Aspect Hunter

And so the yak and I rode out of the deep past to save the world from ice. Again.

As usual, we Associated deep among the glaciers, high up in the accumulation area of a new icefield. On distant ridges snow fell thick and fast as the glacial anima called down more ice to its banner. They were preparing for war. It was, after all, why the yak and I had been called.

We sat on an abandoned railway platform all hung with icicles, the tarmac slippery with frost. It was clear and crisp here, even as blizzards raged to the north and south, the snow held back by residual energies from the Association. Phosphorescent lines of force still curled around the cast-iron legs of the benches ranged along the platform. Overhead, the sky was the peculiar pearl colour that belied ice high in the wind. A sign half-buried in a snowdrift said ATOOMB. It seemed appropriate, despite the dyslexia.

The yak slumped on one of the benches and sighed as I paced up and down. The tracks were deserted in both directions. This mountain town was frozen, dead. The telegraph wires were forearm-thick with a coating of rime. Windows in abandoned shops glittered as a cracked pedestrian crossing sign dangled from a cord slung across the street. The sign carried its own little burden of snow.

It would be ironic indeed if, in order to help those who had summonsed us, we had to fight our way through miles of ice and white-demons just to get to the muster point, only to turn around and fight our way back up the hill. I stood on the edge of the platform and looked out to the north east. A line of dark ice lay there, beyond the reach of the early morning sun, drowning the old landscape.

“Lokboksfrost, apparently,” I said to the yak, glancing over my shoulder. The yak grunted and chewed the cud. Its arms were folded under its massive shaggy chest, the killing talons hidden beneath great curls and snarls of wool. But I knew it was always alert; woe betide any white-demon that should choose to jump out at us now.

Lokboksfrost. I rolled the name around in my mouth. He had nicknames, of course: the Widowmaker, the Great Darkness, the Big L. All cliché. But I could hardly blame the folk who named him, the folk he’d chased out of these mountains. How were they supposed to respond to thrice ten million tonnes of malevolent ice? Poetry? Was it fair of me to expect great lyricism of these people, as their homes were crushed under his blister-drop and his white-demons slaughtered their loved ones?

He was a new glacier, was Lokboksfrost, and angry for it. He had much to prove to the Rebel Princes and the Glaciation Front. Word had it that the Fenris Wolf in Europe wouldn’t even receive Lokboksfrost’s emissaries. And great Kuf of the Canadian Shield thought of him as nothing more than a frozen puddle, a piddling little glacier barely three hundred kilometres long. As for Long Lambert and the Antarchs, it was true they took at least a passing interest, since Lokboksfrost was the first to breach the great dry continent – Australia – and bring ice to its warm hills. But it was a condescending and patronising interest. Antarctic ice didn’t think the Widowmaker had the will to march on any human holding. He lay poised on the edge of one of humanity’s most important cities, which stretched glittering across the plain of Albion only a hundred kilometres to the east, but still the Cold Husband and the Cold Wife thought him too weak to make any move.

They were very wrong.

The USGS saw it. They had their headquarters in Greater Sydney now, ever since so much of North America had been buried under the Laurentide ice sheet and the Cordilleran marched southward toward their western cities. In Greater Sydney, a small USGS detachment on Kent Street had quickly grown into a regional office, then a regional headquarters, and now word had it that all USGS operations were launched from the sixth floor of Veritas Tower, and that the goldwire nexus itself was quartered there.

I touched the goldwire threaded through my right ear and listened for the whispers of the USGS. The goldwire was silent, any cogent energy dampened and drained by the massive power of Lokboksfrost’s anima and the lingering backwash of the Association.

The yak and I were immune to both, of course. The yak, because it had been designed for these conditions and me because... well, that was the mystery. And that was why the USGS had so much use for me.

A great curtain of icicles shivered on the morning breeze and then fell from the station eaves to smash on the rails with a sound like the yak in a china shop.

The animal in question pricked its ears and looked east. There was nothing yet, but the rails began to sing, shedding frost and rime as whatever approached sent vibrations shrieking toward the station. More icicles fell, but we ignored them; they were just dead ice, after all.

A curve obscured the tracks to the east, but shortly an armoured train came barrelling around the bend, white-demons clinging to the roof and trying to drive killing spikes of self-assembled ice through the roof and into the brains of whoever had come to fetch me. The train flashed its fog light and sounded its horn. I could see generators throwing a static field around the squat, gunmetal locomotive and the single carriage, designed to counter the confounding effects of Lokboksfrost’s fright-lights and anima.

A chainsaw blade, specially reinforced, snarled through a slot in the side of the carriage and sliced one white-demon neatly through the waist. The creature fell away, then deftly leapt up onto its hands and skittered across to where its legs lay spasming in the snow. It reached out, held its pelvis to its waist and was whole again, just like that. That was the problem with these damn things.

The train sounded its horn again. I must confess, the yak and I were surprised by its sudden appearance, and stood there slack-jawed. It was so unlike the USGS to use something like this. Attack choppers and tanks were more their style.

A flamethrower on the front of the locomotive belched, and a clinging white-demon melted like snowflakes on a summer breeze. The tiny mind-prism fell away, pulsing blue, into a snowdrift. Seconds later, the white-demon reassembled itself by fusing the snow into new blades and limbs, and leapt back into the fray.

“Come on,” I said to the yak. We leapt too, with our own blades akimbo.

The train dropped the brakes and came shrieking to a halt on the platform in a shower of sparks. More white-demons came charging up from the east, but they took one look at the yak and me whirling into combat and abandoned their... well, companions is the wrong word but it’ll have to do here. They fled back into the mist. Six white-demons remained, focused on peeling the sheet metal from the carriage walls like someone opening a can of sardines. The howling was constant, and terrible.

The first one I reached seemed surprised to see me. It raised a bladed limb and I shattered it with a well-placed strike from my right-hand ice-pick, and used my left-hand pick to spike the creature squarely in what passed for its face and gouge out the tiny mind-prism from between its ghostly blue eyes. With a practiced flip I dropped the pick and let it dangle from its wrist-strap, snatching the mind-prism before it could fall. As I crushed the tiny black-blue crystal, the white-demon – pardon the pun – froze, turned to snow, and scattered to powder on the light morning breeze.

In the meantime, the yak had engaged two of the larger specimens and led them in a cruel dance across the platform, parrying, jabbing, always seeming to fall back. Triumphant, the white-demons pressed what they saw as their advantage, only to have the yak gore one to pieces and shatter the other with a double palm strike from those terrible talons. Hooves flashed out, crushing the mind-prisms before the white-demons could reassemble.

The train’s flamethrower took care of two of the remaining monstrosities, and I was quick to trample the mind-prisms before they could cause any more mischief. The last white-demon stood atop the carriage, hauling on some kind of vent covering, only to explode into shards and fragments as the yak somersaulted into it. A click of flat, ruminant teeth and a gulp, and the mind-prism began its long and painful journey through the yak’s complicated set of stomachs.

