Temperature in suit is zero degrees.

Temperature in suit is zero degrees.

Temperature in suit –

Campbell quickly tapped in the override command on his wrist mount. He understood it was cold, he didn’t need a voice letting him know that anymore time outside base confines was going to become very problematic.

“Camp, your suit hissing at you too?”

“Poor girl doesn’t like the cold, you’d think out here she’d be used it.” The clear comms between the two sat starkly against the vicious storm they trudged through. Nothing like a crisp datalink to overshadow a blizzard.

“We’re coming up to Dot 2 in a few hundred metres. Eyes open for the hatch.”

“On it Ellie, it’ll be good to get an extra ten degrees in my bones.”

“Think we can get Jensen to mod the voice protocols in these things? They amount of times our temp packs fail it would be nice to switch it up.”

“Oh c’mon, what’s not to love about a stodgy, uptight woman letting you know you’re going to die? All she needs is a little bit of condescension and it would be like my childhood all over again.”

Campbell bent down, one knee sinking into the piling snow. The cold instantly pushed through his suit, his temperature pack wasn’t going to keep him from freezing outside for very much longer. He brushed off the hatch interface, digging away the accumulated snow.

“No matter how long you’re gone, two minutes or two days, that damn snow just builds up.”

“Seen where we are Camp? Snow and ice big guy, snow and ice.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Campbell punched in the Hatch code, it’s door rising a few inches out of the snow mound revealing a gaping black hole against the white blizzard.

The expedition works in pairs, one knowing the coordinate locations of the Dots, the other with appropriate access codes. In case of problems, or hostilities, it kept the information compartmentalized. Campbell liked to think it kept them safe from themselves, there wasn’t anything else to fear out here. Although in practical applications it was useless, the pair shared each other’s knowledge immediately on secure comms, but keeping up appearances was just as important as not breaking protocol in the first place.

“Ladies first Ellie.” Campbell made a sweeping bow look as elegant as possible given the large suit he had on.

“Shut it.” Campbell mimicked her comment to himself, before following her down into the Dot 2 Hatch.

The two descended a short staircase, bringing them to a landing zone, with a waiting elevator. When the Hatches has been bored into the ice the only thing that had made sense for the construction crews was to dig diagonally down. It wasn’t a designed requirement, but there had been serious equipment failures when drilling directly vertical, so the diagonal approach was adopted. Hatch Dot 2 was the first to feature the diagonal elevator shaft. Hatch Dot 1 had largely collapsed upon itself during the first migration expedition. It was still salvageable, but required time, and patience, something that failure prone temperature packs in the Cold Suits didn’t allow a lot of leeway for.

The returned pair descended the diagonal elevator shaft in relative silence. This section of the Hatch still required their suits to be kept on, but the temperature wasn’t an immediate threat.

“Dr. Campbell, Dr. Harris, welcome back to Dot 2.” The heavily accented voice greeted them across the elevator PA system. “The pressurization unit has been awaiting your return from the surface, the chamber is ready for your immediate use.”

“Wow, not wasting any time with this one. We’re gone for 6 hours longer than we should have been and we face immediate pressurization. Sticklers for protocol.”

“Whatever news we’re bringing back must be pretty important. Though it’s surprising we didn’t see any travellers from the Dot 3 expedition at Base Station.”

“I wouldn’t have even thought about that Ellie, good catch, Hendricks must really want to see what we picked up.” Campbell leaned himself against the elevator’s far left wall, angling himself to face Ellie and the door. “I was looking forward to catching a little sleep in the Hatch transition room, but I guess being up for 56 hours, and travelling for 54 them isn’t nearly exhausting enough for them.”

“Relax Camp, you can get some of your precious sleep when you’re in the pressurization unit for all I care, just don’t fall asleep in the suit again without deactivating your sensors.”

“You don’t want the blaring alarm bells going through the communications channels? Dr. Harris, Dr. Campbell has lost consciousness. Dr. Harris, Dr. Campbell has lost consciousness.” Campbell robotically moved his arms up and down, laughing at his own joke.

“It’s not funny, it’s one of the most annoying features of these damn suits. You’d think for all the money they cost that maybe, just maybe, they’d be able to tell the difference between asleep and unconscious.”

“Let’s not forget about regulating temperature for the particular climate they are built to survive in.”

“Voice mods to avoid the stodgy woman.”

“Flexibility in the shoulders and elbows.”

“Lightweight.”

The elevator ground to a halt. Reaching its destination the door slid open, the voice on the PA greeting them once again.

“As I mentioned before, please proceed directly to the secondary shaft, you’re coming to the Pod, and that means going to the pressurization unit, and stop complaining about the suits that save your lives.”

Campbell could feel Ellie’s embarrassment pulsing from her body, all he could do was stupidly look up to the closest security camera and offer up a half-assed salute.

The doors slid shut behind Campbell and Ellie as they entered the pressurization unit. The locks gave out a loud hiss, the pressurization beginning with a jolt, lowering the unit down toward the Pod.

Doctor Stefan Campbell was a biologist and by happenstance more than desire, a trained military medic. He understood people, not always in a social sense, but physically at the very least. He had seen his share of combat duties, and like any man not fond of war, jumped at the opportunity to be as far away from it as possible. He was a medic, not a soldier, a thinker, certainly not a fighter, though he had done his fair share of all of the above. Against the dim light of the pressurization unit he fumbled his way out of his Suit.

