Fugitives of the Ice Fields
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Masks and helmets on, the two aces of the Dead Bunch paddled for a good hour through the damp sewers beneath Black Comet. His arm over Miles’ shoulders, the wizzo limped, avoiding as much as possible the treacherous quagmire of oil slicks and plastic filaments’ deepest parts.
They discreetly crossed most of the plantation that way; and from the inspection chambers sometimes giving on the avenues, they witnessed the former colony being turned into a chaotic slaughterhouse. Above, panicked Martians ran everywhere amid the ravaged factories and the counter-orbital defenses while mysterious androids of chrome hunted them in the streets.
“Why are these strange MKs ruthlessly killing everything?” Pierre asked with a quavering voice through the short-range radio. He lost a lot of blood from the twisted leg he dragged behind. Despite the self-compression around the damaged limb, ruddy beads dotted his visor. “Who can do that?”
Before getting any answer, he lost consciousness. His body collapsed into the dark mud, scaring away frightened mutagenic rats holed up in a blocked pipe.
Miles painfully hoisted him onto his back. The pilot continued step by step into the slowly flowing toxic water, until a powerful explosion echoed deep underground. The black river suddenly began to bubble before smelly ripples started tickling his knees. The onboard computer in his suit alerted him that the temperature soared.
“What now?” he painted, turning around.
Behind, a blazing wave rushed straight at his position.
“God Darwin be damned…”
Miles started running. His only hope appeared to be the red door eaten away by rust at the end of the tunnel, fifty feet away. Staggering under the weight of his comrade slowing him down in the thickening marsh, he slipped several times on garbage or panicked rats. Gritting his teeth, he finally reached his goal, and striked the heavy panel with his free shoulder the moment vicious flames licked Pierre’s boots.
Both fell down into a round airlock. Automated showers sprayed their suits with cold water and Halon 1301 gas, suppressing the fire before it could turn the small room into a crematorium.
Pierre regained consciousness as Miles dragged him to a fully equipped garage with a stalactite covered ceiling. “What’s going on? Why am I on fire and wet at the same time?” he grunted a moment later, straightening against what seemed to be an old electric cabinet. He took a second to blow away a blood bead from his mustache. “Is—is this our raft?” With a shake of his head, the Cajun man pointed to a vessel coated by a moisture-stained tarp.
Miles started inspecting the aircraft. Lifting the coverlet, he discovered a last-generation Orel: a two-seater used by the Soviets to explore the Outer Worlds. However, her round belly had been reinforced to accommodate not probes, but contraband crates stacked against the cellar back walls, between the dust-covered maintenance equipment and stale tanks of coolant.
“Apparently. How’s your leg?”
The WSO felt his knee over his dripping jumpsuit. “Still here.” Where he pressed his fingers, plasma oozed through the shredded nylon. “Not sure if it’s a good thing or not—to be honest.”
Miles turned around. When he tried to remove his helmet, his armor’s built-in computer notified him of the lack of oxygen in the room. Another buzz warned him of his personal reserve reaching a new low.
“Fucking thermobaric bombardment,” Pierre said, dragging himself towards a stack of smuggled goods and reactor parts. Pain made him wince while sitting on a broken turbine. “Bu—burning all the fucking oxygen so your targets can’t hide underground.”
“We gotta delta..” Miles went on before heading for the locker room behind his friend. There, he immediately discovered all the equipment he needed on a stool, and warned the cursing injured. “Found new suits.”
“They have fucking morphine capsules?”
“They do have fucking Soviet patches.”
“Merde… No painkillers at all?”
Between a dirty shower and a cabinet, Miles uncovered a first aid kit containing nothing more than crusty compresses and a bunch of Tylenol pills fused into a curious brown grape cluster.
His heart sank. His chest-box’s vial appeared to be dry as well. Meaning he’d probably die within a day or two. Without the computer the WarTech agents melted during their inquisitive session on Mimas, it was impossible to tell. Stuart’s way out or not, the dark tunnels of Ymir seemed to be the end of the line.
Miles swore. Dragging the orange suits and two small oxygen tanks with him, he exited the locker room; and found his limping yet unstoppable friend checking the coolant pump alongside the disused workbench.
“Gas up!” Staggering, his relentless copilot tugged on the old rubber hose before inserting the gun into the specially dedicated opening at the back of the ship.
