Prologue
There has never been a recorded case of murder anywhere on the Antarctic continent.
2028, the second year of the Pacific Rim War. A stalemate, the pundits and generals on both the Chinese and American sides say, but there is no forgiveness in war. Only patience until an advantage reveals itself.
February 22nd, 2028
In Christchurch, New Zealand, callsign Borak 27 lifts off from Runway 02. There are six people aboard the heavily modified Basler BT-67, but the manifest shows the aircraft as empty except for the two-pilot crew. Two hundred miles south of Invercargill, its transponder turns off. Borak 27 disappears from air traffic control scopes, headed due south.
June 13th, 2028
Two hundred yards from the geographic South Pole, Amundsen-Scott Station manager Bill Gaudin’s lips are pressed tightly together, his face the color of dirty linen. During the Station’s sliver of overhead satellite connectivity, downlinked at dial-up modem speeds, the latest image from Washington shows two Chinese snow-vehicles three-hundred miles away from their home base of Dome-A’s Kunlun Station. Headed toward South Pole.
With eight days until the winter solstice, the final band of twilight fades from the horizon. The sun has set at the bottom of the world, where there is just one long day and one long night each year. The stars are out. The wan aurorae flicker intermittently across the sky like distant streamers. It will be completely dark for the next four months.
BOOK ONE
The First Two Deaths
JUNE 18TH – JUNE 21ST
I am not at ease, nor am I quiet;
I have no rest; but trouble comes.
Job 3:25-26
Chapter One
SOUTH POLE STATION, POPULATION: 41
June 18th, 91 miles from the South Pole
Rajan Chariya is startled to hear fear in Luis Weeks’s voice. The harsh squelch of the radio bleeds everything out of the syllables except the words themselves, but he feels the terror lacing them as surely as he feels ice heavy on his eyelids. Ever since their first mile north and away from South Pole Station, to intercept the incoming Chinese traverse from Kunlun Station, he’s been waiting for the guillotine to drop. Fearing it. A tense band around his chest that cuts deeper than the Antarctic wind.
Weeks’s words begin spilling together. “Rajan-get-your-ass-over-here now now now.”
Rajan is already running, past the ring of flares enclosing the two hulking Chinese trucks, knees popping like fire-crackers. That tense itch intensifies and runs with him.
It’s Spencer he sees first, on his hands and knees in front of the second truck. Great gasping breaths plume beneath his hanging head. Akinori Nakagawa and Weeks stand on the ice by the truck’s open door, dwarfed by its rugged snow-filled pontoon treads. Akinori’s eyes keep skittering away, not looking at anything in particular. A galloping wave of dread threatens to close over Rajan because he knows that look; it’s a look he hoped to never see again.
The vacant expression of someone slipping into shock.
Spencer Kaur looks up at Rajan Chariya, then the looming darkness beyond the truck door. “Don’t… it’s hell in there, man.” His voice is a low, guttural moan.
A bright red flare squirts into the air, blooming over the three American Sno-Cats from Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, squaring off against the two Chinese traverse trucks. The flares stain everything red, even the stars. The wind dies down. For a long moment, everything on the plateau is still.
Then the black of the night creeps back in, and with it Rajan feels gripped by a cold and unshakeable feeling of two-ness. A voice in his head, warmly familiar but coldly distant. A voice of headachy reflexes and fears of the unknown, ancestral and urgent and full of premonitory dread.
“You should take a look,” Weeks interrupts Rajan’s thoughts. His voice is brittle. “But be careful. That’s a crime scene.”
Rajan feels all their eyes on his skin. Like coiled cats in an apartment window, watching warily from behind a safe pane of glass.
The first murder in Antarctica and, somehow, he has become the decision maker.
A feeling of helplessness bubbles up within him. An urge to throw up his hands; explain that he is more at home at a scientific conference than in a military formation, that he’s a first-timer to the ice and surely this is a job for someone with multiple seasons of experience. But he is
also the only active-duty military member on the entire continent, because by treaty you can only come to Antarctica for scientific purposes. The rest of the world is at war, the Chinese have shown up inside a hundred miles of South Pole with a blood footprint, and he is the key that fits both locks.
