The Iceman's Lament

The Skimmer, as it was called, was a two-person surface rover, fully enclosed and mounted on thick rubber tracks, used for station maintenance and breakdowns on the haul road. It had a seven-hour air supply and two pressure-suits in case of EVA.

“Hello baby,” Tom patted the bulbous-looking carapace of the vehicle. The shadows of two massive haulers hid him from sight as he popped the hatch and climbed inside.

“Let’s see now,” he mused, flicking switches, not having driven a skimmer before. “Here, here….and here….”

The skimmer whined into life. He made an experimental circuit of the docks. Skimmers were always trundling around and if anyone in the control room noticed, they raised no challenge.

“Easy Peasy Japanesy” he warbled, ramming home the throttles to send the skimmer flying forward. A hauler had just left the docks and was crawling towards the airlock. Tom skidded out in front of it.

He wondered if the hauler pilot had seen him. He poured on speed, needing to get as far ahead as he could before it caught up.

“I’m out!’ he yelled gleefully as he cleared the outer airlock.

And then he wondered idly how the hell he was going to get back in.

After piloting a 230-foot hauler the little skimmer was like a sports car and he almost lost control of it, screwing across the regolith like a speedboat on a low swell, the prow up high and the back end churning up a rooster-tail of dust. The release, the sudden freedom, made him cackle with glee.

Faster, he pressed it, wild abandon chasing him like whiskey shots, dimly aware somewhere way back in his hind-brain that that this was folly, that he had stolen, that he would pay. And yet he could not summon a single shred of fear or regret. Not yet.

And then a hauler, pulling twenty-five trailers, lights ablaze, bearing down upon him in full-headlong steaming horror, an infernal freight train three-stories tall.

He watched helplessly as it filled his vision, frozen in terror like an animal in the middle of the road. He can see me, he thought dumbly. Surely he can see me….

Instinct took over: he slammed the joystick of the skimmer hard to starboard. The hauler swept by with inches to spare.

“Jesus Mary and Joseph!” he cried out, his tiny vehicle rocking madly in the torrent of the haulers passing. The driver would surely call it in. But Tom had taken care, as he stole the skimmer, to disable the transponders and the tracking and navigation software. Any haulers chundering south piled high with ice would be unaware that he was in their path.

He wiped the sweat from his brow, reversed cautiously back onto the road and proceeded onwards. No, they can’t see me, he realized. And with the nav. shut off neither could he see them. He twisted in his seat to peer out through the rear of the hardened plastic dome of the skimmer. Sure enough the hauler he had cut off leaving the station was now looming up behind him, perhaps a kilometer away.

Gun it, he thought grimly, pushing all the way down on the throttles of the skimmer. Shouldn’t be hard to keep ahead of it.

Five minutes later he was sweating hard again because the little skimmer, as zippy and maneuverable as it was, still could not come close to the velocity of a hauler, an empty hauler, piling on speed for the long run north. He was maxed out already at barely a hundred klicks an hour and he knew the hauler would get close to two hundred on this long straight stretch up into the mountains.

Again, he barely had enough time to pull off the road, the skimmer pitching and bouncing and skidding around boulders, the second hauler blowing by in a shower of rocks and regolith. He steered around, looked cautiously both ways, and tucked in behind it.

Now the draft of the haulers wake actually sucked him along. He was so close to the ground that he could probably drive right underneath the axles of the thing.

Easy now, easy now, he chided himself, letting the poisonous wind pull him along.

What else did you forget?

He checked the supplies in the skimmer. Plenty of air and the hydrogen drive produced pure H2O as a by-product. No food though, he realized. He had not replenished the nutrient packs in his pressure suit and there didn’t appear to be any sustenance of any kind aboard. Why would there be?

It doesn’t matter, he told himself cheerfully.

Ain’t gonna be gone that long.

In the narrows of Barnes Gap, heading up into the mountains, the hauler now far ahead of him, he wisely waited for southbound traffic to pass and then threaded his way cautiously onwards. Less than a half hour hour later he was at The Breadloaf, steering joyously into the ‘rest area’ he had cleared with his exosuit just weeks before. And then he realized he could get a lot closer to where he needed to be in this little pocket-rocket of a skimmer. He eased it almost halfway up the narrow path.

