Frost and Frontiers

by Jessica Payseur

  Chantal’s voice was even steadier relating that bit, and Nessa breathed out in relief. If something familiar made Chantal feel more in control, then it was good some of the medical programming was still functional.

  “Weird, it’s like everyone’s up on the bridge. Except a few people in their cabins. But it looks like…I mean, it looks like everyone’s unconscious. Systems say the bridge and cabins were all flooded with anesthetic gas, the cabins first.”

  Nessa did the math. Chantal was technically supposed to be in her cabin, too, but had sneaked out to use the transmitter in the rec area, deserted at that hour on the ship. Her cabin transmitter wasn’t nearly as strong and couldn’t get images at all, not that images were working at the moment, but obviously she was supposed to be in her cabin while the gas was pumped in. With everyone else on the bridge, that pointed to one thing.

  “Ness?” Chantal sounded worried again.

  “Is your cabin full of it, too?” asked Nessa.

  “Systems say yes. What is it?”

  “I suppose you can’t see how much later the bridge got it, can you?”

  “I don’t know. After the cabins.” Chantal’s tone was suspicious. “Nessa, what is it?”

  Nessa didn’t want to worry Chantal, but she seemed to be the only person still active on the Ice Star, which meant she had a lot to do. Nessa swallowed. She could talk Chantal through it, but she felt awful.

  “Sounds like someone tried to hijack the ship,” she said, waiting for a response, but Chantal was very quiet. Damn, she wanted to wrap her arms around Chantal so much right now. “Captain Fletch has a record of complete competence and coolheadedness, though, trust me—”

  “I know how much you went over the Ice Star before I boarded,” said Chantal, sounding impatient.

  “I bet ey flooded the bridge emself to stop whoever did this,” said Nessa.

  She could hear Chantal pause, turn this over in her head before she swore. “It’s just me. Shit. I can’t run a ship.”

  “It’ll be okay. I’ll walk you through it.”

  “It’s so damn cold, Ness,” said Chantal.

  Nessa thought she could hear the chatter of teeth. “It’ll be okay,” she said again, needing to make sure Chantal knew it, needing to believe it herself. The Ice Star was so old, even Nessa’s rusty knowledge of ship’s functioning should be enough. “I’ll walk you through it. You just need to get to the secondary command center. It’ll be okay, I promis—”

  Nessa was jolted sideways as the quake hit.

  * * * *

  It was only one mistake Nessa made while young that had wrecked her entire engineering career: she’d slept with the wrong person. It could happen to anyone, she reminded herself over the years whenever it bobbed back into memory, sour in her belly. It had been her first internship out of schooling, and she’d slept with the undeniably attractive captain of the vessel she’d been stationed to.

  She’d been young, full of dreams and excitement, and had snagged a position aboard a top-of-the-line, freshly commissioned science scout ship. She could only see her world expanding from there. Sleek ship, sleeker captain. God, the woman had been perfect. Nessa had gladly fallen into bed with her and under her spell. The captain’s fingers could trace star systems over her skin that she’d never even heard of before, could coax such sounds from her lips. Nessa had thrilled in every moment of it, higher and higher, until it all came crashing down around her.

  She hadn’t known it was possible to fall from the heavens. But the captain she so adored had cheated on a very powerful member of the president’s inner circle, and he found a way to destroy everything and everyone she touched. Nessa was denied her request to be hired on properly, and mysteriously terrible “reports” popped up about her when she tried to seek a better position elsewhere. Her captain deserted her for a new recent graduate, and Nessa was stuck. Though she was brilliant, she could only ever snag posts on unimportant vessels thereafter.

  Nessa had tolerated that for a decade before she’d saved up enough to take the plunge to go after her dream. There was nothing to lose, as far as she was concerned, no way to move up in her current career path. She burned through three decent relationships during the process of finding the perfect place and purchasing it. Sometimes when she thought about them, she would spike her coffee. She would have married any or all of them.

