The Iceman's Lament

The adrenaline of the day had abated, leaving him hollow and bleak. Back at the hovel he threw himself onto the bunk and within minutes he had passed out, exhausted beyond belief. Three hours later he snapped up screaming from a nightmare. The ice…the ice was closing in, pushing him down, deep into the trailer and over the cracking and popping he could hear Meng, laughing into her phone, laughing with Flanagan.

Well, at least that’s a new one, he thought, wiping the sweat from his face. He stood, unsteadily, examined his suit hanging from the back of the door. There was a large rent on the lower leg. He’d need a patch of Orlan to repair it, he thought, standing there dumbly, remembering every detail of the ordeal.

Fucking crazy, he mumbled.

That final terror at the Lights, the way they had turned on him and kicked up that vicious little shower of sharp rocks… They could just as easily have killed him outright. Or perhaps by destroying his stolen skimmer they’d intended his death to be a protracted affair, slowly asphyxiating out there on the edge of the haul road. He was done with it. From now on he’d drive the hauler and stay away from Breadloaf-like formations behind which alien life-forms lurked.

He took a long scalding shower, feeling every bruise from his escapade, his swollen ankles, thankfully just sprained and not shattered.

Limping onto the porch, he realized that beyond the pain, he actually felt pretty good considering the beating he’d taken. He felt calmer, his outlook more positive now that the demon drink was being leached from his system.

Yeah you’ll get over it, he cautioned. Sobriety was like a new religion. Eventually the old one would come creeping back.

But Annie, he kept thinking. Annie. He’d driven her to the Lights and the Lights had driven her away. He’d tried to find out more, to fill in the gaps between her return from the Pole and her departure on the Trade Voyager: her friends had no inkling of why she had decided to chuck it all in, break her contract, return to Earth.

It could be something else; he’d tried to convince himself. A family emergency, or perhaps even a new, more lucrative opportunity elsewhere. It happened. A lot of people on Phoedrus were just marking time, waiting for the next gig. But if either one of those possibilities existed she would have told someone, not just bolted like that.

And he knew the truth anyway.

The Lights had banished her.

It would be another fifteen hours before he was due back at the docks and he went back inside to try sleeping again, but then his device chimed with a tightbeam notification. He was gonna sleep, he thought, he was going to actually bloody sleep this time. Then the chime…

It was Gottlieb. No voice, just a message.

“Happy Birthday,” it read. Just that. He scratched his head. Ain’t me feckin’ birthday, he muttered. Then it clicked.

He sat up, fired up his wallscreen, typed in the codes to access his drop-box. And there it was, a fat file of reports, the responses to the keywords he’d provided. I’ll just take a look, he told himself, a quick look. Then I’ll get some rest.

And about ten minutes later he was making coffee.

Wading through the reports made his eyeballs sag: UNSA had a way of turning the most exciting of expeditions into dull recitations of logistics and provisioning. He skimmed through, scrubbing at his scalp, searching for nuggets of real information,.

Was he was remiss in keeping the existence of the Lights a secret? Did he not owe it to UNSA, to the Dexter Company, to inform them of what he’d found?

“They’ll kill you Tom,” Annie had said.

Little doubt they would: Flanagan and his goons, with the tacit approval or even the outright urging of Ria Tinto and the stakeholders of the Dexter Company. Far too much at stake for them to allow Phoedrus to be quarantined or designated off-limits because of the hallucinations of some disgruntled ice-hauler.

For a moment he pushed back his chair and rubbed his face. They wouldn’t kill him. There were far easier ways of silencing Tom Kelly. Character assasination for one: manipulate the narrative of his life into one long scream for attention. Dredge up witnesses who would tell of his anger, his instability. His drinking. Remind the universe of who had been at the helm of that asteroid barge. Or the events that had taken place on the bog road from Abbeyknockmoy.

They’d take him down so fast his head would spin and he’d wake up on a slow boat going back down the Well and they’d charge him for the ticket. Maybe to buy his silence they’d give him a psych discharge and he’d spend his remaining days hustling for change at some highway intersection. If he was lucky.

Yet more reasons to keep the shit to himself.

In his paranoia he wondered if Gottlieb had sent Lucy Lin his way. It made no sense unless you were thinking many moves ahead. Build a sensational story but then discredit Tom and prove that everything he said and did was a lie. How then could Tom reveal the truth of what had really happened on that barge? Or that bog road?

You’re missing something, he reminded himself.

Nobody knows about the Lights.

