“There is a place, like no place on Earth. A land full of
wonder, mystery, and danger. Some say, to survive it, you
need to be as mad as a hatter. Which, luckily, I am.”

—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“I fully believe we’re not alone and have not been for many
years even though at the time I went to the moon it was the
conventional wisdom both in science and theology that we
were alone in the universe. We’re just barely out of the trees
even though we like to think we’re fairly sophisticated.”

—Dr. Edgar Mitchell, former NASA astronaut

PROLOGUE

Davis Station, East Antarctica
Latitude 68 degrees 35' S, Longitude 77
degrees 58' E

2 March

Thomas Nilsson definitely had his “monk-on.”

“Monk-on” was Antarctic slang for being in a foul mood, and the fifty-one-year-old marine biologist’s temperament fit the bill. His day—if you could call four hours of sunlight a day—had begun twenty hours and eighteen hundred miles ago back at McMurdo Station with a “Dear John” e-mail from his wife, Keira. She had begun the transmission with, “You know how I’ve been telling you how unhappy I’ve been,” and ended with, “I sold the house. Your belongings are in storage. I left the dog with your mother.”

Twenty-two years of marriage… deleted in an e-mail.

In Antarctica, they called it being “chinged.” It happened a lot among the scientists and support staff stationed at McMurdo and the other thirty-seven international bases located around the continent. It wasn’t enough to work in the coldest, driest, windiest, and most isolated environment on the planet. Accepting a research grant to go there, if you were crazy enough to winter on the ice, meant leaving your loved ones for a minimum of six months.

Like most of the four thousand visitors (there are no indigenous people in Antarctica), Nilsson’s six months had begun at the start of summer, which ran from late September through February. In Antarctica, the difference between winter and summer was literally night and day. When the vernal equinox arrived on March 20 the sun would disappear, casting the continent into six months of frigid darkness, with temperatures plunging as low as minus seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Nilsson was scheduled to fly out on one of the last C-130 transports and had been counting the hours until he would see his nineteen-year-old daughter again, could take his first hot shower of the New Year, and could make love to his wife.

He would have to settle for two out of three.

For twenty minutes he had stared at the laptop monitor, contemplating a response. For inspiration, he rolled up his left sleeve and glanced at the tattoo on his forearm. Contemptus mortis, pulchra vulnera amor laudis. “Contempt for death, beautiful wounds, joy for victory.”

Keira had just stabbed him in the heart; his only response was to find a way to make the wound beautiful.