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During Phil's first flight to Cape Town, Techno hadn't noticed the hours ticking by. There were so many different projects happening all at once, each with the same level of urgency, that he hadn't had time to focus on more than the Stronghold and it's residents. Within fifteen minutes of Phil disappearing into the aurora, one of the hunting teams had made a distress call; they had been stranded on a ridge by a glacial outburst flood that had destroyed their sleds and the rest of their supplies. The team and their sled dogs were unharmed, but they had no way back.
Technoblade had spent less than a minute remembering the Strobe Flash's lone immediate survivor before volunteering to lead the recovery team.
They spent a full cycle out in the desolate icy wastes that made up the Antarctic Empire. It had taken hours to get out to the opposite ridge, and then they had needed to find a new way to cross the still-slick expanse of the glacier in order to establish a path for the hunting party to reach them. It had been a slow, painstaking process that took several more hours of careful steps and probes for crevasses. Only once they had all crossed could they make the hours-long return journey.
After they had all made it back to the Stronghold with minor cases of frostbite and a twisted ankle as their only casualties, Techno had learned of another team going out to deal with an attempted incursion by Florida. Apparently they'd gotten tired of waiting for the long dark winter to finish them off and had decided to take matters into their own hands. Techno stayed in the Stronghold just long enough to thaw his hands out and hook his sled up to a fresh team of sled dogs before heading right back out to deal with the infiltrators.
From that moment on had kept running, from one task to the next until he fell into his bedroll and slept for a few hours (or had another incident of falling asleep propped up against a wall in a quiet corner of the Stronghold), only to wake and repeat the process the next cycle. In the spare three seconds he had to himself during that time, he wondered if all of the crises had waited until Phil was gone to pop up.
When he made his way to last shift of the third cycle without Phil, he was told by a giggling Serai and her multitude of kitchen helpers that there had been a mixup and that he was actually scheduled for a shift in the radio tower instead of on dinner cleanup with them. Bemused and slightly concerned, he'd made his way up to the tower just in time to hear Phil check in for the final stretch of his journey. Technoblade had grinned and welcomed him back to civilization, gladly settling in for an hour or two of conversation before he could sleep.
No, the first flight outside of the Empire Techno hadn't worried. The second flight, however…
Technoblade is just as busy during Phil's second flight to Cape Town as he was during the first. Physically he's up to his elbows in soil, or inspecting the newest mine shaft their engineers had painstakingly designed to be less prone to collapse from redstone torches melting the ice supporting the roof, or conferring with their sole geologist about the possibility piping in geothermal heat from a suspected volcano in the region. (Nesi had gone out to the site of the outburst flood and done a careful survey of the area. She was fairly certain it had been caused by volcanic activity, but had been the first to point out that her specialty was ice and not volcanoes.) And his little free time is spent with the reserve rescue teams, or filling the gaps in patrol routes for anyone who was grounded by their few healers due to the warning fever of a phenotype change.
(It worries him, sometimes, that Phil hasn't gone through a change yet. Techno's had been one of the first in the Empire, if not the server, and Pete's fox features had taken a respectable six months. Phil's night vision is the only sign so far of any adaptation. He takes Techno's "late bloomer" jokes in stride, but it's still slightly concerning).
Mentally, however, he's up in the skies with Phil. The route had been carefully planned and timed during the first attempt, six hours to Port, two hours to refuel and repair if necessary, twenty long hours to Cape Town, a day to load and unload cargo while Phil rested, and then twenty hours back to Port, another two hours maximum to refuel and rest, and then the last six hours back to the Stronghold. Phil had been able to shave a couple of hours off that time with favorable winds, but it was still a grueling journey. And at any point during those fifty-six hours everything could go wrong and lead to delays or death. That first trip had been an act of near-madness, a desperate Hail Mary attempt by a group of people who had done the risk-reward analysis without even knowing all the risks (although they had included most of them, pessimists and realists and planners that they were.) Now, on the second run, the risks felt more immediate. The plane could fall to pieces, Phil's body could give in to the need for rest, he could hit a spot of bad weather and get lost or crash in a storm. The numerous ships patrolling the Antarctic waters could spot the plane and bring the hammer down even harder on them all. Someone had spotted Phil on his previous flight and had prepared countermeasures for this one. Cape Town could sell them out.
The last worries Techno the most; nature and the observational capabilities of their enemies are outside of his direct control, but he had been the one to suggest Cape Town for their first run and had given Pete the necessary information to facilitate everything. If Phil walked into a trap after twenty hours without sleep, Technoblade would be to blame.
And what's worse, they might never know. He has no doubt that if Phil was captured the other factions would make his end public, a demonstration of what Techno himself would face if he were to survive the winter or fall into their clutches. But if Phil crashes or runs out of fuel or gets lost in a storm, they might never know what happened to him. Their radios aren't strong enough for constant radio contact; there are large swathes of the journey that leave the radio operators holding their breath for the next check-in.
It's the not knowing that worries him the most. Even as he works to corral Floof's puppies after one of the children left the door to their room open, it gnaws at him. It chips away at his psyche like the ice grinding away the stone beneath their feet and all around them. The only reprieve is when Mathius, the ringleader of the child-messengers for the radio room, skids into the nearest doorway and tells him that Phil made his check-ins as-scheduled.
(The fact that Mathius and his friends are the ones to bring the message is enough to prove all is well on it's own. If anything serious had happened, it would be an adult sent to bring him the news, or one of the radio operators themselves if it was bad enough. The runners for the official embargo declarations had been all of the off-duty radio operators.)
This time, when they get a confirmation from Port that Phil is on his final leg of the journey (masquerading as a burst of long-range static) Techno goes straight to the radio tower. It's late, late enough that he should be eating his carefully-rationed meal and then going to bed, but he needs to know.
Finally, finally, Phil's voice comes over the radio.
"Hey, mate," and suddenly the loss of anxiety leaves Techno dizzy. He breathes a near-silent sigh of relief and offers a prayer of thanks to whatever gods might still be willing to listen to it, and settles in to regale Phil with tales of puppy antics and Stronghold gossip.