On the Ice Islands

by Gregory Feeley

Illustration by Alan Giana

None of them knew the color of the sky. The terrible dispossessed children, living in a universe of corridors and chambers, regarded the screens of wheeling stars with the uncomprehending indifference they might have accorded a history program from Earth; while their quarry, hunted through tangles of conduit and wallboarded spaces they could not clearly remember, dreamed of empyrean blue and open air that they would never see again. The youthful elect, escaped from the decaying carcass of the Centaur in their gleaming ceramic vessels, looked down upon Neptune’s turbid troposphere and imagined its methane clouds seen from beneath, an imagined zone where their floating habitats could bob free of the killer winds yet see them swirling above: the miracle of weather, illuminated by faint sunlight like the smoke-dimmed windows of cathedral stained glass.

Yarrow woke in a panic, thrashing in sweat-slicked sheets that twined about her. Her skins began to breathe more easily as soon as she kicked them free, but her heart continued to pound in the darkness, which she finally banished with a word. Sitting up in the reassuring half-light, Yarrow listened to the fading sounds of struggle, which seemed to recede beyond the new wallboard partitions. A sharp pain stabbed behind her left eye, unmistakable evidence that her vision was not simply a dream.

Sleep was no longer a possibility, and Yarrow pulled her orange jumper from the wall. Regulations decreed that workers wear their clensuit skins at all times and be able to shuck off any additional garments in five seconds, which left little room for fashion. Unwilling to display her indifferent physique among colleagues, Yarrow wore a pocketed singlesuit like a preoccupied lab worker.

The empty crawlspace—wide enough for two people to squeeze past each other—was illuminated every two meters with pairs of facing glow-strips that banished shadows. Yarrow still enjoyed the luxury of ample lighting, enough that the cramped quarters rarely bothered her.

The commode was the size of a closet, which is why workers were encouraged to use the sloptubes in their rooms. Up before her shift, Yarrow was able to get in after only a minute’s wait, a bargain. Glancing at the brightly lit mirror, she considered getting out her comb, then decided to let the next user in. She opened the hatch and floated out, nodding at Ling who (she suspected) would rather die than slip the funnel of the sloptube into her skins.

Yarrow lingered over breakfast, her last meal in a space large enough to seat a crowded six. She sat with the window on her left, her fellow diners overhead and to the right. The empty seat beside her seemed, at that moment, more attractive than axial orientation with her companions, who were deep in uninteresting conversation.

“But only below four hundred bars,” said Chin, one of the engineers. “Get above that and conductivity changes entirely.”

“A sufficiently powerful signal will penetrate both levels,” said Zhou calmly. He stirred the bottom of his bowl and raised a mouthful carefully to his lips. Eating rice with chopsticks was permissible in the Lotus if you let no grains escape.

“Not with that turbulence,” replied Chin.

“The proper wavelength—”

Yarrow had no interest in conditions at the planet’s core, a sullen coal that fed the currents and winds of the world’s layered atmosphere but possessed no true energies. She had not spent her life sailing to Neptune in order to study dead magma.

“Any word from the Ship?” asked Chang. There were half a dozen vessels now deployed through greater Neptune, but the Centaur would never lose its singularity for those who had come out on it.

Tsujimoto scowled. “They just announced that their transmitters would be down for the next two hours. Don’t bother running to check the morning feed.”

Chin pulled a long face, but the others appeared unconcerned. Yarrow, who had no interest in communicating with the Centaur, did not even trouble to react. Hot tea rose in her bulb, which she lifted from the table with a click.

“Up and out, Yarrow?” asked Zhou companionably.

“Ho,” she allowed, without enthusiasm. “In twenty-five minutes.”

Her messmates exchanged smiles. Romantic liaisons during the four-day tour at the Teardrop were a favorite theme, but no one could imagine one here.

“Is Castor up yet?” Chin asked abruptly. Both Zhou and Tsujimoto glanced at their wristbands to calculate whether the pod had swung out from behind Neptune, and so would be available for direct communication. Taking her bulb with her, Yarrow kicked out of the room and down the Lotus’s long axis, through the narrow tube that separated the life-support module from the docking bay, and into the lock where the duster waited.

George was running a needless systems check when Yarrow poked her head through the seal. He was already in his clensuit; had probably got in and suited up early in order to avoid having to engage in the delicate business of hooking up with Yarrow present. His clensuit, still partway open, revealed his favorite skins, mottled yellow on black in a pattern that he once explained was copied from the terrestrial gila monster. Yarrow had never asked what that meant.

“Everything all right?” she asked blandly.

Since sarcasm was not evident in her tone, he detected none. “Looks good,” he answered, glancing up at her. Still halfway through the seal, Yarrow unsnapped her kit and stuck it to her seat, then began to wriggle out of her jumper. If peeling off a garment to reveal undecorated skins possessed erotic connotations for George, he at least wouldn’t see most of it.

In fact George kept his eyes firmly on the systems displays as Yarrow pushed her way into the cramped cabin, lifted the clensuit that lay in her seat like a desiccated spaceman, and pulled it on, unself-consciously threading its plumbing through her skins. The clock showed six minutes to pushoff, plenty of time by prevailing standards but perhaps not by those of George’s day.

“Ready?” she asked him, a bit maliciously.

At this he glanced sideways at her, and Yarrow noticed the dark bags under his eyes, which always seemed especially lurid when he was under stress. When she’d first met him she had vaguely imagined that the bags were the product of piloting in Earthspace—accelerational stress, living on planets—but later someone told her that the bruised capillaries Chills sported were hibernation damage. Yarrow didn’t understand how the fine structures of the brain and liver could survive eighteen years of cold storage if such grosser injuries had been sustained subcutaneously, but she had never bothered to ask. She remembered from her days as a lab assistant on the Centaur the frozen samples tended to spoil once thawed, and that, as far as she was concerned, was what had happened to George.

“I’m composing myself,” he replied mildly, returning his gaze forward and closing his eyes.

Earthspacers also tended to meditate before piloting missions, even those that were wholly automated. This meditation may have been justified, although Yarrow had her doubts: a sterile transit between points in a vacuum required scant spiritual reserves. But George had traveled from Earthspace through vacuum and lost his soul in the process, so perhaps he was right to accord the act respect.

Yarrow spent the remaining minutes looking about the cabin, which would be her home for four days. Most of the walls were devoted to screen, which George would convert to Views in order to create the illusion (compelling for him alone) of spaciousness; but there were fittings protruding at odd locations, and Yarrow proceeded to familiarize herself with them. The screen before her might show a bank of displays or sunrise on Mercury, but Yarrow’s toothbrush holder would always be at her right hand.

“Two minutes,” the Onboard announced. Yarrow dutifully closed her eyes and sought to prepare herself. If this was not a journey across water or through air, both elements lay at the end of it, at least in frozen potential. She concentrated on the ball of stilled volatiles, but the image that rose before her resounded with cries, elongated shadows waving down half-lit corridors flecked with blood. Yarrow shook her head, then turned to ask George if he had caught the evening feed. George was counting down the remaining seconds with eyes closed, however, so she turned back with a sigh and waited for the kick.

Pushoff was nothing dramatic, and Yarrow felt only a few seconds’ force as the extensor arm shoved the duster smoothly from the bay. George, who liked realtime models, had converted the screen before him, and now watched the starscape list slowly as the duster yawed. The rearview screen showed the Lotus retreating gracefully, its panels opened like petals to catch what the Centaur might send it. The image drifted to one side as the duster rotated into proper alignment.

“Spray-on in eighteen seconds,” the Onboard observed. George hated the duster engine, and longed for the day when the expedition had stocked enough hydrogen and oxygen to be able to blow it out thrusters and lose it forever. Yarrow, who had grown up in the rigidly closed world of the Centaur, possessed no such qualms. Accelerating minute particles of local matter to relativistic speeds pleased her costive sensibility, for even the Centaur could spare tonnes of pulverized rock. And the dust of greater Neptune—blackening the rings, coating the inner moons like carbonized exhaust—was everywhere: it filled the region inside the Roche limit in bands that spiraled down to the surface; it clumped in ring structures; it settled like soot over everything, even brilliant Triton, which sprayed nitrogen geysers to coat it with fresh snow. Dust particles fired by the engine were expelled at speeds that sent them out of Neptune orbit forever, and Yarrow—who lived in close spaces, and was neat—liked that fine.

