The Iceman's Lament

As dawn creased the celestial plain he dragged a razor across his face, pulled on clean overalls and made his way down to the docks.

F-351, his hauler, was ready, seventeen empty trailers and a stumpy tractor unit, pumped full of fresh hydrogen for the nine-hour run north to the Pole. He checked in with the dock captain.

“Solar storm warning,” said the captain. “Might get delayed up there.”

““Ice waits for no man,” Tom intoned.

“Yeah….” The captain eyed him skeptically. “Jesus man, you look like nine kinds of shit…”

“Hah,” Tom grunted. “That’s about how I feel too…”

“I heard about your little fracas…”

Tom grunted again.

“They were down here, those people, asking about you.”

“Asking about me?” He took the tablet the Captain was holding out, signed out the hauler, handed it back. The pills he’d popped before going in to see Flanagan were wearing off and now the hangover was pounding at his skull like skinheads in an alley. He needed to be inside his hauler, in his little safe world, away from this place. “What, the media people?”

“The big star herself,” the captain said. “Lucy Lin, on our humble little….”

“What the hell was she asking questions about me for?” Tom interrupted. “What did you tell her?”

The Captain snorted, scrolled through the tablet, the electronic equivalent of shuffling paperwork. “Better get on the road, there Lieutenant….like I said, storm coming.”

Tom felt a brief surge of rage. Dock Captain, he thought sourly. Back on Earth he’d be a bank manager. Pissant member of the supervisory classes.

“What did you tell her?” Tom drummed his fingers on the steel hull of the hauler.

The Captain looked up, down, around, making a final inspection, ignoring the question. Finally he nodded, tucked the tablet under his arm like a baton and turned to leave. Then he noticed the hand-cart Tom had pulled along with him and the neatly-folded UNSA-issued pressure suit upon it. It was a heavy item: cumbersome to carry, although once it was actually on his body and pumped with O2 it would lighten considerably.

“What’s that for then?” UNSA-issue suits were expensive. Workers on Eleanor station were issued much lighter and cheaper suits that had nothing like the range and durability of those used in actual Space. “Why you dragging that thing along?”

Tom thought fast. He hadn’t expected anyone to notice.

“Yeah, it’s mine, right? Needs repair. Guy at the Pole knows how to work on it….”

“Thinking about selling it are we?”

“Why would…? No, it’s mine, I’ll be needing it again. When I leave here…” He leaned in closer. “What did you tell Lucy Lin about me, Captain?”

“Expensive piece of kit, that,” the Captain said, still looking at the suit. “Right then…” He turned to go.

Tom watched the Captain strut off down the docks.

What would he have told them, anyway? A dock Captain was nobody in this place. He pressed the control panel on the hull and the hatch hissed open with a rush of escaping air.

The hell out of here…

The truth was, he loved his Ice Hauler. The much-vaunted hardship of the road, the loneliness and the isolation, for him they were the most splendid of things. As he climbed up into the rig and went through the complex process of starting the engines he felt something lighten within him.

Eleanor Station was basically a dome-covered impact crater and and egress was through a tunnel drilled horizontally through the side. The first of a system of airlocks irised open as he approached the entrance, threading the rig into its 3000 meter length, building up speed until he was hurtling full headlong at the outer airlock, always that moment of hesitation as it loomed up on the forward screen, opening at the last possible second, and then out like a bullet train, onto the surface of Phoedrus.

The haul road was an unending scar of rutted regolith, scorched by radiation and scoured by the howling solar winds, dotted with boulders and shifting sands, pounded down hard by the running of the hauler fleet. Sometimes it was well-defined but then the winds would come and render it as soft and smooth as new-fallen snow. No time to do anything right, to plan for the long-term, to perhaps build something that would last a while: Eleanor needed ice. Never enough drivers, never enough rigs, unrelenting pressure on equipment, on people.

Continual vigilance was required. Rigs would get bogged down, boulders would knock them sideways, drivers would lose their bearings and plunge over rifts, into crevasses, or into each other. They worked on two-year contracts and made more money than they ever would in their lives again. If they survived to make it back down the Well.

