1

The dazzling expanse of ice and snow stretched out towards the horizon. Against this frigid wasteland the sky appeared almost violet. Marta had remembered her snow goggles this time. When they’d first flown over the barrier, she had looked away from the dazzling whiteness stretched out beneath them to find she was as blind as a bat,
“Shit…I can’t see my lap…” she’d gasped, and it was true, everything in the cockpit was as black as pitch…Marta had fumbled for her goggles in her kit…and once she’d managed to put them on had cautiously looked out over the landscape, waiting for her eyes to adjust. After a while she could see the snows again, but it took ages before she could see details inside the cockpit…
Fortunately, she hadn’t been flying the aircraft. Han the pilot, with his fondness for kit of all kinds, had been wearing his goggles since they’d started the last leg of their journey…for Marta it had been a salutary and scary lesson…
They were busy setting up their forward camp on the ice, she was helping him drive the sockets into the ice which would hold the flagpole and the aerial mast. Both were vital in this featureless expanse, to mark the position of the camp both visually, and electronically, via the signal the mast sent out. The Northern Barrier was (in one sense) a true desert, with precipitation levels of less than five centimetres per annum most years. But the winds that periodically came howling down from the Pole carried with them a blinding curtain of ice crystals that reduced visibility to zero, and were capable of burying everything, tents, gear, aircraft even…in minutes…
They had camped on the edge of an immense ice cap that radiated from the Pole in all directions… This stupendous glacier had formed with infinite slowness over the millennia, locking up, together with its southern counterpart, 80% of the water on the planet… The ice cap was in retreat, had been for a thousand years, but it didn’t feel like that from where Marta was standing… It felt like the ice owned the whole world…
“Do you need any help putting up the mast…?” called Priya, “…we’ve finished staking down the aircraft…”
“No, we’re fine…best if you start putting up the tents…!” she called back.
While Han assembled the collapsible sections of the mast, Marta had time to daydream, and really look at the landscape. She found that what at first had looked like uniform whiteness was in fact infinite variations on graduated shade and colour; blue-white through to orange-white with everything in between…
Priya and Sal hove into view, interrupting her reverie,
“You’re definitely going to need help getting those masts up…” said Sal, “…we can do that and then put the tents up and secure them together…”
“Aye, Aye Cap’n…!”
Priya smiled at this small witticism. In point of fact Marta, Sal, and Han were in joint command of the expedition, as each was conducting research in one of their specialisms. Sal was using the perfect conditions to conduct astronomical observations on the asteroid belt, and measurements on A5’s magnetic field. While Han would do research at the base of the Barrier on the impact of the ice’s slow retreat on the landscape. He would also look for meteorites captured and preserved in the ice… For Marta the trip provided an unparalleled opportunity for climatological research. She would be drilling and extracting cores from the ice cap. Through her analysis of these she was hoping to read the recent history of climate change on the planet.
Marta had noticed another quality of the light; the glare cast violet shadows under Priya’s cheekbones…she hoped Sal had noticed how beautiful it made her look…
It had taken them three days to get this point. At a cruising speed of 200 km h, sixteen hours of travel over two days had brought them over the ice cap. After the incursion that had led to Marta’s temporary snow blindness, they had landed at the foot of the great wall of ice and set up their base camp. The next day was Han’s show. As the geomorphologist, he was primarily interested in the effect the retreating ice was having on the landscape. One of these effects was clear. The wall of ice was disgorging vast quantities of melt water; streams, rivers, pools and even lakes abounded, running water was in abundance here, while being virtually absent further south,
“There’s enough physical geography, just in this area, to keep a team of geomorphologists busy for the rest of their lives…” Han had told them on that first evening, his excitement plain…
But there was work for all of them. Sal prepared his telescopes and scanners, Priya busied herself taking samples from streams and pools to check for plant and animal life, while Marta examined the ice front seeing if she could spot the different layers of snow and ice accretion laid down over geological time. She could see that the fault lines and fracturing, as well as the steady melting of the ice front would make this difficult, and she was just about to give up when she noticed something, apparently embedded in the ice,
“Priya…PRIYA…!”
“Yes…what is it…?”
