The Iceman's Lament

He had thought carefully about how he would introduce the matter of the Lights.

“Ok,” he called out, nudging Jared out from the pilot seat. “We’re about to head up into the mountains. Gets a big tricky…and I’ve got something to show you too. Let’s practice suiting up.”

“Something to show us, Tom?” Lucy Lin asked as she shed her skinsuit, as she stripped down to bra and panties.

He gulped, trying to keep his eyes on the way ahead, pouring on power for the long climb up.

“Either of you ever been EVA?”

At the Breadloaf he brought the rig to a halt and shut the engines down to aux power. He checked their suits, showed them how the airlock worked.

“We’ll just do a practice run,” he told them. “Out onto the surface, around the rig, back in again. If you guys can deal with it, if you’re capable, we’ll do the real thing on the run back down. Good?”

Lucy Lin was practically salivating. His story was forgotten now. This was far bigger than any expose about corruption, any interesting nuggets about a hauler with a chequered past. The hook was set.

Holy shit, he thought as they suited up, as they ran through the procedures. This was gonna be fun.

They had been EVA before, Lucy and Jared, in the way that tourists go scuba diving: they knew to drop to the surface, to bend forwards and breathe deeply, to let the suit read the environment and calibrate things accordingly. It was just the first moment, waiting to trust the suit, it was scary to the uninitiated. It was scary to him.

“We’re tethered,” he yelled over the comm, pulling them to him, bumping his faceplate off theirs to secure the connection. “You read me?”

“Read you!” they yelled, eyes bulging.

“We’ll stand here for a minute.” He checked their bio-readouts. Like the fiercest snowstorm you could imagine, out there. Yet just fifty meters off the road things calmed down. This was the worst of it. He led Lucy and Jared around the rig, having them touch each tire, feeling their way around. The light out here was harsh, their faceplates adjusted but still, the blinding light, knee-deep in soft drifting regolith and the wind, the wind that would scour the hull of a hauler down to base metal, battering at them.

It took thirty minutes to get around the rig. He showed them how to key the airlock, how to cycle back in, how to let the escaping air hose all of the dust from their suits, how to wipe their bloody feet before stepping on his priceless kilim rug.

They were bouncing off the walls, the two of them, like kids that had just come off the roller-coaster ride of their lives.

Lucy Lin pulled him in to her, hugging him, Jared slapping his back.

“Fuckin’ hell mate,” he kept saying. “Fuckin’ hell…”

“Yeah wait,” Tom laughed. “Wait for tomorrow.”

At the Pole a party was in full swing and they threw their shit into the cabins, rushing back down to join the frenzy.

Greg was there with his ribald yarns, a dozen other haulers all enraptured with Lucy Lin and her giant of a Minder, these exotic creatures suddenly dumped among them on this desolate outpost where Phoedran lager, Phoedran scotch and Phoedran weed were all in copious abundance with Lucy Lin laughing, Jared doing this looping dance and Tom as intoxicated as the rest of them but still not a drop to drink.

And then, later, much later, when Lucy Lin took his arm and led him to her cabin, he kept his eyes closed. He thought of Annie.

At one point he awoke to see her silhouetted against the light of the narrow window, contemplating the surface of this desolate place. She turned and saw him watching and gave him a lovely smile. He felt a pang of guilt.

But then he rolled over.

He still had two more hours of sleep.

In the morning Lucy and Jared set up their cameras to get footage of the ice extraction operation and he let Jared try out the exosuit.

“I feel like Ironman in this thing!” the Minder yelled out over the speaker as he picked up a three-ton slab of ice and hurled it up into a trailer.

“No cameras where we’re going,” he reminded them. “No mikes either. At least not this first time.” He’d already removed the helmet cams and checked everything for hidden devices.

They nodded excitedly as he moved the rig out, fully loaded, trundling slowly out of the station and out onto the plain, heading once again for the mountains.

On the way down from the Pole he gave them a rundown on what to expect. Lucy Lin’s eyes had shone like a child at the circus at the thought of a scoop, but then her natural skepticism had kicked in.

“It’s hard to believe that sentient life of this description could have missed by the surveyors, Tom,” she said.

“Yes it is,” he agreed. “But it’s a big planet. Not like they would have walked across every acre poking into every crevasse.”

“The scans, though, the analysis. This place is a dead as Mars.”

And he thought about showing them the reports Gottlieb had sent. That would banish any doubts. No, he decided. They could find that themselves.

“The phenomena have been seen before, on other planets. Remember Sol Invictus?”

“That was a virus. It drove everyone mad. No reports of life forms…”

“Maybe dig a little deeper into that,” he grunted. “Maybe task your…Gail, with that. Think about it: ice at the Poles, a whole network of underground rivers, could be an entire ecosystem down there.”

“Then why haven’t you told anyone?” Her voice was soft now, her fingers stroking his neck.

“They’d kill me,” he said simply.

“How do you know they won’t kill us, Tom?”

And he laughed. “You’re Lucy Lin,” he said. “And you’ll be long gone before you break this story.” He looked up at her. “Which also means you keep me out of it. How you get your footage later won’t involve me. Can’t involve me.”

Once again they dropped from the airlock to the surface and waited for their suits to calibrate. For once the wind had abated and the going was a lot easier. He made sure their tethers were secure and they began the hike over to the Breadloaf.

