Zodiac Station

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What the hell is out there?

Carl Franklin, Captain of the US Coast Guard ice-breaking cutter Terra Nova, stared out the wheelhouse windows. A 360˚ field of view — but he might as well have his nose pressed against a painted wall. The clouds had settled after the storm, fusing the sky with the air and the air with the ice to make a perfect blank. Growing up in Maine, he thought he’d seen fog, but this was like nothing else. Even the bow light wasn’t much more than a rumour.

He put his hand against the cold glass, just to touch something solid. Hopefully the crew didn’t notice. In the middle of the Arctic Ocean, a thousand miles of ice around them and four thousand metres of near-freezing water below the keel, he didn’t want them thinking their captain was losing his grip on reality.

He rocked back on his heels, reassured by the mass of sixteen thousand tons of steel under his feet. The Terra Nova was state of the art, the pride of the Coast Guard: an ice-reinforced vessel capable of making a steady three knots through four-foot ice, of smashing her way to the North Pole if need be. She’d already been there twice in her short working life.

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