In the heat of battle I decided not to mention anything about my trip to the Pentagon or that I’d be joining her aboard Oceanus for the Omega practice run. By the time I phoned her back three hours later, Andie and her fellow crewmen were already en route to the South Pole, all means of communicating with the outside world silenced.

A harsh katabatic wind buffeted the chopper, separating me from my thoughts. Three days earlier, the sun had peaked above the Antarctic horizon, bringing an end to six months of wintery darkness. Despite the returning daylight, spring would not arrive until mid-November, the sea ice finally thawing in January.

“Robbie, you okay?”

I turned to my uncle, who was seated next to me. The two of us were dressed in thermal long johns, ski pants, and boots, and were seated on our goose-down parkas, the hard bench seats no picnic on our bouncing buttocks. “I was just thinking about Andria.”

“Your problem is that you think too much. You’ll be seeing her in about six hours. Which reminds me, it’s time for your next shot.”

“I told you, I’m committed to the Omega trial but I’m not being frozen.”

“And I told you, GOLEM will never allow you on board Oceanus without blood work. The Omega astronauts have already received a month’s worth of shots. You’ll need to double up on your protocol over the next two weeks, right up until the moment the crew is frozen. At that time, you can inform the computer that you’ve determined the suspected crewman is fine to stay with the mission, and that instead of being held in cryogenic stasis you’ll be using your designated sleep time to catch up on your reading. That’ll give you another four weeks to observe GOLEM.”

My response was silenced by another wave of turbulence, the violent wind gusts peppering the Chinook with ice particles as the airship soared west over the Transantarctic mountain range, heading for the Ross Ice Shelf.

Formed and fed by eight mammoth glaciers, the Ross Ice Shelf was a six-hundred-mile-long, five-hundred-mile-wide sheet of ice, a half-mile thick. Floating atop Antarctica’s Southern Ocean, this sheer white cliff occasionally fractured, calving city-size icebergs into the Ross Sea, which formed the shelf’s southwestern border.

Another eighty minutes passed before the military transport slowed to hover over McMurdo Station.