Ice Station

his white-gray body armor, he knew the reflective single-lens glasses made him look particularly icy. A kid would like that. Schofield didn't take the glasses off.

'Yeah, I guess they are pretty cool,' he said. 'How old are you?'

'Twelve, almost thirteen.'

'Yeah?'

'I'm kind of short for my age,' Kirsty added matter-of-factly.

'Me, too,' Schofield said, nodding.

He looked down as the seal flopped forward and started sniffing at his knee. 'And your friend here. What's his name?'

'She's a girl, and her name is Wendy.'

Schofield reached down and let the seal sniff his hand. She wasn't very big, about the size of a medium-sized dog, and she happily wore a cute red collar.

'Wendy. What kind of seal is she?' Schofield asked as he began to pat Wendy on the head.

'Arctocephalus gazella,' Kirsty said. 'Antarctic fur seal.'

Wendy started winding her head around in Schofield's hand, forcing him to pat her behind her earflap. He did, and then suddenly Wendy dropped to the ground and rolled over onto her back.

'She wants you to rub her tummy,' Kirsty said, smiling. 'She likes that.'

Wendy lay on the catwalk, on her back, her flippers held out wide, waiting to be patted. Schofield bent down and gave her a quick rub on the stomach.

'You just won yourself a friend for life,' Sarah Hensleigh said, watching Schofield closely.

'Great,' Schofield said, rising.

'I didn't know Marines could be so friendly,' Sarah said suddenly, taking Schofield slightly off guard.

'We're not all heartless.'

'Not when there's something here that you want.'

The comment made Schofield stop and look at Sarah for a long second. Clearly, she was no fool.

Schofield nodded slowly, accepting the criticism. 'Ma'am, if you don't mind, if we could just get back to what we were discussing before, you know two of them, and you know of one of them, right?'

'That's right.'

'What about the fourth one, Cuvier?'

'Never met him.'

Schofield moved on. 'And how many did they take back to d'Urville?'

'They could only fit six people in their hovercraft, so one of their guys took five of our people back there.'

'Leaving the other four back here.'

'That's right.'

Schofield nodded to himself. Then he looked at Hensleigh. 'There are a couple of other things we need to talk about. Like what you found down in the ice. And the Renshaw ... incident.'

Sarah understood what he was saying. Such matters were best discussed in the absence of a twelve-year- old.

She nodded. 'No problem.'

Schofield looked at the ice station around him: at the pool down at the bottom, at the catwalks set into the walls of the cylinder, at the tunnels that disappeared into the ice. There was something about it all that wasn't quite right, something that he couldn't quite put his finger on.

And then he realized, and he turned to face Sarah. 'Stop me if this is a stupid question, but if this whole station is carved into the ice shelf and all the walls are made of ice, why don't they melt? Surely you must generate a lot of heat in here with your machinery and all. Shouldn't the walls be dripping constantly?'

Sarah said, 'It's not a stupid question. In fact, it's a very good question. When we first arrived here, we found that the heat from the exhaust of the core-drilling machine was causing some of the ice walls to melt. So we had a cooling system installed on C-deck. It works off a thermostat that keeps the temperature steady at ?1° Celsius no matter what heat we produce. The funny thing is, since the surface temperature outside is almost thirty below, the cooling system actually warms the air in here. We love it.'

'Very clever,' Schofield said as he looked around the ice station.

His gaze came to rest on the dining room. Luc Champion and the other three French scientists were in there, sitting at the table with the residents of Wilkes. Schofield watched them, deep in thought.

'Are you going to take us home?' Kirsty said suddenly from behind him.

For a long moment Schofield continued to watch the four French scientists in the dining room. Then he turned to face the little girl.

'Not just yet,' he said. 'Some other people will be here soon to take you home. I'm just here to take care of you until they do.'

Schofield and Hensleigh walked quickly down the wide ice tunnel. Montana and Hollywood kept pace behind them.

They were on B-deck, the main living area. The ice tunnel curved around a wide bend. Doors were sunk into it on either side: bedrooms, a common room, and various labs and studies. Schofield couldn't help noticing one particular door that had a distinctive three-ringed biohazard sign on it. A rectangular plate beneath the sign read: biotoxin laboratory.

Schofield said, 'They said something about it when we got to McMurdo. That Renshaw claimed he did it because the other guy was stealing his research. Something like that.'

'That's right,' Hensleigh said, walking fast. She looked at Schofield. 'It's just crazy.'

They came to the end of the tunnel, to a door set into the ice. It was closed and it had a heavy wooden beam locked in place across it.

'James Renshaw,' Schofield mused. 'Isn't he the one who found the spaceship?'

'That's right. But there's a whole lot more to it than that.'

Upon arriving at McMurdo Station, Schofield had been given a short briefing on Wilkes Ice Station. On the face of it, the station seemed like nothing special. It contained the usual assortment of academics: marine biologists studying the ocean fauna; paleontologists studying fossils frozen in the ice; geologists looking for mineral deposits; and geophysicists like James Renshaw who drilled deep down into the ice looking for thousand-year-old traces of carbon monoxide and other gases.

What made Wilkes Ice Station something special was that two days before Abby Sinclair's distress signal had gone out another high-priority signal had been sent out from the station: This earlier signal, sent to McMurdo, had been a formal request seeking the dispatch to Wilkes of a squad of military police.

Although the details had been sketchy, it appeared that one of the scientists at Wilkes had killed one of his colleagues.

Schofleld stared at the barred door at the end of the ice tunnel and shook his head. He really didn't have time for this. His orders had been very specific:

Secure the station. Investigate the spacecraft. Verify its existence. And then guard it against all parties until reinforcements arrived.

Schofield remembered sitting in the closed briefing room on board the Shreveport, listening to the voice of the Undersecretary of Defense on the speakerphone. 'Other parties have almost certainly picked up that distress signal, Lieutenant. If there really is an extraterrestrial vehicle down there, there's a good chance one of those parties might make a play for it. The United States Government would like to avoid that situation, Lieutenant. Your objective is the protection of the spacecraft, nothing else. I repeat. Your objective is the protection of the spacecraft. All other considerations are secondary. We want that ship.'

Not once had the safety of the American scientists at the station been mentioned, a fact that hadn't gone unnoticed by Schofield. It obviously hadn't slipped past Sarah Hensleigh either.

All other considerations are secondary.

 In any case, Schofield thought, he couldn't afford to send any divers down to investigate the spacecraft while