He tries not to touch anything, not even the railing to pull himself up. Balancing carefully, he climbs the steps perched over the heavy caterpillar treads, then into the truck. The sullen glow from the flares dying into the ice become ghostly, fading before the deeper darkness inside.
His breath becomes an echo in his ears.
That’s when the smell first hits him.
A ghastly rich stench; a sick-dead amalgam of blood and sweat and human decay. The dense, gut-wrenching way it cloys hints at what lies wrapped in the darkness of the cargo truck. That ancestral hunter voice in Rajan’s head, the voice as familiar with being the predator as the prey, picks up steam. Get out get out get out–
He flicks on the flashlight. Its white beam lights up the body lying against the far wall.
He jerks back, like he’s been punched. His mind makes the words what the fuck, but they won’t go to his dry throat and just bounce between his ears. The light skitters up to the roof. Wide swaths of blood there, like a fist had been punching –
(clawing)
– at the roof.
Rajan’s hand shakes, he can’t make it stop, and the flashlight dips. The floor is slick with a thick layer of blood, smudged with bare footprints but growing more viscous as he traces it back, drawn like a ghastly magnet, and that’s when he sees the guts of the Chinese man. His intestines and bloated stomach are split open, spilled out onto the floor, and the stink swells like a physical thing, a fist driving through Rajan’s nose and into it. A glassy dead eye glares in the gory flare backlight like the eye of a goat in a slaughter yard. Meeting that eye, sharp shudders rack Rajan’s body. Half the man’s skull is no more than pulpy blood clots smeared into the wall he is slumped against –
(Get back GET OUT)
– and still his killer hadn’t stopped, because bone gleams at Rajan from head-sized dents in the wall of the truck.
His stomach does a jittery forward roll, and he stumbles back a step, grasping blindly
for the door. Almost falling out of the truck as he slams it shut.
The wind rattles in his ears like all the dark things beneath the world gleefully free and glommed together. A hundred afterimages of the man’s skull cracked into the wall whirl blackly before his eyes, knocking his thoughts into an uncertain sprawl. Rajan has seen bodies before. He has seen people shot. I’ve been shot myself. But nothing…
Nothing ever like this.
An endless river of snow kicks between his legs like fine baking flour, then flutters out of his flashlight beam and ceases to exist in the pitch Antarctic black. Rajan clutches his parka over his ribs, trying to hug himself warm, gasping the wind and cold in, but even outside, the sick-dead smell stays in his lungs.
“Holy shit,” he says, at last.
“Spencer walked into that with no warning,” Weeks says beside him. “Poor bastard.”
Rajan looks over at Spencer and is immediately struck by the haggard pallor of the carpenter’s face. The man is a sallow painting of himself, still on all fours, staring limply at his own icy vomit. Akinori wanders away, muttering to himself, words lost in the dark of the polar night.
“Who else has been in there?”
“Just Spencer, Akinori, and the two of us.”
Rajan’s temples jump and quiver. Like tiny fists beating into the side of his face. “Nobody else enters this vehicle except Doc. No one.”
His teeth chatter, he starts walking, and Weeks follows in his trail. It is bitterly cold, sixty-five degrees below zero, a physical wall that their lungs strain against with every breath. The dark emptiness of the Antarctic holds no light except from the indifferent stars; cloaks nothing except blowing snow to the horizon and beyond. It’s hard not to think about how precipitously cold it is. How much it would hurt to die out here.
Rajan turns to look at the three Chinese scientists who had been in the traverse vehicles. They are all dressed in Antarctic-issue red parka jumpsuits with a thick
black stripe sashing around the middle, huddled together, casting anxious glances his way. They know how it must look.
They’ve come from Kunlun Station on Dome Argus, known as Dome-A, an ice plateau sixteen thousand feet high. It’s the coldest region in the world, with temperatures often below minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The Chinese have driven almost seven hundred miles toward them, the nearest humans on the ice continent, along a route that has never been attempted in the treachery of winter.
