Man of Steel: The Official Movie Novelization

CHAPTER ELEVEN

From above, it looked as though the Ice Age had never left Ellesmere Island. Vast ice caps and glaciers covered the mountainous Arctic island, which was barely more than five hundred miles south of the North Pole. Global warming had taken its toll on the thick ice shelves that extended beyond the island into the sea, but Ellesmere was still forbiddingly white, and barren in appearance. It was said to be one of the most remote places on Earth.

Lois Lane hoped the trip was worth it.

The Sikorsky S-61 helicopter touched down on a landing field at the northeastern tip of the island. Lois braced herself for the bitter cold as she exited the ’copter. A heavy parka and boots provided a degree of protection against the harsh polar climate. Her long auburn hair was tucked beneath the hood of the parka. Not the most flattering outfit she had ever worn, but Lois didn’t care about that.

If anything, she sometimes regarded her own— admittedly—striking good looks as an impediment, getting in the way of her career. She wanted people to pay attention to her byline, not her eyes or figure.

A two-man welcoming committee was waiting. The older of the men, who was obviously in charge, came forward to meet her.

“Ms. Lane? I’m Jed Eubanks with Arctic Cargo.” His breath frosted in front of his lips. “We’re a private contractor augmenting NORTHCOM on the operation.”

US Northern Command had been established in the wake of 9/11, to defend and secure the United States and its interests. Although the island was under Canadian rule, NORTHCOM was authorized to coordinate efforts with America’s allies. In recent years, Lois knew, budget cuts had led to the privatization of various support services on Ellesmere.

“Got it,” she said. “How far’s the station?”

He indicated a distant ridge. Snow and ice covered the rugged hills and valleys. They were far above the timberline, so there was no vegetation or wildlife in sight. Sunlight glinted off rolling expanses of white.

“Camp is just over yonder,” he said. “I’ll walk you there. Joe can get your bags.” He turned toward his associate, a strapping young man with a scruffy black beard. “Help her out, Joe.”

Lois briefly checked Joe out. He wasn’t bad-looking, in a hunky Ice Road Trucker kind of way. He nodded to her and began unloading cargo from the helicopter. As he did so, he reached for her overstuffed duffle bag.

“Careful,” she said. “That one’s heavy.”

He lifted it easily. Lois was impressed.

Guess they grow them strong up here, she thought.

Leaving Joe to deal with the luggage, Eubanks escorted Lois away from the landing field.

“Gotta confess, Ms. Lane,” he said, “I’m not a fan of the Daily Planet, as such. But those pieces you wrote when you were embedded with the 1st Division were mighty impressive.”

She appreciated the good review, especially after what she’d survived to get those stories.

“What can I say?” she responded. “I get writer’s block if I’m not wearing a bulletproof vest.”

“So what brings you to the ass-end of nowhere?” he asked. “Ellesmere’s not exactly your standard vacation spot.”

That was putting it lightly. The Alert Station at the tip of the island was the northernmost permanent settlement on the planet. The base had been established as a weather station back in the fifties, and had served as a joint US/ Canadian listening post during the Cold War. Today it also hosted a handful of environmental science facilities, but nothing worth writing headlines about—until recently.

“Same thing that brought a few hundred assorted Army personnel,” Lois said. “Word is their climatologists found something under the ice.”

Eubanks neither confirmed nor denied her words, but the view from the ridge lived up to the rumors Lois had heard.

The remote outpost, which rarely housed more than fifty residents at a time, had ballooned into a miniature city supporting hundreds of US and Canadian troops. Temporary structures consisting of insulation draped over steel and aluminum frames had been erected in the snowbound valley. Barracks, garages, hangars, and mess halls had sprung up practically overnight. Mechanical earth movers had been employed to carve out a large settlement out of the permafrost.

And at the center of the base was a deep pit, where a thermal meltdown generator was being used to bore through the packed ice. Steam rose from the borehole.

