Boots on the Ice

Last time we promised ourselves that the next visit would be done properly: with a plan, with kit, with somebody having read a single safety document. Reader, we did all three. We still left at three in the morning and told nobody, because some things about this operation are load-bearing.

We packed like grown-ups

The Registrar drew up a kit list and we, for once, followed it: full polar gear — base layers, down, shells, mitts over gloves, goggles — and high-altitude breathing equipment, because everything we’d seen of the moon said thin as loudly as it said cold. Sandwiches, as promised. A flask each. We loaded it all aboard Prometheus in the small hours, lifted off the way we now know how, and were falling toward the green belt before the kettle at home had finished cooling.

Landfall on the green belt

We set the ship down on the thin ribbon of green that wraps the moon’s equator — the only part of it that isn’t simply ice — and stepped out into a forest that took a moment to parse. Some of the trees are recognisably conifer: dark, needled, patient. The rest are wrong in a wonderful way — tall scaly columns crowned with soft club-moss tufts, like the inside of a coal-age textbook come to life. Everything wore a fur of frost.

It is not empty. There are insects, slow and antifreeze-stubborn, working the bark. There are birds with wingspans absurd for their little bodies — built to hang on thin air — and feathers so light-absorbent that against the snow they read as holes rather than shapes. And there are animals: round, dense-furred, rodent-ish things that pop up at burrow mouths, regard you with total composure, and pop back down. We named one Brian. Brian was unmoved.

Outside, briefly

The plan held right up until the air didn’t. Bundled to the eyebrows, breathing gear on the whole time, we got perhaps forty minutes of the most exhilarating cold any of us has felt — and then the tanks started talking to us, one by one, and the readings agreed: the air out there is too thin and too freezing to loiter in, and we’d brought only so much oxygen. We trudged back to the ship genuinely thrilled and genuinely deflated, like children called in from the snow before they were ready.

The cabinet

Back aboard, peeling off layers and feeling robbed, the Registrar — who cannot be in a room for ten minutes without cataloguing it — found a cabinet we’d never opened, low in the aft bulkhead, full of small handled devices, each marked in the same flowing alien script as everything else on the ship. We did the responsible thing and immediately pressed one.

A bubble of forcefield bloomed around whoever held the device — a soft, faintly glowing skin you could push a mitt through but air apparently could not. Inside it: still, warm, breathable, and smelling unmistakably of pine forest after rain. We worked it out fairly quickly, for us: portable life support, one per person, and far better than anything we’d packed.

It smells like a forest you’re finally allowed to be in.— the Oracle, inside the first bubble

So out we went again, one by one, each in our own quiet pine-scented sphere, no masks, no mitts, hands free for once. The photographs improved enormously. So did our mood.

Water

With air no longer rationed we walked further than before, downhill through the frost, until the trees opened onto water — a broad dark river, or a very narrow sea, we genuinely couldn’t tell which and didn’t much care. Liquid water, on this of all worlds, moving and alive: ribbons of aquatic plant streaming in the current, and fish — pale, big-eyed, unbothered — holding station under a skin of meltwater.

The locals

And then everything happened. Around the bend came two of them — beings, people, kids, near enough — wearing almost nothing against a cold that had nearly killed us, breathing the thin air like it was nothing, each balanced on a sleek little craft that skimmed the river exactly the way a jet-ski does: standing up, leaning hard, throwing spray, racing each other up and down and plainly showing off.

We arrived at a working theory, and we are quietly fond of it: this moon is the system’s neglected back paddock. Too barren and too cold for the farmers of the green world to bother with — but just wild and empty enough that the local young come out here to mess about on the water where no adult will tell them to stop. We own, in short, the galactic equivalent of a scrubby field behind the bypass that the kids have claimed.

Sunset, all at once

We’d have stayed for the backflips alone, but the light went strange and then went fast: the sun dropped toward the ice and the day drained out of the sky in what felt like minutes, the cold deepening with every one of them. You do not want to be a long walk from the ship when night arrives on a place like this. We turned for home while we could still see the way.