Combat training. I don’t have any. If the movement I thought I just saw actually does turn out to be movement, I’m gonna get sprayed over this iceberg like raspberry flavouring over a snow cone. Ni pedo. Así es la vida.

Papá was hoping I’d get killed. In between raving about how I was a traitor and trying to get my signature for a life insurance policy with him as the beneficiary, he prayed to God that the Argentinian guerrillas, Las Focas Leopardo, would put a bullet in my head.

That’s if bullets could get through a skull as thick as mine, he said.

Keeping my hood up and my head down, I writhe back down to the groove where the bot grinds its diamonds against the ice. When I open the panel, I discover there’s still 83 minutes to go.

While I watch, the bot draws up a two-metre section of the 550 mm core sample, seals it in plastic and rolls it down the tarpaulin to lie beside the others.

The autoboat that’s coming in 83 minutes has a two-metre wide cargo hold.

When the bot finishes taking the sample, it’ll roll up the tarp full of ice columns, hook up its cable and lower them over the edge of the iceberg into the boat.

The bot itself will be left behind, its circuits irreparably damaged by the cold, but I’ll have the proof that we need. Let the sceptics argue that the ice under my feet is not a piece of Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf.

Let them pretend that the missing I-667 that the International Ice Centre lost track of during the storm has rejoined the continent somewhere, its outline camouflaged by thin sheets of sea ice.

I’m not letting them get away with it. This is I-667. If the only way to prove it is to match a 75 m core sample with one from McMurdo, I’m crazy enough to do it.

Chúpalo, sceptics. I don’t have kids, but I’ve got nieces, five of them, all sleeping in the same bed, and for every second that you put your fingers in your ears and sing, “money, money, money makes the world go round,” thousands more dirty bodies get crammed into mass graves or overcrowded camps.

Another movement in the corner of my eye. I twitch. It’s just a bit of ice flicked into the air by the bot, surely. Not the remnants of an army that hacked off Larsen Ice Shelf and towed it to Argentina after they drank their mainland glaciers dry.

Not the nominal losers in a water war that ended with New Buenos Aires in flames and four million Argentinian climate refugees sent to Australia and New Zealand as part of the peace treaty.

You tell me who the real losers were in that war. The white Australian social worker who’s supposed to give counselling to my Papá, for one. I’m pretty sure she prays to have him make good on his hunger strike threat and put an end to the monthly shoe-pelting once and for all.

A boot crunch. Abandoning the bot, I scurry half way to the edge of the iceberg before I remember that the autoboat isn’t there, yet, and the water is minus two degrees. If I was a giant, I’d run across the Ross Sea, using the white stepping stones God provided, all the way to the New Zealand Navy base at Possession Island.

I run the other way, uphill.

Actually, it’s less like running. More like trying to climb a pyramid of chayotes in a street market. My breath freezes on the fur of my hood; the insulation of the suit makes me overheat; the blood rushes to my head like mercury in a thermometer that’s going to explode. All the time, I’m trying desperately to believe that I’m running away from my imagination: maybe seals; maybe birds.

“Alto o disparo!” a man’s voice barks.

When I turn, there are three of them, armed with the latest sub-zero Swedish Ks.

“Greetings, brothers,” I manage in my best imitation of Papá. It comes out much less manly and assured than when I practiced it on board the ship. Also, my Australian accent seems really obvious.

“Put your hands up,” the middle one, a woman, instructs in castellano. “You’re Australian. I see the flag on your suit. You’re coming with us, get it?”

I’m terrified. And then it starts to penetrate my brain that she’s got an accent, too, a sort of slurred and sing-song one. She’s swallowing her ‘d’s and ‘s’s. She’s not Argentinian at all.

“You’re from Chile,” I say with wonder.

“Don’t tell him anything, Graciela,” the man growls.

They grab my upraised arms and prod me away from my equipment. The surface is uneven and they have to let go of me for a minute so I can use both hands to climb the ridge that screened me from the main part of the berg.

Then I’m staring across a great, flat, white island and they’re prodding at me again.

