In this blaze of self-recrimination it took her a while to notice that Mac Town was not answering. Sometimes Randi was slow, but not this slow. Val pushed the button again and repeated her message. “Hello, McMurdo, this is T-023, do you read me, over?”
Hiss of radio space; white noise. No McMurdo! She checked the wrist radio for status. It appeared to still be working, but there were no connections at all, all across the usual band. This was unprecedented, and she switched quickly to the emergency band, and then back around the dial. No answers anywhere. No radio.
“Shit,” she said, staring at the little display screen. She pushed the function button and checked around. GPS was down too.
“Hey folks,” she said. “Will you all try your wrist phones, and Ta Shu your radio glasses? I’m not getting through, and I want to see if it’s my phone that’s the problem.”
One by one they tried calling out, with no success. Ta Shu whipped off his heavy video glasses and squinted at them.
“Someone’s messed with the satellites,” Val concluded, staring at her wrist screen. Of course she knew their present location all too well, but still. All satellite connections appeared to be severed, which was amazing, because there were a lot of satellites up there. The GPS system alone relied on making contact with up to eight satellites per fix. She tried the radio again. No more luck than before. Sunspots, perhaps? But the satellites were supposed to have alleviated the problems that sunspots gave Antarctic radio communication.
It was possible the big radio in the sledge would have done better; their little wrist radios didn’t have the power to reach geosynchronous satellites, and sometimes there was trouble with the system of lower satellites. But there was no way to test that now. The sledge was corked and no two ways about it.
“Hmm.” She thought it over. Single-sledge travel was based on the idea that if you lost your sledge down a crevasse (it had happened before, at least three times that Val knew of), you had personal radios and helicopter rescue to back you up. Without coms to alert the rescue system, however, they were on their own.
It was an ugly situation. Essentially they needed to get to the nearest shelter as fast as they could. In that regard at least they were much better off than the old guys would have been; there were a fair number of camps and stations in the Transantarctics. The closest one to them, Val decided after looking at the paper map she kept in her parka pocket for just such an eventuality as this, was the SCAG oil base camp on Roberts Massif, just across the Mohn Basin to the west. But that was about a hundred kilometers away.
She sat down on a rock in the middle of the others, and got them all to quit trying their phones. “Come on, we’ve proved it. All satellite coms are down as far as we’re concerned, and we’re not getting GPS either. It means we have to get ourselves to the nearest station. But that’s okay, I know where that is, and we only have to cross a bit of the ice cap. We’re going to be all right.”
“Where’s the nearest station?” Elspeth asked calmly.
“It’s to the west, there across the Mohn Basin.” She pointed. “It’s one of those African oil camps, on the south side of Roberts Massif. It’s on the side we’ll be approaching, so all we have to do is cross the ice plateau. Level easy walking all the way.”
“How far away?” Jorge asked.
“Well, it’s about a hundred kilometers,” Val said, looking at each of them in turn. “Maybe a bit more. A long way, for sure, but not too long. We can do it. We’ll just pace ourselves, take rests when we need to, and keep walking till we get there.”
“No problem,” Jack said. “I ran a fifty-miler once.”
Val nodded, suppressing all irritation. “That’s right. And we won’t be in any special hurry. Our suits are like little walking emergency huts. They’re warmer than we’ll need, and they’ve got emergency food sewn into them, and the arm flasks for melting snow to water.” She patted her upper arm. “It’s too bad we don’t have our skis, but we have our crampons and ski poles, and we’ll be fine. Walking is easier than skiing anyway.”
Which was only true in certain conditions. But they were likely to run into sastrugi and blue ice on the Mohn Basin, also the snow dunes called supersastrugi that were building on the ice as a result of the increase in precipitation; and in all those areas the skis wouldn’t have helped them. So it was partly true. Anyway they needed the encouragement, Val judged. Not that anyone looked particularly frightened; they were serious but resolute. Jack was nursing his hurt hand, and he had his lips pursed in a scowl of determination, but he certainly did not look worried.
In any case, there was no reason to delay. In fact the sooner they were off, the better. “Let’s get going,” Val said. “We’ll keep trying the wrist radios at every rest stop, and probably they’ll click back in soon, and we’ll have an SAR team out before we get very far. But even if we don’t, we’ll still be fine.” She stood. “Hey, a real adventure this time.”
No great laughs at that. The situation was too much felt in the body to be made light of; it was very cold, sitting there in the wind falling off the cap down the glacier. So they stood up stiffly, and followed her as she led them around the shore of Hansen Shoulder. This was a hard part, actually; the ice was beginning its fall into the glacier, and as it deformed around the little nunatak there were many crevasse fields and shear zones to be avoided. But Val found flat ice all the way through, and soon enough they were on the broad plain of firn to the west of the nunatak—on the ice plateau of the great polar cap, and no two ways about it. Nothing before them but white snow and ice, and the dark blue sky.
Six people, alone in such an immensity; a strange sight; a strange sensation. White snow, blue sky; in the polar cap’s extreme simplicity, the black cliffs of the Transantarctics behind them and to the right were somehow comforting, bleak and jagged though they were. Compared to the ice plateau they were familiar, even homey. But there was no help to be had among them, only broken ice and empty glaciers falling to the sea. And they would be hiking out until the mountains passed under the horizon and there would be no land in sight, as if they were far out on a white ocean.
Val started walking over the ice.
blue dome
white plane
Snowmobiling across the polar cap felt different now. Wade was aware that the change was psychological in origin, but that did not lessen the sensation, which was as distinct as the difference between a sunny day and a cloudy one. Speaking of which, a few cirrus clouds now scythed the pure blue overhead, located distinctly lower in the sky than cirrus clouds usually appeared, indicating the great altitude of the ice plateau, or the altered physics of Ice Planet itself; the effect somehow made the world seem huge. And he could not make it shrink back to its previous size.
A bigger world, and emptier. The surface of the plateau was rougher. The snowmobile was less stable, and louder, its racket that of a motor grinding away, filled with skips and irregularities, as if always on the edge of stalling. Tipping the thing could be a fatal mistake, and it was rocking violently from side to side. The sun stood overhead at its usual angle, a blinding chip in a dark immensity. It seemed he was catching brief glimpses of space itself, up there behind the dark blue sky. And it was colder as well, the wind in his face a bitter numbing blast. The Skidoo tilted and he overcorrected every time, his pulse racing.
He had to admit it; he was afraid. Cold fear. There was nothing ahead, and nothing behind. A white plain of snow in all directions. No other kind of exposure could match it. As if they were alone in the world, under the blinding eye of a cold god. Alone on the blank white roof of the universe.