An hour's run, lukewarm shower—can't even have our creature comforts—and fresh outfit later, I steel myself and return to the dining room. Liu and Krüger have dispersed, leaving an ecosystem of red marker scribblings on the table. Why couldn't he have gotten blue? Every time I see this colour somewhere, I have half a heart attack thinking someone's cut themself on one of the kitchen knives.
Liu is in her room if the off-tune singing not quite muffled by the "soundproof" door is to judge, and Krüger has left to check the instruments outside. His sign-out on the fingerprint register dates back less than ten minutes. I wander back to the common room occupying the Pod's broadest regions. It's a square-ish space with windows along both exterior walls, and blow-up rubber couches that look comfy at a glance. A rickety metal-and-plastic coffee table boasts three coffee-mug rings, an empty mug, two of Liu's beloved notebooks, four pens—two of them capless—and a smattering of crumbs.
I take a deep breath, run a hand through my hair, and move deliberately to the other side of the room. I need a haircut; I'm getting shaggy. I have to punt a couch out of the way to reach the only window designed for anyone shorter than a meter sixty: a long, vertical thing that stares at you from across the room like a cat's pupil. The view outside is resoundingly white. If Krüger didn't clip himself to the line Kwon installed last week when we saw this blizzard coming, I'll skin him alive and turn him into a throw pillow.
Which would probably still be comfier than the couches, actually.
I'm going to start dropping obscenities if I have to exist near the mess on the coffee table any longer, and having a team member outside alone on my watch never fails to make me squirrelly. Out here, at least. I pace down the hallway to the back of the Pod, resisting the urge to check outside for Krüger again. Bedrooms, comms room, workshop, gym. I feel like I've been here six hundred times in the last week alone. I spin around and retrace my steps: ten to the common room, six across it, and another ten past the kitchen and dining room, cleaning closet, and into the research lab. Is counting steps an early sign of insanity? Or am I just spinning?
There's a ladder masquerading as a staircase at the back of the lab. I haul myself up it by the railing and step out into the greenhouse that occupies the Pod's second-ish floor. Plants cram the space like pillow stuffing. I breathe deeply, but hydroponic systems carry none of the rich, earthy smell that I miss more often than I care to admit. I push my way to the center of the room, where I can get a better look at the sky.
Oh, for fuck's sake. It's been six and a half days; you'd think the snow would have gotten tired and blown off somewhere else already. This is the worst weather we've had in two months at the station, and that's saying something.
News clippings of Jenu's dust storms and the havoc they wreaked spring to mind unbidden. My gaze lingers outside. The head of Liu and Krüger research group might have been onto something when she used Jenu and Mahaha's similarities to justify this mission. The ferocity of their storms matches, as does their unpredictability. I hope the wind anomalies Krüger spotted last week don't draw another parallel. Jenu deserves more research, but I'd hate to see missions to its closest meteorological match—this—become commonplace in an effort to understand it.
The airlock pops downstairs, followed by a shout. "Boss?"
I let out a breath and trot back down the staircase and find Krüger shedding snow all over our pint-sized lobby. Safe inside again. He unzips the top half of his suit, which empties a small drift into my boots by the door. "We're going to get snowed in if we don't move the Pod."
Shit. "Kwon?"
"On it!" comes a call from down the hallway. The ceiling whines as a sensor array starts its upward trajectory from the Pod roof. I sincerely hope the equipment can still register the local topography through this storm.
"Want me to get Samson?" says Krüger.
"No. I'll do it."
"Are you sure?" He looks down at his still-suited lower half. "I'm already—"
"No."
"As you wish." He makes no particular effort to prevent more snow from taking up residence in my footwear as he shimmies out of the rest of his gear. He hangs up his suit, but leaves his boots smack in the middle of the floor.
His cleaning list just keeps getting longer and longer.
"Higher ground at two o'clock, estimated distance thirty-seven meters," shouts Kwon down the hallway.
I empty my boots into the snow trap and slip into my own gear. With Mahaha's gravity and atmospheric pressure clocking in only slightly below earth's, our outdoor outfits here are essentially glorified snowsuits with radiation shielding and allowance for an ice helmet and oxygen mask. Krüger makes himself scarce as I adjust my goggles and call Kwon in to check the tank on my back. These oxygen masks pull the low-concentration oxygen directly from the atmosphere, but stock their own reserve tanks in case of a failure.
"Good to go," says Kwon, thumping my shoulder.
