Excerpt: Chwilen

Coils of razor wire, their sharpened hypodermic prongs filled with paralysing venom, twisted malevolently through the frozen drifts like nests of vipers. Behind them, bald, soot-blackened patches in the snow betrayed the location of vast gas burners. Blue pilot flames flickered behind weather-proof shields, ghostly cones always on the verge of being extinguished by the harsh Antarctic winds. The sky overhead was clear and cloudless, and aurora australis danced across the star-speckled sky as rainbow rivers of ionised particles coursed through the magnetic field.
A dark shimmering shadow rose over the horizon, clearly silhouetted by the multicolour light show. Wreathed by a cloak of churning ice crystals, it whirred slowly over the treacherous landscape, its heavy load supported under two enormous rotor blades. Red and white lights fixed to outcroppings blinked in irregular patterns, tapping out complex codes agreed by arcane international law and defined in thousand-page manuals inside its cockpit. Dull yellowing light flooded out of the windscreens, casting the half-visible forms of the pilots as vague black shapes; the pupils of a pair of vast jaundiced eyes.
Sirens blared from somewhere far beyond the razor wire, and two high powered searchlights crunched into action, the searing light melting and vaporising the snow and slush that coated their massive barrels.
The dark shape was cast into harsh relief, revealing an ungainly cetacean hulk of smoky grey titanium-aluminium alloy freckled with rivets, slung between two propeller blades. The rotors jutted from powerhouses the size of cottages, each blade a blurred trunk of carbon fibre sprayed with stripes of safety yellow that persistence of vision smeared into utilitarian halos. Hastily stencilled letters bearing the legend “NEAF” marred the smooth frosted skin of the gyrodyne while RAF roundels of blue, white and red, haphazardly sprayed over, lay fading behind them. Blinds snap up one by one behind portholes
The gyrodyne shuddered over a thick concrete wall, studded with yellow and red warning signs. Snow piled up in dunes around the angular buttresses, forming sleek comae swept away from the prevailing wind. Past the wall, sleek modular buildings of thick blue plastic and ribbed corrugated metal stood surrounded by sparse crowds in thick polar wear awaiting the arrival of the craft. Creaking, the rotors of the gyrodyne twisted into an upright position, drenching the ground below with downdraft that eroded the neat, freshly ploughed edges of the deep gutters of snow that passed at roads at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.
With a sharp tug at the control stick, the pilots turned the pulsating square of light that delineated the helipad. The engines replied with a sharp squeal that, had anyone on the base still be asleep, would surely have awoken them. The massive vessel soared over the base, its flight computer chirruping with brief confusion as they passed over the ninety zero zero co-ordinates of the South Pole, letting massive rubber wheels drop ungracefully from its undercarriage. One final whine from the engines, and it was still, idling on the twinkling concentric quadrilaterals.
A klaxon wailed and the landing crew – dressed in fluorescent orange parkas – hurriedly evacuated the helipad. Pipes buried under feet of snow packed as hard as concrete shuddered futilely, and then fountains burst out of the deckplate from nozzles at two metre intervals. A mixture of propylene glycol and ampulex venom soaked the craft, turning the thick skin of ice covering the craft into rivulets of meltwater. Hydraulic systems deep inside the aircraft juddered as panels and flaps frozen in place suddenly broke free and slipped back into place and the air was filled with the heady noxious smell of de-icing agents.
Once the jets of spray had subsided, soldiers dressed in thick white uniforms ran out wearing thermographic cameras and carrying smaller canisters of the chemical cocktails on their backs. They investigated every nook and cranny of the airframe, poking sensors into vents and landing gear struts. Radios chattered anxiously in their ears, asking them to check and double check troublesome spots – patches of unexpected warmth, unusual exhaust flow rates. Once the people on the other side of the radios were happy that the gyrodyne was indeed clean, the soldiers left the pad and the crews returned, connecting the aircraft to the complex circulatory network of fuel lines, water mains, electrical cables and sewers underneath the base.
Massive deadbolts in the cargo bay doors slammed inwards and the hatches swung open like the belly of some great disembowelled leviathan. A small fleet of forklifts and buses pulled up alongside the ramp as the passengers, wearing thick insulated jackets and hoods pulled on quickly over their normal clothes, made the short, punishing journey through the cold air to the pre-warmed seats and complimentary tea and coffee on board the buses.
Shouts, muffled by layers of synthetic wool, echoed from deep inside the hold of the gyrodyne, stopping the disembarking passengers in their tracks. Someone was having an altercation with the cargo handlers somewhere in the warren of crates. Zips and Velcro crackled as they unpeeled, and the voices suddenly became clear.
“You’re not touching these computers! They took my research group 18 months to build and program, and I’m not having some jackass dropping them, or bumping them, or leaving them in the freezing snow, or tearing them open in the misguided belief that they’re stuffed with Exy! This is valuable equipment, you understand? Not the normal goddamn junk you unload.”
“Mister Helin, with all due respect,” replied a voice that conveyed in a careful clipped military accent just how much respect she thought was really due, “all the staff here are handpicked from the Pan-American Strongholds’ finest. We can unload a computer just fine.”
“Our finest? Don’t make me laugh! You’re uppity railway porters who think living under a little snow and some pretty lights in the sky mean you’re the elite! I was at the Overrunning of Anchorage, watching as the bugs slaughtered half of downtown. I even fought alongside the army as we defended the Xenobiology Institute. Saw a lot of good men and women die that day. Where were you? Lugging boxes off a transporter plane halfway around the world? Don’t talk to me about our finest.”
A pregnant pause – the distinctive silence of someone trying to work out whether an uncivil comeback would be worth the disciplinary action – hung awkwardly, somehow emphasised by the quiet whisper of hydraulics deep inside the cavities of the walls. A trolley gently creaked as something heavy was loaded onto it and the two appeared from behind a stack of frozen meals. A woman with cropped cupronickel hair, brown with premature silver threads, pushed a forklift trolley laden with a massive box of black anodised aluminium just visible through layers of thick insulation against both shock and cold. Her deceptively thick jacket bore the triple chevrons of a Specialist 7 rank and a machine-stitched name tag reading “S. Wisniewska”. Following behind was a goateed man wearing a heavy, bulky parka emblazoned with a Pan-American Xenobiosciences monogram, pulling all the fasteners together as they left the relatively warm, temperature controlled area of the cargo hold.
“ I’m going to come with you to the scanning centre,” he said, ignoring the crowd that had paused in the cold to watch. “I don’t trust you army monkeys with my equipment. I want to be there myself to make sure you don’t start tearing out the motherboard, as if you think Exy could make their nests inside a sterile, clean-room assembled machine! I have had this happen before, don’t think you won’t make that same mistake!”
“Look, sir,” Specialist Wisniewska replied, annoyance seeping in around the edges of her voice, “regulations require that all foreign objects that enter the station must be thoroughly checked for EXI, free from any outside interference.”
“Okay.” His voice wavered slightly, before continuing with a less emotional tone. “I respect that. However, station regulations also say that specialised equipment must be studied by an expert in the field. Since I’m the only tenured computational xenobiologist in the world, surely I’m best qualified to examine the equipment.”
Specialist Wisniewska sighed. Without looking back, she continued down the ramp towards the security station. If he still wanted to argue with her, at least there it was warm and she had backup. Smug at apparently winning the argument, Helin looked around at the other passengers, who were staring at him with at least vague anger.
“What are you looking at? Get on the goddamn buses.”
Suddenly again noticing the intense cold, the others turned around and hurried aboard the idling vehicles.