  In her early thirties, she’d opened her coffee shop, Once in a Brew Moon, on the most interesting real estate she could find: Europa. It was a gamble that took every penny she had. It was a gamble that paid off. Four years later and business was stronger than her coffee, and Nessa had a promising interest in Chantal.

  Long distance dating was always a challenge, but Nessa had gotten used to it while stationed on various transport vessels. You just made it work; often you didn’t get as attached as you’d like, sometimes you kept the relationship open. But Chantal was the first person Nessa had gone out of her way to meet, joining a site and posting a profile, something she had never tried before. She’d been wary of going out with anyone she met at her shop, and she was too tired at the end of the day to explore Europa’s night life.

  She’d tried it once, of course—Nessa would never pass up trying anything once—but she should have known it’d be a bad idea. He had been attractive and not too much older than she was, a regular customer who claimed to have a position at the nearby genetics laboratory. Nessa had varied taste, and although men had always been less of a draw for her, this one said and did all the right things. When their relationship had exploded, when she’d found out he’d been lying to her about everything from his job down to his favorite roast, she’d kicked him out and found Chantal.

  Or, rather, Chantal had found her. Nessa had admired her from afar—short perfect purple hair, average build, stable career as a nurse in Toronto. But she hadn’t bothered to contact Chantal, certain the woman wouldn’t care for anyone like her. Nessa was getting closer to forty with each day, undeniably overweight, and way the hell out on Europa.

  Chantal had sent her the first message. Nessa had thought she was dreaming then, and she half-believed she was dreaming ever since.

  * * * *

  Nessa could hear thuds and groans from the building, from things flying out of place and falling. She found herself on the floor and moved out of the way of anything heavy, her entire world unstable. People were shouting and swearing in the shop up front as their cups broke and everything rattled to the floor. She’d always known this was possible on Europa, the destruction as an ice plate shifted, but the occurrence was rare and she hadn’t expected to live through one.

  “Ness?” she could hear Chantal calling from her transmitter. “Nessa?” The volume faded in and out, and Nessa didn’t know if the reason Chantal’s voice disappeared abruptly was because the transmitter was broken or if Chantal herself could no longer connect. She tried to call back but couldn’t hear her own voice in the chaos unfolding around her.

  The shaking grew worse; Nessa tried her best to protect her head as the lights flickered and went out, more items crashed around. All the books from the nearby shelf fell, half of them landing on her legs before she pulled them in close to her body. Fading in and out on her transmitter, she could hear the reportbots instructing everyone to stay calm, to take cover. Why nothing had detected this before it hit, Nessa didn’t know, but it seemed too long before it ended.

  In stories and media there was always a pause, a silence after a catastrophe, but Nessa heard the groans and shouts immediately after the quake subsided. She’d been through enough incidents that her mind bounced back immediately. She got to her feet even as the few final rumbles shook through the building.

  “Nessa. Nessa.”

  “Here,” said Nessa, moving to the transmitter. It was still working, Chantal coming in stronger now. It must have been the shaking that had affected it. “And you won’t believe it—there was just a quake.”

  “And I missed it?” Chantal was joking but soun
ded relieved.

  Nessa smiled. She ached to be near Chantal so badly right now that she could almost forget they had never even touched yet.

  “I have to go check on the customers. Will you be all right?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” said Chantal. “Computer says braking thrusters fired.”

  “Good,” said Nessa, although the part of her mind she was trying to push aside at the moment was panicking. Someone had programmed the Ice Star’s systems to halt the flight, and if that were the case, it was very likely someone trying to take over the ship who didn’t want it to get too close to its original destination.

  But she couldn’t think about that now. In the front of her shop, she could hear children crying and whining, people calling to each other. Nessa picked her way through the kitchen, which was utterly destroyed, and moved to grab the med case. It had been bashed up pretty badly and she cursed herself for never putting it in a safe place. Still, she managed to wrestle it out of the collapsed compartment and staggered into the coffee shop.

