Two hours later, the rover once again safely on solid ground, Andrew and Jasmine climbed gratefully up the aluminium ladder to the hab-rover's airlock.
"So," said James over the intercom as his father and his sister stripped off their surface suits. "What now?"
"We do what you suggested," said Andrew as he hung his suit's life support backpack on its wall mount and plugged in the hoses that would refill its oxygen tanks and recharge its batteries. All electrical power in the hab-rover came from an atomic generator powered by a chunk of plutonium that had once been part of a nuclear warhead. The nuclear apocalypse that the world had feared for so long had never happened. A worse apocalypse had happened instead and the warheads, now rendered superfluous, had been found a more peaceful use.
"We go east," Andrew continued. "Right around Bassenthwaite Planitia. Then we find one of the old roads going south and follow it until we find a place where we can go west, back to the dig site. It's a bit out of our way but it'll get us there."
"I was looking at the satellite images while you were out," said Susan distractedly while watching Jasmine peel the suit from her arms and upper body. "Looks like there's a traversible path. The bad news is that it passes quite close to Skiddaw Mons, the highest mountain in the area. There could be nitrogen flows coming down the mountain, blocking our path. Jasmine dear, let me look at you. Are you hurt?"
"I'm fine," the girl replied, looking down at herself as she wriggled the suit past her hips and down her thighs. She prodded the pink, healthy looking skin with the tips of her fingers. "See? No frostbite. No bruising."
"Let me see." Susan pushed her daughter's hand away and performed her own inspection. "You have to be careful out there. Your boots and gloves are the only parts of your suit that can..."
"I know, mum. I've studied the suit's specs as thoroughly as the rest of you."
"Reading them is one thing..."
"I just slipped, mum. Stop fussing."
"Yeah, mum," said Andrew, feeling suddenly mischievous. "You'll give her a complex."
David's chuckle came over the intercom from the childrens' shared bedroom where he was doing his homework. Susan glared at her husband, but then she smiled and nodded, conceding the point. She still insisted on inspecting her daughter's body, though, and Jasmine endured it stoically until her mother was finally satisfied and allowed her daughter to get dressed in her indoor clothes.
"Mum's right," said James, who had called up a map from before The Freeze on one of the cockpit displays. "There was a road going south past Bassenthwaite Planitia. Whetner it's still there remains to be seen, of course. Who knows that the Hoder floods and earthquakes did to the place?"
"If the route's impassable we could always travel across Bassenthwaite Planitia itself," said Andrew as he got dressed. "It's a bowl, surrounded by hills except where the rivers used to enter and leave. There's nowhere for the ice to go so it should be stable. No crevasses. Nothing but tiny fractures where the ice contracted as it cooled."
"Nice, flat ground," said James approvingly. "Should be a nice, smooth drive. I'll get going to the east, then, shall I?"
"Yes please," said Andrew. "I'll be right there."
☆☆☆
Mile after mile of frozen, ice covered ground passed by outside the rover as Andrew and James sat in the two cockpit seats, watching the already gloomy landscape grow darker as the distant sun sank towards the horizon.
"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.
"What in Hoder's name are they?" said James, staring in wonder.
"Please don't use that word," said Andrew, wincing with distaste.
"Hoder? Sorry, but everyone at school says it."
"Doesn't mean we have to."
James nodded. "Maybe if we get a look at what this place used to look like..."
He tapped some commands into the rover's computer, which sent a request back to New London for some image files from its huge historical database. A moment later an image appeared on one of the cockpit monitors. A narrow road lined with trees on one side and a low hedge on the other with pretty mauve flowers growing at its base. On the other side of the hedge were fields and farm buildings, and beyond them were tall hills lined with trees. It was a beautiful, tranquil scene that had both father and son staring at it with aching sorrow.
"This is as close to our current position as I can get," said James. "We seem to have strayed from where the road used to be. Doesn't matter. Let's try again."
