Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

swallowed up
her flitter.
    Suddenly the fragile little craft was turning end over end, alarms
wailing and flashing, all its sensors disabled. But to Minda, feeling
nothing thanks to her cabin’s inertial suspension, it was just a
light show, a Virtual game, nothing to do with her.
    Just seconds after entering the ash plume, the flitter rammed
itself upside down into an unfeasibly hard ground. Crumpling metal
screamed. Then the inertial suspension failed. Minda tumbled out of
her seat, and her head slammed into the cabin roof.
    Immersed in sudden silence, sprawled on the inverted ceiling, she
found herself staring out of a window. Gushing vapour obscured the
landscape. That was air, she thought woozily. The frozen air of this
world, of Snowball, blasted to vapour by the flitter’s residual
heat.
    All she could think of was what her cadre leader would have to
say. You fouled up, Bryn would tell her. You don’t deserve to
survive. And the species will be stronger for your deletion.
    I’m fifteen years old. I’m strong. I’m not dead yet. I’ll show
her.
    She passed out.
     
    Maybe she awoke, briefly. She thought she heard a voice.
    ’… You are a homeotherm. That is, your body tries to maintain a
constant temperature. It is a common heat management strategy. You
have an inner hot core, which appears to comprise your digestive
organs and your nervous system, and an outer cooler shell, of skin
and fat and muscle and limbs. The outer shell serves as a buffer
between the outside world and the core. Understanding this basic
mechanism should help you survive…’
    Through the window, between gusts of billowing mist, she glimpsed
something moving: a smooth curve sliding easily past the wreck, a
distorted image of a crumpled metallic mass. It couldn’t be real, of
course. Nothing moved on this cold world.
    When she woke up properly, it was going to hurt. She closed her
eyes.
     
    When she couldn’t stay unconscious any longer, she was relieved to
find she could move.
    She climbed gingerly out of the crumpled ceiling panel. She probed
at her limbs and back. She seemed to have suffered nothing worse than
bruises, stiffness and pulled muscles.
    But she was already feeling cold. And she had a deepening headache
that seemed to go beyond the clatter she had suffered during the
landing.
    Her cabin had been reduced to a ball, barely large enough for her
to stand up. The only light was a dim red emergency glow. She quickly
determined she had no comms, not so much as a radio beacon to reveal
her position - and there was only a trickle of power. Most of the
craft’s systems seemed to be down - everything important, anyhow.
There was no heat, no air renewal; maybe she was lucky the gathering
cold had woken her before the growing foulness of the air put her to
sleep permanently.
    But she was stuck here. She sat on the floor, tucking her knees to
her chest.
    It all seemed a very heavy punishment for what was, after all, a
pretty minor breach of discipline.
    OK, Minda shouldn’t have taken a flitter for a sightseeing jaunt
around the glimmering curve of the new world. OK, she shouldn’t have
gone solo, and should have lodged and stuck to a flight plan. OK, she
shouldn’t have flown so low over the ruined city.
    But the fact was that after grousing her way through the three
long years of the migration flight from Earth - three years, a fifth
of her whole life - she’d fallen in love with this strange, lonely,
frozen planet as soon as it had come swimming toward her through
sunless space. She had sat glued before Virtual representations of
her new home, tracing ocean beds with their frozen lids of ice,
continents coated by sparkling frost - and the faint, all-but-erased
hints of cities and roads, the mark of the vanished former
inhabitants of this unlucky place. The rest of her cadre were more
interested in Virtual visions of the future, when new artificial suns
would be thrown into orbit around this desolate pebble. But it was
Snowball itself that entranced Minda - Snowball as it was, here and
now, a world deep-frozen for a million years.
    As the Spline fleet had lumbered into orbit - as she had endured
the ceremonies marking the claiming of this planet on behalf of the
human species and the Coalition - she had itched to walk on shining
lands embedded in a stillness she had never known in Earth’s crowded
Conurbations.
    Which was why, just a week after the first human landing on
Snowball, she had gotten herself into such a