The Frankenstein Protocol

CHAPTER TWO (C)

She was still in the cryo-bay, cross-referencing the electrophysiology data against every paper on dormant biological systems she could access through the ship’s satellite connection, when Captain Oduya came to tell her they were three hours from port.

“The Norwegian Maritime Authority has been notified,” he said. “They’ll have representatives at the dock. Standard protocol for an unusual recovery.”

“Good,” she said.

“Calloway’s logistics company has also been in contact. They’re sending a climate-controlled transport for the specimen.”

She looked up. “On whose authority?”

Oduya’s expression told her he had already asked this question and not been satisfied with the answer. “The secondary funding agreement apparently includes a specimen rights clause. I’ve had legal review it. It’s… technically valid.”

“Does ‘technically valid’ mean…?”

“It means a very good lawyer wrote it to mean exactly as much as needed and no more.” He paused. “I’m sorry, Mara.”

She looked at the column. The ice had not cracked. The smell of ozone and ancient earth still moved faintly through the cryo-bay. Somewhere in the centre of it, at 0317 that morning, something had pulsed once, as if to confirm it was still there.

“Who is Calloway’s company?”

Oduya handed her a document. The letterhead read: VOSS DYNAMICS — ADVANCED RESEARCH DIVISION. Below it, a correspondence address in Reykjavík. Below that, a phone number with no name attached.

She’d heard the name. Defence sector. Contracts with three NATO governments. Elias Voss, the founder, had been profiled in The Economist two years ago under the headline The Merchant of What Comes Next. She remembered the photograph: a lean man in his fifties with a face like a closed door, standing in front of what the caption described as a ‘proprietary research campus’ in Iceland.

Iceland.

She handed the document back.

“Is there anything I can do?” Oduya asked.

“Probably not.” She looked at her notebook, at the characters she had copied from the right hand of the figure in the ice. “But I’d like to photograph the specimen one more time before we dock. Everything. Close as I can get.”

“Of course.”

He left.

She picked up her camera.

―――――――――――――――

She had approximately two hours and forty minutes.

She spent every minute of them.

She photographed the column from every angle and at every magnification her equipment allowed. She documented the suture lines in sequence, mapping them onto a rough anatomical diagram she sketched in her notebook. She recorded the inscriptions on the right hand at six different focal lengths. She photographed the face — what she could see of it, the partial profile, the closed eye, the jaw — and then she moved around the sling to find the angle she had been avoiding, the one that put her directly in front of wherever the face was pointing.

There was no good angle. The head was tilted back, chin up, and the ice above the face was fractionally less clear than elsewhere, a slight cloudiness she hadn’t noticed before. She pressed her lens against the panel and increased the magnification and adjusted her floodlight until she had the best view available to her.

She saw the face.

She took photographs.

She took a great many photographs.

And then she lowered the camera and stood very still, because there was something she needed to think about before she arrived in port, before the Voss Dynamics transport took the specimen away, before the NDAs and the institutional silence and the very good lawyers made thought difficult.

The face was the face of something assembled, as the rest of the body was assembled. She had known this would be true and had prepared herself for it. The asymmetries were subtle — a slight difference in the orbital depth of the two eyes, the jaw fractionally wider on the left than the right — but they were there for anyone trained to look for them. Composite. Constructed. Built.

None of that was what she needed to think about.

What she needed to think about was the expression.

She had conducted her entire examination on the assumption that the figure in the ice was inert. Two centuries in deep water at near-zero temperatures, she had told herself: the body was a specimen, an object, a remarkable and inexplicable thing but a thing nonetheless, acted upon rather than acting. She had brought a scientist’s detachment to two days of documentation, and she had been proud of that detachment.

The expression dissolved it.

The face in the ice was not the face of a body. It was not the slack, neutral blankness of unconsciousness or death. The muscles of the jaw and brow were not relaxed. They were set. Deliberately, precisely, permanently set, in an expression she recognised not from pathology or forensics but from ordinary human life, from the faces of people she had known in moments of absolute, grinding endurance.

Patience.

That was the expression.

Patience of such depth and duration that it had calcified into something indistinguishable from peace. The face of something that had chosen to wait, and had been waiting, and had long since made its accommodation with the waiting.

The eye that was closed was not at rest. It was held closed. There was a difference, and she knew it, and she stood there in the humming cold of the cryo-bay and let herself know it.

Something was in there.

Something that had decided to wait.

The transport from Voss Dynamics arrived forty minutes after the Nereid docked.

It was a refrigerated articulated lorry, unmarked, black, staffed by four men who communicated in short sentences and loaded the cryo-sling with the practiced efficiency of people who had moved large, sensitive objects before. They had the correct paperwork. They had, as Oduya had said, a very good lawyer’s signature on the specimen rights clause. They loaded the column in forty minutes and drove it away into the Tromsø evening without a word to anyone on the dock.

Mara stood on the pier and watched the lorry until it was gone.

Torres appeared at her shoulder. “What do we do?”

She thought about the sensor log. The pulse at 0317. The eleven seconds of something that remembered what a heartbeat was.

She thought about the expression on the face.

She thought about Elias Voss, standing in front of his proprietary research campus in Iceland, with a face like a closed door and a headline that called him the merchant of what comes next.

“We document,” she said. “All of it. Everything we recorded, everything we observed, everything we measured. We build a record so complete that it can’t be buried.”

“And then?”

She looked at the empty pier where the lorry had been.

“We find out where they’re taking it.”

―――――――――――――――

The lorry drove south through the Norwegian night, through mountain tunnels and along coastal roads where the black sea appeared and disappeared between headlands. Inside the refrigerated hold, the cryo-sling sat in the dark, maintaining its temperature within a fraction of a degree.

The smell of ozone and ancient earth filled the hold.

At some point during the drive, in the total dark, in the cold that was almost but not quite the cold of the deep ocean, the right hand of the figure inside the ice uncurled.

Very slowly.

The fingers extended, one by one, until the hand was open and flat, pressed against the interior of the ice from within.

The ice did not crack.

The hand rested there, open, in the dark, for the remainder of the drive.

Waiting, as it had always waited.

But differently now.

Now it knew someone had found it.