The helicopter blades were already slowing when the wheels made contact with the salt-crusted tarmac. Through the scratched plexiglass of the passenger cabin, Station Nine looked less like a manned research post and more like a slab of grey basalt sheared off the mountain by an ancient avalanche.
There were no trees. Above the sixty-fourth parallel, the earth abandons ornamentation. Only lichen clung to the volcanic scree, yellowish-grey, like dried tallow on cold iron.
David Miller set his duffel bag onto the damp aggregate. The wind came off the gulf without warning—cold, flat, smelling of brine and diesel exhaust. A man in a heavy shearling coat was waiting beside the fuel bunker, his hands buried deep within his pockets, a canvas cap pulled down to the bridge of his brow.
"You're late by two tides," the man said as David approached. His voice had the dry rasp of someone who spent forty days at a time speaking only to maintenance logs.
"The headwind over Tromsø held the transit flight," David replied, squinting against the spray. "Are you Keller?"
"I was Keller when the contract was signed," the man said, turning toward the heavy steel doorway recessed into the cliffside. "Now I am simply the person who hands you the brass keys and catches the return rotor. Leave the duffel by the compressor hatch; the boy will haul it to Level Three."
Inside the tunnel, the temperature dropped four degrees before rising again, thick with the dry mineral heat of steam radiators. Fluorescent tubes hummed overhead at sixty cycles, casting long, clean rectangles against the damp board-formed concrete.
"The manifest listed seventeen civil technicians," David noted, consulting the leather-bound ledger tucked beneath his arm. "The platform seems deserted."
Keller stopped at the entrance to the elevator cage. He looked back over his shoulder, his gray eyes narrowing in the artificial glare.
"The manifest is forty months old, Mr. Miller. In this sector, things do not stay staffed. They evaporate quietly. The telemetry runs on relays; the relays run on diesel; and diesel arrives every six weeks unless the ice closes the fiord. If you came looking for conversation, you brought the wrong training."
David stepped into the cage. The iron gate clattered shut with the sound of a rifle bolt chambering a round. As the hydraulic piston groaned into motion, descending past layers of damp granite, David smelled the first trace of ozone—sharp, metallic, unmistakably the scent of powered vacuum tubes and high-voltage transmission lines that had not cooled since 1974.