Marta had run all the way, and was yelling at her friend who was crouched on the other side of one of the many meltwater pools, filling a specimen jar with water,
“You’ve got to come and see this…I mean, you really have to…”
“What have you found…?”
“Best if I show you…”
Priya allowed a momentary frown of exasperation to cross her face, but she was used to Marta’s enthusiasms, and knew that she’d have to go with her…
“OK, give me a couple of minutes to finish up here…”
She made a point of filling another sample jar before stowing everything neatly in her pack…
“So, what’s so urgent…?”
“You’ll see…! But I promise you it’s something you’ll be interested in…”
They were clambering up the wavefront of sediment and debris piled up by the outflow from the base of the ice. Marta thought for one horrible moment that she lost the location of the find she wanted to show her friend…but then she found the erratic boulder she’d had to squeeze past,
“It’s just here…” she said, pointing to a smooth plane of ice exposed by a recent collapse,
“What am I looking at…?”
“It helps if you get close to it, and ignore the reflections…” said Marta, “…concentrate on what you can see in the the ice…”
Priya did so, wiping away some of the surface frost with her gloved hand….
“Oh my God…!”
“I told you you’d be interested…”
“How the fuck did it get there…?” Priya hardly ever swore, so Marta knew she was really excited,
“I can’t even begin to speculate…but it must have been there for millennia…” Marta paused to consider the enormity of it all, “…in fact, longer than that…at least a million years, I would say…probably more…”
The enigmatic face of the pseudo-crustacean stared out mistily at them from its blue prison. Marta shuddered involuntarily. She could almost feel the weight of the years separating them from the entombed creature, bearing down on her…
“So, what do we do…?”
“Well, I think my primary task on this expedition has just been established…” said Priya, “I need to document this find as thoroughly as possible…and to think I assumed I was just making up the numbers…”
Priya turned to face her friend,
“We’ll need to divide the party…it’s going to take me a while to sort this…” Priya had suddenly gone into overdrive, “Do we have anything in our gear that I can use to cut through the ice…?”
Yes, we have ultra-sound saws and cutters…they’ll do the trick…”
“I’m going to need them…I have to be able to expose at least part of the exoskeleton so I can take samples…and it would help if I can cut a tunnel, running the length of the creature…that way I can take measurements and image the creature from the side… We need to see how big it is and whether its the same species as our modern day crusties, or something that evolved separately…”
“I can let you have the saws and cutters…I’ll be mainly using the core drill up on the ice to get my core samples…”
“We better let the boys know the good news…!”
It was decided that all of them would fly up onto the barrier the following day to establish their forward camp on the ice…then Han and Priya would return to base camp to continue their work, while Sal and Marta conducted their research up on top…

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2

After dinner Han and Priya left to fly back to base camp. They had originally planned to stay overnight, but the forecast indicated the strong possibility of dangerously high winds over the ice cap by morning, and they didn’t want to become stranded… Priya wasn’t happy and spent ages saying goodbye to Sal, but eventually they had departed, leaving Sal and Marta alone together. For a while neither quite knew what to say, they were used to each other’s company, but nearly always with Priya or Jorge in attendance. Sal decided to break the silence,
“We should see a particularly good display of the Northern Lights once Alph goes down…”
The planet’s primary was low in the sky. At this latitude the star’s zenith was noticeably lower than when seen from the Dome. Sunsets were also longer and more colourful,
“Hey, I can see something already…” Marta was pointing off towards the horizon, underneath the setting star, where it was just possible to see what looked like wispy clouds, just above the dark earth …these ‘clouds’ glowed like molten metal,
“That’s another optical phenomenon…I’m not sure if it has a name, but it’s seen on Earth in the polar regions… It’s caused by sunlight reflecting off ice crystals in the atmosphere… We won’t see the Aurora until it’s completely dark…” said Sal.
