Jim Baen's Universe

Science Fiction Stories

Thin Ice

Written by Dave Freer

Illustrated by Adam Burch

"ARI, it's not going away. I'm stuck on a ledge on this crater-wall, like a fly in a closed pantry window. In about two hours the sunlight is going to come over that edge, and I'm going to fry. If my air holds out that long."

I took a deep, ragged breath, trying-and failing-to conserve my air. "And there isn't even a sign of Simmo and Lucy. They're . . . just gone. Into the damned thing."

"Describe the organism." ARI's voice showed no sign of emotion. They'd done a lot with AIs, but not solved that one.

"Dammit, ARI! I told you—"

"Repeat it. Try to add more details. Remain calm. You will use less oxygen that way. Your respiration rate is unnecessarily high."

I took another breath, just as deep and ragged as the last. If I got out of here, back to Earth, I would smash the silicon-hearted box to pieces. Little, little, tiny pieces. With a good, old-fashioned four-pound hammer. And I would never, ever go off-world again. And certainly never come within a hundred light-years of this hot-cold death trap.

"Okay. Look, it's about seven meters across. About as wide right now, but when it was chasing me it sort of elongated. Almost like, well, when I was a kid, somebody brought a blob of mercury to school. It moved like that . . . except more fluidly. No limbs or anything, or not that I can see. Not even eyes."

"Describe the color."

"Like polished chrome. That's how come we spotted it down here. I told you. Lucy's headlight caught it and the reflection was . . . We thought it must be an artifact. A piece of an alien ship or something. That's why we climbed down into this hellhole!"

We'd struggled to find a way down. Whatever had caused this terrible tear in the poor one-face planet's battered skin must have been massive. It had taken us a cautious hour in our cold-suits to get down there. The suits might be made of the toughest fabric known to humankind, but still, you had to be careful.

True, they weren't the damned "Michelin man" suits the first explorers had had to put up with. You could actually do pretty fine work in these gloves, and you didn't have to worry about rips and tears. However, even a garment woven from fibrous ceramic-fullerene wouldn't save the soft bits inside it from a quarter klick fall. And they hadn't saved Simmo and Lucy from . . .

I shuddered.

"Tell me as much as possible about the contact incident."

"You were listening. You heard it!"

"There is some confusion. Attempt to clarify the following: Why did the creature suddenly begin to pursue you? You had been observing it for some three minutes and twenty-two seconds, when Captain Colvine said 'It's coming towards us. We'd better get out of here.'"

ARI had, in true computer fashion, just patched Lucy's rich contralto voice straight into his dialogue. I blinked and swallowed. My voice felt tight.

"I don't really know, ARI. When we found it, and you know how we'd battled, it was just slowly edging along that fissure. It took us about half a minute to work out it was moving at all."

"Seventeen seconds until Mr. Ougo commented on it. Yes. Continue."

"We'd nearly missed seeing the thing in that side-gully. It was nowhere near where he had spotted it from the top. And it is so dark down here."

Hell, without an atmosphere it was dark everywhere, even now, with less than two short hours before the "dawn." Hades was a one-face world, but even so there was an axial wobble zone. Every thirty hours the sun would rise here, on edge between light and darkness. Then, less than four hours later, it would set.

I wouldn't need four hours. Ten minutes of that sunlight would fry me, in this suit.

"There is a point eight-five probability that this is not the same organism."

I nearly fell of my ledge, my precious seven hundred square centimeters of refuge. "You're kidding! You mean there are more of them? If I get away from this one there are likely to be more?"

"That is highly probable. Continue."

"Oh, mother. It doesn't seem worth it."

"I am recording."

If I ever get out of here, I'll find the son of a bitch who programmed ARI's psychology ROM. I'm going to have his brain looked at. Won't be hard. I'll pull it out of his nose with hooks so it's good and visible. I know I'm going to die. And now I can't even feel sorry for myself loudly because ARI will take my weeping and wailing home. Hell, why should I care? I'll be dead. But Sanji and the kids won't be . . .

