Stars Beneath My Feet

by D L Frizzell

  I’ve always known that Seneca played his cards close to the vest. Though I’d learned to trust his judgment years ago, I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d been forced to play a bad hand. As the conversation continued, Hathan-Fen revealed things I already knew, or had figured out on my own.

  Major Hathan-Fen relayed the events that brought all of us to Dolina, including my own ill-timed arrival. She also added that magnetic disruptions were increasing and were thought to be exacerbating already-heightened tensions between the different human territories. Mayford listened intently, only interrupting with questions once in a while. Otherwise, he seemed to take everything in stride.

  “Many of my people have believed that the T’Neth would eventually make a move against the humans on Arion,” Mayford said when the major finished. “It is one of the many reasons we keep Dolina a secret. We’ll need to seek the Ambassador’s council on all this, of course, and you were wise to bring Kate to them,” he said. “However, the T’Neth are a peaceful people by nature. I can’t believe they would instigate any sort of conflict against humans. We are nothing to them, you see.”

  Thinking Mayford might be wearing blinders when it came to the T’Neth, I almost mentioned my experience at the caravan. A look at Redland made me think otherwise, though. He was scowling, staying uncharacteristically silent for one who usually enjoyed throwing the proverbial cat into the henhouse.

  “Mister Mayford,” Hathan-Fen said with her trademark impatience, “you know why we came to Dolina. Our original goal was to get Kate to safety, to help her escape the kind of life the T’Neth wanted to force upon her. With your help, I think we will accomplish that. However, you must see that there is so much more at stake. We are talking about all human life on this planet.”

  Mayford paused to select his words carefully. “Major, I understand how the increased magnetic activity around the world may create additional tension for you and your governments. However, I will demonstrate that all this is no cause for alarm, and certainly not a reason to vilify the T’Neth.”

  Hathan-Fen stared at Mayford in disbelief but continued as evenly as she could. “Sir, there are wheels in motion that are beyond our control in the Alliance Territories. Likely, there are dangerous events occurring in the Jovian Nation as well. We can only guess what those are, but we have it on good authority that The Guile is building up a new army, larger than the one he had in years past. Since he has been effectively denied access to our half of the world, we are left to assume he perceives a different threat.”

  “Or an opportunity,” Redland added.

  Mayford seemed unfazed by all this. “Major, remember that humans have always shown a talent to overcome such adversity. The Titans survived on Saturn’s moons where the temperatures were no different than they are here. The Jovians did the same around Jupiter. The Founding Fleet was built at the shipyards above Mercury, which was hotter than Arion’s North Pole is right now. They all came from different cultures, even those on Earth and Mars, but when their resources began running out, they united to build the Founding Fleet. Circumstances are difficult right now. I don’t deny that, but I also have faith in humanity. We will find a way to resolve these problems.”

  “I’m not talking about the climate,” Hathan-Fen said testily.

  “I am,” Mayford said.

  Hathan-Fen stopped walking, stared at Mayford in puzzled amazement, and threw up her arms. “I don’t believe this!” she said under her breath, and then turned away before her temper got the better of her.

  I did what I could to keep the conversation going. Not that I enjoyed listening to Mayford prattle on, but I needed answers. We needed answers. “Are you saying this because Arion’s magnetism is getting worse?” I asked Mayford, thinking he hadn’t really listened to a word the major said,

  “No, my boy,” Mayford said. “It’s getting better.”

  Redland gave Mayford the kind of look he reserved for idiots. “You haven’t seen the world lately, chum.”

  “Oh yes, I have,” Mayford said. “I do not need to leave the safety of Dolina to know what is going on. In fact, I know the truth better than you, Marshal. You will see, within a decade, or two at the most, that we will solve our technology problems and return to the stars. In the end, our difficulties with the T’Neth will not matter. They will leave this planet to go their way, and we will leave it to go ours.”

  “You don’t know the T’Neth like we do,” Redland growled.