Lights flickered across the displays, reporting the build-up of energies in the acceleration coils, the ionization rates of the reaction mass. Yarrow didn’t know why George wanted to see the figures: if something went wrong it would be corrected, or the mission scrubbed, without his intercession. She found herself feeling for the faint vibrations the swelling charge imposed on the cabin’s frame, but her clensuit muffled such faint harmonics, and it was only with “Spray on” and the growing push of the engines that she felt a roar of static, grit lofted to the velocity of flare particles. George might find engine burns routine, but Yarrow did not: Reversal had been the greatest event of her life, and every acceleration brought it astonishingly back.

Six point seven seconds of thrust—she had read the mission profile as a matter of routine—and the roar abruptly ceased, without echo or diminishing grumble. The thrill of being pressed into their couch was gone, the deceptive freedom of zero G restored. As if waking from a brief but vivid dream, Yarrow looked across wonderingly to George, who, matter of fact, had converted all the screenspace to View and had made the cabin a cupola looking upon the vastness of greater Neptune.

“Transit time?” he asked.

“Seven hours, sixteen minutes,” the Onboard replied. Yarrow could already make out the Teardrop against the field of stars, half again their size and faintly (or so she imagined) irregular. Were the comet closer to the Sun, its reflected light would shine brilliantly.

“Message from the Lotus,” the Onboard announced. “Nora Tsujimoto.”

Her voice came through tight with anxiety. “We’ve just got a short message from Castor; something about an abortive mutiny on the Centaur.”

“Mutiny?” George repeated, voice disbelieving.

“They said ‘uprising.’ No one knows anything more.”

Yarrow found herself speaking before she had registered any emotion. “Why did they say abortive?”

George shot her a look. “That’s the word they used,” Tsujimoto said fretfully. “Then they signed off. I should sign off. Call me if you hear anything.” She disappeared with a click.

Yarrow and George stared at each other.

“An uprising. What could that be?” he asked. Yarrow knew that George, like her, had already run past this point, imagining the bloody mutiny those stories used to predict and wondering what faction had sought to seize power, how the Civil Police had responded, what was happening at Castor and Pollux. It seemed somehow indecent not to pause at the brink of this calamity, to acknowledge that one had swiftly imagined the horrors beyond.

“Does the CP have guns?” she asked. It was long supposed that the cops controlled an unseen cache of weapons.

“What about the Ship’s Officers? They were military.”

“Not military as in carrying sidearms. They just wore uniforms.”

“I bet some had sidearms.”

They were avoiding the central terror, skirting a frightening vacancy whose edges crumbled larger. Yarrow began to speak, then saw that George’s eyes had taken on a distant cast, as though something puzzling had occurred to him. She touched the bead in her ear, but no voice came through. Yarrow began to ask the Onboard whether a transmission was reaching the duster when George raised his hand and tapped out a code on a square that had darkened in front of him. Her head, turning to follow his action, abruptly encountered an impedance, as though some object were resting next to her helmet. Trying to draw back, she found herself again balked. Her helmet was held fast, as in a vise.

Yarrow tried to raise her arm and found it would not move. Her clensuit had frozen in place like rusting armor.

“George!” she called. “I am experiencing suit malfunction.”

Silence. No alarms flashed; the starscape remained quiet. George’s arm had retreated from her field of vision, and she could not see the rest of him.

“Onboard: Emergency,” she said in a clear voice. “Display life support.”

“The Onboard won’t reply,” said George suddenly. “You have been denied access.”

“George, what the hell’s going on?”

“I have received a message from the Ship reporting that you are a security risk. Until the situation on the Centaur has stabilized, you are considered a danger to this mission, and must be neutralized if it is to continue. On orders from the Bridge, I have sent a command to the Onboard inactivating your clensuit’s user controls.”

“What?” Astonishment swamped any further response, even indignation. Yarrow tried to round on him, found herself unable to move, and began to struggle violently. The clensuit, still secured in its crash web, rocked slightly. She stopped abruptly, took a slow breath. Adrenaline was flooding her system: she made herself relax.

“George, that’s crazy. If I had a criminal record, I would never have made it onto the Lotus. Who gave you this order? George?”

Silence in her helmet. Yarrow listened for the sound of George breathing, but heard nothing.

“Onboard: Emergency,” she said. “Display suit functions.”

No reply, not even the response of Access Denied. Coldly, Yarrow began to test her suit’s remaining functions. Breathing air was available; the toilet systems worked. The flush of heat that had followed her initial alarm was being dispelled, and her wet underarms were drying. Yarrow guessed that the food tube near her chin would produce emergency stores on demand. But the Onboard would not respond to any summons, and attempts to place an outgoing call, or even to monitor the news feed, brought no response. Yarrow wondered if the Onboard had been instructed to disregard her orders, or she had been actually cut off from it.

The angle of her helmet, half turned toward George, was growing uncomfortable. “George,” she said sharply, “I have to straighten my neck. See for yourself.”

No response. It occurred to her that George might want to avoid defending his actions, yet wish quietly to listen to whatever she might say. In which case he could not adjust her helmet without betraying himself.

Yarrow arched her neck within its rigid confines, seeking the most comfortable position. Settling herself as best she could, she closed her eyes; then opened them a second later. The image came to her of George, sensing her slowed respiration through the Onboard, leaning over her helmet, looking in upon her sleeping face. She sought to opaque the faceplate, but the system remained unresponsive.

Yarrow looked at the screens before her. They each displayed contiguous views of the starfield, like large leaded windows looking upon space. The craft, Yarrow guessed, had emerged from Neptune’s umbra: an almost imperceptible quality of the blackness suggested that the scattered dust of Greater Neptune was catching the Sun’s dim light.

Seven hours to the Teardrop, during which Yarrow now had more to think about than she had expected. Unable to turn away from the gritty sky, she closed her eyes. She, at least, knew its color: one step up from black.

She woke to the faint vibrations of the engine charging up, a hum she took several seconds to recognize. Evidently the immobilized clensuit conducted sound better, faint compensation for her disabled radio.

Her helmet was facing forward, having evidently been adjusted while she slept. Yarrow could imagine George waiting until she was deeply asleep before carrying out the furtive act: violation posing as solicitude.

The Dragon’s Teardrop hung before her: a dim chip, tear-shaped only when seen from a different angle, bereft of detail in the natural light. An enhanced view, such as it would appear by the sunlight of Earthspace, would show a dust-burnished iceberg, darker on its leading edge as it swung, tidally locked, through High Neptune Orbit. George liked enhanced views; the dimness of Greater Neptune distressed him, perhaps because he had not lived through the Centaur s long retreat from Sol.

Yaw engines hissed briefly and the Teardrop began to drift toward starboard. Yarrow watched the stars slide by, then felt a compensating series of hisses as the image steadied. No warning was spoken as the dust engine fired, slowing the craft’s backward approach. George evidently knew that she was awake, whether he acknowledged monitoring her or not.

“You can’t complete the mission alone,” she remarked. “You haven’t trained as long as I have. And your hand-eye coordination has never really come back.”

No reply. Yarrow listened attentively as the engines sprayed and the ship slowed, then felt the resonant clang of the duster connecting with the docking collar. Anchored deep in the Teardrop’s ice, the collar was their landing pad and their base, the single installation on a chunk of ice measuring a quarter of a cubic kilometer. Held fast like Yarrow herself, the ship was at rest.

George seemed resolved to treat her like a statue, a prisoner in a clensuit-sized cell. She could feel him moving about, trying not to cross into her line of vision. Once he brushed against her arm, and drew quickly away.

Yarrow waited for the faint shudder of the airlock cycling. It took longer than it should—was George calling for instructions?—but came at last, clangorous through the rigid suit. George would now be negotiating his way along handholds to the comet’s surface, and Yarrow was alone in the craft.

“I know you’re listening,” she said. “George doesn’t suspect your existence, but I know.”

There was no reply. Yarrow settled herself more comfortably, relaxed now that she knew no eyes gazed upon her, and spoke thoughtfully.

“You had him enter that order to make him feel complicit, didn’t you? Or no—to make him feel empowered. It wouldn’t do for him to realize that the ship can be controlled remotely.”

