Ruining His Smirk (Polar Love Stories #4)

1. Nate

Nate

Polar Research Ship Icebreaker

Weddell Sea, Antarctica

Austral Summer

Dec 9th

I stood on the deck of the ship as it shuddered beneath me. The vibration traveled through the soles of my boots into my very bones. A deep, eerie moan filled the cold Antarctic air as our ship—a polar icebreaker—climbed onto a sheet of sea ice.

For several long seconds, the ship continued to glide up, weighing down on the ice below with its massive bulk.

Then a crack split the air.

The ice surrendered. I looked down from the deck and watched the crack in the ice as it raced outward beneath the ship and across the white expanse, branching into dark fractures before the sheet below us buckled from the pressure of thousands of tons of steel.

I smiled into the bitter wind. I would never get tired of watching an icebreaker do what it had been built to do: this enormous beast of metal crushing a path through the remote, desolate corner of the planet and taking us farther into the depths of the Weddell Sea.

I twisted to look behind. The ship had left a dark blue channel of freshly exposed water cut through the frozen sea.

Ahead of me stretched an endless white plain.

There was no other ship for miles and miles.

We were the only human beings and we were completely dependent on this ship to keep us warm, safe, and alive.

I turned back to my sketchbook and braced it against my forearm before the wind could tear it from my hands.

The page ruffled beneath my frozen fingers.

I had been on deck sketching the scenery for half an hour, and my fingers were just about frozen.

The side door opened behind me with a heavy metallic thud.

Keith stepped outside and pulled the door shut against the pressure, his shoulders hunched inside his heavy jacket and both hands buried firmly in its pockets.

He crossed the deck toward me, the collar of his heavy jacket turned up and a thick woolen beanie pulled over his head.

He came to stand next to me and looked down at my bare fingers. “It’s too cold today.”

That was his way of saying I should wrap it up. I stuffed my pencils in my pencil pouch and closed my sketchbook.

“What did you draw?” he asked.

“Seals. Icebergs,” I replied, pulling my gloves over my stiffened fingers. Restoring the circulation was going to sting.

“Is this for your next book?” Keith rested both forearms on the railing, staring across the ice. We’d worked together for years. Before I met him, he’d served with the Navy SEALs, and now his primary role was our ship’s medic and rescue specialist.

“Yeah. I’m thinking of a baby seal story or maybe a baby whale. Not decided yet.”

“You’re a whale researcher, so why not baby whale?”

“We won’t get to see too many whales until we leave the sea ice area. It’s still early in the season. Most of my whales are still en route from warmer waters. Meanwhile I have plenty of seals to draw here.”

He nodded as he looked out at the passing scenery. Another shudder rocked us.

“I thought you were mooning over your cowboy out here all by your lonesome self.”

My mood immediately nosedived. “He’s not my cowboy.”

“But you’d like him to be yours.”

I glared at him. “I met the man once.”

“Exactly. A whole year ago.”

“I hardly think about him.”

Keith gave me a level look. “You know a funny thing about firefights?”

“Enlighten me.” I spread my hands.

He didn’t even look at me as he spewed his nonsense. “Sometimes the shortest ones leave the longest scars.”

“That’s not as deep or poetic as you think it is,” I ground out.

He grinned.

“What?”

“No one else… except him gets under your skin like this.”

I opened my mouth.

Closed it again.

“And there goes your defense,” he chuckled.

“Defense my arse.”

He bumped my shoulder but mercifully shut his trap. We stood in silence for a moment. Another gust of Antarctic wind swept across the ice and I shivered.

“How’s that fine arse doing?”

“Frozen like a brass monkey.”

He grinned. “Your British always shows up when you’re truly suffering. Coffee?”

“Tea.”

The two of us went inside, immediately enveloped by the blissfully climate-controlled warm air of our ship.

* * *

Three days later, the team found the spot where we wanted to park our ship for the next few weeks. It was right next to an iceberg and would allow us to study the ocean floor.

All of us had gathered in the science hangar.

It was the first time we were going to use the moon pool since leaving the mainland, and the excitement aboard the ship was palpable.

I looked at the water visible in it. It was a square opening in the floor, four meters by four meters, surrounded by sturdy railings.

Dark seawater rose and fell inside it with the gentle movement of the ship.

Looking down into it felt profoundly wrong.

Every instinct insisted a hole straight through the middle of a ship shouldn’t exist.

It was the heart of the vessel.

“Easy now,” Captain Birch called, leaning over the moon pool’s railing. “That little beauty costs a million dollars.”

One of the technicians looked up with a patient smile.

“Yes, Captain.” She’d been handling the probe like fine china long before he’d said anything.

The probe was about the size of a large canister vacuum, a squat rectangular machine enclosed in a black metal frame, with cameras and large headlamps across its sides.

The captain watched for another second before rubbing his hands together. “So then.” He looked around at us. “What treasures are we expecting to bring back from the bottom of the Southern Ocean? Mermaids?” A few chuckles rippled through the hangar.

“Mud,” Hillary said with a grin. She cupped both hands in front of her as though holding an overflowing heap. “Beautiful, glorious mud.”

The captain shook his head. “Spoken like a scientist.” He turned toward me. “And you, Nate?”

