Eicere Ad Finem

Their trip through the Charitum Mountains went poorly. The huge mountain to the east of Charis was a steep seven-thousand-meter vertical climb up a slope that was scree where it wasn’t sheer cliff face. A journey that they hoped would seem wholly impossible to any pursuers, and one that was nearly so even for themselves, as little as they would have preferred to acknowledge that fact. By daybreak, they’d climbed to a saddle upon the mountain’s vast shoulder, perhaps a thousand meters down from the summit. They could find no ground over which their truck could climb the rest of the way to the peak, and so decided this place would serve well as their pass to cross into the wild lands beyond. It was also in this place that Jack announced they should dump all of what he referred to as their ‘unnecessary cargo’. Nestor was happy to be rid of the bodies, as their presence haunted him, and hearing them jostle around in the compartment as the truck bounded over the rough terrain had been making him feel ill.

The first task before they dumped anything was to swap the shuttle GPS to the truck. Nestor removed the GPS from the shuttle quite easily, but installing that device into the truck proved impossible, as the connections were not perfectly aligned between the new GPS and truck, and even once Nestor spliced them, the shuttle GPS would not boot up, and nothing he tried seemed to fix it. Jack quickly tired of attending to Nestor’s futile troubleshooting, and told him they’d proceed without.

“But how will we find our way out of these mountains, then?” Nestor asked, looking out the window at the labyrinthine expanse spread below them.

“We’ll find our way. I will find our way. Plus, once we get clear of these here mountains, we jes need to head straight west to find the road. Once we have the road, we won’t need no GPS.”

Nestor opened his mouth to press his argument further, but his compatriot turned away and was already preparing to unload the shuttle. This proved a minor task, as they had been jettisoning pieces of that craft steadily throughout their entire ascent, and most of the smaller, looser parts had bounced off to mix heterogeneously with the dry slurry of rocks over which the truck had crawled. The main shuttle hull and bomb both remained, however, for the hull had been tightly strapped down, winched forward, and bolted in place by the crane arm, and the bomb had been placed in a large metal box that was of the platform itself.

The shuttle had rattled far enough back on the platform that the straps holding it strained under incredible tension, and they explosively undid themselves at the merest prompting from Nestor. The winch spun free with a simple button push, and the bolts attaching the crane to the shuttle came out when Jack, using only the crane arm, shoved the hull off the platform. The shuttle crashed to the rocks below, and eager to once again become an independent thing, it slid down the steep slope, for a moment tugging the huge behemoth of a truck to lean precariously in that direction, until those bolts whined away into the thin air like bullets. The craft began a slow roll and tumbled downslope until it settled, tilted against a large boulder some distance down.

Nestor tried to busy himself around the exterior of the truck by picking up small pieces of junk from the shuttle, folding and coiling straps, anything to avoid going back in to touch those bodies, but Jack would hear none of it. Nestor’s suit coms came alive with Jack’s annoyed voice, “Hey what you doin’ out there? I need you in here to help me.”

“They cain’t weigh no more’n thirty kilos. You can handle thirty kilos.”

“They are too much for any person to handle by hisself. It ain’t jes how much they weigh, it’s that they’re bulky and they’re stiff. You helped kill ‘em, and so you need to get in here right now to help get rid of ‘em.”

Nestor moped inside, declining to remove the bulky envirosuit, hoping perhaps the thick gloves might insulate him from all sensation of what would come next. The man with the exploded knee had stiffened into a pose clutching it, and Nestor insisted they get rid of that body first. Negotiating the doubled-over corpse into the single-person airlock proved especially difficult, as there was no way to occupy the airlock with him, and so having one person hand him down to the other person waiting in the airlock below was impossible. Eventually, they depressurized the cab and then opened both airlock doors and unceremoniously dumped the bodies out. They left them where they landed and pretended amongst themselves this was a sufficient burial.

Unburdened from their history, Jack seemed quite content as he took over the controls and began piloting the truck down the mountain. However, as he exited the saddle proper and began descending the eastern slope, it became apparent for the first time just how vertiginous their ascent in the dark must have been, and how precarious was their descent. The truck was so wide and heavy that it seemed disinclined to roll, but all the same Jack panicked as it lost traction, and began sawing the steering controls back and forth. At one point he had the truck pointed backwards at a shallow angle, the huge treads kicking up spumes of scree and fines as they tried in vain to gain some foothold. They continued to slide downhill.

Nestor could tell by Jack’s face that this was not the time for feedback nor criticism, but he so thoroughly lost his patience with their predicament that he yelled anyway, “Goddammit, you gotta turn into the descent, you dumb sumbitch. Stop fightin’ it like that before you roll us over.”

Jack rounded on him and let go the controls, losing all focus on driving. His cool demeanor evaporated and his face contorted into a seething anger that caused Nestor to recoil.

“Don’t you tell me a fuckin’ thing. You think I need truck drivin’ advice from some fuckin’ dust-farmin’ hick?”

Nestor’s hands went up in automatic defense from one so angered. He must have looked pathetic indeed, because Jack’s demeanor seemed to flip in an instant, his face falling into a slight frown. He stared at Nestor and shook his head and turned his attention back to the truck, which in the absence of his stewardship over the intervening few seconds had come around to face downwards. No way was Jack going to let that happen, however, no way was he going to implicitly acknowledge that Nestor had been correct in admonishing him, and he sawed the wheel hard to the left to stop the truck’s automatic correction.

The nose of the behemoth came about obediently at Jack’s touch, but physics felt no fealty towards Jack whatsoever, and the truck continued its downhill slide. Abruptly, the treads found traction on some rocky subsurface, and the contradictory steering inputs combined with this newfound traction caused a jolting screech followed by a series of rapid thumps, and then Jack lost all ability to steer. He eased off the throttle and fought with the controls, but neither action did anything to stop their slide down the mountain, and the nose of the truck once again came about by itself to face down the slope. The big truck began picking up speed as it slid, and would have continued to do so if it hadn’t tipped sickeningly over a ten-meter-tall cliff, coming down hard on its right side and tossing Nestor and Jack, unrestrained both, about inside the cab. Nestor instinctively put up his arms as he fell, trying to brace himself, and he jammed his left arm against some unseen obstacle as he tumbled. The pain was explosive and searing and seemed to emanate from shoulder and elbow and all points in between, and continued unabated by Nestor’s panic or by any other thing real or imagined in all the universe.

The slope below the cliff was perhaps close cousin to cliff itself and as such the truck didn’t stay on its side but now rolled sideways once, twice, before finding a gentler incline and settling back on its treads. The scree and dust on this new, gentler slope was several meters deep, and sinking into this mire, the truck came to a blessed stop.