The unanswering silence did not trouble her. “Did you arrange to place a Chill on the mission? I imagine they must be good risks: loyal to mission objectives, unembittered by the past decade’s disappointment, politically ignorant. They must be well dispersed about Greater Neptune by now.

“I don’t suppose you could free my hands for a minute, so I could straighten the kink in my right wrist? Didn’t think so. It wouldn’t do to prove yourself to me, in case I actually do retain doubts. And anyway, you might not have such fine control over my suit; likelier it’s all or nothing.” She sucked on her food tube, which yielded up a flavored paste called apricot. “This stuff is awful. There were two pirogi in the hamper, and I bet George ate both of them. The rewards of political compliance.”

The stars before her drifted at a steady but non-periodic pace. Perturbed by repeated pushoffs, the comet now tumbled erratically, precessing like a wobbling top. Eventually, she knew, Neptune would swing into view, as well as the Sun, the Centaur (you had to look for it), and waxing Triton. George always looked pained when he saw the Sun, as though it had left him. “You’re looking in the wrong direction,” she told him once.

“There it is,” she said. A blue limb, darker than a hue should be and yet carry such richness, glided slowly along the screen’s right edge, disappearing halfway down. Yarrow began counting seconds, and reached 1187 before Neptune reappeared, a slightly broader slice than before. Her helmet monitor gave the same elapsed period, but she still didn’t trust it.

Why make so much of fragmentary blue? The line was from a poem she had had to learn, taught by an old fool who would recite favored bits at his sullen students. The poem’s meaning (it had at least been short) had something to do with the blue of the heavens being more real than the various blues of Earthly things, and so what? After a minute the matching line came to her: When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue. The teacher admitted that this had been slightly old-fashioned language even when the poem was written, which left the poet no excuse, Yarrow thought. Li Ch’ing-chao wrote in a style still lucid as water, in a language whose people didn’t wear out locutions with each generation.

Neptune was no solid hue; its deep blue stirred with white like sour cream into soup. Yarrow could observe it for hours, watching its whipped curds change shape as they crept across its face, imagining the forces that drove them. If her teacher had meant for them to think of Neptune, she had either missed it or forgotten. She was still musing on this when the voice addressed her.

“Relax your muscles,” it said in the Onboard’s uninflected tone. “The suit is about to move.”

Startled, Yarrow tensed, then ordered her body to relax. A second later her right hand swung up and carefully made a fist. The crash web released itself, and her legs drew up and kicked lightly against the couch. Yarrow drifted across the cabin and bumped against the screens.

“Hey! Give me control back. This suit isn’t a remote control device.”

Silence. Yarrow’s arms and legs were moving tentatively, like those of a recovered invalid exploring his range of motion. Yarrow pulled hard on her left forearm, and managed to impede slightly its slow wave.

“Am I being exercised? I appreciate the thought. How about speaking up again, since you have already come out?”

The clensuit extended its arms, working the fingers one by one. Suddenly Yarrow understood.

“You need something done, is that it? And you don’t trust me, so you want to use my suit hke a bodyglove? I don’t think you have the dexterity.”

It came to her instantly, with a pang like a jab in the stomach. No sooner did she wonder what in the cabin her oppressor might want her to do than she knew: nothing. Any device in the duster’s interior could be controlled electronically. Yarrow was being readied for a trip outside.

“Forget it,” she cried, alarmed. “You’re not walking this suit out there. Tell me what you want, and I’ll do it. But trying to manhandle this thing on the ice will get me killed.”

No response, but the clensuit paused in its exertions. Perhaps someone was thinking it over.

Thinking quickly, Yarrow said, “My scope for sabotage would be limited anyway, would it not? And you could kill me if I didn’t cooperate. Even if you couldn’t open my helmet, you could simply lock up the ship. That might be worth it to me, assuming I am a saboteur, if I could wreck something major, but how could I? Think about it.”

She continued to think herself, reasoning outracing words. “Hold it— George doesn’t need help, does he? He’s in trouble—otherwise you could assist him by driving the tools out there. You could probably even do so without his realizing it.”

And at this the entity spoke. “You can divest yourself of the suit.”

Yarrow was so startled that she merely gaped. Then she understood. “You mean let the suit waltz outside and leave me here naked? No chance. It hasn’t the strength to do real work—don’t you know that?— and you’d fail at whatever you want. And then where would I be? You think I’d fly back like that, returning alone and without my clensuit?”

The pause that followed lasted so long that Yarrow wondered if her controller had given up whatever its plan was. Then the clensuit jerked once, as limbs do in sleep, and she realized that control of it was hers again. Immediately she whirled about, confirming—though the size of the cabin left little doubt—that she was alone.

“Hello?” No voice replied from either her helmet speaker or the cabin system. Yarrow put a call through to George. “Chow, you treacherous shitbag, are you okay? It would serve you well if you weren’t.”

No reply. Yarrow checked his suit diagnostic, which should send back a signal of either Okay or Emergency, but got no response at all.

She glanced at the com system, which could send a message to the Lotus, or even the Centaur; then shrugged. Nothing to tell either party, and she suspected that an idle status query to the Centaur would provoke the intercession of the Voice, who was (she was sure) still monitoring her.

“I’m going out,” she said. “If you know something that would help me, now’s the time.”

She ran an integrity check on her suit, glanced at the screen, then moved toward the airlock. Abruptly her helmet seal popped open, causing her to jump convulsively.

Yarrow looked down at the flaring seal. Had this happened in vacuum, her helmet would have blown off.

“I get it,” she said. She resealed her helmet and palmed open the airlock.

The airlock was no bigger than a coffin, a pair of doors that closed upon the cabin and opened onto space. Looking down, Yarrow saw a field of dim ice, Neptune-blue in its reflected light.

“Base lights on,” she said. A dozen white eyes winked open below her, ringed by smudges of surrounding ice that glowed like fluorescing minerals. The duster rested on a platform two meters above the rugged surface, which was darkened in turn by unlit boxes and modules pitoned to its surface. The utter vacuum gave the illuminated planes and shadows a crystalline clarity.

Thinking that the ship’s antenna might be damaged, Yarrow hailed George through her suit transmitter. No answer. She began to clamber down the rungs stitching the hull, mindful that an incautious leap could send her sailing free of the Teardrop’s negligible gravity.

“Care to share what you know?” she asked the surrounding landscape. “Such as what has befallen George, or where he was when it happened? I can’t believe you don’t know that.”

She might have been alone on this world, the only living creature within ten thousand kilometers. Quite possibly she was.

Activating her helmet light, Yarrow slowly turned through 360 degrees. A dozen steps away from the craft, she already stood on a slightly different plane from it. The horizon was closer in some directions than in others, and sloped away after a few dozen meters. Standing on the Teardrop was like (someone had told her) looking out from the top of an icy peak at Earth’s nighttime sky. Aside from suggesting that some mountaintops were the size of comets, this didn’t tell her much.

Crates; roped perimeters of pitons for future projects; platforms of reinforced wallboard like the floors of unbuilt houses. Yarrow had to aim her beam low, else it shone straight into the sky, returning nothing. No footprints on the hard rippled ice, no scrap of fabric clinging to a corner. He could be just outside her sight lines, or on the comet’s far side.

Yarrow was studying the middle distance when her visor went black. She exclaimed in alarm, and had begun to raise her hands to her face when control was wrested from her. The clensuit turned smartly and strode forward, surefooted in Yarrow’s blindness. Several panicked seconds passed before she realized what was happening; then she howled her outrage.

“Stop this! You can’t use someone this way! I—” She hurled her strength against the suit, straining against its resistance as if pulling herself up a wall. The clensuit, which was working its hands rapidly, abruptly began to go cold at the extremities, underarms, and groin. Yarrow gasped, unreasoning terror flooding her. The chill, like liquid nitrogen spilling through the suit seams, was spreading rapidly.

She went limp, fighting a powerful urge to try to wrap her arms around herself. The spread of cold ceased, but the cold remained, dissipating through her limbs and torso. Yarrow began shivering, and felt with astonishment her teeth begin to chatter.

Minutes later—the passage of time lost in the black welling of terror— her visor abruptly cleared. She was standing back where she had been, facing the rippled horizon. Yarrow began to sag, then caught herself. She pushed up her suit temperature (though it was by now warm enough), and turned to look behind her. There was no indication of what it was the suit had done.