“Are you taking me to a boat?” I ask. It’s incomprehensible that Chileans would be stealing a berg. They fought with Australia and New Zealand in the war against Argentina.

At the time, they had no more water than their neighbours, but somehow they found the money for desalination plants, for wind farms to fill the glacial valleys and cover two dozen of their islands.

“Why do you need a berg?” I try again.

Common sense. I don’t have any.

If I did, I’d just keep my mouth shut. In fact, I’d still be on the research icebreaker with the others, sipping ristretto, stuffing my face with medialunas and laughing about how I had this insane idea to try and get a core sample from what I suspected was I-667, even if the berg would have had to swim against the current to reach its position.

When I get over the next hump, I realise there’s something laid out over the surface of the berg. Solar cells, black and gleaming, spreading out in branching patterns. Spheres that sit like fallen crystal baubles, half-buried in the snow.

We pass one. My captors ignore it, but I make a strangled noise. The spheres are conduits for sunlight. Skylights. They’re channelling the daylight deep inside the berg. The solar cells are arranged to give the impression of cracks in thin ice.

The next time the satellite swings overhead, it won’t even register the berg. My friends will see it and think the ice has broken up under my feet.
Will they even look for me if they see that? Or will they just hold a quiet memorial ceremony?

“Devil’s dunghole,” I say. “What is this? Are you freaky ice people? Where do the skylights lead? Do you live inside this berg?”

“Quiet, get it?” the woman says, exasperated. “Walk that way!”

I walk that way. There’s a petite dome. A hatch. A ladder. The Chileans open it. We climb a long way down, eventually reaching a riveted metal floor in a cylindrical room.

They murmur into little black devices. I put my hands out for balance as the room drops. An elevator. An elevator in an iceberg.

“You are freaky ice people,” I say, feeling slightly hysterical. I was prepared for Las Focas Leopardo. There was always a chance they would be here. Scientists like outcome probabilities.

Am I probably going to die?

It’s warm inside the elevator. I start to take off my suit, but submachine guns in gloved hands train on me again and I stop with my tabs dangling and my zip half undone.

The elevator stops and four doors slide open. The woman, Graciela, pushes me through one of them.

We go down a low corridor with steel doors that reminds me of the detention centre. The one where Papá slapped me in the face and told me to hold my chin up, that I was better than the guards; better than the Australian army officers; better than anyone in this stinking second-class country.

I was Argentinian. And I’d better tell them I had a grandmother in Spain, or I’d be left behind in this hole while the rest of the family went to Europe where they belonged.

No amount of imaginary relatives could get him to Europe, in the end. Does it really matter, anyway? We’re all drowning, we’re all dying of thirst and nobody wants to help, nobody wants to stop it, everyone just wants to grab what they can.

Think I don’t know where the money for my dispensable, high-tech bot came from; the money for the military-issue autoboat?

I’m not above being used by the Australian military if it gets me the climate data that we need. Only, now there’s going to be no data, and no excuse for the navy to declare that the theft of I-667 is an act of war, either – because I’m here with the freaky ice people.

Another door opens. A small, moustached man looks up from behind a broad mahogany desk and says in English, “Welcome, visitor!”

I stare at him. This grinning dwarf is the King of the Ice People?

“I am Captain Éden,” he says, leaning back in his comfy chair. His coat is cashmere, his collared shirt is cream-coloured silk.

“How is your health, Captain?” I ask.

“It is fine, thank you, Mister – ?”

“Sol. Federico Sol.”

Éden smiles. He takes a moment to enter information, most likely my name, into his computer.

“How is your health, Mr Sol?”

I’ve had enough of this farce.

“Oh, it’s tolerable, Captain, presuming you aren’t about to cut me into little pieces and send me home in a beaker. Why don’t you tell me how my health is going to be, in, say, a week from now?”

The Captain laughs.

“Only God knows that.”

“Really? Don’t you speak to Him? Didn’t He tell you to dig out a hole in the middle of an iceberg and start living in it?”