They picked themselves up inside the cab and were much reduced from their state only seconds prior. Nestor’s arm was barely usable and painful to the touch, and blood kept running into his eyes from some source on his head. He palpated sore spots to find the cut, but could not locate the source of the blood, and so he sufficed by continually wiping at his brow with the back of his hand. Jack’s leg could bear no weight and his face looked as though he had lost a fight, being cut in multiple places and with two black eyes and a crooked nose.

Nestor went to find a first aid kit, and Jack sat at the controls in a wounded attempt at assessing what their damage was. He’d accept no aid from Nestor, and so the boy tended to his own wounds while Jack flipped through screens on the console and jockeyed at different controls and blinked his bleary, swollen eyes at what he saw. The truck would not move, though the engine seemed to work just fine. Jack, with a grimace upon his face, attempted to rise.

“Gotta be the treads. I’ll go check.”

Nestor tossed him the first aid kit and rose instead, “Fix yourself up. I’ll go take a look at the treads.”

“What you know about tread repair? You gonna tell me yer a long-lost truck mechanic now?”

Nestor looked at him for a moment and decided not to take the bait, “I ain’t no mechanic, but I did spend my entire childhood fixin’ things. And you ain’t gonna fix nothin’ if you don’t attend to that leg.”

The boy must have spoken with enough confidence to dissuade Jack from further inquiries, as he turned from Nestor and opened the kit and then said over his shoulder, “Fine then, but stay on the coms the whole time, and tell me everthing you see.”

Outside, Nestor found the truck buried to the axles. After exhuming enough tread to see what damage there may be, Nestor found a left track that was torn and bent sharply up and several dished out wheels on both sides, collapsed from the lateral forces during their roll down the slope. Luckily, the platform truck was well-equipped with tools, including a quite nice plasma torch, and so he set to work torch-welding the tread back into place and cutting loose the bent wheels. It was well into the night before he had finished, working stoically while Jack lounged inside and offered blind, unsolicited advice on his actions, and against his better impulses, Nestor felt quite at home. Once his repairs were in place, they resumed their track down the slope, at much reduced speed and with frequent stops to go outside to inspect the treads.

They spent the following days hiding and lost in those rugged mountains, playing a game of cat and mouse where the existence of either cat or mouse was speculative to the other. Jack used the sun and the stars to keep them headed east; he claimed going north would take them into Argyre, south to the plains, and west back to Charis, so east was their only option. They’d seen copters in the distance several times, each time under the cover of darkness, but the copters never came near and there was no other sign of man. They descended out of the mountains into a broad deep canyon, and following this canyon, found it emptied into a crater which itself partially overlaid another crater, which led into a third and final crater, the three sister craters relics of an ancient bombardment, perhaps a single larger meteor that broke into three on descent, or perhaps three coincidental strikes billions of years apart. They could not tell.

The travellers climbed out of the final crater to find a level plain, featureless in the predawn gloom but for the rock outcroppings of distant crater rims, and scattered with every size of boulder stretching out to the horizon in all directions. Nestor turned the truck west, and before long the sun rose at their backs, casting the platform truck’s shadow far before them across the playa. As they drove, that shadow slowly shortened, and as it disappeared entirely, they came to a long undulating beachhead of dunes running north-south, the entire mass of sand shifting in unison as if directed by some higher force, millions of tons of grit and dust hissing over the surface in a geographically-scaled sine wave.

Nestor drove to the beachhead and climbed that moving surface, crabbing the big truck up the shifting face of sand, the treads creaking and squealing in strain, and soon the truck crested on the merits of its momentum and naught else. On the other side of the beachhead they found an ocean of similar shifting dunes, some easily a thousand meters tall, with no end in sight. Nestor spent some time staring at them all moving out there and he wondered what to do now.

“I ain’t drivin’ through that,” Nestor said, visions of his marooned range truck back in the Valley welling up before him, “we’ll get lost in there an’ never find our way out. Plus this truck cain’t manage deep sand in the state it’s in, anyway.”

Jack shrugged from his position perched woundedly upon the passenger seat, “Well, guess we ought to find some other way then.”

They backtracked using the dune shallows and turned south, skirting the shores of the dusty ocean, driving for days more through a landscape that seemed to change little as they travelled, just the dunes to the west and the yawning flat boulder fields to the east, and the stretched shadow of the voyagers in their truck as companion.

*****

He watched the blizzard roiling over the plains towards them and mused that it looked like the strangest dust storm he’d ever seen. Rather than a towering wall of dust, capped by a voluminous and amorphous ceiling of orange and brown clouds, and arced throughout by tendrils of lighting, this storm was a stratospherically-looming gray cloud front, trailing broad white curtains behind, as if it were tugging them along, cautious not to jerk too hard and pull those curtains loose from their fragile moorings. The sunset cast beams of purple through openings in the curtains and refracted through the thicker veils to make them glow in motes that danced.

Nestor drove the truck into one of those curtains and found himself inundated by carbon dioxide snow. He had seen carbon snow before, but the snow on the high plains back home was rare and special, a fine-grained stuff that filtered down gently from a clear sky with rays of sunlight glittering through it and filled their drab amber world with crystals and rainbows. The snowflakes of this blizzard were different, large dense cuboidal clumps of dull white blown sideways across his path and obscuring the windows on the windward side of the truck with miniature avalanches.

It wasn’t long before drifts formed, which rose to the bottom of the huge platform truck and exploded in blooms of white when the truck hit them. Visibility dropped to nothing, which mattered little as it was already pitch dark, the wind, encompassing blanket of carbon snow, and the travelers in their ill-begotten transport the only things verifiable as existing anywhere. Nestor kept the truck bouncing forward, the treads hitting and mounting and dismounting myriad obstacles entombed in the shifting, blowing snow. The lights shone through the deluge of crystals and created a streaking tunnel shaped around their direction of travel, somehow making visibility worse, creating the impression of pushing through a soft cream blanket that malformed around them, clinging and dragging, refusing to allow them to see past it or through it. Nestor gave up on the lights and turned them off and slowed even further and drove on by feel alone.

Jack came up from where he’d been sleeping in the passenger area and leaned over Nestor’s shoulder and peered ahead to see something that Nestor couldn’t.

“Ain’t never seen it snow like this.”

“Been at it for a while. You shoulda seen it blowin’ in across the plains at sundown.”

“Times like this I wish we had a GPS.”

Nestor shook his head and said nothing in reply.

“You wanna switch out?”

“Want to stop and wait it out. It’s gotta blow over.”

