The Dying Ice

Dying Ice

By Kieran Westling

I have decided to choose life.

This is a difficult choice here. Death surrounds me.

It chants in the ragged coughs, the shuddering figures who look like living corpses in the mixed light of oil barrel fires and dim, green-blue algae lamps.

It lives in the toxic rain that slicks off everything, spewing up from the strip-mining further inland, melting away color and signage, dulling all the hazard yellow to urine brown.

It waits, slumbering in the black silhouettes of cannons that rest on the blockade of UN warships offshore, their running lights glistening like hungry eyes. Here for our safety, apparently.

Death runs like an invisible undertow, dragging down the conversation I make with camp residents, when the topics turn to those left behind in rising waters. It fades smiles, haunts the halls of memories, rattling its chains at hope.

I see it in the Mercs. Their gray and blue plated armor, so much bulkier and more expensive than our flimsy PPE, adorned with death-heads and jolly rogers, garish as the medieval knights they wanna be. They’re full seal in there, climate-controlled and faceless, spared from the acid taste that burns the rest of our throats. No respirator sores around their goateed mouths when I see them in the mess hall.

They are hired, and outfitted to protect, but bring death with them. It waits in the gun-barrels that swivel on their shoulders, chattering, seeing the folks I work with and designating targets. It licks its lips in their filtered demon voices, that call for an end to resistance in a place populated by those who only know how to resist.

The other day, they mowed down a raft full of refugees as they stumbled onto Port Deception’s docks.

The little boat had been spray-painted with stealth coating and sent through the blockade on a prayer. It had slipped the warships and made it to the outer line of the city’s skeletal harbor complex. Of course, a dockworker happened to be having a smoke as the first scouts wearily clambered up, and searched for a crowd to melt into.

Instead, they found a full goon squad on site in minutes, air-lifted in before more than a few of them had climbed into the tangle of scaffolding. And then the shooting started.

It was the middle of the night, so I was roused by my Thirdeye, the implant pulsing red awakening into my brain, displaying the scope of the damage. Or what little I was allowed to see of it anyway.

Actual footage of the incident was classified, despite the fact that each Merc gun was equipped with a built-in camera. Those reels were usually only released when they told a story that favored the side behind the trigger though. I just got the cliff notes, packaged and bowtied in a nice little bundle of text projected on to my retinas.

"Peacekeeping Unit Lima engaged, and terminated multiple Unauthorizeds at approximately 0:4:15. Multiple others wounded. Immediate medical triage requested."

The message came with a location tag. It was a spot I knew actually, a little break in the docks that had been filled in with a few layers of storage containers, where noodle vendors and holographers did their thing, and kids climbed around. I didn’t look forward to seeing it painted in red.

But I got my ass in gear, and I waded through the death.

More info came from my coworkers, and camp friends and acquaintances, and exes, and the base doctor, and the guy who delivered Thai food door to door. And from you of course, even though you were already on your way to the glacier.

I appreciated you calling to check in, by the way. I’m sorry I was so cold. I was just getting ready for it.

The nets tore into my brain as I buckled on my medkit, mini-defib and diagnoser, as I checked for extra gauze, and peppermint gum in case the smell was really bad. Simple statements, status updates, snippets of video from afar, filled my head with shadow pictures of the carnage that waited for me.

As I hopped in the crawler with the rest of the triage team, I kissed my grandmother’s necklace, held that little origami swan you made me fold myself, and told my fears that there were many good reasons to go on.

And in the distance, a cold sunrise touched the peaks of long buried mountains. They were black scytheheads, anvils who had waited for their day in the light since long before I or any other stupid ape was a dream in evolution’s blind eye.

The reaper even lives in the name of this place. Not Antarctica anymore. That was some other land, that tickled our parent’s imaginations with dreams of snow and penguins.

This is the Dying Ice, where new earth is ripe for the drill, and the huddled masses flee from the drowning coasts; where we do what we can for them. Where the tents stretch on in endless, rain-stained marches, and drones keep the skies.

And then there’s your glacier. I hope it’s everything you hoped. A frozen fossil, a masterpiece in your eyes. A locket with a picture inside, a snapshot of the world we killed.

You told me how much you needed those clear skies, and the quiet, and everything that Port Deception is not. And also, goddamn, I bet you’re gonna win so many awards for whatever you find, diggin in the slush.

But yeah, a locket.

This girl at the docks had one, clutched in the pale caramel, bloodred and bone white of her half-a-hand. A little pink heart dangled on a silver chain, glinting from behind the yellow safety barrier, caught in the salt breeze. My stomach fluttered in time with it.