He pulled his chair back up to the desk, poured more coffee. Find it, he ordered himself. It’s there. Somewhere.

Slowly, his brain slowly baking in the minutiae of the logistics of Deep Space missions, a pattern began to emerge. Buried in the mind-numbing details of several expeditions were reports of UNSA personnel suffering psychotic breakdowns while downrange. Isolated incidents attributed to the extreme stress of the unknown even in places that had been thoroughly probed and analyzed before landing highly-trained expeditionary forces on them.

In one instance there had been a viable planet, Ganesh 771. It had a a potentially-breathable atmosphere, coated in a desert scrub indicating the presence of water. Drones reported an early-Pleistocene-like environment: no megafauna but very likely some lower life-forms.

He recalled the discovery: major news at first: much discussion and conjecture in the media. But UNSA was not in the habit of releasing much detail on these explorations, not in the early stages. They liked to dampen the expectations of the general public. Public attention withered.

He found a summary report. Confident they’d struck pay dirt, UNSA had landed a squad of marines on Ganesh and began to explore. The public record ended with them returning, reporting that they’d found a virus and retreated. Ganesh 771 was closed, pending further review.

But mining companies were underwriting these expeditions: they needed to understand why Ganesh would not work for them. Tom dug in, struggling to join the dots of disparate reports: geological, biological, medical. All of it classified. A narrative began to build.

Ganesh had thin, dry soil with evidence of water flow much like the arroyos and washes of the American West. The marines had tested the air and found it breathable. Procedure dictated that they keep their helmets closed, using their own oxygen, but eventually all of them popped the seals. Tom could understand it. Breathing real air after months in a space-craft was like spring water after a drought.

The report outlined the plan to sample soil and vegetation: a window into an environment that echoed the early epochs of Earth itself.

But something happened. Almost as if the very vegetation itself revolted against them. The report stated simply that the marines had encountered a hyper-acidic form of plant life that made attempts to gather samples impossible. They had retreated to their lander to regroup.

He had to ferret around for another report addressing the lander: extensive damage to the undercarriage had been discovered. There were images: the struts of the landing gear smoking and dissolving. The marines had EVA’d back to the mother ship. The lander could not be brought back aboard. UNSA directed that it be sent back down under remote control to conduct further analysis. The lander went back. Apparently it did not last long. The UNSA report gave no more details.

Tom followed deeper links, post-expeditionary reports, an interview with a marine who told of tentacles sprouting from the ground, lashing him with an acid that threatened to burn through his suit and…here Tom went back several times…a swarm of lights that surrounded him, talking to him. Several of these highly-trained and highly-disciplined soldiers had simply lost their shit and returned babbling back to the ship, disappearing forever into the daisy-chain of mental-health stations that led back to Earth.

This lead to another report: the situation on Sol Invictus.

Along with Phoedrus and Genesis, Sol Invictus was one of only three viable planets in the Deccan system. Phoedrus, with its ample mineral deposits and low-G, was easy to colonize. No life, sentient or otherwise, was to be found on its scarred and bitter cold surface. Genesis was similar, but on the other end of the scale: almost 200-degrees F in the shade of its soaring mountains. No life there either, but a lot harder to work in.

Sol Invictus, with a variable temperature of -50F to almost 150F, was entirely covered in a barren desert plain. The atmosphere was heavy in carbon dioxide and poisonous to humans but easily managed with lightweight rebreathing rigs. Nothing to prevent the yellow earthmovers and the giant green tractors from tearing up the surface. No native flora or megafauna for the proxies of Earth to destroy. The ultimate Goldilocks planet. But it had proven impossible to colonize.

Officially, the story was that, much like Ganesh 771, a new form of toxin had revealed itself on the surface. This time, however, it went undetected during the initial surveys. Drones showed nothing to be alarmed about. The first expeditionary crews were able to explore without hindrance. A crew of engineers followed, planning the first actual base on the surface. Construction began.

And then things began to go sideways. The reports described twin paths of misfortune. First there were anomalies in the surface that caused the construction to collapse. Ground that was seemingly solid proved to be weak. At the same time almost all of the expeditionary suffered a gradual collapse of their nervous systems: losing motor control, then their sight. Several died before they could get back to the UNSA platforms. The planet was evacuated and decreed off limits until more could be learned about the toxin.

This much Tom already knew. It had been a huge story back on Earth and UNSA had found themselves on the defensive, having sent humans into harms way. An UNSA cruiser remained in orbit, keeping the curious at bay.

