Free Raising Atlantis by Thomas Greanias

sorry way to die, he thought, staring at the flare in his gloved fist. You survive an airplane crash only to turn into a Popsicle. God, how he hated the cold. It was all he ever knew as a child, and to die in the snow was the last way he wanted to go. It would signify he had not traveled as far from home as he once dreamed. And he would never reconcile with his father.
    How’s that for irony? he thought as he scanned the temperature reading on his multisensor watch. The digital thermometer displayed ¯25° F. Then he took a closer look and realized he had missed a digit. ¯125° F.
    Conrad slumped to the floor with the rest of the crew, his eyelids starting to get heavy. He fought to stay awake, but it was a losing battle, and he had begun to drift off into unconsciousness when suddenly the plane started to shake and he thought he heard a dog barking.
    He opened his eyes, dragged himself over to his backpack on the floor, and managed to sling it over his shoulder. He then fumbled for his flare, his fingers working slowly, slid down through a hole in the fuselage, and fell onto the ice.
    The thud sharpened his senses.
    Conrad staggered to his feet and looked across the barren ice. But there was nothing to see. If anything, the snow was coming down even harder. Then, out of the mist, a huge tractorlike vehicle appeared.
    It looked like one of those big Swedish Hagglunds. Its two fiberglass cabs were linked together and ran on rubber treads that left wide waffle tracks in the snow.
    Conrad quickly broke his flare and started waving his hands. His arms felt heavy and he couldn’t feel the flare in his fist.
    The Hagglunds plowed to a stop in front of him. The forward cabin door opened. A white Alaskan husky jumped out and ran past Conrad to the wreckage. Conrad heard clanking and saw the white boots of a large figure emerge from the Hagglunds and descend the rungs of the small ladder to the ice pack.
    Conrad could tell from the towering frame and crisp, spare movements that it was his father. Stiff in a white freezer suit with charcoal under his goggles to block the snow glare, Yeats marched toward him, his powerful strides crunching deeply into the snow.
    “You broke my radio blackout orders, son.” Yeats stood there like a statue, snow flying all around him. “You blew our twenty.”
    “It’s good to see you, too, Dad.”
    Yeats took the flare from Conrad’s hand, dropped it into the snow, and ground it under his boot. “You’ve attracted enough attention.”
    A geyser of anger suddenly erupted inside Conrad. Anger at Yeats and at himself for letting his father reach out across time and pull him back into this personal frozen hell.
    “Lundstrom’s dead along with half your men,” Conrad gestured with his frostbitten hand toward the plane.
    Yeats spoke into his radio. “S and R teams,” Yeats barked. “See what you can salvage from the cargo hold before the storm buries us alive.”
    Conrad glanced back at the wreckage and men, which would soon be forgotten under the merciless snow. Then the husky trotted out with a wristwatch in his mouth. Its face was smeared with frozen blood. Conrad felt the husky brush past his leg and looked on as it ran for the Hagglunds.
    “Nimrod!” Yeats called out after the dog. But the husky was already scratching at the door of the forward cab.
    “Nimrod’s the only one here with half a brain.” Conrad marched toward the Hagglunds. But when he reached the forward cab and grasped the door handle, Yeats blocked it with a stiff arm.
    “Where do you think you’re going?” Yeats demanded.
    Conrad cracked open the icy cab door, letting Nimrod jump into the warm cab first. “Don’t piss in your pants, Dad. In this cold, something might fall off.”
    Conrad glanced at his bandaged hand as he followed Yeats down an insulated corridor inside the mysterious Ice Base Orion. A medic in the infirmary had dressed the hand as best he could. But now that it was thawing, it hurt like the