“Hey, Russ, you’re back in right the nick. Got an e-mail inside from that unbelievable redhead over at Cold Corners.”

Russ Granger jumped from the Bell’s cockpit onto the helipad, his boots mashing down on thumbnail ripples of white powdery snow, a coat he figured had to be close to a foot deep. When he’d left two hours earlier to fly a sling-load of food rations out to the Lake Hoare camp in Taylor Valley, the landing area was clear, its markings visible from a good altitude. But that was how it was in this place. Sastrugi, as the wavy drifts of snow were called, formed quickly parallel to a rising wind, and it had picked up a great deal since his departure.

He looked at the parka-clad station manager. Though the sky was still showing a lot of blue, snowflakes were blowing through the air from some widely spaced cloud scuds that had come in over the ice shelf.

“Megan Breen?” Granger said.

The station manager’s hooded head bobbed up and down. “You heard me say ‘unbelievable,’ right? Should I have added the word ‘hot’?”

Granger pulled up his own fleece-trimmed hood against the stinging flurries.

“That woman’s a hundred percent business, Chuck,” he said. “Take my word for it, there’s nothing in that message to make either of us sweaty.”

Chuck Trewillen motioned to his rear. Beyond the depot’s fuel lines stood three orange Quonset huts and a couple of old dozers, their shovels heaped with snow. Beyond them was another small building that had served as Trewillen’s isolated home for the half decade he’d held his job at Marble Point. Beyond that building there was only the great sawtoothed jut of the Wilson Piedmont Glacier.

“You ought to hear the noises that glacier makes when it’s calving bergs,” Trewillen said. “It sort of pants and moans. I’m talking loud, deep moooooans.” He shrugged. “Sometimes they’re enough to get me worked up.”

Granger smiled, clapped Trewillen on the shoulder. “You’ve been out here alone way too long, man,” he said, and started toward the computer hut.

Granger paused in the entrance to the air-heated Quonset, stamped caked snow off his boots, and unzipped his jacket. Then he sat at the desktop and tapped a key to erase its screen-saver—flamingos on a tropical beach, lush palms and turquoise water in the background.

The beach scene gave way to an e-mail application’s opening window. Granger dragged and clicked to the In-box, and saw Megan Breen’s message at the top of its queue—the single new one. Its title was simply his first name in caps followed by a string of exclamation marks.

Typical Megan, he thought.

The message itself was also characteristically brief and straight to the point:

Russ,