2043
The figure seemed to coalesce out of the snow. It had the shape of a man, but it was formed from pyramids and polyhedra and mechanical servos. The armor was clearly made of solid angled slabs, but the exterior was a covering of fabric and foam, colored pure white. Two wing-like structures came out of the back, and a crown of iron rods ringed the helmet. A rigid steel prosthesis took the place of the third finger of the right hand, clenched in a fist. This was one of the already-legendary finbacks of Serbia's exotroopers, and this particular individual was the no less legendary Zaratustra, also known as Zed. Born in the South African compound of a neo-Nazi cult and raised in Germany by relatives who tried in vain to lead him from the ways of his father, he had ended up imprisoned far from home in Belgrade for the murder of a fellow neo-Nazi. Then he had been freed to fight in Serbia's war with Kosovo and Albania, and soon after admitted for training in the desperately undermanned exotrooper corps. Now, he was still farther from home, hiking over the Ronne Ice Shelf toward the ice-locked shores of Antarctica.
Behind him followed another exotrooper. He carried a weapon that looked like a "super soaker" squirt gun, and was indeed very similar except that what it squirted was burning napalm. This was Zotgjakt, the only ethnic Albanian in Serbia's exotrooper corps. In his struggles to attain some level of respect, he had repeatedly sought out training as a specialist, and one of those specialties was operating a flame thrower. During the Novi Pazar insurrections that triggered the first skirmishes with Kosova, Serbia had fielded a (relatively) compact version of the flame thrower, dubbed the flame carbine, to the outrage of the rest of the world, which had long since replaced their flame throwers with even more devastating thermobaric weapons. Serbia, while well-stocked with thermobaric munitions itself, had seen a niche for a flame thrower in close-in, direct-fire combat, and built one accordingly. The discrete but urgent missive that had summoned the finbacks to the last continent had been very specific and insistent that they were to bring a functioning flame carbine.
Though the flame carbine was about half as heavy as typical mid-20th century flamethrower, it still weighed almost 20 kg when loaded. Only an exotrooper could carry one without a considerable loss of mobility, and even one of them could not conveniently carry all the equipment necessary to keep it functional. The flame carbine's two napalm tanks would provide for only three seconds of continuous fire, and normally only two additional tanks were carried. By the time all of them were emptied, a cartridge of propellant gas would also normally be exhausted, though a manual pump under the barrel could add an extra second or so. At that point, refueling required at least one larger reservoir to refill the napalm tanks and an air compressor to recharge the propellant cartridges. The task of carrying that equipment fell upon the ever-beleaguered support troops known as squires. And so at the rear came two lightly armored figures, who at the start of their storied careers had already been dubbed the Flea and the Tick. The Flea carried a 15-liter reservoir on his back plus 4 filled tanks at his hips. The Tick carried the apparatus for recharging the propellant cartridges, plus another 30 liters of napalm.
"Hey," said the Flea, "what do you think of this mission?"
"What do you think, ponor?" the Tick replied. "Why do you even keep talking to me?"
The footgear of the 311A combat exoskeleton added 5 cm to a finback's height, and gave them footprints of Sasquatch proportions. The segmented soles were loaded with shock absorbers, sensors and a variety of spikes and bumps that would retract or extend according to the demands of the terrain. At the moment, especially long spikes gouged and gripped at the ice, and little bursts of warm air regularly de-iced the soles. Reaching a ten-meter cliff of pure ice, Zed extended a set of climbing claws and started up with an impressive spring.
The squires came next. The Flea whooped as he vaulted the top, then swore at the sight, at some remove but not far distant, of another cliff at least 30 m tall. A line was thrown down to the others. Even with the help of the rope, the Tick resorted to continuous kicking and clawing to make his ascent, showering chunks of ice down on Zotgjakt. At the top, he angrily swatted away the Flea's extended hand, dug his claws into the cliff top and hauled himself up. Cracks shot out from his fingerholds, and as he mounted the cliff top, more than a meter of ice ponderously collapsed out from under him. Zed was there in an instant. He grabbed the squire by the arm and yanked him to safety, seeming more impatient than heroic.
From the first voyages of discovery in the 1800s to the proliferation of research stations beginning in the 1950s, human activity in Antarctica had concentrated disproportionately in about one-third of last continent, on the west side a mountain chain simply called the Trans-Antarctic Mountains. Apart from a few incursions beyond the mountains during the race for the South Pole, exploration of the other two-thirds of the last continent had to wait until the late 1920s. What the explorers discovered was a vast expanse called the Antarctic Plateau, and described without the slightest hint of exaggeration as the coldest, driest, windiest, most inaccessible and most uninhabitable on the planet.
With an average annual temperature of -50 degrees C, average precipitation of 5 cm per year, average elevation of 3 km and average windspeed of 80 km per hour, the environment of the Plateau was exceptionally bad even by Antarctica's standards. Signs of anything resembling human habitation were likewise scarce even for the last continent. Out of hundreds of past and present Antarctic research stations, the largest to be sustained on the Plateau was probably the Russians' Vostok Station, where, on a pitch-black winter's day in July 1983, a dozen or so poor frozen bastards had measured a temperature of -128 degrees F, the lowest ever recorded to the satisfaction of the keepers of the record books. Even the record keepers allowed that Plateau temperatures could be even lower, particularly closer to the Plateau's four-thousand meter summit. That was the destination of the exotroopers.