There was a curious silence. Ice spun in the wind, outraged. The glacier, never far away, grumbled and shuddered, no doubt throwing more white-demons over the edge of the escarpment to run us down and skewer us. Time, I thought, to head out.

From the side of the carriage came the sound of bolts being drawn, and then a door slid back revealing the bruised and bloody face of my old adversary John Quick, of the USGS.

“Oh great,” I muttered. The yak peered over the top of the carriage and rolled its eyes.

“This train is express to the city,” said John Quick with an insufferable grin. “And given today’s travel conditions, we do mean express.”

Then the heat island from my recent Association collapsed, and the blizzard hit us like a jackhammer. Fat barbed snowflakes beat at my head, trying to suck the life-force from me, collecting on my beard, singing me to lay down in the snow and sleep, sleep forever. I easily shrugged off the effects of the anima, and cocked an unimpressed eyebrow at the flaring fright-lights racing through the streets of the town to engulf the abandoned station in great curls of glowing red and green and ghostly blue.

“Welcome to 1986,” said John Quick as the yak and I clambered awkwardly onto the train. “Coffee?”

“You’ve just Dissociated from 11,000 BC?” asked John Quick, as the train finished a complicated shunting procedure to turn itself around. Now we clattered eastward toward the lowlands and the city, static field running at full strength now and bouncing white-demons off into snowdrifts even as they leapt on us from the embankments. We were, to all intents and purposes, immune. Still, the carriage rocked alarmingly.

“That’s right,” I said, as a mighty gorge filled with ice flashed by to the north. I could see the tiny figures of white-demons clustered around crevasses below the equilibrium line. There were thousands of them. Perhaps tens of thousands. Lokboksfrost had been busy in my absence.

“What’s happening back then? I forget,” said Quick, sipping at his coffee.

“Megafloods,” I said, by way of explanation. My mind filled with a brief but intense image of the yak and I clinging to the side of an uprooted Californian redwood as it barrelled toward a set of falls a thousand metres high. “Wild days.”

“I can imagine,” Quick replied. He let the steam from his mug work at his frostbite. “How long since you’ve been back here?”

I shrugged, my own coffee mug empty on the tray table in front of me. “Seven years real time, three years subjective.”

The yak sat across the aisle, filling both seats. It was oiling my ice picks, making sure the clips and carabiners that attached the stout titanium handles to the triple-weave nylon wrist-straps were free of ice and rust. Since the yak needed no weapons of its own, it always volunteered to clean mine.

I sighed. “So what’s the deal Johnno? I mean, I guess it’s obvious why I got the call, given the state of the landscape, but why did they send you? Last time you saw me I recall you gave a speech along the lines of the USGS being able to fight its own battles. Freelancers, you said, were surplus to requirements.”

Quick held out his hands and shrugged.

“That was ten years ago. Things change. You know how it works. Maybe back then I didn’t show the right degree of respect for the mighty Aspect Hunter -“ he said it with just the wrong amount of barely-concealed disdain, “- but the situation is different now. All this you see around you is less than a decade old. He’s done all this, in just eight years.”

I looked out at the frozen landscape around me. We flashed along the lines, the flamethrowers melting ice as we went, the great metal cow-catcher on the front of the locomotive scattering the boulders that some of the more enterprising white-demons had rolled onto the tracks. We were unstoppable, but we felt small and vulnerable as we passed through town after abandoned town. Dead places with names like Hazelbrook and Faulconbridge, Warrimoo and Lapstone. Mountain towns where cheery little cottages had once filled the air with the safe smell of woodsmoke and children had built snowmen on street corners. All silent now, frozen under tonnes of ice, the ruins picked over by white-demons and the occasional wandering glacial champion. Oh yes, there were seracs abroad in those silent streets, and I had a feeling the yak and I would cross paths with one soon enough.

“So first you reject my help,” I said thoughtfully, “and now I get the call, because you’ve lost control. You’ve failed to keep your house in order, Johnno, is that it?”

Quick was playing a game. I could tell from the way his watery green eyes narrowed imperceptibly at this barb. This was all for show. He no more had a newfound approval of me than I had a newfound respect for him. This was a man who favoured the toys and tricks of USGS science over the old, tried and tested ways of fighting ice. So far, every one of his marvellous devices had failed him, and taken more than a few good field researchers down into dark crevasses besides. He was pompous, ridiculous and dangerous.

“Good coffee though,” I said, tapping my empty mug.

Quick clicked his fingers and a terrified research assistant ran down from the far end of the carriage with an urn wobbling on the end of her shaking arm. She tried to keep one eye on the bulky mass of the yak as she poured me another cup.

“Oh don’t worry about that thing,” I said, “it’s harmless.”

The yak bared its flat teeth and then gave a complicated cough as it spat up the cud and resumed chewing. The research assistant fled back to the train’s galley.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Never learnt her name,” Quick replied, which was typical.

“Look,” I leaned forward. “How about we drop the charade? I can only imagine that you agreed to collect me as some part of some condition of some plot you’ve hatched in your continuing quest for glory. But that’s not important to me. Thanks for picking us up and all that, you’ve saved us a long and unpleasant walk, but I’m not here to take a supporting role in some power play you’ve set up. I’m the Aspect Hunter. That’s what I do. I hunt glaciers and the yak hunts with me. We don’t play politics.”

Quick raised his eyebrows.

“Well then,” he said. And that seemed to be it. But then he went on. “All right, since you’re so fond of plain speaking, I’ll say that my coming to get you wasn’t a condition or a punishment from the steering committee. I came of my own accord. I wanted to see you first, to explain. I want you to give me a chance to use my new weapon against ice.”

I rolled my eyes, I just couldn’t help it.

“This time it’s different!” hissed Quick.

“It’s always different!” I moaned. “And it always turns to crap the moment you deploy your cockamamie doohickie against a real glacier. Remember the napalm bombs? Remember the thermal inversion field generator? Remember, dare I say it, the yak?”

The yak looked up from its knitting and nodded. It remembered.

“This is different,” insisted Quick.

“Oh really?” I asked. “What is it?”

By the time we rolled into Central towards mid-morning, John Quick and I were no longer speaking. As the train lurched to a halt in front of a platform of USGS dignitaries who regarded its scarred and pitted armour plating with expressions of horror, the yak and I threw down our cards and leapt from the train.

It was oppressively hot here deep among the lofty towers of Greater Sydney, almost six degrees above zero. I peeled off my overjacket as I shouldered my way through the crowd.

“Where’s Lawler? Take me to Lawler!” I demanded.

The USGS director stepped out from behind a local government nobody and extended his hand.

“Aspect Hunter,” he said, “I’m so glad you could -“

“What’s this crap about letting Quick fool around with the weather?” I cried.

Director Phil Lawler had just managed a good look at the remains of the train.

“What the devil happened to the -“

Quick popped up like some kind of scrawny jack-in-the-box.

