At his orders now, the men were quick to break camp and stow their bedrolls and folded tents aboard their snowmobiles. The gathering of birds continued to study them from their perch, barely curious, simply watching because of their nearness. He looked at the creatures as he waited, lifted a chunk of ice off the ground, and suddenly snapped it at them with a hard overhand throw.

It struck the ledge with a crack, breaking to pieces. The birds jumped and fluttered in surprise, scolded him indignantly, but did not take flight.

He gave them a slight nod of appreciation.

“Eine gute Gesellschaft,” he said, turning from the ledge.

They had been good enough company in their way.

Minutes later he mounted his snowmobile, throttled up its engine, and went speeding on across the ice toward his goal, the rest of his band traveling close behind him.

Cold Corners Base, Antarctica

“What I need is to get down low into the pass,” Nimec was saying. Soon after returning to base from the helipad, he’d steered Russ Granger to a partitioned workstation where a downscaled, black-and-white version of Megan’s Dry Valley contour map was spread across the desk, circles drawn with colored pencils substituting for the pins she’d used to mark its key sites. “I want to see it with my own eyes.”

Granger nodded from the chair beside him.

“Understood,” he said. “I can take us pretty far in at its wider sections.”

Nimec’s forefinger bull’s-eyed the circle indicating the coordinates of Scout IV’s final transmission, and the presumable outer limit of the recovery team’s search area. “What about here?”

Granger shook his head.

“Your map doesn’t convey how rough it is around the notch,” he said. That much was absolutely true. “The terrain’s bad enough. But our real problem is katabatic wind pouring straight down the notch’s lee sides. The lower it gets, the harder gravity presses on it, and the faster it blows. You fly near ground level, it’s suicidal. Like riding a toy raft through heavy rapids.”

“What’s the best you can do, as far as that goes?”

Granger traced a path with his hand. “We’ll swing around the notch, dip into Wright Valley just to its south.”

Nimec thought a moment, then grunted his acceptance.

“A couple of things, though,” Granger said. “It’s obvious we have to work around this storm that’s on the way. I don’t think it’ll be bad enough to force evacs out of any NSF field camps. But I’ll have to make some trips over to them, check that the personnel are stockpiled to last it out.”

“Any reason why I can’t come along? We could shoot right over Bull Pass after your last hop.”

Granger had anticipated the question. He pretended to think through an answer that had been readied well beforehand.