“I’ll remember this,” she whispered. Too softly for the mike to pick up; but that was just exhaustion.

The glideline began near her right arm, a slim pyloned ribbon like a handrail that ran across the ice field and vanished over the horizon. Yarrow took one of the grips dangling from it and clipped it to her suit. She braced a foot against the kickplate and launched herself, skittering out along the line like an upside-down gondola.

The grip squealed merrily, a startling effect in silent vacuum. Yarrow swept her beam about the horizon, seeing nothing that might be a clensuited figure. Something was niggling at her hindbrain, but she didn’t have time to coax it forth.

George had courted danger in venturing out alone, and now Yarrow was doing the same. Most of their duties could be accomplished by a pair of advanced mechs, but the intelligent ones that could match the manipulative capacity of two people were in constant demand on the Triton project, and semi-skilled labor was cheap. What modest dangers attended the mission jeopardized only the workers themselves.

The glideline circled the comet like a meridian, allowing workers to circumnavigate its long axis without having to use ice boots or their jetpacks. The whine of the grip oscillated as Yarrow bounced lightly against its elasticity, her path tracing a sine wave above the ribbon’s precise curve.

Abruptly—the thought convulsed her muscles before fully taking form—Yarrow grabbed hard on the brake. The grip shrieked, slewing her forward as it slowed. She struck the rail with her opposite forearm, releasing the grip, and rebounded against its tethered length. Feeling the rail rasp against her ribs, she grabbed at it with both hands, a tailless monkey clutching the last strung vine.

Breathing hard, Yarrow looked down the rail stretching before her, which disappeared unbroken over the near horizon. The image was coming clear only now in her mind: the glideline, snapped by meteoric debris, seismic shifting, or perhaps just cold stress, raising two jagged ends pointing just past each other. A glider, oblivious in the darkness, flies off it like a load fired from a mass driver, sailing on a tangent into a Neptune orbit of its own.

Very slowly, Yarrow let go of the rail and, after floating free for several seconds, began to pull herself, hand over hand, along its length. She narrowed the focus of her beam and ran it carefully along the rail for a dozen meters ahead of her. In the absence of visual landmarks, the receding ribbon swelled in scale: a tram line soaring over a polar plain.

No breaks were apparent, but Yarrow found herself unable to glance to either side for more than a few seconds before she felt compelled to look back at the glideline. How fast could a worker escape the Teardrop and still be able to return via his jetpack? Was George perhaps returning now? (She scanned the sky.) Had the Teardrop’s spin placed him over its opposite hemisphere, from which he might return to the duster unseen by her? (But then would not the Voice recall her?)

Something was wrong with her reasoning, but she didn’t dare pause to find it. Enjoining herself to think clearly, she called up the duty sheet on her screen and wondered which tasks George would have turned to first. Presumably those that a single person could accomplish; the rest would be best deferred.

In the event, George seemed to have begun with the tasks closest to hand, pausing at each stop like a milkman. A water processor whose microwave dish had darkened with dust had been cleaned; and a large cutting device, its talons gripping square meters of ice that had begun to fracture under the strain, had been (crudely) repositioned. “Going to let me discover everything on my own?” she asked, expecting and getting no answer.

Something was wrong at the third site. A scaffold post, emerging slowly over the horizon, leaned at a vertiginous angle; and Yarrow soon saw a jig, slight but unmistakable, in the glideline’s path. Her heart in her mouth, she approached it cautiously; but the ribbon proved unbroken. The worksite beyond was now visible, however, and she saw what had happened at once.

A deep trench had been opened in the ice, a smooth-walled crevasse, several meters deep, that had permitted core samples to be taken from several degrees of arc. Once a meter wide, the trench had crunched shut like a frost giant’s crooked mouth. Splintered icecakes piled up at the ragged seam, and the ground seemed lower to one side.

Yarrow shifted her grip to the tributary gliderail and approached the site cautiously. The ribbon ran beside the trench site—a guardrail overlooking the verge of a vanished canyon—permitting her to shine her beam along the impacted edge. Two thirds of the way down she saw it: a glimpse of clensuit among the glittering shards.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. Christians had the best maledictions.

Grasping spurs of ice, Yarrow pulled herself closer. Wedging one boot in a crevasse, she began to prise away blocks of rubble. Quickly she discovered that the clensuit lay half a meter below ground level, glinting between two floes propped against each other. It took her nearly an hour to clear the intervening space: although gravity was negligible, loose chunks of ice kept spilling into her excavation from isostatic pressure.

The scrap was George’s shoulder, which meant that his helmet lay beneath a large block that was pinned by surrounding rubble. Yarrow hooked her fingers under the block, which proved too massive to dislodge. She thought she could feel a helmet collar.

She fumbled through her belt kit, which contained a small cutting laser. Even at sharpest focus, the device was barely sufficient for spot welding; but how much power did it require to vaporize ice?

Quite a bit, she soon discovered: the beam produced a small puff of steam but made remarkably little headway. Belatedly Yarrow remembered that that the ice on the Teardrop was only 50°K, and could absorb much heat before melting. In the end she sharpened its focus to a pinpoint and sought to slice through the floe. When this failed to work—the escaping steam, she suspected, was refreezing in the space she had already cut—she took out her pick and hacked angrily. The nanometer-scale tip pierced the ice readily, and after some effort Yarrow broke the block in two and wedged the halves centimeters apart.

George’s helmet was dusted with ice, but did not possess the frosted rime of escaped air. Leaning in as close as she could, Yarrow touched the tip of her laser to his helmet, then pressed its handle against her own.

“George, can you hear me? I’m trying to dig you out. You don’t need your radio to respond.”

No sound, not even the ragged susurrus of injured breathing. Yarrow thought of something.

“I don’t know your relationship with the Voice from the Centaur, but it can’t hear you from here. Didn’t even know what happened to you. It untied me so I could haul you back, but if there’s anything you have to say that you don’t want it to hear, now’s the time.”

No response. Yarrow wondered if George was being cagy, or just dead. It wasn’t easy to breach the integrity of a clensuit, but tectonic forces, even those of a comet, might suffice.

She climbed out of the hole she had dug, found a piece of wallboard, and sliced it into long rectangles. Returning to her hole (which was slowly filling) she resumed digging, using the boards as crude bulwarks. She didn’t check her watch; but by the time she had finished she had drained her suit’s store of fruit juice and was feeling aching tremors in her arms and back. George’s upper body lay exposed at the bottom of a three-sided well; Yarrow had shucked her jetpack and most of her hand tools in order to reach past him in the narrow confines. She touched her forefinger to the display stud on George’s chest and read the numbers on her helmet display.

George’s body temperature was 31°C. The hypothermia of shock, or the clensuit warming a cooling corpse?

Yarrow had, in fact, little doubt. George’s chest seemed misshapen, and one shoulder plainly dislocated. She looped a cord under his arms, clambered to the top of her makeshift caisson, and slowly hauled him out.

Returning to the glideline, Yarrow felt his deadweight bouncing at the end of the cord, a helium balloon she did not glance back at. She secured the cord to the grip, grabbed its strap, and shoved herself briskly along the rail.

Belatedly she thought to activate her recorder, which would be examined at mission’s end. “Seventeen forty-three,” she said, “returning with body of George Chow, who was crushed when the fissure at Site Sixteen closed up. Possibly the shock of our landing stressed the ice; how long does it take for such pressure to work through supercold cometary material?”

Yarrow started to erase the last words, then remembered that mission tapes could not be altered. She tried to speak more carefully.

“The control exerted over my suit by the Voice that addressed me in the cabin does not seem to extend far beyond the ship. I do not understand its mechanism, and shall not speculate. Since it did not know what had befallen George, I imagine—”

Something grabbed her from behind. Yarrow shrieked, releasing the grip as a second arm snaked around her helmet, blocking her view.

Yarrow snatched at the arms, unthinkingly moving to break their grip on her throat. But the hands were scrabbling down her suit chest as though seeking to paw her breasts. She grabbed a wrist as its hand closed on her display stud and pulled it away.

Shifting her center of gravity, Yarrow moved to throw the figure over her shoulder, but microgravity marred her reflexes. The exertion spun her around, and she found herself face to face with George’s clensuit. Before she could react, its interior helmet light came on, illuminating a visor splashed with blood and a pallid face beyond, eyes bulging and crusted lips agape as if horrified to be dead.

