Wormhole Base, Northern Greenland The ice was a creaking, shifting presence. Dylan didn"t like to dwell on the audible reminders that a substance so hard could be so dynamic that it would slowly fill any tunnel bored through it, given time.
"Was this part of the American base?" Kubota asked.
The businessman from somewhere in Asia-the name sounded j.a.panese to Dylan, but he hadn"t inquired-was casting eager looks at the mechanical debris mixed in with the icy rubble left along the foot of the newly carved wall. Dylan hurried him along and opted for enough of an explanation to keep him happy.
"In a sense, yes. The Americans were thought to have cleaned out all of Project Iceworm"s stuff when they left, back in 1966, but we"re still finding their sc.r.a.ps. Looks like they just didn"t bother dragging out various pieces of broken-down machinery or equipment. We"ve also come across furniture and remnants of the theater. Or perhaps it was the church. Everything got trapped inside the ice sheet when it closed in."
"So then, this tunnel isn"t one of the original diggings?"
"No."
"Did you find any missiles?"
Dylan glanced at Kubota without managing to spot the twinkle in his eye that had to be there.
"No," he said curtly. "And the nuclear reactor was decommissioned and removed."
"Good. So then, this is a safe place."
Maybe he was radiation-shy. Given the effects of the Taiwan nuclear exchange on the entire region he came from, that wouldn"t be surprising.
"The safest," Dylan confirmed. "Part of the Consortium"s cover here is the Extragalactic Neutrino Observatory. The deep ice is clean enough for Cerenkov radiation to shine through quite a large volume. Not as good as in Antarctica, but at least we"re looking in the opposite direction. The detectors point down, of course, to use the Earth itself as a gigantic shield and filter, but they"re also protected to some extent by the bulk of the ice over them. We"re not as far down, with only ninety meters of ice above us, but it"s still a nicely rad-free environment."
"A one-time creation."
"The whole point," Dylan agreed.
The Consortium offered visitors with a need for utmost confidentiality the most private facilities ever built. Every meeting room was freshly dug out of millennia-old ice. The only manufactured objects brought in-chairs, tables, infrared lamps-were so basic as to be easily searched for even nanotech bugs. n.o.body else had used a given room before and n.o.body else would afterward.
This time, the Consortium itself had called the meeting. Secrecy would be absolute. Dylan had heard that all of the furniture would be made of particle board produced on the premises with lumber harvested from a submerged forest in an African lake. The whole idea being that no hidden transmitter or recorder could have been included decades ago within the trunks of a soon-to-be-drowned grove, or would have survived the chipping process ... Dylan could think of a few flaws with this a.s.sumption, but as long as it served its purpose of setting suspicious minds at ease, he wouldn"t quibble.
"Here we are," he said.
Kubota went in first and Dylan followed, finding his way to the side of Brian McGuire. As head manager of the local Consortium office, McGuire would chair the meeting. As the brightest of the bright young interns, Dylan would supply specifics if required.
The room was large and freezing cold until one entered the enchanted ring of infrared lamps.
The tables were set in a hollow square, with enough seating for twenty people: an eclectic mix of owners, executives, and highly trusted a.s.sistants.
"No names," McGuire announced in a booming voice. "Names are too easy to remember. Faces just slip away. Or change."
Not that individual names really mattered. The only names that counted were displayed on yellow cardboard squares and they identified the companies or industrial concerns represented by the people around the table.
"Notes?" asked a woman with a slight Scandinavian accent.
"You may use papers or internal electronics. If you managed to sneak in any external electronics, my congratulations to your technical staff, but you"ll still have to sneak them out and their contents will have to survive a low-level electromagnetic pulse."
The woman nodded. McGuire added: "At the end of the meeting, I will offer a road map, boiled down to six main points. We worded them to be easy to memorize. In many instances, details will come later. We are here to ask and to answer questions. If the answers aren"t satisfactory, we won"t go forward. But I truly believe that we are standing on the ground floor of something big."
