End of an Era

It was a warm, bright midnight in December, and time for my shift. The skies on the western horizon were tinged pinkish-orange, as they had been for nearly two months. I had a tall glass of water for breakfast, just like the previous day. Even after being in Antarctica for a year, it still shocked me how clean and pure it tasted. Unlike distilled water, which was flat and tasteless, this was sweet with a hint of minerals.

How long can a person last without food, I wondered. A lot longer than they can without water. That was the only thing that kept me moving. I hadn’t eaten in forty hours or so and was feeling lethargic, but I had a job to do. I just wish the damn navy would do their job and let our supplies through.

I grabbed a radio and headed out to the equipment yard. “Morning, Petersen.”

“If it’s morning, then we’re late,” he answered.

“As long as we make quota, it doesn’t matter what time we start.”

Alex Petersen, a Norwegian biologist, had been left behind when South Africa pulled out of the SANAE IV research station a few years earlier. He claimed no one would pick him up and take him home, but I think he stayed behind because he knew that things were as bad back home as they were everywhere else. At least Antarctica was mostly quiet.

“I never thought I’d say it, but I miss the dried rations from the old station,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I figure Big Boss’ll have somebody’s head before the day’s out. She’ll get our food to us.”

“Six weeks with no radio communication, though.”

“If she has to, she’ll flat yell loud enough to be heard in Sao Paolo. Either way, she’ll make it happen.” I didn’t really believe that. North American pirate ships had been running a blockade on the Brasilia Water ships trying to collect ice or drop off supplies. It didn’t stop me from hoping, though.

I drove an ice cutter. Carving out one-tonne blocks of ice that are then loaded onto water haulers. Old oil tankers, their diesel engines replaced with nuclear reactors that ran on the waste of the previous generations’ reactors, were cleaned up and now carried pure water from Antarctica to… wherever. The sea ice had been gone for a long time, towed off to the nearest land to stave off the impending collapse in years past.

“Turner, you need to cut these short. We’re almost to ground,” Petersen radioed.

“I got you,” I said. Ground penetrating radar showed me that I had eight and a half meters of ice before I’d hit the rocky soil beneath. I set the rig to cut to eight meters depth and made eight one-tonne blocks per cut rather than twelve. “We’ll have to move further inland again next week.”

It would be the third move in six months; cutting a new road to get to the top of the ice pack. Starting a new cut on top of the pack made harvesting easier, once the road was cut. The road was cut into the ice by removing it wedges and creating a slope the equipment could climb. Every move, though, made the workday a little longer by extending our commute that extra fifty meters.

We made our quota before noon, and the day was warming. It was 10º C by the time we returned the equipment to the yard. The mood in the station was bleak. After two weeks on severely limited rations, our last meal, more than two days ago, was around 200 grams of instant mashed potatoes each. It was remarkable how fast previously healthy people turn gaunt when working with little or no food.

Big Boss stood up and cleared her throat. Her name was Fatima Ahmad, but we all called her Big Boss. She was the supervisor, dispute settler, and substitute mother to us all. She had to be over sixty, but she was tougher than anybody else I’d ever met.

“We’re not cutting any more ice until we get two ships in and out,” she said. When the mix of complaints and relief subsided, she continued. “We don’t have any space on the dock until we get a freighter loaded, and we’re losing too much to melt.”

“Any idea when that is? Or are we going to starve to death first?” Petersen said what we were all thinking.

“Good news is, there’s a ship coming in tonight at 21:00. The Crystal Palace is bringing food, new coveralls, medicine, machine parts, and fuel salts for the reactor. They’ll then be loaded to maximum with as much ice as we can cram into her. We’ll have to wait for the next ship before we start cutting again.”

“What’s the bad news?” I asked.

“The water wars have gotten worse, and BW is no more. We now work for the PanAfrica something or other.” She leaned against the wall. “We all knew it was going to get worse. It seems that idea just got very real.”

“What about the Ice Queen?” someone asked.

“Disappeared six weeks ago, presumed sunk.” She cursed under her breath in a language I didn’t recognize. “Waste of a good ship and all our supplies.”

“I don’t care who we work for,” I said, “as long as we eat.”

“Maybe that’s what took them so long to contact us,” she said. “The new outfit took over six weeks ago. A day before our supply was due. Maybe they want to make sure we’re ready to accept the new order.”

“Nothing better to keep a crew in line than to starve them and hang a bone in front of them if they play nice,” Petersen said.

“No way,” I said. “If they could’ve gotten the supplies here on time but didn’t, I’m far more likely to stop working altogether.”

“You do that,” she said, “and you won’t eat. No work, no food. You don’t make quota, we don’t make quota. We’re in this together.”

