The Winter Over

by Iden, Matthew

  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.

  An aide raised his hand. “Isn’t there a snow road from here to McMurdo Station?”

  Cass nodded. “The South Pole overland Traverse, or the SPoT. When your plane takes off from here, look out the window to your right and you’ll see it, a trail of thin blue sticks leading away from the base. It ends almost a thousand miles away at McMurdo Station. But it’s operational only during the summer, when the sun shines twenty-four hours a day. Even then, it takes more than a month for a fully loaded convoy to reach Shackleton. If it made the run without freight, it might make the trip in half that time. And, of course, there are frequent flights, like the one you’ll take back to McMurdo. But during winter, neither is possible due to the constant darkness and the potential for extreme winds.”

  “So what would you do in case of a real emergency?”

  “We’d have to take care of it ourselves,” Cass said. “We’re equipped to handle almost any contingency. We have a full trauma center—we’ll see that later—and possess the power, food, and emergency equipment to last the nine months until the summer crew arrives.”

  “No one can fly in, even in an emergency?”

  “There have been three recorded winter flights, all of them small craft performing life-saving medevacs,” Cass conceded. “But winter winds have been clocked at hurricane force and the skiway has no lights, which, as you can imagine, is particularly inconvenient when there’s complete darkness for half the year. No plane can take off or land in those conditions. Those three flights were major exceptions.”

  “So it can be done, but only in extremis and, I imagine, only for one or two lucky—or unlucky—souls,” Sikes said.

  “Exactly. The reality is, we’re stuck here.” She smiled, getting ready to deliver the punch line in three . . . two . . . “During winter-over, what happens at Shackleton stays at Shackleton.”

  That got the expected chuckle and, rapport established, she coaxed them into moving with her down the corridor, showing them the science lab, the gym, the galley and mess hall where everyone took their meals. If one ignored the setting, it was the stuff of tours at college campuses and army bases everywhere and not the most scintillating stuff. To snap the group out of its complacency, she paused to point out the flags and medals from various visiting dignitaries from around the world, as well as memorabilia—South Pole markers from years past, a harpoon from a nineteenth-century whaling ship, and the station’s prized possession, a page from Ernest Shackleton’s journal during his time as a young mariner on the Tintagel Castle . Sikes and his clan murmured and hummed their appreciation, then they climbed a short set of stairs to continue to the library, the lounge, and the movie room.

  “They didn’t spare any expense, did they?” This from one of the young staffers who had laughed the loudest at the VIP’s joke. “I guess TransAnt wants its people to be treated to the best.”

  “The shortest staff assignment at Shackleton is the summer rotation, at just four months,” Cass explained patiently, “but the winter crew is required to stay for nine, and some elect to stay for the entire calendar year. You can see how morale can be a problem if there aren’t at least a few comforts. Over that long winter, we also have to combat T3 syndrome, a mental fugue state brought on by the lack of sunshine and the repetitive environment. Four decades of human behavior studies concluded that it would be foolish to spend
millions on a scientific research facility only to fail because the crew had cabin fever.”

  “Speaking of research, the experiments are still conducted to the standards set by the NSF?” He furrowed his brow.

  “Yes,” Cass said, then plunged into the corporate message she’d been told to memorize. “TransAnt maintains a one hundred percent commitment to preserving the original mission of the base, which is to advance science in any and every capacity.”

  “Except that TransAnt is assured of research and patent exclusivity, correct?”

  Cass hid a grimace. The benefits their employer would receive for taking the reins of Shackleton away from the NSF were well known and difficult to defend. With the possible exception of TransAnt employees like Hanratty, Taylor, and the base psychologist, Dr. Keene—those who were not either new hires or remnants of past South Pole crews like the rest of them—no one on base was excited about increasing TransAnt’s bottom line instead of working purely for science. But that was beyond their pay grade. For most, the South Pole was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and if they needed to be employees of TransAnt to come here, so be it.

  “I’m personal friends with most of TransAnt’s board of directors, Jimmy,” Sikes broke in testily. “I’m sure there’s nothing untoward about the situation.”

  “I understand, sir, but you’re going to be fielding some tough questions when we return—”

  “It’s nothing I can’t handle. In any case, all the public wants to know is that less of their tax money is going to pie-in-the-sky science projects and whether or not we’ve found the cure for cancer under a block of ice. No one cares if TransAnt makes a small profit at the same time, especially considering the risk they ran taking charge down here. We’ll work on messaging on that long flight back.”

  “It’s bad optics,” Jimmy groused, unsatisfied. “This place is outfitted like a resort.”

  “Don’t begrudge them a few creature comforts, son. You’ve never lived in subzero temperatures for nine months.”

  “I don’t know about that, sir,” a third man interjected, a handsome, Harvard-looking type. “Have you met Jimmy’s mother?”

  After the laughter had died down, Cass pulled the group along to the berths and the greenhouse, the e-systems control room and the IT pit, but the big belly laugh at Jimmy’s expense had popped the cork on the formality of the group. Snickers and side conversations picked up as they waddled down the corridor, a sign that attention spans were shrinking. Time to wow them a little. She stopped in front of a door set into a black-and-orange-checkered wall.

  “If you take a peek in here, you’ll see a room with a kitchenette, some comfortable couches, and shelves full of books. It looks just like one of our extravagant lounges.” She glanced at Jimmy. “We call it the Lifeboat. The thick wall you noticed is a three-hour-rated firewall, the kitchen is stocked to keep a skeleton staff alive for weeks, and the whole mini-wing has its own dedicated power supply.”

  One of the men cleared his throat. “Why three hours on the firewall?”

  “Our engineers have calculated that’s the maximum amount of time it would take for the rest of the station to burn to the ground.” Cass let that sink in. “There’s some extra margin built in, but not much.”

