Lebedev came in grumpy, as he always did, condensation hanging from his beard in unfriendly icicles. Alexei admitted to himself that he dreaded the bitter cold of a kerebatic wind over an ice shelf less than he did the coldness of his superior’s stare.

“What is it now?” Lebedev snapped. “If it’s more problems with the survey equipment, I’ll wager it’s problems with the survey team that are truly to blame.”

“It’s not that, Commander,” said Alexei. “The ground penetrating radar is performing as designed and within normal tolerances. But…”

“But, but, but!” Lebedev mocked. “By Lenin’s beard, spit it out, or I’ll have you chipping pissicles out of the latrine for wasting my time.”

“We found another subglacial lake,” Alexei said. “A smaller one, nothing like Vostok.”

“Oh, is that all?” snapped Lebedev. “A real Hero of the Soviet Union, here. Look, Brasov, I do not need to be personally informed about every little pebble you find. It goes in the report, which I will read, at my leisure, with some hot tea.”

“There is a void in the lake, something displacing the water.”

“And?”

“It’s at the lake bottom. Radar telemetry confirms, across three devices and three operators, that the void is less dense than the subsurface water.”

Lebedev fell silent.

“It’s like an upside-down lake, contrary to the pull of gravity. A gravitational anomaly that my team is, at present, unable to explain.”

“Prepare the tractor and a drilling team,” Lebedev said quietly. “We leave at once. Not a word of this to anyone who does not already know of it.”

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