“We cain’t stop here. They could still be behind us, for one. And for two, where we goin’, they’s gonna be a lot of snow and a lot of dark too. So consider this practice.”

Jack smiled a wolfish grin at Nestor, who looked at him for a moment with blank eyes, shook his head again, and returned to his task.

“Well, let me know when you wanna switch out. I ain’t seen you sleep in…in a while, you can always go back and take a nap while I take over.”

“Don’t want to switch out and don’t want to sleep,” Nestor heard himself say, while knowing deep down that neither statement was the truth. He was desperately tired and his head ached from the concentration he was putting into driving, but he didn’t want to see the bloodstains in the passenger area and didn’t want to think about anything other than keeping the truck moving vaguely in the direction-he-believed-to-be south. He definitely didn’t want what passed for sleep nowadays.

He drove all night in the indefatigable snow and the drifts, navigating by intuition and by accident and by little else. The snow kept packing into the treads and compacted there into ice and that ice covered over drive sprockets and return rollers, making the treads useless and bringing them to a stop. Thus waylaid, Nestor would descend from the airlock wearing one of the dead men’s envirosuits, his own suit’s backpack standing no prospect of combating this cold, and emerge into the blinding storm bloated and awkward as a mythical snow beast. He’d beat upon the ice with prybars, and if the wind allowed he’d wield the truck’s plasma torch upon the more stubborn ice, and free the truck. He did this so many times that his entire body ached and his hurt arm hung useless and spent and heavy from his shoulder.

At last the snow stopped falling from above, but the winds did not cease in the least and blew the fallen snow laterally, somehow becoming even more visibility-obscuring than before, and everything, the ground, the air, the windows, all became consumed in opaque white. When the sun rose mid-morning, the winds scoured away the remaining clouds and then themselves died, and in that nascent tranquility the world around them dazzled. All was white; boulders were vague lumps, gullies and ditches had become minor depressions, and the distant serrated ridges of craters had transformed into gleaming teeth within the open maws of geologic abominable underground snow monsters waiting for some small foolish creature to venture near.

They drove on blind from the glare. Nestor dug around in the side pockets of the cab looking for some sort of shades, but found nothing. He stopped the truck and looked through all the compartments and toolboxes, but still found little that could help him. Blinking his watery, tired eyes in their snowblindness, Nestor cut out the restraining belt from one of the jump seats, held the belt up to his face to measure, and then cut a slit for each eye. He tied the belt around his head and peered into the glare, and found his invention to work quite well. It worked so well, in fact, that Jack demanded one for himself, which Nestor fashioned from the other jump seat belt. So bandanaed, they drove on as strange, dirty, and reeking primitives, persevering on their arcane quest against all odds and all barriers.

As the sun rose towards its apogee, the carbon snow around them began steaming, and then sublimated back into the atmosphere whence it had precipitated. Their world became engulfed in fog and roils of it poured down every incline, the occasional frigid gasp of a breeze snatching a wisp and spinning it around into a ghostly dancer that dissipated and reformed and dissipated and reformed. Again, Nestor navigated by intuition alone, and he felt lucky as the blanket of snow disappeared, for at least he could now see the obstacles as he hit them.

The sun tumbled back towards the horizon in mid-afternoon, and as the surrounding land ceased steaming for the day, the black tarmac of the hidden road had still more steam left to give, having spent the meager daylight hours soaking up excess heat from the sun. So, in a world growing gradually more clear by the moment, it was easy to make out the river of fog in the distance, a strange ephemeral wall snaking through the plains before them. The travelers had found their route to the Great Seed Bank.

*****

They travelled for days upon the road before it disappeared. It seemed impossible, but the tarmac ceased in a near-perfect line, as if the road builders had stopped in their tracks here, perhaps after hitting some great invisible wall. The darkness had permanently enveloped them and Nestor wondered under his breath if he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and had blindly turned off onto an unfinished spur, but he knew deep down that this wasn’t possible, and the road had been the road, and nothing had ever branched off it. It was simply gone. He reported as much back over his shoulder to Jack, who had been sleeping more and more since their adventure through the blizzard. Jack came forward and looked through the front windows. “Looks like someone jes decided to stop makin’ a road right there,” he said, his tone overflowing with amusement.

Nestor felt too tired to find much humor in their situation, “So what do we do now? How we gonna find the Seed Bank in the dark without a map or even a road to follow?”

Jack looked out the window quietly for a moment, his face expressionless, “We can still use the stars to find south, and that’s all we need anyways. Seed Bank’s at the South Pole. I reckon at this point we jes keep drivin’ south until we run out of south to drive.” He smiled at his cleverness, looking at Nestor to see if he got the joke. Nestor deadpanned back.

“But I don’t understand. I saw a road comin’ in to the Seed Bank complex on that schematic. There ain’t no road. So what road was in that drawin’?”

Jack shrugged, “Don’t believe everthing you see in pictures, I guess.”

“But that ain’t no answer. You sayin’ the road I saw was some sort of lie?”

“Look, I don’t know how old that schematic was, nor do I know why Nils let you see it, nor do I know why you put so much stock in it. A contact of ours jes found it in an old archive. You think a terrorist cell has access to current satellite imagery?” Jack chuckled in disbelief, shrugging again as he spoke.

“So you tellin’ me there once was a road, and that’s what I saw in the image? But then, where did it go? The road’s been fine all the way up to this point.”

“I don’t know what happened to the damn road any better than you do. It ain’t here, and us speculatin’ on its whereabouts is about the most asinine thing I can think to do in our current situation. Now, do you think you can drive this truck south, or do I need to take over?”

“But I jes don’t get it,” Nestor persisted, “You tellin’ me you all planned this whole mission jes based on the first image you found of yer target? You didn’t do no other research than that?”

Jack glared at him, and his face reddened. “Oh, now you’d like to criticize our mission planning, eh? You, a kid from nowhere who goes around peddlin’ some half-cocked, bullshit pilot story. I don’t think Linh or myself or anyone needs plannin’ feedback from some pathologically-lyin’ juvenile delinquent.”

Nestor felt shame bubbling up as Jack spoke and felt it curdling into anger. His vision smeared as his eyes filled with tears and he blinked them back and looked away from Jack, staring out the windows at the whorl of stars above shining crystal bright in the ceaseless frigid night.

“Jes nevermind,” he choked out, aware of the suppressed sob coming through in his voice all the same, “I’ll jes drive it south.”

Jack looked at him with a merciless, hateful stare for several moments. Finally, he gave up and turned from Nestor. “Don’t wake me again unless it’s actually important,” he said dully over his shoulder as he limped to the makeshift hammock he’d set up back in the passenger compartment.

