that wasn’t it. What, then? She started off again, still wondering.

A male Polie came shuffling toward her in his own little pod of light. He was tall, with a long, rust-colored beard, and he was bent over a smartphone, texting.

She got it. Doc had not recorded any of the data produced by his exam. Not on paper, not in a computer. Merritt hadn’t written or recorded anything either. Then why in hell would they do an examination?

There was only one answer.

They didn’t care about the results.

Then what
was
the reason, if not obtaining data from her?