Through the window, between gusts of billowing mist, she glimpsed something moving: a smooth curve sliding easily past the wreck, a distorted image of a crumpled metallic mass. It couldn’t be real, of course. Nothing moved on this cold world.
When she woke up properly, it was going to hurt. She closed her eyes.
When she couldn’t stay unconscious any longer, she was relieved to find she could move.
She climbed gingerly out of the crumpled ceiling panel. She probed at her limbs and back. She seemed to have suffered nothing worse than bruises, stiffness and pulled muscles.
But she was already feeling cold. And she had a deepening headache that seemed to go beyond the clatter she had suffered during the landing.
Her cabin had been reduced to a ball, barely large enough for her to stand up. The only light was a dim red emergency glow. She quickly determined she had no comms, not so much as a radio beacon to reveal her position – and there was only a trickle of power. Most of the craft’s systems seemed to be down – everything important, anyhow. There was no heat, no air renewal; maybe she was lucky the gathering cold had woken her before the growing foulness of the air put her to sleep permanently.
But she was stuck here. She sat on the floor, tucking her knees to her chest.
It all seemed a very heavy punishment for what was, after all, a pretty minor breach of discipline.
OK, Minda shouldn’t have taken a flitter for a sightseeing jaunt around the glimmering curve of the new world. OK, she shouldn’t have gone solo, and should have lodged and stuck to a flight plan. OK, she shouldn’t have flown so low over the ruined city.
But the fact was that after grousing her way through the three long years of the migration flight from Earth – three years, a fifth of her whole life – she’d fallen in love with this strange, lonely, frozen planet as soon as it had come swimming toward her through sunless space. She had sat glued before Virtual representations of her new home, tracing ocean beds with their frozen lids of ice, continents coated by sparkling frost – and the faint, all-but-erased hints of cities and roads, the mark of the vanished former inhabitants of this unlucky place. The rest of her cadre were more interested in Virtual visions of the future, when new artificial suns would be thrown into orbit around this desolate pebble. But it was Snowball itself that entranced Minda – Snowball as it was, here and now, a world deep-frozen for a million years.
As the Spline fleet had lumbered into orbit – as she had endured the ceremonies marking the claiming of this planet on behalf of the human species and the Coalition – she had itched to walk on shining lands embedded in a stillness she had never known in Earth’s crowded Conurbations.
Which was why, just a week after the first human landing on Snowball, she had gotten herself into such a mess.
Well, she couldn’t stay here. Reluctantly she got to her feet.
With a yank on a pull-tag, her seat cushion opened up into a survival suit. It was thick and quilted, with an independent air supply and a sewn-in grid of heating elements and lightweight power cells. She sealed herself in. Clean air washed over her face, and the suit’s limited medical facilities probed at her torn muscles.
She had to trigger explosive bolts to get the hatch open. The last of the flitter’s air gushed out into a landscape of silver and black, and crystals of frost fell in neat parabolas to an icebound ground. Though she was cocooned in her suit, she felt a deeper chill descend on her.
And as the vapour froze out, again she glimpsed strange sudden movement – a surface like a bubble, or a distorting mirror – an image of herself, a silvery figure standing framed in a doorway, ruddy light silhouetting her. The image shrank away.
It had been like seeing a ghost. This world of death might be full of ghosts. I should be scared, she thought. But I’m walking away from a volcanic eruption and a flitter crash. One thing at a time, Minda. Clumsily she clambered through the crash-distorted hatchway.
She found herself standing in a drift of loose, feathery snow that came up to her knees. Beneath the snow was a harder surface: perhaps water ice, even bare rock. Where her suit touched the snow, vapour billowed around her.
To her left that volcano loomed above the horizon, belching foul black fast-moving plumes that obscured the stars. And to her right, in a shallow valley, she made out structures – low, broken walls, perhaps a gridwork of streets. Everything was crystal clear: no mist to spoil the view on this world, where every molecule of atmosphere lay as frost on the ground. The sky was black and without a sun – yet it was far more crowded than the sky of Earth, for here, at the edge of the great interstellar void known as the Local Bubble, the hot young stars of Scorpio were close and dazzling.
The landscape was wonderful, what she had borrowed the flitter to come see. And yet it was lethaclass="underline" every wisp of gas around her feet was a monument to more lost heat. Her fingers and toes were already numb, painful when she flexed them.
She walked around the crash site. The flitter had dug itself a trench. And as it crashed the flitter had let itself implode, giving up its structural integrity to protect the life bubble at its heart – to protect her. The craft had finished up as a rough, crumpled sphere. Now it had nothing left to give her.
Her suit would expire after no more than a few hours. She had no way to tell Bryn where she was – they probably hadn’t even missed her yet. And she and her flitter made no more than a metallic pinprick in the hide of a world as large as Earth.
She was, she thought wonderingly, going to die here. She spoke it out loud, trying to make it real. ‘I’m going to die.’ But she was Minda. How could she die? Would history go on after her? Would mankind sweep on, outward from the Earth, an irresistible colonising wave that would crest far beyond this lonely outpost, with her name no more than a minor footnote, the first human to die on the new world? ‘I haven’t done anything yet. I haven’t even had sex properly—’
A vast, silvered epidermis ballooned before her, and a voice spoke neutrally in her ear.
‘Nor, as it happens, have I.’
It was the silver ghost.
She screamed and fell back in the snow.
A bauble, silvered, perhaps two metres across, hovered a metre above the ground, like a huge droplet of mercury. It was so perfectly reflective that it was as if she couldn’t see it at alclass="underline" only a fish-eye reflection of the flitter wreck and her own sprawled self, as if a piece of the world had been cut out and folded over.
And this silvery, ghostly, not-really-there creature was talking to her.
‘Native life forms are emerging from dormancy,’ said a flat, machine-generated voice in her earpieces. ‘Your heat is feeding them. To them you are a brief, unlikely summer. How fascinating.’
Clumsy in her thick protective suit, bombarded by shocks and strangeness, she twisted her head to see.
The snow was melting all around her, gushing up in thin clouds of vapour that quickly refroze and fell back, so that she was lying in the centre of a spreading crater dug out of the soft snow. And in that crater there was movement. Colours spread over the ice, all around her: green and purple and even red, patches of it like lichen, widening as she watched. A clutch of what looked like worms wriggled in fractured ice. She even saw a tiny flower push out of a mound of frozen air, widening a crimson mouth.