Nestor did as instructed and kept the truck headed due south. It wasn’t long before the frost-covered rock, which had been their roadside companion for so long, was replaced by glacial carbon ice, dull white in the lights, starting off just a thin skein but thickening to several meters deep before they’d driven long at all. It was so frigid that the surface was not slick in the least and the treads bit into the hard carbon ice and groaned and squealed in the cold.

He crawled along, and blinked and rubbed his red-rimmed eyes and fought a desperate battle with the sleep that wanted to overcome him, and was not helped in his efforts by the featureless quality of the ice, for all that could be seen in any direction was a formless void rendered in monochrome shades, like a horizon drawn on an unfinished painting. He’d nearly dozed off when the truck tilted violently forward. The treads screeched under this new strain and his stomach felt the plummet before his tired eyes had processed that they were dropping down a near-vertical decline.

Luckily the fall was brief, but the truck slammed down at force on the front plow, bending it up and in with a thunderous crash. The truck then settled back, the treads at the rear coming to rest against the glacier wall. They were stuck in this position until Nestor gave the treads their all, and with them spinning and screeching and the engine roaring, he could sufficiently bend the plow up and out of the way, and the back of the truck came crashing down.

Jack had been tossed free of his hammock and came forward to demand that Nestor let him drive. Nestor said nothing in response, but sullenly moved over to the passenger seat and huddled up there with his eyes closed. It was not long before Jack began screaming a stream of swears. The truck would not respond to any of his inputs. Without saying a word to Nestor, he limped back to the airlock. Nestor sat hugging his knees to his chest in the passenger seat until he heard Jack exit the airlock, and sitting there in the silence, decided that he didn’t want to sleep anyway, and so he followed Jack outside.

Out in the frigid dark, they found that several more wheels had bent in their fall and were restricting the treads. Nestor cut these wheels loose and then they stood looking at the scanty few that remained.

Jack insisted over the coms, “We jes gonna have to take’er slow from here on. But it’ll make it. I’m sure of it. We makin’ history and ever step has led us to here. It cain’t have all been for nothin’.”

Nestor glanced over at him, unsure of Jack’s unaccounted-for optimistic tone, “These last wheels are gonna wear fast. And ever one of them is at least a little damaged. It’s only a matter of time before they fail, and then once that happens, we done. This truck’ll not move again.”

Jack limped over to the airlock, “We close. It’ll make it the rest of the way. C’mon, let’s get goin’.”

At the controls again, Jack found that they’d fallen into a sort of shallow depression, and coming to the opposite wall, learned that the truck in its present state could in no way climb up out of that place. He turned the truck and followed the wall, looking for egress, and found it in a sort of gully which they followed into another shallower depression, and in this one they found an incline that the big truck trudged up to the surface.

Stretched out around them in the dark as they left the depression was an entire landscape pockmarked with similar pits. Jack picked his way between those massive potholes, trying to keep the truck headed south, following a slow and circuitous course through that impossible icy world, enclosed in the never-ending night of polar winter. Their winding course made the truck rock back and forth in its track, and it was in this state that Nestor fell into a dreamless sleep.

*****

The wind tugged ceaselessly at Nestor and for a moment he imagined himself in a child’s fantasy, one in which the wind could pick him up and lift him above this frozen world and whip him over the South Pole before twisting, turning there and sling-shotting him away from the ice and out of the dark and free from all of this and it wouldn’t matter at all where he landed then because it would be so far away from here that he could never return. He sighed and shook his head in the helmet and looked at the wreckage that remained of the last wheels on the left side of the truck. There were exactly two good wheels remaining on this entire truck, both on the other side, not enough to keep going. The tread was also horribly ruined, a ragged scarf of metal all that remained. Nestor’s former repair had been quite good, in retrospect, but they had driven an incredible distance since then and in the worst possible conditions. It was those conditions that he suspected had taken the last three wheels on this side. He considered the cold as the primary culprit, for all the metal on the outside of the truck seemed to have become quite brittle in these frigid temperatures. The wheels had simply shattered.

The cold was also a problem in that the suit heater within his purloined envirosuit could not keep up. Coming outside for these repairs always left him shivering, and it was taking longer and longer for him to warm back up once inside. He wondered what it was going to be like to walk in this suit and he wondered where the nearest civilization could be from this wilderness and he knew that walking to wherever that place might lie would be necessary, as this truck was officially done moving, and could conceivably be considered a new permanent landscape feature, a landmark that future travelers would use to know when they’d ventured too far south. Those successive voyagers would amongst themselves tell the story of the two young terrorists who once stole a platform truck to bomb the Great Seed Bank and failed, a cautionary tale of hubris and ineptitude, and they would turn back here for no sane person would continue on from this point, no matter what may lie beyond.

“It’s shattered completely?” Jack asked over the coms. He didn’t sound as angry as Nestor had expected. Nestor hated these times more than when Jack was outright angry. It was the suspense. He hated not knowing what Jack would do next.

“Yep. Broke into four…wait, no five, actually, five parts. I don’t think torch-weldin’ five pieces back together is gonna hold at all. This truck is done, Jack.”

He left it at that, because he didn’t want to say what came next and hoped that Jack would have some better idea. Something that didn’t require them to walk through this murderous cold and dark.

“Ok, go on and get the box the bomb’s in opened on up. I’ll use the crane to lift it out and put it on the ground, then I’ll be out. Be thinkin’ about how to get that armor plating off it.”

Nestor didn’t move, “The bomb? What are we doin’ with the bomb, Jack? We cain’t take a bomb back to town with us.”

“Town? We ain’t never goin’ back to no town, Nestor. We takin’ the bomb with us to the Seed Bank, same as we always was. I woulda thought that was pretty obvious. But we don’t need that armor plating. It was for the impact, originally, to keep the bomb from breakin’ into a billon pieces ‘fore it could properly explode. But we don’t need that extra weight, not now.”

“You want to keep on to the Seed Bank?” Nestor asked with trepidation.

“We don’t have no choice but to get to the Seed Bank. We still have a mission to complete, and still have history to make, and that didn’t change when you wrecked the shuttle, and it didn’t change when you wrecked the truck, and it ain’t changed now that we got to walk the rest of the way, neither. Ever decision we have made has put us here and we ain’t got no choice but to go on.”

“We can choose somethin’ different, Jack. Maybe if we walked back a ways we might could find another truck to steal, and come back for the bomb in that. Or hell maybe we could jes leave the bomb behind and forget this mission. Have you thought that maybe we ain’t meant to complete it, and that’s why we been havin’ so much trouble?”

