Chapter 2
Back within the sterile hum of the lab, the cold clung to him for only a moment before the recycled air leached it away. He set the datapad on the steel workbench, its screen glowing with neat columns of verified assets. The low, predictable thrum of the mass spectrometer—a constant, mechanical heartbeat—was the only truth he welcomed. With practiced economy, Aris shed his heavy parka, hanging it on its designated hook. From the pocket, a small audio recorder tumbled out, skittering across the polished concrete floor with a cheap plastic clatter.
He stared at it. An anomaly. An unnecessary variable on the clean grid of his existence.
For a full minute, Aris ignored the device, turning instead to the cryo-cooler to log the new sample manifest, his fingers flying across the touch-screen interface with a precision that bordered on surgical. But the black rectangle lay in his peripheral vision, a disruption. He told himself it was an operational concern, perhaps a verbal addendum she was too lazy to type. That had to be it. With a sigh of pure irritation, he snatched the recorder from the floor. It felt absurdly light in his hand, a toy. He pressed the small triangular button marked PLAY.
A burst of static, then a voice bloomed in the quiet of the lab, a burst of tropical heat in the cryo-core facility. It was warm, melodic, and utterly out of place.
“…and the turbulence coming over the Transantarctics? Felt like the whole bird was being rattled by a giant, invisible toddler. So, apologies if my handwriting on the inventory note looks like a seismograph. Anyway, I was watching you guys appear on the nav screen, just this one tiny flicker of warmth in all that static. Made me wonder. Up here, all I hear is the engine drone. I bet the silence down there is so absolute you can hear the blood in your own ears. Must be strange, living in a place where the sky is the main event and the ground is the history book.”
The voice paused, followed by a soft, husky laugh that seemed to echo in the sterile space. “God, listen to me. Talking to a box. Anyway. Hope all the core samples and freeze-dried chili made it in one piece. This is Lena. Over and out… I guess.”
Aris stabbed the stop button, cutting her off. The silence that rushed back into the room felt heavier now, compromised. Unprofessional. He hated the rambling speculation, the pointless metaphors, the sheer, wasteful intrusion of it all. As the door slid open with a soft hiss, Kenji entered, holding a steaming mug and moving with his usual deliberate grace.
“Everything arrive safely?” Kenji asked, his voice calm and low.
“Fine,” Aris clipped out, setting the recorder on his desk with a deliberate, final click.
Kenji’s eyes flickered to the small black device, an object clearly not part of the standard lab equipment, then back to the rigid set of Aris’s shoulders. He placed the mug on a clear corner of the workbench. “The silence seems… different today.”
When Aris didn’t respond, Kenji gave a small, understanding nod to himself and departed as quietly as he had come. Aris stared at the screen in front of him, where the data stream from the ice core samples awaited his analysis. That was real. That mattered. But the station’s hum had changed. What Kenji called his sanctuary of silence now felt like an excavation, a hollowed-out space where her voice had been.
His gaze slid back to the rugged little recorder, an alien artifact in his sterile domain. Pushing his chair back with a scrape that tore violently at the quiet, he closed his long, steady fingers around the device. A muscle ticked in his jaw. He thumbed the small red button, and a tiny light blinked to life, a single, insistent eye. Holding the recorder near his lips as if it were a contaminated sample, he spoke, his baritone a flat line.
“This message confirms receipt of supply manifest seven-four-alpha. All items accounted for.” He began the list, his thumbnail making a sharp, clean tap against the workbench for each item. “Crate one: cryo-vials, one thousand units. Crate two: nutrient packs, fifty kilograms. Crate three: replacement spectrometer lenses, four units. Crate four…” A fractional pause, a breath held a microsecond too long. “Personal effects, assorted. The recording device is functional.” Another beat of humming silence stretched taut. “Next scheduled drop requires high-purity nitrogen, two standard cylinders. Calibration fluid, type-three, ten liters. Genomic sequencing kits, twenty units.” He bit off the last word. “End of transmission.”
His thumb clicked the button, and the light died. After setting the recorder on the corner of his workbench, he nudged it with a fingertip, once, twice, until its edges aligned perfectly with the laser-etched grid of the work surface. A contained disruption. He turned back to the cold, hard facts preserved in ancient ice, forcing his mind to find their rhythm, to lock into their unimpeachable logic. For a moment, though, the numbers refused to resolve, blurring into a meaningless shimmer of blue light.