They sat there on the ice while their sun turned from orange to maroon to nearly purple and slipped beneath the horizon… It was completely still, but the temperature dropped rapidly… Sal switched on the plasma stove, and they huddled in front of it. A5 has a particularly strong magnetic field which Sal was here to measure, and this was one of the reasons why communications were so difficult on A5. But, this also resulted in spectacular aurora, especially at this latitude…
It started as a faint flickering green curtain over the horizon, rapidly expanding and deepening ’til it covered the whole sky…they could now see that the tops of the green curtain were turning a muddy shade of brownish red… Marta who had never even seen fireworks, except in documentaries sent from Earth, was astonished and entranced in equal measure,
“Why these colours…?” she asked after a while,
“It has to do with the composition of the atmosphere…” replied Sal, “…less nitrogen more oxygen…”
Marta was well versed in the composition of A5’s atmosphere…thinner than Earth’s but with a slightly higher oxygen content… Someone from Earth would have felt light-headed in minutes and would have had trouble breathing up on the Barrier, but the children had grown up with it and were perfectly adapted…but to see one of the more poetic consequences of their atmosphere still took her breath away,
“Hey…! Shouldn’t you be at your instruments or something…?”
“I set them up earlier…” replied the boy, “…I’m getting the feed straight to my ’face…”
Marta was beginning to notice how cold it was becoming. Even in her parka, with the plasma heater at full blast she was starting to get seriously chilled,
“I think we better get to our tents…” she said; reluctantly they left the heavens to play on alone…
The wind had stiffened appreciably by the time they got up. Sal had set up all his experiments the previous day, and it really just a case of monitoring the data…so he was free to help Marta with the donkey work of drilling for core samples…
This took them all day, as Marta wanted samples from three distinct locations each separated by several kilometres. This meant assembling the core drill (mechanical rather than ultrasonic), drilling and retrieving the samples, and then disassembling everything and carting it to the next location. They had bought a collapsible sled to move everything around, but the labour involved was still back-breaking, and by the end of the day they were leaning into what was virtually a gale as they hauled the gear and samples back to camp,
“D’ye think they’ll make it over tonight…?” she asked,
“Probably not…” said Sal despondently, “…Han won’t risk it if it’s gusting over thirty knots, the wind shear near the Barrier is just too dangerous…”
“We could try getting a message via Earthcomm downlink…” she suggested, knowing how keen he would be to talk to Priya,
“Means setting up more gear, aiming an antenna at the satellite…I’m too tired, we can try tomorrow…”
After their meal they were both too exhausted to talk and retired to their separate tents. Marta fell asleep to the rising moan of the arctic wind…
By the following day the wind had slackened, but they awoke to a changed landscape; both tents were virtually buried in wind-blown snow, and even the ’plane had a big bank of snow heaped up against its windward side. But the masts were still flying their colours proudly, and none of the gear seemed to have shifted overnight,
“I’d better go and check my experiments…” said Sal.
The boys had spent an hour on day two using the ultrasound saw to fashion ice blocks to build an igloo for Sal’s instruments. Sal had used his interface to model the structure, calculating exactly the right number needed… The whole gang had then spent a fun twenty minutes putting the ice house together before dinner; Sal wanted to check how his instruments had weathered the storm,
“I’m still getting telemetry from all of the detectors…” said the boy, “…but the image from the optical telescope is a bit foggy…which means that loose snow has got inside…”
Sal managed to track the igloo with his ’face from the telemetry signal, which was useful, as they wouldn’t have found it any other way,
“I’ll put up a flagpole next time…” he said ruefully,
Marta had brought a shovel, and Sal a mattock, even so it took them nearly an hour to find the entrance, dig it out and then remove the snow that had got inside,
“Must remember to block up the viewing port if we have another storm…” said the astronomer largely to himself, as he busied himself fussing over his kit…
Marta was no longer needed and decided to wander. She was upon the crevasse before she even noticed it was there, and for one horrible moment found herself sliding down into it. Fortunately, she had an ice axe hanging from her belt and had the presence of mind to use it… Pulling herself cautiously up to level ground, she surveyed her discovery… It definitely hadn’t been there when they’d come this way previously…or at least it had, but they hadn’t seen it, covered over by snow and ice as it must have been,
‘I wonder how close we were to walking into it…?’ the thought made her shiver…
She found a flat section where she could inch to the edge and peer over; the angle of the sun had illuminated part of the crevasse… Peering in she was instantly convinced that she could something down there. There appeared to be a series of dark shapes, some looked like they were sealed within the ice itself, but others were apparently exposed to the air…the nearest was about twenty metres down…
For the second time on that trip Marta found herself running, desperate to tell someone about her find…
Sal wasn’t keen,
“I don’t think you should be putting yourself at risk like that…climbing down into an unknown situation, what if you were to fall…? To injure yourself…?”
