Sun Jan 15 2012

Sun Jan 15 2072 It came without physical warning. Later, people would say they 'felt' a disturbance in earth's aura, but most magical scholars will dismiss them as crackpots. No warning for McMurdo station, but sheltered on Ross Island, it will survive with damage. But Helier Station, owned by the Atlantian Foundation and probing the Bently Subglacial trench.. there is no chance. No escape. Lava is very hot - and the massive earthquake that rumbled up from below seems to have loosed a crevasse that allowed magma seepage to the surface. This is not so much a problem, when your surface is not a mile thick glacier. Magma and ice, becomes water becomes steam. Steam explodes. Helier station is gone… two thousand men and countless pre-awakening artifacts that were reportedly found in the depths of the ice. Launched from McMurdo, a UCAS heavy lift transport outfitted with a sensor package flies over what remains of Helier Station. As telemetry is relayed back to McMurdo and then to the UCAS, a clearer picture emerges. The actual blast over the trench is relatively contained in its scope - a half kilometer of ice blown outward and up, concentric rings of debris showing as heavier and lighter ejecta landed. There is nothing here that should have reduced Halier station to the smoldering ruin that shows as the aircraft banks wide over the site. In the bay, the Atlantis Maru lies on its side, broken in two. The 500 foot supply ship leaks fuel into the bay, a burning slick spreading for several hundred feet across the water and ice. The campus of weatherproofed buildings are all torn open, burning to their foundations. Smoke, steam and haze make details hard to distinguish, but analysis makes it clear - whatever happened here, was not a natural disaster.