Yarrow screamed and kicked out, driving her foot against the suit’s chest even as it groped for her own. The clensuited figure flew backward and rebounded on its cord, but Yarrow found herself receding rapidly as though the gliderail, the clensuit, and the ground beneath them were a video image contracting as the POV drew smoothly back. With a start she realized that she was leaving the comet’s surface.

She flailed, but there was nothing to grasp, no purchase to gain. A dozen meters away, the clensuited figure was fumbling with its cord, waving its free arm in a wide sweep. Yarrow took an instant to wonder why it wasn’t watching her in triumph or dismay, then gave herself over to panic.

No roar of engines, no whistle of atmosphere. The horizon was visible now, an uneven but perceptible curve. Yarrow was leaving the Teardrop on an almost straight path, and the ground was falling away rapidly.

She aimed her transmitter at the icefields below, hoping that a relay dish lay within direct sight. “Onboard: Emergency,” she said. “Am leaving Teardrop at apparent escape velocity. Acknowledge.”

Response would be instantaneous if it came at all, but she waited long seconds before dejection hit her. The Voice had plainly suborned the Onboard, assuming that her message had reached the ship at all. The duster would come after her only if It chose to do so.

With a small start, Yarrow realized that her recorder was still on. “I suppose you heard all that,” she remarked. She spent a minute calming herself by describing what had happened, then switched off. Should she have to leave a farewell message, she would take some care in composing it.

Her rate of ascent, she knew, was gradually slowing (if only slightly) under the pull of the Teardrop’s gravity. This pull, however, was also weakening with increasing distance, and probably at a faster rate, which meant that she would never slow to a halt and fall back. Yarrow studied the receding comet—now fully visible—with care. It was shrinking almost imperceptibly; conceivably she would go into an elliptical orbit. Of course, this would do her little good if the rotational period proved to last days or weeks.

No training course had counseled this, but Yarrow had watched enough videos as a child to know what to do. Her clensuit held a pressurized oxygen reserve, which could allow her an hour’s breathing if her recyclers failed. A hose permitted her to feed air into another’s suit in emergencies. Yarrow fumbled out the hose, aimed it directly away from the Teardrop, and opened the valve.

The rush of escaping gas distantly reached her ears. Inertia leaned into her, compelling her to control the hose with both hands. She called up a grid on her visor and watched the outline of the Teardrop against it, willing the direction of drift to stop and reverse itself. By the time she was certain she could see this, the reserve tank was 83 percent empty.

“Don’t know my own strength,” she muttered. Wild Boys tended to have strongly developed leg muscles. She had once imagined that this could get her in trouble.

Her helmet light, playing across the dark expanse below her, found the gliderail, a thread of reflective silver. Yarrow cut off the spray and ran her beam along the rail’s length. After a moment she found it, and jumped up visor magnification to get a clearer image: George’s clensuit, moving with slow deliberation, pushing itself toward the duster. Despite moving within an illuminated circle, it did not look up.

She was drifting toward the comet with dreamlike slowness, an orbital-ballistic dance outside the frenetic pace of human time. Yarrow positioned the hose and opened the valve once again.

The results were startling: the pressure gauge spun down to 0 almost immediately, but she felt only slight acceleration. Of course, she thought with awful realization: the remaining oxygen would exert less pressure. There was a law of physics concerning that.

George was growing steadily in her beam, a long, still figure nosing against the rail like a feeding fish. She would miss him on her present course, though not by much: her work outside the Lotus had sharpened her spatial hand-eye skills.

The tip of the duster appeared over the horizon, a clean parabola breaking the irregular salience. Yarrow swore aloud. If the shambling kuei made it to the ship, she was dead.

Some part of her had been readying for this. She opened the programmer of her clensuit, overrode its safeguards, and sealed the respirer membrane of her recycler. With the CO_2 awaiting catalysis into carbon and oxygen thus isolated, she pumped it into the reserve tank. It made a dismayingly low-pressure mix, so she drained off nitrogen to supplement it. Her ears popped as the air pressure in the helmet went down.

Working quickly, Yarrow drove the gas mixture through a heating coil, then shunted its thrashing molecules back into the reserve tank. Aiming the hose carefully, she overlaid a bull’s eye on her visor, sited the kuei at its center, and released the nozzle. Her lungs began to itch.

The nozzle, hissing for scant seconds, faded into silence. Yarrow used its last puff to correct her course, aiming at a point on the rail ahead of the gliding figure. She took a deep breath, but the urgency signaled by her lungs did not abate. “Watch this,” she whispered to the tape.

The clensuited legs came up at her like a docking boom. Arms extended, Yarrow struck hard, clutching them before she had a chance to register impact. A second later came a harder blow: the cord securing George to the grip yanked taut and held. She felt her teeth rattle, but had no time to react: George’s clensuit, with more than human speed, was swarming over her.

Hands clawed for her chest, as she had expected. She knocked one away, grabbed the other wrist and tried to spin the suit around. The kuei lacked George’s strength, an advantage. Another: it was tethered to the cord, while Yarrow was free. The dolly was singing down the gliderail like a runaway train, exerting a steady pull on the clensuit’s movements.

Yarrow grabbed the suit from behind, pressing her chest against it to protect her display studs. George’s suit began to wriggle about with inhuman pliancy, and she tightened her grasp. Something gave softly under her grasp, and she nearly let go with a shriek.

She didn’t dare let go to pull out her air hose, even as black spots began to bloom against her visor, but it proved unnecessary. Indicator lights on her visor display abruptly changed, and a second later she felt cool air against her face. Dizzily she realized that her clensuit, sensing the proximity of a second unit, had extruded the hose like a proboscis and fixed it upon George’s emergency tank. She drank in her first breath in wonder, willing her arms clenched.

The clensuit sensed what was happening. It writhed frantically, then leaned forward to bump helmets with her.

“Yarrow, for God’s sake! You’ll kill me if you take my air!” The voice echoed in her helmet, tinny but recognizable.

This was not George. George Chow was dead.

“For God’s sake, Yarrow, leave off! My recycler’s crippled; I’m on the tank, too.” His voice was weak and pained. “I can’t control the suit, but that’s no reason to kill me!”

Abruptly she released him, and immediately drew back a hand and pushed him away. Connected by the air hose to Yarrow and by the cord to the dolly, the kuei danced for a second like a suit on a clothesline, then reached quickly for the hose. The creature had it crimped in one hand, cutting off the air flow, and was reaching for Yarrow’s chest with the other when she got out her laser and sliced through the cord.

The suit went dead instantly, an unstrung puppet. The whine of the dolly was abruptly gone, and the air flow returned with a puff. Yarrow was drifting, weapon raised, tied loosely to a corpse.

Below her the dolly glided on, unhindered by its flailing cargo. Yarrow looked to the horizon. From ground level, the duster was not yet visible. Had the clensuit gotten close enough to make visual contact with the duster’s transmitter, the Voice might have been able to reassert control.

Heart pounding, Yarrow forced herself to put away the laser. Slowly she pulled the limp clensuit toward her, watching lest it move. She pulled at the cord looped under its arms and examined the burnt end. It was strong work cord, adequate for hauling large masses; but its core was a woven crystal of conducting nanofiber, capable of carrying a substantial dataload.

Yarrow looked to the gliderail, intact and rigid in the deep chill of High Neptune Orbit. She was suddenly certain that it could serve as a superconductor.

Pulling the clensuit toward her, Yarrow took its jetpack and fired a spurt skyward. She grasped the suit’s wrist as they drifted gently to the ground, bumping against each other like tired drunks. Feeling like a ghoul, she lashed the clensuit to the ice, securing the cord with self-driving pitons she took from a storage shed nearby. A mobile bot could still come and cut the suit free, hauling it back into transmitter range, but she didn’t plan on giving it time.

Walking the Teardrop was easy if one didn’t mind the pace: Yarrow’s boots extruded barbed cleats that gripped the ice, permitting an easy if jerky gait. She strode away from the duster, looking about cautiously for transmitters. She tried to snap off her suit antenna, but couldn’t reach it.

“Clensuit: display suit functions,” she ordered. A row of green bars appeared along the bottom of her faceplate. She asked the system to report suit pressure verbally. “Point nine seven three millibars,” it replied.

