“I wish it were only seven,” Kurt replied. “I’ve been on thirty glaciers in the last six months. And my conclusion is going to require a perfect record to generate any help. That means no gaps or missing data.”
She sighed. “So that’s why we fly out in the helicopter to reach the station. And when the clouds begin to close in, we land and then we hike. Okay, fine. But what I don’t understand is the obsession. The urgency. We’ve discovered exactly what we expected to discover. So far, everything has proven to be”—she paused, looking for the right word—“copacetic,” she said finally, using a word he’d been uttering far too frequently of late.
“That’s the problem,” Kurt said. “Nothing should be copacetic.”
He wasn’t at liberty to explain any further. And they didn’t have time to talk anyway. He put the goggles back in place. “We have to keep moving. There’s a storm coming. We need to find the station, get the data and get out of here or we’re going to be building an igloo and keeping each other warm until spring.”
“I could think of worse ways to spend the winter,” she said with a grin. “But not without food.”
He double-checked the bearing, set his feet and continued on.
The first sign of their goal was a bank of solar panels, black and glossy against the endless white field. The panels were designed by NASA for use on distant worlds at a cost of a million dollars per square foot, but the automated station required an incredible amount of power, and acres of standard solar cells would have been needed to generate what these four small panels were able to provide.
From the solar array, they followed a power line toward a suspicious-looking dome of white. It rested in a slight depression on the otherwise flat landscape.
Clearing away the windblown snow revealed metal plating with NUMA stenciled on it in block letters.
“National Underwater and Marine Agency,” Vala said. “I’ll never understand the American obsession with labeling every last piece of equipment.”
Kurt laughed. “You never know when someone is going to come along and steal your hubcaps.”
“Up here?”
“Probably not,” he said. “But when ten million dollars of equipment suddenly stops transmitting . . . well, the thought crossed my mind.”
Kurt scraped more snow and ice from the automated modules. They hadn’t been stolen, but something had obviously gone wrong. They were tilted over at an angle when they should have been level. “Looks like some ice slid down from the first module and sheared off the antenna. No wonder it wasn’t sending any data.”
He unzipped one of the many pockets in his jacket and pulled out a handheld computer. It looked like a cell phone, but was more rugged and winterized. Using a cable, he plugged it into a data port on the central module.
“The CPU is undamaged,” he said. “But it’ll take a few minutes to download all this data.”
As he waited, Vala wandered to the front edge of the station. “The drill is still operating.”
The station used a heat probe to drill down into the glacier until it found flowing water. Then, by measuring the depth, temperature and speed of the water, it determined the amount of glacial melting that was occurring.
They needed the information to test a new theory, one that suggested the world’s glaciers had been hollowing out from the inside instead of just retreating from the southern ends.
Kurt watched as the progress bar on the computer inched toward completion. “What’s the depth on the heat probe?”
“Eleven hundred feet,” Vala said. “And it seems—”
The ice shifted beneath them and her voice was drowned out by a loud crack. As Kurt steadied himself, the module in front of him slid to the right and tilted twenty degrees. He instinctively jumped back and checked the ground around him. On the other side of the monitoring station, Vala screamed.
Kurt ran to her, cutting around the front of the module. A large gap had opened up beneath the monitoring station. A drop of two hundred feet loomed beneath it. The only thing keeping the unit—and the Nordic scientist clinging to it—in place were the outlying anchors.
Kurt stepped forward and the snow beneath him began sliding away.
“Crevasse!” she called out.
He could see that. He pulled an ice pick from his belt and swung hard. The tungsten point bit deeply and gave him something to anchor himself with. Gripping the pick, and then the strap at the end, he stepped dangerously toward Vala, grabbed her by the hood of her snowsuit and pulled.
She leapt toward him and grabbed onto his arm, climbing over him and onto solid ground. Once there, she did what any sane person would have done: she started running away from the widening crevasse.
Kurt was inclined to follow, but he hadn’t come all this way to leave the data behind. He pulled himself up, yanked the ice pick free and rushed back to the computer, which was now dangling from the data port by its cord.
The station shifted again as two of the anchors holding it in place broke loose and their tautly stretched cords snapped across the snow like whips.
Kurt ducked to avoid the flying anchors and jammed the ice pick into the ground once again. He leaned out over the crevasse and was able to touch the computer, but the padded fingers of his gloves were so puffy that it was impossible to grasp it and pull it free.