Ice's End, page 1
Copyright © 2025 P. Finian Reilly
First Edition — 2025
All rights reserved.
Revised Editon.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information browsing, storage, or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author and publisher. Without in any way limiting the author’s and publisher’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited.
Interior Design: Mariella Travis | www.alleiram.com
Map by Dan Kirchoff | www.dankirchoff.com
Large Print and eBook Conversion by Sam Sheng | linkedin.com/in/samsheng
ISBN
978-1-961905-47-4 (Paperback)
978-1-961905-57-3 (Large Print Edition)
978-1-961905-48-1 (eBook)
12 Willows Press
Winterport, Maine
www.12willowspress.com
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Epilogue
Author’s Note
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Prologue
H.M.S. Erebus
Unnamed Sea
February 1841
This far south, ice was an enemy.
A great frozen cliff—as high, white, and solid as the Cliffs of Dover—had blocked the two warships’ progress for weeks. Now, the floes and bergs at their waterline blocked their escape.
“Swing harder!” came a shout. Yule looked over his shoulder at its source—a figure swaddled in a scarf and Welsh wig, and with the epaulets that marked him as a Captain of the Royal Navy. James Clark Ross had ordered every man not manning the sails onto the ice while he stayed on the prow of H.M.S. Erebus, the better to watch her able seamen and officers attack the ice at their feet with pickaxes. The ice pack had admitted the Erebus and her sister, H.M.S. Terror, through a gap in the great ice cliff they had followed for weeks. They didn’t get far. The gap opened into a bay rounded by its own ice wall, as though a giant aimed to crush the Erebus and Terror like two flies between the folds of its handkerchief. Ross, in his hope that yet another gap would reveal itself, had ordered Erebus deeper into this bay—to the very brink of crashing into the ice cliffs. The two ships had only just escaped that fate by turning back, when the rough sheets of ice bobbing around their hulls locked into place. Second Master Henry Braddick Yule now had to hope this ice pack would yield to his pickax.
“The ship that frees herself first shall splice the main brace!” Ross bellowed. Yule glanced at Terror, also locked in the pack. He doubted her pickax crew had heard Ross, or that the captain’s promise of a double rum ration would draw any more strength from the men. They were already driven by fear—fear that this bay at the end of the world would become their tomb.
Yule, though, had another reason to swing his pickax. It lay in his cupboard of a bunk on the Erebus, among the stones, potted ferns, jarred jellyfish, and boxed beetles gathered from the many ports of call on their long voyage toward the South Magnetic Pole. At the bottom of a pail, beneath a mound of basalt stones from wretched Franklin Island, Yule had hidden the papers he would need to profit from this voyage and end Captain Ross’s career—along with his life.
Now more than ever, Yule smiled at the prospect.
To make it a reality, though, he needed to reach a British port alive. And so, he attacked the ice with all his might.
Chapter 1
Ross Sea Coast
Antarctica
May 2123
For the first time in his life, Roscoe felt cold.
For the first time, he wanted one of the puffy jackets he’d seen on faded posters in his internship academy, a converted ski lodge. Instead, just before the submarine hatch had been opened to the Antarctic night, a light bundle was dropped onto Roscoe’s lap by a passing crewman. “Put these on,” he shouted down the aisle. “Remember your safety briefing. You have three minutes!”
Stiff-necked from the jump seat, groggy from hours of sedated sleep, but grateful that the scabs he’d cut into his wrist three weeks earlier hadn’t burst, Roscoe slid into the coveralls he’d been given. Drawstrings cinched the foil-thin plastic tight around his waist and closed the hood around his face, leaving just enough room for his eyes. This was supposed to keep him alive in Antarctica?
The sub crewman didn’t seem to think so; he donned a big, puffy jacket and pants like the old-time skiers. Once the dozen bunny-suited interns lined up down the sub’s aisle, he shouted, “Sorry for the inconvenience. Another sub was delayed due to a mechanical problem, leaving our slip at the port. This is the only way to get you out and keep water loading on schedule.” The sedatives and the swaddling stifled any objections.
“We are going to disembark via Spigot’s external pier. When you step outside, you will see a red searchlight directly ahead. Follow me down the pier, single file, toward that light. We will be outside for approximately five minutes.” A few hooded heads nodded in front of Roscoe. The crewman turned and headed for the hatch. The interns followed, Roscoe bringing up the rear.
The cold sank deeper into his bones, and by the time he reached the conning tower’s hatch and looked down at the pier, his toes were numb. He stared down the long, gray band stretching toward a red light glowing under a sky dense with stars. On either side of the pier, the starlight glinted off the water, which rippled between a loose, shifting quilt of dull white sheets—a frozen version of the scum that coated coastlines around the world. . In a few spots where the channels widened, chunks of the same pale hue bobbed gently. It took Roscoe a moment to recognize what he was looking at: fragments of Earth’s last sea ice, floating just beneath the path to his new home.
“Get movin’, we got a schedule to keep,” another crew member shouted.