“Once we get near, I’ll be shutting off the helmet comms,” he told them. “Radio silence is key. Any electronic noise and you’ll spook them”

They walked in single file: Tom leading the way, Lucy in the middle, Jared bringing up the rear.

“Rest for a moment,” he said, several times, stopping to check their suits, their bio-readouts.

“How much further?” Lucy gasped.

“Not much. A half-hour.”

Her faceplate was a little fogged. He showed her how to clear it.

“Jesus, I don’t know if I can take another half-hour of this…and then we have to get back.”

And suddenly Jared was lifting her, boosting her up onto his shoulders like a child.

“Keep moving, Tom,” he grunted.

“Hup, two, three,” Tom grinned. He pointed up the trail. “Beyond that ridge,” he told them. “Then radio silence.”

Major Gottlieb had been his mentor, his commander, his guardian, ever since the grubby little recruit from the Irish Engineers, Tom Kelly, had been seconded to his company in the early days of the space-platform Prophet 21. Gottlieb had been a company commander back then, but as his career progressed, Tom Kelly and a handful of other non-coms from various other countries had come with him.

It was Gottlieb who had enabled him to stay up there beyond his rotation and go through the training needed to pilot an ion barge. Things were moving very quickly with the push into Decca and there were not enough trained pilots to bring up from Earth. The ones that did come took several more months before they could take their first tentative circuits around the platform, even longer before they could do useful work, whereas scrappy little Tom Kelly, ex juvenile violent offender, had taken to the ion-drive barge as easily as driving a farm tractor.

And when Tom had been first to the scene of a disaster involving a rapidly-decompressing passenger shuttle, going EVA to effect hasty repairs and restore enough air supply to the stricken craft to ensure the survival of passengers, Gottlieb had rewarded him with a field promotion to Lieutenant. Tom had gone from being a barge pilot to the commander of an asteroid-netting shuttle, and from there to the fast atmosphere-capable shuttles.

Gottlieb had been his hero, still was, but he’d been a deeply-flawed man too. Booze mostly, but also opioids and the seduction of young women in the lower ranks. And when they gave him that Juno-class cruiser as a command, he couldn’t help but show it off with reckless fly-bys and fast approaches.

And then he’d been hammered on the bridge, not even aware that his cruiser had sliced through the tethers of an ore barge.

Tom had stepped up. He’d been at the helm that night, he claimed, and Gottlieb was off-duty, in his cabin with some lissome JG.

Gottlieb was the only one, besides Annie, who’d believed Tom about the murder of his father. He’d believed in Tom.

Annie had been absolutely right in her assessment.

Tom loved him like the father he had lost.

Damned if Lucy Lin was taking him down.

The first tendrils of Lights hovered over the far ridge. Terror gripped them.

“How should we be?” whispered Lucy Lin.

“Supine,” he told her. “Empty your heads of all thought. Even better, think of something that preys upon your mind, some mistake you’ve made. Be humble. Be penitent.”

Jared grabbed his arm.

“I done some bad things in my life, mate.”

It was hard to see his features through the reflections off his faceplate, but Tom could feel the man’s fear.

“Ain’t we all, brother? Ain’t we all?”

And then he punched them in the arms. “Here they come. Radio’s off. “

Afterwards, back at the rig, as he wrapped them in thermal blankets and made fresh hot tea, he saw that Jared had his face buried in his hands, his great shoulders shaking softly. Worried, thinking of Annie, Tom touched his arm.

“No, I’m alright, I’m alright,” Jared whispered. “Just…the way they…” He looked up at Tom. “It’s like they knew me. Like they knew everything about me.”

And Tom squeezed his shoulder.

“Be alright mate,” he said.

Lucy Lin already had her tablet out, her face radiant with excitement.

“We’ll use the AirFlex,” she was saying. “And that new audio boom…right Jared?”

But Jared refused to look at her.

“Can you get us better suits Tom?”

“I’ll give you the name of a guy.” He slid into the pilot seat and began to light up the main engines again.

“You need to bring us back here.”

“No! I brought you this once. Now find someone else. That was the deal.”

“But how will we find this place again?”

Tom shrugged as the rig, towering with ice, began to move forward.

“I’ll draw you a map,” he growled. For a few minutes it was all about the rig, getting underway, up to speed, ready for the long descent to the plains on the other other side and the last hard push to Eleanor.

Then he looked back at Jared. Lucy Lin was talking to him in a low rapid voice but he appeared to be unaware of her presence. He’d gone from a state of emotional turmoil to looking like a man who had just eaten the greatest meal of his life, sitting there, spread-eagled, eyes closed, fingers laced together and resting on his belly.

Yeah, that’s the look, Tom thought.

Lucy Lin, however, was as businesslike as ever. She had a story now. Sentient life. Everything else was forgotten.

She’s not bloody human, he thought. How could you witness something like the Lights and act so disaffected, thinking only of the Story.

Or maybe she was just a professional. Maybe she’d already discarded emotion in favor of practicality.

“What do you think they are Tom?” She sat on the arm of his pilot’s chair.

“Some kind of hive mind perhaps. Sentinels for some other, higher form of life.”

“Do you think they’re…dangerous?”

He shifted in his seat.

“I don’t know,” he lied. “But I’ll tell you something,” he looked up at her. “They’re yours now. I won’t have anything more to do with them.”

“But why?”

“Because I’m scared of them.”

“But why, if they’re not dangerous?”

“We don’t know that. We don’t know anything.”

“Well I’m not!”

And he gave his grim little smile. He pushed the hauler faster.