Maya knows her job as mining supervisor, and she knows it well. But do the higher-ups listen to her? Of course not.

But when the biggest ice storm yet hits Xeunite, Maya finds her incompetent bosses the least of her worries. As the storm rages, Maya faces life-and-death decisions—ones she might not survive.

With “Ice Breakers,” Kristine Kathryn Rusch offers up an unexpected heroine of the highest order.

“Ice Breakers” by Hugo Award-winning author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook through various online retailers here.

Ice BreakersKristine Kathryn RuschPerfect time for the equipment to break. Maya lashed the handle of the Ice Breaker against the pole, fighting the wind with every movement. Her environmental suit—a little too old and a little too tight—blocked the cold, but nothing blocked the wind.

She cursed the higher-ups with each breath. Money-grubbing assholes. She’d been telling them for the past five years that the equipment was on its last legs, that it would break at the exact wrong possible moment, and then they’d lose millions.

But did anyone listen? Of course not. And now, the equipment had broken down at the worst possible moment.

She wrapped an arm around the pole, and braced herself. Most of the equipment was deep in the ice, sturdy enough to handle the high winds that came with Xeunite’s storms.

But this storm, this was a motherfucker, the biggest they’d seen since they started mining Xeunite’s northernmost ice-covered continent. The ice coated everything, but beneath it was a cornucopia of minerals that formed the basis of almost every piece of equipment on every ship and settlement from here to Megnacia.

ClaaLorus Systems had guessed the minerals would be here, spent a small fortune to secure not just the rights but the land, and had been digging in the ice ever since.

Maya had been head of operations for the past five years, and she’d never seen a storm warning like this one. Sustained winds of a hundred and fifty miles per hour and snow mixed with ice. The temperatures, always lethally low here, would go to unimaginable levels considering the wind speed.

Her environmental suit was up to the challenge, but her body wasn’t. There wasn’t a lot to protect her out here. Early this year, she had ordered her team to move the equipment to an ice plain that had once been a gigantic freshwater lake. Ice and snow-covered mountains ringed it on three sides, protecting the area from some storms, but not this one.

This one was coming from the east, directly into the gap between the mountain ranges, and, if her computer simulations were accurate, would form some kind of weather vortex that could sweep up everything in its path.

Normally, she would have sent a crew to make sure every piece of equipment was lashed into place, but she didn’t trust the timing of the predictions. The computer simulation was working off models created nearly a century ago by the first colonizers, and their predictions had been off in the past.

If anyone was going to get caught out here, it would be her. Not because she was the most experienced, but because she would be able to sleep better at night, knowing that she hadn’t sent three team members into this kind of danger.

The wind had picked up just in the past hour. She didn’t have a lot to do outside—and normally, she wouldn’t have had to do anything. But the top of the equipment—four separate poles exposed to the elements—had broken down first.

They didn’t recede into the ground the way they were supposed to. And the poles were mostly hollow. They had caps, but the caps had been built for the shape the poles had been originally. After years of debris and wind and rocks and dents, the caps didn’t hold as tightly.

She had to lower the poles manually, and the one she held was the last one she had to work on.

If a team member had been out here, she’d have told him to leave it. She’d deal with the damage. But she was only five minutes from finishing, and she was a completist. The winds were still weak enough that she could walk through them, although that latest gust had nearly peeled her from the pole.

She opened the exterior control panel, hating the design (just like she had every time). Someone had thought overrides should be accessible from the top, not the tiny interior cabin in the very center of each machine. She managed to hit the right sequence of commands with her gloved fingers, then leaned back.

The pole shuddered and jerked a little. She hadn’t recessed the poles in more than a month because she had been afraid they’d get stuck and she would have to send a repair team out. Now, it seemed, her deliberate negligence was going to cause more of a problem.

Then the pole shuddered one last time and, with a squeal, started downward. She wiped her hands on her thighs, even though she didn’t have to. The environmental suit was self-cleaning. But that pole seemed dirty and rusty and she didn’t want to transfer anything from it to her rover.

