The Iceman's Lament

Ice.

Dirty great blackened slabs of it, trapped for countless millennia under the Phoedran pole, now falling neatly into sections under the whine of his diamond-tipped exosuit blades.

It’s good, he thought, it’s good to get some bloody exercise. The exosuit did most of the work but still he was sweating heavily as he loaded the rig: four hundred tons or more of it stacked twenty meters high like some infernal hay wagon lurching down a country road. And he had to wear that shitty Dexter EVA suit, hulking O2 tanks hanging off the exosuit like baggage.

The comm was crackling as he entered the cabin and began to strip off his outer layers. “Goddam I stink”, his body pungent in the confined space. Maybe there’d be time for a shower before leaving, the hydrogen-drive of the rig producing copious amounts of fresh hot water.

“F-351, F351, please respond.”

“F-351,” Tom said tiredly. The rig was loaded. He was ready to go.

“Hold for passenger. Copy…”

For a moment he dared to think it might be Annie. But he’d looked for her that morning and seen that the rig she was bringing back to Eleanor was no longer in its berth.

An engineer needed a ride back to Eleanor. Tom knew him, an affable Finn by the name of Lars. Crap, thought Tom. He wouldn’t be taking Lars to the Lights, that was for sure.

Won’t be long. He’d turn around at Eleanor and head right back up there.

The run went smoothly: no storms to batter them. They threaded through the mountains, past the Breadloaf (without stopping) and gathered speed down onto the plain.

“Son of Satan’s whore!” Lars gasped, gripping the armrests as the rig built up serious speed and began to sway alarmingly.

“Say it in Finnish, Lars!” Tom yelled.

“Saatana perekele!” Lars yelled back.

“Oh I like the sound of that one, I like the way it rolls off the tongue.”

“We’ll be rolling into the ditch if you don’t slow down!”

“No ditches on Phoedrus, Lars,” Tom said reprovingly. “Don’t worry about it. Here, have a drink…” He reached down into a pocket on the console and tossed a hip-flask of scotch to the Finn.

Lars took a sniff, almost spilling as he bounced in his seat.

“Dogs piss,” he grumbled, after a long slug.

“Finish it up, mate, I’m on duty,” Tom grinned over as Lars lifted an enquiring eyebrow. “Maybe later though...”

And so Lars got good and drunk and regaled Tom with stories all the way into Eleanor so that for a while he almost forgot about Annie and the Lights.

At the Eleanor he tipped the load and brought the rig to the docks and shut it all down. The docks were quiet, almost nobody there. Lars slapped him on the back as he stumbled off, a slap that drove the breath out of him.

“Y ’owe me a drink!” he yelled at the departing Finn.

Lars yelled something incomprehensible and Tom laughed. The sound echoed around the huge, empty building, coming back at him in staccato waves.

Silence, suddenly. Everything shut down for the night. All that had happened, all of the day, only to end up here, in this hangar, still coughing regolith.

“Fuck,” he said quietly, thinking of Annie, thinking of the Lights, realizing that the gnawing feeling in his stomach was a lot more than just lack of alcohol.

He couldn’t find her. Nobody knew where she was. The rig she’d brought down from the Pole was at the docks, squared away. He’d seen it.

Sleep was impossible. He ran a hard five klicks on the cinder track connecting the domed craters of Eleanor Station, ear buds in, pounding along to the dulcet strains of Joy Division, his mind sifting through all he’d seen, the Lights, Annie, trying to make sense of it.

His phone cut in. A tightbeam call. That meant UNSA. Let it go to voicemail, he thought. But it was tightbeam, which meant it was incredibly expensive and likely important.

Important to someone, he thought sourly, stopping, staring at the device, eventually clicking upon the icon to answer it. He took a deep breath.

It was Gottlieb, Major Hans Andersen Gottlieb, UNSA, and his former CO.

“Hey Tam! Tam! How ya doin’?” Gottlieb was from Massachusetts. His accent was like a hockey stick in the teeth.

“I’m doing well, major,” Tom said politely. “And how about yourself?”

“Ah the fuckin’…the fuckin’…I tell you what, Tam! Its alla buncha crap, I tell ya, same crap alla time. It’s a fuckin’ racket…”

And Tom’s heart sank. The Major was drunk. Or well on the way to it. The last thing on his to-do list, Tom thought, right before the steady oblivion he had summoned would arrive, was to call me. Or perhaps the second-to-last thing. A pretty young cadet was probably primping herself in his washroom right now.

Gottlieb called him every month or so and he liked to believe the Major was concerned for the welfare of his one-time protégé, his fast-rising star. But he knew deep down it was just that Gottlieb wanted to know where he was, that their agreement was still intact, that Tom wasn’t turning on him. Hence the tightbeam, the near-impossible to intercept encryption.

