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companion, it budged a little bit and Keller moaned louder.

  “Easy Keller, I’m going to get you out, just hang on,” Jurac said, knowing Keller probably couldn’t hear him. He wrenched on the console again; still it refused to yield more than a centimeter or so.

  After two more minutes of fruitless effort, Jurac became aware of another low groaning in his helmet speakers, followed by the muttered comment, “Oh God, my head!”

  “Terran?”

  “Yeah, Captain is that you?”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” Jurac answered with unrepressed relief as he re-entered the cockpit and crossed to his navigator’s side. “Terran, how do you feel, any broken bones?”

  Terran was moving his head around inside his helmet experimentally. “No, I don’t think so but I’ve got one hell of a headache!”

  “Join the club! Can you walk? Keller’s trapped, I need help getting him free.”

  “Yeah okay, what about Mark?”

  Jurac swallowed. “He didn’t make it.”

  “Shit!” Terran swore, shaking his head slowly from side to side, then popped the clips on his own harness and followed Jurac into the aft cockpit cabin. Together they hauled at the console that had Keller pinned.

  After twenty minutes the pair had managed to extract Keller and lay him, still moaning and doubled up, on the deck. Panting from their exertions, their breathing taxing their suits’ exchange regulators, they dropped down to the deck to rest. Terran went to remove his helmet.

  “Don’t do that,” Jurac said quickly.

  “Why? The radiation hasn’t reached this far forward yet and besides, a suit will only buy us an extra couple of hours at best anyway.”

  “I know that!” Jurac snapped, then replied to Terran's questioning look. “Take a look at your suit’s external temperature readout.” Terran glanced down at the LED on the lower inside of his helmet rim; it read over seventy-degrees below zero. He nodded soberly at Jurac.

  “Any idea where we came down?” Terran asked.

  Jurac shook his head. “No, but we’re a long way from where we want to be.” He paused, “We do have a portable navigational locator aboard, don’t we?” Terran nodded. “Forward or aft?” Jurac asked and Terran’s heart skipped a beat as he tried to remember.

  “Forward stores,” he said finally with a sigh of relief, “If it survived the crash that is.”

  Jurac nodded. “They pack those things pretty securely, it should be okay.”

  “Any indication of radiation on your counter? I’ve got none but maybe mine’s faulty. Do we know if the reactor compartment was breached when we hit?” Terran asked.

  “I don’t know but it was moving through the ship pretty quickly before we came down. It’s only a matter of time now, we’ll have to work quickly.” Jurac got to his feet and tiredly Terran followed suit.

  The hundred and fifty meter long hull of the downed satellite service ship lay shattered and half buried in flurrying snow at the end of a long rut that had been gouged into the glacial surface. One wing had been torn off and lay five hundred meters back down the crash path. Without a backward glance the two able-bodied men, dragging their prone companion on a makeshift sled, trudged out into the barren, blizzard-swept white landscape.

  Jurac was in the lead, hunched over into the howling wind. Behind him Terran was stepping in his footprints while both tugged on the rope that was pulling Keller on his sled along with the supplies. Keller was quiet now, unconscious after being given a shot for the pain. That was a relief to the two men as it meant they didn’t have to hear his continual moaning. They could have just turned off his suit transmitter but if Keller had awoken again later, lucid and asking for help, neither would have known.

  It had taken a little over three hours to ready themselves to depart the wreck. While Jurac saw to stabilizing Keller and getting together what supplies and equipment they may need, he had ordered Terran to determine their position in relation to the relay base and program the portable navigation locator. Within an hour Terran had the results and they were less than heartening. The ship had come down just under two hundred kilometers from the base, a long trek in the best of conditions, which unfortunately these were not. They certainly couldn’t stay with the ship. With the reactor breached and the hull’s integrity compromised, the whole area would be ‘hot’ in a matter of days - if not sooner.

  After computing the navigation, Terran helped Jurac rig a crude sled from spare parts found in ship stores, and onto this they strapped the unconscious Keller. The pair then added the supplies; food, water, all the emergency rations along with a below zero tent, power cells to run their suit heaters and other survival equipment.