“Look we’ll use ropes and crampons, we’ve got them in our kit….and I’ll be careful…”
“I still don’t like it…”
“Sal, we could search for years and never find anything like this…”
“With your luck we’ll find another one next week…! Look, we should mark it with a tracking device and come back later…better prepared…”
“You know what this ice is like…its constantly moving…if we leave it now the chances of ever finding it again, let alone being able to get inside, are virtually zero…”
Marta could see he was weakening, so she decided to have one more try,
“Look, if we get the core driller, I read in the manual that you can convert it into a winch… We’ll secure it to the ice like we did for the core drills, then you can winch me down, and then winch me back up when I’ve taken a look,
“All right then, but don’t unhook yourself from the harness…!”
It took them another two hours to get the gear and set it up, but finally they were ready…
So, Marta found herself hanging in mid-air as the improvised winch inched her down into the void… She could see an ice shelf about ten metres below her feet. This was the spot where she’d seen the dark shapes earlier, or at least she thought it was… Alph had shifted in the time it had taken to set up the gear, and was no longer lighting up the scene…
Marta spoke to Sal via her ’face. She could have shouted, but wanted to be sure he understood,
“I’m about ten metres from the ice shelf…so keep lowering…! There’s a sheer drop below the shelf… No idea how far it goes down, but I’m going to drop something to check… OK?”
She had found a bolt with the climbing gear, a spare part of some kind…she now tossed this into the void, and listened. At least ten seconds elapsed before she heard a faint sound, and another one still fainter… It was a long way down…
Her eyes were beginning to adjust to the gloom,
“I can now see some things down here… Are you getting this, Sal…?
“Not at the moment…”
“Try tapping my optical feed…”
“OK…got it…! Holy shit…! Is that what I think it is…?”
“Yup…it’s a crusty, alright…! Keep lowering… I’ve got about two metres to go…”
“OK…the optical feed is beginning to break up…”
“…I’ll keep relaying data verbally…”
“Roge…” and that was it, Sal’s voiced squawked and died. ‘No signal’ appeared on her interface display…
The pseudo-crustacean lay in shadow about a three and a half metres from where she touched down. Her line had gone slack, Sal had clearly got the message as he had stopped lowering… Marta moved cautiously towards the side of the crevasse, and used a piton to secure another line to the ice wall… She gave it a firm tug, it appeared secure enough… Time to look around!
The crusty was huddled against the ice wall, with the hind section of its abdomen still frozen within the ice… What had exposed it in this way, she couldn’t begin to speculate but some its limbs were missing, apparently sheared off by whatever event had brought it to the light of day…maybe when ice had split to form the crevasse… The creature was smaller than the crusties they saw ’round the Dome, more like the size of the Equatorial beasts. It was also different in other intangible ways… At first she couldn’t put her finger on it but then it occurred to her that there were distinct anatomical differences…the animal’s claws were smaller and more delicate, less use for defence or hunting, but maybe better for manipulation! Marta was recording her impressions verbally…her sub-vocalisations would be recorded by her ’face, which would also retain the images from her visual cortex,
“…if I didn’t know better I would say that a shelf of pseudo-chitin positioned below the joint of the two claws could almost function as a sort of ‘thumb’, enabling the creature to hold things more easily…”
‘…but what sort of things….?’ was her immediate thought.
The other differences were in the creature’s head…! The eyes were on stalks, but these were shorter, carrying the eyes closer to the head itself…she was convinced the creature would have had good binocular vision…and finally the head itself was…larger,
‘This creature must have been intelligent…’ she told herself, ‘…could it also have been a tool user…?’
It was also clearly the not the same species as Priya’s specimen. Time to check the other dark objects she’d seen from the crevasse edge… The girl switched on her torch, the dazzle and reflections immediately made anything inside the ice wall invisible, but by trial and error she positioned the torch and herself so the interior of the ice was illuminated but worst of the reflections eliminated, And then she saw it,
“Fuck…!”
‘That’s it…!’ she told herself, ‘…this blows everything out of the water… Oh my God…!’