“Getting’ ready to move on outta… here, Tam.” The Major’s voice was tight, breathy, the way it got when he was trying not to slur his words.

“Oh yeah? Done with Sector Five, eh? Finally?”

“And onto the next one, Tam. Same shit alla time. New crew comin’ in next cycle, whole new crew, gotta get ’em sorted, sorted out…”

Tom walked on, sweat cooling on his face, letting the Major ramble on, interjecting every now and then just for forms sake, like talking to a distant relative, or a parent with whom you’d tentatively reconciled: certain topics to be avoided, conversations kept light, no mention of events you’d both rather forget.

The Major was still in command of a cruiser, just not a particularly glamorous one. More of a work-boat: housing the ion-drive tugs netting asteroids, towing them out to the daisy-chain of Prophet Platforms forming a highway back to Earth… keep the lights on, the factories running. Not so different from hauling ice on Phoedrus.

And then he thought of something.

“Major,” he cut in as Gottlieb rambled. “I need a favor.”

“A favor, Tam? Sure, whaddya need?”

And Tom almost laughed. He could sense the sudden fear in the Major’s tone. Yeah, I’d be nervous too, he thought, if the kid holding information that could see him facing jail-time was asking for a ‘favor’.

“I can’t access Spacenet down here, Major. Well, not really. Nothing substantive. Can’t get any real information, y’know?”

“Well…sure…Tam. What kinda info you lookin’ for?”

“You know…er, nothing really Major….just some reports. Surveys….”

There was silence on the line for a moment. Spooked him, Tom thought. He took a deep breath. “Reports on what might have happened on certain planets, why they looked so ready-for-business and then suddenly weren’t...”

“That there is probably…”

“Classified?” Tom prompted.

“That would be the case, most likely, Tam.” The Major’s tone snapped up a notch.

“It’s not going to go beyond me, ever,” said Tom.

“Hey you know, don’t tell me anything. I don’t need to know.”

“You might find it useful, one day,” Tom mused. “But not yet.”

“Tam…”

“Major…”

“You fuckin’ with me?”

“No! No sir. I’m serious. This is nothing to do with…anything. Nothing at all. And I might be completely wrong about something. If I am, great. But if I’m not…well, like I said. The info might be useful.”

He had no idea what he was blathering about now. It didn’t matter. The Major was spooked. Which meant he would help.

“Just some reports?”

“Yes sir. I’ll send you a link. Secure. I still have my drop-box.”

Afterwards he ran on, harder than before.

Ought to shake something loose, he thought. Either that or I really am bat-shit crazy.

“Ah Christ, not you again,” Todd said, back at the Scurvy Dog.

Tom looked at him enquiringly.

“I only got so many chairs and tables, Lieutenant.”

It took him a while to figure out what Todd meant. Then it clicked. The Junior Officers…apparently the big Minder had dispatched them with aplomb. It seemed like a long time ago.

“Hey Todd, I’m sorry about that. I didn’t start it, you saw that.”

“Not this time. I see yer off the sauce. That’s a good idea.”

“I had a…er…a kind of near miss, Todd, actually. On the road.” Tom took a cautious sip of his Phoedran seltzer. He felt like a man who’d walked away from a car wreck.

“Oh yeah?” Todd was holding a glass up to the light, inspecting it, breathing on it, polishing it with a soft cloth. Todd was never impressed with stories from the road. His bar glasses were far more important than some tale of reckless misconduct with multi-million dollar equipment. Then again, his glasses were pretty expensive too, shipped up from Earth like precious antiquities to be handled with care, not slung around by drunken haulers.

“Hey Todd,” Tom began. “Have you ever heard about…haulers, or anyone, seeing things out there, on the surface?”

“What do you mean, things?”

Tom rubbed his face. “Forget it,” he said. “Hallucinations, probably.”

“I seen a lot of you people lose your shit,” Todd reflected, polishing more glasses. “If that’s what you mean. It ain’t no kind of life, hauling and mining and drinkin’ your faces off every night.”

“Ah we’re all gonna go home rich, Todd, especially you.”

“You reckon?”

And suddenly Tom thought of something.

He had just completed his fourth back-to-back run. Now there would be three days of mandated rest.

Normally when this happened he would hit the bars like a sailor on shore leave: drinking and fornicating and frolicking until the steady oblivion he had summoned finally arrived. And then he’d spend the remaining time in penance at the gym, in the sauna, toxins leaching from his body and guilt hammering at his head.

But this time the urge to drink had disappeared completely. It felt very strange. What would he do with himself, he wondered, with three days before he could once again fall prostrate under the all-encompassing, all-enveloping, all-forgiving Lights? Something akin to panic was hitting him.

He nodded at Todd and slid from his stool. I can’t sit around here waiting, he thought, like some junkie hanging around for his dealer to return. Waiting for Gottlieb to get him the information he’d requested.

And where the hell was Annie?