Yarrow founding it mildly comforting that she could talk to something, even if only her clensuit. “Uplink,” she ventured, but the system could find no satellite in the skies above. The notion of anything orbiting this frozen globule seemed merely foolish.

Something niggled at her memory, and Yarrow looked across the horizon, wondering what it was. She glanced to her left, turning nearly in a circle to catch what had snagged her subconscious, but her helmet beam disclosed only the soft limbs of ice, eroded by the millennia’s micrometeorites.

“You out there, Mister Man?” she called. “You got something to say, I’m listening.”

Triton rose behind her, bright enough to cast shadows. When full—it was now in three-quarters phase—the moon shone like a shaded light-bulb, sometimes the same size, and nearly as bright, as the Sun. It was hard to believe that the brilliant globe was the coldest place in the solar system, reflecting back all light and keeping none for itself.

At once a wave of weariness rose and struck her. Both feet anchored, Yarrow swayed like a nodding reed. “Time?” she asked, realizing with a start that she didn’t know within hours.

“Nineteen thirty-one,” her suit told her. Five hours since Touchdown, scarcely a full day. After a few seconds she realized that her exertions were nonetheless adequate to tire her.

In microgravity one can sleep in any position. Yarrow felt her eyes close, and wondered vaguely whether her exposed position left her vulnerable. She imagined the duster lifting off the comet’s surface, coming after her… no other danger seemed credible, save the sparse but inescapable sleet of tiny particles, every grain moving fast enough to puncture her suit, perhaps punch through her body entirely, like a cosmic ray tearing through a choromosome…

“Warning: power supply low,” the suit said abruptly. Yarrow started awake, looking about wildly as a dream-threat receded rapidly from conscious recall. Her helmet beam swung across a darkened landscape (Triton was gone from the sky), disclosing nothing but still ice. Collecting her thoughts, she asked for the suit functions display.

Suit power, a squat green bar a few hours ago, now stood at 18 percent capacity, low enough that the display lined it in orange. Guiltily Yarrow realized that her present anchored position was permitting heat to leach into the ice underfoot, which would not have been possible had she thought to tie a tether and doze drifting.

Cursing softly, she pulled herself free and began to stamp across the ice as though to warm herself. She remembered passing a powerbox earlier, and retraced her steps until she saw it on the horizon, an unpolished cube atop a stalk no wider than her finger. She paused before plugging in—could the Voice have entered the powerbox and set a trap?—but could finally see no alternative. As she brought her belt close to the nearest face, a cable snaked out from her suit and attached itself to the featureless surface. “Recharge in progress,” the suit told her.

She was sitting on the cube, imagining herself still wholly awake, when her helmet trilled that it was detecting a radio signal. Yarrow came to her senses with a start as her system caught the frequency.

“…there? George, Yarrow, please rep—”

Recognizing the voice, Yarrow began to answer, but her suit queeped suddenly and flashed a reply code before her eyes. Yarrow swore.

“—can hear us. We cannot read any—” Tsujimoto stopped as she received the burst from Yarrow’s clensuit. Silence followed, as she presumably went away to tell someone.

Yarrow checked the code number against the suit’s directory, but she was pretty sure what had been sent. The clensuit had prevented her from replying because of its low energy levels, and instead had sent a three-bit burst, which signified acknowledgment of a message when the recipient was unable to respond for technical reasons. She wondered what the Lotus would make of it.

Bemusedly Yarrow searched the sky, wondering what source had hailed her. The Lotus could not communicate directly with clensuits across thousands of klicks, so used orbital comsats. Evidently one was overhead, circling the Teardrop in a high, slow orbit (this icechip could hardly retain it otherwise) that just now brought it over the horizon. One would have expected two comsats in such circumstances, one overhead at all times, but perhaps the Voice had disabled the other.

“Yarrow,” Tsujimoto said, “get back to the duster as soon as you are able. Since you didn’t signal an emergency, I assume you merely—”

Recharge Malfunction, her faceplate said in flashing red. The system chimed once, and a series of numbers began to crawl across her field of vision.

“—automatic takeoff. Please reply as soon as you are able.”

Yarrow cried “Hold!” to the systems display, but heard over her voice the trill that signaled downlink disconnection. Glowing codes hung frozen before her till she banished them.

“System, can you repeat that message?” she asked. The system, unsurprisingly, could not. “Doesn’t matter,” she said to herself. It was the other news that actually concerned her.

Grimly Yarrow recalled the codes and studied them. The fault, according to her clensuit, lay in the powerbox: something was preventing its proper discharge. Her system duly listed the various attempts it had made to overcome this, none of which Yarrow was competent to judge. At the bottom of the list appeared the results of its efforts: Suit power was now at 21.3 percent.

“At present expenditure levels, how long until suit failure?” she asked the system.

“Lethal failure in two point six hours,” her suit replied.

Walking on the surface, of course, would accelerate energy expenditure. Yarrow sighed, then ordered her suit to heat up a cup of strong tea. Swallowing a mouthful of fruit paste, she told herself to wake up, then set about finding the trail of cleat-marks that would lead her back to the duster.

“Recorder on,” she said. Between sips of tea she recounted recent events, including her suspicion that the Voice had managed to disrupt the emergency powerboxes. “It’s a cold way to die,” she remarked bitterly. She felt a stab of envy for Chow, dispatched to eternity by the grinding hydrodynamics of a true if tiny world.

Yarrow found a second powerbox near the excavation site, but was again unable to coax current from it. If the Voice had sent her blacked-out clensuit to establish connections extending its control over the power grid, she would not be able to undo it from here. She followed the branching gliderail back toward the duster, taking care not to touch it.

“There it is,” she said as the craft’s rounded tip broke the ragged horizon. No searchlight shone, but Yarrow was certain that the ship’s instrumentation could detect her. She decided to leave the recorder on, an unwashed creek bed that the next few minutes would etch.

Like an enemy fortress, the duster loomed up in the night sky, discernible as much by the stars it occluded as by their dim reflection. Yarrow approached cautiously, trying to remember where she had stood when clensuit control was wrested from her. She had been only a few steps from the hatch—which did not guarantee that the Voice’s range of control did not extend farther.

“Hello the Ship,” Yarrow ventured. There was no reply. She hailed the Onboard electronically, and was rewarded with a standard acknowledgment. Emboldened, she ordered the hatch to open.

Nothing happened.

Yarrow took a breath and started forward. “Advancing slowly,” she reported. In fact she was approaching in a wide spiral, like a housebreaker looking for a back entrance. The ground beneath the hatch showed smooth plate like a paved walkway, which she avoided. The duster’s three legs nestled snugly into the docking collar’s fitted recesses, holding the craft fast as though against a hurricane. Yarrow considered climbing one, then remembered that the yaw rockets rested atop each.

A stack of leftover material stood beside the landing platform, and she picked up a meter-long metal rod and secured it to her belt. Finger-sized joint fasteners lay discarded nearby, which she stuffed into her pouch. She wondered if the Voice was observing this, and whether it would realize what she was about. Quickly she stood, took half a step toward the craft, then flexed her knees lightly and hopped.

She rose lazily, drifting past the rocket nozzles with aching slowness, but continued with almost undiminished momentum to the tip of the duster and beyond. She was three times the ship’s height before she felt herself slow at last to a stop and hang over the starlit icescape, as though her body were straining to detect the comet’s faint gravity.

Her descent began almost imperceptibly, allowing her ample time to study its path. Deciding that she would overshoot the duster by several meters, she took out a fastener and flung it away on a flat tangent. Her course seemed little altered by this, and she hurled two more into her path, wishing she had something more massive. Below her, the antenna complex protruded like an askew weathervane from the duster’s smooth surface. She was descending toward the duster’s bow, a featureless hemisphere that would permit no purchase. Coming down lightly, Yarrow kicked off with one foot, sending her up a few meters in the proper direction. The antenna passed below her, a tangle of electronics like a wind-gnarled tree growing from a stony outcrop. She had her cord ready in one hand, but it proved unnecessary; her outstretched arm snagged a boom and she pulled herself in.

