Burning the Ice

1 Singing the Icebrine Blues That morning before breakfast Manda stopped by her work chamber to check her marine-waldos' night's work. The chamber was an ugly, rock-hewn room with poor lighting and a thatch floor. In the room's center, a device that looked like a hiker's daypack hung from a wire web suspended below the rough ceiling. Already decked out in her livesuit and -hood, Manda slipped the livepack on and plugged its leads into her yoke. Her liveface appeared before her as she did so, rendered on her retinas by lasers in the specs set into her livemask. Glamour filled the room, a glowing sphere that defined her projection pod. A host of 3-D icons appeared: shiny, translucent satellites locked in Manda-static orbit. First Manda touched her communications-cube, and it expanded into a thicket of geometric shapes. With economical movements, she checked her mail and messages, then folded the commcube up and called up her marine-waldo data. It blossomed around her in glistening bouquets and thickets of numbers, charts, and graphic landscapes, and she began to sort through it all. Her handcrafted fleet of eight marine-waldos, theAculeusseries, had collected a lot of information, and she had a lot of data to get through since she had taken the evening off yesterday. But it wasn't long before fingers of cold seeped in, disrupting her concentration. Beneath all the protective layers Manda had onlayers of plastic, organic, and metallic fibers, one after another till she could scarcely bend elbow or kneeshe shivered, nicking virtual icons with cold-clumsy hands and elbows. Data strands fragmented and cascaded down the inner boundaries of her projection sphere. "Shit." With a sigh, suppressing both her frustration and the shivers, she recovered the data, reconstructed it, and started againdancing her marine-waldo control dance, working her fingers, arms, legs, and torso to guide her fleet of machines across the dark floor of the ocean, to read its secrets with their instruments. She was the colony's best waldo pilot. The best. Amid the billions back on Earth, how could any single human presume to be the best at anything? For that, at least, she was glad to be one of the handful who lived on this freezing, barren world. She hadn't lost a machine yet, in almost eight seasons of piloting in some extremely dangerous environments. And she didn't intend to start now. But she was growing tired of this latest assignment, this fruitless search through the depths of Brimstone's frigid waters. Arlene had suggested the ocean search project to Manda, while the rest of the clone geared up on Project IceFlame. Whatever secrets lay beneath Brimstone's icy crust had stayed hidden ever since the JebediahMeriwether twoclone had died fifteen seasons ago, while exploring the ocean floor in their deep-sea submersible. The colonists knew little about this world they inhabited. When Arlene had suggested it, this assignment had seemed ideal. Manda hadn't been interested in attempting a collaboration with the rest of her sibling groupeven if it would have put her at the controls of the winged waldos that would shortly be strafing the methane-laced ice at the poles. They had all the skills they needed without her, and without a twin she was always the odd one out. She wanted to carve out her own space, not simply try to fit into theirs. But all she'd found so far was dark and cold, and she'd had her fill of those. At least her prior assignmentsflying the jet-waldos up to the poles, and using land-explorer equipment to take ice and air samples therehad turned up interesting data to analyze. Even her tedious and dangerous first assignment, driving a tractor-waldo acrMixon, Laura J. is the author of 'Burning the Ice', published 2002 under ISBN 9780312869038 and ISBN 0312869037.