Chapter 2 - To Do
Earlier; Interior.
The Man rubbed his palms together. He blew hot breath over his fingers as he stepped along the black corridor of the shell. Turning right at the spinning room curtain, the hall ran a short distance. At its end another plastic curtain separated the largest space in the shell, the brain chamber. The Man had made it his living quarters and study.
As The Man walked, his legs were steady. A day of pushing no longer left them shaky; many days of such had made them iron. He would not have shuffled anyway. Shuffling wasted time.
The Man itemized the tasks yet to do before the night’s close: clean off the window, add fuel to the furnace to stop the shell freeze, log the distance traveled, chart that distance, cross reference his findings with the frontier map.
The Man heard a rustle from behind, down the other direction of the hallway.
The Phae. It had been anxious for the last hour. The Man would need to deal with it. It wailed about the cold, despite its feathered coat. The warm shell had made it weak.
The cold… First things first, The Man focused on the dropping temperature. The furnace hum was now like a whisper. He just heard it over the Wind buffeting outside the shell.
The Man’s sweaty silk underclothes clung to his skin like a layer of solid spring-water fresh from a mountain’s peak. First things first, The Man had to change.
The plastic curtain folds rubbed unfeelingly against The Man’s knuckles as he pushed into the study. The curtain closed behind with an artificial flapping sound. The study opened before him, bright compared to the hall, but still lit only by filtered light from pre-waking stars.
The Man’s eyes passed without focus over the room’s oddments: hammock in the corner, wooden desk, piled papers and books beside the viewing glass, drapes drawn back beside a bookshelf, more leather backed tomes, a wooden chair. These things were necessities. They were for later. They were blurred in The Man’s passing vision, like furniture in a dream.
The Man turned his focus to the right. Hanging from a spike driven into the shell metal, he saw a human-shape - his outside coat and pants. Both were made from brownish deerhide, and padded inside with a thick mesh of woven feathers. Not Phaen feathers, for Phaen’s were wily game, but the softer brown-and-black feathers of Staegons.
The Man would need to spear another Staegon soon; the feather lining looked thin and sere at the neck.
The coat was in the duffle style. It had a built in eyeglass-hood, with another leather flap to fasten over the nose and mouth. It had two thick mitts attached to the cuffs by thongs. Two loops of leather allowed the pants to be secured to any set of his boots by tying them beneath the sole-arch.
But the outer clothing would come second. The Man moved to the wooden box beneath the coat and pants. He undid the latch - the metal had little feeling to his numbing fingers, so he worked his hands by sight - and pushed back the lid.
Inside were spare silken underclothes.
The Man untied the bandanna and draped it over the edge of the chest. The shell air jumped at the exposed, warmer skin. Now came the worst part. The Man slipped his hand beneath his collar. As quick as he could The Man threw the sweat-soaked shirt off. The clingy, cold fabric ran over his skin like ice water. He did the same for his trousers. He closed his hand on a rag of absorbent texel-cloth from the chest. He rubbed himself dry.
The Wind struck the shell hard as The Man dressed. He threw a hand against the feathered collar of his coat and leaned on the wall for stability. As the room rocked, The Man glanced through the viewing glass.
The metal line of the striation split the firmament in two. The striation slid towards the shell, disappearing into the middle of the window’s top edge. The Man’s shell crawled still along it. The last energy from The Man’s spinning and the paltry furnace-burn kept his track’s turning. His connecting-wheels moseyed along the metal line.
The Man would not let his shell roll blindly forward. And he had no moment to spare watching from the viewing window. He had tasks. And anyway, the stars would open soon. The Man added ‘pull the brake lever’ to his mental list.
From the other side of the study curtain came the noises of the Phaen. The Man heard it rushing up and down the long central tunnel. Its talons scraped the floor, its throat gave voice to warbling cries.
The animal was acting with needful frailty.
The Man attributed his Phaen’s behavior to the temperature. The shell was colder now than at most nights’-end. The Man had loaded only forty kilograms of dried Aedra in the morning, instead of the usual forty-five. He’d rationed his supply, until he found another dense patch of roots for harvest.
