Being able to hold your breath for hours didn't often mean one wouldn't feel the urge to breathe down his neck.
Numbing my mind off pain had seemed to alleviate the anguish of slow asphyxia. Accepting death was a long-learned trick between our people. It would reduce the intolerable hurt that came with the ending of the body...
I faltered though.
The short-lived flare that lit through the icy ground reignited my hope, my mind restarted thinking, which brought back the mind-torturing sensation of asphyxia.
[ GET A GASS TANK!!! HIS OX IS BLARING LIKE MAD!!! ]
That voice again... Kevin was there, I just had to hold on for a few more minutes.
| Just a little more. Just... |
Then it was gone. Subsided by the darkness of gelid ice, the intensity of the flare rapidly died down.
...
Then there was a movement...
Through my numbed senses, I felt a hand tightly grip my right arm. The rough surface enveloping the limb was warm, and another hand grasped my shoulder.
The weight of the rapidly melting ice was considerable, but in the end, the softening snow gave in, allowing Kevin and Mack to pull me out with relative safety.
Tearing through the recently born terrain was an insanely risky task, more so knowing our reserves of ice-burner compound was not abundant by any means, and burning more than strictly necessary would simply be senseless in their situation.
Gahj!!
Freed arms, legs... Once my head was outside I couldn't help myself but gasp for new air out of sheer instinct. The impulse had been overwhelming, my body would not take the time to rationalize it.
I had to be cruelly reminded of the fact Pluto had no atmosphere. No air to breathe. The little reserves I had inside me rapidly escaped through my thin, bloodied lips.
Sensing hollowness inside one's lungs had never been a good signal, but it gave me the limited awareness I needed to finally understand the meaning of the deafening blaring between my ears.
The battery of my suit had had long run out trying to preserve minimum bodily heat. That meant the constant circle renewing the air supply had been out for a while.
I had been holding my breath quite possibly for dozens of minutes and hadn't even realized it.
| Hea- hea |
My eyes lit with pulsing blood, as my diaphragm contracted in rapid fire. I didn't know how much time I had left because I had never let myself go this far before. This much pressure on my system would have deterred me from trying to hold to this extent.
I was damn sure I was nearing my limits then and there.
Click!!!
It was too blurry for me to see, the contrast of the headlamps against the darkness of that tunnel made it difficult for me to discern shapes. A pair of hands reached out, helping me remove my helmet.
There was no sound...
There was no pressure inside the valves of my suit, I could guess why, my visor had been badly damaged. Long cracks ran through its surface, allowing air to leak outside.
Clackt!
That sound...
PshhhT!!!
A thin, familiar air intake burrowed in between my teeth. Despite being nothing but numb from the pressure under the snow, my hands reacted surprisingly nimbly, holding onto the emergency with the intense ferocity of an adult Baagr.
Tsshhhhhh!!!
I didn't wait for a second, without thinking it thrice, my mandible dug into the release mechanism, allowing the cold, pure oxygen inside the canister to bite the insides of my lungs.
...
Bliss.
No matter how cold or deadly, the charge of enhanced breath was bliss. The hours of struggling and squealing under the ice all seemed to vanish, carried away by a gale of fresh air.
Other than that... I could hardly see, but I did feel the hugs coiling around me, the soft wailing, and the quiet palms on my back.
All that I did, in a way.
...
Despite being freed from my tomb more than an hour ago, the rhythm of my breath had yet to fully recover.
[ We are closing into the surface, Mack, operate this thing for a while, I'll be taking care of some of the stuff we'll need to make a safe trip. ]
Kevin uttered through his radio communication.
Steps descended slowly through a second adjacent tunnel that connected both, the buried mule, and the elongation that led to the place I'd been rescued in.
A glint of the lantern in Kev's head seemed to point toward our direction before turning around to face the opposite way.
...
The escape towards the surface was seeming to advance way smoother than expected.
The default protocol of blindly tunneling the snow with the modified blowtorch was not a useful one. The terrain was too irregular, containing irregularly sized chunks of ice, all sandwiched by a grinned layer of softer snow.
In order to reach the surface, Kev suggested using the burner to soften the snow in between, which would allow us to make a path with our own bare hands.
Perhaps that way we could make it out...
[ Any progress with comms, Vaam? ]
Mack said, his tone struggling to hide his pessimism.
[ Mission Control does not answer, and I have yet to establish a direct channel with base. ]
Communications were always a constraint. It was a one-directional channel, so communicating with other units once we had left the near surroundings of our base was practically impossible.
Our only way to know what was happening was through MC, but that didn't seem to go. I would have to rewire some things... If that even worked.
I thought to myself, as I attempted to bring my mind back to focused action. In vain...
My mind recalled the conversation we'd had a few moments before
[ How did you guys make it? ]
The mood was bleak, too bleak for our desperate situation. I had to say something, so I decided to ask.
