Skibird by M. L. Buchman

Author:M. L. Buchman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Buchman Bookworks, Inc.

25

Miranda’s phone rang.

It was the first sound to shatter the vast silence.

The explosion had not been followed by fire as there was nothing of substance below left to burn. A few stray wisps of smoke emerged from the crevasse, perhaps the Russian helicopter’s fuel, but no more.

The agony of the groaning ice—did a personification count as a metaphor?—had also subsided into silence.

One by one, each person sat up and looked around at each other but no one spoke. It was as if sound had ceased to exist on the high ice until—

Her phone rang again.

She answered but couldn’t think of what to say.

“Miranda? Is that you?” A male voice. “Are you okay?”

Was she? She hardly knew.

“Miranda?”

“We’re…” she managed, then looked toward the field of shattered ice. “We’re going to need a new Russian.” Did this negate her mistake of revealing to Romanoff that she spoke Russian? She hoped so, because an angry Holly was more than she could handle at the moment.

There was a strangely choked laugh on the other end of the line. “How about the others?” Drake. Drake’s voice.

“What others?”

“Who else is with you Miranda?”

She had to look around to remind herself. “Holly, Mike, and Andi.” Andi was crawling toward her across the ice. No one was standing. “Marla and Freddy.”

“Who?”

“They’re Australian. Antarctic Program.”

Freddy was holding a handful of red snow against his cheek. Marla reached into the Hagglund and pulled out a medical kit.

“And Wang Daiyu. She’s Chinese.”

There was a brief silence during which Miranda noticed that the tail and wing of the Il-76 were gone as well. She hadn’t seen those being swallowed by the disaster. And the crew’s bodies, too. Their final burial place would be in the ice, until the glacier eventually moved out to sea in the distant future.

“Wang Daiyu?” Drake had paused long enough that he must have looked her up. He made it sound important.

“Yes. Did you want to speak to her?”

“Um…no. Tell me what happened. I’m here with Lizzy.”

“Hi, Lizzy.”

“Hello, Miranda. That was quite a fire.”

“It was. Though as nothing is burning, I believe that explosion would be a more appropriate noun to select.”

Again one of those weird conversational pauses. “Did you want me to keep speaking?”

“Yes please. Can you tell us what happened?”

This was good. She pulled out her personal notebook and made a note that a pause could be a silent invitation to continue a communication. She left a question mark in the column that denoted whether this was a standard rule or simply an occasional usage methodology.

“Miranda? Are you there?”

“Yes. We were investigating a Russian Il-76 that crash landed at Whoop Whoop Skiway. It was a good landing under the circumstances, or it would have been if the hadn’t been for the final dah in NHA. The plane fell into a deep crevasse, jamming into place twenty meters below the surface.”

“The final…NHA…never mind. Did the crew survive?”

“One lived to the surface, but probably not much longer.”

“That was over thirty-hours ago, so—”

“Between thirty-five and thirty-nine hours.”

Drake sighed deeply

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