The Winter Over(29)

Pushing through it, she hobbled to the door and flung it open. A blast of freezing cold air hit her in the face—this was the long tunnel connecting the service arches that she’d brought Sikes and her other charges down earlier that day. Shielding her face with her hands, she peered through the gap of her fingers. The figure she’d been chasing was pelting down the tunnel and moving fast. Cass limped after, but in just a few seconds, the form had disappeared into the gloom and shrinking horizon of the tunnel walls.

Cursing, she shambled back through the carpentry shop and into the VMF, full of questions. But when she got back to the garage, Hanratty, Taylor, and Keene were gone, leaving nothing behind but the buzz of the overhead lights and the muffled roar of the Hercules in the distance.





CHAPTER TWELVE


“I didn’t even want to come to the Pole,” Colin Sutter was saying. “What I really wanted to do was study the Gamburtsevs.”

“Ah, yes. The Gamburtsevs.” Tim Kowalski shot a glance at Carla Bjorkholm. “The Russian circus family? From Moscow? I caught their show in New York once.”

“No,” Colin said, confused. He pushed his glasses up a long nose. “It’s a subglacial mountain range east of here. It’s quite famous.”

“So is the circus,” Carla said, straight-faced.

Anne took up the thread. “Amazing contortionists. Their show is something to see. You should get out more, Colin.”

“The Gamburtsevs? Really?” Colin frowned. “I suppose it might be a common name in Russia . . .”

The three glanced at one another. Tim popped an eyebrow, Carla shrugged, Anne smothered a grin. Colin’s cluelessness bordered on the obtuse, but after having spent the summer season together, they were used to his quirks. Tim, a materials engineer, had suggested that, as a geologist, his friend had taken on the properties of the object he studied and, in fact, they probably all had. When Carla asked how that applied to her as a biologist who studied molds, he backpedaled, although he returned to his theory in a clumsy attempt to compare Anne to the stars. He gave up when Anne told him she dealt mostly in radio astronomy and hadn’t looked through an optical telescope since she was in college.

The four were sitting in the first-floor TV lounge. The galley, their preferred haunt, had been taken over as a staging area for the final flights of the season, making the simple acts of getting a coffee or finding a seat nearly impossible. They’d already said their tearful farewells to friends and colleagues, with promises of getting together in the future. Better to stay out of the way for a few hours until the last flight had taken off.

In groups of four, six, or eight, travelers were summoned via the PA system to report to Destination Alpha so they could begin the shuttle process to the Hercules. Each time the speaker crackled to life, the group of friends would pause, listen to the call, then pick up their conversation.

“None of you have wintered over, right?” Anne looked at the other three, who all shook their heads. Although they’d been at Shackleton for the summer season, it was surprising how little they knew about each other.

“I’ve heard things can get pretty squirrelly,” Tim said. “A crew of two hundred shrinks to forty. Nine months together. Dark for two-thirds of it. We’ll have our work to save us, of course, but that only goes so far.”

“I’m sure we’ll think of something,” Carla said, glancing at Colin.

The geologist nodded. “I already mentioned to Deb that I’d like to start a chess tournament. Someone told me Pete has a rating over two thousand! I’d love to go head-to-head with him.”

Carla mocked smacking her forehead, but as Tim started to laugh, Colin caught his eye, and the geologist winked at him, which just made him laugh harder. Anne, puzzled, asked, “What’s so funny?”

Before Tim could say anything, the PA speaker screeched to life. “Senator Sikes. Senator Sikes. Please report to Destination Alpha and ask your group to do the same. This is the last load of the season. If you’re not on that plane in the next five minutes, then you’ll be our guest for the next nine months. Senator Sikes. Please report to Destination Alpha. ”

The voice disappeared with an electrical snap and the lounge went quiet.

Carla cleared her throat. “Anyone else thinking about running out and stowing away on the senator’s plane?”

“Of course not,” Tim said. “I had a very good reason for almost jumping up and sprinting out the door in the general direction of the skiway just now.”

Anne smiled. “It is going to be weird, isn’t it? Do you remember how strange the winter-overs acted when we landed last summer?”

“They huddled together in one corner of the galley and wouldn’t look at us as we came in,” Carla said, her eyes unfocused as she remembered. “I mean, I wasn’t expecting a brass band, but some of them looked like they wanted to claw my eyes out just for being there.”

“One lady actually snatched a chair away from me when I tried to sit at her table,” Colin said, his tone still injured. “I swear she almost growled at me.”

“I heard one of them call us the ‘orange people’ because we actually had some color to our skin,” Tim said.

“Pasty, mean, and anthropophobic. Great,” Anne said. “I hope we’ll be a little different.”