text: The corpse was right where I left it, half-buried in the snow six miles north-east of base camp. Even through my tinted visor, the glare of the sun on Antarctic snow practically blocked out the terrain, and I had to squint to see three meters in front of me. Unfortunately, that didn’t obscure the frozen arcs of vermilion blood on the ground, or the fact that the body lacked a head. “What the fuck is this, Barton?” Nilsen asked me. I couldn’t form words. I’d never seen a dead person in real life; maybe a few body bags, the odd morgue, but nothing nearly as visceral or as raw as this. I swallowed bile. The acrid tang of last night’s rations burned my throat and made my eyes stream. “I don’t know, sir. Sorry--Nilsen. I found it--them--this morning on a hike.” “Well, it is clearly a Russian,” he said, gesturing to a blurred mass of black text on the corpse’s chest. “Demidov is not an American surname.” I blinked away tears and the body’s nameplate, black text on a bright orange background, was thrown into focus. Padded under thick, ice-spattered layers, the body was essentially androgynous. Without the face peeking out from under the parka’s hood, there was no means of identifying the body any further. Whatever had torn the hapless Russian’s head off had done a remarkably clean job; the wound was neat and even, with barely a tear on the skin below the cut-off point. The only sign of violence was a loose tear in the material around the parka’s collar. The fluorescent orange fabric had frayed and come apart from the outer lining, as if somebody had tried to rip the collar off. Bloodstained, it lay spread on the snow, a cruel facsimile of the national flags that ringed our own research outpost. “Probably from Vostok,” Nilsen continued. “They are the closest base to us. Still, travelling fifty miles in this cold? They must have frozen or starved to death days ago. It’s a miracle they made it so far.” “They must’ve been fucking desperate,” I muttered. “There’s no way anyone would’ve left a snowmobile behind unless--” “Unless there was no other option.” He glanced at me, eyes invisible behind his goggles. Neither of us dared mention the blood or the absence of Demidov’s head above the nape of their neck: the first human being we’d encountered aside from ourselves in seven months, and they turn up dead and mutilated in a snowdrift. There are bad omens, and then there’s just a great big middle finger from the universe. I stared out at the endless expanse of white, unwilling to glance at the corpse. “Should we take the, um, body back? Y’know, to study or something?” “Unless it’s a magic troll in disguise that will somehow deliver another year’s worth of food,” Nilsen replied bitterly, “then there’s no point, is there?” “Should we bury them? I think--” “Let the snow take care of it. If that corpse freezes in the ice cap, it’ll outlast the rest of us.” “Nilsen--” “When I give an order, I expect you to call me sir,” he interrupted brusquely, his Danish accent sharpening the vowels. I knew that arguing would be hopeless. Nilsen didn’t exercise his authority as base commander often, but when he did, there was no such thing as a rebuttal. He trudged back to the snowmobile, not waiting for a reply. Predictable. Nilsen was totally unreasonable in one of his taciturn moods, not that I could really blame him. Everyone who remained had their coping mechanisms. Fettes drank her way through what little was left of the alcohol stores. Lindwall wrote three emails a day to her wife: they ended up in the unsent tray every time, but she kept going, letter after letter. Waites poked and prodded at the radio, hoping that against all logic and reason, a voice would finally reply to his increasingly frantic hails. I went for my hikes, trekking further and further each time. Nobody minded. In fact, I think they’d all be secretly glad if I ended up getting lost and ending up like poor Demidov. Anything to stretch out their supplies and stave off the inevitable. In any other age, any other situation, the discovery of a headless corpse at the South Pole would’ve been a legend. Now it was simply a tiring annoyance, another thing to keep us awake during the endless daylight of the Antarctic summer.