Bones of Ice

by A. L. Strezze

  ~~*~~

  Day Two

  When the light of dawn woke her, she set out, eager for breakfast, to check her traps. The first undisturbed snare shook her confidence, and when snare after snare hung empty she started to despair.

  The sight of a tripped deadfall trap made her mouth water in anticipation, but when she lifted the stone, there was nothing underneath but the trigger sticks, still holding the dead worm she had used as bait the day before.

  A few tears leaked out of her eyes, but there was nothing to do but keep trying. She left the snares where they were, waiting for something to blunder through. Resetting the sprung deadfall, she set to work looking for more worms and beetles to use as bait.

  “Something has to work eventually,” she reassured herself. “And even if it doesn’t, the colonists will be here soon. But just in case, I’ll set some more deadfalls. The more traps I set, the more chances I have to catch something, right?”

  There were plenty of rocks sticking out of the thick layer of pine needles that made up the forest floor. Shifting a stone the size of her head to get to the nice flat one underneath, she disturbed a huge millipede that immediately curled into a tight, chitinous ball the size of a mouse.

  “You’re… just about big enough to eat, aren’t you?”

  She stared at it, trying to wrap her mind, and more importantly, her stomach, around the idea. “Come on, Jade. It’s protein and fat, right? Just like meat, only crunchier…”

  Setting the rock aside, she picked the millipede up, trying not to cringe when she touched it. “Chew. Swallow. It should be easy, right? I’m hungry, and this… is food.”

  It didn’t feel like food, though. If felt like something she should be handling with a sampler, rather than her bare hands, and then only long enough to determine whether it was poisonous. They weren’t, she remembered.

  It didn’t help.

  Her hand just wouldn’t move, not until she gave in and lowered it. “Maybe tomorrow,” she said, pulling out a leftover bit of wire. “If I don’t catch anything better.”

  Jade skewered the millipede’s carapace with the wire, determinedly ignoring its sudden struggle to get away while she twisted it securely in place on a newly nocked set of trigger sticks. She balanced her chosen deadfall rock carefully on top and let go. It held for a moment, but then fell with a loud thump.

  “Too much movement,” she muttered, picking it up again. Pieces of the millipede stuck to the ground, while its guts adhered to the trigger sticks and the rock. Her stomach turned, but she reset the trap and this time it stayed set when she walked away.

  “What am I even going to attract with this sort of bait?” she asked herself, moving on to look for more flat, heavy stones. “I don’t know if these stones are big enough to hurt a creeper, but they’re not the only insectivores. Lots of birds eat bugs. Would they go under a stone for it? Maybe ground squirrels… I’ll have to be careful to cook them thoroughly if I catch any - the ones we took samples from were carrying a whole host of diseases.”

  With that hopeful thought, Jade turned over another roundish rock, looking for more bait. She spotted the wet glisten of a partially exposed earthworm, and dug into the ground to pull it free.

  Trying not to think, she popped it into her mouth, only to spit it right back out, dry-heaving.

  She picked it up again, holding it low and trying to forget the sensation of it wriggling across her tongue. “Bait, you are,” she said, rolling it between her fingers while she looked for another suitably flat deadfall rock.

  The cool sliminess of the worm’s skin was almost enjoyable now that she wasn’t trying to eat it. The spinning motion made her smile too, remembering how she used to play with the odds and ends of her mother’s yarn.

  Mom liked to craft with expensive natural fibers - wool and angora, cotton and hemp - though these days it was cats rather than children that entertained themselves with her cast-offs.

  Jade remembered spending hours as a child, unraveling a single thread of purple yarn almost infinitely into smaller and smaller fibers. She had never managed to re-twist them into something usable, but at the time she hadn’t been doing it for survival, either. She was sure she could figure it out.

  “Yarn is made by twisting fibers together,” she said. “Rope and line used to be made that way too, before extrusions replaced them. So… if I can find something fibrous to work with, I could make some yarn, and use that to make a net for catching fish.” She raised her hand to hold the squirming worm in front of her eyes, still spinning it gently between thumb and finger.

  “But it’s not just spinning, is it? What is it about you that makes me think of fish?”

  There was something… Like a word on the tip of her tongue, Jade could feel the sensation of a memory, hiding just out of reach in some forgotten recess of her mind. She stood there, frozen in place, chasing that hint of meaning. Was it a book she had read? Something mentioned in boot camp? A chance comment by someone in a club?

  The worm squirmed free, shaking her out of her reverie. She bent to recapture it before it could burrow into the ground, and gave up on the effort to remember.

  “Fish and worms,” she said instead, triggering a new search on her com and setting the results to scroll in a skimming pattern until a likely match caught her eye.

