Authors: Matthew Johnson
“Well, there’s that.”
“I may be gone for some time,” Gord had said.
It was their only joke, and like everything else in the base it had been worn smooth with use and re-use: Stan and Gord each said it before leaving the base, every time they went out to walk the inuksuit and fire the flare, their way of laughing at the dark.
The whole island was just over a kilometre square; on a good day, Defence had calculated the whole circuit would take just over three hours. The problem was that Hans Island had no good days. At this time of year there were hardly any days at all: only a little over an hour of grey twilight around noon, the remaining time given over to the endless Arctic dark.
Stan glanced at his watch, put down his book and went to start the Coleman stove. Though it was substantially warmer within Base Hearn than outside, where kerosene turned thick and white as lard, it still took the stove a few minutes to heat up; while he waited Stan unpacked two dozen frozen Tim Hortons doughnuts and a can of coffee. It was a challenge, getting the six thousand calories they needed each day, but the doughnuts and coffee were more than a contribution towards that: the two half-hour overlaps between their shifts were the only time either of them saw another human being each day, and the ritual helped them pretend that they were back in the real world—not planting a frozen toehold for Canada in a place so remote even the Inuit considered it uninhabitable.
Before long the stove was hissing with a bright blue flame, but Gord had not returned. Stan checked his watch: 14:35, just five minutes late—six hours was normally enough time to get from base to base, but with the storm he could hear howling outside it might easily take more. He turned the stove low, just hot enough to keep the fuel liquid, picked up the one-volume Deptford Trilogy and started reading, careful not to lose Gord’s place.
It was around 14:45 when Stan checked his watch again, and he decided to brew the coffee and fry the first dozen doughnuts. He had to give himself a good ten minutes to suit up, not to mention warming his hands enough that he could stand to insert the catheter, so he unsealed the pack of frozen doughnuts and tossed them in the skillet. The smell quickly filled the small space, the fat surrounding each doughnut melting and starting to sizzle, and when the coffee aroma joined it Stan could almost imagine he was home.
When another ten minutes had passed he began to worry. Gord was now almost a half-hour late, and Stan began to wonder if something had happened to him. Of course, he might just be holed up in Base Franklin; they were under strict radio silence—anything battery-powered died within a week in this cold, anyway, and their hand-crank radios could receive but not send—so there was no way to communicate between the two bases, just thirty-five metres apart as the goose flew. No way, for that matter, to send a cry for help.
Stan sighed, drank the last of his coffee; a layer of frost had already begun to creep inwards from the rim of the mug. “Sorry, Gord,” he said as he shut off the stove’s low flame, hoping the fuel would not have time to thicken again before Gord got back. He pulled his undersuit off the hook, stepped to the middle of the room where he could stand up straight and stepped into it, cotton and Kevlar covering everything but his mouth and eyes. Then he popped a bulb of hydrating gel into his mouth, minty and medicinal, and stepped to the first door of the heatlock.
He reached towards the emergency override before stopping himself. If something had happened to Gord—if he wasn’t just late, hadn’t just decided to wait out the weather at Base Franklin—what if it hadn’t been an accident? What if there was a Dane out there?
It was no secret the Danes wanted them gone; it was their government, after all, that disputed ownership of the island with Canada—the only reason anyone cared about a barren hunk of rock halfway between Ellesmere Island and Greenland. Or not exactly halfway, as each government claimed. Hans Island was at the edge of a strait that had opened up in recent years, in summer at least, making a Northwest Passage finally viable for commercial shipping; if the island was Canadian then so was the strait, and if it wasn’t the strait was international waters. For want of a nail, the horse was lost. . . .
Neither Canada nor Denmark, both NATO allies, were willing to fight over it. That was why he and Gord were there: to live for twelve full months on the island, firing a flare each day at the two times satellites passed overhead, to prove Canadians lived there year-round. Gord and Stan had been detailed from the Ranger base at Alert when no Inuit had been found willing to do it; even for them this was no place to live. As for the Danes. . . .