I sighed. "It snuffled along until it came to the end of the fissure. Then it headed out, back into the main crater."

"It was, in fact, between you and the way you had followed down?"

"Yeah, look, we were nearly past it when I shone my head-torch up that gully and spotted the damned thing. We'd moved on a bit so we could see it properly. The thing was moving so slowly that it didn't seem any kind of threat. It didn't matter that it was between us and the way we'd come down. Your grandmother could outwalk it. Anyway, it didn't seem interested in us. Didn't even seem to notice us, when we shone our torches on it."

"I do not have a grandmother, but I think I understand. What happened to make the creature begin moving rapidly?"

"I don't know, damn you! One minute, it was cutting across the trail, and the next it accelerated like a juggernaut at Lucy and Simmo. Just a blue flash and they were gone. Into it! I was off to the side getting another pic of the two them and the thing. It all happened so damn fast. They didn't even get a chance to run!"

"In fact, Captain Colvine's last order to you was to run. I gather you successfully obeyed."

I hung my head, and didn't answer. Shame burned at my vitals. I hadn't even heard her say that. I'd already been running. Blindly. So fast I'd have won the ice-speed-trials in Oslo with ease, never mind any mere slow land sprint races. I still wouldn't have escaped if it had started after me straight away. And then I'd run into the same dead-end gully the thing had just left. When I'd hit the back wall I'd climbed it until I reached this ledge. Then I'd been forced to stop.

I was maybe six meters up. Above me stretched blankness. A long smooth slab. Recently a huge flake must have fractured off here. Fractured cleanly when the sun-lash whipped the space-cold rocks. There were not even the tiny handholds that had brought me up the overhanging wall to the ledge. The ledge bore the cluttered remains of the rock-burst. I'd nearly fallen, clutching one of broken fragments when I'd pulled up onto it. Below, but not very far below, the silver blob waited. Occasionally it s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d towards me. I'd tried flinging pieces of rock from the ledge at it. They impacted as into an over-soft mattress and then gradually disappeared, sank away into it. They certainly had not chased the damned thing away.

"Extrapolating from the limited data it would appear that the creature only became aware of your presence when it crossed the trail. Logic suggests that it must be able to follow that trail."

"Like a bloodhound," I said bitterly. "It hurtled in here. Hit the blank piece of cliff that I ran to first, in exactly the same place. Then it zipped along until it came to where I started to climb. Now it's sitting like a guard-dog straight below me."

"It cannot have followed you in the fashion of a bloodhound. In the absence of an atmosphere we must discount a sense of smell."

That was AIs for you. Nobody had yet managed to program them to be anything other than literal. "The degree of heat-loss through your boots is minuscule. The heat-loss directly from the suit is considerably greater. Why should the creature track an infinitesimal heat-trace along the ground when it could have homed in on the heat-leakage from your suit? Therefore it must have followed something else. The earlier behavior of the creature investigating the fissure is consistent with a quest for minerals or metals."

"ARI, for God's sake, this is Hades, not some biologist's paradise. It wasn't looking for mice. Of course the damn thing is a mineral feeder! It must eat rocks, because there isn't anything else."

ARI continued as if I hadn't interrupted. "Hades is a high-density world, with pools of molten metal on the dayside. Analysis of spectroscopic data show no such surface deposits on the nightside. Geomagnetic data indicate considerable subsurface deposits. This is statistically improbable. Therefore, I deduce your creature is a nightside metalovore."

I ground my teeth. We were a geological survey team, sure, but . . .

"ARI. I'm stuck on a ledge. The damn thing is just below me. It . . . engulfed the rest of your crew. It couldn't have broken down suit-polymer. Nothing, but nothing, damages suit polymer. If what it wants is metals I've got nothing for it. And neither had Simmo or Lucy."

"The paucity of surface metals suggests the creatures may be very effective at tracking metal elements in minuscule quantities. I suspect the creature is foraging here to collect the tiny quantities of metal vapor condensate that will occur here."

"And how does that get me off the ledge? Why did it eat the others?"

"For the metal cleats on their boots. Which I am sure