“Director, you really must explain to this time-skipping meddler that -“

“Oh don’t give me that!” I spluttered. “Of all your schemes, Quick, this one really takes the big biscuit. The possibility of disaster and the potential scale of that disaster is -“

“I hardly think you’re in a position to make any comment on a system you’ve never even -“

“Gentlemen please!” spluttered Lawler. “Look at that gouge in the side of the locomotive there! Are either of you hurt?”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“Ah, yes, well. John, are you hurt?”

“Just my pride, Director, just my pride. If I could explain, this oaf has already -“

“I’ll give you oaf!” I cried, and went to punch him in the mouth. The yak, with animal wisdom, gently stayed my hand. The whole exchange had caused some consternation among the crowd, but naturally none of them wanted to get too close. Most probably hadn’t realised that putting a goldwire call through to me also meant calling the yak. Most of them probably hadn’t realised a creature like the yak even existed. It was an enigma, that was for sure. A battle beast from the old wars, so the pamphlet said, with a six-foot horn span and terrible talons where the hooves should have been. Some wild-eyed geneticist had cooked it up in an embattled Canadian lab at Quick’s mad request, and now here it was. Once, it had been barely bigger than a pony. Now it was massive, bulked up by an impressively intense gym routine to make it more than a match for any white-demon, and a serious threat even unto the seracs, those mightiest warriors of ice.

Quick glowered at me. I glowered at him.

“Why don’t we retire to my office?” Lawler suggested, with typical diplomacy.

“But Director,” hissed a flunky, “what about the antipasto?” He waved to where some kind of reception brunch or morning-tea had been assembled beneath a hastily strung up length of bunting.

“The devil take your light finger food and your internationally acclaimed string quartet too!” cried Lawler. “We have a war to fight gentlemen and now our most potent weapon has arrived we must plan our attack!”

“Second most potent,” corrected Quick.

“That remains to be seen.”

“But Phil!” I spluttered, secure in the knowledge that only I, of all the people who crawled across the face of this rapidly freezing little ball of slush we called a planet, could get away with calling him that. “Messing with the weather! It’s a recipe for absolute disaster!”

“Or absolute victory,” insisted Quick. “The REALBOW is a sophisticated piece of software, Aspect Hunter. Not a blunt instrument.” He looked pointedly at the yak. The yak looked pointedly at him.

“Bring the car,” Lawler said to the flunky. We marched as a loose but loudly arguing gaggle through the vaulted grand concourse of the station. Other trains – steam and diesel now that Lokboksfrost had frozen the power stations in the mountains – shunted and hissed on other platforms, disgorging passengers who were trying to get on with what passed for normal lives even as ice crowded in the hills to their east and the days got colder and colder.

Outside the station, a line of black cars waited in the street, exhaust billowing in the cold air. Lawler’s car had a couple of little flags on the bonnet, the crossed rock hammers of the United States Geological Survey. The USGS was the supreme power now, bigger than governments, bigger than the military. Of all organisations, only they understood ice. And of all the USGS, only I really understood ice. The goldwire in my ear tingled as it mated itself to the local network. I was online now, able to instantly requisition any field equipment I needed: snowploughs, dog teams, corers, GPS pings and last-ditch napalm strikes on high concentrations of white-demons. A thousand gallons of jellied petroleum would slow even the biggest attack force. Only for a while, sure, but five minutes is an eternity when you’re crawling along the dark moraine of some cruel glacier of evil name.

Inside, the car was plush and warm. The convoy spooled through the city streets in the chilly shadow of the great towers. Beyond, small, mindless icebergs clustered in the harbour, butting up against the pylons of the bridge. Icicles dangled from the sails of the Opera House and pack ice choked the little bays and inlets where once people had eaten fresh salmon at seafood restaurants. Weddell seals honked on the rocks around the promontory at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair.

It was funny, I thought, the hairs which humans would split to convince themselves that they hadn’t already lost the war against ice. Sure, their summer city was groaning under its eight hundredth consecutive day of frost, but as long as no actual glacial ice covered the wide boulevards and heaters still burned in the lofty towers, the war was still being hotly contested. Hot. Now there was a word that didn’t get much use, nowadays.

Eventually, the convoy pulled into the lee of the looming bulk of Veritas Tower. The charming little cafe at street level was closed now, frost heavy on the folded umbrellas and the tables slippery with ice. But lights burned brightly on all levels as telecommunications companies and PR agencies and insurance brokers and of course the USGS worked day and night to redefine the meaning of stoicism and determination, keeping up appearances, getting on with life.

Still squabbling like children, we hauled ourselves out of the cars, into the lift, up to level six and into Phil Lawler’s spotless office. Pride of place on the wall behind his desk was an enormous photograph of the last human team ever to survive a winter in Antarctica. The expressions on the faces of those six men and four women were something to behold.

“Right!” said Lawler, sitting in his chair and motioning Quick and me to take a seat. The various flunkies and hangers-on found themselves quietly but firmly ushered back out into the corridor by the yak. It stood at the door, arms folded, chewing the cud.

“Let’s start from the beginning,” said Lawler.

Quick and I both opened our mouths.

“I’ll start from the beginning,” said Lawler. “Aspect Hunter, we’ve called you here to ask for your help in a final assault on the glacier that now threatens the city. His name, as you will have been briefed, is Lokboksfrost. He’s a conglomerate of new glaciers that have formed in the Gross, Megalong, Jameson and Hawkesbury valleys. You will have seen on your maps that he seems to have chosen to invade the Albion plain from out of the Hawkesbury. For a while we thought he would come through the Warragamba dam, but ironically enough, by freezing our main water supply he has created a vast plug of mindless ice directly in his path. So Hawkesbury it is.”

I expected some kind of cool animated map to unfurl from a hidden compartment in the ceiling, but Lawler just went on, assuming correctly that I could picture the landscape in my mind, or call it up on the goldwire if I became disoriented.

“We have two courses of action open to us,” Lawler continued. “Either we do what we have always done – send a force to the equilibrium line, where you and the yak will smash your way down to the mind-prism and destroy it – or we use Professor Quick’s new weather control program.”

I made a small whimpering noise in the back of my throat.

“Now, John, I think it is an appropriate time for you to brief us properly on this new device.”

“It’s not a device,” said Quick, “it’s software. The really big weather algorithm, which someone on my team abbreviated to REALBOW...”

I tried to figure this one out in my head, but couldn’t.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“No, it’s one of those acronyms that don’t really stand for... that is to say... well, REBWA wasn’t considered very... oh look it doesn’t matter! The important point is that with the REALBOW we can generate very powerful, localised hot-weather events by channelling lines of quantum flux within the atmosphere to bend isobars, change air pressures and focus intense sunlight on an area as small as fifty metres across.”

“Sounds like bullshit to me Johnny,” I quipped.

“Now now,” warned Lawler.

“But what does he mean ‘bend isobars’, they’re just lines drawn on a chart!”

“It’s a metaphor you prehistoric putz!”

“Gentlemen SIT DOWN!” screamed Lawler. We subsided.

