This is coming together nicely.
April 5
We’ve worked to re-familiarize ourselves with our coldsuits. More hybrid tech; supposedly we can almost understand most of the alien-derived systems! Essentially, it’s a spacesuit that can pull oxygen from the outside atmosphere while still keeping its wearer in a controlled environment. If the air does go away, the suits have a recycling system that can keep someone alive for two weeks without refreshing. It’s flexible and light, too, to the point where you can scratch an itch through it. Once we’re at the Shackleton Site, we’ll be able to move around fairly freely, and very safely.
The trick is actually getting there. We can’t exactly take a suborbital to the site. The NSF has been working on sending down a jump-copter, and supposedly it’ll be here in another week. Then we should expect another week to put the copter together, and make sure it’s not going to conk out, mid-trip. By then we can actually go. Or at least some of us: the copter’s rated for five passengers, and their supplies.
In the meantime, we’ve sent another drone to deliver a sensor package. Claire told me there’s no sense using alien tech to keep an eye on the place when our own stuff can do the job. She then casually mentioned that it’s better to use disposable technology in situations where the goo-bags might show up, which eventually resulted in me going down the rabbit hole that is Antarctica conspiracy theory. I’ll say this for that nut Dyer: he could spin one hell of a fairy tale.
Annotation
I suppose that I should now have an open mind about this, but… no. William Dyer was either a fraud, or a madman. Aside from everything else, we’ve never found a sign of those damned mountains of his. Note that I say that, having just overseen a surface survey of the entire continent, so I know what I’m talking about.
I wonder if that data will ever see the light of day, at least.