Iceberg (Banks novel)
Following their betrayal by Tobias Vaughn and the failure of their planned invasion of Earth, a group of Cybermen crashes in Antarctica while fleeing the destruction of their mothership.Scientist Pamela Cutler learns that her unresolved issues with her domineering father will never be resolved; he has been killed in action at the South Pole, and the events leading up to his death have been classified.Twenty years later, investigative journalist Ruby Duvall, Phillip's daughter, sets off on an Antarctic tour on the SS Elysium, a pleasure cruise sponsored by the Australian billionaire Sir Stanley Straker (“The Wizard of Oz”).Ruby soon makes new friends on the cruise; a Canadian woman named Barbara teaches her the martial art Pah T’wa, and the ship's entertainers, Diana and Leslie, tell her about the Wizard of Oz cabaret they’ll be staging.However, Ruby finds it difficult to get close to moody artist Michael Brack, who has been hired to sculpt icebergs into caricatures of the ship's passengers using a decommissioned Army laser.He seems to go out of his way to avoid her, but when she catches a glimpse of his cocktail napkin she finds that he's been obsessively drawing her face along with blueprints for a large cybernetic machine... Pamela Cutler joined the Army after her father's death, and has risen to the rank of General.She has now been assigned to Snowcap Tracking Station, where scientists are working on a project named FLIPback, the human race's defense against the reversal of the Earth's magnetic polarity.Under Cutler's strict discipline, the project gets back on schedule - just on time, for the crew finds that true south is shifting out of position and realises that the reversal could occur within the year.He tells her what he's never told anyone before; about finding the remains of men in crumbling metal armour, and a spaceship which appeared to be falling apart and which had vanished by the time he got back to the landing site.Weighted down with guilt and seeking to free himself from his past, the Doctor has departed from the TARDIS in a subset of the ship which takes the form of Lao Tzu's Jade Pagoda.The celebrations at Snowcap are curtailed when Nike and Bono's exploration vehicle breaks down in the Torus Antarctica, a mysterious zone where entire survey teams have been known to vanish without trace.The Doctor is brought before the Cyber Controller, originally an immobile co-ordinator unit which has now acquired mobility by using the huge body of the Snowcap officer Bono.