The Glacier
A standalone sci-fi short story
I’m easing back into writing after my hiatus, and to get the creative juices flowing again I had a shot at this week’s Flash Fiction Friday prompts from Scoot. The prompts were:
Write about spring
glacial onrushing
“you promised”
A character who is wearing something backwards
This story is the result. It’s flash fiction in the sense that I wrote it without a particular plan, and without a lot of editing, rather than it being particularly short! But I enjoyed writing it, and I hope you enjoy reading it!
“Turn the lights off.”
“What? Why?”
Vatn Agassiz, Aquarius Engineer First Class, gestured at the low ceiling of the rover.
“Just for a few minutes. Not every day we’re this far out.”
Koltví Sýringur sighed, leaned forward in the cockpit and clicked off the headlights. The three men looked out at the cold desert on the other side of the windscreen.
“Still got light pollution from the mine.”
“No we don’t.” That was Tan Xuebeng, also Aquarius Engineer First Class. He was looking over to where the floodlights at the mining camp should be. They could all see that there was no white glow spilling blue and milky from behind the ridge.
“Well I’ll be—”
Agassiz looked at his companions in the uneasy green-white light of the cabin. “Kolt — try to raise Náma and check status at the camp. Tan, let’s go. We’ll clear the pumps first then go say hello.”
Koltví Sýringur nodded. He took his baseball cap off and turned it in his hands then put it on again back to front. The cap was worn with sweat and the single eye embroidered above the half-moon opening was dark with grease. He ran the three fingers of his right hand across that eye and whispered his lucky words and pressed the button to activate the airlock.
Tan and Agassiz checked their seals and tubes and batteries one more time and stepped into the airlock, and when the pressure equalised they stepped one after the other onto the grey shingle that stretched out like the ash of a long-dead fire on the slope of the basin. In the basin and stretching beyond its far rim and up the high mountain beyond was the hard wrinkled surface of the ice that was grey as hunger and silver as veins and white as Earth in the heavens on a clear night.
Above the basin, the Southern Cross and Sirius and Canopus were sharp and bright against the galaxy and the Milky Way itself was a silver and foamy cataract across the night. Agassiz turned in a circle with his neck craning up as far as the helmet of his suit would allow.
“This never gets old.”
“Flakkari-Three to Engineer Agassiz, over.”
Agassiz lowered his head and looked towards the rover.
“Agassiz here. What’s up, Kolt? Over.”
“Unable to make contact with the camp. Looks like it might be more than a simple power outage. Over.”
“Acknowledged. Is Tan on? Over.”
“I’m here, boss. Over.”
Agassiz felt his throat dry and sticky in the suit. He coughed to clear the phlegm and drank a little water from the helmet nipple and looked at the ridge over which there was no light scattering.
“Flakkari-Three, why don’t you head on over towards camp while Tan and I fix the pump? Could be an emergency. Then we’ll cut over and join you. Over.”
“That would be a breach of protocol, Vatn. No can do. Over.”
“Hardly any distance for us to walk. Over the ridge. Over.”
“Still a breach of protocol. Remember after last time? You promised, Vatn. Over.”
“We got two things to do here, Kolt. We got to fix the pump, or the pipeline dries up and Muskovy runs out of water. And we got to go check on the camp and make sure it’s no more than both their generators conking out at the same time and raise the alarm if, Lord have mercy, something else is up. So the way I see it, protocol or no, you take the tin can over there and we clear the pump pronto and cut across to meet you. You with me, Tan? Over.”
“Yep. Over.”
“Fine. But if we lose our jobs, you can pay my child support. Over.”
“We’re wasting battery, guys. Over.”
“Let’s go. Over and out.”
Koltví Sýringur revved the rover’s engines and the thin cold poison of the air trembled and carried that vibration to Agassiz and Tan on the edge of the basin where the ice lay. The rover’s headlights were turned back on, and the white beams sliced the air and lit a glitter of carbon dioxide crystals that hung in the air like gnats over a river pool on Earth in summer and drifted slowly down to the ice, and then the beams swung away from them and the rover began to trundle away towards the saddle where the ridge was low enough for it to mount and cross.
Agassiz and Tan switched on the lights on their suits and walked down the shingly grey side of the basin towards the pumping station. When Agassiz looked up, he could still see Sirius and Canopus and the Southern Cross, but more washed out, and he could barely see the Milky Way at all. Then they rounded the dark bluff that jutted into the basin ahead of them and saw the beacon light on the pumping station and the reflectors on the pipeline before it plunged into the regolith towards Muskovy.
“Least the light’s on here.”
“Roger that.”
The automatic lights in the pumping station flickered on fluorescent and oily bright when they went inside but the squat body of the machinery and its tight metallic coils were still and rimed in water ice although the air in the room was dry.
“Son of a —”
Agassiz pressed the button on the human-readable monitor. Tan walked along the silent flank of the main pump casing.
“Tan, check this out.”
“No, you come and check this out.”
Agassiz looked over to where Tan stood below the inlet from the CO2 separator. Tan was looking up at the inlet, and Agassiz followed his gaze and saw a gorgon’s head of ice vomiting from a crack at the mouth of the separator. He walked a little closer.
