The Curiosity Read Online Free Page B

that the good doctor straightens. “Holy cow,” she says.
    He pulls his ponytail forward, checking the split ends. “Yeah, not half bad.”
    He’s displaying an outline of the entire berg, with green lines in a perfect grid throughout and white veins where hard-ice runs through the ordinary kind. It looks like ore in a mine. Here and there, red stripes ribbon the hard-ice. “That’s your potential reanimation material,” Gerber explains. “Carbon. Presto.”
    â€œThis is fantastic,” Dr. Kate says. “It will sharpen documentation, too.”
    â€œAmazing what some guys can accomplish with the right tunes playing. Hey, people.” He’s speaking into his headset now. “Hold there a second. Hold, team.”
    The men on the iceberg stand still while Gerber taps at his keyboard. “We got garbage data on that last core, fellas. Walk it back and re-sound, would you?”
    We can’t hear the reply, it’s in his headphones only. Gerber watches the men retracing their steps and smirks. “Billings, you have my deepest sympathy, but it was junk data. Try it again.” He grins at us. “All right: please. Pretty please.”
    The men wrestle the scanner backward, and Gerber taps keys. “Same deal, dammit. Let’s rerun again.” There’s an edge in his voice. He listens a moment. “Don’t blame me, dude, I don’t know. Has one of you goons got your thumb over the lens?”
    He listens, then frowns. “What I am receiving is solid carbon for that section. Every bit of it. Ditto the four above it and five of the surrounding twelve.”
    Dr. Kate taps Gerber’s shoulder. “What’s going on?”
    He waves dismissively at the screen, where amid the green grid there is now a block of solid red. “The reading here is that the entire cubic foot is full of carbon. Which is as likely as throwing a shovel at a coal mine and finding a flawless diamond.”
    â€œMay I?” Dr. Kate holds out her hands and Gerber places the headset in them. She fits it over her head, keeping her fingertips on the earpieces. “Billings, instead of the usual pattern, could you guys please run one cube north?”
    I watch the monitor as they hoist the scanner onto a new spot. Despite the moon suits, their body language reveals reluctance and annoyance.
    â€œSee?” Gerber points at his screen. There’s red again, a solid block. “That one is full of carbon, too. Dammit, I debugged this stuff all the way through yesterday. Maybe the sonogram is down. What’s the wind chill out there tonight anyway?”
    â€œOne more to the north, would you please?”
    She’s listening now, concentrating on what they say.
    â€œShit, there’s a third row,” Gerber says. He throws a pen against the table. “I hate what the cold does to my equipment.”
    She holds up one finger to silence him. “How deep are we scanning now?” She listens again. “Really? The underside?” She smiles. “Excellent work, gentlemen. I am going to suit up, and I’d like Squad Three on this one. Let’s say full gear in forty minutes, on my mark of 4:18, GMT. That’s all for now. Way to go, guys.”
    Gerber is looking up at her like a baby bird waiting to be fed. She hands the headphones back to him.
    â€œI need you to be my shipboard brains, Gerber. Save the scan data real time, and back it up on two hard drives, okay? In the water we’ll go full video, with snapshot captures on my marks. I want this recovery sequence unimpeachable.”
    â€œYou don’t think it’s the equipment?”
    She laughs, one high note. “Gerber, don’t you get it? I don’t know if it’s a seal, or immature beluga, or shark. But something big is frozen in there. Really big.”
    â€œIt’s so exciting,” Gerber deadpans. He tilts his head at me. “I’ll alert the