The rover. Now that the poles were underneath the ice, it looked like the only thing on the plain. One black utility rover, with big wheels for groundwork, grapplers for orbital assistance, and some carved vents for releasing everything from atmosphere to unrecyclable garbage.

She had landed the rover only ten yards away, but it looked like ten miles. The expanse of ice had that effect. It also tired the eyes.

She debated whether or not to run or to program her boots to adhere to the ice. If she adhered to the ice, she’d move slower than she wanted to. She glanced at the opening in the mountain ring.

The clouds had lowered. They were white and gray and very puffy-fat, except along one side, where it looked like someone had rubbed a finger over them, smearing them.

She had never seen clouds look like that, even though she had worked in bad weather before.

Run, not adhere. If she needed the extra stickiness, she would access it as she moved.

She sprinted across the ice, and reached the rover’s side, just as another gust of wind hit her. It slammed her against the rover, knocking the breath out of her.

Her entire body hurt, and multicolored lights rose in front of her eyes. It took her a moment to realize that the lights were internal.

The wind held her against the rover for what seemed like forever but was probably little more than a few seconds.

Then it eased, and she staggered backwards.

She sent the open command along with her personal code to the rover, and the door rose upward, nearly hitting her in the chin. She had been standing too close.

That blow had knocked more than the air out of her. It had momentarily robbed her of good sense.

She slipped inside, and let the door seal behind her. The rover informed her that its severe weather shields were now in place.

She let out a small breath, and leaned on the door.

Her heart was racing. She hadn’t realized quite how panicked she had been.

Her suit beeped, notifying her that it was adjusting to the rover’s environment. Seventy degrees, the proper mix of oxygen—she could peel off the suit if she wanted to, and she used to do that. But one bad experience (one bad loss) had taught her not to.

The environmental suit remained on in bad weather, even if the rover was just fine.

The suit was doing its nerdy thing, the thing she had set it up for one fine afternoon, giving her facts and figures she normally liked to receive. The temperature differential between inside and out was a hundred degrees, not counting wind chill. At the current wind speed, the windchill was eighty-six below.

Nothing would survive out there for very long.

The rover had originally been divided into four separate spaces—a storage/supply area for whatever mission the rover was going on; a sleep chamber/personal area in case the mission was a long one; a kitchen/relaxation area that could be converted into more seating if a crew was on the rover; and a cockpit, which covered the entire front of the vehicle.

Maya had modified this rover so that the sleep chamber was little more than a closet. She kept the kitchen equipment intact, but had removed everything from the relaxation part of the room. The extra seating could rise out of the floor with a simple command; she didn’t have to move anything else at all.

She had taken some of that extra space for supplies, which filled the back. She had brought extra food and backup equipment for everything from the Ice Breaker to the rover itself. She had known when she left base that morning that she had a good chance of riding out the storm right here, on this stupid ice plain.

She was prepared for that, down to the extra entertainment units to distract her from the whistling wind.

The wind really wasn’t whistling inside the rover. It was too tight for that. And the stabilizers held it in place, so that it wasn’t rocking in the wind either.

Given the predictions, though, she was going to have to sink the grapplers into the ice, because the vehicle itself didn’t have enough weight to withstand wind speeds that high.

Very little did.

If she was trapped here. Right now, she had a go-window of about two hours before the impossible winds hit and she couldn’t fly out of here. She could try to drive for an extra hour after that, but she would only do that if the vortex wasn’t as bad as predicted.

The beeping of her environmental suit, sending information through the hood, was beginning to annoy her. It would only take a few seconds to replace that hood on her head, a few seconds more for the environment to reassert itself throughout the system.

She could gamble on that.

She pulled the hood off, leaving it dangling over the back of the suit, then sat in the pilot’s chair. The rover had already protected itself by sealing up the windows that ran along the front.

The windows weren’t essential. Many of the team who piloted the rover kept the seals over the windows at all times. But she loved having them open. The natural light was lovely, especially when it reflected off the ice field. Some found that blinding; she found it refreshing, and breathtakingly beautiful.

But safer to keep the windows closed. So she swiped a hand across the top of the navigation board, commanding it to use the windows as a screen for the imagery that the front of the rover was recording. It wasn’t quite the same as the view through the windows, but it was close enough.