“I’m just here for the fun. My whales don’t hang around here. They need vast open areas.”

“Excellent. I’m here for the fun too.” He clapped his hands together.

Just as the technicians finished setting up the probe, the hangar doors opened behind me. I glanced over my shoulder as another group filtered inside. Keith was among them.

The captain looked around at the growing crowd and laughed.

“I do hope somebody’s still at the bridge.”

Looking around the hangar, I counted at least fifteen heads. That was half of our entire crew. Even our chef had come down to see the spectacle.

The chatter died away as the lead technician rested a hand on the control console. “Beginning deployment,” he announced. The hangar fell silent. The wall of screens flickered on.

Goosebumps erupted over my arms. The electric winch hummed to life. The probe disappeared beneath the dark waters through the moon pool.

“Deployment confirmed.”

All of our eyes went to the screens. Small flashes of life drifted through the lights. Tiny translucent creatures pulsed past the cameras before vanishing back into the darkness.

For the next half hour, we watched the astonishing diversity of underwater life move across the screens.

“Depth approaching seabed.”

“I’m glad I lived long enough to see this,” the captain said quietly.

Several of us nodded. It wasn’t that the ocean floor was unknown. It was just that it was the least mapped of all the surfaces on our planet. Only a tiny fraction of the ocean floor had ever been mapped to a level of detail comparable to land.

The vehicle glided ahead. The lights swept slowly across the bottom, revealing scattered rocks and gentle ripples in the sediment before the edge of the iceberg came into view.

Even beneath the surface it was enormous.

The white-blue wall stretched upward beyond the reach of the cameras, disappearing into darkness above.

The beam from the lights played across smooth ice worn into gentle curves by years of moving water.

“Hold on.” I frowned at the top-left screen. “I want to explore this bit.” I tapped.

The probe reversed a few feet and glided forward again at a slightly different angle.

“There!”

“Is that… a cave?” Hillary squinted. “Oh… that’s the underside of the iceberg.” She looked back at me.

“But it’s not touching the ocean floor?” I asked her.

She nodded. “It is not grounded in this section. Looks like we have some evidence of melting here.” She pointed to the screen. “We have an overhang. That’s why it looked like a cave earlier.”

The technician maneuvered the probe as all three of us huddled together to focus on the screens. Suddenly, something pale caught the edge of the beam.

I stiffened. “Stop.”

The vehicle jerked to a stop.

“Do you guys see what I see?”

“I see it.” Keith stared at the screen. “This right here, correct?”

“Yeah. Uh…can you very slowly nudge the probe? Be careful not to touch it.”

The white shape grew longer. The lights revealed the unmistakable arc of a spine.

“Keep going,” I said quietly.

The probe crept forward. Vertebra after vertebra emerged from the darkness, followed by ribs curving outward beneath a fine layer of sediment.

My pulse quickened. “It’s a whale skeleton.”

Hillary glanced at me. “Can you tell which species?”

I nodded without taking my eyes off the screen. “Humpback.”

The technician eased the probe farther back, widening the view.

“No,” I whispered.

Keith looked at me. “What?”

“It can’t be.”

“What’s wrong?”

I shook my head slowly. “Nothing’s wrong. That’s the problem.”

The lights traveled along the pale curve of the spine. The vertebrae continued in an unbroken line, with the ribs still fanned out on either side instead of scattered across the seabed.

“It’s articulated,” I said. “The bones are still lying in anatomical position.”

Keith frowned. “You don’t normally find them like that?”

“Almost never this complete.” I stepped closer to the screens.

“Once a whale reaches the seafloor, an entire ecosystem goes to work on it. Scavengers strip the tissue. Smaller organisms colonize the bones. Currents and sediment shift things over time. The skeleton gets disturbed, buried, pulled apart.”

“But this one didn’t.”

“No. Look at the spine. The ribs. If the skull is still attached…”

The technician moved the probe a little farther, and the lights found the great sweep of the jaw.

The captain came up to stand next to me. “Museums have whole whale skeletons, though. Don’t they?”

“Yes, but that isn’t what this is.” I pointed at the screen.

“Those are prepared specimens. Bones collected, cleaned, reconstructed, and mounted. This animal is still lying where it came to rest. The sediment around it is part of the discovery. The position of every bone is part of it.” I swallowed.

“We may be looking at an entire whale fall that has remained intact.”

“So how rare are we talking? How many have been found?”

“Complete, articulated humpbacks in their original Antarctic seabed context?” I shook my head. “Not many. Possibly none quite like this.”

The captain whistled as he rocked back on his heels.

Then the technician asked the obvious question. “Can we bring it up?”

My excitement evaporated. I looked at the skeleton again, lying peacefully beneath untold years of undisturbed Antarctic water. It had probably been exposed only because of the recent melting along the belly of the iceberg.

“…No.” The word tasted bitter. “Our probe can document it. Photograph it.” I shook my head. “But that skeleton weighs several tons. We don’t have anything aboard capable of lifting something that size without destroying it.”

“I’m sorry, man.” Keith squeezed my shoulder. “That’s a hell of a discovery.”

It was. We’d just found the discovery of a lifetime.

And it was going to stay exactly where it was.