“The vulture’s perch,” she muttered, reaching down to feel among the instrumentation. Upon waking she had realized that the Voice must be controlling the ship’s Onboard remotely, so could be balked by disabling its receivers. Looping the cord around a strut, she secured the other end to her belt, then braced her feet and hefted the metal rod. She identified a vulnerable spot behind the antenna dish, swung back the rod, and brought it down hard.

The shock of the blast threw her backward, every thought knocked from her head. The clensuit was shrilling, but Yarrow didn’t hear it. A timeless interval followed, of effortless floating and absence of pain or thought. It was only when she bounced, once and then again, and came lightly to rest on a rough chilly surface that the world of inevitable consequence returned.

Get up. It was an urgent voice, more intimate than the clensuit’s in her ear. Yarrow groaned, although pain had not yet arrived.

You’re dying, get up. It seemed a non sequitur, and Yarrow puzzled slightly, as one might recall an odd remark from the night before. Don’t die not fighting: Up.

The pain came then, like sunshine burning through fog. The underside of her body was growing quite cold, which was welcome, since every joint and sinew ached as though sawn. This was wrong, Yarrow thought confusedly; and then sharper pain sliced through the gauze of her befuddlement.

Up, yes. Getting up was easy in microgravity; and the cold seeping through the ice (she reahzed that she was lying on the ground) was beginning to ache on the peripheries of numbness. Yarrow rose to a sitting position and nearly cried out. The searing gust raced beneath her suit like a flame.

Her faceplate glowed dimly with electronic noise, and her suit’s joints moved with difficulty. The clensuit was dead, its systems fried. Standing unsteadily, Yarrow could feel her soles chilling, while the rest of her body failed to warm.

Something brushed against her thigh, and she held up the end of her cord, its ragged end charred. Had she not been tethered by it, the shock of the blast might have thrown her into escape orbit. Or possibly the voltage would have killed her outright.

She might well be dead in another minute, anyway.

The ship; in. Yarrow turned until she saw the ship, a dozen meters away and seemingly unchanged in the dim light. The antenna, of course, had been destroyed by the surge the Voice had sent through it. Never mind that now. In or die here. Her air was growing stale, and cold.

Three low leaps brought her to the docking collar. She did not trouble to avoid the metal plating, through which the Voice had earlier taken over her suit. Having destroyed the antenna, it had lost access to the ship, a limb it had sawn off to see her fall.

She could not send a radio signal to open the airlock, but the hatch possessed manual controls. Swarming up the ladder, oblivious to the pain in her hands but alert to the worsening air, Yarrow reached the control pad and tapped out the emergency entry code.

Nothing happened.

Yarrow didn’t think, didn’t wait for the orders in her ear. The screw-driver in her glove would not extrude, but she was able to work it out with her finger, like a child pushing out a splinter. The threads holding the coverplate in place would not respond to random vibration, but the microscopic pressure sensors lining the helices detected the directed effort of a tool blade and allowed the screws to turn. Four screws off, and the coverplate drifted free.

Yarrow reached in with her right hand. She had not manipulated the release for the explosive bolts in three years, but they had made her perform the act repeatedly and in the dark, and with the handle’s touch she remembered what to do. A half twist clockwise, pull, and a quarter twist back while pushing down: the hull shuddered once. When she withdrew her hand and ran it across the hatch, she felt its edge raised several centimeters.

With the blood roaring in her ears, Yarrow pulled open the hatch and squeezed in. The inner door opened manually; firing the bolts had released its switches. A blast of air rushed past her as she slid it open, like the soul escaping from a violated body.

Darkness within, not even the glow of displays. Of course: before withdrawing from the duster, the Voice had pithed its Onboard. The doors could not be made to close behind her; the air system would not come on.

The spare suit. Was it her angel speaking, or merely the voice of her training? Yarrow didn’t wonder. The cabin was too small to get lost in; she felt her way across the wall, hands sliding along smooth displays. Behind the pilot’s seat, the cabinet panel snapped open when she twisted its handle. She pulled out the bunched suit, fumbling for its belt.

No air left. She activated the other suit, embracing it like a withered friend in less need of succor than she. The hiss of oxygen was very cold.

Fingers stiffening, Yarrow activated the helmet light on the spare suit. Stowed in an insulated compartment, it had been impervious to the Voice’s devastations, and its beam came on at once. Her faceplate was milky with frost, and the plume of her breath added more. With a curse she killed the light, then wrapped the limp suit round her neck, knotting its limbs like a sash.

Working by touch, she found the proper switch beneath the pilot’s seat, thinking with etched clarity that whether she lived or died turned freely upon this moment. A second after she pushed the control a faint light came on behind her.

Yarrow pushed herself backward, looking for the welcome glow of cabin displays. A string of pilot lights shone dimly through the haze of her visor, like stars through Neptune’s rings. She kicked closer, wondering why there were not more of them, and heard the joints of her skins crackle.

This decided her. Maneuvering again by touch she found the airlock, and discovered that it had slid shut with the reawakening of the system. She fumbled back to the pilot’s chair and felt for the manual controls, but could not discern their settings. As a calming languor stole over her, Yarrow found the helmet of the empty clensuit, pressed it against her own, and asked: “Can you get this ship into the air?”

If the suit’s system replied, she did not hear it. A great force pressed down upon her, crushing the chill air from her lungs. Yarrow felt her spirit being squeezed from her body, and braced at last for death. But the compression simply went on, as though some stretched sinew yet bound her to her battered frame, and she felt the contending surges of numbness and pain, knowing that the latter meant that she was alive.

It was a cold crossing. The duster’s system, shut down by the Voice, lay beyond the reach of the clensuit, and the cabin remained unpressured and unheated. The empty suit heated the air it piped into Yarrow’s helmet, but it could not restore the functioning of her own dead system, and she shivered and moaned through the hours of passage.

The spare clensuit could run just enough of the duster to set a course for the Lotus. Communication was impossible, as the antenna was melted into a single mass. The cabin shone dimly, resolved into clearer darkness as the frost in her helmet slowly melted. With every breath, however, Yarrow saw a chilly plume, and reflected that if she were warmer she would doubtless hurt more.

All that Yarrow was able to derive from the ship’s Onboard was the last order left in its registers: to deploy its limited microrepair facilities to rebuild the antenna. Puzzling over this, she realized that the Voice wished to eliminate the evidence that it had killed her. Had her body been recovered, another frozen island in High Neptune Orbit, it would have seemed to have fallen victim to a mishap when recharging from a powerbox. With the antenna replaced and control over the duster restored, the Voice could no doubt contrive to discharge one of the boxes in a catastrophic surge.

During her stronger moments she wondered what was happening on the Centaur, and once made an attempt to establish radio contact with the Lotus through the working clensuit’s system. Then her thirst would rise up, and she would hold up the clensuit helmet like a skull and yearn for a way to reach its stores of juice and water. Weakness and pain would overwhelm her, and she would weep silently, regret the death of Chow, and fear for the future until she had rocked herself into exhaustion.

No displays shone in the cabin, and Yarrow’s dead suit would not even report the passage of time. Perhaps the duster had repaired its antenna, and could be steered safely to the Lotus by remote pilot. Otherwise the clensuit’s modest system would bring the craft as close as possible and then try to kill relative velocity. Dozing in fits, Yarrow wondered how many hours had passed.

She was asleep when the engines came on, and had to snatch at the clensuit before it was torn from her grasp. “Status report!” she cried, touching helmets; but the system’s capacities were already fully occupied. Yarrow sought to ready herself as deceleration woke drowsing injuries, but excitement splintered her resolve.

A series of irregular bursts from the secondaries was bringing the craft around, but Yarrow could not calculate its orientation. It was only when the ship bumped once with a muffled clang that she knew herself docked. A mechanical whine sounded somewhere beneath her couch: emergency probes sounding the crippled ship.

A minute later the outer airlock opened, then the inner door slid roughly aside. The blast of air that broke into the cabin flapped the limbs of the clensuit, and a world of sound swirled about her again. Yarrow worked the manual seals on her helmet with trembling fingers, and tore it off with a scream of relief at the warm fresh puff in her face.

Footsteps ran outside the airlock, but Yarrow, fumbling desperately with the second helmet’s seals, was too busy to look up. Pencils of light wavered in the dirty air, bright circles sliding over the displays. When one caught Yarrow in the face she looked up blinking, a water tube trailing from the opened faceplate into her mouth.

