Lost Worlds Short Stories by Adam Roberts

Author:Adam Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flame Tree Publishing
Published: 2018-12-03T09:52:03+00:00

In Ice Entombed

K.G. McAbee

“What the hell is that?” I pointed at the whirling maelstrom ahead of us, peculiar colors chasing each other through the massed ice.

Kirsch shrugged. He wiped condensate off the poly-glass window of our borer and hissed as the cold penetrated his thick glove.

Damn, it was cold. You’d think, with the globe warming and the icecaps melting, cold would no longer be an issue. You’d be right, mostly, but so wrong in Antarctica.

“Backwash?” Kirsch flipped switches and regarded dials. “Nope, everything within parameters. Maybe some sort of visual anomaly?”

I leaned closer to the window and examined the mass of ice before us. It didn’t look like a snow mirage, like none I’ve seen, anyway. And I’ve seen a lot of them since we started mining here at the bottom of the world.

But this job, now. This job had been different from the get-go.

“It’s a lake under nearly a mile of ice,” my boss had told me back at our base on Heard Island. “And somebody with a lot of money wants a big hole in the ice sheath to get to the water.” He handed me the work order and I whistled when I read it.

“Yeah,” Johnson agreed. “He wants it bad. Seems that water beneath the ice hasn’t been exposed since one of those prehistoric times, Jurassic or Triassic or some other -ic. So go bore us a hole and let’s see why the water under it is so valuable.”

“Any non-contamination procedures I need to be aware of?” I looked out the window in his office so I wouldn’t have to see the smirk on his face. I knew his attitude towards rules and procedures: things to bypass when possible or buy out of when necessary.

“Just go and do your job,” he said. “Take whatever crew you like.”

“Triple time?”

This time he didn’t limit it to a smirk but threw his bearded head back. A deep laugh erupted from his belly. “Hell, that’s just to start. Remember, though. Your job is to get close then call me. A rep from the corporation wants to be there when the water is exposed.”

“This corporation have a name?” I asked.

“I’m sure it does. Don’t they all?”

Okay, then, as suspected. We were on our own. So we’d trekked all our equipment in, some by heli-transport, some by snow cats, and set up on the shores of Lake Vostok, deep in the Antarctic interior.

Now, three months later, Kirsch, Meehan and I were in a borer, which is basically a big-ass drill with seats inside. And we were damn close to the end of the ice sheath over the lake and the beginning of that ancient fresh water. That mysteriously valuable ancient water.

“How long ago is the Triassic?” Meehan asked as he looked out his own window. The maelstrom or whirlpool or, hell, visual anomaly, was getting closer.

“Sixty-five or seventy million years, give or take,” I said. Yes, I’d read up on it.

“Long damn time,” he said and went back to making notes on his pad.

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