Heads nodded. The Consortium had already proved it could place big bets when it had built up Qaqortoq from a sleepy fishing village into a major port for container ships coming or going from Asia, Europe, or North America, and needing to swap containers before heading to their ultimate destination. In the broader context, Wormhole Base was a side-project catering to a few thousand people a year though it also served to demonstrate the Consortium"s commitment to Greenland. But McGuire was willing to go slow and build his case first.
"Global warming is the new industrial frontier. Mitigation and adaptation are already huge, and are going to become even huger. We"ll have to beat back deserts, move cities to higher ground, and re-create whole new species."
"I thought the Loaves and Fishes group was cornering the market for new heat-tolerant crops and pollution-resistant fish," said an older man whose spot at the table bore the name of a well-known Canadian nanotech company.
"Perhaps, but they"re not turning a profit," Dylan objected.
McGuire threw him a menacing look, but his voice remained smooth and practiced as he ignored the double interruption.
"Everybody here has a finger in the pie, and a stake in the result, but we want more. Greenland is the first new piece of prime real estate completely up for grabs since humans arrived in North America-unless that first wave actually beat the one that went to Australia."
"Rather barren real estate."
"It"ll get better."
"And not entirely deserted."
"The current population is just hanging off the edges of the landma.s.s, so it will only be a factor if we let it. Our new facilities have attracted so many immigrants that they"re swamping the locals. One way or another, we don"t expect the Nuuk government to be a worry."
The man identified as Toluca nodded, apparently willing to concede the point. His own face bore a distant family resemblance to that of the Greenland Inuit.
"As part of your invitation, we included a topographic map of Greenland without the ice sheet," McGuire added. "It must have struck you, looking at the map, that there are only a few major glacial outlets. Plug them up and the Greenland ice sheet will no longer contribute anything to sea level rise."
There were blank looks all around the table. Preventing sea level rise was not an obvious source of profits. Saving the world would have to yield dividends to catch this group"s attention.
"Where will the water go?"
"Nowhere. It"ll stay where it is. Part of Greenland lies below sea level. Up to three hundred meters. The central part of the continent can easily contain a major inland sea."
"Isn"t the crust depressed under the weight of all that ice? Won"t it rebound?"
The woman from Scandinavia probably knew something about post-glacial rebound. Dylan looked expectantly at McGuire, but the Consortium manager did not need to consult his a.s.sistant.
"Come on, think! If the water is contained when the ice melts, it won"t go anywhere. The overburden remains nearly the same. The melt.w.a.ter will be quite sufficient to prevent isostatic rebound."
The woman did not yield as easily as Toluca and probed further.
"I did look at the map. The central ice sheet is over three kilometers high; most of the surrounding mountains are no more than hills. The peaks reach up to two kilometers on the eastern coast, but most of the western hills are only half a kilometer high. Even if you could turn most of central Greenland into an enclosed basin, something like half the ice is still going to melt and add to sea level rise."
"Half is better than none. And the half flowing out can be turned to good use."
"Such as?"
"No mean bonus. If you plug the outlets and water rises behind the walls, we will be able to use some of it to power hydroelectric plants."
Dylan hid a smile as backs straightened, chair legs sc.r.a.ped along the roughened ice of the floor, and gazes fastened on McGurie.
"White coal," Kubota said, his eyes narrowing.
"Enough to power whole new cities, yes."
"The gaps between the hills are huge," the Scandinavian woman noted.
"All the more work for us. If this is sold as a way to control water outflow, we can get government money to help with the construction. And we can start with the smallest outlets, the ones that will cost least to plug and will be all the more profitable."
"So then, a.s.suming there is money to be made, I think we would like to be a part of it," Kubota said slowly. "We can talk about the technical issues later. Plenty of time for that. What I would like to know is how you intend to tackle the political side. Sea levels have risen a meter since the beginning of the century, but most governments haven"t budged or tried seriously to slow the warming. So then, why would they act now?"
