Leader Clent was having what was probably the worst week of his entire life. It had all started when Arden had to go and excavate something from the ice that had turned out to be an alien who'd been stranded alongside his spaceship several thousand years ago. Either that, or a few decades ago when the new glaciers had made their first appearances after man had fucked the environment sideways, apparently not having been satisfied with merely screwing the world over with Global Warming. It was hard to tell, considering the fact that the "glacier" that was trying to eat Great Britain and Northern Europe was being pushed down from the North Pole, and some of the ice could've drifted in from there.

The only explanation he could find for why the creatures that claimed to be from Mars were up and walking around rather than being interesting museum pieces for the likes of Arden and Penley to study and argue over was that they had managed to use their highly advanced armor which apparently looked like lizard skin for aesthetic purposes to put themselves in some form of suspended animation before they froze to death, and removal from the ice had started some sort of reanimation cycle.

Now, the leader of the Ice Warriors was standing there demanding Mercury isotopes from their reactor which ran on Plutonium, and telling him that he was going to fire on the base again if they didn't get him some Mercury posthaste.

Did he mention that the base got fired on? He probably forgot to mention it in the whole alien warriors running around kidnapping and killing people, glaciers advancing to the point where the base was in imminent danger of being swallowed by the ice, and some jackass called the Doctor running around berating him because he preferred to trust the computer which was less prone to human error than that little thing in his skull which couldn't multiply 17 by 25 without writing it out, much less figure out how the hell to deal with the ice that was creeping across the world eating everything in its path. He got enough of that "Don't trust the computer" crap from Penley before the bastard decided to pull a Flower Child and go move in with the Scavengers so he could be "Free", thank you very much.

"But, we don't have any...Wait a second..." Leader Clent who'd had to do more thinking in the last two days than he had to do in his entire life said as the leader of the Martian Ice Warriors made another demand that they pop open the reactor and hand them some Mercury.

"Yesssssssss?" the leader of the Ice Warriors Varga said.

"We have that thingymabob that can make just about any chemical, right?" Leader Clent asked his computer expert.

"Yes?" the young woman replied.

"That can make Mercury, right?" he asked before wincing when he realized how stupid a question that was.

"Well yes, if you work around the safety programs which inhibit the manufacture of dangerous and/or illicit substances, it will." she replied. "Which reminds me, someone needs to tell Miller that the food dispenser isn't a still, tell Iverson that it isn't a weed factory, remind Williams that he's not allowed to use amphetamines while he's on duty, schedule an appointment to have Grissom placed in rehab to deal with his Heroin addiction, and go and disarm that pipe bomb Penley made before he left."

Deciding to leave those problems for later and deal with the more pressing matter at hand, Leader Clent gestured to the leader of the Ice Warriors before turning towards the door. "Follow me" he said with a sigh before leading them to the room that served as medical wing, food dispensary, and auxiliary control.

After punching some buttons and screwing around with a dial that the designers who'd had a great deal of fun decorating the base in "Sci-fi retro" must've put there as a joke of some sort, he handed the leader of the Ice Warriors a vial full of a silvery fluid.

"Here's your fucking Mercury," he said. "Now get the hell out of here!"

"sssssssssThank yousssssssss." the leader of the Ice Warriors said as he and his men turned and left the base, presumably to get their ship back online so they could blast off from this miserable rock.

Two minutes later, the Doctor fired on the base.

Omake:

"Alright, I'll admit it, the reason I've been so inconsistent in my orders regarding the Victoria creature that we've been using as bait is because I want to keep it as a pet. It's kinda adorable in a weird ugly alien sort of way."