“The obvious advantage to the REALBOW,” Quick continued smoothly, “is that we can burn the mind-prism from five hundred feet up, safe in a helicopter. No field personnel need risk their lives climbing all over icefalls and white-demon lairs. And can I remind you of the rumours of seracs coming down out of the high hills to spread terror and mayhem? Wouldn’t it be fine to avoid all of that?”

“Oh it’d be fine indeed Johnny,” I snarled. “But it’s a fantasy! Think this through: you say this REALBOW is just an algorithm. Remember, if you will, what ice did to the US military’s fledgling post-war global information system, the so-called interweb. Ice can control information, Quick, and it can control this REALBOW of yours. Can you imagine the kind of destruction a glacier like Lokboksfrost could unleash if he could control the freaking weather? Even considering this is insane.”

“But...”

“I know you and the USGS have only had thirty years of subjective experience with ice in its current manifestation, I know that the International Geophysical Year in ‘56 and ‘57 was the first time you realised glaciers were alive and full of menace, but remember this: I have been hunting these things for thousands of years. I am old, Quick, and I am wise. I have seen cultures rise and fall on the tide of ice and I have seen every crazed, wild, and ill-considered human plot to defeat the glaciers ever conceived.”

“Even a system to control the weather?”

“Let me tell you about this one night in medieval Florence. Da Vinci said to me -“

“Gentlemen please,” Lawler interrupted, “this is getting us nowhere and anyway,” he steepled his fingers on the top of his desk, “the goldwire informs me that question of the REALBOW has just become moot. The steering committee has voted against its deployment. I’m sorry John.”

Quick’s mouth made a line like a tiny fissure in a thirty metre wall of white ice.

“That’s disappointing,” he said.

I tuned my own goldwire into the final moments of the committee meeting. They were all congratulating themselves on a job well done, a decision well made. For once, I thought they’d made the right one.

“Look,” I said to Quick, letting a conciliatory note creep into my voice, “full marks for trying, okay John? No one blames you for wanting to reduce the risk and figure out some definitive way of beating the ice. But take it from me: there just isn’t one.”

His eyes were narrowed so far it was a wonder the man could still see.

“Quite,” he bit off. “If you gentlemen would excuse me.”

“Of course,” said Lawler, and yeah, he was pretty damn patronising. “Go and prep your field team John. We ride out in just a few hours.”

Quick nodded tersely and stalked from the room, almost bumping into the yak as it leapt aside from the doors. The various sub-directors and committee chiefs clustered in the corridor listening at the keyhole reeled back in surprise. Then the yak shut the doors again. I took a deep breath.

“Okay,” I said. “So, let’s plan this attack huh? And could we make it snappy? I’d kind of like a few minutes with Ellen before we ride out.”

My relationship with Ellen had always been awkward because on the one hand she was Phil Lawler’s daughter and on the other hand I knew that in the high future she would rule an interstellar matriarchy called Auntish and thrice three-score billion people would call her their leader. And ten billion more would call her conqueror.

Her fiery obsession with liberating the homeworld from the persistent grip of ice was renowned up there in the future, so it was always odd to find her here, oblivious of her eventual fate, calmly handing out field kits from the USGS storeroom, known of course as the Q.

“How do,” I said with a smile, leaning nonchalantly against the doorframe. She turned around, all pretty and dark-haired, in the middle of cleaning an ice-proof compass. Her eyes were green like John Quick’s, but bright.

“Hello,” she said in the kind of tone that sent a shiver up my spine. “Dad ‘warned’ me you were in town. How’s the yak?”

It grunted that it was indeed fine. She walked over and ran a hand through its coarse pelt. To my knowledge, she was the only other person in the universe the yak let touch it. She favoured me with another smile. I had last seen her eight or nine months ago, subjective, when she had been seconded to a USGS detachment rolling out sensor arrays in the Upper Palaeolithic, and now here she was again, back in the present.

“Bad business, this glacier,” I tipped my chin in the direction I thought Lokboksfrost lay.

“Well, you know ice. Dad’s especially worked up over this one. I’ll assume he told you all about the REALBOW, at length.”

“You got it. So did Quick.”

“And I assume instead of using the REALBOW, Dad’s having you go up there by yourself, to challenge the ice, as usual?”

“Two for two.”

We stood in silence for a moment.

“And I guess you won’t take any of the new weapons I’ve invented?”

I sighed. This was an age-old argument. I could hardly blame her; she was human after all. It was ever in their nature to tinker and create, to make new things, to think up new ways of tackling problems and challenges. And I could never properly explain to them why ice was immune to all trickery. A bold declaration of war and two stout picks, that was all ice could understand, and thus that was all to which ice was vulnerable. Over the years I had replaced iron with steel, then steel with aluminium and titanium, sure, but the design remained the same, the essential weapon unchanged. As for new toys, a million microwave scatterguns and napalm slingers couldn’t help me.

Ellen looked sadly at the rack full of gleaming new devices she’d spent hours building from scraps around the workshop. Field packs were lined up on a table near the door, but they too were useless to me.

“Okay,” she said sadly. “But I’ll still keep building them, right? I’ll still keep inventing for you. Maybe one day you’ll try some of them out.”

“It’s the thought that counts,” I smiled.

“Look, maybe just for me you’d take one thing? It’s just a little thing, it won’t get in the way. It goes on one of your picks.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out some kind of metal box with a stout brace on it. I was intrigued, despite myself.

“What’s all this then?” I asked.

“It goes on your pick,” she motioned for my left-hand pick, my dominant hand. I unclipped the carabiner and handed it over. The yak had cleaned it well; the titanium gleamed under the fluorescent lighting in the Q.

Ellen slipped the brace over the handle and slid it up until it rested against where the blade of the pick was bolted to the titanium handle. Then she flipped out an electric screwdriver and tightened the brace against the handle. She swung the pick a couple of times and then handed it back to me.

“It hardly changes the balance at all,” she said.

“What does it do?” I asked, looking closer. There was a button, easily reached by my thumb if I held the pick high up the handle, like I did when delivering a shattering blow.

“There’s a powerpack in the box, rigged to pump several hundred amps of juice into the blade when you press the button. The blade will superheat in about half a second, while an insulator on the brace prevents the handle from getting too hot. At four hundred degrees, it should slice through pretty much anything.”

“Actually that is a neat idea,” I said, giving the pick a couple of experimental swings to confirm the box didn’t tip the balance. It was fine. I clipped it back onto my harness, and adjusted the straps across my hips, from habit.

“It’s a one-time thing though,” she said. “Once you’ve set it off, the blade will stay hot for a few minutes, less if you happen to plunge it into the frigid heart of a mind-prism. But after that you need to bring it back here for recharging. Sorry I don’t have a second one for you, I only thought up the idea last night.”

“It’s awesome,” I said, genuinely touched. It was still a curious feeling, having the future ruler of the known galaxy, Aunty Ellen herself, lovingly build instruments of death for me in the wee hours.

“Tell me about my future again,” she asked quietly.

