Free The Orion Protocol by Gary Tigerman

than a firsthand look at the world of 10,000 B.C.E. Not to mention a first-rate mystery: How does a forest get to the South Pole? Within days, the National Science Foundation was galvanized into action.
    All science done in Antarctica must be done according to rules enunciated in a United Nations agreement protecting the entire continent from exploitation and pollution: the Antarctic belongs to all mankind and is held in sacred trust. Thus, all junk, all refuse, including every ounce of human waste generated by the three thousand people in the science town of McMurdo, was flown out each spring in over forty-five lift sorties and recycled in California.
    On the last airlift before all flights were shut down for the winter, foundation scientists quietly brought in a nuclear-powered ice drill designed to tunnel down through the glacier to the prehistoric forest waiting beneath the ice. After weeks of building out the dig site in the perpetual dark and testing the drill in various extremes of temperature and conditions, the excited waiting was over and they had begun tunneling carefully down to the trees.
    But as it happened, there was something more contagious than the NSF excitement over their find. Within hours of retrieving the first core samples from Dunsinane, signs of severe viral infection began to appear at McMurdo.
    The work was halted, the tunnel sealed over, and the dig site decontaminated, but it was too late: everyone exposed to the Dunsinane samples was quarantined, many developing high fevers and vomiting. The little science colony at the pole now realized that the ice samples held hibernating viruses that had been “switched on” by the relative warmth of the Quonset huts and were then released: twelve-thousand-year-old bacteria to which human beings were no longer immune.
    By the time Bertrand arrived, thirty-five scientists and engineers were being extracted, including the McMurdo medical staff members who had treated the first sick ones and then fallen ill themselves. Augie Blake’s astronaut trainees, wintering over, had not come into direct contact with the virus but were evacuated as a precaution. And all evacked personnel were sequestered for treatment in a military hospital in New Zealand.

    There had been no fatalities, but the worst was not necessarily over. After securing and cleansing the Dunsinane site, bundled-up Army engineers and National Science Foundation glaciologists now gathered to bring Captain Bertrand and his Spec Ops crew up to speed.
    Bertrand peered at a dim, greenish video screen set up on a workbench in the main Quonset: the only remaining connection to the prehistoric forest down below was via the camera on their broken nuclear-powered drill.
    “How far down is that?”
    “About two thousand feet.” The lead scientist pointed to a 3-D map.
    The tiny reactor with its tank tracks and titanium bit had tunneled into the glacier efficiently enough. But weather at the South Pole is changeable in the extreme, with temp swings of as much as one hundred degrees in a six-hour period.
    “How cold was it when you had to shut her down?”
    “Yeah, that was the bitch. About minus eighty-five degrees, Fahrenheit,” an engineer said. Approaching ninety below, running anything mechanical that required lubrication was to court failure. “The hydraulic fluid froze.”
    “That’d do it.” Bertrand scratched at his jaw with a thermal glove. The rasping sound of his day-old beard was audible across the room. There was not exactly a vast array of options: restarting the drill and taking it out under its own power was out of the question. At least they were still getting video.
    “How hot is it?”
    “Celsius or rads?”
    An Army engineer showed him the two readings.
    “Jesus. We got us a little Chernobyl, gentlemen.” Bertrand gestured toward his crew. Each man took a turn checking out the monitor, but they were all getting the picture: ground truth at ninety below was a sobering