But The Man couldn’t let the shell get as cold as the sky. He needed to refuel the furnace. He needed warmth.
He should turn on the radio, The Man thought. That would tranquilize the Phaen.
Clothes, however, came before all else. Over the silks went a wrapping of gauze. Over the gauze went a layer of warmer texel; sweater, long underpants, and socks.
The Man pulled his feathered coat and trousers from the hook. The feather lining slid easily over the other layers. He slipped into the boots. He tied down all the straps, closing off the openings.
Feeling had returned to The Man’s fingers - blood peeking out from where it hid in his torso. The feather-lined coat lured his body back to warmth.
The Man would need that warm blood when he went to clear the snow from the window.
Later; Exterior.
The Wind rushed up from beneath the shell, skirting along the frosted exterior. The Man’s many clothes took most of its punch. His skin, however, felt small air needles poke through the seams in his feather-lined coat. And his whole body swayed in the rope harness. He threw a hand out to the shell to steady himself.
The Man withdrew the hand instantly. The flat shell accepted cold from the Wind, then released it back into The Man when he touched it with his thin glove-leather.
The Man pulled on his mitt. He let a moment pass. He swayed in the harness.
An impulse suggested he glance at his left leg. That was the leg he fixed securely in the harness loop with each centimeter climbed. He would bend the leg inward and fasten the loop over the knee, around his thigh and ankle. He’d done The Maneuver many times over many days, but his mind always suggested a double-check.
The Man ignored the thought. He kept his eyes fixed either on the shell straight ahead, or the remainder left to climb. He kept his eyes horizontal, or looked up. Now he looked up.
The shell surface was covered in sky-ice. A bumpy sheet of thin crystal coated the black metal, so that The Man appeared to be working his way up a glacier; one with only an inch of ice at the exterior, and an interior of frozen crude.
At meter-wide intervals, scaling up the side of the ovoid shell, rungs of iron jutted from the ice.
When the harness stopped moving, The Man brought his free foot up. He hooked it through another loop in the rope he’d made, just above the one for his knee. He worked his knee loose, keeping tight hold of the current iron bar all the time.
For the next moment, The Man moved slowly and carefully. He waited for a time when the blowing Wind seemed to press him into the shell, instead of sideways, or from underneath, or from above. When it did, The Man pushed himself slowly up with the looped foot, keeping both hands wrapped around the iron bar, and balancing his weight as he rose above it. When his head was set about halfway between the current rung and the next, he took a quick breath through the leather face-cover. He fixed his eyes - the goggles in the hood kept them from watering - on the rung above. He took one mitted hand from the lower rung and curled it around the upper. He pulled on the rung once to assess its hold. They were welded iron, but just to be sure… The Man then brought his other hand up. Always keeping one hand on a rung, he re-formed the knee-loop and slipped his knee securely in. Only then did he take his pushing foot from the harness.
Then The Man was ready for the next ascent.
There were fifteen rungs from the portal-door near the base of the shell to the flatter slope of its top. The Man focused on each in its turn. He gave each step of the ascent its proper care. The ascent did not take ten minutes, but each of those minutes seemed to pass slower than any single one spent inside on his spinner.
All through that ascent The Man felt the elements. The Wind attacked the exposed human; sometimes coming in with a haymaker blow from the left or right; sometimes rolling over the shell to press down just as The Man was between rungs, like a killer pressing his victim’s head into a full sink.
With the Wind came the true cold of negative fifty. It found the little openings in The Man’s coat. It crept through the small slit between his goggle-hood and face-wrap to slice across his cheeks. It wrung his wrists like shackles where the mitts met the arms. The cold was pain. Manageable pain; but it added to the trial.
The Man neither complained, nor turned back for the door below. He focused on the rungs. The window had to be cleared.
The Man climbed patiently, with the muffled clamor of the gale against the sides of his hood, and the muted, bland face of the shell in his goggles. The bland shell face was a good place for his eyes. And the gale’s voice was predictable. The Man did not mind the gale. It was a drone that rose and fell. Not like the radio’s distracting babble.