As soon as Roscoe stepped onto the pier, the hatch slammed behind him and wind blasted his left side. He widened his stance to brace himself. Both feet slipped, his legs splayed apart, and Roscoe fell on his backside.
He sat up and turned, just in time to see the conning tower’s tip slip beneath the waves. Looking forward, he saw the line of interns shrink in the distance. He had to get moving. Roscoe started to stand—but as soon as his feet made contact with the pier’s gray surface, he slipped again. None of the other interns seemed to have this problem, he noticed, as they continued down the pier. What had they done differently?
Then, he realized, they had remembered their safety briefing. He hadn’t.
Three weeks earlier, as the sub sailed down Delaware Bay, the interns were warned that they might need to go out on the ice. The video said it usually didn’t happen, but “sometimes water loading schedules may require disembarkation on Spigot’s external pier.” Roscoe knew just enough about Spigot to understand what this meant: By dropping their human cargo on this pier, the sub crews could ensure themselves enough time to flood their holds with precious water and head back north.
“In the unlikely event of a pier disembarkation, submarine crew members will distribute protective clothing,” the video said. “Standard-issue intern footwear is not adequate for Antarctic conditions. For your safety, a compartment under your seat will unlock, providing ice-grips to attach to your shoes. These are essential for walking on the pier, which is often extremely slippery in winter.” It sure is, Roscoe thought, noticing a slick sheen of ice on its surface.
A block of yellow light appeared beneath the red searchlight; the interns had reached the door, and it had opened for them. Shit, Roscoe thought. He had to get moving, or it would close, and he would be stuck out here. On another try, he managed to stand, take three steps, and fall again. The door closed; only the searchlight watched him now. He stood again and tried to run. He slipped on his first stride.
But this time, he didn’t fall forward.
His foot slipped off the pier at the worst possible moment, and Roscoe felt gravity pull him to the right, toward a gap of open water between two ice sheets. In the split second before impact, he noticed white lights embedded along the pier about every meter, set into recesses several centimeters deep. A survival instinct, one he’d never used before, screamed Handles! Then, he hit the water.
The suit spared Roscoe a shock—but the numbing cold had a new weight behind it. The water wanted to get inside his suit. He knifed his left hand into the nearest recessed light and took several hard kicks to stay afloat, watching his breath cloud around the tiny bulb.
Roscoe lifted his right arm over his head, onto the pier surface just a few centimeters above the bulb. Just as he started to lift, a new pain shot up his right leg, and a new weight started to pull it down. His suit had sprung a leak.
He tried to lift himself over the pier’s side, but the sedatives and cold had robbed him of the strength he needed. His leg grew heavier, and the pain was beginning to fade. Maybe this was it—the Southern Ocean would do what he hadn’t managed, just a week earlier, with a razor blade on his wrist.
He looked around—maybe in one last search for help, maybe just to get a look at his final resting place. And something caught his eye: Lagrange-2. StarCross had the one sure way to distribute electricity to a storm-scoured, fire-scorched planet—beaming it through the sky—and space stations at the two best points to do it. Gravitational forces held Lagrange-2 and its sister, Lagrange-1, at opposing orbital nodes. Up there, StarCross generated electricity from city-sized solar arrays, and sent that power as microwave beams to any nation whose government had signed on to the StarCross Updated Terms of Service. If any buyer took issue with those terms, their missiles would be destroyed by StarCross long before they traversed the million and a half klicks from Earth to either Lagrange station.
Those orbiting cities, and StarCross’s mining and relay station on the Moon, also promised clean air and stable weather for anyone who worked hard enough.
For the second time in as many weeks, that promise saved Roscoe. He remembered the message he received just after slicing his left wrist, the message that told him he still had a path off this dying rock and up to that orbiting city. And that path ran down the pier toward the searchlight. His parents were counting on him to keep going. You’re it! Move!
At last, adrenaline surged through him. Roscoe hauled himself back onto the pier, taking a few deep breaths before moving again. He didn’t walk. Instead, he crawled—at first dripping wet, then stiff and crusted over as the water on his suit froze.
After two agonizing minutes, the searchlight led him to flat, solid ground. Roscoe wanted to kiss the gravel under his feet, but he didn’t dare stop. His limbs and face were numb, except for the feeling of new weight on his ice-sheathed right leg and the exhaustion dragging down his upper eyelids. He ran uphill, fueled by the last of his adrenaline. Beneath the searchlight, he saw a shed with a single doorway, painted with the light blue outline of a water droplet. He pounded on it with all the strength he had left.
If Roscoe had believed in God, he would have thanked Him when the door opened. He collapsed onto the floor, savoring the sudden warmth, and looked up at a startled man wearing a bulletproof vest and a shoulder patch with the StarCross logo: three white stars and one blue droplet, placed at the corners of an invisible diamond kite. Roscoe’s eyes rested on the lowest point, on the droplet representing Spigot. Then, the guard jerked back and, with a “What the hell?” reached for his holster.
Roscoe, still suited and on his back, raised his hands.
