They transferred Valentina to Philip's rover for the rest of the expedition. Like all the rovers, it only had two bedrooms. Andrew wondered what the sleeping arrangements would be over there, then decided it was none of his business.
The three children spent most of the rest of the journey across Atlantica Planitia in their rooms, which was unusual. Andrew suspected it was because James needed time to process what had happened aboard the Yang rover. He needed to come to terms with his close call with death and the shock of seeing Li's body, probably mangled in some awful way. David and Jasmine were keeping him company, he thought. Just being with him. Giving him the comfort of their presence. Hoping he would open up if they just waited long enough.
James, though, if he was typical of teenage boys in general, was probably afflicted with a bad case of masculine pride. He was probably afraid that, if he showed them how disturbed and shaken up he was, the rest of his family would see him as weak, still a child. The idea exasperated Andrew no end. Didn't James know how much they all loved him? Didn't they know how proud his father was of him? Didn't he know that he, Andrew, had also been afraid and emotionally upset many times?
Of course he didn't know, he realised with a shock, because he'd never told him. James knew that his father had seen terrible things while chasing Reginald Fox, but Andrew had always made light of it whenever he'd been asked. He'd wanted to protect his children. Keep them from knowing about the horrors that the world could inflict on even the strongest and the most careful. Now, though, James was taking his silence as an example to follow. He thought that his father had been teaching him to show a brave front. To stay strong for the people around him.
It was clear to them all, though, that James had something on his mind. It was written all over him. In the way he tended to stare off into the distance for minutes at a time, requiring a tap on the shoulder to get his attention. In the way he gave clipped, often monosyllabic answers to questions as if he was so busy dealing with whatever was going on in his brain that he had no time for outside distractions. Andrew saw David and Jasmine giving each other worried glances before staring at their parents, their eyes telling them that something needed to be done. They're right, Andrew knew. He had to talk to him. He had to talk to all of them. He had to tell them the things he should have told them right from the start.
Susan was in the cockpit, keeping an eye on things, so Andrew climbed to the upper level and knocked on the door of his children's bedroom. "Okay if I come in?" he asked.
"Sure," Jasmine replied. Andrew opened the door to see the three of them all sitting on their beds staring down at their tablet computers. They all had their remote schooling apps open on the screens, but it was very clear that there wasn't any learning being done. Instead, there was a tense atmosphere in the room. David and Jasmine were waiting for James to talk, to open up to them, but he wouldn't. He didn't know how to give voice to whatever was inside of him.
"It's James I really wanted to talk to," said Andrew. James looked up guiltily, wondering what he'd done wrong, and Andrew waved a hand at him reassuringly. "I wanted to talk about what happened back there," he said. "At the crevasse, but you other guys can stay as well. You all need to hear this."
David and Jasmine, who'd tensed up to leave, nodded and relaxed again on their beds.
"I know I've already said this," said Andrew to James, "but I just wanted to tell you how proud I am of you. The way you handled yourself out there. I know you must have been terrified. I know what that's like, to be scared."
"I wasn't scared," James protested, bristling indignantly.
"Yes you were," replied Andrew, "and there's nothing wrong with that. I've been scared, many times. Most lately when we were chasing Fox to Etna Mons. The way I was accused of being a remainer. The way they thought I was helping Fox to escape. I was scared of what you guys would think of me if you believed the accusations."
"We never believed it, Dad!" David told him.
"I know that," Andrew replied, reaching across to pat the back of the boy's hand. "I know it up here." He tapped the side of his head with his finger. "But there's still a part of me that went to dark places, especially in the small hours of the morning. No matter how silly you know you're being, there's still a part of your brain that whispers things that you know aren't true, and those whispers made me afraid, at least until it was full daytime and I remembered just how great you guys are."
"You're pretty great too, Dad," said Jasmine, leaning forward to beam at him.
"So that's that kind of fear, and then there's the fear of your life actually being in danger, like when Cheval and I had to go outside to disable the sentry weapon and when Fox was shooting at us on the slopes of Etna Mons."
"And when you jumped from one moving rover to another!" cried David, his eyes shining. "That was badass!"