“I’m back, folks,” he laughed, pulling on his helmet, running quickly through the pre-EVA checks before popping open the dome of the skimmer. “Did you miss me?”

The voice, the resonant bass, the lovely cadence calling to him.

But he could not understand the words. Be still, he thought, closing his eyes, once again lying on his back, arms spread, legs spread as the wooly ether embraced him, as the Lights did their swarming swooping swirling ballet. They’re talking to mes. They’re talking to me.

On Ganymede you did no harm, he heard.

‘I did no harm…’

On Ganymede…” He could not make out what followed. The voice changed. A chill went through him. Then another, a deep vast chill….he bolted upright.

“No,” he began. “No, I’m sorry…”

Once again the angry birds, the carrion swooping. He felt a push and flew backwards. At the last second he twisted sideways and rolled and saw through the faceplate the sharp point of the rock he would have slammed into. A shower of small stones kicked up, battering him. He turned, hands over head, and began to run.

“I’m sorry!” he screamed as the awful wind began to howl, as the carrion swooped, as the lovely cadence became a choir of terror.

Run.

The rain of sharp rocks abated as he rounded the corner back to the path. He tripped, fell, scurried back onto his feet. Silence once again. He looked back. The Lights were gone; the carrion had retreated to their eerie. A thin veneer of ice lined the inside of his faceplate.

But then a sudden reflection of light caught his eye, a blaze of orange amid the ochre. His stolen skimmer.

That’s not where I left it, he muttered. That’s a long way from where I left it.

But that was where it would stay.

There was a tiny amount of air left in the skimmer tanks, enough for an hour, he calculated, maybe a little more if he didn’t exert himself. He plugged the power cells into his suit to recharge the thermal and recycling units.

The skimmer had nose-dived into the declivity. One rubber track remained; the other was strewn across an ever-widening circle. The carapace of the dome was shattered, regolith drifting like blown sand into the cockpit.

I didn’t shut it down properly, he thought, his brain fighting for understanding. I literally left it idling in forward gear and eventually it began to move, it ripped off one of its tracks against a rock and fell into the gorge.

But as he stood there, grappling with his new and dire situation, he knew that was not the explanation. He wasn’t that careless. He wasn’t that stupid. And the skimmer had not just trundled around by itself until it tipped over the edge of the hollow. There were no tracks leading up to it. He began to shiver uncontrollably and not just from the cold. He walked back until he found signs of tracks, first one, and then two of them. Between where they ended and the lip of the hollow was about ten meters of regolith, smooth as powder, untouched.

The skimmer had been thrown, smashed, dashed against the rocks by some angry and powerful hand…

He turned away.

He began to run.

He did not stop until he reached the haul road.

The ruts on the surface of the road, the signs of civilization itself, calmed him a little. There is an explanation for everything, he told himself, pausing to catch his breath, hands on knees, head and heart and lungs pounding like a cement mixer. The HUD bleeped warnings but he blinked them away.

He would hail a passing hauler, he thought. Part of his mind raced with the excuses he might come up with for being alone on the haul road with no possible legitimate reason to be there. Another part raced to explain why he had not just stolen a skimmer but then somehow allowed it to be destroyed. This is it, he thought glumly, your career was already in a very dubious place but now you’re a criminal as well. And a bloody incompetent one at that.

But mostly his mind raced with how exactly he was going to survive.

The ‘rest area’ where he usually hid his rig was close to the bottom of a long incline and the Southbound haulers with all the weight of the ice they carried would be pushing close to maximum speed, the empty rigs going northbound pouring on the power to crest the hill.

He needed to get higher, to the apex of the incline, where fully-laden haulers would have slowed and anything travelling empty on the northern approach would be yielding to them. His suit radio was not designed for anything but very local use and Phoedrus had no satellite navigation system, no GPS locators. He would need to get near a transponder that would relay a signal back to the Pole or down to Eleanor Station.

And tell them…what?

He paused to let his heartrate settle. Fatigue was seeping into his bones now, the adrenaline of his situation beginning to abate.

A squeeze of his fingers, he thought, back in his UNSA days, enough to activate a flow of combat-grade amphetamine that would banish weakness and fear, flood his system with strength and stamina on long EVAs. No such help here, his tongue seeking the suction feed for water. A mere trickle dappled his tongue and he sucked harder, feeling the emptiness of the water bladder contracting.

