Nexus by Robert Boyczuk (best large ebook reader txt) 📕

The hustled away from the meteorite.

It was still dark, but the stars provided enough illumination for her visor amplification to pick up all but the smallest details of the surrounding landscape. To her right, a humped ridge of ice jutted up like the skeletal remains of a monstrous creature. On her left ran the dark thin lines of crevasses. The mountain range ahead had disappeared almost completely behind the horizon, and Liis suddenly realised they must have moved into a lengthy, shallow depression. She watched the final peak sink lower and lower. Ten minutes later, when she expected to lose sight of this last peak, the process began to reverse itself, the mountain growing in size. She checked her suit display. An hour had elapsed; they had traversed only one and a half kilometers. At this rate it would take them five days to reach the pass. When Hebuiza had told her this earlier, she had thought him mistaken, perhaps overly pessimistic. But already her legs were growing tired; breathing was becoming a labour. It occurred to her that Hebuiza might have been too optimistic in his estimate.

She trudged on.

When the muscles in her legs ached sharply, and she thought a rest was long overdue, Yilda finally halted the party. The medication must have been wearing off, for her arm had also begun to trouble her, throbbing incessantly. Easing herself down onto the icy surface, she pulled greedily at her water nipple. Then from her food tube she sucked an acrid goo-a mixture optimized for recycling, but not for taste-into her mouth. When she tried to swallow, it seemed to stick in her gullet, and she had to pull again at her water tube to prevent herself from gagging. It seemed to help. She called up her display. Two hours had passed, and they had travelled a mere two and a half kilometers. Their pace was slowing already. And they still hadn’t turned south, towards the pass. If they didn’t pick up the pace their supplies would run out long before they reached the Speakers’ dome. Each suit carried enough food and water for seventeen days with recycling; the suit batteries and oxygen recirculator would last another two beyond. Hebuiza had estimated five days to the pass. Then another nine to the dome. Leaving them with a five day cushion before their suits would fail. But covering such distances now seemed a near impossible feat.

Liis was startled by a tap on her shoulder. She swung around, causing a jolt in her arm that made her wince. Penirdth stood over her, his arm stretched toward her; ahead, the others were moving again. Near the front of the line, Hebuiza waited at the side, staring back at them. Clasping Penirdth’s hand, she struggled to her feet. For a moment she stood, the dark band of her visor facing Penirdth’s. Liis stared at the narrow black rectangle, imagining Penirdth’s round face and wiry-silver hair. She wondered if he was recalling her face, with its swirl of mad scars, in the same way. Suddenly self-conscious, she turned away. Ignoring the stab of pain in her arm as she jerked her sled into motion, she set off at a trot to catch up her place in line.

Boredom was the greatest enemy.

They had covered only six kilometers in five marches, resting every two hours. And already tedium had set in. Though she had replaced the analgesic patch, her arm now throbbed constantly in background of her consciousness. The muscles in her shoulders, neck and lower back pained her relentlessly from the weight she dragged behind her. How could it have seemed so light a few hours ago? She knew the sled itself wasn’t particularly heavy-but the constant pull of its extra few kilos crept into her muscles, making them knot up and ache.

Three times they had had to detour around wide crevasses, and once around an massive chunk of blue ice that looked like an upthrust fist. More frequently now, they encountered small clefts or cracks in the surface that ran away into the distance. Most were shallow and less than a meter in width, but some dropped away quickly, their bottoms lost to sight. Whenever the fissure was too wide to drag the sleds over safely, Hebuiza would pull a small, narrow folding bridge constructed of wire mesh from the lead toboggan and set it up across the gap. Then the party would cross, one by one, Hebuiza bringing up the rear and retrieving the bridge. Fully extended, the bridge could safely span a gap of about three meters. Liis wondered what would happen if they encountered a larger crevasse of considerable width. Would they be forced to detour dozens of kilometers out of their way, losing hours or days? But the Facilitator would, of course, have a reasonably complete map of the terrain in his head, downloaded from the images gathered on their descent. Still, Liis couldn’t help wondering how detailed it was, and how clearly the fissures would have appeared, at night, against the monotone background.

Sometime after they had passed the seventh kilometer, she was startled to discover that the distant mountains were no longer indecipherable silhouettes, but now showed broken and mottled surfaces, traces of steel-blue and thin yellows below their pink snow-capped peaks. Behind the peaks, the stars had faded almost completely in an azure sky. And the icefield on which they marched, she suddenly realised, had changed colour. Like the snow caps on the mountains, it too was tinged pink. The transition had been so gradual she hadn’t even noticed. Liis looked back, to the east: she caught her breath. Straddling the horizon was the upper edge of an colossal red disc, its colour staining the underbelly of the clouds crimson. On her longhauls, she had always been confined to an orbital lazarette in a system with a relatively bright, young sun; this was the first truly alien sunrise she had witnessed. As she trudged on, she turned her head again and again, watching the star continue to rise until it seemed to fill half the sky, spilling over the edge of the world and soaking everything in blood-red light.