Andrew grinned despite himself. "Thanks," he said, "but it was also scary." He turned to look at James. "So you can believe I know what it's like to be afraid. I'm not ashamed to admit it and neither should you be." James nodded solemnly but said nothing.
"But there's a third kind of fear," Andrew continued, his voice dropping without his being aware of it. His children noticed, though. They sensed that he was getting to what he'd really come to say and they stared at him, giving him their full attention.
"I told you about the time we fell through the roof of a library," Andrew continued. "Fox had placed some explosive charges and waited for us to drive over them. I didn't tell you what we found in that library, though. I wanted to spare you from the horror of it, but that was a mistake. You need to know that the world cares nothing about our delicate human sensibilities and sometimes shows us things that we're not prepared to handle."
He went on to tell them about the room in which a small group of people had tried to stay alive during The Freeze by burning books for warmth. And when their food had run out, they had turned to eating each other until there was only one man left; the mummified remains of a man who had probably been perfectly decent and civilised before the arrival of Hoder but who had finally been driven to eat the flesh of his former friends in an attempt to postpone the inevitable. Jasmine's face grew white as he spoke and David stared silently at him, hie face showing no trace of the fascination he normally felt at hearing the grisly details of horror stories. This was no story, he understood. This was real, and it had done something deep and profound to his father. He looked away, staring blankly at the movie posters decorating the wall, and Andrew could see him wishing that he would stop talking. Andrew didn't stop, though. This was something that he now knew the three of them needed to hear.
He was speaking mainly to James, though, and as he spoke, his voice breaking as the emotional memories threatened to overwhelm him, he was relieved to see something happening on his son's face. Tears were beginning to appear at the corners of his eyes as if powerful emotions were rising up inside him. He understood, Andrew thought with profound relief. He understood that what his father was really telling him was that it was okay to talk about things like this. It's okay to reveal that you've been affected by something. It doesn't mean you're weak. It means that you trust the people you love enough to share the deepest secrets of your soul with them.
"His head had broken open," the teenager suddenly said, interrupting his father in mid sentence. He squeezed his eyes closed and tears flowed down his face to drip from his chin. His voice trembled when he spoke again. "He must have hit his head on something. Hit it hard, on something sharp. It broke his skull open like an egg. I mean, really cracked it open. Half his brain had spilled out, all broken. I thought..." He paused, took a desperate breath. Andrew and the others waited patiently for him to continue. "It looked like Davey's birthday cake when he dropped it that time, you remember. The crust broken open and the soft centre all spilled out on the carpet." He closed his eyes and his body shook with misery and shame. "I saw his brain and I thought it looked like a broken cake."
Andrew went to sit on the bed beside him and took his son in his arms, holding him tight while the boy's body shook and the tears continued to leak from between his tightly closed eyes. Andrew said nothing. He just held him in his arms while David and Jasmine quietly left the room, closing the door behind them.
☆☆☆
They approached the uplands of America Terra Borealis two days later, near what had once been Newfoundland. They turned south to take advantage of the smooth ice of Atlantica Planitia for as long as possible, only turning west when they passed the southern extremity of Nova Scotia. On the third day after they lost Li Yang and his rover, Andrew and Jasmine, sitting in the cockpit, saw the ground rising ahead of them and knew they were approaching what had once been Maine, just a few kilometres south of the city of Portland.
"Everyone have your passports ready," said Jasmine as the rover tilted upwards, climbing the steep slope of the ancient shoreline. "Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?"
"Well," Andrew replied, deciding to take the question seriously. "Since they decided that the pursuit of personal wealth and belongings would help keep us sane in the centuries we were confined underground, I suppose the answer to that question is no. We're all raging capitalists, and therefore should be perfectly at home here."
"Are you sure?" asking Jasmine, mimicking her father's serious tone. "We don't have a single gun among the lot of us."
"Guess we'll have to make up for it by having barbecues and playing baseball, then," said Andrew, trying to keep the laugh in check.
"What's baseball?" asked David, appearing in the doorway behind them. He stared out the window at the tops of masts belongings to fishing boats buried under the ice. Each mast had outstretched fingers of ice stretching sideways like tattered pennants. This had once been a fishing harbour, Andrew realised. Off to their right he saw the top of what he guessed had been a lighthouse, now dark and still, inhabited only by the ghost of its former keeper. His imagination painted a picture of what the place must have been like before The Freeze. A small house, just big enough for one man. His job to keep the light shining, to warn ships of the rocks below against which waves crashed endlessly. Now, the whole scene was buried beneath ten metres of blue tinged nitrogen and oxygen ice leaving only the very top of the lighthouse exposed, encrusted with brilliant white water ice.