“Sweet Jesus!” a familiar voice cried. Yarrow had not known that Tsujimoto was a Christian. The cabin lights slowly came up as the Lotus’ emergency systems took control of the damaged ship. As the torch’s glare faded into the ambient glow she looked in confusion from Tsujimoto’s intent expression—bereft of relief or concern—to the tool she held in her other hand. It took Yarrow a second to realize that she was looking at a gun.

They locked her in a small room created for that purpose, as though to put her into her own quarters would detract from the gravity of the situation. Communication with others was forbidden her, another symbolic sanction, or did they think she would seek to sway witnesses? In the hours between her long periods of sleep, Yarrow decided that some incriminating message had been fabricated by the Voice, Chow crying murder or some routine broadcast that contradicted the chronology of the account she had given. In addition (or so Yarrow guessed during her debriefing), conditions on the Centaur were still unknown, which left everyone frightened.

“Are you listening?” she once asked the featureless walls, but knew that if anyone was, it was not her captors. At regular intervals a slot appeared in one wall and a food tray peeped forth. Yarrow could not determine the intervals between meals—was it constitutional to deny a prisoner knowledge of the passage of time?—but guessed that she was being fed when everyone else was. Eight meals thus meant three days.

When they came for her she coldly requested a shower, which was granted after an uneasy exchange of glances. She was escorted down the passageway by two colleagues while Chin stuck his head into the stall, presumably to confirm that none of the fixtures could be broken off and used as a weapon. Left alone, Yarrow soaped herself extravagantly, expending three times a day’s fair water ration. She guessed that no one would bring themselves to bang on the door.

Her judges were assembled in the common room, which had been stripped of amenities in order to accommodate their crowded numbers. Ling, Tsujimoto, Yarrow’s own superior Deng, a pilot who spent most of his time in space, and two Han-faced Slavs, probably lovers, who always kept the same shift, sat facing her in severe silence. Yarrow tried to remember whether six constituted a board of inquiry or a tribunal.

The male Slav (his name tag read “Vrdolyak”) lifted slightly the gavel that identified him as chair. Yarrow expected him to convene the meeting with an official declaration, but his only words—“Tell us what you say happened,” as he pointed at her—made clear that the session was long in progress. Panic fluttered up in her chest: she was to be told nothing.

Carefully she recounted her ordeal, which she had pondered and rehearsed in her days of confinement. At times she would allude to what her listeners must have determined from other evidence—“As the tape shows,” or “Which you will note from the antenna”—and look for a sign of acknowledgment in their eyes. At her mention of the Voice Ling looked faintly quizzical, Vrdolyak frowned. No one else’s expression told her anything.

When she finished, the six looked at her silently, not exchanging glances. After a few seconds Vrdolyak stirred slightly and said, “Thank you.” He touched the side of his chair, and the door opened behind her.

Yarrow stared. “You mean that’s it? You haven’t even told me what’s going on!” Her two escorts appeared on either side of her, one of them touching her elbow. She shook them loose furiously. “Is this a trial? I have the right to an advocate!”

“This is not a criminal proceeding,” said Vrdolyak. “The crew does not have the authority to convene such.” Tsujimoto murmured something, and he added, “Should criminal charges be brought, you will have access to an advocate and all your legal rights.”

“Charges for what?” she shouted. “You haven’t told me what I’m being accused of!” Vrdolyak began to speak, but she overrode him. “And don’t tell me that you haven’t brought criminal charges: why am I under arrest?”

Vrdolyak flushed brick red. “You are being held under emergency statutes,” he said curtly. “Constitutional civil liberties may be suspended during emergency conditions.”

They stared at each other.

“You mean that’s it?” she demanded, incredulous. “There’s an emergency, you don’t have to tell me what because it supersedes my right to know, and you can lock me up without telling me why on the same basis? You know that everything I said is supported by the tape.”

“Your suit tape was damaged by electrical discharge, and cannot be easily played,” said Deng heavily. “We are employing scanning techniques to reconstruct what we can.”

Yarrow leaped to her feet. “No!” she cried. Hands grabbed at her. “Can’t you see what you’re doing?” She was pulled backward as her escorts clumsily overpowered her. Shouting, she was dragged out the door as her judges stared impassively.

In her solitude, she considered how things must look. What would the “restored” tape show? Something baldly incriminating? She decided not; it would suffice if recovered portions of the tape contradicted the account she had given. She spent more time pondering what a team sent to the comet would find. An autopsy would disclose the order in which the injuries to George’s body had been inflicted, and which ones had occurred posthumously. Would Castor send a physician to study the body in situ, or would they ship it back first, or—she caught her breath at the thought—would they leave its examination to expert systems? She could not believe that the CP would conduct a murder investigation without having a human examine the victim.

She was drinking tea (delivered through a hatch no wider than the pot) when a door opened in the ceding and Ling floated through. Yarrow stared, not sure what to say, then gestured apologetically. “I only have one cup.”

“That’s all right, thank you.” Ling was embarrassed—no, her pinched expression bespoke something more: she was, Yarrow realized, frightened. Yarrow wondered whether she feared assault.

She pushed herself down to the wall that Yarrow was using as floor, and sat with her crossed ankles adhering to the clings trip. Yarrow looked at her questioningly.

“They asked me,” she began, “to tell you what they have decided.”

Her weakness lent Yarrow strength. “Verdict or sentence?” she asked caustically.

Ling flinched. “Neither,” she said. “You know they can’t do that.”

“I thought they could do anything during an emergency. This is an emergency, I gather.”

Ling hung her head in acknowledgment of others’ dereliction. “You should have been told everything. Perhaps they did not want you to realize how little we ourselves know. Transmissions from the Ship are… unreliable. There is little we truly know…”

“And you are not supposed to tell me that much. I see. So no one dares to hang me until they know which way the wind is blowing?”

“No!” Ling looked up, shocked. “We know too little to decide anything at all, and to disregard what we heard of you would be a vital decision. And after what happened on the comet, well—” She squared her shoulders, resolute at last. “So it was decided to do nothing; to put you on ice, as someone said.”

Yarrow lifted an eyebrow. “You’re going to keep me locked up indefinitely, in my own room with security measures? I’m surprised the Lotus can spare the resources.”

“We can’t.” Now Ling would not meet her eye. “You might try to escape, and we cannot maintain staff forever on standby against this possibility. So you are going to be Chilled, till the emergency is over.”

Yarrow stared, then flung herself at Ling with a scream. The technician threw up her arms in alarm, but there was no strength in Yarrow’s spring: her bunched legs unfolded like paper flowers blooming in water, and her hands reached out with dreamlike slowness. A hatch banged open behind her, and Yarrow was unable to look around before a sticky substance enveloped her.

“No!”

Ling was scuttling backward on all fours, eyes wide. The web tightened around Yarrow, binding her limbs to her sides, but strength fled her from within: blearily she realized that she had been drugged. “No,” she cried, horror rising about her like water. “Don’t let them—Ling! Don’t let them freeze me! No—!”

There was no light in the icebox, yet Yarrow experienced not darkness but the vibrant non-color that bespoke “fingerpainting,” direct stimulation of the striatic cortex. The visual center offered the broadest gate to the city, open now to invaders she could neither see nor debar. Her calmness suggested that sedatives had already crossed the blood-brain barrier.

The neutral screen resolved into an empty landscape, pale sky above featureless ground. Yarrow suspected that she was projecting upon sensory deprivation: the line of the horizon seemed suspiciously arbitrary. The sky looked cold, about to snow; perhaps the cryopreservative was already entering her veins.

Rime etched itself across the sky, which took on depth: Yarrow was inside a snow crystal, watching interstices thicken about her like an involuting fractal. She knew that the Chills were not actually frozen, but cooled to a level beyond hibernation, where dreaming ceased and mental activity stalled to a vegetable muttering impossible to recall. A cocoon was being woven about her mind, packing material for the descent into inanimation.

“You’re coming, aren’t you?” she asked. No terror tinged her voice; at the still, cooling center of things, serenity comes naturally. “Will you make yourself known to me, or shall you wait until I am inert, clay beneath your hands?” A faint wind sighed on the edge of hearing, bringing no sound of approach. A seeping chill spread further, settling things into orderly stillness as Yarrow composed herself to await her vanquisher.

Content

On the Ice Islands
by Gregory Feeley