Cultivator
Universe

“We'd better hurry and find her,” Pataco responded, but his guide seemed to hesitate. Pataco considered other options. “We'll follow the prints in my ship. It's not designed for low-level flying, but it's not like there's anything to run into around here.” He sent the ship's call code.

The storm arrived first. The wind pounced and jabbed,and forced a frenzy of snow flakes against their masks. Pataco turned on the visor's headlight, only to find himself staring into a bright blinding swirl of whiteness. He snapped the light off again. “What do we do for better visibility?”

“Get inside.“

Very funny, Pataco thought unappreciatively. He turned his shoulders against the wind and clicked through all the visor view modes. Apparently Grusti hadn't been joking; he could make out the terrain, and his approaching ship, but nothing gave him a clear view of the footprints. “If there are no tracks, how will we find her?” The only answer was a flag on the visor readout indicating that a preliminary report from a sniffer was available. Instictively, he triggered the go ahead, and scanned the summary. His attention was caught by the words “Estimated time of death...” Time of death? Wasn't this just the preliminary analysis of the blood sample he'd picked up here on the ice? It was. He checked the readout again.

“Estimated time of death: 4742:09:11:25.” Six hours ago. That fit. Tskagaixtoric's report of a missed communication from the temperate zone had been forwarded to him less than an hour later—four and a half hours ago. She could have been dead for six hours. But how could the sniffer know that, when the a blood sample had clearly been deposited while she was still alive? Pataco found himself squinting down at the fading trail of footprints in the snow again. They approached in a wavering line out of the frenzy of white and lead away back into it.

Pataco felt a tugging at his sleeve, and turning saw that his ship had arrived. He staggered towards it, only to have the wind slam him against its side and drop him in the snow. Shakily he climbed back to his feet and thrust a mittened hand through the pull of the wind, toward the ship's hull. The hull shimmied sideways, smacking the hand aside. Then Grusti grabbed him and pulled him down as the ship whistled over their heads.

“Send it away,” Grusti advised, “before it kills us both.”

“Send it away?” Pataco repeated, as he brushed the snow off the front of his mask. “We need it to get out of here.” But even as he spoke the ship dipped and bucked, sending him scrambling forward on all fours through the snow to avoid another painful collision.

“Its not got either the mass or sufficient stabilizers to hold it steady in this gale.”

Pataco eyed his wildly gyrating ship through the rents in the snow filled air, and gave the order for it to head upwards a couple kilometers and hover. “Now what?” he demanded. “We can't stay out here. I'm starting to get cold.”

Actually he had been starting to get cold ever since he had left the residence, but had been concentrating on the investigation and hadn't really noticed. Now he did. His fingers and toes ached, there was an icy sliver of air that had found its way pasted the edges of the mask and was slipping like sandpaper across his neck, and his nose was starting to drip.

Grusti dug at the snow with his mittens. "Ice," he concluded disgustedly. "Follow me. Stay close." In a half crouch, half crawl, he headed away into the blizzard. Pataco, imitating his awkward posture, followed as best he could, but once he stumbled enough to fall nearly a meter behind, and almost panicked when he realized that all he could see of his guide was a smudge of dark gray through the blurring white.

“Are we going far?” he finally asked. “I don't think I can feel my toes anymore.”

“Do you want to feel your toes?” Grusti snapped. Then he stopped, and Pataco stumbled into the back of him, and fell down in a pile of snow that wasn't nearly as soft as it looked.

Grusti had removed some kind of a tool from an exterior pocket, and was doing something to the ground, only Pataco couldn't see what. Couldn't see anything really. The surrounding whiteness was now a surrounding grayness, and he was beginning to wish he couldn't feel his fingers either. The creeping coldness seemed to have sunk in all the way to the bone.

“Your visor recording,” Grusti told him. “Turn it off.”

“What?” Pataco tried to stare through the wind driven snows at his guide, but he saw nothing. “I'm on a case.”

“Not right now you aren't,” Grusti answered.

He was not on the girl's trail, the visor cam was picking up nothing but an all-encompassing white death, and he wasn't really in a position to argue with his native guide. So he deactivated the autosave. “It's off now.”

“Good.”

Something, Pataco hoped it was Grusti, grabbed his boot and began tugging him forward, and then, downward. He descended into darkness, and landed with a jolt that returned sensation to his toes in a most agonizing manner.

A light switched on. Pataco blinked. Wiped the snow off his mask, and then blinked again. Belatedly he remembered to switch on his own light, which illuminated a small shower of snow that drifted down from above, bounced off dark curving walls that appeared to be made out of mud encased in ice, and then stopped at the reclining form of a smooth-skinned, bipedal creature just over a meter tall, lying on a bier of frozen mud. It had large wide feet and long webbed fingers, was wearing a crude utility belt of leather, and would have looked like it was sleeping, except for the sheen that showed that it too was encased in ice.

“This is what you wanted to stay off the record,” Pataco said at last. “Clethaci are Fenris' only surviving native land animal?”

Grusti grunted. He held out a couple of small oblong shapes. “Heat packs. Push one in each boot down to the toes. The boots have heating circuits, but these'll warm you faster.”

Pataco removed his mitts so that he could push the heat packs further into his boots, and discovered that the sudden warmth hurt just as badly as the cold, but he didn't take his eyes off the creature.

“You can kill yourself by warming your toes too fast,” Grusti explained. “But you weren't that cold yet.”

“What is it?” Pataco demanded.

Grusti's only reply was to hold out a ration bar. “Eat. Your body needs fuel.”