At fourteen hundred hours local time, Grimm’s front paws shattered the final crust of surface firn.
With a bone-shaking eruption of sparkling white powder, the eight-meter Glacial World-Eater bounded out of the Boreas-IV digging shaft. He carried Arthur Vance into the blinding, golden bright glare of the Antarctic polar day.
The shift from the lightless underworld to the surface was breathtaking.
Above them stretched an endless, cloudless sky of pure, crystal-clear azure. The midnight sun hung low on the southern horizon, bathing the jagged peaks of Mount Menzies in a brilliant sea of molten gold and clean white snowfields. The air was crisp, clean, and biting at minus thirty-four degrees, carried by a gentle fourteen-half-mile-per-hour breeze that ruffled Grimm’s thick jet-black coat.
Arthur raised his hand, shading his eyes as his sight visor automatically adjusted its polarization to filter the dazzling glare of the ice sheets.
He pulled down his padded storm hood and unlatched his breathing mask faceplate. He drew his first breath of raw polar surface air in twenty-four days. The freezing oxygen stung his throat with the invigorating sharpness of crushed mint, fully free of the metal ozone and rotting sulfur that had choked the sub-ice-slow trench.
