Bones of Ice Read online

Bones of Ice

  by A. L. Strezze

  Copyright © 2013 A. L. Strezze

  Cover created by A. L. Strezze using art licensed from "Siloto" and "Alptraum" via Dreamstime.com.

  The following is a work of fiction, and all names, places, characters and events are products of the author's imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real locales, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Dedicated to Brian, Dad, and my other beta readers, who helped me to keep making the story better!

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  Stranded on an uninhabited planet, Jade's only hope is to survive long enough for colonists to arrive and send her home. But what if they're not coming?

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  Table of Contents

  Day One

  Day Two

  Day Three

  Day Seventy-One

  Day Seventy-Four

  More by this Author

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2013 A. L. Strezze

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  Day One

  Jade gritted her teeth, staring at the bare stone of the portal site and the empty air above it.

  I’ve got to stop this.

  The portal site didn’t look like much - just five titanium plugs set into the natural stone, outlining a rough arc about four meters across. She walked slowly up to it this time, until she stood just in front of where the portal would be, if it were active.

  The portal could be open right now, and I’d never know. You can’t see a portal until you walk through. Can’t hear or smell or feel it.

  She raised one hand to the empty air, as if she could rest her hand against the absent gateway to another world. Her world.

  It could be open. Now!

  Impelled by that thought, Jade jumped across the threshold.

  Eyes screwed shut, she could almost pretend that when she opened them she would be back in the Hub on Talinn. But the pine-scented breeze caressing her face had no place in the transit level of the Hub. Nor did the sunset birds she could hear loudly declaring their territories.

  She opened her eyes and swore. “I’ve got to stop doing this. It’s not open. It’s not open now, and it won’t be open ten seconds from now, or ten minutes from now, either!”

  In spite of herself, she turned and stepped across again. “Every time. Every time, I’m disappointed, even though I know it’s not active. This is stupid!”

  She forced herself to keep walking until she was several paces away, and then stooped to pick up a pine cone. It flew threw the portal site to land, untransported, on the rock. “See?” she told herself. “Not. Open. And if it does open, it’ll be because the Agency triggered it, and someone is coming across. I’ll see them, even if I can’t see the portal. Right? Right!”

  It was hard, though.

  Six years of survey work, of knowing to the second when her portal home would open, and now she was stuck.

  “But not really stuck,” she said, trying to reassure herself. “Not stuck forever.”

  Survey Authority guidelines said that the only reason for a survey team to miss their portal home was if they were all dead, in which case the world they were surveying was written off as a bad colonization risk and never visited again. It was a great incentive to punctuality, and as far as she knew it was followed to the letter.

  “But it’s just me that didn’t make it. As long as Donly and Alenn transited on time, there shouldn’t be any problem.”

  She might have missed her portal home by an entire season, but one dead surveyor - or presumed dead, anyway - wouldn’t be enough to stop the colonization process.

  Donly and Alenn would report how she “died.” The Survey Authority would provide recommendations on how to control the risk, and the colony group would be bound to follow through on their bid to settle on Ice or forfeit the deposit.

  “All I have to do is wait until they get here. And stay alive. On my own, with nothing but a bare-bones survival kit, for who knows how long…”

  If Jade had been leading the colony group, they would have been here already, to have as much time as possible to prepare for Ice’s brutal winter. Not that she would ever join a colonist group, let alone be leading one. She liked civilization too much.

  But it was to her benefit that they weren’t already here, or she wouldn’t have much choice in the matter. Once the colony group came through and started their establishment period, the Agency wouldn’t activate the portal again for another twenty years. If she had woken from her involuntary hibernation to find the colony already here, she would have been well and truly stuck.

  “No, I got lucky.” She paused, rubbing her scarred shoulder. “Well, not lucky to get bitten, but at least it didn’t wear off too soon and drop me in the middle of winter, or keep me asleep long enough for the colonists to already be here. Or for the kittens to eat me.”

  She fingered the bandage covering the new wound on her forearm, remembering sharp teeth and the surprising lightness of her assailant’s body.

  “Weird, the way the adult waited outside while the young fed. I’d love to know how that behavior evolved. And whether they eat from the larder a bit at a time, or sleep with their prey through the winter and then gorge in the spring.” She shuddered, considering the possibility that she could have become Ice badger food at any time in the last few months. Maybe she had been even luckier than she realized.

  “Maybe the colonists will figure it out,” she said, shaking her head. “The important thing for me now is that they’re not here yet, so I’ll be able to go back home while they’re moving in.”

