“Listen,” he said, motioning his chin toward the window. “You have any idea how long it takes to plot and cut an ice runway?”

Nimec shook his head, shrugging, uncertain whether he cared at that particular moment. He’d spent the better part of his week hurtling through transoceanic airspace, spent much of the week before getting poked, prodded, and pissing into paper cups in an accelerated barrage of medical examinations. He was annoyed by his own crabbiness. And he missed his sweetheart Corvette.

“At least sixty, seventy hours,” Halloran was saying in answer to his own question. “Think about it. The field groomers get through with all their snow-moving and grading, then a storm plasters the area and they’re back to square one. That happens so often—with a vengeance—nobody even thinks to rag. It’s just business as usual.”

“Your point being . . . ?”

“Exactly what it was when we started this conversation,” Halloran said. “Adjust. Don’t try to impose yourself on this place. Even most governments acknowledge it’s ungovernable.”

Nimec looked at him. This place. Nothing at all out of the ordinary about the phrase. But he somehow found Halloran’s repetition of it interesting . . . and hadn’t Evers also used it at least once rather than having named the continent?

“Take things as they come,” Nimec said, putting aside the thought. “Does that sound about right?”

Halloran continued to disregard the obvious pique in his tone.

“About.”

“You have a very Zen attitude for a military man,” Nimec said.

Halloran smiled, touched the circular ANG 139th TAS shoulder patch on the blouse of his flight suit. A nose-on view of a Hercules ski transport against a blue background, with the polar ice caps embroidered in white at the top and bottom, it was designed to be symbolic of a compass: the wings of the plane crossing east and west to the edges of the patch, the tail rudder similarly pointing due north, the skis lowered toward the southern cap.

“Very Zen,” Halloran said to the Guardsman beside him, a fellow lieutenant named Mathews. “Maybe we should have that stitched right here above the plane, make it our official motto. How about it?”

Mathews grinned and told him it sounded like a good idea. Then all three members of the aircrew were laughing again.

Nimec sighed, rapped the table with his fingers, listened to the engines of the plane humming outside the lounge.

Something told him he was at the hard rock bottom of what would be a steep and difficult learning curve.

Cold Corners Research Base
(21°88’ S, 144°72’ E)