Although it didn’t light up the interior of the rover the way that the actual view did. Not that there would have been much light once the storm hit full force.

She plotted her trip back to base, looking at the position of the storm versus the power of the storm. The rover did have orbital capacity, so she could zoom straight up and circle Xeunite a few times, waiting for the storm to die.

That would probably be the safest maneuver since, by the time she got to the base, the base would be suffering from the severe weather as well.

The base was on a regular plain, snow-covered, not ice-covered, and wasn’t ringed by mountains the way the mining surface was. Even though the base was mostly underground, the top—which opened for ship arrivals—was exposed to the weather.

It was that moment—the one where she would have to lower the rover into the base in hurricane force winds—that she wanted to avoid. Even driving the rover into the base from the side could cause damage to the base’s interior.

She ran a hand over her face, and prepped the rover for the diciest part of her trip—going straight upward through the edge of the storm—to get to orbit.

She had the rover do some calculations, and she did a few on the non-networked tablet she carried with her on every trip. Sometimes she found that the equipment provided by ClaaLorus Systems had an overly optimistic view of the stresses the equipment could tolerate, and what, exactly, the human body could tolerate.

The overly optimistic view wasn’t enough for her to file a complaint with the various government boards and agencies that provided oversight to this part of the sector, but it was enough for her to redo the mathematics.

And…if she were actually being honest with herself…she was accumulating evidence, so that she would actually be able to be paid by those government agencies once she became a whistleblower. Otherwise, she would need a job somewhere, and this industry was notorious for failing to hire anyone who had complained about anything anywhere.

The routes did not look promising. The force of the wind would strain the rover’s engines. She might have missed her window for the best way to travel.

The storm’s conditions could and would change at any moment.

And that was when something on the feed caught her eye.

She looked up, scanned the imagery playing on the windows. Black and gray clouds, mostly smeared, in the eastern entrance to the ice field. The tallest mountain peaks in the ring around her had vanished in the clouds.

The storm system was actually covering the entire valley like a gigantic blanket which had not been predicted at all.

But that wasn’t what had caught her attention. Something black and gold had pierced the cloud cover to the north. She watched as the thing—which looked like some kind of meteorite—sped toward the center of the valley, leaving a trail of flame and smoke behind it.

The ice’s surface was three miles deep, but she had no idea what would happen exactly if something that hot moving that fast hit the surface.

She didn’t have any weaponry on the rover that could shoot the thing and break it up. So with two swift commands, she added two layers of shields, one for deep space and one to protect against any kind of attack.

Then the thing hit the ice with such force that she could actually hear the bang. Although bang was too small a word for the sound, muffled as it was by the shield layers and the rover’s natural protections. The rover itself shuddered once from the impact, and then rocked as an aftershock hit.

She gripped the navigation panel and stared at the images the rover was sending her. The thing hit, then skidded through the ice, breaking a path, feet deep, sending steam—or ice fog—or maybe even ice itself into the air. She couldn’t quite tell, and the wind didn’t help. It grabbed whatever that plume was and broke it apart, flattening it, and sending it in a thousand different directions.

The thing finally stopped maybe a hundred yards from her, to the east, directly in front of the storm.

But it all looked wrong to her. At that speed, shouldn’t the thing have gone deeper into the ice? Should it have skidded at all? And if it had been a meteorite, shouldn’t it have broken up on impact?

Cracks started forming along the top of the ice. The cracks ran along the length of the entire grove in the ice.

She started two separate scans—the first to see if the cracks off the path the thing created in the ice went vertically as well as horizontally, and the second to see what kind of damage the damn thing was doing where it ended up. Did it still give off heat? Was it burning through the ice? What was it exactly?

She got the answer to the last question first: it was some kind of ship. And her scan showed her two life signs inside.

“Great,” she muttered. Two life signs inside a flaming ball that had landed at that speed. Her gut told her she was looking at some kind of escape pod or debris from some broken-up ship.

Part of her wished there were no life signs. No life signs meant she could deal with the other problem at hand.