An exosuit, he thought forlornly as he began to walk again, low-air icons blinking on his HUD. It had lights and a more powerful radio. And bigger air tanks. But he didn’t have a damned exosuit. He’d have to stand out here in the middle and pray that the driver was paying attention to the road ahead. Maybe it would be someone he trusted.

The road was hard-packed. The next storm would render it into soft powder until the haulers had pounded it back down again but at least he was able to cover some ground now without expending too much energy. The HUD bleeped. His breath rasped inside the helmet.

The germ of an idea began to form. Perhaps he wouldn’t need to reveal himself at all.

It’s Meng, he thought excitedly, a half hour later, amplifying the vision controls in the helmet. Three, four klicks away. A huge rooster tail of dust rose behind her rig. “China Doll” was unmistakable with its elaborate dragon sigil appearing on his display. He thought about hailing her as she approached. He could trust her, surely.

Once you pull your little stunt, he thought, there is no going back, no calling for help.

It doesn’t matter, he muttered. If he failed to hitch a ride he’d just go back to the Lights, lie down and fold his arms and wait for it all to end like some Apache elder left on the hilltop for the wolves.

Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea.

But he still had one trick left.

Hydrogen-drive haulers pumped out vast amounts of steam and China Doll labored like an ancient locomotive on the ascent. She’s in there, he was thinking, Meng, that permanent scowl on her face, listening to some rancid Norwegian Death Metal and smoking her long expensive cigarettes.

“Hey,” he imagined himself saying as she stopped in amazement and opened her hatch. ”Yeah don’t worry about it. Thought I’d take a little hike on my day off, know what I mean?”

Instead of which he clambered up on top of a large boulder, about even with the top of China Dolls tractor unit, the ground shaking as it approached. She was down to just twenty klicks as she crested the hill. She passed, the blind-sentinel of her rig bristling with cameras and antennae’s.

And then he jumped.

Haulers had different methodologies and theories as to the best way of transporting ice. High-sided trailers would keep it from spilling but loads could shift and fuck up the balance, making it even harder to maintain stability. Tom always cut his ice into neat and uniform slabs, fitting them together like bricks, increasing his load weight even it if did take more time.

Meng had little patience for such finesse: she cut her ice in widely-varying sizes and shapes and slung it up into the trailers with the arms of her exosuit flapping some some crazed threshing machine. She didn’t get as much weight on there but it didn’t matter: haulers were paid bonuses on how many loads they hauled.

This had no bearing on anything until Tom leaped into the back of her rig, into the foremost trailer, right behind the tractor. The impact drove the air from his lungs and he felt an almost-audible cracking as his ankle snapped and pain lanced up through his body. He screamed and flailed around, scrambling to hold onto something, anything. But there there were cavities in her load as treacherous as any crevasse. He slid down into one.

Now there was a moment of true panic. The trailer was three meters deep: slabs of ice fell down onto him. A chunk smashed into his shoulders, another crashed into his chest. He thought dimly of a mosh pit, of skinheads beating him in an alley and suddenly he was pinned between two monoliths of millennia-old ice slabs, the pressure suit bulging and popping, cracking sounds in the helmet…this is how is ends, he thought, thrashing madly, his feet struggling to find purchase. Meng would tip the load into the hopper back at Eleanor, his body would be crushed in a maelstrom of super-heated steam and the inhabitants of the station would breathe him, drink him, clinks ice-cubes of his remains….

The trailer bounced, lurched, the whole load shook and for a split second the pressure was relieved. His boots found a grip and he thrust down with all his might, the stars above visible through the parting canopy of ice.

And then he was up, out of the crevasse, clinging to the lip of the trailer, pulling himself with agonizing slowness towards the tractor unit where an exosuit was mounted behind the cab, a blinking green icon indicating merrily that it was fully charged. His low-air alarm bleated again. Minutes, he thought. Need to get to that suit. Need to jump across the two-meter gap between tractor and trailer. Need to jettison his air tanks, empty or not, right as he did it.

