“Yee-uck. I hate it when you do that.” Tom wiped his neck with his hand and turned around. Aimee sat smiling with her left eyebrow raised and the straw dangling from her bottom lip.
She had known Tom for ten years, ever since he had been at her university spotting on behalf of his company. Even as a gangly, or as her father said “coltish,” nineteen-year-old, her grades and natural scientific talent in the areas of biology and biogenic decomposition made her stand out from a crowded and impressive field. Her potential was a magnet to companies looking for the most valuable of corporate assets: intelligence. Tom had made her laugh till tears ran down her cheeks and humanised science more than any dry professor ever had. He was like an older brother and could still make her laugh today like that kid at university a decade ago, yet over the years he had looked out for her and guided her career and now she was one of the most respected petrobiologists in the world.
Tom Hendsen was the lead scientist working for GBR, a small research company that specialised in geological and biological research into fossil fuels, their discovery, use, synthesis and hopefully one day, replacement. He was forty, slim and tall, with an easy laugh. Though they all had an informal working relationship within GBR he was the natural leader due to his maturity and encyclopedic knowledge of deep earth petrobiology.
Aimee loved Tom, but as with all sibling relationships there were flare-ups — rare, but they happened; just like now. Tom had been urgently requested by the government to accompany a rescue mission to the Antarctic. A private jet had gone down on the ice, or rather, through the ice. A large cavern had been opened up and initial data received indicated a large body of mid-crust liquid that could be surface petroleum and natural gas. It was probably nothing more than screwy data or some illegal dumping ground used by the numerous nations that visited the Antarctic for everything from research to mining — nations that eyed the continent hungrily as the last great unexplored, or rather unravaged, continent on earth. However, it could also be something significant; the Antarctic wasn’t always covered in snow and ice and about 150 million years before, when Gondwana began to break up, what was now the Antarctic coalesced around the South Pole. A number of species of dinosaur were known to have existed and the lush plant life became dominated by fern-like plants which grew in swamps. Over time these swamps became deposits of coal in the Transantarctic Mountains and could have decomposed into reservoirs of oil below them.
“But you hate the cold, and you don’t like field work. I’m more than qualified to at least assist you down there.” Aimee hated the whining tone creeping into her voice. She knew Tom was the best person to go, but she had been working on her current project now for eighteen months and was looking for any sort of interesting diversion — and this sounded like just the sort of thing that she’d like to do.
“Aimee, someone has got to front the board on Wednesday and discuss our results on the viability models for synthetic fuel production or we won’t get the additional funding,” Tom responded in his most patient tone. “You know you’re better than I am at twisting those board members around your little finger.” Aimee could tell Tom was deliberately flattering her and she gave him a fake “gosh, thanks” smile.
“I’ll be back in a week, probably with little more than a cold to show for it,” he said without looking up from his packing. “I’ll take some electromagnetic readings and map the near-surface alteration effects of any hydrocarbon migration and then we can turn the results into some nice 3D models for our friends in the boardroom.”
“Well, make sure you use plenty of colour and description and lose all the jargon or you might as well show them pictures of your auntie’s knitting for all those board members will understand,” Aimee responded half-jokingly, knowing Tom was the best in the business at making complex subjects easy to understand and accessible to even the dullest bureaucrat. “And bring me back some snow.”
“I’ll bring you a penguin, no two, to make a pair of slippers,” he said, both of them now laughing at their silliness.
Her eyes had once more returned to the soft Aimee blue. As usual he had managed to disarm her with a sense of humour that was more at home in a schoolyard than a laboratory. Knowing Tom, he’d spend his time in the tent hunched over his computer and be cold and bored by the end of the first day.
Next time, she thought, it would be her turn, no question about it.
Three
Alex Hunter walked from the warm seawater after his dawn swim; it was his favourite time of the day — with the screeching of the gulls as they circled overhead and the shushing of the surf as it crashed onto the golden beach. The sea mist blew gently across his face as his grey-green eyes scanned the horizon. He closed them briefly and drew in a large breath to totally absorb the smells of his world.
After an hour of hard swimming he wasn’t even breathing hard. At thirty-six years old and just over six feet tall his body was lean but strongly muscled across the arms and chest, representative of someone who trained vigorously and often. However, numerous scars attested to the fact this was no frame created in a gymnasium, but one that was hewn in and for battle. Alex shook his head from side to side and then dragged his hand through his short black hair. His square jaw and angular cheeks ensured there was no shortage of female attention, however, a complex and dangerous lifestyle meant there could never be any permanence to his relationships. Alex had been trained to win, to fight and succeed no matter what the odds, but there were some things that he felt were beyond even his capabilities. He could never settle down, could never describe his work, and could never share his success and failures with anyone other than his military peers. And now, following his field accident, he was more alone than ever.
Like a bronze statue Alex stood motionless on the sand, hands tightly gripping a faded beach towel; his eyes became lifeless chips of glass as he travelled in his head back to a life that now seemed to belong to someone else. Angie was gone, she was already leaving him before his last mission but had promised she would wait and be there to talk to him when he returned; he never made it. He didn’t think she had stopped loving him — just couldn’t stop the worrying, he guessed. In the time they had together they had loved and laughed like teenagers, and even now little things about her still haunted him: her thick brown hair that always smelled of fresh green apples, the line of perspiration on her top lip after they had made love, her enormous brown eyes. She said he could make her blush and go tingly just by talking to her. They were going to be married, and now he couldn’t even call her, he had ceased to exist. He had heard she was seeing some suit from Boston; she’d be OK.
His mother had been told he was dead, heaven knew when he would ever be authorised to tell her the truth. Since his father had been taken by a heart attack ten years ago she had quit her job and slowed right down; she swapped a job in advertising for flowers, vegetables, and games of bridge two nights a week. He could still see her on the front porch in late spring with her spoilt Alsatian, Jess, asleep at her feet, her paws twitching in a dream where snooty overweight Siamese cats tripped over right in front of her. Until he learned to control and conceal his new abilities, it wasn’t safe for anybody to know he was alive.
Life had made Alex a strange trade, one where he had both gained and lost. The thick towel Alex was gripping tore in half; he hadn’t realised that the pressure had been building within him.
His rehabilitation, if you could call it that, was complete. Two years ago on a clandestine search and rescue mission in northern Chechnya, Alex Hunter had been ambushed and shot in the head — a trauma that should have killed him. He had been in a death-like coma for two weeks and when he had emerged from hospital after another month he was different, somehow altered. The bullet was lodged deep within his cerebellum in the junction between his hypothalamus and thalamus, a position that made removal more manslaughter than surgery. However, instead of causing irreparable damage as it should have done, it had ignited a storm of both physical and mental changes that had astounded his doctors.
Alex remembered them trying to explain what had happened to him and their assumptions when some of his abilities had started to emerge. Even among the gathered specialists in his room there was debate on how the human midbrain functioned. Some argued that humans make use of less than half of their total brain functions, with the other significant portion locked away for evolution to make use of when environmental or chronological factors dictate they are ready. Others were just as adamant that the unused portions were an evolutionary remnant of no more use than the appendix or tonsils.