  “Listen up,” she shouted above the din. The nearest person to her had a gash in their palm from a broken cup, but that was only a minor injury and could wait. “Everyone not in need of immediate medical help, stand up.”

  This had been the protocol on Nessa’s ships. If you were able to stand, no one would waste their time on you, and you could easily indicate where aid was needed. Most people stood, some with clear cuts.

  “The med kit,” said a middle-aged man, white and wide-eyed.

  “I’ll bring the med case around, please stay where you are,” she said. Motion to her side made her turn.

  “I don’t think he can breathe,” said a woman, pulling at a table that had fallen over. Someone was beneath it.

  Nessa turned and pointed to the three nearest people. “You, you, you,” she said. “Get it off him.”

  She knelt on the floor to open the med case. People in crisis liked direction; the people she’d pointed out did as told as she wrested the battered case open. Something wasn’t right, though. The medical case should have been running scans, talking to her. She wouldn’t know what to do if the device didn’t guide her through it. She brought it over to the injured man regardless.

  “What’s wrong with it?” asked the woman as Nessa set the med case down. “Shouldn’t it be giving us instructions?”

  “It was damaged in the quake.”

  “He’s going to die,” said one of the people Nessa had pointed to. “My God, he’s going to die.”

  The man on the floor was writhing and trying futilely to gasp, but his motions were weak. Nessa knew what had happened; she’d seen it once before. His throat had been crushed. But the only other time she’d experienced this, someone else had helped the injured person, and the med case had actually worked. There was no way she could do this on her own.

  “He’s not going to die,” she said, getting to her feet. Her mind still half-stuck on Chantal, she knew where she could get help. “Wait here, keep everyone back.”

  She dashed to the back room and fiddled with the transmitter, running it through to the front of the coffee shop. Thankfully the building’s inner systems were still functioning.

  “Chan,” she said, rushing back into the front area. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah, not well, but,” Chantal paused, gave a dry chuckle. “Doesn’t matter with how everything’s going. Is everyone all right?”

  “No,” said Nessa, finding someone handing out cut-sealing gel packets from the med case when she returned. She pushed them aside and kneeled, pulling the med case to her and grabbing the set of gloves. “I need your help.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Who’s that?” asked the middle-aged man.

  “Help, now shut the hell up,” said Nessa. The prone man looked to have passed out, which was both kinder for him and not a good sign. “Walk me through a tracheotomy.”

  “It’s actually called a—”

  “Chantal,” said Nessa firmly. She knew it was nerves. Chantal was under stress, alone on that ship, and Nessa hated that she couldn’t help.

  “Is there an obstruction?”

  “One of the tables crushed his throat in the quake.” Nessa reached for the laser knife and the provided tube.

  “Okay. Have the laser knife and trache tube ready.”

  “Got it,” said Nessa. She was proud of Chantal’s coolness in all this. They were a good team together. She swallowed, focused.

  “Find the Adam’s apple. Just a little below that should be another little bump about an inch down.”

  “You want me to cut there?” Nessa fingered the laser knife.

  “Between there,” said Chantal, very confidently. Nessa doubted anyone in the coffee shop had any idea she was currently stranded on a partially-hijacked ship, stuck in the middle of space. So far away, in so much of her own danger. “Horizontal, about half an inch long.”

  Nessa swallowed and nodded as though Chantal could actually see her, and made the cut.

  * * * *

  She had never known what it was Chantal saw in her, why she had reached out. Nessa had figured at first it would be just another in a series of failed relationships, but she was willing to try in part because she had nothing else to do. Anything was better than being bored to death on Europa.

  The colony on Jupiter’s moon was fine, of course, beautiful even, encased in a series of greenhouse-like structures that helped maintain a lovely moderate climate constantly. But Nessa was used to ships and ports, and Europa was closer to general life planetside than anything else. It had taken some getting used to; it had taken some push from Chantal.