“If we wasn’t meant to complete the mission, we wouldn’t have made it this far. But if you don’t want to be part of this no more, after all we done, all we been through, then fine. Go on, walk out into that dark alone and see how long you last before you’re dead. Because we caught up in a tempest of destiny Nestor. It’s pushin’ us along to our destination, and if we try to force our way some other direction it’ll tear us up, sure as anything. And if you walk away now, I want you to remember that as you’re freezin’ to death out there.”

Nestor stood and stared through the dark at the lights of the truck and imagined Jack emerging from that truck alone and crippled to struggle against the bomb here in the frigid wind and he imagined himself walking forsaken and lost through the carbon ice and he could stomach neither image.

“But how we gonna take the bomb anywheres, Jack? It ain’t like we can jes pick it up and carry it, especially in the state we in right now.”

“We gonna have to figure out the how. I’m thinkin’ some sort of sled that we can pull with straps. We’ll need to see what works. Now, would you kindly get over to open up that box?”

Nestor heard the annoyance rising in Jack’s voice and decided not to argue any longer. He idly hoped, as he undid the box, that once Jack got out in this cold, he might change his mind. Jack hadn’t been out of the truck in days. He did not know what it was like out here.

Nestor had the entire front armor plate disassembled by the time Jack limped out to him with his helmet visor visibly frozen over at the edges, but he mentioned nothing about the cold or the dark or his injury, moving without pause over to the bomb to inspect Nestor’s work. The armor plate had come apart into a nose cone and four sides, which Nestor had scattered around the tundra, and Jack found one of the side pieces and held it up to the bomb, “Reattach this side to it. I’ll go get some straps and be back.”

Nestor did so and Jack returned at length dragging a strap from his shoulder and holding a large drill with a diamond bit and with considerable effort he drilled a hole in the plate and ran a bolt through this hole and attached both ends of the strap to the bolt, and using Nestor to do most of the pushing, rolled the bomb over to rest on this makeshift sled and pulled the straps taught and leaned against them, testing to be sure the straps would hold. Satisfied with their craftsmanship, he ordered Nestor back inside to retrieve one of the dead crew member’s packs, water, nutrient paste tubes, batteries, and the emergency survival tent.

By the time Nestor had gathered everything and returned outside, Jack had taken two of the large prybars from the truck and had torch-welded them together into a very serviceable crutch. He assumed position with the straps about his waist and the crutch draped awkwardly forward in front of them. He beckoned Nestor to stand next to him, and together like long-extinct draft animals that they only knew from pictures in storybooks they pulled the bomb forward, that parcel begrudging each of their steps over the sheet of frozen carbon ice and they pulled in defiance of this and the wind and the dark all in equal measure.

They pulled the bomb this way, slipping and falling on the ice, feet scrabbling for purchase, the ever-present weight behind them leaning perpetually in opposition to their efforts, until they both collapsed in exhaustion in the traces. They sat side-by-side in the wind and the carbon snow until Nestor rose like a frozen being coming unstuck to do some awful bidding. All he did was resume pulling alone. The bomb inched forward as Nestor’s thighs and arms and stomach and back all burned and vied for which was in the most pain and still yet Nestor pulled. Jack took up position behind the bomb and pushed, even though he moved quite pitifully, and notwithstanding his inability to place his one foot upon the ground at all. He leaned against the thing and shoved using a combination of his one good leg and the crutch, and could thus help Nestor further the bomb’s progress.

Their numb extremities began failing and then gave, and they slumped together on the leeward side of the bomb and felt warmer to be out of the wind. Jack suggested setting up the survival tent here, and so Nestor set it up and they both climbed inside and felt even warmer yet and both were asleep before long at all.

Nestor dreamt he was standing in the opening of a tall cave, bounded on all edges of the cavern by great square blocks that were spaced evenly from one another. He was looking from the cave’s opening to a grand green parkland spread like a carpet all the way to a horizon obscured by a white-capped mountain range. A thunderhead loomed above those mountains, an anvil in the sky arcing lighting down to the ground below it and the lightning formed many luminous temporary appendages that reached out to pull the cloud mass along and it crawled over the verdant fields and brought with it a deep gray veil that obscured all which the storm bestrode.

He was aware of someone coming up to stand at his side and he turned to see his father standing there surveying all in silence alongside him.

“Someday this will all be yours, son,” his father said with a smile that, as Nestor watched, extended out to his ears and trickled rivulets of blood down his cheeks. Nestor screamed in his dream and backed away from his father. The cave ceiling boomed above his head, and he looked up to see one of the enormous boulders fall from its position at the top of the opening to come crashing to his feet. Nestor jumped back and stared at it lying there in front of him and he realized the rock looked very much like a tooth, broken free from its root up in the old cave’s mouth. He turned and he looked at the rest and became aware how they formed lines extending back into the cave, and the floor beneath him writhed in a lingual motion and then from the back of the cave blood gurgled up and overflowed and poured towards him.

He turned and ran to the lips of the giant’s mouth and upon turning back, saw his father inundated by the blood already and Louis stared down at it as it rose above his ankles to his knees. Louis looked up at Nestor and screamed, “Nestor, run!” the same way he always did in Nestor’s memories of his death, but had not done in real life, and Nestor chose in this dream to not run but to save his father.

He splashed towards his father through the rising tide of blood and he reached out and grabbed his father’s hand, but Louis would not budge. He was looking down again and Nestor looked with him, but only saw the blood at his thighs and making for his waist.

“They got me trapped, son,” his father said to him, pointing down at his feet.

Nestor could see nothing through the crimson tide and so knelt down and in kneeling brought it sloshing up to his shoulders and about his neck and the blood was trying very hard to splash into a mouth which he kept closed so tightly he worried he might bite through his lips entirely, and he reached to feel down his father’s legs, his hands touching thick ropes wound about Louis’s feet that his fingers could barely enwrap. Nestor grabbed a rope in each fist and they came away quite freely and he hefted himself up out of the blood. As Nestor stood, he lifted the ropes up out of the blood to see veiny yellow intestines in his hands. He screamed again and felt every atom in his body vibrate with that same frequency and pain and outrage and as he screamed his eyes traced those long loose guts back to his father’s belly and from the gaping wound there, he could see the source of the blood engulfing them both. His eyes wandered up his father’s body and when they found his father’s face it was no face at all but nothing, null, a mask that distorted and bent and this was somehow the most terrible thing of all to him and it was in this horror that Nestor awoke.

He awoke to find Jack already awake and gazing intently at him. Jack said nothing to him to explain his queer look and, lacking any proper accounting of the passage of time in this permanent dark, they agreed to call it the next day and rose to their task. For what matter is a proper accounting of time when you are at the end of everything?

