Captain Hanzo sipped his tea and peered gloomily out at the brilliant blue sky, the flawless blue-white ice, the calm waves, and hated it all. He was old enough to remember first coming to these waters back in the late 1990s, when the ice sheets seemed too vast, too dense, too ancient to be vulnerable to the stupidity and careless cruelty of man.

Now he was watching a continent die, seeing it melt away as the waters rose and the air grew warmer. He personally wished he could get every fool who denied the realities of climate change and force them to work for a full year down here. Force them to see the damage being done to the planet. To his cold world down here.

He kept such thoughts to himself. He was eighteen months from retirement and did not want to go out on a psychiatric discharge. His wife was counting on a full pension and the invitations to all those fancy dinners. She also liked the extra money waiting from lecture tours on sailing the Antarctic that would come once he was a civilian. The same had happened to her father, who’d died well off and a very happy man.

Hanzo, however, was not happy.

The Shirase was not happy, either. Hanzo knew that ships had souls, had memories. They were alive, and he knew that his ship was grieving for a planet out of balance with its natural order.

Those were his thoughts when one of his crewmen cut through the morning air with a yell. Suddenly, a lot of men were bellowing. Feet thudded up and down ladders and along the deck as a knot of sailors clustered together by a section of the port bow rail, all of them pointing to something in the water.

Before Hanzo could demand an explanation, a petty officer dashed onto the bridge.

“Captain, we’ve spotted a lifeboat a mile three points off the port bow,” said the petty officer excitedly. “There are survivors in it.”

“Is it from the Hakudo Maru?” demanded the captain.

“I think it is, sir.”

Hanzo immediately gave the orders for heave to, and to have a pair of his boats swayed down and lowered.

The Hakudo Maru was a scientific vessel that had been sent from Tokyo a few months ago to study the release of ancient bacteria from melting ice. It was part of a joint venture initiated a few years ago after research teams had found—and revived—an eight-million-year-old bacterium that had been dormant in the Mullins and Beacon valleys of the icy continent. Since then, other bacteria had been discovered, and the growing fear was that these prehistoric biologicals could pose a serious threat once ocean currents moved them around the globe. The Hakudo Maru’s task was to catch random fish and study them for the presence of unknown bacteria and viruses.