The next image showed a small cluster of houses with cars on the road and people wandering along the street. There were hills in the background again, except that this time there was a line of structures standing half way up it. Tall pylons of metal girders standing in a line with wires strung between them.
"Of course," said Andrew. "Electricity pylons. Carrying electricity from the power stations to the towns and villages in the area. Tall enough to protrude above the ice."
"They're completely encased in nitrogen," said James in awe.
"Yeah," his father replied. "At first, the air condensed to liquid and ran like water to the lowest points, but when the air pressure dropped low enough it couldn't exist in liquid form any more. It just deposited itself directly in solid form onto any surface it could find. About a metre thick."
James looked at the image on the monitor again, marvelling at how slender and fragile looking the pylons were. "I'm amazed they could bear the weight," he said.
"I would imagine they're stronger than they look," Andrew replied. "You didn't want a few hundred thousand volts of power coming down in a gale and hurting someone."
"A gale," said James dreamily. "Weather. I wonder what it was like to be in weather. Wind or rain or snow."
"At the time, people described it as unpleasant," said Andrew. "They avoided going out in it. When they had no choice they dressed up in heavy clothing to protect themselves, but I'd give almost anything to be out in what they described as a 'good, solid downpour'. Just to see what it was like."
James nodded, looking back down at the image on the monitor screen. It was sunny in that scene, and the people were dressed lightly in shorts and tee shirts. "They look so happy," he said. "They had no idea what was coming."
"Back when that picture was taken, the governments of the world were probably already building the underground cities," said Andrew. "The great experiment, they called it. To see if people could live underground so we could give the surface back to nature. The environment was on everyone's minds back then. Pollution, habitat loss. It gave the governments the perfect excuse to build underground cities without anyone guessing why they were really doing it."
"All the astronomers in the world must have known, though," said James. "A bloody great brown dwarf, seventy five times the mass of Jupiter, careening towards the solar system... You'd have been able to see it with the naked eye while it was still twenty years away!"
"The greatest conspiracy in the history of the world," his father replied. "There were so many people in on it, asked to keep it secret for the good of all mankind. It's a miracle they were able to keep it under wraps for so long. And then, when the truth did break..."
They both fell silent as they remembered what their history teachers had told them in solemn, respectful tones. The Anarchy, as nearly nine billion people realised what was going to happen to the Earth. The breakdown of civilisation, except where it was ruthlessly enforced by the world's armies. The growing terror as Hoder, the brown dwarf, named after the Norse God of winter, cold and darkness, loomed in the sky. As large as the full moon, then larger. Every one of the twelve underground cities had come under seige as everyone doomed to be left on the surface tried to get their families to safety. Most had fallen, desperately overcrowded by invaders, none of whom had the skills to replace those they'd killed. Only on the Mars colony had peace prevailed, and even those in the three surviving underground cities began to fear that only the Martians held any hope for the survival of mankind.
Then had come The Apocalypse as Hoder's gravity pulled mercilessly at the Earth, spilling the oceans from their basins to inundate every continent and tearing every fault line open with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. By some miracle, millions had somehow managed to survive on the surface, but then had come The Freeze as the Earth had begun to recede from the sun. Within the year there was ice covering every ocean, even at the equator, and within two there was no evidence that there was anyone still alive outside New London, New Beijing, New Richmond or the Mars colony. Not even in the massive, well provisioned nuclear bunkers dating from the cold war. Then there was nothing for the fifty thousand refugees to do but wait for the atmosphere to finish freezing out onto the surface, a process that had taken nearly two hundred years.
Andrew reached out to turn off the display, sick with horror and sorrow. The sun was on the horizon now, and as it sank out of sight the ice-bound electricity pylons disappeared from sight, plunged into a darkness that was now broken only by the two pools of light cast by the rover's headlights. Andrew and James sat in silence for a few moments, glad that those awful times were now two centuries in the past, and then Jason turned on the music player, suddenly feeling a desperate need to hear something cheerful.