A thick feeling of tension creeps across Rajan like a metal guitar string being pulled too tight. He imagines deadly crevasses, invisible in the perpetual darkness. The ice, crackling mysteriously under the thick white quilt of the snow cover.
The safest place for them is huddled inside their Station, and yet here they are. Something has driven them out of Dome-A.
Something that outweighs the risk of a journey that could have killed them.
What if the rest of their Station looks like the back of their truck?
Rajan drifts to a stop in front of Bill Gaudin. The South Pole Station Manager stands with his arms crossed, facemask down, watching the truck with his permanent scowl. Gaudin’s eyes, normally hazel green, have gone a slaty color, like a deep lake on a stormy day.
“Well?” he demands.
“There’s no way a human being could do that much damage to himself. Definitely a murder. One of their crew.” Rajan tries to shunt his brain out of the sludge that the stink has trapped his thoughts in. “Have we asked our visitors what happened?”
“Absolutely not,” Gaudin says at once.
“Why not? They’ve got to know. They know.”
“Because.” Gaudin’s hands snap to his hips. “If there was a death en route–”
“A murder,” Rajan says flatly.
“– there’s no jurisdiction. It’s no man’s country between the Stations.”
No one has dedicated more time than Bill Gaudin to surfing the fickle waves of the Antarctic Treaty, and its geopolitical sensitivities, and Rajan can’t keep a frustrated noise from bubbling out.
“Don’t give me that attitude, Dr. Chariya,” the manager says sourly. “We didn’t spend two days punching trenches into the snow to stop them here out of goodwill. It’s a time of war. We have to be careful how we get involved.” His lip curls. “I would have thought you, of all people, would get that.”
“I think we’re involved either way now. If jurisdiction is an issue, let’s get jurisdiction.”
“What do you mean?”
“Cram them back in their vehicles and bring them to South Pole. It’s an American station. The NSF’s lawyers can figure out what to do next.”
With the National Science Foundation in charge of all American research stations on the continent, Rajan can tell the idea of turning the diplomatic hassle into their problem appeals to Gaudin. “They’ll need to be held separately,” he muses. “Somewhere no one can talk to them and muddy the investigation.”
“Except for the Doc, right?” Rajan interjects. “Doc Wei needs to determine time and cause of death?”
Gaudin is barely listening, stroking a mustache bushy with ice. “We’ll isolate the vehicles by the berms,” he says, referring to the collection of containers from previous seasons, obsolete or stored for returning summer scientists. It’s called End-of-the-World for good reason. The Chinese vehicles would be covered in a layer of snow by week’s end, indistinguishable from the other half-buried cargo.
“And them?” Rajan gestures at the three travelers but it feels jerky, like his arms are new to his body. “One of them is a killer. Maybe all of them.”
“Shit, it’s not like we have a jail. Hell, I can’t even think of a door at Pole that locks.”
Weeks steps up from just out of Gaudin’s line of sight, where he’s been lingering. “We could use ARO.”
The Atmospheric Research Observatory sits on the edge of Pole’s Clean Air Sector, half a kilometer northeast of the Station. Its isolation, designed for atmospheric purity to measure long-term trends of trace gases in the pristine South Pole air, could certainly be put to use to house unwelcome guests.
“They have a room that locks?”
Rajan nods. His lips feel cold and ashy. “ARO uses pressurized nitrogen to cryo-cool equipment. NSF Safety required them to secure the canisters so the whole building wouldn’t turn into shrapnel. There’s a reinforced room downstairs that locks from the outside.”
“Then let’s pack up and get the hell back to Pole.”
Gaudin strides off, past the Chinese scientists. Rajan notices them shy away, cluster closer together. The knowledge drops into him with the cold certainty of a quarter slotting into a vending machine.
They’re afraid.
Whatever they know, it scares the shit out of them.
He lifts his head to the Milky Way and lets a long shaky breath escape him. Sprawling above them in a corkscrew of cold light, the stars shine hard and bright, somehow closer at the bottom of the world. Gems he could pluck off the galaxy’s dark skin and wear himself.
Leave them.