"Like cricket, sort of," Jasmine said to David when Andrew remained silent. "I'm sure there's some footage in the archives... Oh. I forgot we're out of contact with the city. I'll show you when we get back home."
The procession of rovers, the Birch rover once more in the lead, followed the path of an ancient river as it wound its way between the rounded humps of ice that covered the buildings of a small town. The plan was to head west, crossing New Hampshire to Albany and then following the path of Interstate 90 to Ontario Planitia. The smooth, level lowlands of what had once been the great lakes would then take them most of the rest of the way to LaSalle, where a nuclear fabrication facility had once been located, one of whose tasks had been to use dysprosium to make control rods for nuclear reactors. The route made the best use of the terrain and avoided the major cities, any of which might contain buried buildings, invisible unde the ice. Traps like the one that had almost defeated them in Augsburg.
The scenery was familiar to Andrew as they made their way inland. They could almost have still been in Britannia Terra. Even so, though, Andrew found himself acutely aware that they were now on another continent. It was the same feeling an astronaut might have had at finding himself on another planet. No matter how familiar it looked, it felt different. He suspected it was just the knowledge of how far away they were from home. They were out of radio contact with the city, after all. Cut off from everyone outside their little convoy. There were no life hutches out there. If some disaster struck, there would be no rescue rover to come save them. They were alone. As alone as if they were indeed on the surface of another planet.
"We're turning," said Jasmine suddenly, jolting him out of his thoughts. "We shouldn't be turning."
Andrew stared at the monitor screens, then looked out the window. It was true, they were angling slowly to the left, onto a shallow valley that led towards Boston. Why? What the hell was going on?
"Wheel tracks!" said David in astonishment, leaning past Andrew's shoulder to point out the window. "We're following wheel tracks."
He was right, Andrew saw, staring in disbelief. There ahead of them, stretching from behind and to the right to ahead and to the left, was a set of tracks left by the wheel cleats of a rover. They'd forgotten to turn off the tracking system and the rover had obediently done what it thought it was supposed to.
"Andrew?" came Lungelo's voice over the intercom. "Why are we turning?"
"I'll get back to you," Andrew replied. He turned off the autopilot and brought the rover to a halt. Behind him, the other rovers also stopped, waiting patiently in line for their leader to get under way again.
"How can there be wheel tracks out here?" asked Jasmine, her eyes wide with astonishment. "We're the first people to come out here."
"From one of the other cities, perhaps," suggested David. "Before they fell."
"New Philadelphia was overwhelmed by the mobs, nearly two hundred years ago," said Andrew. "And New Richmond fell while the atmosphere was still freezing out. Any tracks left by their rovers would have been covered by the ice. It's been twenty years since the atmosphere finished freezing, so those tracks have to be younger than that."
"Andy?" said Philip's voice over the intercom. "Why have we stopped? Is there a problem?"
"Someone's been here before us," Andrew replied. He turned on the video link and both Philip and Lungelo's faces appeared on a monitor screen. "We've come across some rover tracks."
"Impossible," Philip declared. "We're the first to come out this far."
"Apparently not, "Andrew replied. "Could the Council have sent someone before us, years ago perhaps? Some kind of secret mission? They might have taken the Iceland route, which would be why we haven't seen their tracks before now."
"They would have known that we'd see their tracks at some point," said Lungelo. "The Earth is like the Moon used to be. Footprints and wheel tracks last forever now."
"I'm coming up," said Philip. "Not that I doubt you, Andy. I just want to see them for myself."
"No offence taken, Phil. Come on up."
Lungelo also brought his rover forwards, and soon all three vehicles were parked side by side, their headlights shining on the scratchmarks left in the ice by the wheel cleats of a vehicle. "Narrower than a hab-rover," Lungelo observed. "An IceRunner perhaps."