  She closed her eyes again and visualized the scene. “I’ll be out gathering food, but close enough to hear them. A hundred or more people settling in have to make a fair bit of noise. It’ll take time for them to transfer all of their people and supplies - plenty of time for me to get back here and take the portal home. I’ll just wave on my way through the crowd, saying ‘Don’t mind me!’”

  A big grin spread across her face at the thought of their reactions, and she surprised herself with a laugh. A part of her mind wondered at how abruptly her mood had shifted, but she pushed it away. Instead, she embraced the feeling of happiness, hoping that it would stay. “This is better,” she whispered, turning her face to the sun. “This is good.”

  After a few minutes, she looked around again, feeling a little more able to deal with the world around her.

  “All right, they should be here soon, but soon might still be a couple of weeks, depending on how much leeway they give themselves to avoid late-season storms.”

  She glanced at the clear blue sky, wondering if she should be worried about late-season storms too, then shook herself. “Stop worrying about things you can’t control, Jade. Including the portal.”

  Even so, she stared longingly back at the empty patch of air that, given the right trigger, could transport her back to the Hub in a single step. It didn’t help to know that portals were natural phenomena, opening on their own often enough to populate thousands of worlds with Earthlike ecosystems.

  “Every few thousand years,” she reminded herself. Her stomach growled, and she sighed.

  “Survival. I need shelter of some sort, water, a fire, food.”

  The first three seemed easy enough. The rocky outcropping that held the portal site and her team’s former camp was surrounded by healthy pine forest, and it was only a few meters away from a river running high with ice-melt. The forest would provide material for a lean-to and fuel for a fire, which she could start with the sparker from her survival kit.

  Food, though - food was the hard part. And she was going to have to figure out something more substantial to eat than cress and chives, if the colon
ists took more than a day or two to arrive. She was already weak, and the bones in her hands showed disturbingly under her skin. Food, high-calorie food, was a necessity.

  Meat.

  Jade’s legs gave out and she sat abruptly on the stone, swamped by a new source of despair. “No Kill,” she whispered, her hands shaking. Could she really break the Survey Authority’s cardinal rule, when her rescue could arrive any day?

  No Kill was even older and better established than No Hazard. And this wouldn’t be just a one-time infraction, an accident or aberration that might be overlooked or forgiven. If she was lucky - she shuddered at the thought - she would be killing one or more animals per day.

  Would the Survey Authority ever send her out in the field again after that? Would they even let her work as an administrative employee, or would they kick her out of the service altogether?

  “No Hazard… No Hazard might be a defense. If I can prove that I would have died without killing for food, then it could be argued that I was obligated to do whatever it took to stay alive, and report back.”

  What value that report might have, she decided that it wasn’t her place to judge. It was simply the duty of a surveyor to report back, and to do that she had to stay alive. Even if it meant killing.

  Of course, given her current luck, the colonists would come through and discover her crime just as she was cooking her first kill, thus proving it unnecessary. Another shudder racked her body, and she tried to distract herself, or perhaps convince herself, by documenting her plight.

  Unfortunately, stripping her filthy clothes off to take images of her own emaciated body was even more disturbing than the thought of killing.

  Her ribs were so prominent that she could count them by touch, and she couldn’t stop shaking, whether from cold or weakness she wasn’t sure. When she checked the images on her com, she could barely recognize herself. She didn’t want to recognize herself in that bony, sick-looking figure. It did prove the point, though.

  “All right,” she whispered, running a reluctant hand across one depleted breast. “I need to hunt.”

  It wasn’t that she had a problem with eating flesh. She ate meat frequently at home, but she was used to proper, vat-grown meat, that came from the store in convenient meal-sized portions. The idea of eating something that had been alive, really alive, and maybe even with young who were depending on it, was repulsive.

  And then, after she killed it, she would have to butcher it, while it watched her with its dead eyes. She had dissected corpses for analysis before, but those were animals who were already dead, usually decaying, and not something she intended to eat afterward.

  Jade had never personally killed anything larger than an earwig, and that had been traumatizing enough that she had never once been tempted to break No Kill, whether for surreptitious dining or for personal protection from dangerous fauna.

  The thought of killing dangerous fauna made her smirk, and then let out a bitter laugh. If she was going to break No Kill anyway, why not go and kill the creature that had gotten her into this mess?

  For a moment, the thought of killing Ice badgers produced a bitter sense of satisfaction. Then she remembered the size of their teeth, and their claws, and the way they struck down their prey with a lightning-fast sprint. Add to that the fact that a grown Ice badger weighed more than she did when she was healthy, and killing one of the beasts didn’t seem very likely.

  The recordings she had watched juxtaposed with her own up-close and personal experiences to paint a terrifying picture, making the skin between her shoulder blades crawl. She resisted for a moment, then spun around to look behind her. There was no sign of danger, but the chill down her spine wouldn’t go away. Pulling her clothes back on, she kept turning in place to scan her surroundings.

