Descent Hour One
The Abyss
The sky over the chasm turned an ominous deep black, and Serena felt the wind pick up with a sudden chill. If this was supposed to be a lull in the polar storm, she didn’t want to stick around for the real deal. Mist boiled up from the abyss below, where the nearest shelter, the so-called P4 Habitat, was a one-mile drop.
“You sure you’re up for this, Sister?”
It was Yeats, sliding down the icy wall above her in his white freezer suit, grinning like the devil under the blinding light of his headtorch. Back on the surface, he had detailed the risks to her about coming down with the insertion team. But what other choice did she have? To wait back at the base with the rest of the world until the team resurfaced would be to remain in the dark.
“Technically, it’s Doctor Serghetti, General,” she said, digging the crampon attached to her plastic boot into a toehold. “And I climbed Everest with my first Mother Superior.”
“She give you the garter?”
Yeats was pointing to Serena’s harness. It actually did look like a red garter belt with two loops around her thighs. In case of a fall it would spread the shock evenly throughout her lower body.
“No, just this.” Serena pulled out her ice ax and hammered an ice screw into the frozen wall before attaching a new line with a carabiner. She wanted to show Yeats she was more than up to the challenge. But in fact she was feeling strange. Her heart was pounding and she was breathing rapidly. “Do you smell something?”
“Yeah,” said Yeats. “Your story.”
She had never met the infamous Griffin Yeats until Ice Base Orion, only heard about him from Conrad. But she didn’t trust him. Like Emerson said: “Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.” The guy was a rogue at heart, just like this expedition. He simply did a better job of hiding it than Conrad, who was refreshingly honest and even charming about his shortcomings. She also concluded that Yeats hadn’t agreed to let her join the team out of the kindness of his heart or even because he valued her for her expertise as a linguist.
“Tell me again why you changed your mind and let me tag along?”
“If anything, I learned from NASA that women are always a pleasant addition to astronaut crews.”
She had expected something sexist like that coming from him. “Gee, I thought it was because women are actually better with precision tasks, more meticulous, and more flexible at multitasking than men.”
“Whenever they’re not too emotional or easily upset,” Yeats replied and dropped out of sight just as Conrad rappeled alongside her.
“Anything wrong?” Conrad asked.
Serena sighed and shook her head. “Your father never stops, does he?”
“It’s not in his nature,” Conrad answered without feeling. “Once he’s programmed, he keeps going and going until he finishes the job.”
“And leaves a trail of bodies behind him.”
“Then we better not let him get too far ahead of us,” Conrad said, rappeling down.
She went after him. He was an expert climber in tropical climates. But overconfidence could be fatal in icy conditions like this. And she was worried for him. For his soul. For her own too. Because in trying to save him once before she felt she had condemned them both.
Conrad was within reach now, and she dropped down a few feet and found a hold. The color of the ice was a beautiful blue and almost seemed to glow. “Pretty,” she said.
“Don’t stop, Serena. Keep going.” Conrad spoke rapidly.
Serena continued to ease up on her line. But Conrad’s physiology concerned her. Was he hyperventilating? Serena didn’t know and could feel her own breathing quicken to an unnaturally fast pace. Her heart too. The pounding was regular but fast.
She eased up a bit more when Conrad motioned with a gloved hand. “Down there,” he said. “See it?”
Serena peered into the mist below. A hole parted and she could see a grid of lights, like a landing pad. “I see.”
“No, do you see it?”
Suddenly Serena could see that the landing pad was in fact the flattened summit of a gleaming white pyramid rising sharply through the floor of the abyss. She had to shade her eyes from the glare of the lights off the pyramid’s surface.
“P4,” she heard herself saying under her breath.
“Don’t ask me how it got here,” Conrad said, now sporting his sunglasses. “I can’t explain it yet. But I will.”
The conviction in his voice inspired confidence. His excitement was pure, unadulterated, and moving. Not a trace of fear, she thought with envy, just genuine curiosity and enthusiasm. She had almost forgotten what that felt like.
She slipped on her sunglasses. The flat summit, brighter than the whitest snow, was blinding. So this was why the pope had sent her down, she realized. She had suspected something spectacular, but she was completely unprepared for the sight or dimension of this monument. It was gigantic.
She was staring at it in wonder when she heard her line creak.
“Just some slack,” Conrad assured her. “No worries.”
She heard a sharp crack and the ping of metal. The piton holding her line in the ice popped out, and she thought she was falling.
“Conrad!” she shouted as she buried her ice ax into the wall and hung on.
But Conrad said nothing. She looked to her side. He was gone. It was his piton that had popped out.
She looked down in time to see Conrad fall into the mist.
“Conrad!” she screamed.
Yeats rappeled down beside her.
“You couldn’t wait until afterward to bury him?” he asked, scanning the billowing mist below. Yeats flicked Conrad’s line with the back of a gloved finger. “He’s still floating.”
She heard a crack and looked up to see the ice screw on her own line start to slip. She instinctively pulled out her ice ax and swung it at Yeats, who put up a defensive arm. “Hold this,” she said and suddenly felt herself plunging into space.
She fell through the cloud a few seconds later, hurtling toward the lights below when her line snapped tight and she stopped with a jolt. For a moment she feared she had shattered her pelvis. But her harness had done its job.
She caught her breath and could hear her windproof parka squeaking against the nylon rope as she swung back and forth.
“Conrad?” she called.
“Over here,” he replied. “I found something.”
She swung her head in the direction of his voice, and her headtorch found him swinging ten feet from the wall, unable to get a hold.
“Hang on,” she said as she swung over.
It took three tries before her arc was wide enough to reach him. As she swung toward him, she held out her hand, and he gripped it tight, holding her next to him. They swung together in space for a few seconds, clinging to each other.
“Finished bungee jumping, Conrad?” she asked, trying to mask her anxiety with sarcasm.
“Look!” he said.
She turned in the darkness and her headtorch bathed the wall with light. There was something in the ice. Then her eyes focused and Serena found herself face-to-face with a little girl, frozen in time.
“Dear Jesus,” she whispered.
“Remember when you told me the only way we’d get together again was when hell freezes over?” he told her. “Well, here we are.”
The mist lifted and the light from below flooded the entire wall. In an instant Serena could see hundreds of human beings, their faces frozen in fear. All of them seemed to shout out at once. Serena covered her ears, only to realize that she was the one screaming.