Twenty minutes later, they were all in flight, their exosuits cutting through the air in stealth mode as they headed south over the Atlantic Ocean toward Antarctica.
The flight was exhilarating in a way that never got old. The suits made sustained supersonic travel feel effortless, and the HUD systems provided navigation data that made the journey feel less like a desperate flight across hostile terrain and more like a guided tour at ridiculous speeds.
Still, twenty minutes of sustained flight over open ocean, then frozen wasteland, was long enough for the initial excitement to settle into something more focused. By the time Antarctica's ice fields came into view, everyone in the group was thinking less about the fun of flying and more about what was waiting for them at the destination.
