“The stuff freezes at two-fifty Kelvin. Acts more like water bound to protein than normal water. Real viscous stuff, binds hard to everything. That’s it, so far.”
“That mean we can’t scrape it off?” asked a crew member.
“Maybe. Boris wants you to try chipping it first. He wants a solid sample, a few kilos at least. All he had to work with was the liquid from Leon’s suit. I told him what I’ll tell you: try the chipping and scraping, but not for long, then take the flamers to it. I want to be totally operational in forty-eight hours.”
“When do we go out, Captain?” asked Leon.
“Two hours. That T-Tauri has flared again, and we should see another plasma burst within the hour. The thing is pretty irregular right now, so when you’re out there, stay on the dark side of the hull. Take hammers, chisels, and flamers, and get a nice block of dirty ice for Cogs. He seems to think it’s something entirely new. Other questions?”
There weren’t any. Then Zeke spoke up: “Captain, another thing I’d like Boris to look at. We’re getting a lot of broad band noise now in communications. Pretty flat spectrum, except for some peaks around a micron, and a sharp one at ninety meters.”
“Cloud emissions?” said Waisley.
“I don’t think so, sir. Wasn’t there before the snowball hit us. It’s not a problem, but I thought you should know.”
“OK. I’ll run it by Cogs. Better start suiting up.”
Leon was paired with Arnie Solvido on the list Zeke circulated. Arnie was a good man, strong but easygoing, a slow breather with not much to say. Leon had pulled over a week’s work on the man’s tether with only a handful of words exchanged. Just the way Leon liked it—outside. Arnie showed up with a twenty pound sledge to go with the smaller tools and flamers they were going to try on the mass of starboard ice mounded on the hull, clumped in blocks at beam intersections of the instrument trellis. They saw all this with the forward video-cam. Right at the sun-line, it was the only instrument not covered with ice.
Six of them suited up an hour after another blast of plasma wind had raked the port side, carrying with it icy particulates that scoured metal like sandpaper, making an audible screech they could hear inside. Space in this dense molecular cloud was not so empty. And Leon still remembered the freezing snow with its flowing ice.
They tethered up at the port hatch and went out by twos, Leon and Arnie last, winching out three tool packs, each with flamer, then moving quickly to the dark side of the hull. Up close, the job looked bad: a solid, amorphous-looking mass of dirty ice up to a meter thick, covering vents and reaction ports. During the first hour they whacked at hull ice, Arnie swinging the big sledge, Leon working with a five-pounder and chisel. Solid ice, no layering or cracks to work with, bonded ferociously to the hull. In minutes they were surrounded by a cloud of ice chips and fistsized chunks, pushing them away from the hull into Orion’s shadow. Leon finally called in.
“Zeke, this is going nowhere fast. It’ll take weeks to break this stuff up, and chisels won’t get it off the hull. I say let’s flame it.”
It was Waisley who answered. “OK, but get some samples for Cogs first. Big chunks, if you can.”
What they got was a couple of soccer-ball-sized blocks Arnie had whacked off. They trundled them back to the lock, then broke out the hydrogen flamers as Zeke came on the line.
“See anything out there? The radio noise has gone way up since you guys started working.”
Leon looked around from the dark-side, the cloud of icy debris dully illuminated by girder-scattered light from the T-Tauri, beyond it only a few stars showing through channels in the thick molecular cloud around them, streaks of red and green far off where a newly born star was glowing. “Just the cloud,” he said. “Flamers on, Zeke. This should go a lot faster.”
And it did—at first. At ten thousand Kelvin the flames flashed the dirty ice to vapor on contact. But then the most amazing thing happened.
The ice began to move.
A flamer would make initial contact, flashing vapor at a point, and beyond that point the ice seemed to slump, color suddenly greenish, changing shape and flowing away from the flame. “What is this shit?” growled Arnie. “It’s running away from the flame!”
“This ain’t no ice,” said Leon. He’d held his flamer at a shallow angle against the hull before a man-sized mound of ice covering a reaction port, and watched the entire mass retreat to form a thick shelf beyond the port. It had moved a full meter in seconds. The port itself was still clogged. He blasted it, saw ice flow out in all directions away from the flame as he went in deeper and deeper, and suddenly the port was clear all the way down to the reaction nozzle throat. “It’s working!” he shouted. “We can clear the ports out with flamers, but we’re not melting the stuff. It’s flowing away from the heat!”
Now it was suddenly a game. Three flamers, pushing masses of ice around without effort, but it was eerie, watching that stuff move like it was alive, running away to escape the heat. When Zeke came on line, his voice was nearly obscured by a hiss.
“Get the other reaction port cleared out first. Once we roll the ship, the sunlight and plasma wind will take care of the rest.”
“We can barely hear you,” said Leon.
“I know. The radio noise is all over the band now, and getting stronger.
Clear the port, and get back inside.”
Zeke sounded a bit anxious, and that bothered Leon. The ice had retreated to the sun-line, forming a two meter ridge forward to aft, though untouched blocks still covered girders and instrument pods in the superstructure. Three flamers went to work on the remaining reaction port, and ice flowed like milk, but then Leon caught something in his peripheral vision and looked up.
Something huge and white filled half his view, rushing towards him at terrible speed on a collision course. Its center glowed like a giant, green eye, and tendrils extended before it, reaching out towards them. Leon lurched backwards, and dropped his flamer.
“Get out of there!” screamed Zeke. Then the ice storm hit, the first tendrils reaching for the three flamers and snuffing them dead. Icy slivers, sleet and snow crashed into them, knocking them down, and Leon felt a terrible cold come with it.
“Arnie!” he yelled, and felt a gloved hand on his arm. “Move fast, before we freeze up! Everybody move!” He felt Arnie scrabbling at his back, the jerk of the tether behind him like a fish on a line, four other men stumbling blindly to their feet in swirling whiteness. But nobody panicked, not this crew, and in seconds they were back to the lock, already open for them. They tumbled inside, tools and flamers left behind on the hull, and the T-Tauri was glaring at them as the hatch slid shut.
“What the fuck was that?” asked one of the crew.
Leon brushed greenish slush from his suit. “The dirty snowball that hit us,” he said. “It’s come back.”
“It’s sitting about two klicks off, right in our shadow,” said Waisley. “It backed off alter you came inside, and the one reaction port is still clear, but all your gear is frozen to the hull.”
“We’ve got plenty more flamers,” said Leon. Now he was angry, and he wasn’t sure why.
“You want to go outside with that thing hovering around? The one fact obvious to me is that it was going right for the flamers. It didn’t give a damn about you guys. Once the flamers were gone, it backed off.”
“You make it sound intelligent, Captain,” said Zeke. “Maybe it is. Cogs thinks so.”
They were still wet, sitting in the briefing room with tubes of scalding coffee in their hands. The air in the room still smelled like methane. “If he’s right, then we owe the fucker something,” said Leon. “It tried to kill us out there. Let’s roll the ship, let the plasma wind take care of the rest of that ice, and get the hell out of here!”