The Thing In The Ice

By E. Catherine Tobler

In the vast, black emptiness between Mars and Jupiter, Ceres was melting

Buried within the asteroid's core, Ceres Station provides water-ice for an ever-growing system of corporations and explorers, each intent on carving their names into the future of the galaxy. But no one anticipates the secret Ceres harbors.
Ice cutter Flit Navarro knows how to haul ice from asteroids and that Scrabble boards only have six Rs. She's never confronted mercenaries intent on claiming Ceres Station for themselves. She's never plummeted to the lowest levels of the station to confront a secret waking from the ice, a monster of ice and instinct.
But she's about to.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apokrupha LLC
• Release date: May 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370752478

E. Catherine Tobler

E. Catherine Tobler's work has been nominated for the Sturgeon Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and others.

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Apokrupha

All Rights Reserved

The Thing In The Ice

E. Catherine Tobler

Kaiju Revisited #4

Published by Apokrupha

Cover Art by Chris Enterline

chrisenterlineart.com

copyright, 2017

apokrupha.com

* * *

I

Can You Dig It?

Somewhere in the vicinity of her heart—

No.

Seven year old Alita Shaw, soon to be Flit Navarro, fidgeted in the rigid plastic chair beside the desk of Schiaparelli Station’s chief administrator.

Miss Shaw? Did you hear me?

Alita had heard, but her focus was on the poster behind Administrator Doyle’s desk. It was old, so worn the wall showed through in places, and Alita couldn’t tell what the woman depicted was doing. Alita had narrowed the choices to rock climbing or managing an administrative meeting. She knew one thing for certain: the woman had gotten where she was because of the BOSS bars in her crossbody bag. The key to success in any venture was Bars Of Sugary Shi—

She couldn’t say that last word, no not at all.

Alita.

Alita slid from the chair. Doyle moved as if she meant to leave the office, but she didn’t head for the door. She went to the window, the window overlooking Mars. Eternal dust storm, Mars; Alita stared into the haze and somewhere in the vicinity of her heart—

No.

"How far is Far Knob?" she asked.

Doyle fell into the particulars and Alita let her mind wander. The Far Knob expedition was not returning; Doyle had said everyone attached to the expedition was dead. Alita knew she should have felt something at this news. The other kids had cried—were still crying out in the hall, but not her. She stared at the copper haze outside the windows and couldn’t summon a single tear for her own parents. They’d been part of the expedition. Hadn’t they packed BOSS bars?

Station admins were going to place Alita with a foster family and she couldn’t even care about that, because she was hollow inside. Hollow like she was hungry.

Do you have any BOSS bars? she asked Doyle.

"…Alita…have you heard a word I’ve said… I should see if I can round you kids up some lunch though—you make an astonishingly valid point… Are you— Alita, are you sure you don’t need—"

A sandwich would do, she added, recognizing the distress and unshed tears in Doyle’s eyes. She understood the same expression should have been on her own face, but she couldn’t find it. It was as if she’d picked up the wrong bag when she left her home quarters that morning. She clutched the bag against her now, realizing the poster was probably two posters, one plastered over the other. Only half of each had survived.

Alita?

Somewhere in the vicinity of her heart—

No.

* * *

Twenty-three years later , in the vast, black emptiness between Mars and Jupiter, Ceres was melting.

Sublimating, Flit said, leaning against the door frame leading to the Icebox’s sickbay. Perfectly normal, sublimation. Above her, the electrical system crackled and a shower of orange sparks spewed from a convex hole in the ceiling onto the crosshatched walkway. One by one, the sparks winked out like stars.

It had been a long time since she’d seen the sky.

Her comm filled with static, then Danse’s baritone. Flit? You there?

She stared at the blood leaking from the hole in the left leg of her suit. At first, she’d thought it was just a tear, the suit’s lining the same blood red. Partly, that was the point, the flash of bright red allowing a cutter to know when they’d torn their suit, or had suffered an injury they might not otherwise feel. She felt this wound, the insistent thrum of the bullet’s passage through her thigh, but didn’t really feel it. Not in any place that mattered.

Her helmet clattered to the floor and she staggered into the room, sickbay’s flickering lights in the hazy air nauseating her as she pushed toward the myriad drawers that lined the far wall. Her left foot squelched a little in her boot, proving the blood had run there too, in silent, crimson rivers.

Flit?

Flit didn’t answer, but neither did she silence her comm. She forced herself to cross sickbay, to not slump against the closest bed and take the pressure off her thigh. Only when she reached the drawers did she allow herself to lean against their support. She opened one, and then another, and then another. A flutter of paper scraps bearing single letters; gauze, tape, scissors, all very useful items she was sure, cascaded from every drawer as she swept through them until at last her fingers closed around what she sought.

She pulled the chocolate-coated protein bar from the fourth drawer with a triumphant grin, noting three others amid the medical debris. The aqua blue wrapper crinkled as she tore it between her teeth, as with gloved hands she shoved half of it into her starving mouth. Manage Your Hunger the BOSS Way! the wrapper screamed in fuchsia print.

Flit!

Danse, she said around the mouthful of sugary shit. You can’t expect me to take these mercs on an empty stomach… She didn’t mention the gunshot wound to her thigh—that would just take the conversation to a place she didn’t want to go. She pictured the mining shaft, the debris, the tangled wreck of Danse’s rig… Nope, she didn’t want to go back there.

Flit sank to the floor, three wrapped bars in her gloved fist, black eyes on the door. If she stayed too long, the mercs would find her. She had no gun; being a cutter, she carried her holstered ice axes, a matched pair she called Tooth and Claw. Who brought axes to a gun fight? Only a cutter… She might have a better shot at the mercs tailing her by throwing food at them. Or maybe they’d become food themselves, given what was chasing them.

Stupid goddamn space monsters, she bit out. I’m in sickbay—level three. She set the protein bars aside long enough to pluck gauze and tape from the spilled debris on the floor and begin the patchwork job on her leg and then her suit. They had air still, but the environmentals were starting to go and there was no telling when the Icebox might be open to space. Stupid goddamn space monsters. Not to slight the sublimation’s part in the facility’s current breakdown—overly aggressive mining didn’t do any planetary body much good in the long run, she supposed.

Theory was, the monster had been born out here, among the asteroids and dwarf planets, a piece of the system as old as any of the rocks the cutters mined. They said the beast lived inside Ceres itself, hibernating within the ice until Flit and Danse and their team of expert cutters set the monster free during operations a week prior. The vein of water ice had been perfect—perfect but for the thing living inside it, apparently. The mine had been destroyed in the ensuing struggle, the beast breaking itself from its icy cocoon, shattering the vein, scattering mining rigs. Countless lives had been lost, the majority of surviving cutters fleeing the collapsing station in escape pods and trawlers laden with ice.

Rita Crane, current head of CraneCo and Icebox Operations, placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of Flit and Danse, and reasoned they should be the ones to bring the beast in. They’d broken it out of its prison—now they had to fix it.

Crane wasn’t someone Flit wanted to argue with—especially when she unexpectedly sweetened the deal. Like countless cutters before her, Flit was indentured to the station; Rita promised that bagging the beast would end Flit’s indenture—she would be free to go where she would, at long last. Flit thought of her foster parents, of how they’d been promised