This day was more of the same, and they settled into a rhythm of pulling and resting that worked to keep the bomb moving along. They ended the day exhausted, yet agreeing that they’d made good progress, though neither man could have defined their progress if asked. Fortunately neither inquired this of the other. Nestor once again set up the tent, and inside they passed out and they awoke after further hours unaccounted for to find themselves buried in snow.

The snow that they dug themselves and their tent out of differed from the carbon snow covering the rest of this Antarctic world. This new snow compacted together much easier and had a translucence to it that glittered and shone in their lights. Jack identified it as water snow, and Nestor held it up to examine, deciding it looked quite like water ice after exiting the crushers in the melter huts back home.

Nestor went and kicked down a path to get them started and they resumed pulling the sled through the half-meter-deep water snow, struggling against this heavier and more binding mire, their helmet visors fogging up and the fog freezing in contact with the visors until they peered out at the world through the few small frost-free holes that remained.

They rested and slept and resumed pulling and rested and slept and pulled again. How many actual days this constituted neither knew or cared. Jack’s leg worsened until he was all but useless in matters of physical labor, and Nestor’s arm hung at his side, numb and dead from the cold, but still they pushed on, the pain and disability simply additional problems atop a pile of identical others that were all being summarily ignored. The stars rotated above them and they could at any point look back to see their drag marks stretching into the darkness and in these two things they assured themselves that they were indeed moving, and this gave them enough spirit to continue, if only just.

Their supplies ran thin and then ran out, and still they pulled. Their lips cracked in dehydration and their empty stomachs growled louder and louder until those growls subsided to cramps and the cramps continued until they too lost the battle against the men’s will and so submerged into a dull, empty numbness. Their heads pounded and then that stopped too, and they decided amongst themselves not to sleep again, agreeing that sleep was a waste of time, which was their only remaining resource and itself in quite short supply indeed.

So it was that neither man had slept in far too long when their lights caught the artificial hulk of a building poking up out of the ice field ahead of them, and in their sleep-deprived state they convinced themselves independently that they didn’t see the things that they were seeing. They nearly walked past the buildings entirely before Jack stated unprompted that the architecture towering above them on all sides was in fact the Great Seed Bank and not a hallucination born of exhaustion. It was here that they finally collapsed, sitting back-to-back and sore and stinking so much it almost wasn’t worth breathing for every breath brought more of their own stench into their mouths and noses, and they stared up at a goal now reached that had seemed entirely hypothetical until just that moment.

*****

After sitting for a while, just long enough that Nestor began to doze off, Jack with great effort lifted himself vertical again and announced that it was time.

“Time for what?” Nestor asked, knowing exactly what Jack had meant.

“You know what I’m talkin’ about,” Jack said with exhaustion, leaning upon the bomb for support, “it’s time that we met our destiny. We need to trigger the bomb. Now get on up here and help me.”

Nestor stood with some effort and stared at the cargo they’d been dragging. In truth, he did not know how a nuclear bomb worked, and all the wires and parts before him were a complete mystery.

“How do we trigger it?” he asked, genuinely curious if Jack knew the answer to that question. It was one he hadn’t taken the time to ponder, and now, as he stared at the complexity of parts assembled before him, it seemed unanswerable.

It turned out that Jack knew something about bombs. “There’s a number of safeties we’ll need to disable, and then it should jes be as simple as connectin’ a couple wires,” Jack said, already taking off the top panel of the bomb.

“So there ain’t no way to detonate it from a safe distance?”

“You mean with a remote or somethin’?” Jack chuckled derisively, “Nah. It was originally set to trigger when the accelerometer in here sensed it impactin’ the ground with sufficient force. That’s one of the safeties we gotta take out, in fact.”

“We cain’t set a timer or somethin’? Maybe run away while it counts down?”

“Ain’t possible to run a safe distance away from a nuclear bomb, Nestor. Not like I can run anywheres,” Jack said with exasperation, not looking up from his efforts inside the bomb.

“But I remember there were circles in that schematic…one of ‘em had to be for the safe distance from the blast…”

“That goddamn schematic again. I swear if I hear you mention it one more time, I’ll kill you first, before settin’ off this bomb. No circle on no old drawin’ matters now that we here. We ain’t gonna make it past this, Nestor. This here’s our ultimate act, and it’s one everone everwhere will remember for all time. You should feel lucky to die here, doin’ this. Makin’ history.”

“But I don’t know that I want to die, Jack. I didn’t ever want to commit suicide, and now that we’re here I still don’t. I’m colder than I ever been, my body is jes wrecked, and I got no idea what to do if I keep livin’. But I do know I don’t wanna die.”

Jack didn’t respond, and it was not clear to Nestor that he’d even heard as he dug through the innards of the weapon before them. Nestor could make no sense of what Jack was doing and found he did not even like looking at the bomb, and so he occupied himself by examining the nearest tower to them, a windowless black rectangle that towered over the ice field by several hundred meters. It seemed to sway in the wind. He wondered who was inside that building, and he wondered if he started walking towards it, whoever was within might venture out and perhaps stop him. Stop them.

He turned to gape at the other five buildings, all arranged in the semicircle he remembered from the schematic. The building they were by was at the apex of the semicircle and was supposed to be at the terminus of the conjectural road. Whether said road was entirely covered by ice or whether it existed at all was impossible to know, as Nestor could make out neither shape nor hint of it. The other buildings hulking in the gloom were smaller and boxier than this one, and yet…there was something off here, something Nestor couldn’t quite put his finger on.

After looking around for a few moments, Nestor decided that there was no one here. No maintenance workers, no security guards, no one at all checked on the two bizarre strangers dragging a device through the ice into their front yard. No alarm had sounded. For all they knew, the nearest human was thousands of kilometers away. Nestor thought about this extemporaneously while Jack worked at their destruction over his shoulder, and he concluded that this was all wrong. It was more than the buildings being abandoned. They seemed wrong, but at this distance the light from his hand torch couldn’t illuminate any of them, and so they were just looming shadows. He wanted a better look.

Jack had pulled some sort of module from the bomb trailing wires and tossed it unceremoniously into the snow. “Hey, how ‘bout we take a look inside one of these buildin’s before we do that?” Nestor tried, keeping his voice as positive-sounding as he could muster.

“You wanna look in the buildin’s? Why? All’s in them are cell cultures. There ain’t nothin’ interestin’ to see in any of ‘em,” Jack replied, not tarrying in the least from digging around inside the bomb.

“Well, how do you know it ain’t interestin’? You ever been inside a seed bank before? Besides, why ain’t there anyone here? Why ain’t we being stopped? Don’t you want to know?” Nestor asked diplomatically.