I punch the exit button before stepping into the airlock. The door whines shut behind me, muffled through my fur-trimmed hood. Not many people realize that a true fur trim is a highly effective way of slowing heat loss on the face—just one of a laundry list of things I had to fight the Hub for when they tried to scale down the size of our arrival capsule two months ago. Communicating survival tips to space techies who've never touched soil or snow in their lives bears a striking resemblance to banging one's head against a brick wall.
Most of them don't know what brick is, either.
The light over the exit door pings on. I push the exit button and brace myself for the wind's assault or anything worse this moon has for me.
A sad little flurry swirls in.
I stare at the white dusting on the floor, then look up and get hit in the face by the wind. Must have been a calm spot. My arm rises on instinct to shield my eyes as I step out into the blizzard. Any exposed skin starts to numb immediately, and the defogging mechanism in my goggles kicks in with an eye-watering puff. This is why full-face masks failed for the last team that stayed here. I heard the most spectacular view they ever got of Mahaha's great outdoors was frosted condensation.
It's five minutes to frostbite in this temperature and wind. I clip myself to the wire along the Pod's flank and fight my way to the back of the station. There are drifts halfway up the wall. I swear I can feel the ground sinking. It's like Mahaha is trying to bury us alive in defiance of the laws of physics, a malevolent force more sentient than meteorological. The scientists are here to study these phenomena, but suffice to say, they've been struggling.
Kwon sees me on the outside cameras and activates the air guns she invented to blast a path to the snow-drowned Pod-garage door. A volcano of white erupts near the Pod's tail.
Several blasts later, her voice crackles to life in my helmet. "Clear for entry."
I scale the new snowbank and slide down the half-opened ramp into the garage. Inside is Samson—Krüger's name for our planetary rover—and an old snowmobile. I swing myself into Samson's driver's seat. The powerful little vehicle revs to life and growls up the ramp. In all of thirty seconds, I'm backing it into the hitch Kwon unfurls from the Pod's nose. I crank the throttle up to full power, and the strangest thing happens.
The moment the Pod lurches in its snowy cradle, the wind around me goes absolutely calm. The snow slows and falls straight, as thick and fluffy as feather down.
"Activating forward guns," reports Kwon, oblivious to the phenomena outside.
Snow spews up from the ground on either side of Samson, and the vehicle leaps forwards as the Pod comes loose. Like it was waiting for that cue, the blizzard clamps down again. I steer our ski-footed station up the new ramp in the snow and sideways out of the two-story snowbank crawling up its leeward side. Samson's studded tires chew the snow-and-ice ground.
Two minutes until frostbite.
I drag my hood down over my forehead to buy a few more seconds. Snow whips my goggles, and the wind's howl erases even the humming of the rover beneath me. The Pod crawls over and through the drifts, up the long, gradual incline to higher ground. Mahaha's surface is always shifting. The trough behind us was the highest spot in the area a week ago.
One minute left.
Kwon disengages the hitch, and I spin Samson around like every off-roader I've ever driven. The ramp this time leads up to the garage. I've parked, followed the wire along the wall, and stepped into the airlock by the time the last seconds of my frostbite limit are up.
Kwon is frowning when the airlock lets me back into the station. "Did you set your extreme conditions timer? I couldn't see the countdown."
I stop short halfway through removing my goggles. "... Shit."
I went on autopilot again. I didn't live in Antarctica for two years for nothing, but that's no excuse for forgetting out here. I throw back my hood, pull off my helmet, and set my mask aside, already clicking through the buttons on my goggles. A number pops up in the corner of one lens. Fed by data from the mask's sensors, it reads four minutes and forty-eight seconds—the limit I should have followed. I overshot.
"Wow," says Krüger dryly from the doorway. "That's a bold move, coming from you. What's next, Boss... actually letting Lingmei out of the station?"
"I will let her outside when I think she's ready."
He says something under his breath about two months, then turns and disappears down the hallway. Kwon is fussing over my forehead and cheekbones. I'm not frostbitten, but that still doesn't excuse forgetting to consult the timer.
"Well, thank God for your experience," says Kwon, letting me go. "I would send anyone else for a medical scan."
"Do it anyway. I'll meet you in the room."
"Gallegos—"
"That was a risk on my part, and my experience doesn't earn me special treatment. The last thing I want is to give the others the wrong idea."
Kwon purses her lips, but says nothing. She helps me beat the snow from my suit, then leaves to get her scanner as the blizzard outside batters against the station walls, hard and harsh, as unrelenting as a waterfall.