The call from Ming Liao had upped the ante. Something had happened on the first Valkyrie drone launch, an unexpected find. Ming refused to provide any details other than to say that she wanted her two pilots on site immediately.

True was brooding. He had not wanted to leave his new lover. Conversely, I hadn’t thought about my family since arriving at Davis. Part of it was the mental and physical demands of learning how to pilot the submersible; part of it was my own acceptance of the mission.

The gray-haired Russian scientist seated across from True and me had been staring at my face ever since we had taken off. Twenty minutes into the flight, he leaned toward me and shouted over the engine noise, “You are Wallace, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Mikhail Kopilevich, geologist. This will be your first time at Vostok?”

“Yes. What about you?”

He snorted. “Eighteen summers on top of four winters. My first trip from Mirny Station was in winter on supply tractor. It took us entire week to travel thirteen hundred kilometers in minus twenty-five degrees Celsius. You know what is minus twenty-five degrees Celsius?”

“About minus seventy-eight degrees Fahrenheit.” I leaned in. “How do you Russian scientists handle such extreme cold?”

He winked. “We know survival secrets.”

“Anything you’d care to share?”

“First, you share something with me. Why does Chinese woman exclude my country from this new field operation? Without Russian Antarctic Expedition there is no Vostok Station. There is no discovery of lake.”

“From what I understand, the coalition scientists involved in this new research station were afraid your team was not adhering to strict contamination protocols. You used Freon and kerosene to lubricate your borehole. Some of these chemicals tainted the bore samples and could have breached the lake.”

The geologist snapped. “We stopped borehole before we reached lake! Vostok is under tremendous pressure. On breakthrough, water will rush up borehole, freeze, and seal chemical fluids.”

“It’s not my expedition, Dr. Kopilevich. I’m simply an invited guest.”

“I think you are more than invited guest, Dr. Wallace. You should know new equipment is developed by St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute to ensure lake remains uncontaminated upon intrusion. Visit our station; I will give you personal tour.”

“Thank you.”

“Consider this gift from new friend.” The Russian reached into his bag and removed a thirty-ounce tub of butter. “When Vostok weather becomes too cold, eat fistful of butter. It will make you warm inside.”

Standing on an ice runway two hours later, I seriously contemplated scooping a mittenful of butter into my mouth.

Vostok greeted us with a punishing forty-mile-an-hour katabatic wind that dropped minus thirty-eight into another realm of cold. It abused our carefully planned layers of Extreme Cold Weather gear and seeped into our bones. It formed snotsicles on my upper lip and pelted my tinted goggles with shards of snow.