Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

mess.
    Well, she couldn’t stay here. Reluctantly she got to her feet.
     
    With a yank on a pull-tag, her seat cushion opened up into a
survival suit. It was thick and quilted, with an independent air
supply and a sewn-in grid of heating elements and lightweight power
cells. She sealed herself in. Clean air washed over her face, and the
suit’s limited medical facilities probed at her torn muscles.
    She had to trigger explosive bolts to get the hatch open. The last
of the flitter’s air gushed out into a landscape of silver and black,
and crystals of frost fell in neat parabolas to an icebound ground.
Though she was cocooned in her suit, she felt a deeper chill descend
on her.
    And as the vapour froze out, again she glimpsed strange sudden
movement - a surface like a bubble, or a distorting mirror - an image
of herself, a silvery figure standing framed in a doorway, ruddy
light silhouetting her. The image shrank away.
    It had been like seeing a ghost. This world of death might be full
of ghosts. I should be scared, she thought. But I’m walking away from
a volcanic eruption and a flitter crash. One thing at a time, Minda.
Clumsily she clambered through the crash-distorted hatchway.
    She found herself standing in a drift of loose, feathery snow that
came up to her knees. Beneath the snow was a harder surface: perhaps
water ice, even bare rock. Where her suit touched the snow, vapour
billowed around her.
    To her left that volcano loomed above the horizon, belching foul
black fast-moving plumes that obscured the stars. And to her right,
in a shallow valley, she made out structures - low, broken walls,
perhaps a gridwork of streets. Everything was crystal clear: no mist
to spoil the view on this world, where every molecule of atmosphere
lay as frost on the ground. The sky was black and without a sun - yet
it was far more crowded than the sky of Earth, for here, at the edge
of the great interstellar void known as the Local Bubble, the hot
young stars of Scorpio were close and dazzling.
    The landscape was wonderful, what she had borrowed the flitter to
come see. And yet it was lethal: every wisp of gas around her feet
was a monument to more lost heat. Her fingers and toes were already
numb, painful when she flexed them.
    She walked around the crash site. The flitter had dug itself a
trench. And as it crashed the flitter had let itself implode, giving
up its structural integrity to protect the life bubble at its heart -
to protect her. The craft had finished up as a rough, crumpled
sphere. Now it had nothing left to give her.
    Her suit would expire after no more than a few hours. She had no
way to tell Bryn where she was - they probably hadn’t even missed her
yet. And she and her flitter made no more than a metallic pinprick in
the hide of a world as large as Earth.
    She was, she thought wonderingly, going to die here. She spoke it
out loud, trying to make it real. ’I’m going to die.’ But she was
Minda. How could she die? Would history go on after her? Would
mankind sweep on, outward from the Earth, an irresistible colonising
wave that would crest far beyond this lonely outpost, with her name
no more than a minor footnote, the first human to die on the new
world? ’I haven’t done anything yet. I haven’t even had sex properly
- ’
    A vast, silvered epidermis ballooned before her, and a voice spoke
neutrally in her ear.
    ’Nor, as it happens, have I.’
    It was the silver ghost.
    She screamed and fell back in the snow.
     
    A bauble, silvered, perhaps two metres across, hovered a metre
above the ground, like a huge droplet of mercury. It was so perfectly
reflective that it was as if she couldn’t see it at all: only a
fish-eye reflection of the flitter wreck and her own sprawled self,
as if a piece of the world had been cut out and folded over.
    And this silvery, ghostly, not-really-there creature was talking
to her.
    ’Native life forms are emerging from dormancy,’ said a flat,
machine-generated voice in her earpieces. ’Your heat is feeding them.
To them you are a brief, unlikely summer. How fascinating.’
    Clumsy in her thick protective suit, bombarded by shocks and
strangeness, she twisted her head to see.
    The snow was melting all around her, gushing up in thin clouds of
vapour that quickly refroze and fell back, so that she was lying in
the centre of a spreading crater dug out of the soft snow. And in
that crater there was movement. Colours spread over the ice, all
around her: green and purple