The damn thing had carved its way across a fissure that ran deep in the ice. The fissure was something she’d been monitoring, because it had grown during their ice mining.

There was bedrock beneath the ice but that wouldn’t stop the ice from splintering. She had seen it on other jobs, decades ago. That carelessness, though, was caused by the company she worked for at the time, not that they had suffered any consequences. Sixteen people had died, falling into a crevasse that had formed almost instantaneously as the fissure split.

Sixteen people, no consequences.

This time, it would just be her, and there would definitely be no consequences.

But she couldn’t leave those two life signs, whatever and whoever they were, to this growing crisis.

They hadn’t activated a distress beacon, which seemed odd, but then, she had no idea if they were conscious. She also had no idea what—if anything—had been destroyed in their crash landing.

She had the rover try to contact them, saying she was in position to rescue them. She sent the message in every language used in this sector and a few other common ones besides, but she received no indication that the owners of those two life signs had even heard the message, let alone could respond to it.

The storm was growing. The large system swirled on the terrain map along her nav board. The winds were picking up, but the system itself seemed trapped in its own circular pattern. Which was good and bad. It wasn’t moving fast, but it was becoming organized and also gathering a great deal of debris.

She had to make a decision about those life signs, and she had to make it fast.

No one would blame her for leaving them. The circumstances certainly allowed for it. They didn’t work for her, and they clearly had no business being here.

But they registered as human life signs, and she’d been criticizing the lack of consideration for human life in the companies she’d worked for over the past thirty-five years. Weirdly, she didn’t want to save these people because she knew them or because it was the right thing to do.

She felt she had to save them to spare herself from becoming a hypocrite.

She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she left them behind. She would always wonder how they died, if they suffocated under the ice when their environment ran out or if they had emerged and eventually died in the storm or if they hadn’t had the gear and had frozen to death.

She was certain she could come up with even more horrible death scenarios as time and her guilt worsened.

“Son of a bitch,” she muttered to herself, and put some queries into the nav board. Could the cracks in the ice handle the weight of the rover? Could they handle the tires moving across the surface, the rumble and the vibration? If not, could the rover fly at a low enough level to skate the surface in this wind?

She ran the same questions in her tablet, and got two different sets of answers. The nav board called the thing an unidentified object, and claimed that the risk wasn’t worthwhile.

Her tablet used the same inputs and declared the thing a government-issue escape pod manufactured twenty-five years ago. And yes, if she acted quickly, the rover could both cross the ice directly or skate above it with the winds.

The tablet recommended skating above it all, but she wasn’t going to. She wanted the ability to punch the rover straight up into the atmosphere, as the storm worsened.

She could only do that from the ground.

“Son of a bitch,” she repeated. Then checked to make sure the grapplers worked properly and she could still section off the storage section of the rover.

When she got a yes to both, she put the rover in gear, and headed forward along the edge of the path carved by the escape pod.

The fissure beneath ran perpendicular to the path the pod carved. But the cracks were working their way down, as the wind was winding up. She stopped looking at the sustained wind number, and pretended she didn’t see the “1” before the numbers for the occasional gusts.

That storm was going to arrive whether she wanted it to or not.

“Hey, Maya!” A voice crackled into the rover’s comm. Risa, contacting her from base. “That storm’s getting worse.”

Maya considered not answering at all, but if she did that, the team might send someone for her, against her explicit instructions.

“Yeah, I know. I’m coming back,” Maya said.

“Looks like you’re going in the wrong direction,” Risa said. “Unless everything is off from that explosion. That had nothing to do with us, right?”

Not you, not the company. Us, as if she had expected something to blow on the Ice Breaker. Which simply showed what bad shape it was truly in.

“No,” Maya said. “Nothing to do with us.”

“Well, that’s the wrong direction. I’ll stay on—”

“I got it,” Maya said, and signed off. She let out a small breath. She didn’t want the distraction from Risa, nor, for some reason, did Maya want Risa to know exactly what was going on.

It didn’t surprise Maya that Risa had no idea something had crash-landed. She hadn’t been monitoring the area (or she shouldn’t have been!) and even if she had, that escape pod might have looked like some kind of debris mingling with the storm cells.