The Man had only used that radio because it calmed his Phaen.
Interior.
From the study The Man stepped back into the dark corridor. The Phaen scurried back as he parted the curtain. The Man knew it had rushed back and forth along the hall in a frenzied panic. While he had dressed, The Phaen’s claws tapped on the floor. The talons punctured the insulating layer of hard packed grime and feathers from hunted wildbirds.
As he exited, The Man saw that his Phaen’s raptor talons had torn that insulation. Loose clouds of feather down floated in the air between them, like tiny motes of smoke in the black hall.
The Phaen had stopped at the corridor’s other end. It crouched in the dark, huddled in front of the furnace chamber.
The Man could barely hear the fire’s hum now, but his fresh layers warmed him.
More noticeable was the Phaen’s bass twitter.
The Man knew he needed to stop the shell. The curtain to the heart room lay at the other end too, a short portal on the right side of the hall. His boots drummed the padded floor mutely as he set a fixed stride.
The Phaen warbled when The Man stepped past the radio room.
The Man stopped with a hard stomp. It reverberated through the tunnel. He turned and shoved the radio room curtain apart. He heard the tapping of the Phaen’s talons as it rushed to wait outside.
The Man ducked into the room. He remained crouched. The radio room was the size of a shoe closet. The smallest chamber of the ones he’d prepared in the shell, it had no window through which starlight might fall. The space was close and dark.
The Man reached above his head and waved the coated hand slowly through the air until he felt the glass side of a lantern. He lifted the lamp off the hook he’d screwed over the door. He brought it to his chest, grabbed the crank at the lantern’s side, and began grinding.
The Man heard the Phaen shuffling excitedly outside the curtain, punctuating the ambient hum of the furnace with soft barking chirps. The Phaen knew the grinding noise.
After four seconds of turning, the electric lantern began to glow. The Man counted out one minute before he hooked it back above his head. It lit the interior of the radio room in artificial yellow.
The Radio room shared the sooty, round, granular black walls with the rest of the shell. Against the wall to the right of the curtain, The Man had fastened a five-shelf tower of wood. Odd bits of wire, boxes of differently-sized nuts and bolts, screws, screwdrivers, nails, hammers, chisels, scalpels, spare pitons, spare rope, and an assortment of other odd tools and machine parts filled the shelves.
The Man kept most of his gear in the room it belonged to: the study, the heart room, the furnace chamber. These shelves were a catchall for small parts.
Against the left wall was the radio. A tall cabinet of metal hid its circuit guts. A thin strip of green glass stood out on the front, marked in millimeter intervals. A black pointer - like the hand of his stopwatch - rested at the left side of the screen. Below the glass were four turnable wooden knobs: volume, bass, pitch, tuning. Twenty-some buttons and flip-levers beneath the dials either turned the radio on, switched it to a specific frequency, or otherwise changed its function. The metal case of the radio could be opened by a metal door at the base. The Man had opened it once to replace a capacitor.
The Man flicked one of the twenty-some levers on the front of the case. The radio turned on. A static hum filled the air above him. He saw the grey mesh in the speaker atop the box rattle. The Man pressed a button marked ‘LMB’. The needle on the green glass dial shifted.
After a moment, voices conversing in Leegesspeech rattled off the mesh. The rattle made them harder to distinguish; the heart of the shell was supplying only a scrap of power. Even so The Man recognized the three station hosts.
Nikon: “All this ‘scientific justification’ shit; it’s not sense. Right?”
Laughter Ma: “Nikon…”
Nikon: “I’m right. This federation’s skewed it’s priorities. This ghost-reason war with Nakadana… It’s entirely useless. Am I wrong? We’re not ‘Protecting ourselves’. By ‘we’ I mean Leeges soldiers.”
Ma: “Well - caveat - you mean Leeges kings.”
Nikon, sarcastically: “Nope. Soldiers. It’s their fault entirely.”
Ma and Dano laugh Dano: “Yes! Winter Wind’s take our warriors!”