Lois could only imagine the money and logistics that had been required to set up an operation this massive in the middle of a frozen, barely habitable wasteland. NORTHCOM wouldn’t have gone to such lengths unless they’d had a very good reason—one she was determined to ferret out. She could practically smell a scoop.

The station’s tactical operations center was located within walking distance of the pit. Eubanks led her into the hut, where he handed her off to the folks in charge. They didn’t look happy to see her. That was fine with Lois. She hadn’t expected them to be.

The commanding officer stepped forward and introduced himself.

“I’m Colonel Nathan Hardy with US NORTHCOM,” he said brusquely. He had a receding hairline and a stern disposition. His ramrod bearing practically screamed “career military,” as did the eagles on his uniform. He gestured toward the man beside him. “This Dr. Emil Hamilton with DARPA.”

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency specialized in developing new scientific technologies for use by the military. Hamilton certainly looked the part of an egghead scientist. He was a professorial type, in his sixties, with a bald pate and neatly trimmed goatee. Lois could easily envision him puttering in a lab somewhere, working on various hush-hush projects.

“We were expecting you tomorrow,” Hardy said gruffly.

She just shrugged.

“Which is why I showed up today,” she replied.

Hardy scowled, but Lois refused to be intimidated. She took off her hood and laid her cards on the table.

“Let’s get one thing straight, okay, guys? The only reason I’m here is because we’re on Canadian soil, and the appellate court overruled your injunction to keep me away. So if we’re done measuring manhoods, you want to tell me what your knob turners found?”

Hardy looked as if he would have preferred to assemble a firing squad, but orders were orders, so he and Hamilton led her over to a bank of sophisticated computers and monitoring equipment, where they introduced her to Staff Sergeant Sekowsky. Unlike his tight-lipped superiors, the curly haired technician seemed eager to talk about what his crew had discovered.

“NASA’s EOS satellites pinged the anomaly first.” He pointed to computer screens cycling through false-color portraits of the seabed and nearby glacial topography. The glacial ice was rendered in shades of blue, while the ocean appeared as green above the rocky gray sea floor. Layers of snow were, appropriately, white. “The ice shelf plays hell on the echo soundings… but there’s definitely something down there.”

Lois squinted at the screens. She wasn’t an expert on interpreting images of this sort, but it was evident that that there was a large solid object embedded deep beneath the ice.

“A submarine, maybe?” she speculated. “Soviet-era?” That would be interesting, but not quite the front-page story she was hoping to find.

“Doubt it,” Hardy said. “At three hundred meters, that’s considerably larger than anything we know they built back then.”

Lois did the conversion in her head. Three hundred meters was roughly a thousand feet long.

That would be an awfully big sub.

Dr. Hamilton asked Sekowsky to call up an “aerial reflection radiometer view.” Lois made a mental note to look that up later, and observed that the image on the screen appeared to have been taken from orbit.

“And then there’s this,” Hamilton said. “You’d expect a sub to be buried in the seabed, but this thing’s lodged one hundred feet above sea level, at the base of this tidewater glacier.”

Lois saw his point. How would a sub end up frozen in the ice, a significant distance above the ocean?

Unless it dropped from the sky.

“Could an earthquake have moved it?” she asked.

“Maybe,” Sekowsky said. “But that’s not the spooky part. The ice surrounding it is nearly twenty thousand years old.”

Twenty thousand years?

Lois was still processing that as Colonel Hardy marched her across the encampment to her quarters. The Arctic sun had dipped below the horizon, taking with it what passed for warmth. Shivering in her parka, Lois decided she would never complain about Metropolis winters again.

“Here it is,” Hardy said, like a grumpy innkeeper. Joe tagged along behind him, still carrying Lois’s duffle bag. Hardy opened the door to the shelter, then realized that Lois had lagged behind. “Ms. Lane.”