Maya didn’t entirely want to examine her motivation for failing to tell Risa about the life signs. Was Maya protecting herself, in case she couldn’t rescue those people? In case she didn’t try?

The rover had reached the edge of the well that the pod had created when it stopped moving. Normally, she would have sent a small arm off the side of the rover to examine the well. But the arm would break off in the wind.

So she sent out a probe with its own internal engine, strong enough to handle these wind speeds. The probe jettisoned from one of the side vents and flew as close to the ground as it could, then descended into the well, sending telemetry and pictures back the entire time.

The pictures showed a round pod with scorch marks on its side. The fire was out, but only because the pod was embedded in ice. The flames had been so hot that the ice had melted significantly, and there was a pool of water below. That water had to be sloughing off around or beneath that pod right now, because the air was so cold the water should freeze the moment it touched air.

It didn’t matter how hot the pod was, as long as it wasn’t actively burning. The rover’s grapplers could handle extreme temperatures of all types.

But Maya wasn’t sure how well the grapplers could handle the wind. If she was going to do anything, she had to do it now.

She raised the hood of her environmental suit, figuring that Risa knew where she was if something went seriously wrong in the next few minutes. Then Maya released the large grappler, guiding it out of its container on the side of the rover.

A gust of wind nearly pulled the grappler off its coupling. That gust had been bigger, but it wasn’t as big as the winds would be in the next hour.

She had to move fast, but she also had to be precise.

The grappler could handle equipment twenty times the size of the rover. Maya had no specifics on the escape pod; she had only eyeballed it. But it seemed to be at the outer limits of the grappler’s capabilities.

She would find out soon enough.

The grappler bent at its top elbow joint and curved downward into the well. It found holds on the outside of the pod, probably for it to remain in place in whatever kind of ship it had come from. The grappler’s gigantic claws slid into those holds as if they were made for it.

Then the grappler tugged.

The pod didn’t move.

The grappler tugged again, and the pod still didn’t move. Either it was too heavy or it had already frozen in place.

Maya’s mouth had gone dry. If she couldn’t get the pod out of that well, she would have to leave those two life signs behind. She personally wasn’t strong enough or fit enough to battle the wind, climb down into that well, and try to open the pod’s doors from the outside. And even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to haul anyone out of there.

The best she could do was mark the spot, hope the incoming blizzard didn’t bury the pod too deep, so that her team could come back when everything was over and try a rescue then.

Even that might not work, because the cold and the wind would create a layer of ice so deep that it might take a week to carve a hole in the ice. She wasn’t sure those life signs would survive that long. She wasn’t sure they would survive long enough for her to rescue them now.

“Come on, come on, come on,” she muttered, not sure if she was talking to the equipment or the pod itself. Because if the life signs could do something, anything, it might help.

Then the grappler tugged the pod loose. In fact, the grappler pulled with such force that it had to overcompensate in the other direction, and the entire rover rocked.

The wind wasn’t helping. It continued to push at the rover. The gusts were actually starting to overcome the stabilizers.

The pod was lighter than she expected, which was another reason the grappler overcompensated. She initiated the commands for the grappler to attach the pod to the back of the rover and, at the same time, she made sure the back of the rover was shielded from the cockpit.

The pod attached with a clang. The airlock computers spun the pod until its airlock matched the rover’s airlock.

The nav board started flaring red. The pod wasn’t adhering properly to the rover. The airlocks weren’t working.

She wouldn’t be able to travel back to base with the pod attached to the rover and the grappler partially extended. She couldn’t fly out of here either, and she couldn’t just sit here. The wind would peel off the grappler as well as the pod.

She needed to get the life signs inside the rover.

She grabbed her laser pistol, regretting every single decision she had made since the day began. She should have let the Ice Breaker break, and let ClaaLorus Systems fire her. She’d been fired from jobs before.

But not after this many years. And not when she was this old.

Too late now, anyway. She was committed.

But she promised herself that if she couldn’t open the pod, she would tag it and drop it close to the Ice Breaker, so that her team could find it. It would get covered with snow and ice, but not like it had been in that well. And maybe those life signs would have a chance to survive.

