Zodiac Station Read Online Free Page B

the corridor. A stocky man strode towards us. I’d been reading Greek myths to Luke that week: in the dim corridor, something about him made me think of a charging Minotaur.
    He stopped in front of us, under one of the fluorescent lights. He had a wide face and blue eyes and a beard he must have been working on for months. On top, his fair hair was cut straight and short, sticking up in a couple of places from his hat. The slogan on the sweatshirt said,
ZODIAC STATION – HELL DOES FREEZE OVER
.
    ‘What the fuck’s going on with the supplies?’ His English was Scandinavian-perfect. A Viking, not a Minotaur. He flapped a pink sheet of paper at us. ‘Huh?’
    Quam’s chest seemed to grow slightly. ‘What’s the problem?’
    ‘I ordered nitrogen. For cooling my instruments.’
    I laughed. Well, it seemed funny, having to cool instruments in the high Arctic. A black look said there was nothing humorous about it. I started to stammer an explanation, something about Eskimos and fridges, but gave it up. Not a good first impression.
    ‘And?’ said Quam.
    ‘Instead of nitrogen, they sent me two hundred litres of this TE buffer solution. Two hundred litres,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t even know what this shit is.’
    ‘You use it for sequencing DNA,’ I said, trying to be helpful. All I got was a dirty look. ‘Do they think I’m running Jurassic Park here?’
    ‘Whose name was on the docket?’ Quam asked.
    The Viking screwed the flimsy pink paper in his fist. ‘Mine. But I didn’t order it.’
    ‘You must have made a mistake.’
    He threw the paper away. It bounced down the corridor. ‘Last flight, Annabel ordered some glacier drill and got a thermal cycler instead. You need to sort this shit out, Quam, or what the hell are we all doing here?’
    He would have left it at that, but Quam blocked his way. He gestured to me.
    ‘This is Hagger’s new arrival.’
    ‘Right.’ The big man gave me a look I couldn’t quite decipher. I was starting to get a feel for how the crew at Zodiac welcomed newcomers.
    ‘This is Fridtjof Torell. Known as Fridge.’
    I offered a handshake. Torell-known-as-Fridge ignored me.
    ‘Was there anything else?’
    ‘No,’ said Quam.
    He disappeared into one of the labs.
    ‘Atmospheric scientist,’ said Quam. He opened the door at the end of the corridor. A handmade poster pinned to it said,
Your Daily Horrorscope
, decorated with grinning death’s heads and a clear plastic envelope where a slip of paper could drop in.
    You are about to make some bad life choices
, I read.
    ‘And this is the mess room.’
    The mess reminded me of an old working men’s club: brown carpet and grey walls, long tables with plastic chairs. A few sofas and armchairs, leaking their stuffing, made a sitting area in one corner around an oversized television. Faded photographs hung crookedly around the room, a few of wildlife but most of stiff-backed men with hollow eyes and frost-rimmed beards. No one could have smoked in there for years, but you could still sense the stale nicotine. The only redeeming feature was the windows, which lined three full sides of the room and gave spectacular views of the fjord and the mountains. They made me want to go outside. Perhaps that was the point.
    Through a serving hatch in the interior wall, I saw a small stainless-steel kitchen. A fat man with tattooed biceps and a too-tight T-shirt gave me a wave through the hatch and turned back to the pot on the hob.
    ‘Danny, the cook. Danny knows all the gossip.’
    Quam stopped in front of two huge maps hung on the wall either side of the door. One was a topographic map of Utgard, mostly white, with Zodiac marked in the lower left-hand corner. The other showed the earth, not as you usually look at it with the equator in the middle, but as you’d see it from a spaceship hovering over the North Pole. The Arctic Ocean filled the centre, hemmed in almost continuously by the countries that bordered it. Nothing south of Shetland