Annie Caulfield shut down her laptop, detached its modem cord from the telephone jack near her room’s tiny desk, and sleeved the computer into her Timberland carry bag. Then she went across the room, put the Timberland on her bed, considered gathering her toiletries from the night stand, and instead sat thinking at the edge of her mattress.

Her face bore a troubled expression. She would not deny that part of it related to things left unfinished with Pete Nimec . . . a large part. But Annie’s focus wasn’t on her personal loose ends. She didn’t think she had the right to turn it in that direction.

Minutes earlier, Annie had checked her e-mail and found a dashed-off reply to a note she’d sent to Jon Ketchum. Then she had scanned, in order, Goddard’s public Internet and confidential Intranet sites for the latest SOHO updates.

Everything she’d read and seen on-line indicated the solar flares that had been cooking on the far side of the sun—and heating up news lines around the world—were at last set to make their highly trumpeted appearance. It would almost surely be a brief one. But Annie had been persuaded it also would be dramatic . . . especially in Antarctica.

Given their high threshold of tolerance for challenging circumstances, she doubted the majority of polar bases would have much to worry about. In fact, she was sure their personnel would await the event with delirious anticipation, seeing it as an opportunity to gather scads of exceptional astrophysical data and enjoy one humdinger of a light show when the aurora australis got an energetic cosmic jolt. For most of them it would be like having ringside seats at an extravagant once-in-a-lifetime circus that came rolling into their backyard. Few to none would complain if the price of admission included a spell of erratic communications and ambiguous blips and ghosts on their radars that would be construed by imaginative Atlantis mappers as signs of the Lost Continent rising. While she realized power fluctuations and outages were a more serious potential consideration, Annie also knew virtually all of the ice stations had hardened electrical systems, and multiple backup generators that would kick in if their primaries were effected by the sun’s demonstrative tizzy.

The situation at Cold Corners gave Annie pause, though. Its water supply plant was down, its security compromised . . . existing predicaments that would be magnified by what were only nuisance problems elsewhere. The last thing the crew here needed was to have their difficulties compounded, to become more isolated than was usually the case because of radio and satcom disturbances. And the last thing Annie wanted was to be leaving when they were in a pinch. Many of the researchers were longtime friends. There was Megan. And yes, there was Pete.