I sighed. “You’ve told me on more than one occasion not to tell you anything,” I admonished.

“Not yet I haven’t,” she pointed out.

“Yes but you will,” I insisted. “No, we have to focus on the ice. I can smell that bastard planning something big. He’s going to surge on the city, I know it. And I have to stop him.”

Ellen regarded me like she wanted to maybe throw her arms around me and kiss me full on the mouth, but was held back by the curious way I always regarded her: part brotherly love, part fierce all-consuming passion, part abject gibbering terror. Whenever I looked at her, sure I saw Ellen Lawler, green-eyed and dark-haired and sweet and true, but I also saw Aunty Ellen, howling imperatrix of the western spiral arm, sweeping down out of Scorpio with her hair burning like a thousand supernovas and worlds crumbling to ash in her wake. It was, as I’ve said, a hell of a relationship.

I was her champion on this slush-ball of a planet. And whenever a glacier fell beneath my blade, another would spring up half a world away and I would thread my way through time and space to face it too. Over and over, on and on.

“When you fight the ice,” Ellen asked after a while, “do you ever feel like you’re one of those circus guys spinning plates on poles, except that whenever you move to set a plate spinning another plate on the far side of the stage falls with a terrible crash and the audience boos you?”

“All the time,” I said.

Before an assault, I always tried to give myself a precious five minutes in the USGS coffee room, nursing an espresso, my mind a studied blank. The yak would stand or slump in the corner, picking its nails, bored and irritable and ready to fight but I would ignore it. It had travelled with me for the better part of ten thousand years, and I had long grown desensitised to any attempt at emotional blackmail. But make no mistake: it had my measure also.

So there I sat in a low chair, head slung back, looking at without seeing the corporate-issue foam ceiling tiles and sprinkler outlets that had never been tested, when Lawler burst into the room with such violence that even the yak jumped.

“It’s Quick,” he spluttered. “That no good underhanded filibustering lie-mongering son of a bitch has taken his team, two choppers, the REALBOW deployment pods and has gone to launch against the glacier.”

“Oh for the love of fine weather!” I cried. The yak bellowed its mighty battle-cry in consternation. Bits of foam fell off the ceiling and the sprinkler system activated.

As we stood there covered in black gunk from the untested pipes, I thought unkind thoughts about John Quick and his precious science project. He would doom us all, nothing surer.

“What a freaking idiot,” I managed.

“Oh that cold water feels good,” said Lawler, lifting his face into the spray.

“All right!” I snapped out of it. “Sign off on two teams, we’ll chase this bastard down and format his tape drive. Which direction did he go?”

“Somewhere over the REALBOW,” muttered Lawler.

“Cute but unhelpful,” I replied. “Forget Quick then, we’ll strike against the glacier now, smash him before Quick can do any damage. I’m off to the helipad. Since the sprinklers will have shut down the lifts, I’ll be five minutes getting to the roof. Make sure there’s something waiting by the time I get there.”

I nodded to the yak, or at least the great mass of wet hair and horns that must have been the yak, and we ran for the stairwell. Five minutes and sixteen flights later we erupted into a light sleet which was marginally worse than standing under the sprinkler system, but only marginally. A bright orange USGS Bell 212 sat on the pad, rotors spinning. The pilot gave me an almost comical thumbs-up through the plexiglass window.

The yak and I jumped in the back where two field agents sat hunched in extreme weather gear, field packs at their feet.

“Hey no pets!” yelled the stupid one, and then screamed as the yak swatted him easily out the other side of the chopper. It liked to ride a-port, facing forward. Groaning, the kid picked himself up and clambered back inside, rubbing his ribs. He resentfully buckled himself into the rear-facing starboard seat, and reached forward to slide the door closed.

“What’s your name kid?” I yelled as the chopper spun up and lifted off the top of Veritas Tower to swing away to the west.

“Steve,” he replied, “and that’s Alan.”

“Hi Al,” I yelled.

“Alan!” insisted Alan.

“Whatever!” I yelled. “So what are you guys, glaciologists?”

“I am,” said Steve, “Al is my research assistant! And by the way, I’m thirty-six.”

“Yeah, that’s why I called you ‘kid’.”

I became aware of the pilot waving at me from the cockpit, indicating by use of signs that there were radio headsets hung on pegs near our seats, so we wouldn’t have to shout.

“Welcome aboard sir,” he said as I plugged in. “I’m sorry but they didn’t brief us when we scrambled. We’re heading for the glacier right?”

“You got it,” I replied. “We were going to chase down a rogue field agent, but the glacier has shifted our priorities. I’m expecting it to surge at any moment. We’re gonna make a bold assault on the mind-prism, so head for the ELA.”

“The...?”

“Equilibrium line altitude, where the accumulation area gives way to the ablation area. The ice is still and silent there, and the mind-prism lies deep in the fluted caverns below. These eggheads here should be able to patch their T-maps through to your autopilot, is that right guys?”

“You got it!” said Steve brightly, fiddling with a veritable medusa’s-head of wires.

We flew out across the CBD and the inner suburbs, rotors settling into a steady whine.

“So what’s your doctorate on?” I asked Alan.

“Effects of human-emitted greenhouse gasses on global temperatures,” he muttered. A shy one, then, behind those thick geeky glasses.

“Eh?”

Steve leaned forward.

“Al has this crazy idea that CO2 and other gasses prevent long-wave radiation from escaping back into space. Like in a greenhouse, right? Generate enough of these gasses and the planet should heat up by several degrees. It’d be the ultimate weapon against ice.”

I thought it over.

“Crazy idea,” I said after a while. “You really think it might work?”

Alan shrugged. “It’s just a theory.”

“He calls it Global Warming. Pretty funny huh?”

I had to admit, it was a good one.

“Sir?” said the pilot. “Something’s happening up ahead. Some kind of weather phenomenon.”

Which of course was the kind of expression I had been dreading to hear ever since we took off. I unbuckled and slung myself into the co-pilot’s seat. We flew across the city through open air with a little sleet, kept clean and more or less clear by the heat island generated by all that human industry in the streets below. But up ahead, far closer than it should have been, the solid grey wall of a massive blizzard was chewing its way across the western suburbs.

“What is it?” breathed the pilot.

“It’s the icedamned REALBOW,” I grimaced. The heat island was clearly collapsing, borne down under the weight of all that snow and ice. Something had augmented Lokboksfrost’s anima and I had a pretty good idea exactly what was going on. I slung myself back into the passenger compartment.

“You guys know Professor Quick?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Steve. “He’s a great guy. Industrious, you know? Always working late hours, always trying to increase the body of scientific...” The chopper gave a fearful lurch as we plunged into the blizzard. Darkness enveloped us, and the rotors howled against the buffeting winds. The chopper thrashed like a cat in a bag, outraged at its loss of liberty and clear air.

“Pilot!” I shrieked.

“No worries sir, she should hold up. For a while anyway!”