“No wonder the crawler couldn’t clear it.”
Agassiz sucked a little water from his helmet nipple and shook his head.
“Agassiz to Flakkari-Three, come in, over.”
“Flakkari-Three here, Vatn. Approaching the camp now. Over.”
“Kolt, I need you to raise Graham at the Water Office. We have a situation. Over.”
“Roger that. What kind of situation? You want to patch through or you want me to relay the info? Over.”
“Tell him we need Squad Seven on this, priority one. No, make that priority zero. We got a discontinuity, repeat discontinuity, in the pipes. Also, send a geologist. Over.”
“Roger that. What in the cold and frozen Niflheim heart of this planet caused that, Vatn? Over.”
“That’s why we want the geologist. Listen, we’re going to see what we can manage here in the meantime. You get to the camp, find Náma, see if they can send some guys over, give them a ride, would you? Over.”
“Roger that. Should be at camp in ten minutes or so. Over and out.”
Tan climbed up to where the inlet pipe had come away from the separator.
“This would have froze up instant. Then the pump shut off downstream. Crawler doesn’t come through this section.”
“Right.”
“This crack’s over an inch wide. Quake?”
“Guess so. But this was engineered quake-proof, wasn’t it? The pumping station?”
Tan climbed back down.
“And there wasn’t anything big on the seismometers.”
“True.”
Agassiz drank more water. “Think we could clear that ice ourselves? How far back does it go?”
“Can’t really see.”
“We’ll need the weld kit. And insulation. But that’ll be a patch job at best.”
“Flakkari-Three to Engineer Agassiz, over.”
“Agassiz here. Any response from Graham? Over.”
“Squad Seven is being dispatched soon as. But Vatn, I’ve just got visual on the mining camp.”
“And? Kolt, speak to me. What are you seeing? Over.”
“It’s — gone.”
“Gone? What are you talking about? Over.”
“There’s been an avalanche or something. The whole valley. The road just runs into the ice. Vatn, they’ve been — buried alive. Over.”
Tan staggered and creased into a squat on the floor of the pumping station with his hands over his helmet. Agassiz started to pace up and down the green-painted floor with his lungs rasping hard in his suit. He had to swerve around Tan on every lap of the narrow floor, passing him always on his right-hand side so that Tan was a small reef in the middle of a path shaped like a longboat.
“Kolt, radio to Muskovy and report then get your ass back here. Over.”
“There might be survivors. We don’t know when it happened. I can go in just a little bit. Over.”
“Negative, Flakkari-Three. Do not approach. Avalanche, maybe a quake, maybe glacial onrush, definitely unstable. Over.”
“There could still be people alive in there!”
“That is a negative, Koltví, and that is an order. You go in there, you risk your own life and you risk mine and Tan’s, because without the rover we’ll last approximately three more hours and then we’re two little Martian popsicles.” Agassiz exhaled and watched the thin mist of water vapour cloud the inside of his visor and dissipate. “Anyway, I can bet that the avalanche happened about the same time as whatever’s cracked the pipe here, and that was now over twenty hours ago. And — protocol is pretty strict on situations like this. Get your ass over here. Over and out.”
Tan stood up and stared at the cracked pipe and the frozen gush of water. His face was pale like a moon in the fluorescent overhead light cutting through his helmet. “Glacial onrushing. Today’s what, the fifty-third of September?”
“Right.”
“Springtime. Just about the season for the glaciers to start calving.”
“So it is.”
“Vatn, when were those parameters calculated?”
“What parameters?”
“Glacial onrush. Seasonal ice movement. Avalanche risk.” He gestured at the pipes. “Tolerances. All that.”
“Must be twenty years ago. More. Pipeline’s been here twenty-two years.”
“Before Port Sunlight started. We’ve warmed the atmosphere a good three degrees in that time.”
Agassiz and Tan looked at each other.
“CO2 ice moves faster than water ice. We know that. But d’you think anyone remembered to update the safety tolerances?”
They walked outside under the dark and freezing sky and trudged back up the basin to where they’d left the rover. Above, Sirius and Canopus and the Southern Cross had swung just a little further round their courses and Phobos had come up and hung thirty degrees above the horizon.
Agassiz looked to see whether the rover was in sight yet, but the ridge was still dark. “You know any of the guys over there just now?”
“Drank with Náma sometimes. And Ashley.”
“Damn. I’m sorry, Tan.”
Agassiz scuffed his boots in the grey and rusty regolith and looked into the sky where the Milky Way stretched like chalk dust.
“Makes you feel real small, don’t it? Fragile.”
“Yeah. Could say that.”
They stood a while longer waiting and looking at the sky until the lights of the rover came over the ridge. The crescent Earth was just rising above the glacier field at the eastern horizon and there was a shadow of a blue tinge to the sky behind it and against that shadow the massy corrugated mountains were thick and dark as blindness.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this story, let me know with a like, comment or share!
If you liked this story, you might also enjoy:
This feels like the opening chapter of a much larger industrial thriller. The mystery of the discontinuity and the buried camp suggests that the planet is waking up in ways the colonists didn't prepare for. Nice one!
Good story - down to earth - engineers just doing their thing