The Mercs made us wait a full hour before our crawler was allowed to shamble in, and we could begin our work on the dead and dying. They had to make sure that we were very clear on what we were going to report, and where the wounded were headed. That was need to know, so I didn’t.

You know my team leader, she doesn’t take shit. But I watched one of them shut her up by putting his glove on her shoulder, and showing the flex of the powered servos there. The gentleness of the act almost brought up my choked-down mango paste breakfast.

No words, before he stepped back. But still he asked - do you dare me to crush you?

And then we began our stitching, our cutting and our setting. It’s funny. Those flechette guns they wear look so damn cool in movies, advertisements, and sims. But they don’t try and sell the graded-cheese they make out of a human being. That’s just an implication, until its bleeding all over your gloves.

If they’d let us in thirty minutes earlier, we could’ve saved five. Maybe even locket girl. She just caught the darts across her hand and arm. I could’ve pulled them out, bandaged that shit and stopped the bleedout. If they’d given us fifteen more minutes. But they didn’t, so we saved three. And they got netted up in carbon fiber, and carried off by chopper to who the hell knows where.

So TL drove the crawler back to base, locked its legs and told us to sleep off the shit. Like she always did. Like she was telling herself too.

I couldn’t sleep though, so I walked down to the marketside, where Port Deception meets the ravenous ocean. I watched the harbor morning, and thought of you, and watched landing airships, docking tankers, and mining rigs flying north.

Then I looked over my shoulder, and saw the tiers of tents, and shacks and shanties, endless layers of stained material against the graphite sky. Endless little campfires, and string lights, hung up to summon some echo of home.

I saw life. Lives I could still improve, with a stitch or a smile. Reasons to go on.

So I walked, before I spiraled too deep, and stopped by the familiar faces; made a point to greet some strange ones.

Eventually I sat and ate curry with another triage officer, and the stall-keeper, who let herself have an early break.

Weirdly, they both also dig old reggae, which as you always tell me is the only shit I ever listen to. And the food was good. So that was something I guess. Maybe the universe spinning me another reason.

Oh, I did really like the playlist though. I listened to it on my walk back to the base, and when I closed the curtains to block the light, and tried to drift off in my bunk.

Hope you like the one I sent you. Hope it’s keeping you warm out on the last of the ice. You said pictures soon, and I still expect them. That satellite shit doesn’t do it justice. Hell, I’ll even take your field notes. Anything to get my mind off the Mercs.

I actually flicked one off the other day. He gave me a little wave, fucking comical in that armor. So I flipped him one, and called him a fucking animal, images of the little girl’s half-hand boiling in me.

And he activated his fucking shoulder gun. The little green light at its base went on, and switched to red. It did its little chitter and swiveled across the street, facing me.

No way he’d open up. But I know he wanted me to see.

So now I see things differently. The way they filter their reports, and ours. They way they play off gassing whole blocks of camp to flush out two or three drug runners selling hydroponic grow, when all of them are hopped up on battle stims. The way they smirk at us in the mess hall, and crack jokes about how the mob of wolves would eat our little flock of red-crossers, if we didn’t have good sheepdogs to protect us.

I also see my defib differently. I see the paddles in my hands, on either side of one of their shiny shaved heads as I come up behind him while he’s eating lunch.

In even darker frames, I see the syringes in my kit differently, and think about how their contents could be mixed to take life instead of give it.

But I have chosen life.

So I cultivate life in the little succulent by my bunk, and the baby spider plant that hangs down from the one above mine.

I take notice of life, unashamed and undeniable in the faces of children as they kick a soccer ball through the rows of tents.

I display life in the string lights I traded for with the chocolate my grandmother sent me, and draped around the door to our room.

Life glimmers, faintly, in the birds that still dive over the poison waters, and the sunrise that stains the mist above Deception Bay.

And in the locket I pocketed, and run over in my hand while I write this with my Thirdeye. In the gaze of the woman, whose soggy, running-ink polaroid is stowed within. I’ll never know her name, but I know why she lives there.

Reasons to go on.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss you. Like hell. But something - a voice that whispers over the breaking waves and helicopter blades - tells me that you’re finding life, out there, on the glacier.

So I’ll keep stitching. I’ll keep stopping for curry.

I have decided to choose life.

Author’s Note:

I’d be lying if I said this story arose out of a vacuum. None really do, unless they’re written in space. But jokes aside, after being in the chaos of Minneapolis following George Floyd’s murder, I felt that one group deserved more publicity than they got.

Again and again, frontline medics were out there, in the horror, in the gas and rubber bullets. Without them, myself and many others would’ve been much worse off. So along with being for my partner, this story is a bit of a love letter to them.

If you want to see real heroes, look no further.