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.
☆☆☆
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.
He wondered how the ancient buildings were still standing under the weight and decided that the ice itself must be supporting them. It wasn't crumbly snow, after all. It was solid, where it had been lashed by freezing rain during the early days of The Freeze. Andrew thought that, at the temperature it had now dropped to, the ice was probably as hard as granite.
Between the tallest buildings, the positions of lower buildings were visible as low mounds arranged in streets and blocks. The tracks of Fox's rover followed the layout of the streets for the most part, but here and there it took a short cut across a row of terraces. When they came to one of these places Andrew slowed the rover to a crawl. He knew that the nitrogen ice was growing harder as the planet crawled further from the sun and the temperatures continued to drop, but it was also growing more brittle and cracking as it shrank. Whether it would support the weight of the rover depended entirely on how much water ice there was between the solid nitrogen and the roofs of the buried buildings below.
Cheval chafed visibly at the slowness of their progress, but he made no protest as Andrew slowed the rover even further. "He could so easily have bypassed the city altogether," the Sergeant muttered to himself. "He wouldn't have taken the risk of coming this way unless he wanted to set a trap for us."
"He could have paused at any of these buildings he crossed," Andrew agreed. "Long enough to plant explosives. That's if you really think there's a chance he's got explosives."
"We assume the worst and give thanks when our fears turn out to be groundless," the Sergeant replied. "There'll be plenty of time to catch him when we're out of the city. The Alps. That's where we'll get him. He'll come to an obstacle of some time blocking the valley he's in, be forced to backtrack and run right into us."
"What if he somehow makes it through the Alps?" asked Andrew. "What then? Where could he possibly he heading? He's not just running, leading us on a wild chase. If he was, he'd have just kept on going east. He's got a specific destination in mind."
"Mount Etna," Cheval replied. "In what used to be Sicily. That's our best guess."
"Are you sure?" asked Andrew doubtfully. "If you're thinking he intends to drop it in a lake of molten rock in the caldera..."
"That's exactly what we're thinking," Cheval replied.
"In between eruptions, the caldera of a volcano is usually solid rock. Before The Freeze they could even have lakes of water in them."
"Not Etna. I've seen satellite photos of it. It had a lava lake four months ago, the last time the satellite went over it, and the slope is gentle enough for a rover to have no trouble climbing right up the side of the mountain. All he has to do is get there before us."
"Will dysprosium melt in lava?"
"No, but it will sink. It's denser than lava. He can just stand beside the caldera and throw the stuff in one bar at a time."
"Then let's hope we catch him before he gets there."
"We will. And if we somehow don't, Carp and Finch will get there days before he does. They took the short cut. South east straight from the city."
"You'd think he'd know he's set himself a hopeless task. Is he doing it just to make a point? For publicity perhaps? Perhaps he's just trying to attract more followers to his cause."
"We can ask him when we catch him. Until then..."
There was a bloom of light on the horizon ahead of them. An explosion. Andrew and Cheval were suddenly sitting up straight, staring at the distant fireball. "Missed," said Cheval with amusement. "It's right in our path. He set a trap for us, just as we thought, and it went off too early."
Then another explosion bloomed, also ahead of them but closer, and then another closer still. More explosions followed, one after another, until Andrew was trembling with nervous anticipation. "What's under us?" he asked. "What's under us right now?"
"We're in a street," Cheval replied. "Just solid ice right down to the ground. He miscalculated."
"Maybe," said Andrew, trying to convince himself. "Maybe..."
Then there was another explosion, this one right under them. The two men gripped the armrests as the rover was lifted up by the force of it, then fell again. And continued to fall. Lower than it had been before the explosion went off. The two men stared in terror as jagged walls of ice rose around them as the rover dropped through the roof of the building they'd been crawling over without knowing.