"Floods."
"As in glacial lake outburst floods?" the Scandinavian woman asked. "Those can be cataclysmic!"
Dylan had researched the Missoula floods that had devastated eastern Washington state at the end of the last glacial period. The lake had been gigantic. The collapse of an ice dam had unleashed a flood with more water than all of the planet"s rivers put together, flowing with a speed rivaling that of a car on a highway. The flood had scoured riverbanks down to bedrock and carried chunks of glacier for kilometers downstream. He expected to answer questions later, but it was still McGuire"s show for now.
"Precisely," the Consortium manager confirmed. "Take Niviarsiat Lake in Kujalleq. Fifty years ago, there was a glacier half a kilometer high in the same spot. Now, it"s a melt.w.a.ter lake dammed by leftover ice. If the dam broke, the water would rush down Ikersuaq Fjord and destroy everything within reach."
"Is this what you"re proposing to do?" the Canadian asked.
Some of the attendees glanced at the icy walls and ceiling, as if to rea.s.sure themselves they were as safe from espionage as could be.
"Does anybody live in Ikersuaq Fjord?" Toluca asked, who was squinting again.
"Most of the valley near the lake actually belongs to a Consortium company and access is forbidden. Once you reach the actual fjord, there"s a small settlement at Niaqornaq and the town of Narssaq is found on the next fjord over, though it is connected to Ikersuaq by a strait. Many buildings have already been moved to higher grounds, but the docks would certainly be swamped. Let"s be frank, people. Casualties would help us make our case to the government."
"Is this a hypothetical discussion?" the Canadian insisted.
McGuire held the eyes of the owners and executives around the table. Dylan noticed some of the a.s.sistants closer to his own age looked uneasy, but they weren"t involved. McGuire challenged his peers when he answered, his voice dropping to a lower tone.
"Last winter, one of our best men set off explosives underneath the glaciers feeding the lake. There were no visible effects, and the blasts could be confused with an ice quake, but the ice beneath the glaciers was turned into Swiss cheese. Throughout the summer, the glaciers calved several times, shedding huge chunks of ice that melted in the sun. The lake level has risen so far and so fast that pressure near the bottom should have pushed the freezing point below the temperature of the ice. The water should already be eating away at the base of the dam."
"When will it break?"
"Two weeks from now. Mid-September."
n.o.body asked how he could be so certain of the timing. Faces closed while minds readied to grapple with technical details as a way of forgetting what had just been discussed. Dylan suspected that all they cared about now was that the meeting room be blown up as promised after they left, tons of ice crushing the furniture and burying the very memory of the dangerous words they had heard.
Niviarsiat Lake, Southern Greenland Old Man Hall had slipped just as he was launching the drone into the air, banging his leg hard on a boulder in the wrong place at the wrong time. He said drily that he"d known right away that it was a break, not just a bruise. Paul didn"t ask how. Unable to put any weight on it, he"d managed to hop and crawl back to his tent, where he"d waited for the return of the drone.
The drone"s video was much clearer than the phone pictures. The small plane seen earlier had found a smooth stretch of gravel by the fan of rivulets streaming out of the ice dam base. Paul would have liked to freeze the frame, but the professor was still holding his phone. The gravel looked suspiciously smooth and uniform, devoid of any larger rocks or significant dips. A previously used landing strip, perhaps?
"This is where it gets interesting," the Old Man whispered.
The plane had come to a quick stop close to the foot of the ice dam. A man stepped out, looked around, but did not look up. He opened a cargo compartment, took out a heavy rucksack, and walked over to the dam, bent under the weight of his load. He was using what looked like a ski pole as a walking stick. He took his time climbing up the b.u.mpy outward surface of the dam. When he was about two-thirds of the way to the top, the man knelt by a narrow creva.s.se and probed with his pole. He got up and tried another creva.s.se a few meters away. It took him two more tries to find what he was looking for.
