The Iceman's Lament

On the return journey to Eleanor Station he did it again, his little EVA routine, on a section of road that dog-legged around a fresh field of boulders. There was less wind in this place, the mountains blunting its edge a little. He’d brought the rig to a halt and left the engines idling on auxiliary power while he stripped out of his overalls and into his pressure suit.

The smell of the suit always triggered memories: his time in the UNSA Guard came flooding back, as if he were a raw nineteen year-old, not that long out of juvenile prison, spending his days floating in space around the Prophet platform, guiding giant pieces of infrastructure around like a longshoreman at the docks.

The airlock ran through its cycle and admitted him outside. If the solar wind had been blowing at anywhere near its normal velocity the walk would have been impossible but the day was calm, relatively. His steps were springy, letting him bounce easily over the tortured terrain. Small rocks scattered underfoot as he did a circuit of the rig, checking out each of the forty giant balloon-like tires, the couplings between the trailers, the running lights, all tasks he would did not need to do until they were safety back within the air bubble of Eleanor. But that was not the point.

The point was to walk in the absolute desolation of Phoedrus.

Right now the only human habitations on this planet were the mining complexes at Eleanor station and the ice station at the Pole. But UNSA was rapidly figuring out how to accommodate more exploitation of the mineral wonders beneath the surface: there would be more people, more growth, eventually a pipeline from the Pole.

Enjoy it while you can, Tom told himself. Soon it will look like fucking Phoenix.

The mountains here were higher and the impact craters from meteor strikes deeper than those that had wiped out the dinosaurs back on Earth. A great monolith rose sharply to his right, hundreds of feet tall. He’d seen it before. He had named it The Breadloaf.

Stopping with the hauler at his back, he could see a path: a narrow ledge running around the monolith, just above the base. It was a natural formation: carved out by the scouring of the solar wind but it looked like a walkway made just for him.

He looked back at the hauler, idling in the semi-dawn light, the running lights twinkling, wisps of hydrogen vapor rising from the front, great dirty slabs of ice heaped in the long train of trailers streaming out behind.

She’s a grand girl, he told himself, snapping some shots with his helmet camera. Wasn’t often you got to photograph a hauler from such an angle.

I’ll be right back, he told her.

Ten minutes into his unauthorized hike he paused for a systems check. The rebreather filters were fine for several hours and thermal systems were working well. The suit was old but well-maintained. He had a water feed and liquid enzymes for food. But he was nervous as he carefully trod forwards. The rig disappeared from view. He was truly alone.

The path formed a gap between monoliths and he could see a brightening ahead as the land promised to open up. Even in the low-grav he had to be very careful: there were sharp rocks and crumbling edges and a fall out here, immobilized with a tear in his suit, would be fatal. He checked his comms. No signal, of course, and now he had this mountain between him and the rig.

This is stupid, he told himself. It not only goes against the regs, but also common sense.

Yeah well, he muttered, pressing on.

The monoliths were in the Front Range, preceding the mountains with long slopes of scree that tumbled down to meet the plains. Like Mars, the surface of Phoedrus had been etched unthinkable eons ago with the flow of water: he could see it in the dry river beds, the canyons and washes. But no water now. Why it had bled out into the atmosphere was still a mystery. All that remained was buried under the Pole and was now being extracted as ice.

The narrow ‘path’ began to taper out. Carefully he eased himself to the ground to rest for a moment and study the view.

Peaceful here, the utter silence enveloping him. No noise, no light that was not reflected from the stars or the twin moons of Phoedrus. Peaceful yet intimidating: such utter desolation. Soon he would be pining for the signs of civilization, the crush of his fellow man.

But for now…it was beautiful. The sweep of the galaxy, the undulating plains, the soaring mountains behind. He gave a happy sigh, rested back on his elbows, drinking it all in.

And then the stars began to move.

Whoa, he thought, shaking his head.

They were still moving. And not in a predictable fashion, across the sky with the rotation of the planet. They were… swarming.

He stood. They were not stars.

He checked the suit settings to make sure the rebreather was calibrated correctly, Get the oxygen mixture wrong and hallucinations would be the least of his worries. But the rebreather was functioning just fine.

He felt a sudden stab of fear. The lights hovered in the middle distance, like fireflies. A skimmer perhaps, he thought, or one of the VTOLs used by UNSA. But VTOLs didn’t operate this far from bases: there was too much particulate in the thin atmosphere. And the movements were too fast, too fluid, more like a flock of birds, illuminated from within.

I’ve been out here too long, he thought. This was a bad idea. He began to walk back along the path. But he twisted to look back over his shoulder at the lights. His foot caught on a rock. He fell. Suddenly the lights were surrounding him.

Back in the hauler, hastily climbing out of his damaged and field-repaired suit, he fired the main engines back up and made ready to move out.

There’d been no time to think, back there: he’d punctured the suit. The thermal layer began to leak out and the freezing, deep Arctic cold was soaking into his bones. Amid the bleating of multiple alarms he’d groped for the emergency sealant kit, fumbling in heavily-gloved hands, glopping paste over the rupture while his heart hammered against his chest and he fought the urge to gulp for air.

The seal held. Alarms ceased. He’d lost a lot of O2 but there was enough, he’d hoped, to reach the hauler.

March, he’d commanded. Hup two, hup three.

He’d made it back with just 20 seconds of air left.

It wasn’t until the hauler was moving and the warmth of the cabin had begun to permeate his body that he began to consider what he’d seen. Something had been out there: the ebb and flow of lights just like the flocking of birds: swirling and cascading and collectively swooping. He had not imagined it. They had seen him and come to investigate. Hovering overhead: little bulbs, little orbs of light, no discernable shape to them.

He’d fallen, frozen to the spot as oxygen leaked from his suit. Reason had left the building, terror oozed up through the balls of his feet… but then fear was banished. The lights hovered and winked benignly down at him and then swept upwards as if being sucked up into a giant chimney, bursting up and over upon themselves and down around him again in a great pouring rush…throwing open his arms, laughing, euphoria washing over him like a shot of some powerful drug..

Then they were gone, swirling away, fading back into the blur of stars and cold was seeping in, oxygen leaking like pearls from his suit. He’d slapped on the repair gel and slowed the leak and began to hustle back along the path.

Now he let the hauler run on auto for a moment, watching the screens carefully while he made himself a big mug of hot tea. He held the steaming mug between his still-cold fingers as he sat back down, nudging the joystick with his elbow to make a course correction.

Well you wanted a little thrill, he told himself. Instead he’d gotten a jolt of stark terror and a wave of pure joy, unlike anything he had ever experienced.

The logical part of him fought against it. It was just hypothermia, he reasoned. You sprung a leak and the whole thing was a hallucination.

Only the lights had come first. And then that euphoria, better than the rush of any drug he ever experienced. Then the leak

Yeah, let’s not tell anyone else about this, he mumbled, gathering speed once more.

He had ice to deliver, after all