  “And you don’t know them like I do,” Mayford said with infuriating calmness.

  Well, I tried, I told myself. I took a cue from the major and walked away from the conversation. Noticing that Engineer Seku and Kate had gone a fair distance ahead of the group, I decided to join them. As I trotted ahead, I looked over my shoulder. Redland and Mayford were still going at it, one an unstoppable force, the other an immovable object. Norio wisely lagged behind, not taking part in the argument at all.

  “Hi,” I said as I caught up with the two T’Neth.

  “They have forgotten why we came here,” Kate said, gesturing back at the group.

  “It kinda looks that way,” I agreed. “Maybe they think you’ll be safe, but our problems will be waiting for us when we go back.”

  “You will go, too?” she asked. Her stomach twisted in anticipation of my answer.

  “Yes,” I said. “I still need to find Jarnum and deal with all the T’Neth who are looking for you.”

  “You came here for me,” she said, “but you would still leave?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Maybe it was the lawman part of me that insisted on protecting her. Maybe it was something else that made me want to stay. I had lost my bearings on a number of things lately, so why not this as well? “Let’s go see the South Pole and worry about it another time,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. Kate had relented, but not given up. I knew this conversation would continue later. She was trying to act like she understood, but she really didn’t. She glanced at me, and I knew how conflicted she felt. I felt conflicted, too.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  At the end of the canyon, we found ourselves standing by an ocean of solid ice. Similar only in that they were both comprised of frozen water, the ocean stood in stark contrast to the glacial formations that towered over us. Dizzying in height, the jagged ice cliffs reached into the galactic night sky, looming as if ready to crash down upon us Ahead of us lay the ocean, hardly a ripple in its glassy surface, seemingly unbreakable. Where the two geographic landforms met, the ocean won the contest of which unnerved me more. The glacial cliffs receded to nothingness at the horizon, but the ocean had a monolithic vastness in every direction. Did this ocean ever end? I wondered. From where I stood, I wasn’t sure.

  Mayford and Redland had given up arguing, probably because neither had a gun and couldn’t strangle each other through their space suits. Both sulked as they followed us. Norio caught up with Hathan-Fen and conferred quietly where I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  Seku and Kate stood at the mouth of the canyon, with ice crystals as fine as dust swirling around their feet. Beyond, a heavy wind blew over the ocean, its mournful howl much louder than it had been in the canyon.

  What would cause such winds at the South Pole? I thought. It’s too cold for weather. Was this what the ambassador and Mayford wanted us to see? Did they want us to know how harsh Arion is, even at the distant extremes? That hardly seemed like news to me, but I figured they must have a reason. I stared at the expanse, most of my feelings of awe exhausted during the previous leg of the trip.

  The other members of my team caught up with us and formed a line at the edge. Seku had the same stoic expression she’d had the entire way. Mayford held his tongue. For once, he didn’t try to explain what we were looking at.

  “Very pretty,” Hathan-Fen said, not sounding the least bit impressed. She was probably still angry with Mayford.

  Redland grunted. Whether it was in agreement or disagreement, I co
uldn’t tell.

  Seku pointed toward the far horizon, where the stars reflected so perfectly against the ice that I wasn’t sure where one ended and the other began. “Go.”

  “Why?” I asked. It seemed like an obvious question.

  “Go,” Seku repeated flatly.

  All eyes turned to Mayford. “Well,” he said, “it would seem to me that the ambassador is very keen for you to have a complete understanding of the T’Neth presence on Arion.”

  “They have a buried city out here, maybe?” Hathan-Fen asked.

  Mayford frowned. “I think the point is that you see it for yourselves.”