The descent down to the Pod would last four hours. Until then Campbell had nothing but time in the poorly lit unit, watching the black ocean depths slowly crawl by. The temperature in the unit had slowly risen, adjusting their body temperatures without inducing the pain of a mild thaw. Campbell helped Ellie struggle out of her Suit. The Suits weren’t necessarily cumbersome, but you always noticed them, and for people who had spent their life in labs, and face deep in a textpad, they were a nightmare to handle solo. Luckily Campbell had experience dealing with the Military Bio-Hazard and Atmosphere suits, the suits designed to save your life, if you have a calm, dedicated ten minutes to put them on in a hurry.

Doctor Ellie Harris was a chemist. For all intents and purposes she had been one since she was six and her father gave her a children’s chemistry set. She could only make chemical reactions that foamed, but by the time she finished elementary school there wasn’t a kid that could touch her volcanos in the science fair. Ellie was a lab scientist through and through, barely pulling her head away from test results for anything unrelated to her field of science. She hadn’t even heard of the expeditions until she was selected. The walks to Base Station accounted for the majority of her life’s outside time, not that she minded now that she was experiencing life outside of a lab. Aside from the temperatures that could snap kill you outside of your Suit, it was a new experience, and one she had no idea she needed.

The hours during the descent dragged by. A fast descent would be nice, but it could easily kill you, so things went slow. Campbell tried his best to sleep, but using his suit for a pillow was something he assumed would be against regulations. Not that he minded breaking protocol, but over a pillow? It wasn’t worth it. Pillows are never worth that much paperwork, which was a hard lesson for Camp to learn. He fidgeted restlessly in the corner, his eyes peering outside the reinforced glass unit, watching for any sign of light. There was never any, but it gave those on the descent something to occupy themselves with. The braided cable lowering the pressurization unit hummed and strained against the icy water, scaring away any sea life that may or may not have been present.

Campbell wasn’t a marine biologist by any stretch of the imagination, but even he knew this ocean was barren. Just ice, water that was worse than ice, and a few Pods jammed full of humans.

When they had first started the expedition there had been a hope amongst those on the first ride out that they would find something. Anything. There was nothing. Not nothing, there was unspoiled ice and water for as far as the eye could see. Which based on the frequency of storms, really wasn’t that far. It was fine for Campbell, he got to study people, his job was easy, all things considered, plus he got to run information, it wasn’t glamorous but it kept him busy. He could be analyzing water, or finding a rope to hang himself. It could always be worse, he could have been trapped in a shaft collapse like his fellow expeditioners in Dot 1, that wouldn’t have been a pleasant way to go. Cold and alone, crushed under some steel, no thanks. He’d take a barren ocean and pod buried beneath an ice sheet on the bottom of an ocean, humanity’s most precious and limited resource, over suffocation in a hole.

The first time he had seen one of their bodies during a reclamation dig had been terrifying. He had volunteered for the duty, thinking it would help the Dot 2 expedition with extra materials, but had left himself entirely unprepared for the actual repercussions of the dig. He had spent a week after that event talking with the Dot 2 therapist just to clear his head. It hadn’t helped, but he pretended to make everyone feel better. That was one thing Campbell learned patching up Marines on the ground, if you can put a smile on your face you do it. Those guys are going through hell too and maybe, just maybe that smile helps them get through it. There’s never a guarantee, but it’s worth the effort to try.

The corner he had chosen to try to sleep in wasn’t particularly comfortable. Then again, nothing in a barren box of steel and reinforced glass could be all that comfortable. The heat was returning to his body, which based on all his previous experience meant they were getting closer to the Pod. It wouldn’t be long until they were either greeted by someone wanting their dispatch from Base Station, or whisked directly to Hendricks. Either way, Campbell didn’t care, he just wanted sleep and whatever option got him there quicker was the option he wanted.

Ellie hadn’t slept which Campbell found strange. She wasn’t one for too much exploring which was why she was with Campbell in the first place, someone to curb his curiosity. He found that a little disconcerting considering they were part of an expedition, but he rolled with it best he could, the powers that be weren’t known to be the most strategic thinkers. Ellie wasn’t accustomed to the strain of the Suits or the long hikes that went with the days on end of being awake. Lab techs tend to just sit all day, maybe occasionally wheel a chair to the other microscope for 10 minutes before wheeling it back. Nothing too stressful. To still be awake after exerting any amount of energy over a few days period was certainly strange for Campbell to process. It must have been the message. They’ve been sent for information retrieval a hundred times before, but nothing that required this level of urgency, nothing that had made them trudge through a blizzard so they wouldn’t get delayed, even though walking through a blizzard inevitably delayed them.

Campbell found it slightly comforting that they had wandered off course and delayed themselves. Navigating through a blizzard using a system that relies on pulsing beacons was tricky at the best of time. When the beacons were malfunctioning because of the storm “playing it by ear” in a hostile environment tends to lead people astray, just a little.

The metal winch ground to a halt with the pressurization unit connecting into the Pod on the sea floor. They would still need to wait half an hour or risk some pretty serious side effects. This wait was the hardest part for Campbell, the being almost ready but not quite. It had ended a lot of relationships for him when he had been younger. His impatience wasn’t his best trait, and in situations like this it drove him as mad as it did everyone else. Campbell looked down and double tapped the top left corner of his wrist mount, initiating the standard timer. Possibly the only saving grace of the Suits is that their wrist overlay connected with the configuration of the standard expedition wearables. Small miracles Campbell thought to himself as the timer ticked down from thirty, he glanced over catching Ellie’s eyes flutter closed.