Under the Ice

It was a loud explosive crack that broke Ootah from his deep coma. The limit awoke with a start, and as his eyes adjusted to the alien brightness that surrounded him, he realized that he was in a strange place, the likes of which he’d never known existed.

Hoping that this was only some sort of horribly realistic dream, he attempted to sit up. Yet when he did so, an agonizing pain shot through his chest. Only then did his hands reach under the crisp white sheet that covered him, and he became conscious that he was stark naked and his cherished amulet was gone.

With this dispiriting realization, he scanned the room in which he found himself. No bigger than an average-sized snow house it held a variety of strange equipment, and several empty cots like the one he lay on, stacked on top of each other. The only thing he could compare it to was the white-man’s house he had once visited in Arctic Bay. But this place was even stranger still, for it didn’t have a single window.

The air was warm and had a peculiar odor to it.

Doing his best to ignore the pain that left him breathless and weak, Ootah sat up. It was then he spotted his clothing hanging on the wall on the other side of the room.

The floor beneath him seemed to be rolling back and forth like a floating floe of ice, and it took a concentrated effort on his part to cross the room without falling. Once, when the entire room rolled hard on its side, the Inuit was forced to reach out for a hand hold in order to steady himself. The object that kept him from losing his balance altogether was known to the white man as a sink. Hanging above its smooth, white basin was a mirror. It only took a single glance into the shiny reflective surface for Ootah to see the fist-sized bruise that stained the central portion of his chest. And seeing it, a long string of forgotten memories rose up in his consciousness.

In the blink of an eye, he remembered the magical flashing object that had fallen from the heavens. And then there were the evil white men who had somehow made their way onto the ice to take the object from him. Other whites had appeared from the opposite direction, and a horrifying gun battle had ensued.

Caught in the crossfire, Ootah could but dig into the snow beneath his sled, and wait for the whites to kill each other off. They didn’t, and when the last bullet whined overhead, he arose out of the snow and saw an even more terrifying sight than the legions of gun-toting strangers that still surrounded him. For emerging from his snow house was the white-haired stranger who had visited him earlier in a dream. And in this mysterious elder’s evil grasp was Ootah’s beloved Akatingwah and their only son!

The Inuit could only silently petition the ancestors to intercede at this point, and his desperate prayers were indeed answered when the white-haired elder asked for Ootah to replace Akatingwah as hostage.

With the flashing box in tow, the stranger forced Ootah to join him on a snowmobile. And off they went, on a pilgrimage that he was just starting to make some sense out of.

Could he ever forget the moment when his struggles caused the vehicle to crash into a snowdrift and overturn?

And his memory would always be etched in horror when he recalled his white-haired captor raising the pistol and shooting practically point-blank at him. So no wonder this place in which he had just awoken seemed strange. This was no dream vision.

Rather it was the first house of the land of the dead!

Chilled by this thought, the Inuit rushed over to dress himself. His clothing felt good on his skin. Only when he was completely decked out in parka, boots, and mittens did he dare attempt to leave the room, to continue this greatest of journeys from which no mortal was ever known to have returned.

A cramped passageway took him down a narrow corridor filled with snaking pipes that were marked in some indecipherable tongue. Wondering why his father, Nakusiak, wasn’t there to greet him, Ootah caught a glimpse of a blue-suited, black man crossing the hallway in front of him. Quickly ducking down to hide himself, the Inuit breathed a sigh of relief only when this figure disappeared into yet another snaking tunnel. Cautiously peeking around the corner, he viewed some sort of ladder leading directly upward. A draft of cool fresh air drew him to its base, and as he looked up to see where it led, he spotted a familiar gray expanse of sky beckoning invitingly in the distance.

He needed no more additional prompting to begin anxiously climbing.

On the exposed sail of the USS Defiance, its two parka-clad senior officers stood, studying the massive, black-hulled vessel that lay off their bow less than twenty yards distant. Over seventy feet longer than the Defiance, the Sierra class submarine had a stubby, elongated sail, and its retractable planes were mounted in its bow. A prominent pod sat upon the ship’s tail-fin, and intelligence assumed that some sort of towed hydrophone array was stored here.