Laughter subsides Nikon: “What I’m saying is, these kings and institute specialists, they just want to hoard all our gadgets and gewgaws. Take Chairos. He rails over the tocsins every morning; “Push Leeges to its borders!” No farther. Chairos can’t handle other patches. Kings like him don’t need other patches. All our kings and specialists sit in their empty homes and studies, and battle and speak so they can be alone.”
Ma: “Are you lonely, Nikon?”
Nikon: “It’s lonely being a god.”
Laughter. Dano: “But I think what Nikon is getting at - correct me if I’m wrong Nikon - is that a lot of people in a lot of the kingdoms are so incredibly prickly when it comes to letting Nakadanan or Higan foreigners see our achievements. And that it comes from thinking they want to be isolated.”
Nikon: “You… you took the word right off my wayward tongue.”
The Man turned the volume knob. The voices from the speaker dropped until they were barely audible. The Man pulled his hood up to mute them. The Man stopped; he checked the lantern, radio, and shelves. Then he turned sharp on his heels and pushed back into the hall.
The Phaen had stalked to the end of the long corridor. It crouched now by the study from which he’d come. It was unmoving, mercifully quiet. The Man saw it staring at him. Its blue eyes gleamed in the dark.
The Man stumbled. The dark hall had suddenly turned. He threw a hand at the wall across from him. He caught himself as the Wind rocked his shell. The Man jerked his hand back from the wall the moment after contact. It was fortunate his hands were gloved. He might have lost skin to that rough, frozen surface.
Clothes and the Radio were finished tasks. Now for the furnace. Now for heat.
The Man walked down the rocking corridor with knees bent for stability. He stopped short of the end. He turned sharply to the curtain on his right. Beyond, a short stair led down.
The furnace could wait a little longer. The Wind was still pushing him blindly along the striation. He had to stop the shell first - he had to stop the heart.
Exterior.
Where it poked out between the leather collar and hood of The Man’s coat, the feathered frill quivered in the wild Wind atop the shell. The Man pulled himself up the last bolted rung. He let a small amount of slack into the harness line. Then The Man slid flat on his stomach, and moved onto the icy, curved shell roof.
Here too The Man made deliberate, slow maneuvers. The ice was usually dry and not slick. Even so, he belly-crawled over the top. He kept his body flat against the frozen surface. He let the heavy Wind blow harmless along his back.
The toes of his boots and the forearms of his coat had embedded studs of metal. These gave The Man leverage to move gradually over the roof. The harness trailed behind him from its fastened place back at the top rung.
The Man pulled with the stud-arms and pushed with his toes. The frozen shell stole the heat from his chest as he crawled. After a meter moving in this way The Man lifted his head. He dropped it back at once as a rogue gust pressed the goggles into his face.
When the Wind had passed, The Man looked up.
Four loop-tracks rose stiffly from the top of the shell. They were made of thick, interlocking sheets of iron, each sheet half-a-meter wide by twenty centimeters long. The tracks made from these sheets ran from four axles, embedded deep in the shell metal, to four clamping mechanisms attached to the striation on the sky. From these four tracks, the weight of the shell was suspended. It dangled about seven meters below the glass sky and the metal striation running through it. More plates might be inserted or removed from the tracks to float higher or lower, but the process to do so was laborious, and dangerous outside of a glasstoucher tower.
The tracks swayed as the Wind pushed the load they bore, but none rolled. When he raised his head The Man saw chunk-ice in the nearest axle housing. He had expected as much, and had brought an icepick in the bundle of tools strapped to his back.
The Man twisted his head to look toward the shell’s front. Two vertical poles stuck up there, welded firmly into place, with two cross beams running between. Between the four iron bars, in the rectangle formed, a thick canvas sail beat the air.
The Man shimmied so that he pointed in the direction of the sail. He brought his head flush with the frosted roof. He used the sound of the flapping canvas to guide him; muffled, but still audible over the Wind through the leather hood. He led with his arms in the crawling movement. He used his mitts to push away the occasional white snow-ridged on the bumpy ice.
The Man’s chest heaved up and down against the cold roof. Vapor poured from the slit between his leather hood and mask.
The Man raised his goggles in another interval of the gusts. he’d only gone a meter, perhaps two. He still had two dozen before he reached the sail.
