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promptly named Lake Vordog. This in honor of a Russian seismologist whose early studies in the region led to its discovery.
    Vordog was hardly the first lake discovered beneath the ice, there were some seventy others, but Vordog — and a few others — had piqued the curiosity of the world scientific establishment. For here was an underground lake trapped beneath nearly a mile of ice, some 300 miles long and nearly fifty in width, that had been hidden away from the light of day for some forty-million years. No sunlight, no outside atmosphere, no contact with any organisms but those it contained originally. Such isolation, it was thought, may have allowed whatever lived in it to follow an entirely separate path of evolution than that of the outside world.
    Imaging had shown that Vordog was over 2,000 feet deep in spots and thermographs proved that instead of being frozen or near-freezing like other sub-glacial lakes, Vordog had a near-constant water temperature of fifty degrees with hot spots up to sixty-five. The only thing that could possibly account for that was some form of subsurface geothermal heat source, possibly hydrothermal vents like those on the ocean floor. In which case, the lake could possibly be teeming with life . . . much of it completely unknown to science and, quite possibly, evolved forms of organisms long extinct elsewhere.
    So instead of the usual paleoclimate coring carried out at the drilling tower, this winter there was something truly exciting happening: a group of technicians headed by a CalTech glaciologist named Gundry were drilling down to the lake in order to release robotic probes into those ancient and pristine waters. The entire thing was being funded by NASA, as part of their groundwork for the Europa Ice Clipper mission which would send similar probes to Jupiter’s ice-covered moons, Europa and Callisto, which were both thought to contain large sub-glacial oceans.
    Whatever was down there had been undisturbed for forty-million years.
    And now that was about to change.

9
    E xactly one day after Gates’ big announcement and two days before Gundry’s drilling team broke through the ice, the Kharkhov Station was zipped-up tight and locked-down. Communication of any sort, whether radio or satellite or email for that matter, was brought to a screaming halt. They were suddenly alone and more isolated than they had been before. But it wasn’t because of a fierce storm or mechanical failure, it was because of LaHune. His directive was quite simple: until further notice, all communication with the outside world was suspended, save emergency beacons.
    It didn’t go over real big.
    When LaHune announced it to the lunch crowd in the community room, it caused a near-riot. For the winter crews at the stations didn’t have much else going for them but their satellite Internet and an occasional radio chat with a loved one. These were their only ties with the outside world, the only things that could remind them that, yes, there were other people in the world and they weren’t really on the moon or Mars, just down yonder at the bottom of the world.
    Later that day, Hayes caught up with Dr. Sharkey at the infirmary. “Did you try to talk sense to that overblown prick?” he asked her.
    She nodded. “Oh, I tried, all right. I tried until I was blue in the face, not that it did me any good. This is an NSF facility, he said, as such it’s under government jurisdiction same as a military base. We all signed the Official Secrets Act and now he’s activating it. Nothing goes out, not until he says so. End of story.”
    James Bond shit. “Jesus Christ, Doc, I supposed to log in with some of the boys from McMurdo tonight. We’ve got a poker game going on the web . . . what the hell are they going to think?”
    â€œWhat’s the rest of the world going to think?”
    Hayes sat down, sighed.
    Sure, there was more than just a poker game in the