Sly turned the dead man over, avoiding the ruined face. This was the tall man he called ‘Greyhair’, the ranking cultist with the quarterstaff, and the third he’d loot today. Loot. Such a loaded term, but oddly appropriate.

  The man wore strange hide-like armour, textured like leather but impressed with an odd, scaled pattern. Not for the first time, he wondered if there was a militant cosplay element in the attackers’ force, but that was way too bizarre. The cloak he wore was soft and warm to the touch, but... tingly, like it held a persistent static charge. He touched the wool and felt a shiver on his fingertips. The other cloaks had been oiled, not… whatever this was. He brought his fingertips to his nose. It had a mild, waxy smell. Lanolin, he thought, but that only confirmed it was wool.

  Sly went through the rest of the dead man’s gear with more speed. A shoulder-bag held what looked like dry bread, a folding knife slippery with oil, tobacco flakes in a soft leather bag but no pipe to smoke them.

  Greyhair had a couple of rings on a silver chain about his neck. A keepsake?

  He concluded the man didn’t have much here. There wasn’t enough stuff even for a nomad, so Greyhair left the bulk of his things in the camp. Sly placed the chain of rings over his own head for safekeeping but left the contents of the bag.

  Then there was the book, against the padded coat inside the armour. The object’s location instantly made it a significant object, one Greyhair didn’t want to lose. Sly unbuckled the armour on the other side, to see if he carried anything else.

  Buckles were weird, he thought as he struggled. Why not use Velcro like normal people? Then again, ‘normal’ people didn’t use crossbows. It was almost as if these crazies took the Antarctic treaties signed since December 1959 at face value. No modern military activity, and sustainable, natural materials only. Survivalist crazies with an environmentalist agenda, maybe? Extremely well-funded crazies, if they got to Antarctica without US military help.

  He searched but there was nothing else there. Only the one notebook.

  He turned it over in his hands.

  Was this what all the fuss was about? he asked himself. It would be a nice, clean end to the mission, and they could get out now, without stomping on Fox’s toes. Unfortunately, looking at it carefully, it left him with doubts. Sure, he would hand it in with the diamonds and the other things the team had found, but although it had the smell of something significant, it didn’t give him enough to call an end to the hunt.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  If the cultists already had what they were looking for, why were they trying so hard to get to L2? Why were they still here? Unlike Ramirez, he didn’t think they couldn’t leave whenever they wanted. After all, they didn’t get here by US transport, and they wouldn’t leave that way, either.

  He'd felt the notebook thoroughly in his hands. Soft, tooled leather, like he’d seen in an upmarket gift shop in Florence. This one came by its softness honestly, from long use and frequent handling, judging by the ink smudges on the cover.

  A leather cord tied it closed. Sly had unstrung the cord and opened it.

  Nothing on the first page or the second. The third page had a sharp crease down the middle: a line the hard, flat edge of a razor might have made. The writing was only on the left side of the paper, but it was gibberish anyway, at least to him. It might’ve been code, but it could also have been a language so different from English that it made no difference.

  Arabesque swirls and dots, inconsistent angles that were hard on the eye.

  Occasionally a pictogram appeared right on the edge of the line, like half a hieroglyph or written logo, or part of a medieval illuminated letter. They were clearly as separate from the arabesque swirls as Japanese Hiragana was from Kanji.

  This was no natural language Sly had ever seen before, though he was no linguist. He flicked through the pages, finding more of the same sharp-creased pages. A notebook written in code, then, possibly military in nature. He closed the book and, having no suitable pockets, slid it into his armour to examine later.

  To feel the book there, held in much the same place its owner used, gave him a sense of intimacy he’d rather not feel with the dead man. But he didn’t want to put it into the tactical backpack he was wearing, either. He didn’t want to risk losing the notebook if some fluke separated him from his bag.

  He stood, paused a long minute. He’d learned nothing by looting the corpses, except that the men hadn’t showered in days and weren’t Chinese. Their possessions were nice enough and well-made, but odd.

  Well-made. That was it. The knickknacks were made, not mass-produced, the contents of a drawer of historic bric-a-brac in an antique store, except most of the goods appeared comparatively new.

  He catalogued the things he took with Gus, hoping for a name, or an address, but finding nothing in a language he understood. He wanted to return the personal things to next of kin if he could. He wasn’t a thief. For all he was removing possessions from the dead, this wasn’t really loot.

  He found the man’s staff inexplicably shattered, as if caught between a rock and a hard place. Sly winced. The wood was thick, immensely hard, and left a cold chill to the touch, as if made of metal. The rod’s width was twice the length of his thumb, and every inch of its length was carved with weird symbols, unlike anything Sly had seen before.

  He turned each piece carefully, tasking Gus with recording the images, then cast the broken pieces aside.