The novelty wore off quickly.

Days on this world were long, Yilda had told them in one of his endless briefings. It would be another forty-seven hours before the sun would set. Which meant they would be walking two of their days before the local day ended. This thought seemed to add to Liis’ weariness. She stopped looking back; instead she stared at her booted feet as she placed one in front of the other, step after step, trying to dull her mind to her perpetual weariness.

Shortly after their fifth rest-Liis’ display showed they had covered eight point seven kilometers in a little less than twelve hours-Hebuiza signalled for yet another halt. Only this time he indicated, through a series of hand signals, that they would remain here for six hours. Liis lowered herself to the ground and lay on her back, breathing raggedly. She felt drained and her shoulders and neck ached; her arm throbbed with each beat of her heart. In the right corner of her visor the sun was a huge orange smear. Eyes closed, she began pulling weakly at her water nipple, liquid dribbling down her chin.

Conscious thought quickly slipped away.

It was dark. But it should have been light.

Liis blinked groggily. She turned her head in the helmet; where the orange sun had been was only undifferentiated black. Then she realised something was eclipsing the light. A person. Long arms, tubes of darkness, reached down, tugged insistently on her shoulders, setting off an intense, jangling pain that coursed through her body like an alarm, jolting her fully awake. Blinking back tears, she knocked away the grasping hands with her good arm. She made an effort to sit up. Her head spun. Fighting back nausea, she pulled her good arm into the suit’s chest cavity and tore the old analgesic patch from her left arm; pulling a fresh one from an inner pocket, she raised it to her mouth and used her teeth to tear it open. Then she applied it to her forearm. Relief was almost immediate.

Her vision cleared and she recognized the Facilitator’s long limbed suit and distended helmet. She checked her display. She’d been asleep five hours and sixteen minutes. She wanted those remaining forty-four minutes. “What…” she started to say, then realised the futility of trying to ask a question. Instead she struggled to her feet feeling the tug of the harness she’d neglected to undo before falling asleep.

Up and down the line the others were in various stages of preparation for the day’s march. Two figures were doing awkward stretches; the others were reattaching the leads to their sleds. Hebuiza stalked off. The sun fell on her fully now, making her blink as her visor adjusted to the onslaught of the red glare. The bottom of the disc had cleared the horizon by several degrees, and now cast the eerie landscape in saffron. It was still early in the planetary morning. The day stretched before her like an interminable punishment.

Her stomach grumbled loudly.

Sucking down a mouthful of the sticky goo that passed for food, followed by a swig of tepid water, Liis struggled into her place in line. Moments later, they set off; her neck and back resumed aching precisely where they had left off the day before. The sun’s rays beat down on her like a palpable weight. Shoulders bowed, she slogged forward.

At eleven point three klicks, Yilda finally turned south. Overhead, thin lines of serried clouds gathered. A light snow fell. Cresting a small rise, the col towards which they were headed came into sight. Liis magnified the view, but could make out little detail because dark clouds now funnelled into the pass, obscuring the peaks; beneath was a wall of turbulent pink: an endless maelstrom of roiling snow. It looked like the sky itself was draining from the icefield and spilling onto the plain below in an endless torrent.

How will Yilda get us through that? she wondered. But the question didn’t really trouble her as she knew it should. She felt no sense of dread or anxiety. Only weariness and an abstract, disconnected curiosity.

The day went on, marches of a kilometer or so punctuated by brief rest periods. Snow began to fall in earnest, and the pass disappeared from sight. Soon Liis fell into a kind of daze, staring at her overlarge white boots as she planted one in front of the other. It was as if they weren’t part of her, but rather part of a machine over which she exerted only a nominal control. She no longer looked around. In this state, her aches seemed to recede, to become part of that other being, the one that plodded forward relentlessly, and to whom she was only tenuously connected. Rests, when they came, surprised her. She would dutifully lower her body to the ground, sensing, rather than feeling, the fatigue. As she lay there, she couldn’t remember what, if anything, had occupied her thoughts the last several hours.

Some time later (she wasn’t sure, for she had given up checking her suit clock) they halted. It wasn’t until she stood-or her body, sensing the rest period concluded, stood for her-that she noticed no one else was