The intensity of the thought surprises him.
Drive back to Pole and let them run into those trenches and die out here.
In the same way the ancient instinct in Rajan’s head knows the Chinese scientists are afraid, it knows that the thought of abandoning them has already crossed Gaudin’s mind.
The NSF had been sending satellite imagery of the traverse from Dome-A limping across the ice toward them. Gaudin hadn’t bothered to hide his fury that the NSF had wanted Rajan present at first contact. If he were'nt
here, perhaps Gaudin would have left them, even after their brutal trek halfway across the continent for help.
Kneecapped them, deflated their tires, and driven away.
You might be doing them and yourselves a favor, the voice in Rajan’s head says quietly.
He looks at the three travelers, shying away from the burly station manager. He imagines what they’ve been through to get here, and something clicks in his throat as he swallows. No way. I could never.
But other doubts fill his head. Like the NSF insisting on his presence, even though he’s a first-timer to the ice. Why would they do that? Had the Department of Defense been whispering in their ear?
And the NSF doesn’t do satellite reconnaissance, Rajan knows that much. Some other three-letter organization is feeding them overhead imagery of the Chinese traverse’s progress toward South Pole. How did they (whoever they were) pick up two tiny vehicles moving across the vast Antarctic wilderness?
Instead of asking Gaudin these things, he watches the Station manager walk away and tries not to think about what lies in the coffin on caterpillar-tracks behind him.
You’ll be sorry, the hunter voice whispers quietly. I can smell it. You’ll be sorry.
Chapter Two
TWO DAYS LATER
June 20th, 4:30 PM (New Zealand Standard Time)
Ben Jacobs stops what he’s doing; looks over his shoulder. The television monitor across from the couch shows views from the four cameras mounted on each corner of the ARO building. The cameras are for monitoring macro-weather conditions, but one of them looks down the flag path to the Station, a quarter-mile away. There’s no one on the path. Philip Cunningham rolls his eyes.
“Jonah’s not coming, dude.”
“Sorry, just habit. This is his place, really–”
“Dude.”
Ben lowers his head between Philip’s knees once more. Obliging, that’s him all over. When he looks up, Philip has spread his arms across the back of the upstairs couch, looking up at the dusty ceiling tiles, a small smile touching his hard slash of a mouth.
Then his eyes slip closed, and he moans, and Ben is happy again.
Twenty minutes later, the windstorm has arrived. Philip stands at the window, naked, stretching luxuriously. The Station is close enough that Ben can usually see the satellite dishes on its roof, but all he sees now is a rising curtain of white. When the blowing snow grows into columns that blur the distinction between ground and velvet sky, ARO becomes invisible to the Station.
Out of sight and out of mind. It’s a thought that never fails to make him uncomfortable.
Then again, the list of things that make Ben uncomfortable would fill a dictionary.
“Damn, it’s nice out here,” Philip says, idly fondling himself. “This whole palace to just you and Jonah. Y’all beakers have it good down here!”
“Every time you say beaker, I get the feeling it’s not a compliment.”
Philip brushes his long hair away from his angular face until it stands up in a shock wave.
“Look, I like ya,” he says, and Ben’s stomach tightens, already knowing he won’t like whatever comes next. “Them other beakers can shine me a watery turd and choke it down with chopsticks.” Philip’s eyes, sunken deep in his face, glitter in their sockets like dark animals trapped in twin snares. “Like that bitch-Nazi Kathryn. Thinks she’s better than me ‘cuz of a coupla letters after her name. I’m fuckin’ tired of it. Fuckin’ tired of Antarctica, for that matter.”
Philip is the second plumber, and Ben has run headlong into his inferiority complex all season. He’d never say it to his face, but it’s probably why Philip hasn’t been upgraded to foreman, even though he has two more seasons on the ice than his boss Spencer.
“It’s been a pretty eventful season, though, right?” Ben hate-hate-hates how diffident he sounds, but once Phil starts spinning around his own axis like a furious little sun, it’ll take most of the night for him to calm down. And this kind of storm-assured privacy doesn’t come often.