  The Ice badger’s fur wouldn’t blend as well with the needle-covered forest floor as it did with its native rockfield, and the rock of the portal site was darker, but she still peered suspiciously at several shadows.

  Tossed pine cones didn’t flush out anything larger than a creeper, though, which squeaked indignantly at its abrupt awakening and trundled off into the forest when she encouraged it with another cone.

  Based on the initial survey data, she should be safe here. Then again, she should have been safe before, too.

  Ice badgers didn’t act like apex predators, although they were the closest the team had found to it in this area. They ate carrion, fruit, insects, and fresh meat with equal relish, but hadn’t been recorded hunting anything larger than the ten-kilo lapins that shared their territory.

  True, her teammate Tad had his leg savaged by one on the original two-week survey, but that was because he literally tripped over it. Tranqs had no effect on the beast, but she and Donly had been able to drive it away with nothing more than shouts and thrown stones.

  They were careful after that, in accordance with No Hazard, and completed their observation of that region via remote. There was never any sign of Ice badgers venturing into the forest that stretched between the rockfields and the portal site, and the rest of the survey was completed without incident.

  So why, when the team returned for a follow-up survey in the fall, had one of them attacked her?

  It had been Jade, Donly, and the newbie Alenn this time, since Tad wasn’t cleared to return to field work yet. The first three days of the five-day survey had been uneventful, and they were actually ahead of schedule on all of their planned sampling.

  When the remotes revealed a vast herd of deer-like grazers heading for the area, they decided to set up hides in the forest for sampling and first-hand observation. Alenn had been wary of the big herbivores and stayed in camp, safe behind the ultrasonic fence. Donly and Jade took the hover further out, hiding it in a hollow at the base of a low ridge they thought might split the body of the herd and make it easier to get a few samples without spooking the rest.

  She could remember joking with Donly as they climbed the ridge, and startling a small advance group of grazers when they pushed through the trees at the top, and then…

  Nothing, until she woke up on the other side of winter in a cave full of sedated grazers, to the sound of Ice badger kittens eating her fellow victims alive.

  Jade shook her head, wishing that memory wasn’t quite so clear.

  No, she didn’t want to go hunting Ice badgers. She would stay well clear of the northern rockfields, and if she was lucky, she would never have to see one again.

  “Which still leaves me with the problem of food. Focus, Jade!”

  On survey, they used tranq guns and binders to subdue animals for sampling. If the animal was too fast or too cautious, they just used the hover and out-ran it. Now, though, all she had was the gear she had been wearing during that expedition, last fall.

  “Enough whining,” she snapped. “Forget about what’s missing, and figure out how to work with what I do have.”

  Survival kit, field knife, a variety of sampling tools, all drained of power, clothes, and her com. It wasn’t much, but there were also all of the natural resources around her, if she could just figure out how to use them.

  Those included plenty of potentially edible animals. There were the small forest lapins, thick-furred forest pigs, and a wide variety of ground and tree squirrels. Mustelids too, like the creeper she had chased away. They weren’t generally classified as food animals, but they weren’t toxic either.

  “I wonder if I should have tried to kill it instead…”

  How was still the question, though. There were plenty of rocks strewn across the forest floor, but would anything small enough for her to throw be big enough to kill an animal? Assuming she could actually hit what she threw it at in the first place.

  “Setting traps might be easier, except I don’t have any with me. So… can I make one?”

  She pondered the com on her wrist. Last night, she had used it to record an account of her escape, in the anticipation of delivering her report soon. It wasn’t just for re
porting and communication, though. Survey-issued coms were also loaded with all sorts of onboard data, since they had to operate on worlds far from any planetary Internet.

  She had never really delved into that resource, since her team always set up their base camp systems to act as a mini-network, but her com should contain manuals for every piece of standard equipment, and thousands of survey reports from different worlds. Was it too much to hope that it had been loaded with survival information too?

  “Let’s give this a try. Traps,” she said, triggering the search function. She spent a few minutes reading the manual for the Tangler series of traps, wishing she had one, then skimmed through the other search results. There were hundreds, but none seemed to say how to make a trap from scratch.

  “All right, synonyms for trap. And a more specific search phrase. How about… how to set snares? Yes!”

  The borders and straps of her all-weather jacket unraveled into several meters of high-test twine, and her survival kit contained another meter of fine wire. With that and the instructions from her com, setting snares was surprisingly easy. Even better, the data on snares led her to further information on how to construct other types of basic traps.

  That night, she lay down by her fire exhausted and hungry, but hopeful.