But there was a deeper, classified report. He’d hesitated as his cursor hovered over the file. They’ll trace it back, he’d warned himself. They’ll figure out it was you. Eventually. If ever they looked.

It didn’t matter anyway. Once he’d started reading, he was hooked.

The story unfolded in a narrative of glorious human triumph. UNSA had sent in a crew to film the landers coming in. He clicked on an icon that revealed footage of giant one-time vessels packed with heavy equipment literally crash-landing on the surface. Then a time-lapse recording of the erection of habitats, the beginnings of an actual settlement.

Large pieces of earthmoving equipment came zipping from the landers and began to cleave a path into the low scrub, building the first basic road into the hinterland and the beginnings of a proper landing pad for incoming ships. Caterpillar D1111 Bulldozers, sealed against the atmosphere, ripped into the stony surface. There was a blur of yellow-streaked activity as, via time-lapse recording, the base for the first road was built.

Daylight ended, the ’dozers powered down. The stick-like figures of their operators trotted back to the buildings. Eighteen hours had passed since they had first guided their bellowing bulldozers into the scrubland.

The film skipped to the next day. The gorgeous yellow egg-yolk of the Deccan sun zipped up over the horizon and again, the ’dozers cleared the path. The crews erected a stone crush and hauled the output to the roadbed where the bulldozers packed it down hard. By end of the day the first Caterpillars had disappeared from view of the cameras, and the base station was ringed by brown gravel. Functional, if not exactly elegant. They had built roadways through the base and cleared a large circle where more landers could arrive.

“Looks like they’re building an Ikea,” Tom had muttered.

Once again he’d watched the graceless ballet of machinery parking up for the night. The lights within the new station gave the place a homey, cozy kind of look. The machinery, with all its branding: Caterpillar, Scania, JCB, the familiar iconography of Earth, huddled together on this new world. Familiar. Safe.

On the Third Day they rose again, but as the sun began to illuminate the little collective something truly catastrophic was happening. The Caterpillars, all three of them, had fallen into some kind of sink hole. Only their hindquarters were visible. The road itself, so proud the previous evening, had collapsed.

In time lapse the engineers trotted rapidly back and forth on the ruined road, trying to figure what the hell went wrong. They had surveyed the route using radar and laser to determine where sand ended and bedrock began. This was not their first rodeo. There was no reason for the ground beneath the ’dozers to have collapsed like that.

They were able to pull them out, relatively unscathed, filling the holes with rocks and shale and whatever else was at hand, pounding it down with the full 70-ton weight of each machine, continued with the road, with the landing strips, with the infrastructure needed to build a properly constructed Station. And that evening, as the time lapse began to move a little faster, the roads simply collapsed.

The final part of the video was chaotic. Far from the worksite, at least two kilometers, a 70-ton D1111 was shown, nose down, the rear end of it sticking up like a lopsided tombstone. No tracks led up to it, nor around it. Tom shivered, thought of his skimmer.

The video portion of the report had ended then. The rest was a terse narrative of chaos. Every indication, every analysis, showed solid rock but no matter where they tried to build, the ground collapsed. There was no sense to it. Equipment was abandoned, workers began to revolt. An UNSA unit went out to patrol, to try to figure out what the hell was going on. Within miles of base they lost radio contact. They did not come back.

Finally there was a report of a battle at the landing zone. UNSA had sent just a bare-bones brigade to help with logistics and support, armed with nothing more lethal than a taser. Something had spooked the workers. They wanted the hell out and UNSA didn’t take them seriously at first. They hadn’t planned for panic, for construction workers using nail guns as weapons, for throats being slashed with box-cutters. In the end some rag-tag gang tried to take off with a lander. Something had surrounded them. The lander was smashed back against the rocks.

UNSA sent down the Marines to restore order and evacuate the remaining crews. No mishaps occurred but there was no attempt to rescue any of the equipment. Recordings of several interviews followed. They were mostly incoherent: the raggedy emotions of men and women who’d been badly scared. They talked about the lander, plucked from the sky, dashed against the rocks by what some as a swarm, others as a flock of feral birds. The last one chilled Tom to the bones.

“Lights,” a marine had howled. “Like the sky was full of swarming stars…”

Lucy Lin found him at the bar, nursing a Phoedran seltzer.

“Hi,” she breezed, settling down on the barstool next to him.

He rubbed his face.

“Ms. Lin” he muttered.

“Oh you can call me Lucy, Tom…hey, can we talk about something?”