“There’s no need for blasphemy. And there is no hole in this iceberg. We simply came up from underneath it. We waited for the storm before we set a course for Chilean waters. They are warmer, and yet your Ross Sea is a traffic jam of military vessels. We could not stay there.”

“Speaking of military vessels,” I say. “My report is due very soon. If I don’t come back, they’re going to empty the whole of Possession Island and come after you.”

My mouth drops open as the Captain’s words penetrate my panicked haze. “Submarine, did you say? Did you say submarine?”

“Yes, this is a submarine. One of the RDM’s finest, the Heiligdom-class, manufactured at the Santiago Droogdok.”

“It has an electric engine?”

“Two. Less powerful than diesel or nuclear for the size of the vehicle, but enough to shift an iceberg off course.”

“And fresh water? You take it from the berg?”

“Waste heat from the submarine melts it as we go along. We start butted up against the bottom and rise slowly towards the top.”

Éden swings his legs out from under the desk. As he comes around the side of it, his dark head passes through the beam of direct sunlight that illuminates the room.

I look up and realise there’s a sphere in the ceiling identical to the ones I saw on the surface of the berg. Bots must have drilled those channels.

“We’re running out of time,” I say brazenly. “I must return with my samples.”

“I have samples,” he replies. “I have a report. You found only thin sea ice, Mr Sol. There is no need for the New Zealand fleet to speed over here. Come to the laboratory and I’ll give you the samples.”

Life. I enjoy it.

“That will be fine,” I say. Even if it makes my blood boil that the cabrón is burning his way through sections of Antarctic ice shelf. Inequality stinks. My calf-eyed, barefoot nieces could sure use some silk shirts.

I got Benita a shoebox of silkworms for her seventh birthday. Supposed to teach her about life cycles. She took them to school and a pack of bullies said it was her lunchbox full of tacos and made her eat one.

She cried all the way home. I had to restrain Papá to keep him from putting an end to those other kids’ life cycles. Back in Argentina, nobody ever went to the police. The family was the local law enforcement. You could always rely on your family, if not your country.

Éden ushers me ahead of him, back down the corridor.

“You know, Federico,” he says as we descend another ladder into a claustrophobic labyrinth, “you know how people with no fashion sense always mix their colours and styles?”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“They do! And tasteless horticulturalists are always putting plants together in their gardens that would never occur that way in nature. That’s Antarctica, you see? All those claims thrown in together. Tasteless and terrible.”

“I see.”

It’s a lie. I don’t see at all. What’s he talking about? I have to get back to the surface before the autoboat arrives. How long since those soldiers discovered me? An hour? Longer than an hour?

“At first, like a fashion victim,” Éden chuckles, “or like the retired grandmother with the garden, it didn’t matter much. It was just a very cold place for studying penguins. But now it matters that New Zealand has a border with Argentina. It matters. Those two countries should be separated by the Pacific Ocean. It’s not natural.”

“Right.”

“Different people shouldn’t mix. They should stay with their own kind.”

Éden breaks the seal on an air locked door and we step through onto short, mown grass. It’s a football field.

Sunlight dazzles through a peppering of skylights overhead. Birch trees that must be twenty, thirty years old are planted at the margins of the field, brushing up against curving steel walls.

Families picnic under the trees. The women and children are all blonde and pale. The men jovially kicking balls around are tall and chisel-jawed.

“Hallo Kapitein,” one of them calls, doing tricks with the football, showing off. “Citizens versus Crew in two weeks. I hope you are not remaining injured.”

For a moment, it seems the land of the freaky ice people can’t get any weirder. Then I remember the Dutch-Chilean alliance. The massive wealth of the Netherlands that evaporated overnight.

The empty camps set up to receive Dutch citizens that never arrived and the conspiracy theories surrounding the surrender of Amsterdam to the sea.

“How many of these do you have?” I ask.

“Enough,” Éden says. “This is the prototype. This is Ijsberg I.”

“Why? Why did they need you?”

“The Dutch have no Antarctic territory and the ice in the Arctic is all gone. There was not enough water for them to live on the Chilean mainland.”
“It’s not your water.”