The pump squeaked loudly, and both realized it was as empty as their respective morphine supplies. This led from Pierre to unorthodox French curses Miles never heard despite being born near the city of Nouvelle Patrie.
“We’re going to have to fly dry,” Miles said walking towards the oxygen refiller while the angry WSO disconnected the fuel nozzle with a feeble punch. “Get dressed.”
Pierre caught the suit his friend tossed him, then laid his back against the left flank. “Gonna hurt,” he quavered, holding his breath.
The man from Ballou slowly removed his helmet and mask. Putting the new ones which he immediately linked to the filled oxygen tank Miles rested on the ship’s wing. The sealing rubber choked him, and he has to manually adjust it; knowing it will leave a very ugly burning mark.
“Do you know how many Belter Soviets they found strangled to death by their own equipment?” Miles asked from the nose, turning on the engine with a magnetic crank. The old VB sputtered but roared.
“Not enough!” Pierre answered, aware of the old joke running in the solar system since before the Uprising.
Back to Pierre, Miles ordered him to spread his injured leg on the floor. Using a screwdriver, he tore the bottom of his friend’s pants to reveal what was left of the leg: two bits of bone floating in the air around a ripped muscle soaked in dark blood. “You ready?” he asked.
White as a corpse, Pierre turned his oxygen supply to the maximum. On the verge of losing consciousness, he gave the go with a broad smile.
Holding his stomach, Miles amputated his comrade without anesthesia, using a few gruesome techniques Adder told him about on a rainy day. The femoral nerve gave up after only two blows.
The screwdriver also appeared to be the only option to separate themselves from their incriminating FID registered in the Freedom League. To make it more believable their fingers have been torn apart during a flight accident, Miles cut off three of them.
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Back from limbo, Pierre babbled: “The tur—bine!”
After lifting his mask to finally throw up, Miles dragged his partner to the back of the ship. There, they cauterize their stumps on the hot steel. The Cajun redhead didn’t even blinked, but passed out again right after half his hand turned into an overcooked brisket.
“Pierre. You’re definitely the toughest guy I’ve ever met…”
Once his friend lifted on the ship, Miles donned the orange suit. He dusted off the thrusters and navigation flaps. As he headed for the console near the airlock, a new explosion—even more violent than the previous ones—shook the moon. Stalactites fell from the ceiling and crashed against the canopy of the Orel.
Miles hit a small button ordering the remote opening of the shutter. A brief transmission delay almost cost him to be flattened by a huge chunk of rock which missed the moving ship by an inch.
The gray plains surrounding the plantation revealed themselves. The meager depressurization spat out the pieces of tarp and dust, and it was against a violent draft that Miles had to manually close the canopy over his head. That kind of out of date aeronef reminded him of the practices at the Techno-Academy, where he stayed less than a year before dropping out.
The rudimentary onboard computer initiated the takeoff. Miles prayed that the Soviet engine wouldn’t explode the moment he reached orbit—after the death of Wermer von Braun, Soviet engineering really went downhill. The rubber wheels squealed and the turbine screeched. With ease, the Orel soared through the air like the old land-based jets did more than a century before.
His head held in place by the seat belt turned into a makeshift harness, Pierre grunted besides Miles.
“Ain’t dead yet, l’ami…” Miles whispered, as if he were answering one of the many taunts he imagined his former feathered copilot often saying. He missed the grumpy duck, and he wondered for a moment whether the red menace was still on Mimas onboard the Forlorn Hope.
Miles followed the gray plains for half a mile before swooping skyward, hoping to dodge as much as possible of the plantation’s still active defense systems. But when he turned to glance at the moon through the canopy, he saw only a pile of smoking rubble. Black Comet and its surroundings had been nuked. Or rather charred.
“Looks like the Sun itself fell on the city…” he said, ready to leave.
But when he stepped on the gas to leave orbit, a beam of light blinded him. Emitted by a ship resembling a chrome pebble, the ray passed through the satellite, pulverizing it.
The blast propelled the Orel out of range of the strange attacker. While the latter disappeared in the debris, the ship whirled around, almost knocking the pilot; but restarting his heart which briefly stopped.
