The Base Commander – Part 1: Polar Night

The hut stood alone in the polar dark, a squat red cabin on stilts with a generator, a radio and a stove, and snow banked to the windows. The booking agent had warned them there was no signal for fifty miles. Ingeborg had smiled and said that was the idea.

She was forty-eight, a polar logistics director with twenty years of command. He was forty, a glaciologist, shy and brilliant, who had once confessed, in a tent, that he spent his working life being the one who knows things and secretly wished to be the one who is told.

At the radio desk she placed a printed sheet. Station Regulations. His limits and hers: no marks, nothing painful, no real humiliation, no leaving the hut. The word was Whiteout.

"Say it."

"Whiteout."

"If you say it, the Commander stands down. We make cocoa."

"Yes, Commander."

"Not yet." She buckled a black parka with a rank patch and pulled on grey gloves. Her voice dropped, flat and unhurried. "Technician. Your readings were late three times this week."

"I am sorry, Commander."

"You will be." She pointed at the bare floor between the stove and the radio. "Attention."

He stood, hands at his sides. She walked a slow circle round him, a clipboard under her arm, and said nothing. The generator hummed. The stove ticked. The wind moaned outside. After a long time she stopped in front of him and tilted his chin with a gloved finger.

"Do you understand why discipline matters in a station?"

"Yes, Commander."

"Tell me."

He told her, haltingly, in words she had written for him on the sheet. She nodded once.

"Are you content, Technician?"

"Content, Commander."

"Good. The night is six months long. We shall begin."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Stand Down.