Pollution, he wasn’t dead yet. The first thing he had to do was to get into his ventral pouch. He had some of the tools of civilization. His comset. A gun that could possibly blast a small hole through this covering if he had enough explosive rounds.
He wasn’t sealed in—he could breathe. He couldn’t see it, but thought there must be an air pocket above his blow hole. He tried sucking air in, then exhaled with his valvae marinae closed. This expanded his upper chest at the expense of the abdomen, and, with an awful creaking protest that filled the sonic spectrum with white noise, the block moved slightly up, and to the side. When he exhaled again, he could wiggle a little. Some water dripped into his blow hole; his breath must have melted it. This slight evidence of affecting his environment helped his morale greatly.
Cold at least was numbing his broken foreleg. After another macrobeat of huffing and puffing, Drin found he could half-wiggle and half-roll enough to slip his tongue out and reach his pouch. His outer skin was so numb and leathery that it didn’t feel like part of him anymore. That would be something for the doctors, he feared. In the meantime, he had his gun and his comset.
Now, where was all this snow and ice most thin? He closed his eyes to concentrate on the sonic image and tried various frequencies of voice, looking for the one that made the picture deepest and clearest. His prison seemed darkest off to his right; which meant the fewest reflections, which meant, he hoped, the thinnest.
Drin squirmed and wriggled until he could open his beak a couple of docis wide. Then he held the gun about a doci from the ice, and fired.
Ice chips stung the inside of his mouth. He probed the hole with a finger—it was deeper than he could reach. He fired twice more into the same hole, and no ice chips came back from the last shot. Struggling to reposition his beak, he repeated the procedure five more times until he had a rough hexagon of holes to the outside near the comer of his mouth.
The idea was that his hexagon of gun-drilled holes would define the weakened border of a plug that he could push out with his good right foreleg, if he could get it in position. To do that, he had to burrow forward, just a little.
The struggles had gained him a little more freedom of movement. He bit off a little ice, pressed his beak to the side, and bit some more. In about a Trimus hour, he was able to wiggle the upper part of his body sideways an eighth of a charter unit. Then he had to press himself, in excruciating pain, against his broken leg to create enough room to bring his right foreleg forward. He groaned in relief when he finally got his claw in the center of the hexagon of holes.
Drin rested. Then he pushed with every cuf of strength he could muster, holding his breath to stiffen his body as much as possible.
The ice broke and Drin found he’d punched a large hole in his prison. Not big enough for him to wiggle through, but perhaps he could enlarge it. He started tearing great hunks from its perimeter with his right claw.
“Drin?”
The faint, but clear voice froze him.
“Drin?”
“Mary?”
Drin struggled to get his right eye at the hole. Mary was standing, shaking almost violently, in the snow and wind just outside the hole. Her cape was gone, as was her mask. Her face was blotchy.
“Damn, it’s good to hear your voice,” she said. “Is it warm in there? My power’s used up.”
“The freezing point of water is about the best I can do—and there’s no room. I was buried thoroughly. What happened?”
“Got shot with a trank dart when I wasn’t looking, and fell. Dumb. That avalanche was no accident—it was set off with some kind of weapon. Well, we were looking for a possible murder suspect. Guess w-we found one.”
“Mary, I got pushed off myself. It might have been a human—maybe a primitivist working with someone here.” Gonikli? An artist friend of hers? Borragil’ib? Could his cousin be yet another proud Do’utian who had found a cause greater than honor? “Time to worry about that later. I have a field med kit in my pouch, with maybe an emergency wrap in it.”
“Gonna need more than that, Drin. I have to—get—warm.”
There was only one way to get her warm that he could think of, but it would incapacitate him further. So, he had to do some other things first. He grabbed his comset, set it on emergency relay, and stuck it out the hole he’d dug.
“Set this on a rock or something, flat side facing south,” he told her, “Then come in here. I’ll tty to open my beak wide enough so you can crawl in my mouth. Feet first if you can. Uh, Mary?”
“Drin?”
“If I die, stay inside. My body will keep you warm for many hours.” He said nothing of the hours of agony that it would take the cold to shut off the blood flow to his brain at the center of a shell of dead frozen flesh. He would have to endure that, for Mary’s sake. The longer he could stay alive, the longer she would.
“R-right.” Her hands shook terribly, but she took the comset and managed to wedge the unit in a crack of ice facing south. Then she started backing in through his hole. In the meantime, Drin found his medical kit and got it out of his pouch and into his mouth. That done, he grabbed Mary’s boots, opened his beak as wide as he could, and pulled her in. With her feet freezing his throat and her backpack poking the lining of the top of his mouth, he closed her in. She just lay there and shivered.
She wasn’t sealed in; he had to leave room for his tongue to hang out the left comer of his mouth—it was starting to freeze again!—and that left an air gap. He breathed for two, inhaling through his blow hole and exhaling the warmed air through his mouth over Mary, his tongue and his hands.
With Mary as secure as she could be, and to keep his hands warm, Drin resumed work on the hole. Another four holes outlined the vertices of another hexagon, contiguous to the first. Rather than pushing it out, and letting the wind in, he outlined a third. Then a fourth.
Despite the noise of the gun drilling through the ice, Mary seemed to have gone to sleep.
At least he hoped it was sleep. He could tell she was still alive, but not much more, and unconscious. To wake her, he knew would deprive her of badly needed recuperation time.
But not knowing was a torture.
The work was going slowly; it had taken him an hour to outline a hole less than a third of the size, he estimated, needed to let him out of his icy prison. And he could feel the cold slipping into him much faster than that.
He had another worry. In all the thrashing and wiggling he’d done he hadn’t managed to move his tail. Not at all. He couldn’t even feel its tip any more. Chaos! He could deal with that later. He loaded another clip and resumed firing.
The hole he’d outlined was almost half wide enough for him to crawl out, if he could crawl, when Mary started moving again. She was doing something with the med kit.
There were, he remembered, some surgical implements in there.
Mary patted the roof of his mouth and he opened it. She wiggled out and sat in the hole, wrapped in the emergency blanket, blocking the occasional cold gust. Her face had some ugly yellow splotches, but her mouth was curved up at the edges and her teeth were showing.
“A little frostbite, the med comp says. And a busted rib. I’ll live. Besides having had fish for dinner last night, how are you?”
How did she know what he’d had for dinner? Never mind. “My left leg is broken. And my tail is trapped. Mary, I may have to ask you to amputate it.”
“Drin!”
“I can ignore the pain and the damage can be repaired, if I live.” What worried him more was that, without his tail, or most of it, to counterbalance, he would have a very hard time moving, let alone climbing, on three legs.