“Yeah, I know, just grumbling out loud.” I looked around at the haggard faces around me. Fifteen people, from fifteen different countries. The only things we shared were varying degrees of skill with English, and the fact that we had nothing left to live for outside of Antarctica. Those who did, left years ago.

I would say we all had nothing left to lose, but shared adversity can turn a group of strangers into a family. We had that to lose.

Petersen said, “Look out, Turner’s about to say something mushy.”

Playing along I said, “I love you all so much,” in a mocking tone.

The Crystal Palace pulled into port right on time, flanked by three gunboats and flying a flag striped in red, green, and black. The deck of the ship was manned with at least thirty armed guards, and a rail gun had been fitted to her prow. It looked like the new operators were not going to wait around for anyone’s navy to save them.

Big Boss was operating the crane, which had a 50-calibre machine gun fitted to it, and we all had pistols to protect against dock raiders. It had worked so far, but now we were so far outgunned it was ludicrous. After a tense minute of sizing each other up, Big Boss got on the radio. “Let’s go, people. Let’s get our gear and load this lady.”

Three hours later, we had offloaded four truckloads of supplies and loaded in 232,000 blocks of ice weighing about a ton each. The melt that gathered in the pit below ice storage was ours to do with as we pleased and was pumped to the station.

I plugged the forklift I’d been operating back in to charge and was ready to drive one of the trucks back to the station when I saw Big Boss talking to one of the guards who’d left the ship. She keyed her radio. “Guys, gather ‘round.”

We approached, not sure what was going on. The wind shifted and I smelled the unmistakable aroma of meat cooking over an open fire. My stomach felt like it was trying to eat itself, and the others all shared the same look of unease.

“Come, eat!” the armed guard said, his rifle slung across his back and his hands wide. “My name is Armand Niambele, and we are your friends.”

“That’s all I needed to hear,” Petersen said.

It wasn’t fancy, but it was the best-tasting thing I’ve ever had. Sausages with spicy mustard on stale buns, fresh cantaloupe, papayas, and pineapple. Grilled asparagus spears and red-skinned potatoes rounded out the meal, with a tangy, sweet, dark red drink they called “sobolo.”

Having eaten our fill, we were too logy to move back to the station. Instead, we started talking with our new bosses.

“We are the Pan-Africa-Asia Alliance,” Armand said. “We fight the warlords and pirates and try to help the farmers. We trade less than half the water; just enough to keep operating. Instead of hoarding it like the companies, we give the rest free to the farmers and villages that need it most and can do the most good with it.”

“If you’re trading less than half the water, where does the food and reactor fuel and everything else come from then?” I asked.

He laughed. “We have our own army and navy. What we can’t get in trade we take from the warlords and pirates, and the water tankers are often given gifts from the people we help.”

“So, you’re pirates and warlords yourselves?” Petersen asked.

“You could see it that way,” he said, “if you wish. As long as you remember you work for these pirates and not any others. For now, your quotas are reduced until we get more tankers. There’s a case of whiskey with your supplies. Whatever liquor we find we’ll share with you, since you are doing more to save your fellow man than anyone else.”

“Did you happen to leave us any ammo?” Big Boss asked.

“Yes, and one of the gunboats will be staying to protect the docks.” He looked at her radio. “If you need help you can call them on maritime channel 14. They will always be monitoring.”

“And they’re just cooped up on the ship until you come back?” Petersen asked.

“They will patrol the docks but stay close to the ship,” Armand said. “And they will be replaced with another gunboat every two weeks or so… we hope.”

“What happened to Brasilia Water?” I asked.

“I’m not entirely sure,” he said, “but we answered a distress call from the Crystal Palace. Something about BW going silent during the South American fire.”

“The what?”

“Oh, you haven’t heard? The pampas and the Amazon are on fire. Most of it is gone, along with Brazil. Started with a nuke in Sao Paolo.” He pointed to the orange sky in the west. “That’s smoke.”

“Then why did it take you so long to get to us?” I asked.

“Until the Crystal Palace joined our fleet, we didn’t know where you were.” He shook his head. “When the Ice Queen showed up, we loaded the Crystal Palace as quickly as we could and made way here under full steam.”

“The Ice Queen?”

“The last logs show she was boarded by pirates. Then she drifted, empty, to South Africa. We found a new captain and crew,” he said, “and more gunboats for security. The Ice Queen will be here in two weeks for the next load.”

At 02:00 the Crystal Palace pulled out of port, followed by two of the gunboats. We drove the truckloads of supplies to the station and loaded everything in.

Fatima’s face was haggard, more tired than I’d ever seen her. “Hey, Big Boss,” I asked, “what happens when all the ice is gone?”

“My guess,” she said, “is the extinction event that ends the Anthropocene era.”