The Man laid flat again and crawled faster. He had to work quickly.
The sail had been a bad idea. He’d thought it would push him farther along the tracks. It probably had. But the Wind had soured. He couldn’t risk the sail tearing - or worse, pulling the tracks against the spinner brakes - in air this hard. And the weather could turn almost instantly, he knew. The Man did not wish to be outside when the winds howled, having to manually furrow the sail.
The Man pushed back part of a snow ridge and crawled through the canyon made.
Furl the sail; chisel the packed ice from the track axles; and after all that, scrape clean the window; all while sliding across an ice-crusted shell; these were issues left to fix.
Better to crawl while the roof was frozen, though. The Man looked up again. Eight yards to go. He ducked and crawled. He had to finish before the shell got hot.
Better to crawl over a cold surface quickly, and get the job done, than wait until the shell thawed from the now-burning furnace, and the ice melted.
Interior.
The Man stepped up the brief, curving steps leading from the heart room. He walked with a hand or shoulder against the sooty wall for balance. The ship never came to full rest - not so near to the sky - because the Wind never ceased blowing.
Still, the soft swaying was easy to counter. The Man found his sky legs, knowing that the brakes were engaged - that the ship hung from a fixed spot on the striation.
The Man mounted the last step. He returned through the curtain into the long, dark corridor.
The out-of-sync radio echoed from speakers in every chamber. The same three voices babbled on.
Ma: “Let me ask: what’s the point of Agisthos launching his steel fleet?”
Dano: “The waking tocsins used the phrase ‘defensive action’.”
Ma: “Defensive? I don’t understand. How does a deployed fleet help defend Leeges?”
Nikon: “Well, you see Ma…”
Ma: “Doesn’t that leave us open? Hasn’t Nakadana built Puncture towers along their major ports?”
Nikon, sarcastically: “Sure. What’s cutting you up about it? Perfectly logical.”
Ma: “Agisthos is only giving Nakadana’s Shore Service a chance to capture a Leeges steamer.”
Nikon: “Yep.”
Ma, laughing: “That’s absurd! We’re handing the ‘opposition’ the science-works we’re trying to keep secret. Why bother with the war aspect?”
Nikon: “You see Ma, if we didn’t make war, there’d be nothing to kill off our excess of soldiers.”
Dano: “Wind’s Tears, Nikon…”
Ma: “In all seriousness, this ‘tech war’ is wasted effort.”
Dano: “And I have to wonder how healthy it is. For the troops.”
Ma: “Dying’s not generally healthy.”
Short laughter Dano: “True. I meant the oversea voyage. What does it do to a person, spending all that time on the water, in the dark under the seacover? I think it slows blood circulation.”
The Man shook off the reverie of the voices. He turned to the furnace room curtain. The Phaen was either in the dark at the other end of the hall where he couldn’t see, or it had slipped into the study and nested on the pile of spare rope. Either way The Man heard no sound from it now. The bird was out of his way.
The Man stepped through the curtain, to the last task left before he ventured outside.
The air had grown slightly warmer as The Man moved down the hall. Now, stepping into the chamber from which the heat came, he felt the rise in temperature. He guessed it to be five, maybe ten degrees in this furnace-housing chamber. The thick coat made it hard to tell for sure.
The room past the plastic curtain was the largest in the shell. At its widest the oval chamber stretched four meters across, and the vertex opposite The Man was eight meters away. The Man had pushed a square table into that far nook. Dark stains spread across its wooden surface.
The wall curved outward and the ceiling curved upward. The soot stained the already-dark metal blacker in here than in any other part of the ship, so that the shadowed ceiling gave the chamber a vaulted feeling. All along the wall on his left side, The Man had installed shelves. Curving lines of grated metal were fixed into place with L-brackets. On the shelves he kept the larger pieces of spare equipment: replacement spinner parts, extra plates for the striation tracks, two spare track axles, varied boards and boxes, lengths of rope, cogs and gears, struts and pistons.
