Harlan’s own story was that he and his tribe were trying to get some of their people back from the Russian Captain Gotfrid Vitkin after the chunk of glacier had split off from the main mass.
Ryan hadn’t quite gotten used to the way the chief could slip from his native tongue into English so easily. Harlan said his ancestors had been part of a British science observatory in the Arctic Circle at the time of the nukecaust, and they’d been taken in by the Inuit. When everything froze over, there weren’t many other places to go, so they’d become more Inuit than British.
“The quakes had gotten worse than usual in the area lately,” Harlan said. “Still, no one expected all the ice masses to tear free the way they had. We tracked this iceberg for two days before we found the right one.”
“Where are your boats?” Dean asked.
“Vitkin’s sailors shot them up,” Harlan answered. “We got caught coming onto the iceberg less than an hour ago. Vitkin’s got to be getting desperate.”
“Why?” J.B. asked. “If he’s a captain, then he’s got a ship.”
Harlan laughed without humor. “He’s got a ship, all right. But it’s mired in the ice. Been there since skydark.”
The battle between the Russians and the Inuit had raged for decades, according to Harlan. They had started out trading back sixty years earlier when Harlan’s wandering tribe had found the Russians.
“Vitkin has a ship?” J.B. asked, pausing in the middle of stripping a piece of pemmican one of the Inuit women had passed out to the companions.
“Yeah,” Harlan said, then added a Russian phrase. “Means Red Star of Glory or something like that. After all these years, who cares, you know?” He shrugged. “Anyway, the story my ancestors handed down to me—and most things are stories around here, because paper and pencil is a luxury, not to mention extra weight you have to lug around—the Russians were some sort of strike team sent into the area to take out some secret base the Americans were supposed to have. Who knows if any of that is true?”
Ryan ate his pemmican, working around the salty taste of it, and didn’t say anything.
“Vitkin’s father’s father or something like that, so the story goes, was the original captain of the ship,” Harlan went on. “Supposed to have been some other ships, but they all got lost in a battle. Only thing that survived was the Red Star of Glory. And it’s locked up in the ice.”
“Vitkin has some of your people?” Krysty asked.
“Yeah. See, back in those days, you didn’t find many Russian sailor women,” the chief said. “Vitkin’s ancestor, to keep up the population, started trading with the Inuit people—other tribes than ours—and traded a few guns for young women. Chiefs made the deals. Up here, a large tribe is a pain in the ass to take care of. You’re always on the move, always looking for enough food to get you by.”
“Seems to me,” Albert said, “that the Russians would have the same problems. Did they trade for food?”
“A little. Stuff that they wanted. They had a lot of stores on ship, though. And the original Captain Vitkin didn’t want to become dependent on the Inuit.”
“Except for women,” Dean said.
“Right. But after a while, he started raising his own women. Didn’t want to lose the Russian bloodline, you see.”
“How inbred are they?” Ryan asked. He had seen small villages so phobic they killed outlanders outright with no thought at all to their own gene pool, degenerating quickly in a matter of a few generations.
“Pretty badly,” Doc said, approaching the group.
“Got a lot of stale genes,” Mildred added. “Those dead guys I got a look at have mismatched arms and legs, cranial problems, cleft palates, no chins, and an assortment of other prime indicators that daddy’s not been rutting far from the old homestead.” She hunkered down and helped herself to the pemmican.
“That’s what the latest Captain Vitkin was doing when he captured our people,” Harlan said. “Trying to add to his bloodstock. After his father started killing some of the Inuit who came to trade with him, getting medicines and guns, everybody said fuck him, who needs it? They go out, pound a seal to death when it’s asleep, had a new set of clothes, fat for their lanterns if they had or wanted them, and meat for a week. Russians were the ones who needed something.”
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