The three of them had managed to save themselves by hiding under the structure of the four-legged cargo machine, which had created enough of an air pocket for them to both move and act.
Over the course of an hour, they had managed to short-wire the mule's bottom panel into an overheat. Softening the ice on its sides enough to hardly reach the containers on its lower sides.
Those contained most of the emergency equipment and tools, and had been the key to both tunneling the newly formed underground and escaping their deaths...
I glanced to my side. Martha's eyes were still tightly closed. Her face, pale and blood-drained hid behind her half-cracked reflective glass. Bandages made out of tissue covered the left side of her upper body...
A piece of falling debris had ricocheted with the ice below and had directly impacted her face and neck. The blood loss was cut for the moment, but the scars...
The fourteen-year-old hadn't talked in a while, her thought was lost somewhere in oblivion, and I didn't know if reaching out to her with nothing to say in mind would be a good idea.
What was she thinking about..? I could almost imagine.
An unexpected, suicidal attack had just rampaged over the moons we liked to call ours. She had seen our few defenses explode into oblivion, she had seen terrain tremble and shudder under the impact of the same machines we used to see with nothing but unending fascination.
Martha, Mack, Kev, and I. We all survived the countless impacts that had occurred along both moons. For now, at least.
Had others been as lucky though?
What was the probability that one of those lost torches had directly impacted near our home? Had it simply been buried in layers upon layers of ice? Or had it been annihilated by a direct collision?
What were the odds everyone was still fine? What were the chances one of the people we loved and shared so much with, was dying right now somewhere under the ice? Somewhere cold, dark, and lonely?
The chances were definitely not zero.
...
Lost in my own thoughts, I didn't realize that Martha had shifted her gaze toward me. She was usually quite reserved, so I didn't expect her to say anything either.
| Why is this happening?.. |
She directly asked in a small, trembling voice. Her golden eyes were directly set on mine.
...
I took a deep long sip out of the light red-colored container, trying to steady my own emotions before saying anything.
| I wouldn't know. |
I simply said, choosing not to talk too much. I could tell her eyelids felt heavy, she needed some rest to restore her energy...
| Everyone is very tough, they'll be fine. |
That seemed to help. At least I hoped that was the case.
Her eyes closed, and her head slowly fell to the side... Trying to catch up on some sleep. I reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder, offering what little comfort I could.
Only when I knew she had fallen deep into her dreams did I stand up from the ground. My hands moved, closing and throwing away the useless communication device. I had been trying to contact for nearly an hour now, it was not going to work.
Anyways, I had already caught up some warmth, and my leg was feeling... Not that numb anymore. I needed to make myself useful other than trying to get answers from someone who may have as well been dead.
| A quarter of day, minimum... |
Not only buried under meters of thick ice, but also short-circuited. Even if we made it outside safely, without a mule to transport us, the journey back to base would be nothing short of nightmarish.
That was accounted for.
| With a little bit of luck it'll be day soon. |
A basic rule of thumb when traversing the frozen wasteland was to always do so at day.
Even if it was minuscule, a warmer temperature, even if by a couple of degrees could make the difference between death, and life. Traversing land on the day would be key.
Still, that was not the only factor involved in the movement through the vast ice expanse.
We were uncommunicated with the rest of our people, regrouping with them as soon as possible was of top priority. If we failed to do so on time, there was a good chance some of them would decide to set a needless search expedition into the frozen wasteland.
| That would not be good. |
I murmured, as I climbed through the newly carved tunnel that lead to the yet-to-be-reached outside.
I continued pondering...
With this much frozen liquid around us, obtaining drinking water would be no issue. However, oxygen and food were two different kinds of beasts.
My suit's battery had already run out, which meant no warmth, and most importantly, no recycling of air.
I was not sure how Kevin and Mack were faring, but judging by the amount of work they were doing, their batteries should be running out too. What's worse, we had lost one of our four emergency oxygen containers in the chaos, and I was using another one. That left 2.
Strangely, another big problem was food...
Miners were a variant with sky-high caloric expenditure. Maintaining peak conditions and awareness at such cold temperatures burnt a lot of energy, so the ordinary rations we had been supplied with would not do for much time.
Luckily, if we acted fast, that shouldn't be a big problem. We would grow a little weaker, and lethargic, but not die.
| We could try hunting something in case things went south... |
I muttered under my breath, making sure no one would hear me having suicidal ideas.
There was virtually no edible flora in either of the moons, and mutated fauna was both extremely rare and murderously lethal-
[ It's here. ]
Without realizing it, I had reached the upper end of the tunnel.
A single ray of natural sunlight reached my eyes, Charon peaked through the corner of the collapsing layer that separated us from the surface...
Mack's expression hung low, his jaw clenched, exposing the veins along his greyish forehead. The blur that was the outside settled into a firm, desolate picture.