Beyond the Ice Limit

28

IN THE VIDEO room, Garza glanced at Glinn to see how he was taking it. Once again, he could only marvel at the man’s coolness.

The video now cut to several quick shots of the ship’s corridors; the running of personnel to the lifeboats; and then to the lifeboats themselves, enclosed orange boats that were not on davits but of the free-fall type, in which the lifeboat sits on a downward-facing track and is launched by sliding off the main vessel.

Back to the bridge. Everyone had abandoned their stations save for First Officer Howell and the helmsman. The helmsman would die, Garza knew, but Howell would survive. But where had the captain gone? Garza recalled that he himself had ordered his men to abandon their stations and then had followed the captain’s orders, leaving the hold and proceeding to his own assigned abandon station: one of the free-fall lifeboats.

Another cut to the hold. Glinn could now be seen arriving at the upper catwalk, greeted by the Tierra del Fuegan, Puppup. The hold elevator was broken, and so Glinn began climbing down to the lower catwalk around the cradle, clinging to the ladder as the ship heeled and the ladder departed from the vertical. The hold was filled with the sound of groaning steel and cracking wood. The tarp around the meteorite had torn, exposing its massive crimson surface.

Garza peered more closely at the screen. Fascination was now replacing his initial shock and horror. These were images he had never seen; events he had never known. Glinn, of course, had never spoken of them.

Glinn began working the rubber-coated chains that had shaken loose, using the motor-assist to tighten them back around the meteorite. Puppup was helping him, their conversation partially drowned out by noise.

Then another figure suddenly appeared on the upper catwalk: Captain Britton. “Eli!” she called in a loud voice. “The ship’s about to break up!”

Glinn said nothing. He continued to work with Puppup, trying to retighten the chains, which had ratcheted loose in the previous roll. Garza himself had tried again and again to tighten the chains in the same way, only to have them slide back out under the immense weight of the meteorite with each roll of the ship, as the ratcheting gears were becoming stripped.

“Come back to the bridge with me,” she called out. “There may still be time to trigger the switch. Both of us can still live.”

Now Glinn shouted back, “Sally, the only people who are going to die are the foolish ones in the lifeboats. If you stay here, you’ll survive.”

The ship heeled once again; the meteorite shuddered; and still the captain pleaded with Glinn to abandon ship. But Glinn refused to stop work on the chains, even as the ship rolled again, more dreadfully, the hold a riot of screeching, tearing metal, the great meteorite shifting with a sound like thunder.

“I could love you, Eli…” came Britton’s last call to him, but he ignored her—and then she disappeared.

Her body had been found in the electronics hub of the ship; Garza guessed she must have been trying to bypass the codes and trigger the dead man’s switch from there.

I could love you, Eli. My God. Garza had had no idea. He hadn’t known just how much Glinn held back from him—just how much he’d been keeping bottled up all these years. No wonder the man had fallen apart on the bridge at the sight of Britton’s body.

As he watched, the ship continued its long roll. And there was Glinn, climbing on top of the rock itself, holding a wrench, attempting to tighten the chain bolts by hand—a completely insane undertaking. He straddled the massive rock, crisscrossed with ropes and chains, like Captain Ahab astride Moby Dick, wrench in hand, desperately flailing and struggling with a massive chain shackle.

There was a tearing sound as the meteorite shifted and the tarps rent, the meteorite now almost completely naked, its strange, crimson surface practically glowing. Hull rivets began popping. And still the ship yawed on its side, more and more steeply. There was an almost bestial sound of rending metal, a shower of sparks, a ratcheting of chains…and the web unraveled. The meteorite rolled out of its cradle, almost leisurely, Glinn atop it; the rock impacted the web of struts and beams, splintering wood and pushing steel aside like butter, descending slowly but inevitably in the inexorable pull of gravity. The ship was now canted almost on its side. The hull began to unzip and the sea came roaring in, white with fury. As Garza watched, the meteorite came in contact with the seawater.

At this point, Nishimura had slowed the video. It now progressed frame by single frame. As the water hit the surface of the meteorite, it seemed to froth or boil, and the meteorite’s skin appeared to split apart and contract, exposing a glassy interior. It reminded Garza of a chrysalis splitting to release a butterfly.

Now the video slowed even more, one frame every second. The boiling of the water around the meteorite intensified, and the red skin of the rock peeled away explosively as the translucent insides appeared to swell; the water rushing into the hold frothed around it; a rippling flash of white light erupted from the interior of the meteorite; Glinn disappeared—and then the video froze.

“That,” said Nishimura, “is the last frame before the feed went dark. I’ve enhanced it as much as possible.”

The image showed the interior of the meteorite, filled with light; and there, suspended in the middle, was the brown, ropy, engorged, melon-shaped thing resembling a brain that they had seen encased in the trunk of the Baobab.

After lingering on this final image, the monitor went dark and the lights came up. After a moment, Glinn rose and, at last, faced the others. Garza was bathed in sweat, profoundly shaken by what he had seen. Reliving the nightmare had been bad enough, but witnessing the unexpected profession of love on the part of Britton, and the callous rejection by Glinn…It was too much.

Glinn was standing before them, silently. A strange expression was on his face. For a moment, Garza worried he would collapse again. A single shudder passed through his frame. And then the moment, whatever it was, passed. His look became as cool, as detached, as unreadable, as always.

He cleared his throat. “Dr. Nishimura and Dr. Sax are analyzing that final image, but it appears that on contact with salt water, the object, which as we now know was not a meteorite, underwent an explosive sprouting or hatching event.” He glanced around. “We hope these last few seconds of footage will provide some insight into the creature’s life cycle and vulnerabilities. In particular, whether that object inside the creature, visible in the final frame, is in fact its brain.”

Glinn looked around. “Are there any questions?”

Total silence. People were too shaken up to ask questions now, although they would surely have some later. Having seen what happened, Garza marveled that Glinn had survived at all; the explosion, evidently tamped by water, had blown him free with just enough force to propel him beyond the sinking ship but not enough to kill him. Many others hadn’t been so lucky; and some, like Britton, had refused to abandon ship.

“If anyone has any insights or theories,” said Glinn, “please bring them privately to me. Recall that the details of what you have just seen should be kept confidential—for obvious reasons. And now, good morning.”

And with that he turned and left the forensic lab without another word.