“Whose water is it?”

The grass is soft. I’m sweltering in my half-undone suit. We pass through the surreal world of Ijsberg I.

Blue eyes flick interestedly towards us as we pass farmed plots, little capsule-houses clustered around communal outdoor cooking areas, and clotheslines pegged with cotton clothing strung proudly over actual cotton plantings. Sunlight is everywhere. So are chickens.

Chickens. In Antarctica. In an iceberg. Me estas hueviando.

We start to climb again. The Captain tells me the laboratories are at the distant end. I haven’t been counting my steps, but the Ijsberg I has to be at least 400 m long. I bet it turns like a barrel in mud.

Éden opens a door. We leave sunlight behind. Here in the engine rooms are accommodations of a different kind. Bunks are stapled to the walls of narrow passages. Chilean workers snore in them.

Chilean children wail from darkened maintenance areas where mop handles and knotted rags have been employed to transform pipes and storage cabinets into unattended crèches. The stink of effluent recycling tanks is everywhere.

“Are you impressed, Mr Sol?” Éden asks.

“Yes.” Mostly by the number of decibels that can be reached by an abandoned bebé.

“Perhaps thinking how many Argentinian refugees could be offloaded from your crowded cities if only your Australian Navy could capture our Ijsberg fleet?”

“Not at all.”

“Because if they come under attack, our Ijsbergs can be evacuated in a matter of minutes. They will self-destruct before we allow them to be taken.”

That seems wasteful to me. But then, evidence suggests we’re all wasteful. What’s in a country, or in a family, when we can all just be wasteful together?

“Captain Éden, if you will just give me the samples you have prepared, I need to be at the surface shortly or I’ll miss my rendezvous and that will spell disaster for you and your Ijsberg.”

“Disaster for your family, too.”

I frown at him, confused.

“Not exactly,” I say. “They would miss me, I guess.”

“I guess. Also, they will lose the chance to come and live on the Ijsberg I.”

“I beg your pardon?”

The Captain laughs. It must be good to have so much to laugh about. He kisses me on both cheeks.

“But as soon as you told me your name, Federico Sol, I sent a communiqué to a friend of mine in the Australian Customs. I knew how pleased you would be to discover that your reward for helping me is to have your father and your sisters and all their children on board the Ijsberg I.”

“Oh, yes,” I say. I start laughing. I laugh so hard that tears come to my eyes. Nobody else in my family is an Australian citizen. They dole those out to the smart ones. The dedicated ones. The young ones. Like me.

Won’t Customs be delighted to hear that permanent places in Chile have been found for my family?

Won’t it be so much easier for me to comply with Captain Éden, knowing my loved ones are being held hostage here on this ludicrously oversized, illegal and very secret submarine?

Only, my Papá won’t be pleased to find himself second-class again, servile to the Dutch, living in the darkness while they swan about having picnics and picking cotton.

At least they’re Europeans. Or, they were, before that part of Europe ceased to exist.

“What is so funny, Mr Sol?”

“Citizens versus Crew,” I sigh. “The Dutch think they can play fútbol. Make sure you put my father on the Chilean team. He’s a regular Maradona.”

I accept the samples. They’re in a small plastic icebox. There’s a feed attached, from a bot that has spent 12 hours searching and found nothing thicker to sample than a few fruitless feet of freshly formed ice.

“Must I go back the way we came?” I ask glumly. “If my autoboat’s kept waiting, the batteries will run low. They can’t be recharged in the cold. I won’t be able to return to the research vessel.”

“Graciela will take you to your cell,” Éden says. “You will wait there until I have received word that all your family is ready to depart. If the autoboat experiences power failure, we will send an encrypted distress signal on your behalf when it is time for you to leave.”

Of course. Of course it’s not time for me to leave until the hostages are in hand.

Graciela steps forward.

“Just follow me, get it?” she snaps.

I follow her, anger warring with despair. You do research so you can make discoveries. Most of the time, you discover small and unimportant things. For the first time in my life, I’ve discovered something really big and I can’t tell anyone.

