Sly had interviewed all the Green Berets volunteers personally but the journey so far cast them all in a new light. As Tony drove, Sly reviewed their profiles and made notes, flicking over the details of Captain John Ramirez, his XO Sarah Kim, and the two operations sergeants, Marcus and Clarke, before landing on a picture of man with narrow Asiatic features.

  Richard Nguyen?

  Sly checked the name, found it was correct, and remembered a lanky man of part-Vietnamese origin with an infectious laugh. A humorous man, Nguyen liked to talk but listened more and with great empathy, and people liked him on first meeting. Just one of the reasons Nguyan excelled as the team’s intelligence sergeant.

  Sly couldn’t contemplate Nguyen without next thinking of ‘Trap’ Singh, his near-constant wingman. Originally from Detroit, and still speaking as if through his nose, Singh was one of two engineering sergeants. The other was Michael Lee, a wiry southerner who smelled of spearmint gum and annoyed anyone in a hurry with his precision and slow deliberate drawl.

  Christian O’Connor and Josh Smith were the team’s medics. O’Connor was the darker, older, calmer, more experienced man, in his mid-thirties, while Smith was ten years younger, blonde, hot-headed and nervous. They spent no time together. Although Sly saw no sign of rancour they were very different men.

  Both communications sergeants stood out. Eli Brown was not the African American stereotype the name suggested, but a lean, tanned white man wearing sun-bleached hair cut too long for the Army standard, and white protective studs in three places up his left ear. A green grass-snake tattoo crept from the back of his brown wrist, when it wasn’t tucked into heavy-duty parka and double-gloves.

  Sly mentally labelled the laid-back and free-spirited Eli, ‘surfer dude’.

  The other coms sergeant was Nio Gonzalez. The short man came across as a stereotypical Latino – powerful, macho and in your face – but he put his ethnicity on and off like a hat, and was a diplomat, not a troublemaker, despite excellent camouflage.

  More individual insight came from the Peacock profiles’ scores for intelligence, strength, dexterity, wisdom, constitution, and charisma. Sly wasn’t shocked that Sarah Kim was highest on measures of pure intelligence while her partner Emil Marcus was the strongest physically. Sly thought Emil resembled a Tarzan pulp-fiction book-cover, had Tarzan been bigger and a Brother.

  Neither was it shocking that charisma was Nguyen’s highest stat. His score was neck-and-neck with that of Sergeant Clarke, which was a revelation. As the team fixer Grace Clarke excelled at engaging others and getting things done, but her charisma was relatively low key. Nio Gonzalez was highest on wisdom, and only a short notch below Sarah Kim on intelligence. That was another shock for Sly: Nio had evidently gained the team’s trust in a remarkably short time.

  Peacock Profiles were excellent at identifying clusters of attributes, but how these manifested in the real world was utterly unpredictable. Eli Brown was huge on dexterity but Sly had to root deep before he found Surfer Dude’s actual passion was free climbing and free running, sometimes known as parkour. In contrast, Trap Singh was high on strength and constitution, and only average on dexterity. Sly read that Trap competed in ironman triathlons, and twice placed in the 70.3 in Frankfort, Michigan.

  O’Connor was quietly charismatic, but the medic’s formal analytical thinking skills were well developed to compensate for being a relative plodder, intelligence-wise. His counterpart, Smith, was high in brains, dexterity, and constitution. Smith was a very good twenty-four-hour poker player and could deal out a new pack of cards in thirty seconds, or less when showing off. Despite all that, Sly decided he’d go to O’Connor if he was ever rubbed sore in a private place. Smith had a keen brain, fast hands and a motormouth but nearly no bedside manner or tact.

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  Near the end of the interminable journey, Sly received an internal message from the rear tractor unit. It was from Ramirez.

  ‘Hey Colonel. What’s our ETA?’

  The tickertape appeared in Sly’s vision at perfect reading distance. He glanced down at his hands and Gus drafted a couple of intelligent replies. Sly flicked one to the captain with a twitch of a finger.

  ‘Three hours, now Area 71’s on the map. Can’t you sleep?’

  ‘Not in this box. It’s not bright, but it’s light.’

  ‘This is Antarctica, you’ll be tired by sunset,’ Sly joked, writing with a finger in the air as if on a misted pane of glass. Gus read his ‘handwriting’ and autocompleted without error. ‘Is the team at each other’s throats yet?’

  ‘Not so you’d notice,’ Ramirez tapped back. ‘You can’t tell?’

  ‘Rude to look at the profiles too often,’ Sly said. He had peeked regularly – it was an equipment test after all – but each soldier could see a glowing icon when he, the Exercise Director, or Ramirez looked in. ‘They need some privacy.’

  ‘They’d signal,’ Ramirez typed, referring to the privacy ‘lock-out’ option on their interface. ‘Most are still making friends, swapping stats and skills-info. When do we pick up the kit?’

  ‘When the drivers drop us off and head back to Leviathan. The cache is at the marked drop-point, from a LAPES drop two hours ago.’

  A low-altitude technique, LAPES used parachutes to extract supplies from an aircraft onto the ice without landing. The cache contained Ramirez’s ‘kit’.

  ‘Is the onboard equipment working well?’

  Ramirez understood his reference to the implanted medical sensors. No one entirely knew how they would perform in such extreme conditions. Which was entirely the point of coming this far south.

  ‘Funny you ask,’ Ramirez wrote. ‘Clarke and Brown mentioned they felt ‘shivers’ – not from the cold, and not unpleasant or painful, but I’ve asked around and most are feeling it.’

  ‘From the strands?’

  Ramirez sent a thumbs-up emoji.

  The main Peacock sensor was called a ‘strand’ because it resembled a vertical hair follicle, or a microscopic blade of grass. Volunteers had hundreds of strands embedded under their skin, each one harvesting energy using the piezoelectric effect. The devices were effectively mechanical batteries, microscopic springs tightened by motion. When power was required by a sensor, its spring released to transform potential energy into vibration, thus generating electricity.

  Dr Frank had theorised that a mass release of coiled energy might give a haptic signal that dermis nerve cells could sense. If the body felt the release as a ‘shiver’, perhaps Dr Frank was right.

  But what caused the surplus potential energy in the first place?

  ‘The strands might be picking up extra charge from the ice’s ambient field,’Sly intuited. ‘If so, the sensors are shedding excessive energy to avoid damage.’

  ‘An electric field. The Southern Lights?’

  ‘No, not ‘Aurora Australis’. Ice crystals create an electric field when they rub against each other, called polar triboelectricity. Not something I’ve heard anyone making use of, but there’s a heck of a lot of ice hereabouts.’

  ‘I can tell the guys it isn’t dangerous?’

  ‘Maybe even useful,’ Sly wrote, pausing momentarily as the vehicle rose and fell like a buoy on choppy seas. ‘Sharks and electric eels use electroreception to sense prey. Perhaps we can, too.’

  A pause, but Sly sensed the captain’s amusement in the ether.

  ‘How do you know this stuff? That’s magic.’

  ‘Gus is my ghost-writer. I repeat what he says.’

  ‘If you understand half of what Gus writes you’re a magician.’

  Sly laughed but remembered Ramirez’s small joke for a very long time.