An acid response rose to his lips. He almost told her to take her questions and her ‘news’ show and shove them up her perfectly-formed ass. But he bit it back. Flanagan had pinged him again that morning about taking her up to the Pole for her little puff-piece on the pipeline.

“Of course,” he smiled. “Always…”

She gave him an odd look. “You’re not drinking,” she observed.

He shrugged. “Er…not right now, I guess….”

“Recovery is a bitch,” she said quietly. He looked sideways at her.

“Er…recovery?”

“Any kind of recovery. Alcohol, drugs, whatever.”

“I don’t understand, who’s in recovery?”

She looked flustered then, her poise slipping.

“No, I didn’t mean…” she began.

He laughed.

“What did you want to ask me, Ms. Lin?”

Todd changed the record on the player, glancing their way to see if they would know the ensemble.

“Miles Davis,” Tom said automatically. “From ‘Decoy’”

“John Scofield on guitar,” she followed up.

“Omar Hakim on drums…”

“Branford Marsalis on sax, and….?” Todd called out.

“And Sting stole his band shortly after that for “Bring on the Night’…” Lucy laughed.

“Free drink for the lady,” Todd grinned. “How about you, Tom?”

“All good mate,” said Tom, covering his glass with the flat of his hand. “Watching my girlish figure, y’know?”

“Glad someone is watching it,” Todd came back.

“Tom,” she said, once her drink, a gin and tonic, had arrived and Todd had sloped away. “I know that…I mean, I want to do this story on you, on the…accident, the Ganymede thing, and I know you don’t want to talk about it, but…”

“But…? You’re gonna do it anyway, with or without me. I have to admit I can’t understand why it’s so compelling. Shit happens. Accidents happen. It’s a dangerous place, Outer Space…”

“They say you were drunk,” she said abruptly.

“They say a lot of things.”

“Well, were you?”

“That’s for the Court of Inquiry to determine,” he responded evenly.

“They also say you were covering up for someone, Tom. Maybe you weren’t drunk. Somebody else was. Somebody who was supposed to be in charge that night.”

“That’s a pretty far-fetched conspiracy theory, Ms. Lin,” he said, standing.

“But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, isn’t it Tom?” she said sweetly.

Alarms began to clang in his head, the familiar pain in his jaws as his molars impacted.

She had taken out her tablet, placed it on the bar before him. A cached copy of the Irish Times and a story about a murdered father, a treacherous brother, a career in juvenile prison and then there he was, nineteen years old, on his first EVA.

“You found it, huh? Who dug that out for you? What’s-her-name, Gail?”

“Hell of a story, Tom,” she said quietly.

“Fuck you,” he said.

“That’s the spirit!”

“No really, what do you know? Nothing at all….” And right then he knew he had lost the battle. She had him. She had it all.

“Covering up, Lieutenant….”

He clenched his teeth, he gripped the bar.

“Seems like a theme in your life, doesn’t it?”

A low growl came from him, from deep in his gullet.

She covered his hand with her own. A simple motion. Even through his rage he could feel the sensuality of it.

“Keep it together Tom,” she said quietly. “I just want you to remember one thing…”

He almost felt tears welling up. The skull of his father cleaved in two, his brother with the bloody shovel. Death on the side of a bog road in the west of Ireland. But grief turned to anger and anger turned to something cold, something like ice, turning his heart to stone.

“One thing,” she continued. “I’m on your side, Tom. Your side only.”

“I’ll tell you what,” he smiled, taking her gin, downing it in one gulp. “We’re going to the Pole tomorrow, are we not?”

“I hope so,” she smiled. “Just you and me, I understand?”

“Bring the others if you want, I don’t care, but no cameras right? Off the record?”

“Sure Tom, sure, if that’s what you want.”

He smiled back at her. He deliberately looked at her breasts, then her buttocks. She squirmed on her seat. She giggled. She was playing him, he knew.

“Meet me in the morning then,” he told her. “At the docks, 5 am…”

“Ok…”

“I’ll give you the story,” he said. “I’ll give you the whole thing.”

“Thank you Tom…”

And he cupped her face in his hands. He brought his lips down on hers and kissed her deeply. She did not resist.

“In the morning,” he said, turning to leave.

She made a strangled kind of moan. All of her composure was shattered. She wanted the story.

“In the morning,” she said breathily. “Unless…” And she reached out to touch his hand, stroking his fingers, her dark eyes limpid.

“I’ll give you a story,” he told her. “I’ll give you an even better story than you know what to do with.”

And he left her there. A load had lifted. He knew what do do next.