She left the cockpit, and closed the cockpit door, something she hadn’t done in years. She locked it, coded not just to her warm handprint and active eye scan, but also physically, with a seventeen-figure numerical that had an image in the middle, something she used on her personal stuff, something not in any computer anywhere.

No one could guess that, not without time and the right equipment, and she doubted the owners of those life signs had that.

Then she made her way to the storage area, pulling up her environmental suit’s hood as she went. The environment formed around her almost immediately and, oddly, gave her comfort.

She pulled open the storage area door, stunned to see ice forming on everything inside.

That leak between the pod and the storage area wasn’t a leak. It was an actual opening.

She turned her boots to the ice setting, hoping she would adhere enough to make it to the pod door.

She could see it, intermittently, as the wind whistled between the two vehicles, bringing pointed ice pellets with it. They were scratching the pod, and probably not doing any good for her rover either.

And she didn’t want to think about the grappler, which she hadn’t yet unhooked.

She couldn’t hear much over the howl of the wind, but as she got closer to the open doors, she thought she heard pounding.

Then the pounding stopped.

Oh, God, if those life signs snuffed out while she was this close, she would…she had no idea what. She didn’t want to imagine it.

She went to the wall, and managed to open the tools locker. Thank every god she could think of that the locker had been designed to work in extreme conditions.

She removed a laser cutter, and put a few other tools on her environmental suit’s belt. Then she stuffed the laser pistol in there as well, because she would need both hands.

She could see the outline of the door on the pod, but that outline was getting coated in ice. She couldn’t strap into the opening near the rover because if she did, she couldn’t reach the pod’s door. So she did the next best thing. She hooked two tethers to her belt.

The wind buffeted her as she worked. She only had one chance at unsealing that pod’s door. If this didn’t work, she couldn’t do anymore, because she would get blown into the ice field.

She braced one hand on the pod. The ice was lumpy beneath her gloves, and thicker than she thought.

She started up the laser cutter, working fast, peeling ice away as she cut pieces loose. The pounding continued inside, getting stronger as the ice moved away.

She had no idea if the people inside could hear her work: she doubted it. But they had to know they had been moved.

Finally, she got to the door itself. She was about to yank it open, when it slid sideways, and she found herself face to face with a man who had been beaten bloody.

His face was black-and-blue. His lower lip was split, his nose broken. His eyes were barely visible under the swelling in his face.

He shoved her backwards, and she nearly fell through the gap between the pod and the rover. She caught herself with her arms, hanging onto the rover on one side and the pod on the other.

The man climbed over her as he got out.

As she struggled to regain her footing, she glanced inside the pod. Another person huddled in there in a fetal position, eyes closed, face battered. He seemed to be unconscious.

Her heart rate spiked. What had she gotten in the middle of?

She pulled herself into the rover, barely able to stand due to the wind swirling around her. She caught a strap near the door, and eased herself inside—

Only to find herself face to face with a laser pistol. It was olive. Government issue.

“Close the damn door,” he said.

“Your friend,” she said, looking at the pod.

“He’s not my friend,” the man said. “Close the damn door or get the hell out.”

The wind swirled again, and he slid just a little. His boots couldn’t find purchase on the ice.

“This is my vehicle,” she said.

“Not anymore,” he said. “This thing is some kind of space-to-land vehicle, right?”

“It’s a rover,” she said, trying to keep herself calm. The wind was getting stronger.

He was shaking. He wasn’t wearing any kind of environmental suit.

“I can handle a rover,” he said, more to himself than to her. “Get out.”

“No,” she said.

He fired. His shaking hands made the shot miss her and ping off the side of the escape pod. He swore, tried to regroup, and ended up losing his footing entirely.

He landed on his back with a whomp! and spun along the ice-covered floor toward her. She blocked his slide by moving a booted foot in front of him, and pulled her own laser pistol from the back of her belt.

“Get your friend out of that pod, and I’ll make sure you get out of here,” she said.

“He’s not my friend.” The battered man’s teeth were chattering. He probably had frostbite already.

“What is he?”