“I-I-I’m an int-t-t-ern. Came f-f-from th-th-the s-s-sub.”
“Let’s see some ID.”
Roscoe tore open his suit front, pulled back the hood, and presented the tag that had been hanging from a cord around his neck since he’d boarded the sub. The guard tapped it with his thick black wristband, then studied the shimmering screen that appeared in front of him. “Well, Roscoe Slake, why didn’t you come in with the others?”
“F-f-f-forgot m-m-my ice-g-grips.”
The security guard nodded, leaving his gun on his hip, and told Roscoe to strip. “Damn lucky you got here when you did,” he said, handing him a foil blanket. “My shift’s almost over. This door would’ve been unguarded for hours.”
Roscoe couldn’t say much more, as two medics from Spigot’s infirmary checked him for frostbite and gave him a set of dry clothes. As they led him down a staircase at the shed’s rear, he heard the security guard talking to an unseen superior.
“Minor incident, boss. The intern coming in from the mid-Atlantic sub forgot his ice-grips. Almost got left out on the ice.” He paused. “Yeah, profile says he was a pounder. Got the height for it. Guess we’ll have to tell the sub crews to watch those ones more closely.” There was a chuckle. “Or leave ’em. Probably not worth search and rescue.”
Reaching the base of the stairs, Roscoe heard the guard sigh. “Why do they always send us the fuckups?”
Chapter 2
A familiar sound jolted Roscoe awake.
Spigot’s alarm was the same StarCross-proprietary one—a mechanical whir, impossible to sleep to, accompanied by a flashing blue light—that had woken Roscoe every day of his decade at Granite Gorge Internship Academy. For a moment, he thought he was back in his dorm room. Then, the ache in his feet reminded him of the night before—and his new home.
He rolled out of bed and traced the noise to a thick, black communications wristband hanging from a hook on the wall—identical to the one the guard had worn the night before. Roscoe slipped it onto his left wrist, grateful that it covered his scab. His academy wristband had been featureless, but this one had two small external hooks. As soon as he noticed them, a tiny light flickered on, projecting a notebook-sized rectangle above his palm. Roscoe read the message:
Good morning, interns! Welcome to Spigot! Report to Auditorium at 1000 hours for orientation. Galley is open for breakfast—map of tunnels in your wristband.
He pecked the home-screen icon on the floating panel and pulled up a map of Spigot’s tunnel network—four wide, slanted lines intersected by four, evenly-spaced narrower ones. His location was marked near the second wide tunnel from the left. The first two tunnels were highlighted white, while the other two were grayed out and marked “Restricted.”
The map showed the stretch of narrow tunnel around Roscoe in light blue, while the areas across the wide main tunnel were pink. Do they still keep genders separate down here? he wondered.
Roscoe found a duffel bag of clothes beside his bed and got dressed, trying to recall anything from the night before, when the medics had dragged him to his room. He didn’t recognize the narrow hallway outside his door, or what lay at its end: the main tunnel, all bare, tan rock, lit by overhead LEDs, as wide as a six-lane highway, and already busy. Workers zipped past in both directions, driving squat electric carts. Their clothes and vehicles all had the light blue droplet outline he’d noticed on the exterior door. Looking down, Roscoe realized the same symbol was stitched on the breast of his jacket. He was a Spigot man now.
Roscoe followed his wristband down the tunnels to the galley, served himself SynCoffee and quinoa, and took a seat near the end of a long table. He recognized a few other interns from the submarine: Ana, from an academy in North Carolina; Darren, from Vermont; and Kevin, from Wisconsin. A wavy-haired, olive-skinned guy sat nearby, but Roscoe didn’t know him. None of them were talking, and Roscoe understood why.
Small talk at any of StarCross’s licensed Internship Academies was a minefield. Back at school, no one had wanted to let slip where they fell in the StarCross hierarchy—which Quarterly Crosscutting Aptitude Test (Q-CAT) percentile they’d fallen into, or whether they’d been on compound. Whenever a conversation edged in on one of those topics, a mention of “StarCross Silence” sufficed to shut it down.
Roscoe wasn’t complaining. After being called a “pounder” by the security asshole the previous night, Roscoe didn’t want anyone else to know he had taken StarCross’s now-banned, aptitude-enhancing compound.
To avoid even having to invoke the Silence, he focused on his wristband screen and skimmed through StarCross News Network (SNN). In the “Top Stories” tab, he found news about elections, legislation, and treaties—the business most governments around the world still made a show of carrying on, and SNN still dutifully reported. None of it mattered. For a generation now, StarCross had controlled the only reliable sources of electricity and water—outer space and Antarctica, respectively. To secure these two vital commodities, virtually every country had subsumed its constitution, statutes, and long-held notions about a government’s proper role into StarCross’s Updated Terms of Service. In the name of complying with those terms, nuclear arsenals were taken off hair-trigger alert; military hardware was either turned against refugees or mothballed; and the top-secret technologies that would have gone toward space exploration and warfare were locked away—all ready to be exchanged for more of StarCross’s water and energy.