Philip stops mid-gesture, staring at the oscilloscope across the room. He looks like a cartoon growing a thought bubble above his head. Ben tries not to giggle. Philip hates it when people laugh at him. Or around him, really, because it’s impossible to convince him that they aren’t laughing at him.
“Schnurbusch told me Gaudin is keeping them Commie beakers here. Is that true?”
“Um,” Ben says, suddenly uncomfortable.
Without a further word, like a greyhound released from the gates, Philip bounds from the room.
Ben springs to his feet; struggles into his pants. His socked feet whisper quickly over the threadbare blue carpet, by the old laser tower and down the stairs, past plaques that hold the names of the two winter-overs that manage ARO every season.
I’m expendable. The plaques remind him of that every time he passes them. Jonah Mitchell’s name appears on those plaques every other year, back to the building’s construction in 1997, then every year for the last ten years. Jonah is the fountain of knowledge on how ARO works. His winter partner is usually, like Ben, a commissioned officer from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the NOAA corps (Science! Service! Stewardship! And that hidden fourth, solitude, forget it at your own peril), but few of the officers return. The officers are expendable.
Another thought Ben is not comfortable with.
Downstairs, past the two office cubicles, instruments on long laboratory benches lurk like still gargoyles in the gloom. A little over a hundred years ago, Roald Amundsen and Robert Scott’s push deep into the ice cap had been a direct function of how much their dogs and ponies could carry on sleds. Today, they might be cut off from the world during the dark winter, but thanks to the logistical magnitude of military airlift, now there are instruments, sofas, and a three-hundred-ton radio telescope at 90 South.
Ben turns on the yellow lights, revealing data recording servers, conference posters from NOAA researchers of years past, and the freezer door in the
grid-east corner. He finds Philip crouching in front of it, studying the latch with an almost wild glee. The chrome of its sturdy lock leers at him like a carnival barker.
“Phil, no one’s supposed to–”
Philip turns and it gives Ben a little start to see how bug-wide his eyes are. “Where’s the key?”
“What?”
“Don’t what me, Benny-boy.” Philip strides up to him and Ben is suddenly reminded of a cop asking him to step out of the car. “I can’t see Jonah playing jail den-mom, which means you have the key. I wanna see them.”
“Well, not like this.” Ben gestures to Philip’s nakedness.
“They might be into it, never know.” Philip grins, and there is something in that smile –
(not something you know exactly what)
(unadulterated top-shelf crazy wrapped in human skin)
– that makes him uneasy. Ben is grimly unsurprised to see that the plumber has a hard-on growing.
He keeps staring into Philip’s gleaming eyes, willing himself not to chicken out and look away. At last, a hoarse laugh tumbles out of Philip’s mouth. “Okay,” he says. His tongue flicks out over his lips. “Okay, okay.”
Ben itches the bridge of his nose as they return upstairs, and he watches Philip pull his clothes on. He tries to convince himself that he’ll say no if that crazy light is still in Philip’s eyes.
They walk downstairs and, as the lock falls away, a sudden and deep dread surges over him. A thousand generations of bad feelings, coming out of time to play the creeps up and down his spine. Ben’s lizard brain is shouting, loudly, wants him to be anywhere else, the feeling so strong he finds himself fighting the urge to pick up his heels and just run. Out of there, out of the building, all the way back to the Station, windstorm be damned –
– but Philip is already pulling the door open.
The three Chinese winter-overs are sitting on the floor, clustered around open
Meals-Ready-to-Eat bags. Without their jackets, they look emaciated and worn. “You fuckers speak English?” Philip demands, hands on his hips.
An old man gathers himself to his feet. He looks older than even old-man Jonah, with silvered hair and a wizened face. He speaks painstakingly, in a slow and respectful voice. “What is your name, sir?”
“Never mind my damn name.” Philip’s eyes draw down to ugly slits. “What the hell happened out at your Station?”
Ben gets the distinct impression the old man understands whom he is dealing with. “We have… emergency. Dr. Xiaofeng dead, in our truck. There is other… dead… Dome-A.”