Numerous moon fragments, also carried away by the explosion, hit the wings and damaged the turbine. The latter sputtered and the nuclear reactor stopped intermittently. Audible alarms and the damage reports flashed on the only monochrome screen still functional in the copilot station. Finally, several auxiliary systems shut down due to a general overload.
“Pierre!” yelled Miles into his microphone before the feedback—a piercing shriek, tore through his eardrums.
The Orel slammed into a block of ice and spun out of control, narrowly avoiding a destroyed Techno-Marine cruiser. Falling to pieces, the latter hit a piece of lunar crust on which an oil well has remained planted. The giant rock fractured into thousands of pebbles, forming another deadly cloud.
“Time for you, the universe, to show some mercy here!”
A cannonball-sized piece of rubble punctured the cockpit between the two pilots. Cursing, Miles managed to divert the Orel’s course and run between two blocks of pure iron that collided once the small spacecraft passed between them.
“Close one… ” The ship stabilized at the edge of an ice field, frost began to invade the canopy. Reaching into the glove compartment, Miles immediately pulled out a foam spray and worked to plug the hole. “Oh come on! Where is Fate when you need her?”
But as he struggled against the weightlessness, holding the applicator with his fingertips, he received the providential help from Pierre. For some unknown reasons, Hell kept spitting him back. “Tell me we’ve landed on Byblos Gates, and you—you ordered a shrimp cocktail to munch on with a couple of hot bikini-babes…” said the ex-rebel as the solidified foam swallowed his glove. From his severed pinkie and ring finger, flowed a long strand of freezing brown blood.
Miles thanked him, cutting off the crazy VB that threatened to explode.
“Where are we?” Pierre growled, patting the cracked dashboard screen with his other hand.
“Somewhere in the B-ring…”
The WSO coughed, gazing at the shattered moon far in the distance.
“The moon blew up,” Miles said.
“Moons don’t bl—blow up.”
“Tell that to Ganymede.”
“Fuck. We’re stranded? Oxygen level?”
Miles waved his hand before his eyes. “Personal pouch emptied. Ship emptied.”
“I’m already seeing funny things…”
“Like what?”
“A Hooters, over yonder…”
“I’d prefer a Buc-ee’s.”
Pierre laughed.
“What do you want us to do?” Miles asked, turning on the radio. The latter sizzled and spat some old-fashioned The Girl From Ipanema it picked up from a probe-emitter as lost as them.
“You can turn that shit to begin with.”
“Funny. My pop always said the day WW3 occurred, the only thing Earth really lost was Nat King Cole.”
“Apparently your father was wrong. Dude’s still airing from the Sun to Planet Nine.”
“My pop was always wrong…”
“I have to admit it’s a riot for an old tune. And young and lovely—the girl from Ipanema…” Pierre started singing.
“Great. Now that you butchered this classic, could we die?”
“Got a root beer?”
“No.”
“I’ll give my other leg for a root beer—or one of my sister’s sweet potato pies.”
“Now we’re talking…”
A piece of foam covered itself in ice before finally being sucked into space. Miles reflexively stuck a finger in, plugging the hole. Peter smiled at his partner’s own body betraying his will to live.
“Did I ever tell you about Ballou?” he asked as he applied another layer of foam for Miles to remove his hand.
“Every fucking day. Every fucking day you have to talk about your home!”
“Not my home, Miles. My moon. Ballou is the nickname for a small rock listed by Mars as Saturn LXIII. My family has lived there for two generations and more to come. Well, what’s left of my family, anyway—my sister, Kat, and our nephew—Petit Beau.”
“You’ll never see Ballou again, Pierre…” Miles heaved. His vision became blurry.
The Cajun readjusted his suit over his shoulders and checked the waterproofness of his gloveless arm. “You’re an asshole… A whiny little bitch of an asshole…” His injured hand turned blue but stopped bleeding. “Merde…” He then opened the canopy with a punch that twisted his wrist. Barely conscious, he stepped out. And kept swearing like never before.
Despite his suit, Miles felt the cold breath of space envelop him, like the veil of death. “What the hell are you doing, you stupid French fuck?” he sighed through the microphone.
His friend—mostly an orange stain, floated above him and slowly drifted away. Behind him shone Saturn and the never ending ice fields. “I will live. And I will go home, Miles…” he murmured as he casually started walking in the void.