I nodded at the yak. It closed its eyes. Born of ice and sworn to destroy it, the yak’s not-unimpressive anima forced a tiny bubble of clear air around the chopper and we flew on smoothly, like a borer through an expensive antique sideboard. Or an encysting parasite through the gullet of some gigantic beast. Steve goggled at the yak.

“How long can he keep that up?”

“It can keep it up all day if it has to,” I said mildly, inspecting my nails.

“The T-map is uploaded,” said Alan, who seemed completely unperturbed by the whole experience. The pilot shouted something vaguely affirmative, but otherwise incoherent, and the chopper swung to a more southerly heading. Lokboksfrost was in our sights now, that frigid bastard, and I would slice and dice him soon.

Alan had his hand to his goldwire. I tuned in myself, to find most of the USGS shouting at once about the collapse of the heat island over Greater Sydney and the sudden inrush of foul weather. Quick had screwed the pooch most definitively this time. I could guess the series of events: REALBOW gets deployed by an idiot who doesn’t understand how the glacial anima works. Glacier absorbs energy from REALBOW that Quick assumed would change the weather. Anima suddenly becomes bloated with power. Glacier surges. Heat island collapses. Millions die. My job was to prevent that final step.

“Clear the goldwire!” I howled. “This is the glacial assault force and we’re inbound to the ELA! I need weather updates and data for my eggheads here, and where the hell is my second team?”

The cacophony died down a little as the lesser field agents were shunted off the wire by the demonically efficient switchboard girls back at the nexus. Lawler spoke, his voice tinny and twisted by the impossible technologies from the future that powered the goldwire.

“The second team is en-route. We delayed it to load on an ice-drill.”

“I don’t need an icedamned drill, I need GPS specialists to track the surge, Phillip, and I need them five minutes ago!” I screamed.

“I can hear you perfectly well, you don’t need to shout.”

I glanced across to where Steve was smirking, hand to his ear. He went deadpan with remarkable speed.

“When will you understand that your toys will not work against ice!” I shrieked. “A bold declaration of war-“

“And two stout picks, yes yes, we’ve heard it all before,” snapped Lawler, probably sitting in his office staring at the terrible faces in that photo from Antarctica. “But just in case, Aspect Hunter. Do it for me. Or do it for Ellen.”

“Oh leave her out of it, for your own sake!” I cried.

Suddenly the yak’s anima faltered, and the chopper was thrown violently about the sky. We clung to what frequent flyers called the ‘Jesus handles’ until the yak regained control.

“What? What?” I demanded. “Is it the surge? Has the surge started?”

The yak just sat there, eyes shut. Had its brow not been covered in thick shaggy hair, I’m sure it would have been sweating.

“LANDSAT update,” said Alan quietly over the goldwire. We had priority at the nexus now, so we didn’t need to use the chopper’s intercom anymore. “Lokboksfrost has begun his surge. The terminus is moving east-nor-east at forty-eight point two klicks.”

“Forty-eight point two,” I muttered. Top speed. He was charging the city. The Widowmaker meant to finish it here, this afternoon. I glanced at my watch, for what it was worth. As far as humans were concerned, it was about three o’clock. Three hours of sunlight remained. After that, when night fell, we would all be as good as dead. “How far is he from the CBD?” I asked.

“Seventy four klicks,” Alan replied. Less than two hours. Well that was alright then. It would all be over one way or the other by nightfall.

“John Quick!” I yelled across the goldwire, “Can you hear me!”

A brief burst of static and then the nexus cut in. “We’ve no header on his signal sir,” said a pleasant female voice. “We should assume his node is offline.”

“Hell and low mercury,” I cursed. Then I composed myself. “This is a general broadcast. Is there anybody out there who knows anything about the REALBOW?”

“Yes,” came a small voice, male and reedy. Classic nerd.

“Who the hell is that?”

“My name’s Angelo.”

“And who are you mate?”

“I’m on the REALBOW team. I refused to go with Quick. He was angry, he said things about the Director. And about you sir. I didn’t like to-“

“Your loyalty is admirable but you can kiss my arse later. Do you have control of the REALBOW at this time?”

“No,” said Angelo in an even smaller voice.

“Brain farts!” I screamed. “Can you regain control of it? Does it work like that?”

“Maybe,” said Angelo.

“WEATHERSAT reports the Greater Sydney heat island has completely collapsed,” Alan looked up from his dials and readouts for the first time. “We’re wide open.”

I nodded. “Okay, okay it’s all good. Ladies, I want you to give Angelo complete mainframe access at his location, unrestricted. I want every last flop of processor power diverted to his station, he must regain control of the REALBOW, now.” The switchboard ladies voiced their acknowledgement and the quality of data from the goldwire flickered for a moment, as if titanic energies were being redirected.

“Wow,” said Angelo, wherever he was.

“Less awe, more saw,” I said as the chopper thundered onward. Was I scared? For myself, not at all. If it all went pear-shaped, the yak and I could simply Dissociate to the deep past, or the high future, safe and secure and beyond the reach of ice. But if we left now, Greater Sydney would fall. These brave boys in the chopper would be flung from the sky and diced by white-demons. And the families in their tidy suburban bungalows would all be turned into middle-class popsicles, grinning insanely into a frozen future. I had to stop it.

“I think,” said Angelo, and stopped.

“Think what, think what?” I demanded, well, screamed really.

“I think I have control. Limited control, but control. I can... I can give it orders. It’s back online. The extra power did it, I’m sure, but...”

“Do it!” I screamed. “Push the big red button, blast this icy bastard with everything you’ve got!” The chopper thumped and lurched in the storm. The yak began grinding its teeth.

“Okay!” bleated Angelo. “Attempting a full temperature inversion! Now!”

Nothing happened. Alan put his hand to his ear.

“You have to press ESC to execute the command,” he said quietly, “it’s weird I know but the mainframe’s kind of old and the guys who designed it were -“

Suddenly, the blizzard stopped. Just like that. The thick snow-clouds seemed to freeze in place and then break up into dazzling crystals of ice. The air was alive with it, singing with it, and slowly the ice spun apart and melted. We flew onward, through clear air, under a blue sky. The yak let out an enormous breath and slumped in its seat.

“Nice work,” I said absently as I stared out around us. Quick’s damned toy had really done it, dissipated the blizzard, the work of a moment. “Incredible.”

“Sir, Director Lawler is requesting goldwire resources be reconnected to the steering committee,” a switchboard girl said.

“Hell!” I blurted. “Angelo! Amazing mate, truly amazing. You’ll get the OAM for this, don’t you worry about it. Awesome job! Keep it up down there and don’t go home yet, we might need another shot.”

Angelo made some kind of stunned noise, and then his connection was redirected back to the boardroom.

“The glacier!” Lawler was screaming as we swept lower toward the mountains, “Where is the glacier?”

Then I saw him.

