White Crystal Butterflies | Wattys 2021 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Six

Retrieving failed equipment is something I daresay I was good at even before this mission. Even before I retrained as a space pilot and took up an interstellar career on the F-300 liners shuttling people back and forth between the four solar systems of the UIS. In fact, leading a research team on a moon like Mahaha is just about the only job in the galaxy that blends both my streams of work experience as smoothly as water and rubbing alcohol.

Heck, throw in the summer camps I served as cabin leader in in my late teens, and I might be the most qualified person for this job in all of the UIS.

Krüger slings down an ice axe and crampons beside me, another layer on a growing pile of equipment for anything from ice-cutting to surviving a local methane-gas flare. We've found methane pockets in Mahaha's ice before, and I want to be absolutely sure we could get back to the Pod in one piece if one such bubble took issue with an electrical spark and decided to blow up Samson.

Krüger stashes a handheld pump and several gas tubes with tight caps in his personal backpack. As if I'm going to let him get close enough to a methane pocket to get a sample if we find one. I don't care if they're potentially biologically produced; they're subsurface bombs for all I care.

I feel like I just left the driver's seat as I hop back over Samson's low side to land behind the wheel. Krüger has unashamedly made himself a seatbelt out of a shirt he burned a hole in before we figured out which burners not to use on the Pod's rickety stove. When I give the belt a raised eyebrow—the point of not having them in the rover is that it's easier to bail—he twirls a buck knife I didn't see sheathed at his hip. Has he had that in the station this whole time? It's a beauty: a well-kept, sooty black ceramic blade that won't cause him any trouble in the caustic atmospheres of some of the places he visits.

It's against station rules to have a knife like that outside the kitchen. I'd also rather not see it come loose and impale him in the event of a crash, though its sheath is high-quality—better than the first one I ever owned. Krüger re-sheathes the knife, then mimes the smooth motion of drawing it and slicing the seatbelt. He's done this before. If this was the Aventureros, I would trust him. He's experienced in the field, and the fact that he brought the knife at all says as much as the smooth ease with which he handles it. In the right hands, a tool like that could be useful to have along.

I give the knife a pass. As for the seatbelt...

Krüger gives me a look reminiscent of a very smart mule. "Either I drive, or I keep the belt."

"So long as you know how to cut it."

I hit the gas, and we're off again.

We're not trying to beat the daylight hours this time, so I take us at a more leisurely pace to let Krüger keep an eye on the tracking receiver in his hand. Like most of the probes we've lost, the Isoptera's transmitter is lodged deep in its metal body in a well-protected pod, sheltered from elements that could incapacitate the rest of its technology. Short of total probe pulverization, it will continue to tell us from kilometers away where the Isoptera lies—though it's not unheard of for interstellar scientists to track down their lost probes and find nothing but smoking wrecks with transmitter pods left inside.

The farther we get from the Pod, the more I have to hide how happy I am to be out here. The wind is crisp, and even the muted sunlight casts the world into sharp detail. Mahaha is, at first glance, breathtaking. At second glance, even more so. Blue, craggy glacial ice rises in waves around valleys cut like jagged wounds in some great, white hide. Aquamarine shadows chase snow caps sculpted into impossible shapes by the wind, and the snow is so white, it looks surreal. It lies over everything, and when the wind blows, ribbons of it scud across the ground like storm petrels.