Cold War - Jerome Preisler [79]
Megan turned to face him. She was in minimal ECW gear, her parka’s hood down, snow goggles raised above her brow, no balaclava. The comm tech had notified her of the arrivals just ten minutes ago, but she could already hear the choppers rumbling in, and expected to be out of the cold before too long.
“And wood sprites in the gloom weave magic secrets,” she said.
“Nice line. Yours or borrowed?”
“You know I’m not that poetic.”
“Nice anyway,” Nimec said. “What’s the message?”
Megan gave him a shrug.
“Our astronomers and field photographers throw conniptions when diamond dust settles on their optics,” she said. “They spend weeks preparing to observe an event of some sort or another, use the finest equipment available, and a little ice shoots the works. It wastes time, effort, and lots of money. People get upset, accuse each other of negligence, incompetence, all sorts of idiotic things. And naturally I wind up having to referee. It’s worse than a nuisance. But the sky. That’s the other side of it for me.”
Nimec frowned. “This time it isn’t about telescopes,” he said. “It’s about three missing human beings.”
Megan was quiet for several moments.
“I don’t need to be reminded of that,” she said then.
Nimec instantly regretted his snappiness. He studied her features. Her gaze was direct, penetrating, but showed no sign of anger. Somehow that made him even more regretful.
“Guess that wasn’t one of my smartest remarks,” he said.
Another pause. “Probably not.” She took in a slow breath. “Pete . . . one thing I’ve learned from my stay on the ice is that there can be magic secrets in the gloom. Don’t close your eyes to them. They help you learn how to live.”
He was silent. They both were. Colors slipped and tailed through the suspended ice motes overhead. Still out of sight, the two approaching helicopters knocked away at the air.
Nimec supposed he really was on edge. Some of it was a carryover from those tumbling boomerangs aboard the Herc. Some of it was his impatience to get going with his search for Scarborough and the two scientists. But there was more besides, and he knew it involved Annie Caulfield’s imminent landing aboard one of the choppers. The news that Annie was already in Antarctica with the Senatorial delegation had made him feel nothing less than ambushed.
He rubbed his face with a gloved hand, thinking. How had Meg originally alluded to their presence? We’re short-handed as far as pilots go, but I’ll explain that later. Just a passing comment as she’d tapped a number into her cell phone. It had gone right by Nimec. But when she got around to her promised explanation, he had learned that one of the base’s three chopper pilots was grounded because his bird was in for repairs, that another was on emergency loan to a French station because their only resident pilot had shipped out for civilization due to illness, and that the third had been to assigned to give the distinguished visitors—DVs, as she called them—a lift from Amundsen-Scott station, the first stop on their tour of the continent. It’s the storm that’s being predicted, Pete. Bad weather’s nothing abnormal around here, but once it hits, there’s a chance it can last for days. The Senators pushed up their schedule to get here before it grounded them at the South Pole, and we were obliged to make accommodations, go ahead with our hosting duties. Incidentally, did Gord happen to mention that Annie Caulfield’s been nannying them?
Ambushed, Nimec thought. Why feel that way, though? Why should the prospect of seeing Annie again have so much guilt attached to it? They’d made an effective team in Florida, but that was in connection with the Orion probe. It was a working relationship. Well, mostly. There was that movie afterward. Dinner and a movie. A nice evening. Annie had introduced him to her kids when he’d picked her up . . . Chris and Linda. Nice. But their date, say you wanted to call it that for lack of a better term, their date was collegial. More or less. At best they were casual friends unwinding after a tough shared assignment. And once it was