  “Okay, we get the full tour then. Let’s go,” Redland said. Despite his commanding tone, he did not take the first step onto the ice ocean. “Marshal Vonn,” he prodded, giving an exaggerated flourish for me to lead the way.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”

  Like I’ve mentioned before, I’m not afraid of heights. I can be intimidated by a few things, though. As I shuffled to the edge of the canyon floor and looked down into the nearly transparent ice, I put my hands out to steady myself. I had expected some type of gradual change between the glaciers and the ocean. There was none. The glacial shelf dropped straight down. I could see hundreds of meters below where shadowy outlines denoted bedrock, but the edge of the glacier was just as well-defined below the ice as it was above us. It’s almost as if I would be stepping off a cliff, except that there wouldn’t be any spongebushes to catch me at the bottom.

  What if this isn’t a solid block of ice, I wondered, but a thin veneer suspended over nothingness? I could step on it and fall through, only to plunge to the shadows far below where the bedrock would break my fall with utter finality.

  The reflection of the stars on the icy surface did me no favors, either. I thought of mariners on ancient Earth who believed the world was flat. Go too far, fall off the edge. I was about to test that theory.

  I took a careful step, then another. I didn’t fall, sink, or die, so I counted that as a success. I started walking at a normal pace, testing the ice further until I was about fifty meters away from the others. It still seemed solid, so there was only one thing left to do.

  I stomped my feet on the ice.It was so solid that the impact jarred my ankles. I gave the others a thumbs-up, wondering why Seku hadn’t just headed out first and saved us the anticipation. She brought the others, and then we all continued together.

  After a half hour of trudging the landscape had not changed, other than the fact that the glaciers were shrinking behind us. In another hour, there would be nothing but ice in every direction. I looked up, thinking there might be some kind of stellar landmark to provide a direction back the way we came, but I remembered that we were at the South Pole and that the stars would rotate around a point directly overhead. Without being able to consult my pocket watch to track the time, following the stars would be an iffy proposition at best.

  I then tried to scuff the ice with my boot, thinking that could serve as a point of reference on the way back. My boots didn’t leave a single scratch. I might as well have tried to etch a titanium plate with a pencil eraser. At that point, there was nothing else to do but trust that Seku would not lead us astray.

  A few minutes later, Redland swore. He had reached for his pocket as he always did, intending to grab a piece of jerky. He’d forgotten that he now wore a space suit over his clothes.

  “I guess Engineer Seku didn’t plan to stop for meals,” I commented. Thinking then that traversing the ice plain could be just as deadly as the desert, I hailed Mayford. “We’re going to get dehydrated if we go too far without water.”

  “Engineer Seku has something that can help with that,” Mayford replied. He waved to get her attention and asked if we could stop for a drink.

  She nodded, and then produced a hand-sized cone of T’Neth metal from her own suit. Kneeling down, she scraped it across the ice, digging a furrow from the hard surface like a knife through butter. The ice coiled into a ball atop the cone. When it was full, she handed it to Mayford.

  Redland laughed. “She made a snow cone! Hot damn, I guess the T’Neth aren’t so bad after all.”

  “What’s a snow cone?” I asked.

  “Here,” Mayford said. He pinched the bottom of the cone and extracted a thin, flexible tube. He waited for my approval, and then attached the tube to a connector in my helmet. He rotated a knob near the connector, which brought a tube inside my helmet to my lips.

  “I got it,” I told him, and took the cone from his hand. He touched a small circle on the side of the cone, and then the ball of ice shrank into the cone. It produced a mouthful of the freshest water I’d ever tasted. Once the cone was empty, I rotted the knob back to its original position and disconnected the cone.

  “Damn,” Redland said. “Any chance we can clean that off and fill it up for me?”

  “The cold eliminates any germs left on the drinking tube,” Mayford said. “They are flash frozen so effectively that Marshal Vonn could have open-pustule Crysteric Plague sores and not pass the larval bacteria on to anybody else.”

  “I don’t have any of those,” I assured everybody. “I’m perfectly healthy.”

  “Of course, you don’t, Marshal,” Mayford agreed. “We would have noticed if you did. I’m only giving a worst-case scenario.”

  Redland grabbed the cone and dropped to one knee. Scooping up ice, he imitated everything I had done. Afterward, he studied the cone. “How do we take a leak?” he asked.

