Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

Ash hauled Vonnie to her feet. She wasn’t wearing her helmet. She held a spare suit over her arm and said, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

“Where’s your helmet?”

“Here!” Metzler yelled. He was fully suited. He extended a helmet to Ash as Vonnie took the suit on Ash’s arm. She sat down and stuffed her feet into the pant legs, not bothering to remove her clothes or to connect the sanitary features.

The four of them were thrown in a pile when the lander seesawed. Frerotte stood up first, bleeding from his mouth.

Vonnie shoved her arms into her sleeves. “The only mecha that can reach us are busy with Module 02,” she said. “I’m going outside.”

“That’s crazy!” Metzler shouted. “Von, you can’t—!”

“Let her go or do it yourself,” Frerotte said. “We need to take off before we fall in like 03.”

“They’re gone!?” Metzler shouted. But he squared his shoulders and said to the women, “You’re the pilots. You stay.”

Vonnie bustled past him toward the air lock. “Ben, I can cut us loose before a stupid biologist figures out which end of a wrench works best.”

She forced a smile as she said it, wanting to kiss him. Instead, she seated her helmet on her collar assembly. She selected a tool kit and emergency pack from the wall. She opened the pack. She grabbed a wad of flexiglue suit patches, which she stuck against her chest, where she could find them easily. Then she turned to Ash.

“Start your preflight,” she said.

“I…” Ash’s face was a wretched mask.

Vonnie opened the inner door to the air lock, stepped in and cycled the lock. As she waited, the floor tipped wildly. She crashed on her knees.

Were they sliding into the ice?

The exterior door opened. It let in a burst of ice shards and dust. Vonnie protected her visor with her gloves. Something the size of a dinner plate caromed off her ribs, but it was mostly air, not solid ice. Otherwise it might have cut her in half.

As she stood, her boot slipped on a hardening sheet of moisture. Everywhere the air swirled with fog and invisible fingers of gas.

Spotlights winked a few hundred meters to her left, where mecha tugged at Module 02, increasing the distance between it and her lander. Ejecta smashed down like cannonballs. Vonnie clutched at the tether reel mounted by the door. The tether was intended for extra-vehicular activity in space, but she clipped the line to her waist. She waded down the lander’s steps into the hurricane, where she stumbled and fell.

She crawled forward with the tool kit in her fist. There was no way to grip the ice. It shuddered and dropped and slammed back into her shins and elbows.

Maybe it wasn’t so strange that she clung to the sunfishes’ behavior as her example. She drew courage from their heroism.

They chose to die for their tribe , she thought. Their assault group was a test. They knew the machines had killed the smaller sunfish. When their own warriors failed, the second group sabotaged the hot springs like they were arming a doomsday bomb. They wanted to stop the mecha before their home was threatened, too. They sacrificed themselves.

Her tether vibrated like a harp’s string, tugging at her waist. Somehow she reached the maintenance shed. She considered opening her tool kit, but the wobbling ice threw her off-balance. She would have lost any tools in hand. It was all she could do to hold onto the kit, using its plastisteel case like a bludgeon against the data/comm and power couplings.

The data/comm line separated easily. The power line was bolted to the shed. Vonnie was in mid-swing when her tether snapped tight and yanked, hurting her spine.

As she turned to deal with it, something bit through her left arm. She never saw the object. She didn’t look. Her life shrank down to the slobbering, howling gash in her sleeve.

Her air cylinders roared through her helmet and chest pack, attempting to compensate for the puncture.

It was her blood that saved her. The fluid acted as a partial seal, freezing inside her sleeve. She also might have gained a second due to the gauzy clouds around her. The water vapor and gases created a denser-than-normal atmosphere. Even then, the partial vacuum of Europa’s surface was so cold it burned like a branding iron, disintegrating her skin, ruining her muscles and bone.

Vonnie bent her bad arm to her chest and clamped three patches on it, creating a lumpy, half-solid ball of hemorrhaging flesh and glue. Her air cylinders redoubled the roar of oxygen.

She didn’t think. She moved. She added another patch to her arm. She keyed no-shock from her helmet dispenser. Then she looked for her tool kit and went back to work, banging at the power line as if freeing it could save her from her agony.

The coupling broke. The line sparked in her face, and Vonnie scrabbled away from it with her throbbing arm.

Thoughts and emotions began to return. She raised her head to look for the jeep charging post. Its mass was much less than that of the shed, which was why she’d made it her second target. If necessary, Ash could lift off with the post hanging from the lander’s side. The flightcraft had plenty of thrust. The question was if Ash was pilot enough to compensate for flying off-balance.

“Ben? Ben?” Vonnie called on her radio. “I can’t find the post!”

No answer.

“Ben!”

She groped at her wrist controls, wondering if she was on the wrong frequency, but she couldn’t touch her arm without keening like a dog. Her eyes didn’t want to stay on the read-out, which was obscured by blood and glue.

More quakes buckled the ice. Rising on her good hand and knees, Vonnie caught a puff of crystals across her shoulder. She ducked and crept alongside the lander, trying to get her bearings. Was she going the right way?

A monstrous shape reared above her in the storm.

She thought something had come out of the frozen sky — a new lifeform — a rhino or a dragon that had been tossed from the ice. It was five times larger than a human being. Its teeth glinted like steel.

Screaming, she clawed sideways. She intended to hide beneath the lander until an orange light on her wrist flashed with a familiar homing pattern. One, two, three, blank. One, two, three, blank.

The monster was their jeep. The spikes on its back were radio antennae. Its ’teeth’ consisted of the bars and pods of its forward sensor array.

Vonnie choked and laughed, nearly hysterical. She rammed her head against the lander’s underside as she emerged, but she forgot her fear when she discovered she could stand. Were the quakes subsiding or was that wishful thinking?

She peered through the eddies of fog. Belatedly, she realized walking was so difficult because the surface canted up thirty degrees. Ahead of her, one of the lander’s grappling hooks had gouged the ice, preventing the lander from sliding more than a few meters. The jeep shared their strange angle, and the ice jutted up behind it for fifty meters.

That was where the surface ended. They were on a broken slab of ice. Vonnie glanced over her shoulder to measure the slab in the other direction.

The maintenance shed had vanished. The edge was four meters away. She couldn’t see more than jagged ice and shadows.

How far would they drop if the slab went in?

All around her, other blocks had capsized or tilted or sunk. Many were adhered together by smoother bumps of water that had shot from the ice, then solidified. Gases and vapor continued to waft up from the shattered plain. Module 02 was farther away than it had been, towed to safety by the mecha, but everything between 04 and 02 was gone.

Vonnie hiked toward the jeep. Why hadn’t Ash lifted off? Because of the charging post?