  “You mean you’ve never gone to the Ice Park?” she’d asked Nessa on one of their chat sessions. The Ice Park was very large and reportedly very beautiful, intricate gardens filled with art and sculptures created from various clear materials to give the feel of ice sculptures among the flowers.

  “It’s not something I’d go to alone,” Nessa had said

  Chantal had smiled. “Take me with then.”

  Chantal had been serious. She talked Nessa into taking a portable transmitter with her to various places on Europa, a long-distance date, and they would have conversations about everything from the art in the garden to the best foods to eat at brunch to politics.

  And Nessa loved her for it, for how Chantal pushed her out of her comfort zone with just enough coaxing, no pressure. She looked forward to their conversations, which always seemed to take an angle Nessa hadn’t been expecting. The dates where Nessa had to venture on her own someplace boring were somehow always memorable. And as much as Nessa had thought herself someone who went after her dreams, Chantal caused her to realize she was really more of a pessimist than she’d ever wanted to be.

  Nessa sent recipes for waffles, for cake, for chili that contained coffee, and she smiled whenever Chantal informed her she had tried them out. She imagined what it would be like to be able to bring Chantal a cup of fresh-brewed coffee in bed, a Europa sunrise out the window, Chantal naked and relaxed and still half-asleep under the covers, as if Nessa’s home was the safest place in the solar system.

  Of course they were intimate, too, in the unsatisfactory way you could be at such a distance. Sophisticated toys enabled them to pleasure each other to some extent, though depending on the connection across space, it could be hit or miss. Nessa had looked forward to those times even as they tormented her—she wanted more than anything to actually hold Chantal, to feel her lips on Chantal’s lips, her mouth on Chantal’s clit and not the toy, even if it did give Chantal sensations with only a one-point-three second gap in transmission.

  “Someday I’ll really hold you,” Nessa had promised, as though she could even promise that, and Chantal would smile. They masturbated together, shared what fantasies they could. They spoke every day, then twice every day. Nessa feared the mistake it was to get so involved with someone who’d never even left Canada, but like so many other impulses she’d follo
wed in her life, she couldn’t stop herself.

  When Chantal’s mother became ill, Nessa sent real cards despite how long they took to ship. Two months after her mother died, Chantal looked for a cheap flight to Europa.

  * * * *

  There was no applause when Nessa finished. No one said a word. She bent forward, gave the man another puff of air through the trache tube, hating the feel of so many eyes on her in silence.

  “Is he breathing on his own?” asked Chantal, disrupting the uncomfortable silence.

  “Weakly,” said Nessa.

  “Without the med scanner on the first aid case, you won’t know the extent of the damage, but you need to get him to a medical facility.”

  “I’ve been calling for the past ten minutes,” said one of the customers, sounding angry. “I can’t get through to anyone.”

  “It must be the quake,” said Nessa, not caring how obvious the statement was. Of course the emergency lines were all flooded. She glanced to the door and windows and saw people staggering through the streets. “It’s best if you all stay in here for now. Someone keep a watch on him, give him some air if he needs it.”

  “Where are you going?” someone asked as Nessa turned.

  “I was in the middle of helping someone else.” She stalked through the destruction to the back room without answering any further questions, trying to keep her mind as focused as it had been moments before. It spun, despairing as it saw the disaster that had only an hour earlier been a beautiful, fully functioning coffee shop. Another one of life’s bad gambles.

  Nessa pulled up a chair that had survived being bashed about and tightened the transmission back to the one room she was in. The reportbots were broadcasting the mayhem of the quake so she flicked them off and swallowed, pulling up the schematics on the class of ship the Ice Star was.

  “Chantal, are you still there?”

  “Yes.” She sounded less confident now that the medical drama was over.

  Nessa smiled a little, although Chantal couldn’t see it. “First, thank you for that. I couldn’t have done it without your directions.”