Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [14]
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.
Schofield 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 Defence on the speakerphone. ‘Other parties have almost certainly picked up that distress signal, Lieutenant. If there really is an extra-terrestrial 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 there existed the possibility that one of the residents of Wilkes might be a source of trouble.
‘All right,’ Schofield said, looking at the door, but addressing Hensleigh. ‘Twenty-five words or less. What’s his story?’
Sarah Hensleigh said, ‘Renshaw is a geophysicist from Stanford, studying ice cores for his Ph.D. Bernie Olson is – was – his supervisor. Renshaw’s work with ice cores was groundbreaking. He was digging core holes deeper than anybody had ever dug before, at times going nearly a kilometre below the surface.’
Schofield vaguely knew about ice core research. It involved drilling a circular hole about thirty centimetres wide down into the ice shelf and pulling out a cylinder of ice known as a core. Held captive within the core were pockets of gases that had existed in the air thousands of years before.
‘Anyway,’ Sarah said, ‘a couple of weeks ago, Renshaw hit the big time. His drill must have hit a layer of upsurged ice – prehistoric ice that has been dislodged by an earthquake sometime in the past and pushed up toward the surface. Suddenly Renshaw was studying pockets of air that were as much as three hundred million years old. It was the discovery of a lifetime. Here was a chance to study an atmosphere that no one has ever known. To see what the earth’s atmosphere was like before the dinosaurs.’ Sarah Hensleigh shrugged. ‘For an academic, something like that is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s worth a fortune on the lecture circuit alone.
‘Only then it got better.
‘A few days ago, Renshaw adjusted his drilling vector slightly – that’s the angle at which you drill down into the ice – and at 1500 feet, in the middle of a four-hundred-million-year-old section of ice, he hit metal.’
Sarah paused, allowing what she had just said to sink in. Schofield said nothing.
Sarah said, ‘We sent the diving bell down, did some sonic-resonance tests of the ice shelf, and discovered that there was a cavern of some sort right where this piece of prehistoric metal was supposed to be. Further tests showed that there was a tunnel leading up to this cavern from a depth of 3000 feet. That was when we sent the divers down, and that was when Austin saw the spacecraft. And that was when all the divers disappeared.’
Schofield said, ‘So what does all this have to do with Bernard Olson’s death?’
Sarah said, ‘Olson was Renshaw