The reply, when it came, was tossed onto Lena’s bunk with a grunt by a pilot returning from a deep-field drop. Pulled back by a thin, patterned curtain that offered the illusion of privacy, she sat cross-legged on her narrow cot, the air thick with the scent of recycled air and disinfectant. Her own colorful scarf, a splash of defiant crimson and gold, lay coiled beside the small, dark object. With a click that sounded loud in the relative quiet of her alcove, she pressed play.
A voice, low and devoid of inflection, filled the small space—a baritone that sounded like it had been calibrated to remove any trace of warmth. “Manifest Drop 4-B,” it began, the words economical. “All items logged against digital inventory. Crate one of two, met sensors, package integrity nominal. Crate two of two, drill-head components, full complement confirmed. Acknowledge receipt.”
Lena’s brows lifted. She had expected something, but not the auditory equivalent of a redacted document. The voice continued, a relentless verbal checklist of freeze-dried rations, fuel canisters, and data drives. There was no greeting, no thanks, no human color whatsoever. And yet, compared to the exaggerated jokes and false bonhomie of the Ready Room, its utter lack of performance felt like a sudden, bracing gust of honesty. A small smile bloomed at the corners of her mouth.
“…for the next delivery,” the voice concluded, “prioritize the replacement spectrometer filters, requisition number seven-dash-four-delta. End transmission.”
The recording ended in an abrupt hiss of static. A laugh, bright and sudden, escaped her. She pressed a hand to her mouth to stifle the sound, her shoulders shaking. He really did treat every word like a finite resource. Leaning back against the thin wall of her cubicle, she hit rewind, the tiny whirring sound a secret between them. A wide, slow grin spread across her face, genuine and dazzling in the dim light. In a world of easy camaraderie and pilots’ bravado, this man’s absolute refusal to perform was the most honest thing she had ever heard.
On her next flight, the drone of the four Allison turboprops was a constant, living thing, a vibration that hummed up from the flight yoke and into her bones. Below the rumbling belly of the Hercules, the ice sheet scrolled on endlessly, a cartographer’s nightmare of undifferentiated white under a sky of bruised velvet. The instrument panel cast a low, green glow across her face, a tiny world of order against the chaos of the continent. Tucked beside a thermos of lukewarm coffee was the recorder, his voice still a recent memory. With a practiced thumb, she clicked the record button. The small red light blinked, a tiny, hopeful heartbeat in the cockpit’s dim glow.
“Okay, message for Dr. Thorne from the flying delivery service,” she began, her voice a warm counterpoint to the engine’s roar. “Skies are clear, no abominable snowmen on the horizon, and your package of cryogenic vials is secure. I was looking at that on the manifest… ‘atmospheric sampling.’ Sounds so official.” She adjusted the trim, the aircraft settling with a gentle shudder. “It got me thinking. You pull up these… what, columns of history? And I just get this image of you putting a stethoscope up to the ice. If you could listen to it, what would you hear? Would it be a weather report from the Pleistocene? A story about a woolly mammoth having a bad day?”
Her fingers drummed a quick, syncopated rhythm against the yoke. “Which reminds me, and I have absolutely no idea why it reminds me, but you’re my only audience so you’re getting this. Ready? What does a penguin do when it gets a flat tire?” She let the question hang, grinning at its sheer absurdity. “It waddles.”
The joke landed with a thud even in the empty cockpit. A real laugh escaped her, bright and loud. “Get it? Waddles? I know, it’s criminal. My dad collects them. The jokes, I mean. Not the penguins.” Wiping a tear of mirth from the corner of her eye, her voice softened. “Anyway. Just trying to keep morale high at the bottom of the world. Your delivery is on schedule. ETA is forty minutes.”
She clicked the button, severing the connection. Placing the recorder back beside the thermos, she looked out the windscreen. Far ahead, almost indistinguishable from the brightest stars, a single point of stubborn, man-made light gleamed in the overwhelming dark. She nudged the yoke, setting her course directly for it.
The recorder was an...
EPUB (Adobe DRM)