  “Ah-ha!” She held the worm up to eye level again, grinning at it. “It looks like you’re in for a more interesting future than I had planned, my friend. You’re going for a nice little swim, just as soon as I figure out what I’m going to use as a hook.”

  Back at camp, she used an expensive and highly specialized sampling tool to shape one of the three pre-threaded needles from her first-aid kit into a hook, careful to bend the tip back into a barb at the end of the curve, just like the image she had found.

  While she worked, her com read out loud to her about the long Earth tradition of angling - fishing with hook and line, rod and reel, sinkers and floats. It was too much to take in all at once, especially in her depleted state, but it kept her focused while she worked, and gave her a degree of confidence that it might be possible for her to catch something to eat this way.

  Jade still couldn’t remember where she had first heard of using worms as bait for catching fish, but it sounded like angling should be simpler - and quicker - than making a net from scratch. As soon as the hook was done, she tied the thread to a nice sturdy stick, and ran to the river to find a good spot to try it out.

  She kept moving downstream until she found a place where the river spread out and slowed down, and the dark flickering shapes of fish were clearly visible in the water. There, she skewered the unfortunate worm on her hook, cast her line, and waited eagerly for her first catch.

  Patience was a struggle. She was so hungry it was tempting to jump in and try to catch the fish by hand, though she knew how fast and slippery they would be. She was also tired enough that her mind kept wandering, brought back to the task at hand only when her improvised fishing pole threatened to slip out of her hand.

  She distracted herself by reading more about fishing. Deciding that she might do better with a bobber, to warn her when a fish finally took the bait, she pulled the line in.

  The hook was empty.

  Anger and despair raged through her at the sight, completely out of proportion to the loss. A fish had to have nibbled at the hook in order to steal away with the worm, and she hadn’t even noticed! Wasn’t the hook supposed to catch the fish when it did that? Was she doing something wrong?

  Practicality, and hunger, quickly set her back to work. Just like with the snares and traps, she had to believe that if she kept trying, she would eventually catch something. A few minutes of digging and a few more of fiddling around with the thread, and she cast her hook back into the water with a bigger, juicier worm, and a short twig for a bobber to tell her next time a fish tried to steal it.

  For hours, she sat there, casting the line out and waiting as long as she could stand bef
ore pulling it back in to check. Sometimes the worm was still there, others she had to replace it, and she wondered if her time would have been better served after all by trying her hand at net-making. Once in a while, her bobber would wobble, sending her hopes skyrocketing, but there was never a fish on the other end when she pulled back on the line.

  The day passed, and she found herself torn between hunger, and fear of being away from her fire after dark. Hunger won, reinforcing her stubbornness every time she almost talked herself into giving up for the day.

  The moon rose high as the afternoon wore into evening, and Jade’s eyes adjusted to the fading light well enough that she could convince herself that it wasn’t all that dark, not yet, even after the sun disappeared behind the trees.

  It was dark enough that she missed the dipping of the bobber, but then a yank on the line nearly jerked the fishing pole out of her hands. She caught it in time and took a step back, trying to pull the line in slowly and steadily, and not shake her fish off the hook out of pure excitement.

  Walking backward, she pulled the line after her, catching her breath with every forceful jerk on the pole. By the time she had the fish - a lovely specimen bigger than her calf - flopping on the rocky shore, she was more intimidated than elated. The thread had gotten slimy and slick during its long immersion, so she wrapped it around her hand to shorten it as she approached her catch, trying to remember what she was supposed to do now. Obviously, she needed to touch it, kill it, but exactly how to do that was a lot less obvious.

  The fish was still flopping energetically, in spite of the way the shortening line constrained it, and Jade was less than half a meter away when it gave an especially vigorous leap. The line between them jerked taught - and snapped.

  “No!” Jade dove for the fish, her fish, all squeamishness gone now that she was faced with losing it.

  It slipped free from her hands before she could get a good grip and flipped closer the the river, and freedom. Seeing it so close to escaping made her realize what else she would lose if it got away now. “My hook!” she shouted.

  Panic clouded her mind momentarily, but the sudden conviction that her life was at stake cut through it like a knife. With cool rationality, she bypassed the problem of gripping the fish’s slippery form by dropping on top of it, pinning its body to the rocky shore with her own. She lay there patiently, moving only enough to keep it covered and confined, until its struggles weakened, and finally ceased altogether.

  She could have kicked herself for forgetting that surgical thread was designed to dissolve. Under tension, and weakened by the water, it was only surprising that it hadn’t snapped sooner. “But I’ve got them - fish and hook both,” she reassured herself.

  Tomorrow, she could look into making a more durable line. Tonight, she had a fish to eat.

  It was almost that simple, too. Hunger made her try to bite into it on the way back to camp, but her gag reflex kicked in again before her teeth even touched its scales.

