Michael Siemsen - Exigency

She examined the front of his suit and sighed. He’d only had the one hand free to write. Maybe it’d been too late. Maybe he’d only managed to slide out the marker tip before succumbing.

Or…

She lifted the arm that had held the fone, grabbed the gloved hand, and turned the palm to her face. There it was in the most logical location, scrawled but legible enough, from pinky to thumb: 1SVr+33

Wind howled across the skimmer and an enormous mound of snow crashed a few meters away, startling her. Through the whirling air she spotted a recently relieved epsequoia pad bobbing up and down.

Sensing anew the vise-like crush on her skull and joints, Minnie realized how utterly done she was with cold.

An incomplete plan coalesced.

She ripped the glove release line from his wrist, separating it from the suit, slid the glove off, and took the other as well. Her hands fit well despite the size, owing to her existing gloves. She clipped his multitool inside her collar, regretting it at once. The icy clip found a better home on her waist.

A hand on his chest, she closed her eyes.

You’ve never been interested in apologies, so just thank you. We’ll chat soon, I guess. I love you.

Her runners plowed through the loose pack, finding her skimmer pad completely buried. She stepped up, kicked off enough for traction, and set out toward the pin she’d dropped on her suit’s location.

Bunny jerky tore between her teeth as the heater thawed her legs. Some skin patches burned, others relished the warmth, while a few concerning spots felt nothing, even when poked with a knife. She didn’t want to think about that right now. She was doing everything she could for herself, given the snap decision to leave behind the medkit and its strewn contents. Her suit’s regulators would do a more thorough, uniform job thawing her, but it was still soaked, hanging on the skimmer, just outside her new shelter.

She aimed a wary eye through the gap in the ice. The visible strip of skimmer had her second guessing herself. If it somehow fell, she’d be utterly done for.

Maybe some kind of tether. There were certainly enough solid anchor points in the vast undercutting behind the frozen waterfall. But unless its residual warmth melted away its parking ledge, the thing wasn’t going anywhere. Or was that just her desire to stay by the heater talking?

She rose with a moan, tiptoed down the chilly, sloped, granite floor, and poked her head outside. Only a couple-hundred-meter drop to the rock-hard plunge pool below. She set her optics to kinetic—a setting rarely used outside a lab—and knelt down on the ice sheet. Focusing beneath the skimmer, kinetic drew a zoned surface map with color-coded highlights for active quadrants. The ice shelf under the skimmer wasn’t melting at all, nor had any slippage occurred since landing. The only detected motion was inside the skimmer’s battery, and to be expected.

Ducking below the side of the console, she grabbed a water bottle from a bin. Its contents were solid, of course, so she scurried back to the heater, set the container down beside it, and retreated into her still-warm survival bag.

She pressed a hand to her chest—a motion repeated no less than twenty times over the past several hours. John’s fone obviously hadn’t gone anywhere since she zipped it into the pocket. It certainly hadn’t gone into her housing. She was too afraid to see what he’d left for her. Afraid he hadn’t left anything at all, other than whatever data he considered important for any future human visitors.

Legacy.

It’d be classic John to use up the last bits of oxygen in his brain to think about the mission.

Minnie rolled onto her feet and grabbed the water bottle, slurping a few melted drops. She returned it to the heater’s side and ripped off another string of jerky. By now, her arsenic levels would probably be concerning to a doctor. No lesions or hyperpigmentation, as far as she knew. Her swollen ankles could certainly be a symptom.

Oh, well. Slow poisoning death or fast starvation?

Her fingers traced the lump in her pocket—the second time in under a minute.

Maybe it was time.

It was time.

Once everything was moved into the tent, and John’s fone installed, Minnie curled up on her side, with John’s glove lying before her resting head. She watched the fone preboot give way to the passcode prompt.

There were a few different ambiguous characters on the glove— 1or lor |, +or t—but she got it right on the second attempt.

His home screen shook her.

She blinked and swallowed and pinched her bottom lip between her fingers.

Minerva | Anyone else

She stared at her name, concentrating on not accidentally selecting it, unable to fathom why she was so thoroughly terrified to follow the link.

With the survival bag pulled tight over her head, she closed her eyes and forced herself to proceed.

A pic filled her view, eclipsing the tent’s warm glow. It was so unexpected that it took a moment to understand what she was looking at. It’d clearly been grabbed from some recent fone vid. She recognized the screen bezel as the PCU she’d snatched from Ish’s EV. Above the screen, a tiny sliver view of two orange-suited legs, stretching out from under the PCU. And on the glowing screen, this was what John had wanted her to see. The supply pod network homepage.

For an instant, scanning without truly reading, she thought John had overwritten her message with one of his own, an update on their situation, a list of those lost. With disbelieving eyes she read each surreal word in order.

Her message had been received.

The rally camp had been established.

Survivors. All but Angela. Something had happened to Angela.

First contact with the Threck.

Friendly relationship established.

Rescue team on the way: Aether, Pablo, Threck.

If their ETA was accurate, they’d have arrived yesterday.

The ground tilted beneath Minnie’s body, her mind overflowing with invasive new data attempting to overwrite fixed, read-only memory. She didn’t need to read it again, the entire message was now branded into her brain. It repeated in her head, read aloud in Aether’s official voice—not her shrink voice, or her personal chat voice, or her real voice.

Wait.

It couldn’t be real. This was absolute BS. They were all dead. She’d already come to terms with that incontrovertible fact. If everything over in Threckville was all cake and coffee, why would they have waited so long to post a message? Sheer fabrication. A cruel, heartless lie.

Rage boiling up her neck, fizzing beneath her skin, Minnie rolled onto her back and shoved finger and thumb into her eye socket, dug filthy nails into the fone, and yanked it from her face. She hurled it away, blindly aiming for the breached ice wall and a terminal plunge. It bounced off the sealed tent door with a contemptible theh , dropping somewhere near her feet.

Fuming chaos. Why? Cursing John. No escape from these thoughts; this despair, renewed with insult; half-mended wounds torn open and acid vomit blasted in; a new call for the sweet respite of death, the only true escape from evil tormenters.

She scrambled to her feet, attacked the tent zipper—curses streaming out and echoing through the stone cavity—and marched downslope, through the ice gap, to the side of the skimmer. Wind struck her face and blew her hair behind her, 200 meters of unobstructed freefall flashing by like she was soaring on great eagle wings. Sans depth perception, the 30m-thick ice basin seemed to hurtle closer, sink deeper, zoom near.