About a year post-landfall, the temperature starts rising and the snow begins to melt. We get our first look at exposed soil a few weeks later. A month after that, the ground is covered in lichen.
Nobody seems to have a clear explanation for why this is happening. Niflheim’s orbit is nearly circular, and its axial tilt is negligible. We shouldn’t have seasons of any kind here, theoretically. The best guess that anyone can come up with about what’s happening is that our sun is actually a marginally variable star, and its cycle is on the upswing.
That’s the sort of thing you’d think the mission planners back on Midgard would have been aware of, isn’t it? I mean, they observed this place for almost thirty years before we boosted out. After a little digging, I find out that they did observe a periodic swing in observed stellar output here. It was pretty well documented. They didn’t ascribe it to the star, though, because nobody had a decent theory as to how that would work from a stellar physics standpoint. Instead, they decided that it must have had something to do with dust clouds in the interstellar medium, and then they filed it away. That’s why they thought we’d be warm and happy here. They thought the high marks for stellar output were the real deal, and the low points were due to interference.
Oops.
At first everyone is pretty happy about the change in the weather, until some guy in the Physics Section thinks to wonder whether we’re going to swing from one extreme to the other and wind up roasting in our own juices.
Spooky thought, but we don’t. After a few months things level out somewhere between brisk and balmy, and eventually the folks in Agriculture actually manage to get an experimental plot going outside the dome.
It’s right around that time, when our fellow colonists are finally starting to spend a bit of time outside and they’re talking about decanting the first few embryos and everyone other than me and Marshall seems to have mostly forgotten about the creepers, that I ask Nasha if she’d like to go for a walk.
We still have to wear rebreathers. The partial pressure of oxygen has been rising, slowly but perceptibly, since green things started growing, but the change won’t be enough to keep one of us alive unaided for a long while yet—if it ever is, of course. We have no idea how long this season will last. It could be years. It could be over tomorrow.
In the meantime, though, it’s a nice day for a hike.
“Where are we going?” Nasha asks after Lucas has waved us through the perimeter.
“Away from the dome. Isn’t that enough?”
She takes my hand, and we walk.
Back on Midgard, there was an enormous desert that straddled the equator and stretched nearly the width of the only continent. Broad swaths of land there could go years without seeing any significant rain. Every once in a long while, though, when weather conditions were just right, a massive storm would roll over and dump a year’s worth of water over those bone-dry plains and arroyos in a day or two. Whenever that happened, we got a reminder that life had been waiting there, poised to spring out at the first opportunity. Plants practically leapt out of the mud, and animals crawled up out of hibernation to eat and drink and hunt and mate.
Niflheim’s biosphere seems to be a bit like that. The snow has only been gone for a couple of months, but already the lichen has given way to something that could be grass, and there are even a few woody-looking shrubs poking up here and there. There are animals too—mostly little crawly things that bear a striking resemblance to the creepers, but a klick or so out from the dome I spot what looks like an eight-legged reptile sunning itself on an exposed shelf of rock.
When I point it out to Nasha, she scowls and puts a hand to the burner she’s brought along, because of course she did.
“Come on,” I say. “It’s cute.”
She shoots me a sideways glance, then shakes her head and lets her hand fall to her side.
We keep walking.
After another five minutes or so, I have to stop to get my bearings. It’s been a long time now, and everything looks so different without the snow. Nasha takes a half step back, folds her arms across her chest, and tilts her head to one side.
“This isn’t just a walk-around, is it?”
I smile behind my rebreather. “Not exactly. I needed to check on something.”
I’ve got my landmark now. We start up a hillside, then turn down into a gully that takes us out of sight of the dome.
“You sure about this?” Nasha asks. I glance back. Her hand is back on the burner. “This looks like creeper country.”
“Yeah,” I say. “We’re actually pretty close to an entrance to their tunnel system.”
“Okay,” she says. “Why?”
“I told you,” I say. “I have to check on something.”
I miss the spot at first. The boulder I’d taken as my marker must have been held in place by the ice, or maybe it was pushed down the slope by runoff. In any case, it’s twenty meters or more down the gully from where it was supposed to be. I finally recognize it, though, and once I’ve done that it’s not too difficult to trace back to the little shelf where it was resting when I came out of the tunnels. Under that shelf is a jumble of smaller rocks. I drop to my knees and start pulling them away.
“Mickey?” Nasha says. “Do you want to tell me what we’re doing here?”
I would, but I don’t have to, because by now I’ve pulled enough of the scree out of the way to expose the hollow space under the rock shelf.
“Holy shit,” Nasha says.
I turn back to look at her, to gauge her reaction. She’s surprised, but not horrified or murderous. I take that as a good sign. Carefully, I reach into the dark space and pull Eight’s pack out into the light.
“You sneaky little shit,” she says.
I laugh. “You didn’t think I’d actually leave this with the creepers, did you?”
She crouches down beside me, reaches out, and runs a hand across the top of the pack. “How?”
“How what? How did I manage to get this atrocity back from the creepers after they’d murdered Eight?”
Nasha turns to look at me. I can tell from her eyes that she’s not smiling under the rebreather. “Yeah, Mickey.”
I shrug. “I asked for it.”
She shakes her head, then turns her attention back to the bomb. “Is it loaded?”
“Well, there’s enough antimatter in here to sterilize a medium-sized city, if that’s what you mean.”
She pulls her hand back.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “As long as the bubbles are intact, the antimatter is basically in a different universe. It can’t touch us.”
“And what if some of them aren’t intact?”
I laugh. “Trust me. You’d know.”
“Why, Mickey?”
“Why, what? Why did I leave a doomsday weapon buried out here like pirate’s treasure?”
“Yeah,” she says. “That.”
I rock back on my heels and turn to look at her. “Well, here’s the thing. If I’d actually left it with the creepers like I told Marshall, they might have eventually gotten it into their heads to use it. I honestly couldn’t have given a shit about most of the people in that dome at that point, but…”