The man grabbed her leg and tried to pull her sideways, to make her lose her balance. But she remained steady because her boots adhered to the ice.

Instead, he managed to slip farther, hanging off the edge of the rover. The wind battered his head against the side of the pod.

“You’re going to die if you don’t do what I said.” She sounded tougher than she felt. Her heart was pounding.

He pointed his laser pistol at her, hands still shaking. “I don’t need you,” he said, and fired again.

She kicked the pistol as he fired, the shot going wild. The force of her kick made him slide the rest of the way out of the rover, falling headfirst between the rover and the pod.

She ran to the edge, to see if she could reach him, but he had fallen deep into the snow.

She had no idea why she wanted to save him. He had tried to shoot her twice, and he had clearly done something to the man inside the pod.

The pod.

The wind had grown so strong now that she could barely hold her own position. And she couldn’t keep the pod attached to the rover.

She grabbed one of the tethers and pulled it across the distance between the pod and the rover, stepping with it, turning on the gravity in her boots as well, hoping that would keep her as stable as possible.

The inside of the pod was trashed. The two men had fought in here, and the man on the floor lost. He was wearing some kind of uniform. The logo on his closest sleeve belonged to a prison transport ship. She looked up, saw that the pod was marked Official Use Only.

Somehow, the guy who had fallen into the snow had commandeered this pod, maybe by forcing the guard to open it all for him, then beating the man within an inch of his life.

She grabbed the man and wrapped the tether around him, before attaching it to his belt. Then she yanked him up, knees buckling under his weight.

She could barely shove him toward the door. Only a few yards to cross to get into the rover. Only a few yards.

The gap between the rover and the pod was the hard part. She wasn’t sure how she felt about the other man, dying on the ice below her (relieved?), but she didn’t want to lose this one. Not that she was certain he was a good man—she had no way of knowing that—but he hadn’t actively tried to harm her, and she had come this far.

She kept her arms wrapped around his torso, and leveraged herself across that gap, yanking him along, feeling the effort in her back and her thighs. Sharp pains were shooting through her knees. She couldn’t hold this position long.

Then the wind came up again, screeching—actually screeching—and for once it worked with her, shoving her into the rover. She fell on top of the man, feeling him slide on the ice beneath her.

She stuck one foot between his thighs to stop him from sliding out of the rover just like his companion had. Then she commanded the rover to close the airlock door.

For a moment, the door didn’t move. The wind shoved in, and she wondered if that was causing the door to stick open. Then bits of ice rained off the door’s side. It slid—too slowly for her tastes—all the way closed.

“Restore environment,” she said, but she really meant temperature. Then she grabbed the man and dragged him toward the door into the rover proper.

She managed to get that door open, not sure what she would do with this guy if he became conscious. Would he be as vicious as his compatriot?

She untethered herself, grabbed some extra cords, and pulled the man out of the storage area. She was dragging him by his collar now, because her back wouldn’t let her do anything else.

And her knees. She had never felt such pain in her knees.

But she wasn’t going to let herself limp. She dragged him to the only bed, and somehow managed to lever him onto it. Then she strapped him into place, just in case.

She didn’t know much field medicine. She knew how to deal with frostbite and ice, but that was it. She wrapped him in the special blankets every rover on the base had, and she let the blankets deal with the man’s extreme cold.

She’d worry about his other injuries later.

She checked the straps, then made her way to the cockpit, opening the door, and stepping inside. Her environmental suit’s hood remained up this time, and it was beeping at her. The wind speeds had reached ridiculous levels.

She unhooked the pod from the back of the rover, and did her best to secure the grappler. If it broke, that was no longer her issue. She had a hunch, given the pain in her back and knees, she’d be on some kind of disability leave anyway. She wasn’t sure she could do the work, not given how she felt at the moment.

Then she ran the simulations. The wind was too strong for her to drive through it, and too gusty for her to jettison into orbit. But the ice was still cracking, and the fissure beneath was growing.

She couldn’t drive out. The rover didn’t have the ability to plow through the snow-ice mix. And the wind wouldn’t let her skim over the surface.

She had to standing-start jump into orbit. A one-time shot.

