Frozen Solid A Novel

41




THE ALTITUDE, DRYNESS, AND POLARRHEA HAD LEFT HER DEHYDRATED. She had no appetite for solid food, but she needed liquid: juice, water, coffee—well, maybe not coffee just yet. She headed for the galley, thinking that she had not had such an unbroken run of bad luck for as long as she could remember. She was still thinking that when she came off the serving line with two big glasses of apple juice and her luck suddenly changed. Maynard Blaine was alone at a corner table, twirling spaghetti around a fork. She sat across from him.

“Aren’t you supposed to be locked up or something?” he said.

“It’s prime dinner time. Why aren’t there any people here?”

“They’re afraid. Don’t want to be with other people.” He forked up a ball of spaghetti dripping with marinara sauce. “Especially not with you. I heard Graeter put you under house arrest. How come you’re out?”

“How come you’re here, Maynard?”

He shrugged. “I hate my goddamned room.”

“No, I mean, how come you’re still sitting here with me?”

“I think it’s probably bullshit, what they’re saying.”

“That I brought in some exotic germ?”

“Yes.” He stopped twirling spaghetti, looked more closely at her. “Maybe I was wrong, though. You don’t look so good.”

“Aw, well, thanks for the compliment, Embie.”

He looked as if she had slapped him.

Polarrhea had turned out to be productive in more ways than one. Maybe there really was something to high colonics, after all, she thought. Ambie wasn’t short for a name beginning with “A-M.” Emily’s Georgia accent had made it sound that way on the video log. She had been saying “Embie.” Short for M.B. And those were the initials of Maynard Blaine.

“What did you call me?”

She leaned forward, lowered her voice. Not really necessary, because only one other table was occupied, and that man was well out of hearing. But she wanted to make an impression. So she hissed just one word:

“Triage.”

He rose too quickly and spilled spaghetti sauce on his shirt. He stood there, staring down at the bright red blotches, seeming to have forgotten all about her.

“Sit down,” she snapped. “We can do this right here, just the two of us, or with Graeter.”

He sat.

The fury she had been holding in made her voice shake. “You told me you barely knew Emily. I know you were sleeping with her. Why did you lie?”

He glanced around, leaned forward. “Please lower your voice.”

“It is low. But it’s about to get louder. Talk to me.”

“Would you want to be known as the jilted boyfriend of a scientist who died under suspicious circumstances?”

She sat back. That was reasonable. Why hadn’t she thought of that? Pole brain. But too soon to let it go. “Other people must have known about the two of you, though.”

“We were discreet. Rarely ate together, no public displays of affection, all very professional.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t care one way or the other. She wanted it that way.”

“Do you know why?”

“She was afraid if word got around, it could hurt her chances for more grants.”

“Who would have cared?”

“Graeter and Merritt both file performance reports on everybody here. In case you haven’t noticed, women are not his favorite people. Women who sleep around are beneath the bottom of his shit list. She thought he would ding her big-time for it.”

“Do you know anything about Vishnu?”

“Yeah. It was the stuff Emily found in the cryopeg.”

“What did she tell you about it?”

“Not much. Ate carbon dioxide like a champ, I think. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Talk to me about Triage,” she said.

Hallie had read the expression “the blood drained from his face,” but she had never actually seen it happen. His mouth opened halfway, but nothing came out. Finally, not looking at her, he said, “About what?”

“I’ll be back with Graeter, Embie.” She stood up.

“Please don’t call me that. And sit down. Please,” he whispered.

“The last time.”

“It could be the end of my career if it goes farther than this table.”

“Could be the end of more than that if you’re involved with Em’s death.”

She had to lean forward to hear. “I’m engineering a new virus that can immobilize enemy combatants without killing them. ‘Humane warfighting’ is what it’s called.”

“By whom?”

“The project originators.”

“You’ll have to do better than that.”

