For each of us, those endless white plains with no real elevation, just the metal rope and the metal posts, had become a kind of repetition that hurt the brain, and the mind with it.
As I looked out across the white, I could not help seeing the impression of shapes in the wind, as if invisible entities fled by, carried there by gusts, unable to get purchase, swept up for hundreds and hundreds of miles before being dashed to the ground.
We did not give up, however.
IV.
About halfway to the nearest dome, amid a storm that reduced our progress incrementally and our line of sight to nothing, we came upon a peculiar tableau.
Six astronaut suits had fallen across and around the metal rope. With the flurries of snow, it took us, even with our powerful headlamps, some minutes to determine the nature of the obstruction. The six suits had been created for a humanoid species that must have had torsos like nine-foot-long slabs, attached to six limbs, three for walking. Their heads had flared out like thick fans. All the helmets were cracked open, and curled inside were the skeletons of some other intelligent species no larger than 40 or 50 pounds, possibly warm-blooded. With no sign of the original occupants.
After a brief analysis cut short by the conditions, we postulated that the warm-blooded species had worn breathable skin suits that, as they failed, required these intruders to seek shelter. All they could find were these six dead astronauts. Because we could discover no trace of the original occupants, the AI put forward the theory that this smaller species had eaten every scrap of the remains within the suits.
Then they too had perished, and in time, the AI suggested, something smaller would take up residence inside those bodies, then smaller still within those, and smaller still—
At this point, the captain attempted a soft reboot of the AI using a coded question. We could hear the concern in her voice.
Yet the AI continued undeterred, suggesting that we might find this to be a common situation. It might be replicated across the planet, depending on a system’s ability to break down and process meat that had not evolved alongside the devourer for millions of years. In all likelihood, most who attempted to eat in this way died soon after, poisoned by alien flesh.
The astrogator had taken to muttering inside his suit, off comms, as if he no longer thought we functioned as a team. No amount of castigation from the captain served to change his mind.
In the terse harshness of the captain’s reprimand, I recognized that her pain levels had spiked once again.
V.
The AI began to talk to us in strange alien voices at mile 700, as we labored through the snowstorm to hold onto the cables and thus the path. The AI warbled and chirped and howled and hummed and clucked. The AI spoke in voices like fossilized choruses of beasts, vast and harmonious. And in voices like dry grass spun to fire by the sun. And in voices like the dissolution of all things, darkness in the blinding white that scared me.