She caught up to Jim, who was waiting for the two of them. The others were strung out ahead, struggling along, well in front of the crevasse detector, which was not good even if they were on the Big Ice Cube. It was cloudier than ever, and bitterly, bitterly cold.
“You’re supposed to be out front.”
“Hey look, he’s hurt,” Jim said angrily. “He’s lost blood.”
“I know. He still has to walk. We can’t carry him.”
Jim stared at her, clearly angry, balked, frustrated. Mask to mask in the whistling wind.
Val looked back. Jack was coming on now, slowly but steadily, using his ski poles to push forward. He was favoring his cut hand. “Here he comes. Do what you can to help him keep going. Give me the radar.”
She took back the crevasse detector and walked ahead of them, trying to keep herself down to their pace, though she needed to be out front with the radar, safe ice or not. As she plodded on she felt worse and worse. There had been a certain amount of pleasure in tongue-lashing Jack into action, of course, after biting back so many remarks in the previous week. Perhaps too much pleasure. In any case it left a bad taste in her mouth. Shackleton would have done it better. Although once after the Endurance had sunk, McNeish had refused to haul the boats over the ice any farther, and Shackleton had taken him aside and given him a choice; go on hauling or Shackleton would shoot him dead. McNeish had gone on.
Nice if you could do it. And in some ways cleaner than sticking a knife into a man’s sense of himself. But not a choice Val had had. They needed Jack moving; and now he was moving. But she had a foul taste in her dry mouth—the sick, salty taste of South Georgia Island—and she did not want to look back at those particular clients anymore.
On they walked. She kept to the stragglers’ pace. They came to a long low hogback hill in the ice, an extension of the ridge running south from Last Cache Nunatak, and she hurried to the front of the group. It was good that they had gotten this far, but crevasses here were a real possibility, and the snow was deep on the side of the slope, and cut by the winds into high sastrugi. Val stomped out as deep a trail as she could, and reminded everyone to stay in single file and in her steps. The ice was flowing over a buried rock ridge, so she kept the pulse radar sweeping the ice ahead, and watched the ice itself closely for telltale dips or changes in snow texture. None appeared, and they were able to walk over the ridge without incident. But even that slight uphill made it clear to Val that her legs were getting tired. Which meant the clients must be wasted. She checked her watch, calculated back; they had been walking for twenty-six hours. She figured they had about twenty kilometers left to go.
Then she heard a faint shout, and looked back quickly. Jack was collapsed on the snow, the others standing or crouched in a knot over him. Val ran back down the slope to them. Jack was semiconscious at best; he was trying to get up, and the others were holding him down.
“Keep down!” Val said to him sharply, almost pleading. She took his pulse, checked him out as best she could. It looked like hypothermia to her, along with whatever else had slowed him down; shock was her best guess, shock from the loss of blood and the fall generally.
She stood and thought it over. Then she took Ta Shu’s ski poles and her own, and with their rope lashed the poles to Jack’s back in a double-X pattern. It was a lousy stretcher, but with the rope tied to her harness she could pull him along on his bottom and boot heels, his neck and head supported. It was harder than pulling the sledge had been, but only Jack’s butt and heels were in occasional contact with the snow, and his head was supported by ski poles and a net of rope. Now that he wasn’t walking he would chill down fast, of course, but there was nothing she could do about that, except dial his suit’s photovoltaic system to max and hurry to Roberts as fast as she could. “Keep up with me if you can,” she ordered the others when the arrangement was finished. “And stay in my tracks for sure.” She took off.
And then she really began to work. It was particularly hard without her ski poles, for those helped walking in snow a great deal. But there was nothing for it. As long as they did not encounter bare ice, she intended to go as fast as she could without stopping, all the way to the Roberts camp. The others would have her bootprints to show the way if they fell too far behind, and Jack’s heels would knock down the largest of the sastrugi, leaving even more of a trail. With luck the others would, like her, feel a new surge of energy at this emergency, and keep her in sight. And once she got to Roberts she could drop Jack off and go back for them.
So off she went, pushing it as hard as she could given the distance left. She had a lot in reserve, and it felt good finally to quit holding herself to the clients’ pace and just take off. This, she thought blackly, was the only part of guiding she was good at.
white sky
rust rock
white ice
A few hours later the closest client was on the horizon behind her, perhaps six to eight kilometers back. She stopped and watched them as she drank her meltwater and caught a breather; she thought it was Ta Shu and Jim leading the way. Jack was still semiconscious, but he seemed aware enough of his predicament to stay still in his traces. On reflection it seemed to Val that he might have suffered a concussion when they fell. Although he had been gung ho for a while after that. Or else he had gone into shock from loss of blood—mild shock at first, followed by serious shock. Hard to say. Now cold would be the major factor; serious hypothermia could not be far away. Only the photovoltaic elements in his suit were protecting him from it, and with the sun obscured by clouds they were much less powerful.
But Roberts Massif was now revealed right to its base; so they were less than ten k out. The oil camp was right around the southernmost point of the massif. So they had done most of it. When the others got closer she pointed at Roberts, hoping to give them the little surge of adrenaline they were sure to get when they saw the goal. Then she was off again, faster than ever. No truly long haul is ever done with much of a kick kept in reserve for the end, but she had gone out extremely slow in the first half, so a good negative split was a distinct possibility. Anyway she was going to give it her best shot; the others could follow at whatever pace they could manage. Although they had looked shattered, they also seemed as though they could carry on to the end. Ta Shu had even spun around once to do his filming or his geomancy, or both. Val liked his imperturbability.
The red dolerite of Roberts reared before her. Then she was stomping down the bare ice dropping to the massif, and she had to pull Jack around and let him down ahead of her. She leaned forward to look at his face; he appeared to be asleep. “We’re almost there,” she said. “We’ll get you some help.”
Then she turned the last corner and saw that the little station had burned down. Completely destroyed. A new kind of fear spiked into her. Her shouts brought no one out of the ruins. Then a figure appeared on the hovercraft still lying next to the dock.
11
Extreme Weather Event
red rock white ice
X opened the door and shouted back at the approaching stranger. A tall woman hauling an injured man on a kind of travois, lashed together from ski poles and climbing rope. Feeling amazed without knowing why, X looked closer. It was Val. His heart leaped: “Hey!” he cried. She looked over at him, saw he was on the hovercraft, and pulled wearily over to the dock. X crossed the broad section of paneling he had made into a gangplank, and helped her to get the stricken man on board. Trouble on her trek, and without helo support from Mac. The tenuous nature of their presence on the ice, something he had thought about a lot during the snowmobile ride to Roberts, came home to him again. They had thought they were out there surviving on their own, when really they had been totally dependent on outside support.