At Concordia, the cameras were not there to watch people. Mostly, they watched doors.
Maëlle Vautrin knew that, of course. She also knew that the camera in the north corridor had a ridiculous blind spot at the foot of the water cooler, and that all you had to do was crouch to vanish from the screen without even leaving the passage. Nils had been promising to move it for three weeks. Whenever he walked past, he glanced up at the black housing, as if greeting an acquaintance whose move he kept postponing.
That morning, at six forty, Maëlle crossed the blind spot with a crate of probes against her chest and the certainty that she was seven minutes late.
The station log lay open on the lectern in the common room. Alessio had written in large block letters: **WIND 19 KT—OUTING REQUIRES REAPPROVAL**. Below the line, Marco had drawn a penguin with an open-end wrench. There were no penguins within a thousand kilometers, but this one wore safety goggles and seemed better equipped than they were.
“Have you seen the wind?” Alessio asked without looking away from the weather screen.
“I’ve seen your penguin.”
“The penguin’s Marco’s. The wind’s Antarctica’s.”
Maëlle set the crate on the table and checked the graph. The increase was real, not dramatic. Nineteen knots on average, a few gusts above that. Outside visibility remained good according to the roof camera, which at Concordia meant you could still make out two rows of marker flags in the blue night instead of one.
The sun would not return for weeks. Outside, the station buildings stood on their pilings like ships stranded in a shoreless ocean. The floodlights flattened the snow into gray patches. Beyond them, there was no depth anymore, only red markers swallowed one after another by the dark.
“Line B is six hundred meters away,” Maëlle said. “I’ll be twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes each way.”
“Twenty-two, if you need to win.”
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