Jack looked up at him, “You want to go look, go on ahead. Ain’t like yer helpin’ me right now, anyway. But this bomb is goin’ off either way. I ain’t waitin’ on you to come back here before I trigger it. It must go off. You understand me?”

Nestor nodded, not sure if he truly did any longer.

Jack seemed unsatisfied with the nod, persisting, “And yer right. We ain’t bein’ stopped right now. Wherever they are, it ain’t here and we need to take advantage of that fact before they decide to show on up.”

Nestor shined his light up and looked at Jack, seeing him for the first time since they’d left the truck. His compatriot and adversary here on the tundra was haggard, with a patchy, greasy, unkempt beard, his eyes sunken to steaming red pits set in pale sallow skin, and mouth frozen in a rictus grin of constant searing femoral pain. In the referred light from Nestor’s torch he looked monstrous, a demon born of the ice and of the wind, come to destroy the hopes and dreams of all men, sent to encourage the straggling remainders of a once-proud race to defile themselves upon the altar of self-interest, of immediacy and of ignorance, forgoing all futures and all pasts, giving all to trade the hell of life on this planet for one eternal. Hoping the setting of hell eternal would be some better place. For Satan’s hell might have air you could breathe and water you could drink and both for free. That hell might have slightly less dust in it. It might even be warm.

“Why don’t you come on with me, Jack? Bomb ain’t goin’ nowhere, and we come all this way. You ain’t even a little bit curious to see what this was all about? What we actually destroyin’ here? Plus, they ain’t nobody here and I know you want to know why, jes as bad as I do.”

Jack looked at him with wild eyes, opening and closing his mouth as if he was trying to form words, but catching and stopping himself from doing so. His eyes met Nestor’s, and they stared at one another and in that connection Jack seemed to deflate, his shoulders slumping a bit and his mouth closing, his eyes looking perhaps slightly less wild. The evil running out of him.

“Alright, fine. I’ll go in this one,” he pointed at the tall building behind Nestor, “but that’s it. I ain’t goin’ on no damn tour of this place. And if it turns out we cain’t even get in, which is likely, then we comin’ right back here and you are gonna help me disable the other safeties on this bomb, alright?”

Nestor nodded his agreement and turned to walk over to the building. Jack limped behind on his makeshift crutch and after quite some time they arrived at the entrance. Nestor shined his torch all around what should have been the entrance airlock, and noted that it looked very much like an interior door, not an airlock door, for it was hinged, and sat flush with the wall, and contained within it a normal-looking doorknob.

“This seem much like an airlock to you?” he said over his coms to Jack.

Jack limped up to stand by his side and his own torch shone upon the strange door, “Not really, no. Why would you have a knob on an airlock? They jes let folk come and go from their pressurized environment?”

Nestor shook his head, “It’s hinged, Jack. How do you air seal a hinged door?”

Nestor reached out experimentally to turn the handle and found it moved easily in his hand. He turned it all the way and pulled gently on the door and it swung out. He turned to look at Jack, who met his gaze and slowly shook his head in amazement. Nestor stepped through the now-open door into a foyer that extended far above him. A platform occupied the opposite side of the room with a skeleton frame of a vast desk draped over it and the missing pieces necessary for completion of said parapet scattered all around. It gave the impression that the workers building the desk had taken a break, perhaps headed off for a long lunch, and would be back soon to finish their job.

Jack limped over and lifted a few pieces up to examine them. Everything still looked new, still wrapped in the plastic it had been shipped in. He looked over his shoulder at Nestor, who was shining his torch straight up into the complicated maze of girders and beams occupying the space above. Nestor followed one girder with his light over to the wall and found in doing so he could count the places where girders met the wall as “floors”. He counted up to fifteen before he could no longer make them out. Jack’s torch joined Nestor’s in shining upon the construction above them.

“Don’t look like it’s finished, does it?” Jack said, shining his torch all about the girders.

“Looks like they still buildin’ it,” Nestor confirmed, looking all around the foyer with his light. He found another door off to the side and went over to try it. It opened into an immense room that extended all the way to the exterior walls and was cut into sections by the metal posts and studs of walls framed out but never finished. Construction equipment of all manner lay scattered about the floor with writing on the tools that neither man could read, and all of it looking scarcely used, waiting for the crew to return and use their sundries. Jack walked into this room behind him and shined his light up through all the unfinished floors above them.

“I don’t understand,” he said, “why haven’t they finished this tower’?”

Nestor looked over at him and felt the same confusion, “Let’s go to one of them other buildin’s. Maybe we’ll figure somethin’ out by lookin’ at it.”

The building immediately beside the tall one had a very similar external door, but this door was set inside a partially-constructed external structure resembling a large tube that ran perpendicular to the entrance.

“Looks like this is how they get between the buildin’s,” Nestor said as they approached, shining his light on the tube, “that must be why that one didn’t have proper airlocks. I bet you they’s an airlock on the far end of this tube.”

“None of this looks completed,” Jack replied, limping over from behind, “or maybe it’s jes all decayed to this point?”

Nestor opened the door into this building and found an interior so filled with snow and ice that he could not walk inside. He could lean in and so he did, shining his light up to find there was no roof and the building was four walls and nothing else. He could see no sign that any roof had ever been attached to the walls and one of those walls did not itself look finished.

Jack leaned in next to him and seeing those same things, said with a tinge of what Nestor decided must be awe in his voice, “This buildin’ ain’t finished neither.” He turned and limped away, heading to the next in the row. Nestor followed beside him and noticed that Jack was moving much quicker now, with greater purpose.

They arrived at the third building and found this one had no door and seemed badly decayed. Nestor guessed the exterior walls had never been finished, and they were looking at the rusted remains of the building’s frame. Jack paused at this crumbling shell long enough to notice its decrepit state and then limped across the campus to the other arm of the semicircle.

Nestor caught him up, and soon they were standing in front of the building opposite. This fourth building looked to be complete in all ways, including the tube out front, which as Nestor had guessed, terminated at the very tip of the semicircle’s arm into an obvious airlock. The airlock would not open and so they followed the tube around to the building next door, where that corridor was still under construction. They entered there and walked back around to the fourth building and looked around in awe as they passed through a hallway encased in glass with once-stylish unpowered lights every few meters, hidden to not obscure your views of the outside, the whole thing filled with ice and covered in ice and in all ways crumbling.

Inside the completed fourth building, they saw a vision of what the foyer in the first building was supposed to be, with a high desk acting as a station for the building’s guards and the same indecipherable writing on all the walls. The wall behind the desk was covered in a huge and beautiful aerial-perspective painting of the complex itself, depicted ice-free but sitting within a cove of glacial walls, the central area encircled by the airlock tubes filled with a green parkland that seemed especially incongruous given the cold dark icy reality waiting for them just outside the doors. There was no power in this building, and the door behind the security desk seemed to use some sort of lock that would require power to disengage, and they could not pass it.