The scene within the ice was arranged as if it were a life-sized diorama, like some early twenty first century artwork… It showed two of the creatures. Both had things, fashioned things, attached to their bodies… Whether these were ornament or functional Marta couldn’t tell, but the nearer creature was clearly holding something in its claw…! If this was tool, weapon…or insignia of office, Lord alone knew…but she was convinced it was made out of some kind of metal…and so were some of the body adornments by the looks of them…! Finally, she could now see something that had escaped her before, another dark shape further in the ice…she couldn’t make it out clearly, but it wasn’t another crusty…!
She sat down, stunned by the enormity of what she had just found… She realised that she had ceased describing what she was seeing some minutes before… But the evidence was conclusive, modern pseudo-crustaceans had shared A5 with intelligent, tool-using relatives, with an advanced technology…with a civilisation, for God’s sake…! Within recent geological time…!
“God…I need to date this…!” Frantically she looked something to contain a sample of ice…settling for chipping off a large chunk and putting it in a large outer pocket,
“Marta…” …for a second she didn’t register that Sal was calling her,
“MARTA…!”
“YES, WHAT IS IT…?”
“I’m going to bring you back up now, the weather is deteriorating really rapidly…”
“I need a few more minutes…to document what I’ve found…”
“I’m sorry…but no can do…”
“Just five more minutes…”
“Marta, Priya will never forgive me if I let anything happen to you…you’ve got to come now…!”
The boy didn’t leave any room for further argument, he’d triggered the winch…she could see it taking up the slack…
As she was winched into the air, Marta suddenly realised she was still tethered to the ice wall….an apparent eternity of fumbling and she found her knife, cutting the line in the nick of time…
When she reached the surface she realised that Sal wasn’t overestimating the danger…! Helping her out of her harness he said,
“We’ll have to leave the drill…we’ve got to get back to the camp…while we still can…!”

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3

The children, while of course very familiar with their own concept of ‘light-out’, had never experienced the similarly-named Earth phenomenon known as a ‘white-out’. Marta remembered reading about it in the material she’d accessed prior to leaving for the Pole, but this was no substitute for actually experiencing one…! They had started their journey in driving snow, but they could still see the camp in the distance…then they could only see the flagpole dimly through the snow flurries…then the whiteness closed around them… Marta’s goggles had reacted to the lack of sunlight and depolarised, but this made no difference…in the white world she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, or Sal beside her… They’d had the presence of mind to attach a line between them…and they were relying on the homing signal from the camp’s mast… In their hermetically sealed world knowing up from down was difficult, let alone left from right…but their interfaces kept them on the right track… After what seemed like eternity, but was actually twenty minutes, they reached the camp…literally stumbled into it…Marta tripped over one of the lines securing stuff against the storm, bringing down Sal as well… They then crawled on their hands and knees,
“I think it’s one of the tents…” shouted Sal against the howl of the wind…another five minutes of fumbling and they managed to find the entrance and get inside…
They’d found Marta’s tent, they had a light, water and some rations…but the plasma stove was in the other tent,
“Perhaps we should move to the other tent, or see if we can find the ’plane…”
Sal’s look convinced her that this was out of the question… Now they weren’t moving they were starting to become chilled… Marta turned towards the boy,
“Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but we’ll need to get into the sleeping bag…together…! The alternative is freezing…”
With their outer clothing on, getting into the bag proved impossible, so she used her knife to fashion it into an improvised blanket which they pulled around them… After a while, body heat did its job and they began to warm up,
“This is fun…” said Marta, “…I promise I won’t tell Priya if you don’t…”
Sal had been very subdued since they had reached the tent. She tried again,
“How long do you think this storm will last…?”
“…I don’t know… We never got ’round to aiming the antenna at the satellite, so we don’t know how big it is, or where it’s moving…or how fast…!”
‘Great…!’ she thought, ‘…stuck inside a confined space again with another uncommunicative male…’
‘He’s just frightened…’ she thought a while later, ‘…best to get him talking…’
“Look, I’m sorry…! I know it’s really my job to check the weather reports, but I was distracted…”
“It’s OK…!” said the boy, “…I know you’ve got more to think about…”
Marta was nominally the expedition meteorologist, but in recent months she’d tended to leave this work to Sal. As the astronomer, the boy had more than a passing interest in the weather, and was happy to take this responsibility… But occasionally they’d been guilty of leaving things to each other, and now they had finally come unstuck. At the end of the day It had been Marta’s responsibility, and she should have been monitoring the developing storm,
“Well, we’ll just have to ride it out…”
“What did you find down there…?” asked the boy.
