Thinking about sex always made her hungry and, after a quick check of her watch, she jumped off her lab stool. It wasn’t every day that she could still make regular lunch hours in the galley instead of begging for scraps across the counter in the odd hours after her experiments wrapped up. She made sure everything was powered down or in a holding pattern as needed, then strode out the door and down the hall to the galley.
Halfway down the corridor, she frowned and wrapped her arms around her body. Living and working at the South Pole, it’s cold seemed a perverse statement. But the main part of Shackleton station was normally kept at a steady seventy degrees year-round. It was a rare day that she felt a chill, and even then it was from wandering too close to one of the outer doors when someone was coming in from the outside.
She shrugged to herself. Sometimes she caught a chill when all of her attention was focused on something in the lab, so much so that she wondered if her body, trying to help, shunted all of the blood and energy to her brain when she was working on a particularly thorny problem. She just needed to grab a bite and move her sedentary scientist’s butt.
When she reached the galley, however, she was still cold. She waved to Anne, who was already sitting with Tim and Colin. Anne wore fleece that was zipped all the way, with the collar covering the lower half of her face. Tim was rubbing his hands together, while steam rose from Colin’s cup of coffee like it had just been poured from the pot. At other tables, crew were hunched or hugging themselves.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked by way of greeting as she sat down.
“What do you mean?” Anne’s voice was muffled. “It’s like this all the time.”
“Deb did a drive-by earlier,” Tim said. “She and Hanratty and Taylor are going around, trying to reassure people.”
“About what?”
“The heating system went down about an hour ago. Some kind of problem with the furnaces.” He delivered the news contritely, as if apologizing on the administration’s behalf.
“Is it the power plant? Are the fuel tanks okay?” Carla had only a rudimentary idea of how Shackleton was powered, but she did know that the base’s furnaces were electrical and therefore relied on the energy produced by the diesel generators in Shackleton’s power plant buried deep under the ice.
But the generators ran off just one source of energy: the jet fuel that had been convoyed to the base over the SPoT road or flown in on the Hercs. If there had been a simple mechanical failure in the generators, that was bad enough—heat and electricity would be compromised and, okay, that wasn’t good—but it had always haunted her that they were sitting on top of several ten-thousand-gallon tanks of highly combustible petroleum product. If the fuel tanks or lines had a problem, an explosion would have the potential kinetic energy of a bomb. She didn’t want to freeze to death, but neither did she want to get blown into the sky.
“I think so,” Tim said. “Or we would’ve been evacuated. Which would be a little inconvenient right now, considering it’s a bit chilly outside.”
Carla shivered. “What happened to the backup systems? If it’s just an electrical problem and not something wrong with the power plant, they should at least be able to get the fallback furnaces going.”
“They’re having trouble with those, too.”
“Jesus.” Carla glanced around the table. “Isn’t that, you know, cause for concern?”
Colin shrugged. “I’m sure they have it under control.”
She shot the geologist an irritated glance at the empty statement. Her daydream about him, still fresh in her mind, frayed around the edges. “How long ago did Deb come by?”
The three looked at each other. “Fifteen, twenty minutes ago?” Tim ventured.
Carla, appetite blunted, glanced around the galley. No one was on the verge of panic, but neither did anyone seem motivated to get answers. She bit her lower lip and considered her tablemates. An astrophysicist, a materials science engineer, and a geologist. Brilliant people, all, but perhaps not as in tune with biological functions and what subzero temperatures might do to those functions as, say, herself.
“Anne, what’s the temperature in here, do you think?”
Her friend tilted her head. “In Fahrenheit? Sixty degrees, maybe high fifties?”
Carla grimaced. Sixty and dropping. Hypothermia had occurred at temperatures as high as fifty degrees, although that normally took place in extreme conditions where the victims didn’t have access to such things as fleece sweaters and hot coffee. But her breath steamed when she exhaled.
She glanced out one of the many galley windows. Gusts whipped the snow savagely, making it appear as though the wind itself were white. Sweaters and hot drinks were nice, but with an outside ambient temperature of eighty below and the wind constantly peeling away radiant heat, real trouble could be just an hour away if they didn’t get those heating elements back online. How did that constitute the situation being “under control”? Someone needed to light a fire—figuratively and maybe literally—under the administration’s rear end.