The katabatic gale screamed off the Antarctic Polar Plateau with the steady, bone-shaking force of a heavy-duty turbine. He drove granular rime across the aligned faceplate of Arthur Vance’s Mk. IV Arctic Triage Exosuit. At three thousand two hundred meters above sea level, the surrounding liquid silver hovered at minus sixty-eight degrees. The howling crosswinds dropped the effective heat drain past minus ninety, cold enough to turn exposed mammalian tissue into brittle baked-clay within ninety seconds.
Arthur adjusted his stance, planting the magnetic cleats of his composite boots firmly into the wind-packed crust. Behind him, the tracked transport crawler that had carried them across the Ross Ice Shelf sat dead in the snow, its diesel-aether turbine already seized solid by the sub-zero chill. From this point forward, clockwork burning was useless. Survival depended strictly on organic body-energy endurance and the five divine lineages anchored to his nervous system.
Beneath the padded rubber seals of Arthur’s storm hood, a steady, nearby warmth radiated against his left collar bone.
Pip was nestled securely within the custom collar pouch of the heated exosuit, his golden-amber crest feathers flattened against Arthur’s collarbone. The little raptor—now a Disaster-grade solar herald carrying the dormant lineage of the Nine-Sun Golden Crow—served as an internal living boiler. It maintained a controlled thirty-eight degrees of dry heat directly against Arthur’s main neck blood vessel. Every few seconds, Pip would let out a faint, shaking whistle through his nostrils, venting tiny plumes of scalding steam through the suit’s brass exhaust…
