Glass Weather

We went for the core on the second surface day, ten of us, because the core was the mission’s instrument and the sponsor’s priority and the only navigation object on the planet, and because not one of those was the reason I went. I went because it was holding her, and it was lying in the open, in the field, the way you do not leave a person lying.

The departure brief took four minutes. Lyren led; Voss walked the line; Jessa brought both trusted drones and a sledge rig; Nae carried her independent instruments on her own back, declining the drone’s rack with terrible politeness. Rao came for the shell’s couplings, Mikel for our suits, Ithe for the ground, Halek for whatever the ground had made of the previous crews. And Cael came because Idoss’s protocol wanted a neuroacoustic baseline taken at the core, which is a sentence whose grammar I invite the reader to sit with — the protocol wanted; the man was the instrument the wanting was done through — and because Cael, given for once a choice with no harness on it, had looked at the protocol’s request and said, “Yes. But I am asking to go. Write it down that I asked.” Pell wrote it down.

The rules of the plain were three by then, and we had derived all three ourselves, the survey data being twenty years stale and the field advisories being above our clearance. One: dust the boot channels, fifteen grams of white cartridge powder per sole, renewed at every rest. Two: all movement off-count — no rhythm, no cadence, no two boots agreeing — because Nae’s first transect had shown the ground taking the pressure of a regular step and holding it, each filament a fraction late, and she did not yet know what the holding was for and did not propose to feed it data while she found out. Three, derived on that morning’s crossing: when the Clickers stop, we stop.

The Clickers were everywhere on the fracture roads — palm-sized noded units, plates spread to the red sun, clicking with a regularity that Mikel, talking, called a foundry full of relief valves, and that Nae, measuring, called sampling. “They are not animals,” she said, when Mikel coined black grass for the filament mats and tried clockroaches for the nodes in the same breath. “The mats are the exposed fraction of a conductive body. The nodes are detachable sensors of a system we have not found the rest of. Name them what you like. Log them as what they are.” An hour out, every node in a hundred-metre radius froze at once — plates half-spread, mid-click, all sound removed from the world like a breaker thrown — and Nae’s meters spiked, and she said, conversationally, “Stand still,” and we stood, nineteen minutes by my count, until the clicking resumed everywhere at once, and nobody asked her what would have happened, and she did not offer.

The glitter came up on the southern horizon at midday: a low bright seam, like light off water where there was no water. Mikel saw it first and said so, twice, his voice climbing, and Lyren called the ship for a weather read, and this is where the record must be exact, because Ithe carried the next part for the rest of her life and the official log carried none of it. Talla’s reply was on time. The channel was not. The transmission arrived stepped — fragments in the wrong order, the duration before the warning, the warning before the hail — and we lost between three and four minutes reassembling a sentence that had been spoken whole: electrostatic front, southern quarter, on you in eleven minutes, find downwind shelter now. Lyren made for the fracture shelf the moment the sentence resolved. It was four hundred metres east, and we were strung out along open ground with a sledge, in a quarter again of standard gravity, and the front, when it arrived, arrived early.

A glass storm is not weather as a shipborn person understands the word. It is the plain itself, lifted: razor silicate off ten thousand years of shattered surface, driven on charge, and it does not howl, it abrades — a sound like the world being machined. Visibility went to two metres of red murk full of bright horizontal scratches. We got eight of ten under the shelf. Halek was hindmost with the sample frame, and the line fouled on a rock rib as the front knocked them down, and a flake the length of my thumb opened their chest seam against the frame’s edge — I heard the suit alarm arrive on the channel before I heard Halek, which I would later learn to call ordinary, in the way that everything on that plain required a new definition of ordinary.

Ithe went back along the line first. The fouled section would not clear, so she cut it — forty metres of tether gone downwind like a nerve — and anchored the remainder by body weight in a wind that was sanding her faceplate white. And Mikel went past her, into the open, to Halek, talking the whole way. The channel kept all of it. Stay down, you’re fine, seam first, hold my wrist, foam’s coming warm, don’t watch the seam, watch my mirror — ninety seconds of a frightened man doing the one thing he was best at while the storm took the surface off everything he was wearing. The patch held. The patch holds to this day, I believe, in a suit locker on a ship I will come to. And at some point in the ninety seconds, a flake found the port shoulder seal of his own suit, where the cold-flex cracks from the night’s hard freeze had already been logged by his own hand that morning, and the seal failed, and he knew it, the alarm was on the channel and he knew it, and he finished sealing Halek first.

He was reaching for his own foam line when the second alarm came. He tapped Halek’s helmet twice — two fingers, the miner’s blessing, machinery, be kind — and what he said, in the falling pressure, in his ordinary running-on voice, was: “Tell Rao the valve was honest.” Then the channel carried breath, and then it carried the storm.

Voss brought him in under the shelf when the front’s worst had passed, carrying a hundred-kilo man and his ruined suit across forty metres of moving glass as though the planet had not yet given him a sufficient argument. We sheltered another hour. Nobody spoke on the channel except for pressure checks. I sat against the rock with my left hand shaking inside its glove where no one could log it, next to Rao, who had taken a strut across the forearm shoving me down into the lee at the front’s arrival and had not mentioned it, and who said, at last, looking at nothing: “Secondary scrubbers won’t last if we have to work low ground. I had it at sixty days this morning. The dust just ate some of that.” It was, I understood, his eulogy. Stocks and margins. The Belt grieves in inventory.

When we came out from under the shelf the air was full of stillness and falling glitter, and high in it, riding the after-static, hung a dozen pale membranes the span of a door, anchor threads trailing like dragged nerves, perfectly suspended, perfectly still. “Stillbirds,” Jessa said, flat, naming them the way you mark a hazard, and Nae let the name stand, which from Nae was a measurement in itself.

The count under the shelf, which I made because counting is what I am for: Ithe’s visor pitted to moderate, her left glove stiffening at the knuckle line, her oxygen at sixty-one percent, forty metres of tether gone. Halek at fifty-eight percent, breathing carefully against a foam patch that was not theirs. Rao clean, sheltered, seventy-four percent, one bruised forearm he would report four days later under direct order. Mikel Tor, deceased, seal failure, port shoulder, while sealing another. Recovered from his suit: half a foam kit, and his helmet, pitted bright across the faceplate, which Ithe took, and carried, and did not explain.

Lyren put the body on the sledge, lashed with the dignity available, and looked at the bearing to the core, and then at the bearing home, and gave the only order the mission allowed him. We went on.

“Storm was survivable,” Ithe said on the closed channel, to me, or to the count she was keeping, as we walked off-count through the settling glitter. “If it had been called earlier. Write that wherever you write things.”

I am writing it here.