Overhead, chipped ceiling panels fit poorly in their flimsy metal frames, loosened and damaged by Polies pulling them down to check for leftover booze and other treasures hidden from season to season. All Cass had found was a deflated soccer ball and three bottles of mint Irish cream liqueur. The gray-green liquid sloshing around in the bottles had apparently looked so gross that even booze-hungry Polies hadn’t broken them open.
A closet near the entrance was just big enough to hold three pairs of jeans, three shirts, several sets of cargo pants, sweaters, and two fleeces that could function as work outfits or casual wear as needed. The rest of the space was taken up with the two backpacks and five pairs of running shoes she’d brought on the long commercial flights from Logan to LAX, and from LAX to Christchurch, then—courtesy of the USAF—from Christchurch to McMurdo on the battleship-sized C-17, and on the final flight to Shackleton.
The small space wasn’t meant for comfort, but at least she could reach everything from the door. In four quick moves, she grabbed a makeup kit, a “nice” sweater that showed off her modest chest, and a relatively clean set of jeans. She changed in the shared bathroom, chucked her work clothes into her berth as she ran by, then left the dormitory and entered Shackleton’s main artery, where she slowed her pace. No one liked to see running down the halls—it put people on edge, made them glance around for the emergency. But a brisk walk put her inside the foyer of Destination Alpha, where she glanced at her watch. Thirty seconds before her guests were scheduled to appear. Alpha, the main entrance to the base, was on the second floor. The stairs slowed all but the fittest visitors.
She took that half minute to settle her ever-present butterflies. Leading visitors through the station was one of her least favorite things to do, and that included cleaning restrooms. The forced social interaction went against every instinct she had—she was shy, retiring, geeky. But that’s precisely why she’d volunteered as a tour guide. The engineer in her knew that a system’s potential was discovered only when pushed to its limit. If she wasn’t in Antarctica to find out more about herself, then why was she here?
A gust of cold air blasted through the meat locker doors and hit her full in the face, whisking those thoughts away. Deb stomped through the door, trailed by eight people stuffed into the ubiquitous scarlet Antarctic parkas with the faux-fur trim around the hood. They shuffled forward like penguins, forced by the awkwardness of many layers to turn their entire bodies if they wanted to look around. Deb gestured toward Cass.
“All right, everyone. I’m going to leave you in the capable hands of one of the station’s best guides. Besides keeping the place spick-and-span, Cass can drive, maintain, or fix just about anything ever built.”
“And she’s not hard to look at either,” said one of the men in front. He was of late middle age, with a doughy face and capped teeth. The men around him, younger versions of him, laughed.
There’s our VIP . Putting the face to the name finally clicked for Cass. Senator Graham Sikes, most likely visiting Shackleton in order to reassure a vaguely troubled public that the one-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar base—the crown jewel of NSF research stations little more than a year ago—would be just fine under the control of the giant multinational corporation TransAnt.
Cass smiled, ignoring the senator’s remark but inwardly imagining her fist connecting with his face. “You can take off your shells now that we’re inside, everyone, but hold on to them. It’s a toasty seventy degrees in the upper station, but I’ll be giving you a full tour today, which means we’ll be going down into the service arches below the station, where it’s a constant sixty below.”
She waited patiently through the rustling of Gore-Tex, the mechanical rasp of zippers unzipping, the jokes and groans about having just put all this junk on. “Welcome to Ninety South and the Shackleton South Pole Research Facility, formerly the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. You’re visiting us at an interesting moment—we’re just a few days from starting our winter-over season, the first under the auspices of TransAnt. Wintering over means when the final flight leaves today, it’ll be the last plane the crew will see until mid-November, two hundred and seventy days from now. For most of that time, the South Pole is in complete darkness, outside temperatures can drop to as low as one hundred degrees below zero, and the base is, in effect, completely cut off from the rest of the planet.”
She’d memorized the lists of salient facts that she threw at them now, from the two miles of ice under their feet to the average wind speed at the station to reiterating the most significant fact of all: once winter arrived, there was no physical way to reach the outside world.