  “I thought you said you were stranded here, that no one could reach you from McMurdo, even if the station were in trouble,” Sikes said, curious. “The existence of the Lifeboat implies a rescue would be forthcoming.”

  “I exaggerated a bit. The three medical flights we discussed were successful, of course, but there’s no way to safely or efficiently remove more than one or two crew members at a time, so we currently have no protocol for transporting ten or twenty people during the winter-over. However, if the base itself were in jeopardy, with all hands at risk, there’s a plan in place to initiate a rescue.”

  “At which point, it’s not about the ability to do it, but the time to make it happen.”

  She nodded. “The expectation is that an overland rescue operation could make it here from McMurdo in about two months. Hence, two months of survival supplies.”

  “Isn’t there a Russian station fairly close, though?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Lyubov Orlova. It’s only about fifty kilometers to the southwest—quite close to the SPoT highway, in fact—but its full-time crew is tiny, smaller even than the winter-over numbers here at Shackleton. In an emergency, we’d overwhelm them, putting both populations at risk.”

  There were nods and murmurs of assent. After passing the fire lockers and more display cases, they reached the end of the hall, where a set of steel doors blocked their path. Cass stopped and turned to face the group.

  “This is the point where I give you the choice of how we proceed. We can return to the first floor and look at more labs, berths, and maintenance facilities. But”—she gestured behind her—“this is the top of the tall, vertical tower I’m sure you saw on your way in. We call it the Beer Can. It’s a massive corrugated metal cylinder protecting a stairwell that not only provides access outside at ground level, it keeps going fifty feet down into the substation ice. That’s where our service arches are—the place where we fix things, build things, and store things.”

  “So, what’s our choice?” Harvard Man looked at her quizzically.

  “We only have time to do one. The first floor is warm, safe, and dull. The service arches are cold, crude, and interesting.”

  “You’re not really selling the physics lab,” Sikes joked.

  She smiled. “I’m the station’s mechanic. I don’t need no stinking room-temperature work environment.” Light laughter and gestures toward the Beer Can. “All right, then. Put on your parkas and gloves. Except for the lack of wind, this is just like heading outside.”

  After running her eyes over them to make sure they were geared up—it would be her fault if frostbite took the tip of someone’s nose and ended a promising political career—she motioned them through the two thick metal doors that led to the most intriguing section of the base.

  Sikes and his group gave a soft, collective grunt as they stepped into the frozen air, inert and so cold as to be almost hanging in front of them. It caught in the chest with hooks and instantly froze the soft, moist membranes inside the nose.

  The Beer Can was just as Cass had described it—a towering, unheated silo with the sole function of protecting the station’s outer staircase from getting buried in drifts of snow and ice. Amenities included a frozen handrail and one stark white lamp at each curl of the stair. Narrow, quadruple-paned thermal windows provided some illumination now, but as the austral winter progressed and the sun fled the continent, there would be nothing beyond the glass but a bruise-colored twilight followed soon after by a velvet darkness.

  Cass guided the group to the edge of the landing and gestured for them to peer downwards. The flooring was an industrial gridwork of steel that was both functional and allowed them to see through each step to the one below it.

  “As you no doubt saw when you came in, the entire station is elevated about fifteen feet in the air on thirty-six concrete pilings. This allows snow to pass underneath the station rather than build up against the sides, as happened to the original domed station from the seventies, eventually burying it. The angled construction of the station’s underbelly actually increases wind speed, causing it to scour the built-up snow away.

  “The Beer Can allows access to the first and second living floors, as well as outside access to the ground level. But, as I mentioned before, the stairwell continues down fifty more feet below the base. It’s not technically under ground , as all the space has been carved from solid ice. What we call service arches are large hangars that have been constructed inside these spaces to house most of the maintenance and storage facilities for Shackleton. We’ll take a short peek into each area, then hurry back before we freeze solid. Everyone ready? Hold on to the handrail as we go.”

  She led the way down the steps, the silo filling with the sound of
eighteen rubber boots thumping on steel. Despite being a descent, she stopped at the bottom floor to give everyone a rest. Shackleton was almost ten thousand feet above sea level, which meant things like altitude sickness and high-altitude edemas were real possibilities, especially for amateurs who’d flown in from sea-level McMurdo just for the day. The only thing more embarrassing than the VIP losing the tip of his nose would be him keeling over from a high-altitude-induced heart attack. Once Sikes had stopped sucking in air and blowing it out in billows, she turned and took them into the bowels of the station.

  What she showed them wasn’t much different than a tour of the vocational departments of a large high school—carpentry, plumbing, and auto shops. In her own domain, the VMF, she gave a quick summary of the work she did on a normal day, pointing out the cherry picker that let her work on the tallest vehicles as well as the snowcats and massive Mantis construction crane, laid up for winter storage. Despite the clutter, the arched ceiling and massive scale gave the entire area the feel of a chapel devoted to vehicle maintenance.

  Back in the hall, Cass gestured to the ice that bloomed on the ceiling, on the walls, on all the metallic surfaces of the lights and structure around them. “The hallways connecting the shops and arches are as cold as the Beer Can, so the moisture from our breath causes small icicles to form on the ceiling. It’s a far cry from the labs above, where most folks wear shorts and Hawaiian shirts to work. Any questions?”

  She waited, but the sheer presence of the ice around them was palpable in a way it hadn’t been in the station; its density smothered all sounds. Footsteps died almost instantly, leaving only muffled breathing and the occasional sniff. The silence was contagious; aside from a few whispered comments, the banter and mumbled conversation was gone.

  Leading them single file down the hall, she let them experience the heft of the place until they reached a bump-out in the corridor. The set of pipes that had followed them overhead now joined a host of others in an alcove before shooting off in three directions. She stopped and turned to the group.