Lokboksfrost had surged, that was for sure, down out of the wide, U-shaped valley toward the suburbs. He was clearly bent for the CBD. From this altitude he looked like a worm, a great beast of legend, curled and menacing. Yet, he was no stranger here. He looked like part of the land. Along his moraine, where ancient sandstone cliffs shattered and trembled at his passing, he seemed extruded from the very rock. He was massive. He looked like a great weight on the Earth, his anima so bloated with energies it caused the clear air to ripple.

He was angry, I knew this. He was furious that his blizzard had been defeated and his armies ran naked under the harsh sun. I could see white-demons swarming from crevasses and spreading out across the frost-stung suburbs, breaking into houses and killing everyone they found. It was a massacre, but it was my job to stop it turning into a genocide.

“This is a big surge,” I muttered. The yak grunted in agreement.

“Too big,” Steve offered, leaning forward so he could see out our side of the chopper. “I know you’ll tell me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t this amount of speed and movement suggest that he’s brought the mind-prism down much closer to the terminus – sorry – blister-drop?”

He was right, of course.

“Pilot! Swing back to the east, we’re gonna land on the head of this damn thing!” I called. The pilot nodded, bless his mirrored shades. We all hung onto the Jesus handles again as he hauled on the stick. Now we rode up behind Lokboksfrost, pointed toward the frigid ocean, dropping lower toward his broad flank.

“Can you see it?” I asked the yak. It stared down as crevasses and screaming white-demons flashed below us, but it shook its head. I looked too, looked for the tell-tale curdle in the almost-invisible anima, the gyre that swung and swung around Lokboksfrost’s great mind-prism.

Then we saw it, a little to the side, beneath a smooth unbroken icefield. The humans couldn’t know what we were looking for, of course, but they followed our orders. They knew we were the only weapon now. The REALBOW had shot its load, so to speak, and had nearly killed everyone besides.

I looked at the yak. Now it nodded. We were in agreement – we would make our stand on that icefield.

“Bring it down to fifty metres!” I yelled to the pilot, checking my picks and harness. “No lower, without us down there to protect you, the anima will fry your brains!”

Steve and Alan were already looking put upon as Lokboksfrost tried to get inside their heads, and whisper to them that it was all pointless, that they should lie down, sleep, let it all flow across them. Ice, said the Widowmaker, was the great answer. Believe in ice, and all the pain and confusion and fighting would stop. Silence would reign. Silence and cold.

“That’s it!” yelled the pilot. The yak and I jumped...

...and four seconds later I hit the ice and rolled. It was cold, down here, and the anima raged. The yak landed behind me with an almighty woollen thud and when I turned to look it was squatting, supporting itself with one terrible hand and grinning. We had landed in the centre of the gyre, directly over the mind-prism. This was going to be easy.

I deftly flipped my pick from my harness into my hand and made a firm, definite first strike on the ice.

It was like striking diamond.

“Hmn,” I thought, and struck again, harder. The pick just bounced off. Finally, I swung at the ice without grace, without method, I just put my whole weight behind the blow. The pick bounced back so violently it hit me in the centre of the forehead.

I reeled, swearing. Gripping my pounding head I turned to look at the yak again. It screamed at the ice, stamped at it, gouged at it, without success. We were locked out. Deep beneath us, the glacier rumbled.

“Is he... is he laughing at us?” I screamed. To the north and south, I could see the suburbs passing us by as Lokboksfrost ploughed inexorably on toward the CBD, the USGS goldwire nexus, and ultimate victory.

“What is going on?” I demanded. Then it hit me. The REALBOW. The ice-damned REALBOW had, in raising the temperature so quickly and dampening the blizzard so precipitously, somehow channelled that energy into fusing the surface of the glacier. “We’ll need a bloody drill to get through it!” I bawled.

“Sorry, what was that?” asked Lawler, over the goldwire.

I stood there, picks dangling, and fumed. He’d been right. The cagey old bastard had been right. So, on the one hand I could give in to him and admit my blinkered short-sightedness, or on the other hand millions could die on the whim of my ego.

“Send ‘em in,” I said, deadpan.

“They were right behind you all the time,” Lawler replied, a little smugly.

A huge blue helicopter of obscure Russian design swept low across the glacier and thumped awkwardly onto a complicated set of skis. It slid toward us, sideways. The yak and I stood our ground. The chopper kept sliding. We stood. The chopper slid. I glanced at the yak, noted the dangerous glint in its eye, and took a casual step to the left to avoid some kind of protruding radio mast thing as the chopper spun through a half circle to a complete stop. The rotors whined, slowed, and cut out. The unearthly silence of the glacier returned, thrown into sharp relief by the forty-eight point two kilometre an hour slipstream created by Lokboksfrost’s continuing charge.

Through the plexiglass canopy, the pilot’s face was ashen.

“Dude!” screamed a USGS field agent in a patched snowsuit as he jumped wildly from the chopper’s side door. “Dude you nearly got totalled! Oh dude!” Behind him, three other men were dragging a coring rig out of the cargo compartment.

“Hello,” I said. “Who are you?”

“Dude, I’m totally Dave,” said Dave. “Your drill sergeant, geddit? Drill sergeant?” He looked at me and stopped grinning. “We’ll set up over here.”

He trudged away and started giving orders. I turned to make some quip to the yak, but it was looking the other way and pointing. Across the distant sastrugi, white-demons were charging us. About fifty of the damn things.

I swung my picks into my hands and took a battle stance. The yak stood beside me. Behind us, I could hear the drill team swearing as the motor stuttered, caught and then howled as the bit struck the unusually solid ice. All the yak and I had to do was hold off the onslaught long enough for the team to punch through into the fluted caverns of the mind-prism chamber.

The white-demons charged, and then, at less than fifteen metres, the front rank just peeled away and ran off. I blinked.

For a second, I didn’t see the serac. For a second, I thought it was part of the glacier itself, a great boulder of ice, jagged and impossible. Then it reared up and thumped a blade nearly a metre long into the ice right near my left foot. And then it roared.

The yak and I stared up at it, this ultimate manifestation of Lokboksfrost’s will, an enormous, semi-autonomous, self-assembling juggernaut of destruction. Half a dozen rusted ice-picks were embedded in its blocky flanks. It was kind of like a bear, if you asked a completely crazy person to draw a bear, and then made it out of ice.

The next swipe came from the right, and the yak managed a nimble back-flip to avoid getting disembowelled. I was less fortunate – the creature clipped me and sent me spinning into a snowdrift. I looked up to see a white-demon leaping for my throat, but all it got was an ice-pick in its own as I rolled out of the way. I struck again with my right hand and the mind-prism seemed to leap from the creature’s skull. To my amazement, it evaporated in the late afternoon sunshine.

“Oi!” I yelled to the yak, where it was sizing up the serac. “The REALBOW is still running! Knock the prism out and it’s as good as dead!” The yak nodded: message received.

Two more white-demons fell to my picks as I swung and slashed my way back toward the serac. There was a sort of arena of awe formed around the yak and the beast, the lesser white-demons watching the serac strike again and again. The ice beneath us cracked but held, curse it, and always the yak danced away.