  Instead, she skewered the fish and propped it over her fire between two forked sticks. It was a beautiful torture to wait and watch, mouth watering while the smell grew increasingly enticing. Finally, the fish’s skin split, its flesh sizzled and spit, and she pulled it down onto a makeshift plate of tree bark.

  Several burns later, she sucked contentedly at her fingers and stared up at the stars through a screen of gently waving pine branches.

  Food helped. She felt calmer than she had at any other point since realizing that she was stranded. Now, stomach full, she felt like her mind was finally working again, and she turned it to looking at the larger implications of her experience.

  The Ice badger’s ability to put a human into hibernation for months on end with no worse damage than a little physical depletion was nothing short of miraculous, and had a vast potential that she hadn’t considered until now. The profit from medical applications alone would be enough to let the colony skip their whole establishment period and go straight to Independent World status.

  Doctors created a similar effect for long surgeries, but it was both expensive and dangerous, involving complex equipment and constant supervision. Properly dosed, the Ice badger venom should be usable in all sorts of therapies, as a safer and simpler replacement for current methods. Not only that, but a person awaiting surgery or a new organ could be put into hibernation until the doctors were ready to treat them.

  And then there were the space exploration programs. Many groups still thought that humanity’s future lay in direct-route space travel, although so far the Elysian program was the only one that had successfully settled another world without the use of a portal. Most other space programs were still limited to orbital trips and unmanned probes, but if the problem of resource consumption could be addressed, they could dramatically expand their areas of manned operation.

  On a more immediate level, if Ice’s winters were truly intransigent, the colonists here could use the Ice badger venom to sleep through the worst of it, although hopefully under more controlled circumstances than hers.

  But only if they knew about it.

  The survey team didn’t. No Hazard or not, Donly would never have left her here if he had thought she was asleep rather than dead. And there was no sign of a hibernation effect when Tad’s leg was savaged, so maybe the Ice badgers only produced their venom when the weather turned cold, or due to some seasonal change in diet.

  Whatever the compound and mechanism, she was currently the only one who knew it even existed.

  And with her “dead” at the teeth of an Ice badger, there was a good chance that the colonists would be planning to exterminate them. No Kill only applied to Survey Authority employees.

  If Jade didn’t survive to report, how could they know about it?

  “Well, I’ll just have to survive, that’s all.”

  Full of delicious fish, she thought it shouldn’t be too hard to stay alive for another week or two, until the colonists arrived. And when they did, the value of the Ice badger venom would give her extra ammunition in arguing that she was justified to break No Kill.

  But her mind just wouldn’t stop and let her rest.

  I could die of an aneurysm tomorrow, out in the woods somewhere. Or even tonight. What if I die in my sleep tonight, and scavengers make off with every last bit of my body?

  No one would ever know. Or I could fall, out gathering food. I had a couple of close calls today already, for all that I brushed them off. If I get trapped or injured and can’t get back here, the colonists might not find me until after the portal closes again. Or after I’m dead…

  Jade shivered. She hadn’t really thought through the implications of how alone she was yet. Surveying uninhabited planets might have its dangers, but there was always a safety net - her teammates, their equipment, the certainty of the portal reopening to let them go home.

  Now, though, everyone who might care if she got hurt was light-years away and thought she was already dead. If she got into trouble - more trouble - then they might never even know she had been here, waiting for them.

  “I could leave a message, right at the portal site where anyone coming through will have to see it. And durable, so even an ice storm won’t move it. The mineral sampler should be able to mark stone, even without power. And I’ll do it now, just in case…”

  The mineral sampler did leave a mark, if she drove it against the stone hard enough. A simple hammer and chisel might have worked better, but the sampler was what she had.

  As she chipped away at the stone, she shortened the message she was planning in her mind, then shortened it again, and finally settled for inscribing a large, clear “J” just outside the central plug. It would at least show them that she had been here, long after they thought her dead. Hopefully she would be able to deliver the rest of her report in person.

  Jade sat back on her heels behind the “J,” staring past the absent portal and into the darkness beyond. Her fire was close enough for reflections to dance across the t
itanium plugs, and to illuminate a pair of eyes staring back at her from the darkness.

  “Tapetum lucidum,” she said absently, hefting the mineral sampler and wondering if she would be able to defend herself with it.

  The animal shied at the sound of her voice, but then its eyes appeared again, glowing green in the light of the fire. They seemed too high for a creeper, and most pig species didn’t have the reflective tapetum lucidum behind their retinas. “So what are you?” she asked it. “Coyfox maybe? Wolverine?”

  It didn’t respond, of course. Just stared. Did it think she was prey? She stood, hefting the sampler again. “Go on! Get out of here!”

  The eyes disappeared, and after a few minutes Jade retreated back to her fire.

  She tried to sleep, but found herself constantly rousing to stare out at sounds in the darkness.