The Winter Over(62)
“We’ve been over the system with a fine-tooth comb. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t an equipment failure. It was sabotaged thoroughly and effectively and we’ve found out that even satcom and the data streams from the labs like COBRA were affected. We can’t call out or receive communications, nor send an emergency signal to McMurdo for extraction. Hell, we can’t send Morse code over the wire.”
“The Observer?” Deb asked.
Hanratty nodded. “Taylor, Keene, and I think so.”
“But why?” she asked, baffled. “We aren’t part of the experiment.”
Keene picked at the dirt under a fingernail. “We are now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“What the hell do you mean our communications are out?”
Hanratty swallowed and passed a hand over his throat self-consciously. He’d called for an all-hands meeting in Shackleton’s gym, hoping that the appearance of transparency would keep everyone calm and united behind him. The gym had seemed a strategic choice not only because of its size, but also to stop cliques from forming, as might have happened in a more familiar locale like the galley. By keeping everyone on their feet and mixed as a general population, he’d planned to increase the feeling of isolation among individual crew members.
Unfortunately, herding all the people on base into a single large room seemed to have had the opposite effect, breeding a single, larger organism filled with anger and fear. Perhaps he’d misjudged his audience. His old leadership instructors at Fort Benning would not have been pleased.
“I understand what you must be feeling right now.” State the problem . “Many of you are upset and scared. Communications is the lifeline that connects us to the outside world, and that lifeline has, admittedly, been compromised.”
A murmur of discontent, amplified by the tile floor and hard concrete walls, rippled through the room.
Biddi Newell raised her voice. “Jack, what happened, exactly? How is it possible that all of our comms went down at once?”
“We’re looking into that. It has been suggested that an electrical surge from the recent heat and power outage might’ve caused some damage that began to accumulate and only now resulted in a circuit failure.”
Hanratty swept his eyes over the crowd, trying to gauge the effect of his words. The mutters picked up volume. Control the message.
“In any case,” he hurried on, “we’re working on solutions, not theories or recriminations. What other questions do you have?”
“What about work? I’m worried about data loss,” Anne said, her expression pinched. “Those transmissions are critical to what we’re doing down here.”
“We have on-base backups as a fail-safe,” he said. “None of your work will be lost.”
“What about a satellite phone?” someone asked from the back. “Can’t we just pick up the line and call McMurdo?”
“We can’t find it.”
A swelling growl of disbelief met his statement. “You’ve got to be joking,” Dave Boychuck said from the middle of the pack, his beard bristling. “And what do you mean ‘it’? We only have one?”
“That’s correct,” he said, getting ready for the storm. “I don’t know how the need was overlooked, but we were left with one sat phone on base. And that one is missing.”
Calls of “Bullshit” and “I can’t believe this” rose in the crowd. Hanratty raised his hands over his head. Show common cause .
“Again, I understand you’re upset, you’re scared, and—since much of the science can’t happen without reliable communications—pretty pissed off. Believe me, I am, too. I didn’t sign up for this any more than you did.”
He looked at the two-score people in front of him, their pale faces watching him for comfort and reassurance. He wished he could give it to them. Get them to unite behind you .
“But the most important thing we can do right now is, you guessed it, stay calm. Going ballistic when we have no way of reaching the outside world isn’t going to help matters. Blaming me or the admin staff might feel good in the short term, but it’s not going to restore our satellite uplink. I called all of you in here today so you could see we’re doing our best to solve the problem. We are still in a safe, stable environment”—a snort met his statement, but he bulled on—“and we’re just a short time away from returning everything back to normal.”
He felt the gazes of Taylor, Keene, Ayres, and Deb boring into him, but he refused to look in their direction. They’d all agreed—with dissension on Ayres’s part, but eventual capitulation—that it would be in everyone’s best interests to maintain the fabrication that the communications failure was an accident and that normal comms would be restored soon. They could continue spooling out excuses for weeks if they had to, but the truth, he knew, would start a riot. End with a positive message .
“In the meantime,” he began, but—Jesus Christ —just as he was set to launch into his message the lights in the gym went out, plunging the room into darkness.
For one startled moment, he thought he could still see thanks to the impression burned on his retina. Then someone screamed and he was jostled as people began moving, shouting, gasping.