I flung myself at the serac’s flank, but it just shifted its weight and I bounced off inelegantly. I looked up to see the drill team staring at the battle.

“Drill damn you!” I screamed.

“Dude!” Dave howled, but went back to work.

“Keep it away from the drill team!” I yelled at the yak. “And watch your back!”

The animal looked over its shoulder to see half a dozen white-demons leaping at once. The yak ducked and the serac’s next strike shattered them all as they glided in an unstoppable trajectory toward its terrible blades. Mind-prisms puffed into vapour under the REALBOW’s glare.

But the serac knew the drill was the real risk. It knew the yak and I were eternal and unstoppable, but by some quirk of fate it couldn’t hope to understand, we needed these puny humans to strike at its master. It shouldered the yak aside again and lumbered toward the drill team. They were staring again, even as the drill whined and bit at the ice, they stared at death charging them.

The yak leapt high and landed on the serac’s back. The animal raised one shaggy arm, talons gleaming, and struck hard at the beast’s shoulder. The serac’s right arm came away in a clean fracture, shards dancing, and there was John Quick, frozen in the serac’s heart, a grotesque trophy. He looked shocked, but defiant. I staggered backward at the sight of him. He had the REALBOW actuator clutched in one frozen hand.

The serac tumbled heavily onto its side. Screaming in anger, it lurched onto its hind legs, grabbed the yak with its remaining hand and flung my friend and silent travelling companion in a flat trajectory into the drill rig.

Men and machinery went in all directions. The vital drill bit, the vital, essential drill bit, went sailing off and disappeared down a crevasse.

Dave sat up in the snow, dazed, and said “Dude?”

“Go!” I screamed. “Flee!” He scrabbled to his feet and ran back toward the chopper, which was spinning up its rotors for a quick getaway, already leaving the ground. The pilot’s face was still ashen.

Howling with rage I charged the serac, swung my picks deep into its back and hauled myself up toward the misshapen chunk of ice it called a head. It moved, fast and powerful, trying to throw me, but the picks bit hard and I hung on. The yak was only a dozen metres away, rising to its feet, groggy and stunned.

The serac focused its attack, it saw the yak was vulnerable now, this one time, this one remarkable time. It could score a mighty victory for its master, for all ice, by felling the yak that had mithered them all for so long. It raised its remaining fist and swung, meaning to crush the yak and end its endless journey at last.

Then the whole icefield collapsed.

We fell. We fell through ice. The yak, the serac and I, tumbling through fluted caverns, through delicate sculpted halls, past the honeycomb iceforms where white-demons are born, through the fissures, into the deep blue heart of the glacier.

We landed, inelegantly, among shards of ice, on a great scalloped ledge. It was terribly beautiful. The air was still. All around us we heard the groans and splinterings of a surging glacier. We could feel the movement, sense it in our bones, but there were no visual cues. It was a cathedral of ice.

And there, flanked by great columns, the prize. Pulsing white and blue and green and casting great flickering waves of the anima, there stood the source of all Lokboksfrost’s malevolent energy – the mind-prism.

It was about the height of a man, six-sided, irregular but possessed of some strange symmetry that was both alien and terribly familiar. It was alive, intelligent. It saw us, here in its sacred temple. It was outraged. It directed more energy into the broken form of the serac lying near the yak on the precipice. I peered over the edge – it was easily two hundred metres straight down into blackness. Not even I could survive that fall.

I hefted my left-hand pick, taking the handle deep into my palm and fingering the button on the device Ellen had fitted. I saw it all stretched out before me – heat the blade, plunge it into the mind-prism, kill the glacier, end the assault, save the city. It was clear, like the air on a day after snow. I took a step forward, and another. The anima would not slow me. If a white-demon leapt, I would strike it down. I was unstoppable. I was the Aspect Hunter.

The yak screamed.

I spun around, to see the serac holding the animal out over all that nothingness, held there by the throat. I didn’t even stop to think or consider what it would mean, I just pressed the button on Ellen’s device and charged.

The superheated blade of the ice-pick sank easily through the serac’s ice-armoured forehead and with my other hand I snatched out the fist-sized mind-prism. Instantly, the creature was dead, mere dumb ice, and the yak was dangling from just another spar, like ten thousand spars it had dangled from before.

It whinnied, the first time I had ever heard it make such a sound. It grabbed at the spar with its talons, swung awkwardly around where it was held by the throat until it straddled what had once been the serac’s arm, and hacked itself free.

Moments later we stood before the mind-prism, scratching our heads.

We hit it with ice-pick and talon, but it wouldn’t crack. We kicked it, beat it, even breathed on it, without result. Lokboksfrost too tried everything. He tried pulsing us with the full fury of his anima, he tried his fright-lights, he tried icy blasts from the great crevasse behind us. We stood through it all. It was, as they say, an impasse.

“Angelo?” I asked, over the goldwire.

“Er, hello? So you’re still alive then?” he replied.

I grinned at the yak.

“More or less mate. Look, we’re standing in front of this mind-prism trying to work out how to smash it into a million bits, and I recall that madman John Quick saying something about a focused strike from the REALBOW. Can you still do that? On my location?”

“Um...” said Angelo.

“Remember you have to press ESC,” I added, nodding at the yak.

There was a pause and then the prism chamber seemed to grow brighter, as if a cloud had passed from in front of the sun. Then it got brighter still. Then uncomfortably bright. Then dazzling. Then blinding. All of John Quick’s misguided will was beamed down that shaft from high above, and it would melt Lokboksfrost like snow on a summer’s breeze...

...except that the glacier, damn him, was holding it back. With focus of his own, Lokboksfrost held the heat and light at bay, by directing the full force of his anima upward, outward.

“This is ridiculous,” I muttered. Then I felt the serac’s mind-prism twitch in my hand. I looked down. It was jumping, eager to find new ice and reassemble, draw power from its master and rejoin the fight.

Draw power from its master...

I swung around and plunged the serac’s mind-prism into the wall of Lokboksfrost’s inner sanctum.

Instantly, the wall shattered, then bulged, twisted, created shapes, legs, arms, blades. The serac howled to be reborn, sucking at the glacial anima, taking vital power from Lokboksfrost’s battle with the REALBOW.

And then the light was all around us, and the great mind-prism cracked, slumped, and shattered into snowflakes. The walls of ice became snow. The serac, without a body, became snow. The scalloped balcony, nothing more than snow. And the light was all around us.

Later, back on the surface after a hard climb and much boasting of who had been the more bruised and battered by the serac, the yak and I met a chopper full of USGS personnel. The one in the green parka looked kind of familiar.

“Come on,” said Ellen, “I’ll buy you a beer, and you can tell me about my future.”

I cocked an eye at her. She was quite pretty, all done up in her snowsuit, the crossed hammers of the USGS proud on her chest.

“Your future?” I asked. “Well, at least now we know you’ve got one.”

We swung away into the sunset, while beneath us, a great line of snowploughs crawled along the Great Western Highway. While we partied, they’d be working all night.

But in the morning, it would be spring.