Ice Station - Matthew Reilly [70]
The new technology, Sarah had been saying, was a long wave sonic pulse that the palaeontologists at Wilkes shot down into the ice to detect fossilised bones. Unlike digging, it located fossils without damaging them.
Schofield said, ‘So what do you do while you wait for the sonic pulse to find your next fossil?’
‘I’m not just a palaeontologist, you know,’ Sarah said, smiling, feigning offence. ‘I was a marine biologist before I took up palaeontology. And before all this happened, I was working with Ben Austin in the Bio Lab on B-deck. He was doing work on a new antivenom for Enhydrina schistosa.’
Schofield nodded. ‘Sea snake.’
Sarah looked at Schofield, surprised, ‘Very good, Lieutenant.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m not just a grunt with a gun, you know,’ Schofield said, smiling.
The two of them came to the outer perimeter of the station where they found Montana standing on the skirt of one of the Marine hovercrafts. The hovercraft was facing out from the station complex.
It was dark – that eerie eternal twilight of winter at the poles – and through the driving snow, Schofield could just make out the vast, flat expanse of land stretching out in front of the stationary hovercraft. The horizon glowed dark orange.
Behind Montana, on the roof of the hovercraft, Schofield saw the hovercraft’s rangefinder. It looked like a long-barrelled gun mounted on a revolving turret, and it swept from side to side in a slow one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arc. It moved slowly, taking about thirty seconds to make a complete sweep from left to right before beginning the return journey.
‘I set them just like you said,’ Montana said, stepping down from the skirt so that he stood in front of Schofield. ‘The other LCAC is at the south-east corner.’ LCAC was the official name for a Marine hovercraft. It stood for ‘Landing Craft – Air Cushioned’. Montana was a stickler for formalities.
Schofield nodded. ‘Good.’
Positioned as they were, the rangefinders on the hovercrafts now covered the entire landward approach to Wilkes Ice Station. With a range of over fifty miles, Schofield and his team would know well in advance if anybody was heading toward the station.
‘Have you got a portable screen?’ Schofield asked Montana.
‘Right here,’ Montana offered Schofield a portable viewscreen that displayed the results of the rangefinders’ sweeps.
It looked like a miniature TV with a handle on the left-hand side. On the screen, two thin green lines clocked slowly back and forth like a pair of windscreen wipers. As soon as an object crossed the rangefinders’ beams, a blinking red dot would appear on the screen and the object’s vital statistics would appear in a small box at the bottom of the screen.
‘All right,’ Schofield said. ‘I think we’re all set. I think it’s time we found out what’s down in that cave.’
The trudge back to the main building took about five minutes. Schofield, Sarah and Montana walked quickly through the falling snow. As they walked, Schofield told Sarah and Montana about his plans for the cave.
First of all, he wanted to verify the existence of the spacecraft itself. At this stage, there was no proof that anything was down there at all. All they had was the report of a single scientist from Wilkes who was himself now probably dead. Who knew what he had seen? That he had also been attacked soon after his sighting of the spacecraft – by enemies unknown – was another question that Schofield wanted answered.
There was a third reason, however, for sending a small team down to the cave. A reason that Schofield didn’t mention to Sarah or Montana.
If anyone else did happen to make a play for the station – especially in the next few hours when the Marines were at their most vulnerable – and if they also managed to overcome what was left of Schofield’s unit up in the station proper, then a second team stationed down