Just inside the curtain on the opposite side, to The Man’s right, he kept his cooking area. A simple, portable stove sat beside a flat stone table, with pans and utensils for butchery. The remains of the butchered - the bones and feathers and talons of birds he’d hunted in his time on the sky - lay in a long pile beside a barrel of thawed sky-snow.
The Man could see a crust of ice over the barrel. The air was colder than five or ten then, colder than zero. The Man stepped over the hardpack of bloody feathers and gristle which covered the floor and lent the room its coppery odor. Grabbing a heavy cleaver-knife from the stone table, he chopped at the crust of ice across the barrel. Then he replaced the clever upon the table and turned to the furnace.
It was a thing of old stones. The great shell furnace stood like a relic of ancient people, against the wall, beside the table at the room’s far vertex. Only the door was metal. It stood open, held a few inches ajar by a chain The Man had installed above the barrel bolt. He always kept the door ajar for better airflow.
Tubes sprawled from the round stone chimney. Like the legs of an upside down spider, the metal tubes curved out from the furnace and into the ceiling. They distributed heat through the vents, out to other chambers in the shell.
At least, the tubes carried heat when the furnace held a true flame. Right now, only ember light sulked through the cracked door. The hum through the ship had become a whisper. It had taken The Man time to dress, and brake the shell, and turn on the Phaen’s radio.
The voices in the radio buzzed from a speaker above the shelves at The Man’s back. He ignored the voices.
The Man stepped over the floor softened by scraps of slain prey. When he reached the furnace door he unhooked the short chain. The metal swung wide with a rusty scream.
Behind the door was a large hollow space, like a sub-cave in the greater cavern of the shell, The Man thought. The mortared stones were black with soot. A thick pile of ash covered the stone base. On a risen metal grate a few roots of Aedra - reduced to small lumps of charcoal - burned. Barely.
The Man took an ash shovel from a wrought iron tool basket beside the furnace. He scooped the spent fuel from beneath the grate. He moved methodically, with slow, gentle scoops to avoid disturbing the still-burning motes. He deposited the ash into a four-wheel push cart on the furnace’s right side. Two bricks held the cart’s wheels in place to stop it rolling when the shell moved.
When he’d finished cleaning the furnace, The Man stepped over to the nearest stack of fixed metal shelves. From a box on the lowest shelf he retrieved an armful of dry feathers. From a woodpile stuffed under that shelf, he pulled a few twists of Aedra twigs.
The Man kindled the flame back to life. He worked his way back and forth from furnace to shelves, and worked his way in the woodpile from smaller bits of wood to larger ones. Mostly he used Aedra for fuel. The roots burned hot. They held more potential energy in a smaller, more compact structure than most plants growing from the glass.
Looking at the shelves and woodpile as a whole, there were other pieces besides Aedra. One shelf had thicker fingers of Dorren Ivy. The bottom one showed a small bundle from a chopped Segel (The Man had been fortunate to find one of the long-trunked, wide-rooted plants dangling just above his shell, and had sawed the rare fuel down and pulled it in).
The Man’s total supply of burnables, however, looked small. He thought the shelves held perhaps ten days of fuel. And The Man knew his spinner couldn’t generate enough power to move the shell on its own. He needed the furnace, for both heat and motion.
The Man shook these thoughts away. He had tasks.
The Man loaded the furnace with enough roots for three or four hours. He shut the iron door most of the way - another rusty squeal - and fixed it to a cracked position with the chain. Soon the shell, the inside of it at least, would be somewhere between fifteen and twenty degrees. Warm enough to live in.
From the shelves, The Man picked up two long ropes, some smaller strands of twine, an extendable ice-chisel, a shorter icepick, and a set of binoculars. He organized them into a bundle with a tied-off bolt of leather.
Beneath The Man, the floor rolled in another great swell of the Wind.
Clothes, radio, brakes, and furnace; all finished, thought The Man. He shook off a wrinkle in his brow, left by the frustration of trivial tasks. He let his mind go calm. He braced himself for the work outside.
Exterior.
With a hard scraper shove, The Man removed the last swath of snow from his spinning room window. It fell away in a white flume.
