Walking on Ice

by

Brian Downes

It was so cold that Lincoln Wade didn’t notice the cold anymore. The horizon was the difference between the white disc of the ice and the blue disc of the immobile sky. Clouds as white as virgins’ shrouds crossed that sky sometimes. The sun shone for weeks at a time, and the nights were just as long, long enough to asphyxiate the mind. Long enough to make you think you were never coming up again. Long enough to become at home with the black world of ice, and miss it when the sun crawled up over the lip of the horizon again.

There were no landmarks on the white disc. Lincoln had brought two NAV-DAT GPS with him.

The Antarctic ice sheet was the world’s largest mirror. Lincoln knew this from his polar training. The ice reflected the sunlight back at you with such efficiency that you were spending two minutes in the sun for each minute that passed. The glare could blind you. You could become sunburned in a matter of minutes, even though the thermometer read -35 C.

Wade’s clothing was a polar survival suit -- heated, insulated, water-reclaiming, full-face mask with glare-reducing faceplate. He was very comfortable inside it. He hardly felt the weather anymore.

Seventy-seven degrees latitude and fifty-two degrees longitude made for some ghastly weather right round the calendar, right round the calendar. But the first week of July was a particularly bad time to visit Antarctica.

He also had two GPS systems. One primary, one backup. And an assault rifle manufactured in Sweden. Also two light disposable rockets. Before the snow had hit, they’d had an ex-SPETSNAZ cyborg humping a heavy machine gun and a thousand rounds of anti-vehicle ammunition. The Russian would have destroyed any robot drones that opposed them at the target.

July was a bad time. It was the bloody middle of the Antarctic winter. The next nearest place to Antarctica where winters were colder, not counting the Arctic, was the Moon. But it couldn’t be helped. The client said it couldn’t be helped.

One American mage. Crispin Taft. Serial killer, convicted eighteen murders, suspected ten more, all in the state of Illinois. Usually mind-controlled his victims into mutilating themselves. One victim he made boil cooking oil, and pour it down her own throat. Finished her by making her set fire to the next pan full before she took her drink. Now incarcerated in a private, highest security prison. In Antarctica.

The client wanted Taft back. Back. They wanted to have him back. The client was anonymous, but with the money they had, Lincoln figured they were a corporate entity of some kind. Maybe the Draco Foundation, he’d thought on the trip across the Antarctic Circle. Maybe Taft was some new kind of mana expression. Maybe they wanted him for research. Maybe they’d vivisect the brutal fucker.

The wind was Lincoln’s big consideration. There was nothing like Antarctic wind, and there was nothing to stop it as it roared scouring down from the pole, and it would grow to 200 kilometers per hour, no problem. This unstoppable ice tombstone of a wind would pick up snow and grains of ice and, without any new precipitation at all, whiteout.

Boom. Whiteout.

The bloody worst time of the year. Blue disc of the sky, white disc of the earth entombed in ice. The most severe cold.

Lincoln had worked on both poles, now. Polar expert. Security for Pisces Mining Company in the Transpolar Aleut. Did some freelance work of a political nature in Iceland. Fought pirates for pay in the North Sea.

Why would anyone want to be a pirate in the North Sea?

You had to keep the cold out of your clothes like you had to keep water out of your boat.

The storm had hit them a little bit short of the midway point. Their weather forecast had said only a ten percent chance of storms during their long walk to the prison, but in Antarctica there was always a thirty percent chance that any weather forecast was worthless.

In that storm, Lincoln couldn’t even see his own feet, the snow was so blinding. Standing up was a battle and walking an epic struggle, presuming you were moving at all. There was nothing to judge progress against.

The wind-driven cold had been bad enough to kill.

When the storm was over, Lincoln was alone. The rest of his team had vanished in the that vast white disc. Maybe buried and frozen alive under the snow.

He would check his current heading on his GPS. He had to make certain he was going in a straight line.

The prison relied on Antarctica to give it her security. The prisoners were plugged into virtual reality simloops. There were no walls, no fences, and almost no staff. Ten tasks out of eleven were handled by automation. It’s location was a secret, but Lincoln’s employers had learned it.

Lincoln’s hope now was to reach the prison. There would be food and shelter there.

He needed to check his course against his GPS. It seemed to him that some of his equipment was malfunctioning.

“Hey, whoa! Whoa! Did y’all see that?” Suddenly Larch, who’d been quiet for a kilometer, twisted violently in his seat . He stabbed a finger against the passenger window of the Snow Bear crawler. “There’s a fella out there!”

Larch was from the Confederated state of Texas. He wore a black Stetson around indoors. Wastrell often wondered how a Texan ended up on the South Pole. Wastrell was from Baltimore, himself.

“Sensors are clear. There’s nothing but ice out there.” Wastrell was rigged into the Bear via his vehicle control cerebral implant. He could feel the tracks of the vehicle churning up the snow like his own feet. He could see everything for two klicks with the crawler’s sensors. In one window, he could see and hear Larch and himself through audio and video sensors inside the cab. When he “spoke”, his voice issued not from his throat, but from a speaker in the ceiling.

“There’s a fella out there!” Larch was trying to see backward out the side-facing window. “Just one fella in a survival suit, walking the way we just came!”

Larch and Wastrell were employees of Revlup Security, the famous private incarceration service that maintained the world’s most secure prisons. They were driving the Bear through light windblown snow today because one of the company’s resupply drones had gone down. They were homing in on its transponder so that they could recover it for repairs.

“Huh. Sensors have got nothing,” Wastrell said again. “How far away was he?”

“Maybe all of fifteen meters. Don‘tcha think we ought to go back?”

“No. At fifteen meters, the sensors would have been sure to pick him up.”

“I’m telling you, I saw a damn man outside my window!”

“I think you just saw the runner.” Wastrell said. “And I missed it. Damn.” His regret was genuine.

“Who? He was walking.”

“Okay, get this. In 2059, apparently, a team of shadowrunners tried to hit the prison, trying to break one of the inmates out, I guess.”

“In 2059?”

“Right. They got within four kilometers, and they were armed to the teeth, lots of gear, probably would have been successful, except a freak snowstorm hit and wiped them out. The corpsicles were out there for weeks before the company noticed them. Since then, this one guy is sometimes seen walking in circles out here. I can’t believe you saw him! I‘ve been here for two years. You‘ve been here for six months. Why do you get to see him?”

“Well,” Larch pronounced it Wa-aaa-al. “I guess ghost sightings are arranged on merit, ’stead of seniority.”