He put the phone to his ear. “Hard to hear, Wade, but stay on the air.”
Some of the captured outlaws had recovered from their neuromuscular incapacitation, and were standing at the windows shouting down at Carlos and the others, red-faced and furious; one crying; one screaming; one pounding the window as hard as she could—she would have put her fist right through the glass if she could have, and damn the consequences. And all unheard through the glass, in the wind and the sound of the blimps’ fans.
“That’s Ron!” X exclaimed, pointing at the gondola window. “That’s Ron Jasper in there! He joined the ice pirates!”
Mai-lis was now using a handset walkie-talkie, presumably to speak to those inside on their radio. Wade hurried to her and put his wrist phone right up next to her walkie-talkie’s mouthpiece. Mai-lis nodded at him as she continued to speak.
“—ninety percent voted on exile, and exile it is. You are not to return on pain of death. Remember this lesson in your new life in the north.” She stared up at them. The look in her little Sami eyes was cold. She made a gesture, and one of her group manipulated another handset, and the big blimp cut away from its anchors and shot up on the wind, spinning its prisoners into the clouds.
After that Val and X and Wade and Carlos were led inside the pirate’s lair, as Addie called it. It was much deeper than the refuge they had been taken to, extending far back into the ice, in a gigantic tunnel of the purest blue. There they found box after box stacked against the walls, and gear of all kinds. At the rear of the tunnel squatted a big yellow vehicle that reminded Wade of a road construction earthmover.
“That’s it!” X yelled. “That’s my SPOT train’s caboose!”
“Told you,” Addie said. “Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ll give you the GPS coordinates for this place, so Mac Town can recover this stuff.”
When they were airborne again she said over the intercom, “Whew! I’m glad that’s over! Thanks for helping us out. Sorry to get you there early, but I wanted to be in on it to tell you the truth. I hate those bastards, them and their obtainium. As if they could do whatever they wanted.”
“So will you kill them if they return?” Wade asked.
“Nah. Unlikely. I suppose it could happen, but in reality we’d probably just try to zap them and ship them out again. The truth is they probably won’t come back. They wouldn’t get any help from anyone else, and you need to be part of the whole feral scene down here to make a real go of it. So even if they did come back they’d just be like those trekker guys, out wandering on their own. It’s not the same as making your living down here.”
“But I don’t see how you do it,” Wade insisted. “The gear you have here must cost a lot more money than you can make.”
A long pause, filled by the sounds of the wind and the fan’s buzz. “Well, you know,” Addie said. “We have our audiences, just like most of the groups down here. Sponsor audiences I mean. Weren’t any of your clients sending out reports on their trek?” she asked Val.
“Yeah sure,” Val said. “Ta Shu was. Still is, I suppose, if he can transmit.”
“Well, we do a bit of that too. And some of the companies that make this stuff like the prototypes tested hard. So we have some alliances.”
“But the Antarctic Treaty,” Wade said again. Once again he had his wrist phone wedged between his right ear and the headset, and he was trying to imagine what Phil would want to ask. He supposed Phil could even have asked his own questions, but he was keeping quiet, and Wade could see how that might be the easiest way to do things.
“Yeah yeah, the Treaty. In suspension now, right? And even when it was active it was only paper. Its values were so pure because the stakes were so small! As soon as oil exploration’s become economical, non-Treaty nations are down here sniffing around, and the Treaty governments are jockeying for position above them. There was never any enforcement to the Treaty, see? No one was going to come down here and zap offenders and ship them out like we just did. The French, they signed the Treaty and then bulldozed a big airstrip right through a penguin rookery near their station. Greenpeace went down there and stood right at the bottom of the slope where the bulldozers were pushing rocks, and the bulldozer drivers just kept on driving. Nearly killed a few Greenpeacers. That was the most dangerous thing they did, I think, worse than driving Zodiacs in front of those Japanese mama whalers. Greenpeace did some great things down here if you ask me, they really made a difference. And without blowing people up, like these whoevers we’re dealing with now. But they couldn’t do it all, because everyone was breaking the Treaty. The Russians broke the treaty, the Poles broke the Treaty, the Americans broke the Treaty, you should see the bottom of the bay off McMurdo! We were as bad as anybody until Greenpeace went down there and poured trash from the dump onto the floor of the Chalet right in the middle of a big meeting. That was so great. The NSF rep went nuts and forbade any of us from talking to any Greenpeacer, and retired end of that season. But it got NSF to think things over. And at the same time the Environmental Defense Fund was suing them back in Washington for breaking NEPA. It was a pincer attack, really. So NSF got religion then, but it was Greenpeace that did it, Greenpeace and EDF. No, the Treaty’s been abused, you take my word for it! There was too much else going on in the world for anyone to risk making anyone mad over a little thing like Antarctica. So the Treaty was there, but no one paid much attention to it except for when it suited them. So, you know. Mai-lis keeps us in compliance with the Treaty like a kindergarten teacher, better than most countries when you actually look at what the thing says. We register all the animals we kill for food and do science on them so we’re no different than the scientists really, except we eat the data when we’re done with it. And Art Devries does that too. So, you know. You can’t expect us to take the Treaty too seriously.”
“Unless it gets you kicked off the continent.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” She shook her head. “That’s why these bastards we shipped out, and whoever it was blowing up the oil stations and messing with coms …” A gust of wind swirled the blimp around, and Addie wrestled with the controls and did not finish the thought. “Come on.”
“What brought you down here?” Wade asked her.
“Airplane.” Another laugh. “No no, I know. I’m from Alabama, right? I never had a thought about Antarctica in my life. If you’d of asked me I’d have said it was some kind of radiator fluid. But I was selling some land, and a man came to look at it, we talked for a while. I’ve been a plumber since I was ten, and a carpenter, electrician—my daddy was a contractor, and I did it all. And then after my Army days I was flying helos for Louisiana Pacific. So I was telling this man about all that, and showing him a well and pumphouse we built, and telling him about us, and he said, Did you ever think of working in Antarctica? And I said, Why no—I never did.” Laugh. “It turned out he was from ASL, and he thought I’d make a good Carhartt. Which I did, for a while.”
“In McMurdo?” X asked.
“And the Pole. Five summers and two winterovers. Then my second winter at the Pole, I was shown some things….”
“Like the water slide?” Wade asked.
“Yeah, how do you know about that? Who are you again? Oh yeah, the senator.”
“I’m not actually the senator.”
“Water slide?” X said. He and Val were looking around at Wade.
“So you went feral,” Wade prompted Addie.
“Yeah. One day I was out emptying a Herc, completely toast, and I looked up and there was a skua flying around. They get blown in to the Pole occasionally, but I didn’t know that then, and when I saw it I thought it was, I don’t know. God. And that very night Herb asked me if I was interested in lighting out for the territory, and I thought of that skua and said you bet, and never looked back.”