For a half-second she thought about staying here, gambling that the cracks wouldn’t become something more serious.

But the same things that factored into her decision to pull the pod out factored into the decision here. If the rover slipped below the surface and got covered in snow-ice, which then froze over…

It would be a hellish death, along with the guy she didn’t know. What if he ended up as mean as the other guy?

Hellish, with company.

She smiled grimly.

She had one thing to do then, and one thing only.

She strapped herself in, and forced herself to make the preparations, going slowly and stating each action out loud, just so she wouldn’t miss any. She had the rover’s computer on, but it wasn’t as sophisticated as some other equipment she had used, equipment that could advise her when she was making a misstep.

She didn’t think she was, even though it had been a long time since she tried anything like this.

Worst case, she’d be stuck here.

At least, she tried.

Her muscles were trembling from the exertion and the adrenalin. She had no choice, and somehow that was all freeing. She started the command sequence, and let it run, feeling the rover shudder as the power built in its engines.

She hadn’t checked the vents. She had no idea if the snow and ice blocked them. Too late to send some kind of clearing heat through the vents or a bit of garbage or anything. Too late—

The rover groaned—a sound she had never heard before—then vibrated. For a moment she worried that it might explode. She hadn’t considered that.

Then she leaned back in the pilot’s chair. If the rover exploded, she died, and she wouldn’t have to worry about any of this anymore.

Somehow that thought gave her comfort. As she calmed down, the rover lurched and then moved sideways.

At that moment, she realized the rover was already jettisoning upward, through the gusts and the storm, buffeting in the gigantic winds. She simply couldn’t see anything, because she hadn’t set up the nav panel that way.

And now there was no point. She would know if they had made it out when the rover stopped vibrating, when everything felt smooth.

She gripped the arms of her chair, hoping—maybe even praying—and then…the vibration stopped.

She tapped the nav panel, saw that the rover was above the storm now, and heading out of the atmosphere.

She had to orbit the planet until the storm abated, but she could now.

She was going to make it.

Maya leaned her head back and sighed. The shakes began, as they always did for her once a crisis ended.

Only the crisis wasn’t quite over. She didn’t know what she had brought on board.

She leaned forward, accessed the ClaaLorus Systems’ news net, and typed in the name of the prison transport.

And then she saw the notice.

She had been right: the man she had not saved had used a guard to get into an escape pod and somehow, even though there had been no emergency on the transport, managed to get the pod away from the ship. Everyone thought the guard was dead.

But he wasn’t. She had him.

And the prisoner—one Maximus Connera, a man who had left a string of bodies all over this sector—he was dead, down in the ice with his pod, his attempt foiled.

By her.

She ran a hand over her face, and let out a small half-laugh of wonder. Would she have even tried to rescue the pod if she had known what it was? Would she have pulled the guard free?

She had no idea.

She was glad she hadn’t known, glad she had made the decision based on the life signs alone.

Because she was no judge or jury. She didn’t have to make decisions like that.

She had been in the ice because she hadn’t wanted her own people to risk their lives for a piece of broken-down equipment. She hadn’t wanted any other lives on her conscience.

She wasn’t sure if she’d have one. Maximus. Such a name. She could barely remember what he looked like—that battered face—but his voice would haunt her. The way that it dripped menace. The way that it half-floated away in the wind.

He hadn’t asked for her help. She was glad of that. She had no idea what she would have done if he begged her to help him.

She leaned back in the pilot’s chair and closed her eyes, just for a moment.

Base medical would have to deal with the man she rescued. They would have to work with her as well.

Once she got back, she wouldn’t have to worry about any of this. She wouldn’t have to worry about the equipment or storms or anything.

She was applying for a medical leave. She needed the rest. And she would take it, maybe even put in for a transfer to somewhere warm.

She’d have to learn all new equipment, but that was okay. She was ready to.

Because this was extreme. And she was tired of extreme.

She needed easy from now on.

Although she doubted she would get it.

Ice Breakers
Copyright© 2023 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Mission Critical, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Solaris 2019.
Cover and Layout copyright © 2022 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira
Cover art copyright © novelo/Depositphotos