The Winter Over(25)

She straightened up and made a more careful inspection of the tiny space, exactly sixteen square feet, reduced to about the distance of her outstretched arms by the junk that had been chucked into the hut over the years.

The hut had probably started out as a temporary shelter for a mining or construction crew, but the NSF had officially stopped using Jamesways in the seventies, which meant generations of Polies had probably commandeered the hut for a thousand different things since. Nosing around like a rat, she’d found broken drill bits, survival blankets, a part of a parachute from the original navy base from the 1950s, and the remains of a dozen eggs that had long since given up the ghost—cracked and frozen but not rotten.

The geek in her had been thrilled to find the curiosities, but she’d been even happier to see the sheer amount of crap in the hut, since she’d had an ulterior motive for poking around.

Moving carefully, she lifted a thick piece of shag carpet from a section of flooring that looked a lot like a wooden packing crate, which was exactly what it was. Kneeling, she pulled out her multi-tool and flicked open the knife blade. Slipping it into a gap between the boards, she pried up the floor, revealing a small, shoebox-sized depression in the ice. In the niche was a spaghetti-like mess of wires, circuits, and diodes, all mounted on a scrap of plywood.

Cass folded and punched the shag carpet into something like a pillow, gingerly lowered herself onto it, then reached into the depression and lifted out the hodgepodge of electronics with a surgeon’s care. She rested the whole thing on the floor beside her. Slipping a hand deep into her parka, she extracted a small black box about the size of two stacked paperback books. It was a twelve-volt SigmasTek rechargeable battery that would’ve lost its charge in an hour if it had been sitting in the ice below the hut, but lived most of its life safely on a shelf in her berth. Kept warm by her body on the trek to the Jamesway, it was juiced and ready to go.

All of this was done by the light of her headlamp. She pulled off the elastic band and, stretching her arm to the limit, hung it from a nail in a sidewall to act as an impromptu overhead light. Pawing at her cuff, she pulled back the sleeve of her parka and checked the time. Two minutes to go. She pulled one glove off and went about connecting the electrodes to the battery, sparking to life the crudest shortwave crystal radio in the history of amateur electronics.

Electrical work had never been a specialty of hers, but you couldn’t graduate from an engineering school without taking a few courses here and there, and every student had a friend in EE who had kluged together a homemade soldering iron, hacked an ATM machine, or built their own robot. Eventually, some of it rubbed off. In her case, she’d learned to build her own ham radio.

Another glance at her watch. Twenty seconds. She blew on her fingers, put the earpiece in—wincing at the sudden cold in an unexpected place—and began fiddling with the tuner.

“Vox,” she said, but the cold clutched at her throat and her voice came out in a rasp. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Vox. Come in, Vox. This is Blaze.”

Only the empty void of static answered her. She repeated the call every ten seconds, giving a self-conscious grimace each time she had to say her call sign out loud. The handle hadn’t been her idea.

After three minutes of constant calling, the answer came back, like a missive from deep space. “Blaze, this is Vox. Are you there, over?”

The voice was heavily accented and the radio waves gave it a hollow, tubular sound, but she grinned. “I’m here, Vox. What took you so long?”

Pause. “I keep telling you, my dear, you don’t know the Russian mind. Stalin might be a wax statue in the Kremlin’s front lobby, but Soviet-style paranoia is alive and well. It takes me an hour to put all the excuses in place to get to the radio. And I can’t talk for more than fifteen minutes, or someone is bound to come looking for me to make sure I’m not plotting against them.”

“It’s not that bad, is it? You’re ten thousand miles away from the nearest KGB agent. Or whatever you guys call it these days.”

“Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii ,” Vox said. “Not KGB, FSB. And, yes, they are on the other side of the planet, but it’s still a part of the planet I’d like to return to someday. So I do my work, watch over my shoulder, and report on my fellow scientists whenever I can.”

“You’re plotting against your other team members?”

“Of course.” It was difficult to tell with the static, but she thought he sounded surprised. “How else am I supposed to keep them paranoid enough to leave me alone?”

She laughed. “That’s crazy.”

“Russians invented crazy,” he said. “But you can’t tell me you Americans don’t do something similar.”

“Of course we don’t.”

“Please. Give me one break. No competition? No gossip? No secrets?”

The smile melted away as she thought about Sheryl. Not a word of this to anyone until I can make an official announcement, understand? Hanratty’s face floated into view from a murky corner of the hut, followed by Keene’s bland, bearded face. Everyone on base knew about Sheryl before you were done taking your gloves off.

She hesitated. She’d met Vox—real name unknown—during an unexpected hiatus at the Christchurch base on the last leg before the flight to McMurdo. The layover was usually a no-nonsense twenty-four-hour pause before the crew shoved off, but a surprise storm along the coast had grounded aircraft for a week. With hundreds of scientists, workers, and other Polies trapped in a mid-sized New Zealand city with nothing to do except indulge in bouts of epic drinking, every bar in the city had turned into an intoxicated, impromptu United Nations. Cass had met Vox, a shaggy-haired, gap-toothed, thirty-something radio astronomer in the company of six Swedish physicists en route to borrowing time at the Lyubov Orlova station.