  They had been packing the sled just inside the forward airlock and were loading the last of their gathered supplies when the compartment’s built-in Geiger counter gave its first twitch and started emitting intermittent clicks. The two men looked at each other and then continued with what they were doing at a more hurried pace. The radiation had moved steadily forward through the ship at a frightfully fast pace; though neither should have been surprised with the hull so badly damaged.

  Having finished with the sled, Jurac hit a button and the outer lock door whined slowly open on the last ergs of the ship’s reserve power. Wind driven snow howled in through the opening as the two men strode out into the storm.

  “God, I can’t see a bloody thing,” Terran huffed into his suit com. Jurac could hear the man's heavy breathing.

  “Do you really want to see anything around here?” Jurac asked, not really caring whether he got an answer or not. They had been trudging along for over three hours now towards the side of the glacier, and the conditions hadn’t changed a bit; total white out.

  “You’ve got a point,” Terran finally muttered. “God I hate this place, why couldn’t we have crashed in a desert rather than this shit?”

  “Then you’d be complaining about the heat and sand,” Jurac said without real malice.

  “Probably, but at least I could take this fucking suit off.”

  “Save your breath, we must be nearing the edge of the glacier and we can rest there. How’s our course?”

  Terran checked the locator. “Fine, half a degree off or so, I just hope we can find a way over the ridge.”

  “We will,” Jurac said.

  They reached the edge of the glacier and hunkered down behind a group of rocks that provided at least partial cover from the howling wind. Jurac checked on Keller, brushing the snow off the sled as he did so. They’d had to do this regularly to prevent the sled from getting too heavy to drag, not to mention the taxing load it added to Keller’s suit heaters.

  Keller hadn’t yet regained consciousness but his bio readouts were all in the green. Jurac took one of their insulated flasks of water and connected it to the straw system on his suit. He took a sip and despite the flask’s insulation the water was ice cold. He handed the flask to Terran who drank also, shivering at the liquid’s low temperature.

  “I think our water is going to freeze,” Terran said as he disconnected the flask. They had brought the flasks along in order to keep some water readily available rather than having to thaw some snow every time they wanted a drink. But it looked as though even the thick insulation surrounding the flask wouldn’t provide adequate protection against this planet’s cold hands.

  “It looks that way,” Jurac agreed.

  “What will we drink?” Terran asked after a second’s pause.

  Jurac looked at him and sighed. “We’ll drink the water, we’ll just have to thaw it out first.” Jurac was aware that Terran knew this, and that he was just being unconsciously trying.

  “How?”

  “We’ll work it out,” Jurac said tiredly.

  After a pause he changed the subject. “How long will our suit batteries last?”

  “That depends on conditions. With the heaters running constantly, the life of the cells will be shorter.”

&
nbsp; “How much shorter?” Terran asked. Jurac didn’t answer but shot him a warning look through his faceplate. He was becoming a little exasperated at his companion’s attitude.

  “We’re not going to make it,” Terran said softly after a long silence. It wasn’t a question, simply a blandly delivered statement. Jurac didn’t say anything, just stared at his navigator. He’d never picked him for such a pessimist.

  After resting for a short time Jurac got to his feet. “Let’s push on. Which would be the best way from here? It’s obvious we can’t go up and over.” He gestured at the sheer rocky ridge that towered over them.

  Terran consulted the nav-computer he carried, frowned at the readouts for a second then lightly banged the machine a couple of times. “Damn cold must be affecting it,” he muttered but after a few more seconds of button pushing he seemed satisfied with the results. He turned to Jurac. “It seems we have a choice, that’s if the data downloaded from the ship’s computer was correct. We weren’t in a good way when I ran the topographical scan…”

  “Cut to it,” Jurac interrupted.

  “Okay, we can either follow the base of the ridge, heading up the glacier to try and find a place to climb up and cut across to the next valley, this being the shortest route. Or, we can follow the glacier down to its end. According to the topographical scan there’s a large flat plain there. We move along that until we reach the base of the next glacial valley. The tracking