White Crystal Butterflies | Wattys 2021 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Six

It makes me miss Antarctica, where the same raw beauty still clung to pockets where the ice survived, and where that ice stayed in its place like any well-behaved glacier. Here, the valleys groan with the threat of motion, and I turn a sharp eye whenever a peak shudders down a dusting of snow or a handful of ice crumbs. It's always in my peripheral vision. They never seem to move when you're watching them.

We've been driving for an hour and a half when the beeping on Krüger's receiver intensifies sharply. We're within a hundred meters of the probe. Krüger keeps his eyes locked on the screen as I slow Samson to a crawl through the last leg of the valley.

"In there."

It's a side branch: a slot canyon off the valley's side, too narrow for the vehicle. I park Samson with some trepidation and join Krüger at the trunk to throw on crampons and grab our gear. The crevasse's shadows swallow us the moment we step inside.

Few things can make me feel as vulnerable as canyons and shifting ice. Mahaha specializes in both. I take the lead, scanning the canyon walls relentlessly, my ice axe at the ready in case something shifts. Wind makes a panflute of the narrow space. The top of the slot is some five meters over our heads; if the ice starts to cave, our only way out is back. Or forwards, but I feel our distance from Samson like a magnetic pull, and I don't want to venture any further than we have to.

My boot squeaks over something just as Krüger's receiver upgrades to a shrill alarm. I withdraw my foot. There's something round and black in my footprint. I swing my ice axe down beside it, and the Isoptera's battered, ice-crusted transmitter pod pops from the snow.

"Holy shit," says Krüger.

I draw a slow breath, wishing it was outdoor air instead of the damp claustrophobia of my oxygen mask. I can control my lungs, but not my heartbeat. The Isoptera wasn't just buried. Wasn't just stripped of its most vulnerable sensors: the ones on its outside. It was bodily wrecked.

I pass Krüger the pod. He turns off the receiver, then pulls out his camera: a small, black box that's been accidentally stepped on, kicked, dropped, and sent through a washing machine with no ill effects. He takes a time lapse of photos as he brushes off the snow and chips the ice from the pod. It's faintly scratched, but otherwise undamaged. Krüger gestures me aside and takes pictures of the hole I dug it from, too. Then more pictures of the crevasse.

"So," I say, when he finally puts away the camera and stashes the pod in his jacket pocket.

"There was wind." He squints up at the top of the slot. "My guess is up there."

I'd say the same; the rest of this branch slopes downwards, making it unlikely that the pod rolled here from further along it. I'm also not going to object to returning to Samson, so we backtrack to find the vehicle exactly where and how we left it. Thank god.

There's only one side of the crevasse that we can reasonably reach from down here, so I drive to the nearest non-cliff and thank whatever engineer built this rover as it grinds up the forty-degree slope on spiked and studded wheels. I don't want to risk driving us into the ice-slot from above, so I park at the top. We continue on foot again. I find the crevasse first, and pace along its rim, following our tracks at the bottom to the place where we found the pod. I turn and peer up the sheer-cut hill behind me.

Krüger is swinging his receiver around like a metal detector. It bleeps across the surface of a waist-high snowbank. I unshoulder the small shovel I've been carrying. Maybe a half meter deep, I unearth a shard of twisted titanium the size of Krüger's hand. He turns it over mutely. Isoptera debris. When he lifts the receiver again, it's still chirping away, so we dig up the rest of the bank and find another shard, plus several bits of wire that didn't register on the receiver's snow-radar function.

Krüger paces through the rubble of the snowbank, then moves on when it proves clean. I pluck another wire piece from a nearby drift. Krüger finds a chip the size of his fingernail, and a chunk of what looks like a circuit board. The trail of debris runs us smack into the hill, which crests over us like a whitecap on the verge of breaking. I lower my shovel. I don't want to risk collapsing this thing.

Krüger apparently has the same idea, and points a question around the hill's other side. I nod, and he lets me take the lead again. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him tap the hill with his shovel. He stops immediately as a light dusting of snow sifts down from above.

The hill is not big, but the wave analogy only strengthens as we trek around its whitewashed flank. Its base is almost triangular, with the broadest edge being the one I avoided digging into, and the opposite point pinning down the high crest's tail. Between this and us is a ridge of snow. I scale it more easily than Krüger does, and stop dead in my tracks.

You could not have gotten the scene before me if you'd unleashed a sculptor on hallucinogens on Mahaha's landscape with three days to work. Over the tail of the wave is a gravity-defying arch of snow, as perfectly symmetrical as the formation pointing to it. Dead behind the hill, the drifts sweep outwards, then up at the center to a slicing edge like the blade of an old concave halberd. Mounted on top of this is a shape reminiscent of a dragon's head or a decorative spear. Its lethal point is leveled at the wave's tail under the arch.

Behind the dragon formation is another arch, this one twice the size and just as impossible. Where it meets the ground, it blends into swells of snow that radiate outwards, symmetrical for tens, if not hundreds of meters.

Krüger's hand touches my shoulder. If I thought I saw him pale on yesterday's drive, it's nothing compared to now. He points me to the smaller arch. There, in the spot from which the rest of the wave-hill rears, is a scattering of Isoptera wreckage. With a single glance, I am willing to bet the pieces here and the pieces we found on the opposite side are strewn in a line straight through the heart of this hill.

This wasn't just an out-of-the-blue gust at three a.m. This was snow—ice, even—that moved with enough force to tear apart the strongest probe in our arsenal. This is what Mahaha is capable of.

"Could wind have done this?" I ask, though I already know the answer.

"I'm not a meteorologist," says Krüger. "We need Lingmei here. And we need to get those pieces back."

"We're doing no such thing." He starts to protest, but I cut him off. I'm not prepared for this. We're not. Until I've had the chance to think this out and plan properly, I'm getting us as far away as I can, to the only safe haven we have on this moon. "Back to the vehicle. We're going home."