  “Not into that,” Mayford said, pointing at the cone. “Unfortunately, T’Neth science is limited in that regard. You can go in your pants, and the suit will pass most of the liquid portion through its membrane to the outside.”

  “Really?” Hathan-Fen asked sourly. “Your pants still get wet, though?”

  Mayford nodded apologetically. “It won’t freeze, fortunately.”

  “That’s all I needed to know,” Redland said, and handed the cone to Norio.

  As we continued, the cliffs finally disappeared behind us, and the lack of landmarks made it seem like we weren’t moving at all. I held onto the snow-cone gadget, not to get a drink but to mark the ice as I’d hoped to do earlier.

  Nobody spoke. There was nothing to talk about. We walked along a frozen ocean that few humans had ever seen, but there’s a limit to human amazement. We’d all passed that limit, even Mayford, after the first two hours on the ice. We’d spread out for the most part, and everybody kept to themselves. Kate walked next to me, but even she had no thoughts that I could register. Only the itinerant wind made any noise at all. I glanced once over at Marshal Redland when he stopped walking and looked down. I watched him shake one of his legs and examine the soles of his shoes before shrugging and resuming his walk. He had apparently just tested the filtering properties of his suit.

  I’m not bored enough to pee on myself, I thought. Not yet.

  For whatever reason, maybe it was the desolation all around us, I recalled a manhunt I’d been on a few years earlier. I’d ridden north to the desert at the forty-fifth parallel, tracking an escaped convict. The guy had figured his tracks would be obscured by the drifting sands if he just walked through the desert long enough. For a person who’d never been outside the moderate climes before, he had planned his escape pretty well. He stole everything he’d need for the long trek in the hot sun, including a loose cloak, a few water bladders, and some high-energy food. What he didn’t anticipate was that one can only get back out of the desert by traveling south. I set up my campwater on a bluff at the edge of the sand where I could see for twenty kilometers in either direction and just relaxed. Scavenger birds knew where he was, so I did too. I sat in a folding chair in relative comfort, with a big umbrella providing shade, and watched through my binoculars as the birds followed him north. When he angled south again, I knew where he would emerge. When he finally reached the desert grass at the edge of the Plainsman Territory, I was waiting to put him out of his misery. He really
was miserable, too. I thought at the time that he just couldn’t take the heat. It was hot to be sure, over fifty Celsius where I sat in the shade, but he seemed almost relieved to find me waiting there.

  As I now trudged across the ice toward the South Pole, I think I understood how that escapee felt. It isn’t just the excessive temperatures that drive people from the wilderness – it’s the deprivation of hope, the lack of direction, and the fear that no matter how far you wandered into the nowhere, you’d only find more of it. And there you’d be trapped. Alone. The Colderlands aren’t that different from the desert in that regard, I thought.

  I looked back at Engineer Seku, who was now trailing behind everybody else. It looked to me like she was building something in her mind. Blue wisps formed and coalesced at arm’s length in front of her. Though the object never took solid form, whatever she was creating seemed far too large to fit into one of their tunnels. If I judged the scale correctly, this vehicle would hold thousands of T’Neth. I couldn’t mention this without making the others aware of my expanded mental abilities, so I took an oblique approach. I leaned toward Kate and spoke under my breath. “Have you been able to communicate with Engineer Seku?” I asked.

  “I can’t hear her,” Kate said.

  Hathan-Fen perked up at the sound of our conversation and joined us. “I thought all the T’Neth could hear each other,” she said.

  “Yes,” Kate replied, looking back at Seku in confusion, “but she doesn’t make sense.”

  Hathan-Fen stare at Kate for a moment as if she were tempted to make a sarcastic comment but turned to me instead. “Alex, do you hear anything from the engineer?”

  “I don’t think Seku can communicate like Kate does,” I answered honestly. “The few words she’s spoken are barely understandable, and I don’t hear anything from her mind.” That was true, I rationalized. I didn’t hear anything; I saw it.