Another massive lurch as Meng hit something, a boulder perhaps, the trailer bouncing, the ice bouncing, his body splaying out to stop from sliding back into a crevasse, ice shifting under him, swimming in it, arms and legs pumping madly. Another bounce and then Meng was braking, ice sliding forwards, sluicing over the foremost lip of the trailer, taking him with it. Now, he grunted, yanking on the quick-release for his tanks, the weight falling off him, no time to look back.

He fell between the rig and the trailer, legs open, onto the drawbar. The suit had ample cushioning but it seemed like his very bollocks had been driven up into his spine. He slid forward like a country boy on a greasy pole, the wheels of the tractor churning on either side, clamped his hands on the bouncing platform and waited for another lurch to boost him up onto it.

And there, on the exosuit: the nozzle that fed the air supply to the tanks. He fumbled for the intake valve on his suit, made a desperate lunge forward across the gap between the trailer and the tractor.

He had to spin himself around, push himself backwards into the suit. His lungs were on fire now, narcolepsy making his head spin and now the danger of that final euphoria, the ecstasy of the drowning man, lulling him, telling him to relax, to let it happen. It was almost as as strong as the tug of the Lights.

But then suddenly he was snapping into place, the pressure suit mating with the exosuit like a power-tool slapped into its charger. The air intake mated with the nozzle. Air began to flow. And like mercy, he passed out.

Jesus let me sleep, he was thinking, deep in the bowels of a dream, trying to get back to that place he’d been earlier: the basso-profundo voicing booming up from the bottom of the well, the lights swirling overhead, the lovely cadence and reassurance of it all.

Brutalized by the bouncing of Meng’s rig, by the pounding of the haul road and the protuberances of the exosuit into which he was now plugged, he was brought slamming back to reality. According to the HUD he’d been out for less than fifteen minutes and yet the low-air alarm of his pressure suit was once again bleating and flashing.

He felt down along his thigh where the air nozzle connected into the exosuit and found that it was secure. The cold creeping up his legs however told him that his pressure-suit was compromised. He ran diagnostics, blinking at the HUD menu to isolate the problem. There was a rip along the seam, down between his calf and his boots. The suit was not holding air: getting crushed between slabs of ice had caused a rupture and he didn’t have enough range of movement to bend down and repair the tear, even if he had been able to find some tape or gel to fix it with.

Quit yer bitching, he mumbled to himself. You’re alive.

Just.

The exosuit was pumping air into the pressure suit and although the air level was low, it didn’t appear to be dropping much further. The pressure suit adjusted thermal levels to cope with the cold leaking in but now his upper body was overheating while his feet and legs were beginning to freeze.

He decoupled and popped up for a second, alarms flashing angrily, stuck his head up over the roof of Meng’s rig to see where they were. The lights of Eleanor twinkled merrily in the distance, not more than three or four klicks away and now he could feel the rig slowing as Meng eased back on the power, shutting it down to get back in through the airlock and into the docks.

He had planned on dropping from the rig as it approached the station and making his way on foot to another much-smaller entrance. Airlocks were not guarded: security in the sealed-eco-system of Eleanor being somewhat rudimentary. (Made it easier for Flanagan’s goons to toss the occasional recalcitrant gambler out of them.) But now with his leaking suit he realized that was not going to work.

Brazen it out, he thought. It’s the only choice. And who was going to notice another grimy hauler trudging up from the docks?

So he rode China Doll all the way in and just as Meng pulled up at the hydrogen hoppers, safely within the domed enclosure of Eleanor, he released himself from the exosuit and dropped to the surface. There was a ladder that led up to the docks. He pulled off his helmet, took a deep breath of dusty, oily air, pasted a pissed-off expression on his face and marched on up there.

“Y’alright then Tom?” a hauler called as he hosed himself off.

“Yeah fucken mighty, mate” Tom grunted without even looking up. He clambered out of his damaged suit. He thought fast. “Something leaking though, under the rig…”

“Jesus man. Looks like you fell into a load of ice.”

“What’s goin’ on up there?” Tom pointed his chin at a clamor of Flanagan’s goons talking earnestly to an UNSA guard.

“Apparently someone stole a skimmer,” the hauler laughed.

“Who the hell would steal a skimmer?”

“Ah, probably some drunken asshole wanting to take a little ride out on the surface. Happens all the time…” The hauler spat on the ground. “Never seem to realize, man….at some point they gotta come back in…”

And Tom turned away, grinning.

Good luck with that…