When she arrived at the same spot the next day at 06:15, Gellan, Colin, and Soren were already loitering in loose formation, surrounded by large backpacks and an air of impatience. Dressed for the surface in thick parka coats and other heat-preserving accouterments, they were all sweating and red-faced on the heated deck. Colin and Soren made an attempt to hide their annoyance, in both cases likely on account of her seniority, and in the Colin's case also because the frustration of the delay was overridden by his enthusiasm to make it onto the ice. Gellan let out a long sigh, but did not say anything. She greeted them all cheerily, and they proceeded to take the forward exterior lift down to the surface.

She had informed Colin and Soren of the plan to go over land to the ice cliff down in the empty double sized cabin they had commandeered as their office. Colin, as expected, was rapturous at the chance. He had apparently found it particularly difficult to have been delayed within eyesight of their target, and had taken to bothering Jenny about progress as often as Gellan had bothered the captain, albeit with far less intensity. He asked a series of quickfire questions about what they would need and what they would do, and quickly made off to prepare.

Soren was less enthusiastic, though he did not show it until Colin had left. The two had been in a loose, comfortable kind of romantic relationship for nearly 6 months. They were brought together by their shared situation, Jenny being an associate professor and Soren being a postdoctoral researcher sharing an office at the same institute, and bonded over a joint experience of the frustrations of academic life. By the same cause, there was not enough difference between them to to produce the right balance of the familiar and alien that gave rise to true passion.

Guiltily, she occasionally found herself vaguely wishing that he were a botanist, philosopher, or computer scientist. Polar research, of which they were both practitioners, was a highly interdisciplinary area of application, but their backgrounds were both in the same kind of generalistic combination of geography, materials, and organism and population-level biology that formed its core. It was not too unusual for the earthbound to date those with very similar backgrounds; they tended to come across a relatively small pool of potential partners on account of the small number of permanent Earth inhabitants - somewhere around 1 million - distributed across an Earth that remained the same size since it was home to more than 15 billion.

Soren had expressed that he wasn't sure how safe the trip was, especially since they were a small group and this was Colin's first time on the ice. Due to the complexity and rarity of polar academic expeditions, Soren had only been on one previous field trip, and even the relatively senior Jenny had only been on three. He noted that the risk assessment for the trip had presented mitigation for the size and inexperience of the group by promising that the ship would be able to take them within a hundred metres of the cliff, with the rest of the approach being made by a small boat, and only around 100 metres over land.

Jenny had responded that the risk assessment was just a formality, that no one ever read them, and that no one would read their report upon returning to know that they had deviated from the plan. She had, in fact, simply copied the protocol from her previous trip and hastily changed out a few specifics. That protocol was in turn copied from her previous trip, all back to her first, which was copied from one she had obtained from her PhD supervisor. He had seemed a little annoyed, saying something about how it wasn't just a box ticking exercise, it was designed to keep them safe, that pre-registration was an important tool for the avoidance of scientific bias, and that the shelf was unusual, potentially presented hazards they weren't prepared for. Jenny had soothed him by agreeing with him, promising they would be careful, and that they would look after each other, and that they would also have Gellan for extra support. This movement of the terms of the discussion from a technical disagreement to an emotional one had softened his aspect, and he had eventually relented.

She replayed the interaction as the forward lift approached the surface, experiencing the gradient as they approached the true environmental temperature. She tried to push away the frustrating anxiety that Soren had seeded in her, the kind of internal conflict that arises when someone close to you expresses concern over something, in spite of your disagreement with it. Jenny had never been with a man before, and found the dynamic interesting - there was a kind of protectiveness and mismatch in focus that she had not experienced before. Though with an N of one, she could not rationally assign it to gender, there was an instinctual recognition of the difference.

Once they made it onto the ice, the cold really took hold. It would take a while to acclimatise. Though the air temperature was only around -12C today, not an unusual temperature for Winter in England since the meridional flow had largely shut down in the latter half of the 21st century, the mild wind brought an additional chill. Moreover, the ground seemed to radiate a chill of its own, the typical microclimate formed by the slow release of the heat the ground absorbed from the sun being absent here, where reflective ice predominated. After a few moments to brace, they started moving towards the ice cliff, few words shared between them, in acknowledgement of the long hike ahead of them, and the need to get moving in the face of the progressing day.

As they moved, she noticed that the cliff itself had changed perspective, as if an invisible dome were centred on them, and the shelf were at its edge, drawn distorted so the tallest of its jagged peaks finished at the apex over their heads. It formed a looming, spectral finial, giving the impression that they were already under, and somehow inside, the great structure. She also noticed that the landscape no longer seemed so bland; their new position close to the horizon granted the rocks that extruded from the ice a definite sense of mass, many of them being several times wider and taller than any of their party.