Just then a gust swung at him. He bent his knees into a crouch. He held fast to the rope running from his waist. He waited for the Wind to pass.
The Man stood exposed. He was secured to one of the loop tracks by his second length of rope. He stood almost horizontally on the side of the ship. His chest faced up now, toward the glass of the sky.
The Man had been forced to this position in order to reach the window with his scraper. Slowly, he’d backwalked down the side of the ship. He had crab-walked from side to side, scraping snow off the long window.
Now The Man could see into the dark, warm interior. He saw the spinning room, his spinner stretching across the nook. He saw, on the wall, the hanging painting, She crawled in Stars with Elder Bugs.
The Man prepared to haul himself back to the track. But he still waited. The Wind tugged at the pack of tools on his back so that The Man fought every minute to keep his feet planted. But he did keep them planted. The Man could be patient now. His tasks were finished.
Nearly finished. The Man still had the day’s logging and charting left. But that was soft work. All the hard labors would be finished, once he returned to the sealing door.
The Man began to see that waiting would help him none. The low moan of the Wind cutting through the thick padding of his hood had become louder. The greater blasts howled in his ears like a specter. The Wind was only worsening; the herald for a glasstouching hurricane. Better to climb while he still could, The Man thought.
The Man tightened his grip on the rope. The padded mitts made for a loose hold, but better that than gripping with only his gloves, and having his fingers numbed by cold.
With a swift, sure move, The Man brought one cleated boot up and slammed it firmly into the ice. The foot landed just above where it had been planted. He kept his knees bent through the motion. The Wind shoved The Man in the fraction of a second where he’d been on one foot, but not enough to topple him.
Step by step, hand by hand, fighting the force pressing into his pack and clothes like a windcatcher, The Man climbed his way back to the top of the shell.
Working swiftly, The Man reached the loop-track in under a minute. Just as swiftly, The Man untied the rope from the cable and looped it about his waste. He crouched, and stuffed the ice scraper back into the bundle of tools.
The Man sank to his knees. He planned to drop to his belly and slide back to where the other rope harnessed him to the rungs.
The Man stopped short. Instead of dropping, he pulled the binoculars loose from the leather pack. He hooked a foot in the hole where the track fed into the axle housing. Then he brought the binoculars to his goggle-covered eyes. The Man turned the twist setting on the sides clumsily through the mitts. He scanned the horizon.
Across the massive glass expanse a glacier-tempest flew. The stars beyond were beginning to widen to greater dots in the waking hour of the day. They shone like frozen honey through the semi translucent, frosted sky. The lumps of snow had all been blown off in the storm prelude, and the air danced with the remnant flakes. Only the Aedra remained, writhing in isolated plants across the barren glass.
Far away to the north, a rugged silhouette fractured the flat expanse. That was the seacover. That was where the frontier ended, and the unknown began. The seacover shrouded the waters that lay beneath it, occluding the light of the stars.
Unconsciously, The Man tilted the binoculars down.
Clouds rolled thickly beneath him. They left no feature of land visible. Even so The Man was quick to bring his hooded eyes away from the magnified view.
The Man would spin no more today. The waking stars made it dangerous. Even with the window, waking stars shed too much radiation. Besides, the Wind seemed to scream louder with each moment.
The Man started to push the binoculars back into the pack. He brought them back out a moment later though, and brought them back to the goggles in his hood. He scanned the horizon slowly. Moving from left to right. Then he turned and scanned the other side of the striation. The sky there stretched to infinity. He saw nothing out of the ordinary.
But The Man had heard something. He stuffed the binoculars back, finally. He lay on his belly and began his descent.
The sound in his ears - the awful howling - had not been Wind alone. The Man had caught the difference in tone. This cry wasn’t the Wind smashing the leather of his hood and drumming his skull. This was a puncturing sound. This was a shrieking echo, octaves above the Wind, like a needle through the leather to pierce his ear.
The Man dropped to the ice on his belly. He shimmied to the top rung with the harness. He set his foot on it and began the descent.
The Man had never before heard that sound. He’d seen nothing on the horizon. But The Man knew stories of the glass sky’s greatest hunter.
Anka.
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