Xiaofeng. Ben says the name to himself so he remembers it for Gaudin later. A scientist, perhaps. Or maybe their medical doctor.
“Yeah? How many dead?”
The old man says something in Mandarin, then holds up ten fingers.
“Ten?”
He shows them two fingers.
“Two? Which is it? Oh, twelve!” Philip exclaims.
Ben’s eyes widen with shock.
“You guys it for the Dome-A crew?”
“Please, slow.”
He tosses his head impatiently. “Are y’all – the only – ones – alive?”
“We alive,” comes the reply. “Only we. People… they sick. People little…” His eyes blink rapidly. Then the word comes to him, and it makes Ben’s flesh crawl helplessly.
“They crazy. Very bad crazy when very bad cold.”
Philip chuckles into his fist like a teenager stumbling across keys to his dad’s convertible. “I know all about crazy in this fuckin’ place, I tell you what.”
“Phil.” Ben’s dominant voice surprises even him. He feels the need to treat the old
Chinese man with some respect. He has survived the death of his crewmates, and a deadly traverse across a frozen continent, only to be trapped in the closest thing to an Antarctic jail cell. “That’s enough.”
“I’m just having a conversation, Benny-boy,” Philip sings, hips throwing obscenely from side to side. He sounds –
(say it Benny)
– delighted.
“I said that’s enough, dammit. Leave them alone.”
Ben’s fists clench by his side as Philip jumps forward instead. The plumber plucks the remainder of a sandwich away from one of the prisoners. He pops it in his mouth, jaws clicking, then wipes his hands deliberately all over the man’s wind pants and jacket. Philip winks and lets out a booming laugh that reveals pieces of turkey in his teeth, then pats the man’s cheek.
“Thanks for the great dinner conversation, fellas,” he says, and just like that, he’s out of the room, bounding up the stairs.
“I’m so sorry, he’s… he’s a fucking ass,” Ben says, unpleasantly realizing how true it rings.
The silent cross of Antarctica is loneliness, a shadowy cloak growing over them like icy moss on stone from their very first moment on the plateau. Finding someone to be intimate with has been an unexpected salve, the most joyous balm scraping at that moss. And because of it, Ben knows he has fallen steadily deeper into craving Philip’s companionship and touch across the winter. Ready and even eager to ignore most anything else about him.
Things like what was behind his eyes when toying with prisoners from a ravaged station.
Ben backs toward the doorway. “Listen, there’s a windstorm that’s picking up. Gale force squalls, triple digits below zero. It might get chilly in here, so I’ll bring you a heater.”
“Happy to arrival before storm,” the old man says.
Ben nods. “I’ll be back after it breaks.”
The older man raises a hand. “Please, please wait.” He has to think about each word. “It get very bad when it get very cold.” He makes a gesture, like peeling the skin off his arms.
Ben takes
another step back. Open palms. “Look, man, I don’t–”
“Very bad!” The old man’s hands are wringing. There’s clearly more he wants to express. “Please, you careful.”
“There are people who’ll come talk to you.” Words spill out of Ben’s mouth as he backs away, light as snow snatched up by the wind. Someone else’s problem, someone else’s fucking problem. “Just don’t eat all the food at once, okay?”
Ben slams the freezer door. His hands fumble at the lock, even as the muffled voices on the other side pick up, one ghastly chorus now. Very bad. Very bad, very cold. In that chorus, improbably, Ben finds a hard edge he can hang a hat on. The hell with being lonely –
(for now just for now)
– he’d rather ride out the storm alone.
Still… it’ll be best to let Philip catch a few hours of sleep before starting a fight. Just so he doesn’t hold a grudge.
It’ll be a lonely winter if he decides to hold a grudge.
Chapter Three
Philip Cunningham stands in the cold, half-in and half-out of the open door of ARO. He has been standing there for several minutes, trying to decide whether to go back in and cuss Ben out some more.
Fuck it, he thinks. I’m making like a tree and leafing. Damned if I’ll stick around where I ain’t wanted.
He pulls the door of ARO shut behind him.
He tries to listen for the two clicks of the walk-in freezer style seals, ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