“You know how picornaviruses have those really long, multifunctional, untranslated region fives? My work focuses on a ribosome entry source in one of those regions that’s very susceptible to protease manipulation. I want to stimulate the protein synthesis in infected cells, which should increase their pathogenicity and give it a neurological affinity.”

“Why in God’s name would you be doing that at the South Pole?”

“There’s no place for it to go.”

“To go? You mean, if there’s a breach?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re using the whole station as one big BSL-4 containment lab.”

“Jesus, no. I told you that before. My lab is biosecure. And Triage isn’t supposed to kill people, anyway. Just immobilize them.”

“Isn’t supposed to. But you’re not sure about that, or you wouldn’t be working down here. You just told me that.”

He didn’t agree, but neither did he deny it. Hallie’s stomach clenched again. The churning and rumbling in her gut was clearly audible.

“Polarrhea,” Blaine said. “Lucky you.”

“Is there any chance your pathogen could have breached containment and killed those women?”

“No way in hell.”

“How much experience do you have working with Level Three and Four pathogens?”

“Enough. Or I wouldn’t have been picked for this project.”

“What’s the first step in donning a Chemturion BSL-4 biosafety suit?”

“Take a piss.”

That was right. “Who’s running this operation?”

“NSF.”

She was about to laugh in his face, but then she remembered what Fida had said about NSF’s national security origin.

“I know it sounds crazy,” he protested, trying to regain some composure and control. “But there it is.” He shrugged. “How did you find out?”

“Believe in ghosts?”

“What? No.”

“You should. Emily told me everything.”

“Bullshit.”

“Like how you mixed Stoli and beer and Ecstasy at the New Year’s Eve party. Got drunk and high and babbled on about things you shouldn’t have. And like how she dumped you, but you kept hanging around, stalking her. I could go on.”

He stared, speechless.

“Let me ask you something else. And keep in mind that I might already know the answer to this question. Just seeing how many lies you’re telling. What did you dress up as for January’s Thing Night?”

“A Walking Dead.”

She waited, holding his eyes.

“Really. I swear. A zombie.”

“Can anybody verify that?”

“I don’t know. The costume was really good. Part of it was a rubber mask over a lot of my face.”

“Do you work with a partner?”

“In the lab? No. Security.”

“Have you ever been down into Old Pole?”

He looked at her like the Pole might already be depriving her of certain faculties. But when he spoke, he sounded hugely relieved to be talking about something other than Triage. “Yes.”

“Tell me about it.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Humor me.”

“Creepiest place you could possibly imagine. Like something straight out of the old Thing movie. The walls and ceilings are collapsing. Everything is fifty years old. Stinks. No lights. It’s like a labyrinth. You can get good and lost down there.”

Sounds just like a cave, she thought. She loved caves. “If it’s so bad, why go there?”

“There’s old booze, for one thing, stashed in odd places. But mainly, it’s f*cking different. You can’t imagine what it’s like after you’ve been here eight or nine months. Your mind shrivels up. Day after day, nothing changes. Old Pole is new, odd as that sounds. Different. Scary. You go down there to make sure you’re still alive.”

“Even though you could get killed.”

“That’s maybe the point, I think.”

“How do you get down there? Through the Underground?”

“Not anymore. There was a tunnel, but Graeter found out about it and had it blocked.”

“So?”

“There’s an equipment shed a quarter mile from the station. Off to the right, about a forty-five-degree angle from the main entrance. The shaft is behind, out of sight of the station. There’s a plywood cover and snow on top of that. Why do you want to know? Are you thinking of going down there?”

She recoiled. “God, no. You couldn’t drag me down to a place like that. No way in hell. I was just curious. The way people talk …” Her stomach moved again, a feeling of viscous churning.

Blaine heard it, said, “You’d better hurry. That stuff can be explosive.”

“I learned that.” She stood. “We’re not done. Be here when I get back.”

She pointed at his shirt. “That looks like blood.”

She left him scrubbing the red spots furiously with a handful of napkins.