Barring any accidents or delays from Eleanor to the Pole was a nine-hour run. Full tilt headlong across the plain, all that momentum, like a locomotive all boiler gauges and hydrogen steam, then braking heavily to creep through fresh fields of boulders, nudging the larger ones aside like some spectral snowplow. It was grueling for sure. Hours of monotony punctuated by seconds of terror. But he was alone, away from the fetid air of Eleanor, the crush of his fellow man. He sat in a plush pilot’s seat facing a crescent of screens, an array of joysticks at his fingers while behind him the train of empty trailers bounced in his wake. Across the plain, up into the mountains, down to the northern plain and on to the Pole.

It was the lifeblood of the operation: Ice for water, ice for hydrogen, ice for the cocktails of Eleanor Station. Without it, all would cease.

And although he had been banished to this place, although his career had taken a brutal and abrupt nosedive, he was oddly happy. He had his music, his solitude, clean and fresh air supplied by the hydrogen drive. Most of all, he thought as he whistled a tune and pushed F-351 up into the mountains, he had the Lights.

Two weeks previously, six or perhaps seven runs ago, he had acted upon an idea that been percolating in his mind for some time. He wanted to take a walk. Outside. On the surface.

The atmosphere of Phoedrus was forbidding: a swirling stew of toxins and dust, colder than the surface of Mars. A weak magnetosphere brought solar winds that regularly hit 150 mph and higher out on the open plains. He would have to plan it carefully, find a sheltered spot. He scouted out a spur in the mountains, an older haul route looping him back to the newer road only recently blasted by engineering crews to speed the traverse. He would need to be quick and get back underway before another rig came up behind him.

Going EVA was strictly forbidden, of course, but Tom had begun his career as a rigger on one of the Prophet Space Platforms and he was a certified EVA-master. Not for surface ops, though, he reminded himself. He knew, to a point, what he was doing but there were a lot of differences between working in zero-grav and wandering off across the surface of a planet.

He tried to think of a legitimate reason to exit the rig, were he to be questioned later. The fire alarms were going off, that was it. And his comms had gone down. And…er…he didn’t want to block the road so…

It was bullshit. But it didn’t matter. He was doing this. He was going EVA.

Came the day when temperatures were a balmy minus-50F and a steady 50 knot wind howled between the mountains. Hiking weather, he’d cried, slowing the hauler to a crawl, nudging aside the boulders blocking access and easing carefully down the wreck of the old road.

He’d clambered into his old UNSA pressure suit, the once-proud white Orlan now a mottled grey, patched in multiple places but still a more useful tool than the standard-issue hauler suit, exited out through the airlock, dropping onto the surface, bent slightly at the knees, one hand resting on the front tire, checking his heads-up display, running through the checklist yet again.

“Been a while,” he muttered, gathering his wits. It wasn’t like him to break rules, especially safety rules. Flanegan would have a shit hemorrhage if he learned about this.

Flanegan can suck on a waste tube Tom had thought, as he planted one foot in front of the other and began to walk cautiously out from the shelter of F-351, out across the actual surface of the planet.

That first time, that first foray, stumbling in the deeply drifting regolith, all he had done was walk the length of the rig. It was like wading through a swamp of molasses. He pulled his way along, inspecting the tires and the linkages of the seventeen trailers, sheltering from the wind behind a wheel as he calibrated the internal temperature of the suit, checking the oxygen flow, ensuring everything worked.

He’d prep’d the suit as best he could, back at Eleanor, but there was no way to really test it. A moment of panic as an alarm bleeped, then faded. The suit held, heater fans whirring dimly in the background, the rasp of his own breath loud in his ears.

It looked very different out here: brighter and harsher, the light unfiltered by the monitors in his cab. The suit had good radiation-shielding but he kept an eye on the HUD anyway, pushing away the thought of how it might fare in a solar storm.

Another alarm bleated. His heartrate was accelerating. Calm, he ordered himself: breathe…breathe…

And it wasn’t just the effort of walking in a heavy suit in the shifting sands. He was scared. Shit scared. He had no tethers, no lifelines, and no crewmates watching anxiously from within. He blinked at the HUD, making the oxygen mix richer, slumping down against a tire, forcing himself to relax, to breathe as he had been trained to.

Yeah this is stupid alright, he had to admit. One mistake and he’d be toast. By the time they found the hauler his body would be buried in the regolith.

And then he gave a little laugh. A little, reckless, slightly hysterical laugh. They’d find the standard-issue suit in the cab. They wouldn’t know about his UNSA suit. They’d think he’d gone EVA in his underpants.