In the hurry and confusion while they’d made it back to camp Marta had completely forgotten to tell him about what she’d found in the ice wall,
“Well, you saw the crusty on the shelf… I examined it more closely, it’s not the same species as the one we found on the first day… It’s smaller, for one thing…it’s pincers are also smaller, and more dextrous, I think… The head is larger in relation to it’s body, and the eyes are held closer to the head…and they definitely face forwards… I think it would have had binocular vision…”
Marta turned her face towards Sal’s,
“It’s definitely a separate species, even more different than the Equatorial crusties… I think it was more advanced…”
Sal didn’t say anything,
“…and then I found the others, frozen in the ice wall…and they proved it…”
“Proved what…?”
“Look, I’ll show you… I’ll transfer the file to your ’face…”
Sal spent the next few minutes viewing this, but then turned to her in puzzlement,
“OK, I see what you mean about the crusty, but what else am I supposed to be seeing…?”
“The ones in the ice…”
“…the optical feed cuts off just after you switched on your torch…”
“It can’t have…”
It occurred to her that she hadn’t viewed the file since their return… She now did so, and Sal was right, there was nothing recorded after she turned on the torch, it was as if she’d switched it off herself,
‘How, for Christ sake…?’
She had a sudden and horrible thought, ‘…the lump of ice’
Sure enough, all she now had in her pocket was a pool of water,
‘So no proof, then…!’
“Bugger…!” she said out loud, “….well, I’ve got no proof, but I’ll tell you what I saw… There were two crusties, of the same new species, frozen within the ice… They were both…wearing things…”
“Wearing…?”
“Yes, like a sort of harness…with stuff attached…”
“What sort of stuff…?”
“I don’t know…tools, maybe, personal items…like jewellery…definitely things that had been crafted in some way…”
“But that would mean…”
“Precisely… Not only were they intelligent, but they had a culture…”
Marta turned to him in exasperation,
“One of them was even holding something, in its pincer…a tool, or maybe a weapon of some kind….and I could see something else behind them…I couldn’t make out what it was, but it wasn’t organic…maybe it was a….a vehicle of some sort…?” she knew she guessing now,
“But, you’ve got no proof…apart from the physiology of the first creature…”
“No, I’ve got no proof…” said Marta, quietly,
“Maybe we’ll be able to find it again…after the storm…”
She knew he was trying to make her feel better, but it didn’t help…

---

Marta spent the next few hours recording her observations in as much detail as possible while the memory was fresh, but she was under no illusions about how certain parties would view her ‘discovery’,
“Don’t worry about it…” said Sal, “the data on the new species is enough by itself…that’s irrefutable…! And I think you’re right, the pseudo-crustacean you found on the shelf was definitely more advanced… Given what we know about the abilities of your common or garden crusty, it’s not too much of a leap to suggest they would have had a culture…and a technology… All we have to do is find the proof… If nothing else, we’ve got an unanswerable argument for a second expedition…”
This was the main consolation… Sal, Priya, and Marta had discussed this before they’d set out. All were of the conviction that the Arctic expedition was something of a sop, offered to them by Nurse Gee and Mission AI to keep them on side while Rai and Jorja continued with the really important work,
‘Well, we’re not finished yet…!’ she thought grimly…
The storm lasted a little over a Standard Alphane day. When they finally emerged, they found an unfamiliar landscape… Sal’s tent had collapsed under the weight of snow, but they were able to dig it out… The ’plane was also buried, but undamaged…and the really good news was none of the gear or samples had gone missing… Sal had made the trek over to the igloo and announced that everything was salvageable, and he had results he wanted… They also managed to point the antenna at Earthcomm downlink, and get a message through to Han and Priya, who had replied that they were already breaking camp, and would soon fly up and help them dig everything out of the snow…!
The only thing they’d lost was the core drilling rig…which had disappeared along with any sign of the crevasse,
‘Like it never existed…’ she said to herself…

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Chapter 16. Around my heart in eighty hours>