Stan drew his hand back, let the heatlock cycle at its normal rate. They had seen no sign of Danes since they had arrived the previous spring, but in planning the mission Defence had assumed they would face some covert attempts to interrupt their stay, come up with as many countermeasures as they could. The heatlock was one of those, designed to prevent the expulsion of too much warm air that might betray the location of the camouflaged base. With no knowledge of what similar technologies the Danes might have—only that they were likely ahead in the race—Equipment, Procurement and Supply had done what they could while Stan and Gord trained in the near North, learning lower-tech survival skills.
After what felt like forever the outer door opened. By that time Stan was chilled through, despite his insulated undersuit. The outersuit was hanging a few metres away from a hook attached to the heat baffle that rose over the base. Unlike the undersuit, which was designed to keep him warm, the outersuit kept the air around him cool: it was basically a man-shaped thermos, filled with gel-packs that stayed liquid to sixty below, absorbing and storing the heat he threw off so he would have no infrared signature. The breathing mask drew air in from outside, cold and dry, but stored his exhaled air in cooling chambers before expelling it, again to keep him as cold as the world around him. Outside the suit was Kevlar covered with a layer of a nanofiber that tuned itself to the ambient light around it, grey in twilight and black in darkness; the headpiece’s visor, sealed away from his breathing mask to avoid fogging, was an insulated crystal display that gave him a digital feed in IR as well as the visible spectrum. He looked like the Michelin Man with it all on, but in this terrain he was nearly invisible to conventional or IR sight.
Flexing the suit’s stiff fingers Stan opened the gun locker, picked up his Ross Polar III and slung it over his shoulder. He patted his hip pocket to make sure the flare pistol was there and then followed the curve of the heat baffle, emerging halfway up the steep slope that led from the cliff on which Base Hearn sat to the flat top of the island where the flare station was. Out of the shelter he felt the force of the wind on him, blowing pebbly snow hard enough to make him glad of the suit’s extra mass.
He switched on the light intensifier, the sky almost fully dark at 15:10—this near to the solstice just a few hours passed between dawn and dusk. The island was barren and nearly featureless, a wrinkled rock that rose up high at one end and sloped down to a stony beach at the other; he tuned the contrast on the video feed way up, exaggerating the many creases and fissures in the ground enough so that he could actually see them, turning all into dark lines that looked like they had been drawn on the ground with a felt-tip marker.
At this end of the island there was no horizon; to his right were the cliffs and the endless, frozen sea, to his left the rocky slope that rose up at an unclimbable angle. He followed the ridge he was on until the first inukshuk came into view. This one they had nicknamed Atii, “Let’s go” in Inuktitut; it looked the most like the inuksuit you saw in the south, a vaguely man-shaped pile of rocks with legs, arms and head, the whole thing about a half-metre tall. They had built eight of these around the island, all different: as well as checkpoints they served as sentries, the thought being that someone unfamiliar with the island would likely stumble over one and knock it over. The first one, built where the lower ridge climbed up towards the island’s flat top, was undisturbed, so Stan sighted the second and headed for it.
It took him a minute to notice what was wrong: this inukshuk, called Howa-ii or “turn left,” should have one arm longer than the other, pointing to its right. Instead it looked like the first one, arms and legs symmetrical. Someone had been here, someone who did not know how the different inuksuit were supposed to look.
Stan checked the timer readout on his visor: 15:53, still almost two hours until he had to fire the flare. He left the inukshuk as it was, to warn Gord if he was still out here, and started the climb up to the plateau at the top of the island. This was one of the few possible approaches, and even here it was a rise of nearly forty-five degrees, going up four metres in a distance just over that; he leaned into the climb, keeping his gaze moving back and forth to spot any moving objects or IR sources.
He was halfway up the slope when he saw something, or thought he did: whatever it was didn’t throw off any heat, and even with the contrast at maximum it was hard to tell a rounded grey shape from the sloping rocks. It might have been Gord, or a Dane, or nothing; before Stan could get a second look his foot caught in one of the island’s deeper folds. He pitched forward, striking the hard ground with a crack before rolling down the slope.
