Runaway World

Augsburg

     The Alps were just as beautiful now as they'd been before The Freeze, thought Andrew.

     The sun was half way up the the sky to their left, and even at its current distance it lit the landscape well enough for him to see the mountains that reared above the horizon ahead of him. The brilliant white of water ice made a stunning contrast with the slate grey of bare rock and the inky blackness of shadows, all sculpted into knife-sharp peaks that were silhouetted against the majesty of the Milky Way behind them. It was a sight that Andrew could have stared at all day, and he wondered what it must have been like for the people who had once lived here, two centuries in the past. Had it seemed as beautiful to them as it did to him, or had it eventually become so familiar that they barely noticed it any more? He dismissed the possibility as ridiculous.

     The tracks of Reginald Fox's rover led straight for them. There were passes through those mountains, Andrew knew. According to the charts made by the new terrain mapping satellites there were even passes now that hadn't existed before The Freeze as steep sided valleys had become filled with a flat bottom of ice. Fox wouldn't deviate too far from the most direct course he intended to take in case it allowed his pursuers to gain on him, but even so there were three courses he might take to pass through those mountains, if that was what he intended to do. There was no way to know which one he intended to take until they were closer.

     Between them and the Alps, though, was the town of Augsburg. Cheval had produced another satellite image and it showed the glowing point of heat that was Fox's rover only a couple of hours ahead of them now and dead in the centre of what had once been a city of half a million people.

     "He's getting desperate," said Cheval. "He's daring us to follow him."

     "Are we going to follow?" asked Andrew, staring at him in concern.

     "Of course we are. We can't lose him now."

     "If we do lose him, we can spot him again the next time a satellite goes overhead."

     "They're not spy satellites. They're ground survey satellites. They can't be moved into new orbits. We have to wait until one passes overhead during the course of its normal operations and that won't happen again for several days. By then he'll be so far away, in an unknown direction, that we'd have to scrutinise hundreds of images to have a chance of spotting him again. No, the only way to catch him is to keep on his tracks. Where he goes, we go."

     "And what if there's a building with a void inside it and tall enough to only have a thin layer of ice above it?"

     "If he made it, we can make it."

     "He has one advantage over us. He knows the exact route we have to take to stay on his tail. Suppose he sets a booby trap for us?"

     "A building rigged with explosives, waiting for us to pass over it?" said Cheval with a smile. "Well, you knew this might he dangerous. That's why you insisted your family be taken off."

     Andrew frowned unhappily, but he had no reply and could only glower unhappily as the rover trundled on to what he feared might be a deadly trap.

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     The tallest buildings in Augsburg rose above the layer of frozen atmosphere that entombed the rest of the city. Andrew thought they looked eerily like ghosts in the pale light of the distant sun. Or no, he suddenly thought. They looked more like the stalagmites he'd seen in old photos of caves except that the ridges and tiers of glossy white that covered them were made of water ice instead of limestone. The nitrogen ice that had once also covered them had long since flowed away to form slumped mounds around their bases.