“So,” I say to Graciela, “any of those screaming kids belong to you? I bet they wouldn’t mind playing under the trees. Or kicking a ball. But Éden says different people shouldn’t mix.”

She doesn’t reply.

“You must go through a couple of bergs in a year, running a place this big. Growing cotton, of all things.”

She ignores me. I keep thinking out loud.

“But the population density isn’t high. You’ve got so much empty space and you’ve tried to be self-sufficient. There can’t be more than 5,000 people on board.”

“Three thousand,” Graciela mutters without slowing.

“Three thousand,” I say. “Three hundred thousand people went AWOL in Amsterdam. Are you trying to tell me there’s 100 of these? Breaking off pieces of the ice shelf, sucking on them like there’s no tomorrow?”
“They would melt, anyway,” Graciela says, stopping and turning to face me. “The Captain says they would melt.”

“They don’t melt until you drag them into warmer waters,” I rave. “They don’t melt until you put a ruddy great temperature-controlled submarine up under them. Like putting a block of butter on a hotplate. I lost one country already. And what happens to you when you’ve gobbled all the ice?”

Graciela stares at me. She swallows.

“Follow me,” she says, pushing past me.

“But we just came from there.”

“Shut your face and follow me, get it?”

I scramble to keep up with her. We go through smaller and smaller spaces. It grows colder. I try to put my suit back on properly without losing sight of Graciela and almost get left behind.

She opens a hatch and stale, frigid air slaps me in the face.

I walk out into darkness, onto the surface of the Ijsberg I. There’s a gap, an air pocket, between the steel shell of it, sealed airtight at the edges, and the blue, arching, glistening roof of the warmth-assaulted iceberg.

Water runs off it and into channels on the surface of the submarine, captured and funnelled away.

Ahead of me, the black con tower protrudes up into the ice. The electrical wiring to the solar panels, the skylight conduits and the elevator must all be contained within it. That’s the way to the surface.

But I’m not being taken to the surface, and this definitely isn’t a holding cell. I’m looking at the bottom of the iceberg.

There’s 75 m of ice between me and freedom. At least, that was the thickness measured by my very expensive bot before it started drilling down.

My disappointment is crushing. After everything, I’m to be killed, after all. Was it something I said?

Graciela beckons me further along. I have no choice but to follow her. She pushes back her hood.

Her dark eyes are intense.

“We’re of the same blood,” she says. “We’re family, you and me. Chile should never have fought with New Zealand and Australia. We should have fought with you. I’m so sorry.”

In that moment, there’s a cracking sound above my head. I stumble backwards, landing on my butt in one of the water-collecting channels. A spinning, diamond-studded disc dangles above me, an ice sample the thickness of my wrist resting on it.

A thick cable leads up from the sample into the heart of the iceberg.
“It’s your bot,” Graciela says, knocking the sample off it. “Grab the cable. If you’re quick, you can reach the navy base before your relatives are taken from their homes. You keep on trying to save the world, get it? Good luck, Federico Sol.”

Family. Is Graciela, one of the freaky ice people, my true family? I knew Papá couldn’t be part of my true family, because family don’t hate. My family of scientists, well, I realised they weren’t really my family the moment they shrugged and let me forge my way, alone, on my hero’s quest to I-667.

Graciela says we’re of the same blood, but she doesn’t share so much as a Y-chromosome with me, and what does she know about me, anyway?

“Thank you,” I mumble. I duck under the ring of diamonds and leap for the cable. My hanging weight jars my shoulders in my sockets. Then, I am slowly but steadily reeled into the tunnel drilled by the bot.

Gritting my teeth, I hunch as best as I can; 550 mm is not a whole lot of room for a man being dragged upwards through a 136,000 tonne mountain of ice. At least I know that the cable can bear my weight, designed as it is to haul close to three and a half cubic metres of ice at a time.

Analytical software. It’s going to go crazy when I get to the surface and the bot scans its final sample. As the cable draws me towards the surface, trapped light on hidden facets gives the iceberg a ghostly glow.

I resolve to enjoy the view while it lasts.

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