Not quite unconscious, Stan’s mind swam as he struggled to right himself. The suit’s weight fought against him, making him slide further down the slope before he could get to his feet. Standing uneasily he looked around. To his dismay, none of the inuksuit were in sight. Their third function was as landmarks: each part of the island looked much like every other part, its steep rise and fall making it impossible to see any distance except from the plateau.
You’re in a house where all four walls face south, he thought. A bear walks by. What colour is the bear? This near to the Pole, a compass was useless; on a clear day he might spot the North Star, but today was far from that. He checked the time readout: 16:20, an hour and a half till the fifteen-minute window during which he needed to fire the flare. He might head straight up, but there were few enough manageable approaches to the plateau that he could spend hours getting there. Better just to follow the path of least resistance: that was where they had placed the inuksuit, at points where anyone walking the island was likely to pass. If he could find one he recognized he would know where he was—assuming it was still intact.
That reminded him of the figure he had seen, or might have seen, just before falling, and he suddenly wondered whether his fall might have damaged the suit. The head of the suit was able to tilt far enough down for him to see that he wasn’t radiating from the front, but there was only one way to tell if he had a sign that read SHOOT ME in IR on his back; sighing, he lay down on the ground, watched a few minutes tick off. Enough heat would have gotten out to visibly warm the stones by now if he was bright, so with effort he rose again and turned around. Nothing: the million-dollar product of Canadian ingenuity and second-hand NASA technology had survived a fall. Letting out a dry breath Stan started his way downhill, not having to remind himself to take the easy path.
He saw the ocean first, the endless frozen waves of Kennedy Channel, almost missed the inukshuk that stood a few metres before the shore. As he neared he saw that the upper stones were leaned against one another to make a V, or a pair of arms held skywards. Now he knew where he was: the southern shore, only about twenty metres and a gentle slope from Base Franklin. Now that he had his bearings he could get there, check on Gord, and still get up to the flare station in plenty of time; knowing where he was he could even see the building, its camouflaged dome barely visible against the curve of the island.
Before he had covered half the distance he saw that he had been wrong to think the suit had not been damaged. It was not leaking heat, but he could see now that the seal between his breathing mask and visor had been broken: dry as his breath was it was starting to fog up the panel, and before long he would be blind.
He could not change his plan: there was no use heading for the flare station if he couldn’t see to fire the flare. If he made it to Base Franklin while he could still see, though, he might be able to get a spare, or repair the seal—or Gord might be there, might tell him that he had fired the morning flare and there was nothing to worry about. Then they could both laugh, share coffee and doughnuts and forget about this whole business.
Stan forced himself to slow down. He had to keep his breathing shallow, slow the frost forming on his visor. The base was so close; it took everything he had to keep his strides even, his heart quiet. Moving this slowly he had too much time to think—about what might have happened to Gord, about the visor, about the Danish rifle that might be pointed at him. Though he knew he was still dark he felt terribly exposed, and could not help letting out a long breath when he reached Base Franklin. Near to the beach end, this base rose up away from the ocean, presenting its rounded grey face to the rest of the island. With stiff fingers Stan flipped up the cover for the keypad, punched in the code for the heatlock.
It didn’t open.
Forcing himself to hold his breath, Stan tried again, punching the numbers carefully with the stylus-tip on his right index finger. Again, nothing.
What was going on here? Frost lacework was creeping in from the edges of his visor; Stan realized he was hyperventilating, forced himself to count to sixty to slow himself down. The timer was covered now, illegible.
Scanning from right to left, Stan noticed that there was no rifle outside the base. That wasn’t like Gord: he knew to leave his weapon in the gun locker outside—any condensation from a change in temperature would freeze and ruin it when you went back out. Slowly, Stan circled the small, slanted building, confirmed there was no rifle anywhere around it. Gord had left his gun somewhere else, then, or he had been forced to go inside without taking the time to drop it—or whoever was in there wasn’t Gord.