EDEN by Dean Crawford Page A

the steps. He unlocked the door and hurried inside. Already the walls were dusted with sparkling ice crystals and the windows thick with frost.
    Cody grabbed a box from a wall cabinet and cracked it open. A yellow Personal Locator Beacon lay inside, designed to transmit on the 406Mhz global satellite signal and on a 121.5Mhz homing signal. It was able to operate in temperatures of minus 20 degrees Celsius, but only for around forty-eight hours. He would have to replace it regularly to maintain a permanent signal. Although Alert was too far north for its transmission dishes to detect communications satellites, a six station repeater chain between Alert and Eureka provided a terrestrial link to the satellite receivers in Ottawa. Even at Eureka, to detect a geosynchronous satellite to the south would require dishes to be set horizontally, so far north was the station. A satellite not directly due south would be invisible beneath the horizon.
    Cody hurried to his bedroom. Ice glittered on the walls as he stepped inside and reached down for the heavy steel storage box. He dragged it backwards through the station and burst out of the accommodation block and back onto the ice. He left the storage box for a moment and fought against the blizzard as he clambered his way up the radio tower steps and onto the multi-tiered roof platform. His gloved hands made work difficult, but he was able to attach the beacon to the main aerial extending up into the inky black sky above.
    Cody fastened the beacon in place and then activated it.
    A bright red light flashed at him, making the falling snow speeding past look like glowing globules of blood. A smaller green light confirmed that the beacon was transmitting.
    Cody clambered back down the steps and turned. He hefted the storage box toward a deep snow drift a few dozen yards away from the station, the kind that stayed throughout most of the year, rising up against shallow north-facing hills near the station and sheltered from what little sunlight reached this far north.
    Cody spent several minutes excavating a deep hole in the drift. Then he opened the lid of the box and dumped the contents deep inside the hole before filling it in again. He then hurried back to his quarters and placed the box back where he had stored it.
    Exhausted, he trudged back to the snowmobile and looked toward the south as he got into the saddle. Through the blizzard and the blackness he could see nothing, his only tenuous link with home obliterated by the uncaring storms.
    He sat for several long minutes, immobile with indecision, before finally turning the snowmobile north and accelerating away into the bleak darkness.
    ***

9
    ‘You think he’s coming back?’
    Jake McDermott did not look up from the large map he was scrutinizing, a creased image of the North West Territories and Greenland unfolded across a table top.
    His breath still clouded on the air, but with the station’s generators running blessed warmth was evaporating the ice on the walls of the accommodation block. Compared to the frigid night outside, it felt almost tropical.
    ‘He’s coming back,’ Jake replied as he drew a finger down the east coast of Ellesmere Island toward Baffin Bay, almost a thousand kilometres south.
    ‘No chance,’ Bradley Trent uttered from nearby as he sipped from a flask of coffee.
    ‘Cody Ryan isn’t dumb enough to try to make it home alone,’ Charlotte Dennis snapped at him.
    ‘Wasn’t talking about him,’ Bradley shot back as he gestured at the map. ‘The Lincoln Sea is frozen all year round but its surface is pack ice, like a glacier. You try to move down south on that it’ll take you a year.’
    Jake glanced up at Bradley. ‘You got a point?’
    The soldier shrugged over his flask. ‘Just sayin’.’
    ‘He’s right,’ Bethany sighed. ‘The winter ice extends only about as far as the abandoned Etah station in Greenland anyway. We’d need a boat after that.’
    ‘That’s what I was hoping,’ Jake