Andrew smiled nostalgically. "Susan and I served on one, back in the day," he said. "It's how we met." He had the autopilot make a measurement, comparing the distance between the tracks with the oval of light cast by the headlights. "You're right," he said. "It's exactly the right width."
"I know some of them are still in service," Lungelo said, "but I believe they are all accounted for. Only so many were ever made. Twenty, I believe."
"Twenty in each city," Andrew agreed. "Made back in the beginning, in preparation for the day when they'd be needed." He hesitated. "We always assumed that all the other cities died. What if one of them didn't?"
"We'd know," Philip replied. "They'd have made contact. What possible reason would they have for hiding? Our two cities could help each other."
Andrew sat in silence for a while, thinking. "Maybe they're afraid of us," he said. "Maybe they think we'd attack them if we knew they existed."
"Why would they think that?"
Andrew hesitated again, knowing he was spinning pure speculation out of thin air. "New Philadelphia was overwhelmed by the mobs," he said. "Right?"
"You're thinking they somehow managed to fight them off?" said Philip. "They'd have let us know."
"Maybe they didn't fight them off. Maybe the invaders broke in, captured the city, but then the first people to get in managed to defend the city against the rest of the mob. Maybe the first people to get in had the best weapons. They would have had to keep some of the original occupants alive, though, to run the life support machinery. Maybe they thought that, if we knew, the other cities would have launched an attack to rescue the prisoners, so they kept silent and let us think they'd all died."
"That's awfully thin, Andy," said Philip sceptically.
"I know," Andrew admitted. "There's probably a thousand different explanations we could think of."
"There's one way to find out," said Lungelo. "We could follow the tracks. See where they lead."
Andrew shook his head, though. "We have a mission," he said. "An important mission. We'll tell the council when we get back and someone else can come out here to investigate."
"If we succeed in obtaining enough dysprosium, we will be leaving this world," said Lungelo, frowning unhappily. "Probably within a few months. A year at the most. There may not be time to send another expedition. Can we, in all conscience, leave this planet knowing that we might be abandoning thousands of people to the fate from which we're so desperate to escape?"
"If we don't get the dysprosium, no-one will be leaving this planet," Andrew replied. "Neither us nor them. Look, there probably isn't another surviving city. It's a ridiculous idea. It's much more likely this vehicle came from our city. Some kind of secret mission years ago. An IceRunner that was supposed to have been destroyed that the Council retrieved in secret. I mean, every government there's ever been has had to do things they didn't want people to know about. Why should ours be any different?"
"Very logical," said Philip, but there was doubt in his voice. "When governments do such things, they're usually very careful to keep people from finding out, but as Lungelo said they would have known that we'd see the tracks they left. My nasty, suspicious mind wonders if they didn't mind our finding out because we've got no way to tell anyone."
"We'll be telling everyone when we get back to the city," Jasmine. told him.
"If we get back," Philip replied. "Doesn't matter if we all die on the surface if, having done all the hard work of digging the dysprosium up, we've taken it to a place from which any Council grunt can come pick it up."
Jasmine's eyes widened with fear and she turned to stare at her father. "And I thought my flight of fancy was unbelievable," he said, reaching across to stroke his daughter's arm reassuringly. "Did any of the old IceRunners go missing?" he asked. "Not destroyed, not scrapped. Just go missing?"
"No," Lungelo replied. "None of ours anyway. I suppose one of the other cities might have sent one out before it fell. Automated, like ours are now. Their atomic power plants can theoretically produce power for decades. Maybe it was sent out on its own for some reason, then it's city fell and it's just been trundling around on its own ever since. Still driving along because there's no-one left to tell it to stop."
Andrew smiled, nodding thoughtfully. "Now that's a more likely explanation," he said. "A rather more reassuring one as well, as it doesn't involve a bunch of Council hit men waiting to ambush us on the way back." He smiled across at Jasmine, who smiled back at him, visibly relieved. "It's not a mystery that's going to be solved by us, though. We've got a mission to perform and we need to be getting on with it."
The others nodded their agreement, and so Andrew started the rover driving again, turning the autopilot back on while making sure the tracking system was turned off. They began heading west, continuing their journey to LaSalle, and the other rovers fell in behind, leaving the mysterious wheel tracks to vanish in the darkness behind them.