The finbacks made their way inland from Prydz Bay, where a submarine had emerged through the ice to deposit them. With the use of stilt accessories, included in the corps' armory since the arrival of the first exoskeletons but previously neglected due to the generally limited lifespan of a soldier 3 meters tall on a battlefield, they were able to move at up to 40 km per hour. But the rough terrain required long stretches of marching or climbing with their standard footgear, and with or without the stilts, pratfalls and close calls continued. The Flea slipped after his deicers clogged, knocked Zotgakt off his feet as he slid, and the both of them stopped just short of the edge of a crevasse. When they strode over another crevasse on stilts, the Tick once again had the ice collapse underneath him on landing, and narrowly escaped with two more very quick steps. Then there was an unexpected and unexplained halt as Zed silently studied a stretch of the ice seemingly indistinguishable from the rest. He stamped three times with one of his stilts, then climbed down, knelt and punched down with enough force to drive his prosthesis into the ice. A vast web of thin cracks suddenly erupted in the ice, and Zed beat a hasty retreat as a whole new crevasse opened in the ice.
After a day and a half, they had progressed more than 300 km, and caught their first sight of rock coming through the ice."Hey!" the Flea said. "Hey, Zed, look at this!" He pointed back at the glacial terrain they had crossed There, at the margin where descending glaciers merged with the ice shelf on the bay, was a ragged but unmistakable semicircle two kilometers wide. "Y'know, it looks almost like a flying saucer wreck."
Zed chuckled. "That is the MacCrae Inlet," he said. "It was first recorded in unpublished notes from the BANZARE Expedition of 1929-1931, and mentioned occasionally in later publications. It probably would have received more attention if a research with ties to occultism had not claimed that it was a wrecked `flying saucer', and that the wreck was being secretly studied by the US military. Nonsense, of course. If a spaceship were to crash, it would have the same fate as an ordinary meteorite: Its most visible trace would be an impact crater, and any parts of it that did not disintegrate completely would be either deeply embedded in the crater or scattered over untold kilometers. And that- hypothetical spaceship notwithstanding- is undoubtedly what happened. By the best estimates, the event occurred two million years ago. At the time, Antarctica was already extensively covered in ice, but there were still forests and terrestrial megafauna. The impact appears to have come at the time of the final decline of the ecosystem, and it has been speculated there was some connection. The impact formed a crater, and as the ice advanced, the crater was covered, but not enough to conceal its shape.
"Not that it has always been as you see it. One hundred years ago, or even twenty, the edges of the ice would have extended much further, and been considerably thicker. The scientists blame that on man-made global warming, but it is nothing new. For better or worse, the ice shelf has always been shifting, sometimes going forth, and sometimes drawing back. Men may push it, one way or another, but with or without them, the cycle will go on. Now, let us go."
Another pratfall came as Zotgjakt was half-buried in a slide of snow and ice chunks from a continuous line of similar debris at the bottom of another, especially formidable cliff. "A closer approach would appear inadvisable," Zed said succinctly. He loaded an attachment on his left forearm shield: a spear gun. The spear Zed loaded was larger than was standard, with a longer cable and a rocket booster for extra range. As the top of the cliff was clearly no more stable than the bottom, he aimed instead for a relatively pristine ledge halfway up. The harpoon lodged, with nothing worse than a short shower of snow, and Zed cut the line and spiked the end in the ice at his feet. Up they climbed.
After following the ledge for twenty meters, they came to what had from the ground looked like nothing more or less than a recess in the ice. It was, in fact, the bottom of a sizable crevasse, just wide enough for them to walk into. Zed led them silently onward, marching uphill through the looming yet claustrophobic chasm. "Like a jebanje birth canal," the Tick muttered.
"Say," said the Flea, "didn't you say you were Russian?"
"Yeah," the Tick said.
"But you speak Srpski just fine," the Flea said.
"Sure," said the Tick.
"I mean, you talk like it was your first language."
The Tick's mood was not helped by a shower of debris from above. "I grew up in Belgrade, okay?"
"So your parents came from Russia?"
"Well... three of my grandparents did."
"Uh-huh... Do you speak Russian?"
There was a long silence. "I've learned, all right?" the Tick answered irritably. "I just haven't gotten good at regular conversation."
"Okay... So if you were born in Serbia... and your parents were born in Serbia... and you speak Srpski... why not just call yourself a Serb?"
The Tick pondered for a moment. "Okay, why don't you tell me this," he said. "If somebody who says he's a Serb lives in, say, Bosnia... and was born in Bosnia... to parents who were born in Bosnia... and he talks just like a Bosniak... Why not just say he's a Bosniak?"
The Flea pondered this for rather more than a moment. "Okay," he said, "touche."
More silence followed, except for crunching and occasional crashing. The Tick was showing signs of unease, and all but jumped when a weird sound for all the world like a howl echoed through the crevasse. After the better part of an hour, Zed loaded another harpoon for an ascent the rest of the way. As he climbed up, there was a crash and a shout from the Tick.