They found the same thing in the building next door and at that point, it was a foregone conclusion that they would also try the sixth and final building. This one was finished as well, but walking in, they found a completely unique design possessing no foyer but instead opening into a warehouse floor which was filled with row upon row of empty shelves. They paced through the aisles, looking for anything in this obvious storage area, but they found naught. At the back of this room there was a line of methalox generators, all unused for so long they were seized and impossible to turn over even with Nestor and Jack’s combined efforts about their respective crankshafts.

“What you think?” Nestor inquired, stepping back from the genny they’d been pulling on and looking around the empty storage room.

“I think no one’s been in here in a long time. I think that’s because it was never completed. And I think that even if there was at some point seed cultures kept in those two completed buildings, theys long dead because they ain’t been no power here to keep ‘em preserved.”

Nestor nodded, “Yeah.” He shined his light on Jack’s feet and recoiled at the haunting referred light on his face. “What you want to do?”

Jack looked at him, and his eyes looked cold and dead in the torch’s light. “I want to set off a nuclear bomb and wipe this place from the face of the planet.”

Nestor thought he was joking, “Ok, but seriously, though. They ain’t no mission no more. Ain’t nothin’ here to destroy except a bunch of old abandoned buildings, which are well on their way to destroyin’ themselves.”

“I ain’t jokin’. You say they ain’t a mission? No one, no one anywhere in this whole world, knows what we know right now about this place. Or maybe some people do know, but they ain’t tellin’. Everone thinks the Great Seed Bank is sittin’ out here at the South Pole quietly waitin’ to save all mankind once we complete the terraformation. They don’t know the truth, not about terraformation and not about this place, neither. They been told lies about it all, and the point of blowin’ this place up all along has been to destroy those lies, and make folk pay for bein’ so willin’ to believe the lie to begin with. They need they hopes crushed, so they can face the reality that terraformin’ this planet is futile. Only then can they ascend to embrace they future. We ain’t jes destroyin’ buildin’s and we never were. We are usin’ nuclear fire to cleanse this world of its delusions, and it turns out the biggest delusion of all was that our ancestors were lookin’ to the future. Lookin’ out fer us. They wasn’t; they give up their history and they give up their future and they give up on us and we all been livin’ that same way ever since.”

Jack’s face was red as he said this, working himself up to a scream at the end. He stooped over his crutch and seemed all the more dangerous for how he was hunched.

“But Jack, no one will ever know what we do here any more than they know that this place ain’t finished. The only people who’ll see a nuclear explosion at the South Pole are the same people who gain from makin’ sure no one knows the truth about this place. Makin’ the people of Mars face the reality of terraformation only works if we actually did something here that mattered, that folks couldn’t help but notice.”

Jack glared at him with pure hatred and betrayal. He was not properly armed and for that, Nestor was glad because for a moment he lifted his crutch and weighed it in his hand before seeming to decide that it would not work as a weapon. Nestor backed away, putting his hands up, and tried to aim his retreat for the door.

“I knew it,” Jack spit over the coms. Nestor felt he could hear the spittle hitting the microphone, “I knew when I saved you from the Edenites that you was a coward. You was a coward then when you stole that baby instead of savin’ its mama, and you was a coward in the bar in Juventae when I saved your stupid ass from starin’ at criminals like some fuckin’ git and you was always a coward in Calahorra too, questionin’ Linh’s plans like you was. You are jes the same as the people who abandoned this place, ignorant of where you come from and blind to yer place in history and desperate to believe any lie about yer future jes so long as you get what you want today. Right now. Too cowardly to do what’s right.”

Jack limped towards Nestor and for a moment Nestor braced himself for some attack, but Jack simply passed by, heading for the door.

Nestor spoke to Jack’s back as he limped away, “But that’s jes it, Jack. I don’t know my place in history. I cain’t know that. That’s for the folk who come after me to decide. Folk who won’t know me, any more than I know Olympus, or Ascraeus, or Young Nedrick. And what they know will be as much fiction as them legends are. Because the past ain’t real, and the future ain’t real neither. You been sayin’ the whole way down here that we cain’t choose no other way because our past choices have brought us here, and that jes don’t make no sense. We didn’t make those choices knowin’ they would bring us here, and we cain’t know where the choices we make now will take us. We jes gotta respond to what’s happenin’ in the moment, and that’s all we can ever do. And in this here moment, all we have to react to is the fact that this seed bank ain’t nothin’. Nothin’ worth destroyin’. Nothin’ worth dying for. We can go some other way, Jack. Maybe do somethin’ that really does matter. We can make another choice.”

Jack rounded on Nestor, standing in the door to the building with the wind whipping about him and scattering in a skiff of carbon snow from outside, “Ain’t no other way fer me. You jes a kid, and you don’t know shit, and I don’t care to hear yer cowardice and I don’t give a good goddamn what happens to you. Make yer other choice. I hope you rot in it.” He turned and left, and Nestor watched him go.

Nestor stepped out of the door and stared at Jack’s receding back, limping along at speed towards the bomb, which waited patiently in the center of all things. He looked up at the stars above him, bright in that pitch, more than any person could count. He looked at them and wondered if any of their ancestors, before coming to Mars, had ever considered going to any other stars. Travelling to any one of them would have required a tremendous level of effort, the sustained work of generations. The same as Mars. So why would anyone come to here? Mars couldn’t have been the best hope of them all. Looking up at the scattered jewels of shining stardust that filled the sky, Nestor decided each one, each star, best resembled an opportunity, a chance, a different destiny, and there were more of them than he could count.

He looked over at Jack’s light shining down into that pointless weapon, its owner tirelessly bent to a destiny of destruction that seemed very much to Nestor a thing of fantasy. Of story. Of myth. Ephemera subject to change at a wish, in a telling. He turned and looked along the imagined line of the road that should have led out and away from there. He wondered how far out lay his safety from the destruction unfolding before him, and he decided he wished to find it, and so he walked, and the road seemed to rise through the ice before his eyes to guide him. Overlaying his vision were the concentric circles of nuclear destruction. He walked up a minor rise at the border to the complex and watched in his mind’s eye as he passed the first of those circles. He walked more, and he looked up at the stars and he tried to decide which one he liked best for himself. For his home. Before long, behind him bloomed a new star, and that star knew what he did not and could not know, that whether by choice or fate, he was already home. Then there was no other choice to make.