This time, he pulled out of his bag four, long boxlike objects linked by cables. He lowered them inside the creva.s.se, using a rope clipped to one of the boxes, and then rose to his feet. The rucksack was much lighter now. The man checked his phone, walked down a few meters, checked it again, walked back to the plane, and checked it one last time before taking off.
"Any chance those wouldn"t be high explosives?" Paul asked hollowly.
"A very small one. I"ve been in the field for decades, I"ve seen geologists at work, glaciologists, bacteriologists, paleontologists ... I can"t say why exactly, but the man"s behavior just doesn"t fit. He was too hasty, didn"t take any measurements ... perhaps he was dropping off an instrument package for somebody else, but I don"t buy it. It"s a good thing I didn"t look at the video for a couple of hours. Too busy trying to take care of my leg, so it was already dark when I watched it."
"And that"s when you called base camp."
"Right away. And I didn"t sleep much that night."
"Why do you think they would want to blow it up?"
"Unsure. The lake behind it is not that big, but the flood would rush down to the fjord and threaten Narssaq. I think Narsarsuaq would be safe from any kind of backwash. If it"s some sort of terrorist plot, I fail to see the logic of it."
"What about the Loaves and Fishes people?"
"They"re into radical adaptation. New heat-tolerant crops. New marine life forms engineered to withstand the acidic seas. If they can thrive on a plastic-enriched diet, even better, since the oceans aren"t going to run out of plastic for centuries ... But terrorism on this scale? I know they"ve sabotaged some bottom trawlers to make a point about disappearing fish stocks. And they"ve been strident about highlighting the shifting land and ocean conditions due to climate change. Still, why would they be behind this?"
Paul shook his head, unable to offer a rationale. The Old Man had been thinking it over for hours, after all.
"How about the Sunscreen Lobby? They"ve been looking for a way to convince governments to fund their orbital shield for years."
The professor shrugged. "Sure, extreme environmentalists of all stripes might go for it as a reminder of the dangers of global warming, but casualties are going to be low even if they blow it at night. And there"s so much happening elsewhere that I doubt it would grab the world"s attention."
"If it"s that unlikely, it might not be a bomb. I should go and check before we panic."
"Now? It"s dark and you won"t see anything."
"I"ve got a good lamp. I watched the video carefully. I think I can find the right creva.s.se."
"How will you fish the package out? It looks like he picked the deepest creva.s.se he could find."
"But he didn"t recover the rope he used to lower the package. With a bit of luck, I can use the rope to pull it back up."
The professor half rose up, stretching out his arm as far as he could.
"Don"t go. If the dam blows while you"re out there, I won"t have a chance. The flash flood will just roll over me."
"And I"ll be dead. In that case, you might as well tell me now why you came to be here."
"What I do on my own time is none of your business."
Paul stood and zipped up his coat.
"If that"s how you feel, professor, we"ll have to discuss this when I come back. I"ve come over the mountain to help you, and that was hard enough. But I"ve spent years working on the identification of bacteria preserved in the ice, or beneath the ice. I"ve examined I don"t know how many samples taken out of tunnels dug with hot water hoses or brought back by icebots from the deepest layers of the ice sheet. I"ve helped to isolate bacteria able to repair their DNA in freezing conditions for over a million years. I"ve found two new strains that synthesize methane in brutally cold conditions to help the Martian Underground plan for the global warming of Mars. And I"ve ... So, if you think I don"t care that my work may benefit somebody who didn"t pay for it, you need more time to rethink your a.s.sumptions."
"All work that I taught you how to do."
"Don"t flatter yourself. I had other professors. But I did look up to you for one thing."
"What?"
"Ethics."
The Old Man grabbed for the stool and tried to lever himself upright without using his leg. Paul shouldered his backpack again, wincing slightly, and opened the tent slit.