Freezer Burn

Freezer Burn

The flakes of snow landed softly on the side of the mountain, and were immediately subsumed into the great mass of their fellows already present there. The recent snowfall insulated the already rather isolated mountain pass in a thick blanket of silence.

The winter on Tamzat was always silent. No birds sang in winter, they had long since flown to warmer climes, and it would be months yet before they thought of returning. No trees creaked and moaned as they were roughly shaken by the mountain’s icy winds, for the barren mountaintop held no trees, nor any other kind of vegetation.

In fact, winter on Mount Tamzat was so cold that it earned the entire planetoid on which it resided the colloquial moniker “Winter”. The asteroid miners and various types of scoundrel and ne’er-do-well that populated the outer rim of the galaxy even said among themselves that it was the coldest planetoid in the entire universe.

This almost year-round frigidity made Winter the perfect location for the Templeton Cryonic Solutions vault. Upon its discovery, the Templeton Corporation had quickly sensed the potential for future exploitation and purchased the exclusive rights to build, terraform, and conduct commerce on the icy rock. Money was no object, Stanley Templeton was the richest man in the Solar system.

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In a cavern deep below the surface of the ice-planet known officially as TCS1092, and unofficially as Winter, Imogen Saltpetre was slowly defrosting. Lights blinked white, yellow, and red on her cyro-capsule and illuminated the rocky chamber in otherworldly color as the awakening process kicked into its final phase. A faint, metallic hum filled the cave, reverberating off its rock walls like sparks. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the complex machinery ceased.

Imogen opened her eyes slowly, as though she had grown out of practice during the long cryo-sleep. She blinked a few times, gaining confidence with each one, until her surroundings came into clearer focus. Eventually she felt strong enough to explore her location and pushed the inner hatch release button. Her chamber opened with a hiss and she was immediately hit with a wall of frigid air.

“Shit! Forgot to enable my climate control.” Her practiced fingers found the button on her left arm before she even had to think. A wave of relief flowed through her as the icy air receded and was replaced by a pleasant warmth. Those hours of subconscious neural training hadn’t gone to waste after all.

Imogen surveyed her immediate surroundings. The cavern was illuminated by the soft, unchanging glow of the other cryogenic devices, which provided a view of about thirty feet into the inky blackness of the cave. Beyond that, it was as pitch dark as outer space.

“Well, I can either try my luck out there, or get back in my cryo-pod” she said to herself. Looking back at her former safe haven of who knew how many months, her choice (or lack thereof) became clear. Venture out it must be. She took a few tenuous steps into the outer light, then further, and soon she had disappeared completely.

Had anyone been around to hear, they would have heard the heavy footfalls receding, becoming fainter, before they vanished altogether. But nobody was around to hear.

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It was raining on Earth. Grizelda Plento (née Juniperia) looked out of her bedroom window at the drops falling to the ground. There was something melancholy about the rain, she thought. The little raindrops created in the clouds, nearly touching Heaven, and yet destined to journey only downwards, Earthwards, landwards, and only once. Such a short journey, and such a hard landing.

Life was like that, she believed. But Grizelda was a survivor. She had survived her five husbands, outlived her seventeen children, had seen four of her grandchildren buried. She knew a thing or two about life by now. If someone had asked, she would have chalked up her remarkable longevity to three things: simple living, enduring faith, and of course, lots of money. Her five late husbands had provided most of the last thing. But nobody did ask. Nobody came to her house anymore, nobody sat at her feet and asked her to tell a story. Nobody begged her for one more tale, just one, then bedtime.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about surviving, she thought. Everyone else dies. So, looking out on the grounds of her palatial estate (and it was hers, now, having at last been wrested from the claw-like grip of her late fifth husband, a man who was not accustomed to giving things up easily), Grizelda realized that it was time for her to join the assembled personages of her family buried in the grave-plot in the woods, just beyond the river. And she was glad. Grizelda was, to the end, a pragmatist. She did not believe in an afterlife of halos and flowing white robes, harps and clouds. But she did believe that, wherever she would end up, she would be joining the ones she loved the most.

She stood up from her stately chair by the window and, looking back at her former safe haven of all these years, her resolve grew stronger. She took a few tenuous steps into the outer light, then further, and soon she had disappeared completely.

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The Planetary Encyclopedia, Ninteenth Edition contains the following entry under the listing “Winter (planetoid)”:

First explored in the 33^rd century by officers of Templeton Cryonic Solutions, the planet TCS1092, better known by the moniker ‘Winter’, quickly became notable as the location of the Templeton Disaster in which three cryo-sleepers disappeared in the caves underneath the planet’s highest mountain. Curiously, three hundred years later, the nascent human colony on the planet’s surface reported a strange happening. According to contemporary accounts, one morning, the mining camp was shocked to find the body of an impossibly ancient woman at the entrance to the mine. The body was sent back to Homeworld where it was DNA matched with the genetic profile of one of the missing cryo-sleepers. A reminder that this universe is stranger than we could possibly imagine.