The Covenant of Genesis

‘I will. Good job you’ll be there to pull me out of any crevasses.’

‘I meant of Sophia.’ Chase’s expression became serious again. ‘If she gets the chance, she’ll try to escape. Or kill us.’

‘So let’s not give her any chances.’

Chase nodded, then looked down at his black leather jacket. ‘Think I’ll need something a bit thicker than this, then.’

20

Antarctica

The sea rushing below the Bell BA609 tilt-rotor was a serene, perfect blue under the stark sunlight. But the day’s brightness was deceptive; even at the height of the Antarctic summer, the temperature was barely above freezing.

Huddled inside a thick parka, Nina peered over the pilot’s shoulder to watch the approaching coastline with awe. The land ahead was dazzling, a wall of ice rising practically vertically out of the sparkling ocean. Ice floes whipped past, tiny dots huddled on one. ‘Oh, wow, Eddie!’ she said. ‘I just saw my first penguins!’

Chase grinned. ‘Maybe we can p-p-p-pick one up on the way back.’

‘This is not a sightseeing tour,’ growled the man beside the pilot. Dr Rohit Bandra, Nina had quickly discovered after landing on the RV Southern Sun following the long flight in the tilt-rotor from Tasmania the previous day, was not someone who responded well to the unexpected. He had immediately launched into a huge argument with Trulli about the unscheduled arrival of his ‘assistants’, and it had taken all Nina’s persuasive powers - and fame - to mollify him even slightly. Apparently, news of her suspension hadn’t reached the South Pole.

He was still fuming, however, and had made it clear that the moment Trulli’s tests were successfully completed - and the expedition switched from a technical to a scientific exercise - the unwelcome guests would be sent packing, accompanied by a sternly worded complaint to the IHA. Although Trulli had downplayed it with his usual casualness, Nina could tell he was actually very worried about what it would mean to his career, and now felt horribly guilty for having involved him.

But her concerns faded as they approached the coastline. The sea was full of drifting ice; the Southern Sun was anchored over eighty miles offshore to keep clear of the floes calving off the ice cap that stretched away to the horizon, a slice of blinding white sandwiched between the deep blues of the ocean and the sky. More ice floes below, densely packed like crazy paving, then the cliff rolled past to reveal nothing but solid whiteness ahead.

They had arrived in Antarctica.

‘Feet dry at oh-eight seventeen,’ said the pilot, a Norwegian called Larsson. ‘Rough air ahead. We’re in for some chop.’

‘You’re not joking,’ Chase said as the Bell lurched, hit by the winds sweeping across the endless plains. He tightened his seatbelt. The other occupants of the cabin - Nina, Sophia, Trulli, Bandra and a pair of Trulli’s engineering assistants, David Baker and Rachel Tamm - quickly did the same.

Larsson checked the GPS, adjusting course. The newly selected test site was seven miles from the coast, the ice sheet having expanded hugely over the millennia. The terrain became more rugged, the flat plain rising up into mountains of pure ice, jagged chasms splitting the surface between them. The walls of the ravines changed colour as they got deeper, turning from white to startling, almost unreal shades of cyan and turquoise. ‘That’s beautiful,’ said Nina, amazed. ‘Why’s it that colour?’

‘Compression, Dr Wilde,’ said Bandra, voice filled with don’t-you-know-anything condescension. ‘The weight of the snow and ice above it squeezes out all the trapped air and turns it solid, so it absorbs red wavelengths of light. Hence, blue ice.’

‘Yeah?’ said Chase. ‘And I thought blue ice was the stuff that falls out of the bogs on planes. Cheers, doc, you learn something every day.’ Bandra looked more annoyed than ever, though Nina and Trulli both smiled at his deflation.

Something else below caught Nina’s attention: a column of what looked like smoke rising in the wind. She found its source, a strangely elongated and angular cone of ice protruding from the surface like a stalagmite. ‘Volcanic vents - we must be in the right place,’ she said, seeing more of the formations in the distance.

‘How far to the site?’ Trulli asked.

Larsson checked the GPS again. ‘About two kilometres.’ He pointed ahead. ‘Past that crevasse.’

Nina craned forward for a better look. It was a blank expanse of snow, not even broken by a volcanic vent, a deep ravine angling away towards the coast before it. The lack of landmarks made it difficult to judge scale, but the plain seemed at least a couple of miles across. The lake hidden beneath it, according to the radar survey, was considerably smaller.

‘I still want to make it perfectly clear that I object in the strongest possible terms to changing the test site,’ said Bandra as the tilt-rotor began to descend. ‘I will be complaining to the UN about the IHA’s appropriation of UNARA’s resources.’

‘Yeah, we got that, Dr Bandra,’ said Nina wearily.

‘But surely, Dr Bandra,’ said Sophia with mischievous innocence, ‘it doesn’t matter where the test takes place? After all, ice is ice.’

‘Ice is most certainly not ice!’ Bandra huffed. ‘Do you have any kind of scientific background at all, Miss Fox, or are you just another freeloading tourist like Mr Chase?’

She smiled. ‘Actually, I have some experience in the nuclear field.’ Trulli coughed at that, and Nina and Chase both gave ‘Miss Fox’ - the name on her fake passport - warning looks. Fortunately, none of the others picked up on her black joke.

The tilt-rotor dropped towards the centre of the ice plain, Larsson zeroing in on the precise GPS co-ordinates Trulli had provided and transitioning the aircraft from flight to hover mode, the engine nacelles on the wingtips pivoting to turn the oversized propellers into rotors. The Bell hung hesitantly above the centre of the vortex of blowing snow and ice crystals before landing with a bump.

Larsson peered out, leaving the engines running at just under takeoff speed. ‘Okay, the ice seems stable. But take a thickness reading before you unload any of the gear. I’d want at least ten metres under us to be safe.’

‘On it,’ said Trulli. He and Baker climbed out with a radar measuring device and circled the aircraft, hunched in their parkas as they took readings. Finally, Trulli gave Larsson a thumbs-up. He returned it and powered down the engines.

‘We’re over the lake,’ Trulli told Nina as he re-entered the cabin. ‘The ice is about forty metres thick, like we thought.’

‘How long will it take to drill through?’

‘Don’t jump the gun! We’ve got to get Cambot set up first; that’ll take a couple of hours. But forty metres . . .’ He stroked his chin, thinking. ‘I don’t want to push too hard, not on a first test run, so maybe half an hour. Unless you want to find one of the thinner patches of ice above the volcanic vents and drill through there.’

‘How thick were they?’

‘Twenty, twenty-five metres.’

‘So it halves the amount of time we have to stand around in the Antarctic. Sounds good to me.’

Bandra frowned at them. ‘And do you really think that is a proper test of the drill? It has to get through four kilometres of ice, not twenty metres!’

‘Cambot’s got to crawl before he can walk, eh?’ said Trulli, picking up more equipment. ‘All right, everybody, let’s kick some ice!’ Even Chase groaned at the pun.

Nina climbed out, immediately glad of her layers of clothing as she stepped on to the plain, the spiked crampons on her boots biting into the frozen surface. She put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses to shield her eyes from the glare of the sunlit snow. Apart from the tilt-rotor, there was no shelter from the constant, cutting wind. The landscape seemed completely flat, not so much as a rock breaking up the hard-packed surface snow. Despite having visited several barren deserts, she had never seen anywhere so utterly empty and lifeless.

Trulli and Baker took about twenty minutes with their radar device to find an area of thinner ice, only