[Black Fleet Crisis] - 02(13)

“It’s under you now. Plus-six. Plus-nine. Plus-fourteen—” Stopa pushed the control handle sharply down, and the rover dropped hard and shook from the impact, nose tilted down and sliding sideways. It came to a stop with another small jolt, then slowly came to level.

“There,” he said, switching quickly among the un-dercarriage scanners and studying the display.

Those closest to the thrusters were frozen over with steam ice, but the forward and aft scanners were clear.

The front landing strut seemed to be wedged in a small crevasse, though no damage was evident. Aft, the body of the rover was sitting comfortably above the ice.

“That wasn’t half bad,” he said with a grin, setting the systems to STANDBY.

“Let’s just get it done,” Josala said crossly.

One behind the other, they made their way through the crawlspace over the orbital engine compartment to the crowded gear bay. There they helped each other into their improvised snow gear—the ferret’s sole emergency spacesuit for her, a standard digger’s isolation suit for him, augmented by the ferret pilot’s spacesuit glove liners.

Neither of them was prepared for the blinding dazzle of the glacier when the gear bay doors swung open.

The sky was clear, and the blue-white sun lit the landscape with cold crystal fire as hard to look at as the sun itself. Josala’s viewplate adjusted for it, but Stopa had to avert his eyes and squint to keep from being overwhelmed.

“Spectacular!” Stopa exulted.

“Sightsee when we’re finished,” Josala chided.

Everything took longer than it should have. The core drill base didn’t want to latch in the working position, giving Josala reason to worry about whether the bay doors would seal properly when it was time to leave.

The gloves made them both clumsy and turned the routine assembly of the first sections of the coring tube into a test. Josala’s sounding for the body beneath them was marred by crazy echoes. The drill’s gimbal mount froze up until the drill was turned on, complicating the alignment on Josala’s sounding.

But at last the coring bit chewed its way into the surface of the glacier and headed down into its depths.

“Seven sections!” Stopa shouted over the rumble of the drill. “At this angle, we’ll need seven sections.”

Josala waved her hand in acknowledgment and turned away to pull the next section from the rack. It danced under her touch, and she drew her hand back.

She pressed her gauntlet against the wall of the bay and felt it shivering. It was then that she realized that what she had thought was her own body shivering was the deck of the rover vibrating under her feet. The drill was roaring now, as though its bearing rings had disintegrated, its lubricants turned to grit.

“Turn it off!” she cried, pulling her way along to where Stopa was leaning out the back of the bay, looking down at the core drive and measuring the drill’s progress. “Turn it off!” He looked up at her dumbly, and she reached behind him for the controls.

The core cylinder spun to a stop, but neither the vibration nor the noise ceased. Just the opposite, in fact—the rumble was growing louder and the shaking growing worse.

With a desperate fear already in their eyes, they looked out from the gear bay at the mountain ridge behind them, the ridge they had flown over just minutes before, the ridge that had been like cotton bathed in sunlight. The middle of the ridge was now hidden behind an onrushing wall of snow and ice, spreading and climbing the sky as it hurtled closer.

There was no chance to escape into that sky. The avalanche was on them before they could even quite remember the word. It tumbled the rover before it like a toy, packing its every crevice with snow, engulfing the ship in the furious turbulence of the icy maelstrom.

When the flow finally slowed and ceased, its leading edge reaching nearly halfway across the valley, there were two more bodies buried on the ice for Penga Rift to recover.

“The first thing we need is a way to find this spot again, and this passage is notably lacking in landmarks,” said Lando. Using the cutting blaster, he sliced a small triangle off one corner of the equipment grid. “Where was our doorway? Here?”

“Lower,” said Lobot. “There.”

“I’m glad you’re sure,” said Lando. “I’m all turned around.” He cut a slit in the bulkhead, inserted one edge of the triangle, and held it there until the bulkhead closed around it. Then he placed one palm flat against the bulkhead and tried to tug the metal grid out of the wall. “That should do it.”

Lobot drifted up with a short length of cord in one hand. “We might want more than one marker before we’re done,” he said, looping the cord through one of the diamond-shaped openings and tying the ends together with an overhand knot. “One knot equals the first marker. We’ll put two knots on the next one.”