Despite the cold, she had paused to take in the view. Steam rose from the excavation site where the meltdown generator was living up to its name. The Aurora Borealis shimmered high overhead, spreading across the night sky in rippling curtains of green and red. Pristine sheets of ice reflected the aurora.

“Try not to wander,” Hardy said impatiently. “Temperatures drop to minus forty at night. And if a whiteout rolls in, we won’t find your body until next spring.”

Lois tore her eyes away from the heavenly lightshow.

“What if I need to tinkle?”

“There’s a bucket in the corner.”

Lois entered the shelter, which turned out to resemble an industrial cargo container more than a cozy bed-and-breakfast. Sure enough, the accommodations consisted of a cot, a sleeping bag—and a bucket.

Hardy smirked before taking his leave. Joe, the hunky baggage carrier, gave Lois an apologetic shrug as he put the duffle bag down, then left without a word. Lois found herself alone in a glorified shack in the middle of an Arctic wasteland.

Could be worse, she thought. Somebody else might be onto this story.

She waited long enough to let her babysitters to get out of the cold, then cracked open the door of the shelter and peeked outside. As she’d hoped, there wasn’t a guard posted. Where was she supposed to go anyway? Hardy clearly expected her to stay inside, where it was safe and warm.

How little he knew her.

Getting the official story wasn’t enough. If she wanted to find out what was really going on, she needed to shake her handlers and poke around on her own.

Slipping outside, she zipped up her parka as far as it would go, then crept down toward the excavation site. Nobody in their right mind was outdoors after dark, so she managed to get a good look at the meltdown generator, which resembled a large steel top hanging from a chain. Hot water circulated through copper lines wrapped around the tip of the machine, which was melting the ice below at a slow but steady rate.

Pumps cleared the melted ice water from the borehole. Lois recalled that a similar gadget had been used to uncover a long-buried WWII fighter plane in Greenland several years earlier. She was hoping for an even bigger discovery here.

Twenty thousand years?

Fishing a digital camera from her pocket, she snapped a few shots of the excavation site. She was looking around for something else worth photographing when she spotted a lone figure moving across a snowy ridge outside the camp. She zoomed in on the figure, using the camera’s telephoto lens, and was surprised to see Joe the baggage handler disappearing into the Arctic wastes.

“Where the hell are you going?” she whispered to herself. Intrigued, she took off after him, following his tracks through the snow. It was a daunting trek, through one of the most inhospitable environments she could have imagined. But it never once crossed her mind to turn back. Her reporter’s instinct told her there was a story to be had, and she wasn’t going home without it.

Hopefully it would be worth a touch of frostbite.

She trudged across a huge shelf of floating ice, hugging herself to keep warm. Ellesmere Island, her research told her, had the largest ice shelves in the world, some of them extending for more than a hundred square miles. She assumed Joe wasn’t planning that long a hike, since nobody human could stay out in this cold too long. But where did he think he was going?

The aurora barely provided enough light to see by. She lost sight of her quarry amid the rolling hills and depressions, but his tracks led her on. Rounding a stony outcropping, she spied an enormous glacier looming ahead. A bright ruby light, not unlike a laser beam, glowed at the base. Clouds of steam obscured her view.

What have we here? she wondered. Another excavation site?

Her face seemed frozen and she couldn’t feel her toes anymore, but she made her way to the base of the glacier. A crystalline white cliff, glistening darkly in the night, towered above her where the glacier wall met the ice shelf beneath her feet.

A tunnel entrance, which looked as though it had been newly carved, stood before her. Rivulets of fresh water dripped from the ceiling and ran down the slick walls, continuing the length of the tunnel. Her boots splashed through puddles of slush.

The sloping tunnel appeared to lead deep beneath the glacier. Despite her professional curiosity, Lois hesitated before entering. She didn’t feel like getting buried in the ice for another twenty millennia or so, like some long-dead Siberian mammoth.

But she had come too far to turn back now. She swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and started down the tunnel.

All right, Joe, she thought. Let’s find out just what you’re up to.