The methane snow screamed through my boots as it sublimed into the vacuum. I was making good time, using a long low-gravity lope to progress steadily toward the unusually close horizon. Saturn was half full in the inky black sky, providing a backdrop of unearthly beauty - which I ignored. Humans can take anything for granted, given enough time.
I glanced at the regenerator's gauge on my sleeve. I still had enough power for two hours of air and heat. The suit converted the motions of my body back into electricity to recharge the batteries, but the process was notoriously inefficient. Still, I had enough to make it back to the base. I hoped.
I tried not to think of the carnage behind me. Death by exposure to vacuum is particularly nasty, and the bitter cold on the night side of this desolate piece of unnamed rock didn't make it any prettier. Oh, I suppose the frozen arcs of arterial blood might have been considered exquisite in some more neutral setting, but I wasn't exactly in a position to enjoy the finer points of the situation.
It was ironic, really, at least to the metamathematician I claimed to be. The odds of the crawler getting holed by something large enough to cause explosive decompression were ridiculously small. Yet the universe seems intent on demonstrating its distain for probability again and again. I tried to distract myself from those particular memories. Left foot, glide, right foot, glide. Repeat. Breathe slowly, no unnecessary motion.
The kilometers passed unmarked. I shifted the pack on my back into a more comfortable orientation. Seven people had died to gather the information within the datacubes I had scavenged from the wreckage of the crawler, and I would be damned if I wasn't going to retrieve it. A more rational me would have realized that the data wasn't going anywhere, and could have been recovered later with the bodies. But I wasn't in the most rational frame of mind just then.
No, not rational at all.
You can respond to my ranting here.
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