Runaway World

Hoder

     "So, how's school going?" Andrew asked his son.

     "Okay," James replied. "All my teachers seem happy with my progress. We had a hydroponics theory test the other day. I came second in class."

     "Great! I imagine it's not the same, though. Doing it on a virtual link on your tablet."

     "I still get to talk to the other kids."

     "Yeah, but they're actually there while you're just a face on a screen. It must seem as though you're getting left out of things. The gossip in the locker room. The banter in the changing rooms. That kind of thing."

     "Yeah," James admitted, "but none of then get to see that."

     He nodded his head to the view out the cockpit window. The vast bulk of Skiddaw Mons reared up to their left, streaked with small nitrogen glaciers and the trails left by boulders of water ice that rolled down the mountainslope during the small earthquakes that still occasionally wracked the area as the planet adjusted to its new condition. It would have been an impressive view to anyone. To someone who'd lived most of their life underground, it was indescribable.

     Andrew nodded. "So you're still glad I brought you?" he said. "You don't wish I'd left you back in the city with your friends?"

     "They're still my friends," James grinned back at him, "and they still will be when we get back. And I'll have some great stories to tell them."

     "Not all surface engineers take their families with them on long range missions, you know," Andrew said, watching his son out of the corner of his eye.

     "But most do," countered James. "The rovers are designed for families. Separate bedrooms, the recreation room. Surface suits tailored for children."

     "I just saw it as a chance for us to get to spend some quality time together. It seemed so important to me when we were getting ready to get out. Since then, though, I've come to realise how selfish I was being. I'm putting your lives in danger."

     "There's not much danger, so long as you know what you're doing," James replied. "You know that better than anyone."

     "But a risk that I take, that I've always been happy to take. Seems like a much greater risk when it's you kids taking it."

     "All the other engineers take their families with them. They clearly don't think the risk is that great."

     "And neither did I, until Henry died."

     "So that's what this is all about." James looked across at his father, who looked away guiltily. "Henry's suit had a faulty heater. People back in the city die sometimes when a bit of equipment goes wrong. Remember that family who suffocated in Lambeth when their ventilator stopped working? It was all over the news..."

     The fourteen year old suddenly fell silent, staring out the cockpit window at something he'd spotted ahead. Andrew, who'd been focusing on the conversation, spun around in alarm to follow his gaze. "What?" he said. "What is it?"

     Then he saw it as well. The rover was traversing a narrow stretch of flat ground between the mountain to their left and a gentle slope to their right than led down to Bassenthwaite Planitia; the almost perfectly flat stretch of ice that had once been Bassenthwaite Lake, back in the golden days before The Freeze. The tiny sun was low down on the horizon on the other side of the Planitia, casting its feeble rays across it so that every slightest undulation cast long shadows of perfect, inky blackness. What took their attention, though, lay ahead of them, where the road turned a bend around a small inlet. On its other side, half way up the mountain slope, was a line of tall, narrow pyramids of ice. Regularly spaced as if they had been placed there by an intelligent hand for some purpose beyond the limited comprehension of man.