Everything about this was so remarkable that we might have stood there for hours looking at it if Brajj hadn’t turned to pay attention to our drivers. They were clambering over the tractor, knocking ice from various pieces of equipment, inspecting the treads, rattling the linkages between the tractor and our sledge, checking fluid levels in the engine. Brajj was a dour and calm man but he was extremely attentive, even skittish, to be standing on the snow at a time when both of the drivers had mounted the tractor. After a minute he simply became too uncomfortable and climbed back aboard. I was happy to follow his example. Only a few moments after I’d settled back into my place, we heard the door of the tractor thudding shut. We called out to Laro and Dag who were several paces behind the sledge, frozen in amazement at the sight of the convoy. We managed to get Dag’s attention. He turned to look at us but still didn’t seem to grasp what was happening until the engine of the tractor roared up, and a linkage clanked as it was put into gear. He smacked Laro on the shoulder, then took a couple of paces toward us, grabbing Laro by the collar as he went by and jerking him along in his wake. Brajj shifted closer to the back and thrust out an arm in case he had to pull them aboard. I got to my feet and moved closer to help. The tractor’s engine roared louder and we heard the distinctive clanking of its treads beginning to move. Laro and Dag reached us at about the same time; Brajj and I each grabbed one of their hands and hauled them aboard. Their momentum carried them forward into the front of the sledge. The tread clanks had already built to a steady rhythm.
We weren’t moving.
Brajj and I looked out at the snow. Then we looked at each other.
Both of us jumped out and ran around to the sides. The tractor was fifty feet away from us and picking up speed. The hitch that had linked it to our sledge was dragging on the snow behind it.
Brajj and I started running after it. The tracks supported our weight most of the time but every few steps we’d break through and sink to mid-thigh. In any event, I ran faster. I covered maybe a hundred feet before the side hatch swung open and the second driver emerged. He clambered out on to a sort of running board above the right tread, and let me see a long projectile weapon slung on his back.
“What are you doing!?” I shouted.
He reached into the cab, hauled out something bulky, and let it drop into the snow: a carton of energy bars. “We’re going to have to take a different pass now,” he called back. “It’s farther. Steeper. We don’t have enough fuel.”
“So you’re abandoning us!?”
He shook his head and dropped out another object: a can of suitsack fuel. “Going to see if we can beg some fuel from the military,” he shouted—getting farther away—“down there. Then we’ll come back up here and fetch you.” Then he ducked back into the cab and closed the door behind himself.
The logic was clear enough: they had been surprised by the convoy. They couldn’t get to safety without more fuel. If they took us with them on their begging expedition, it’d be obvious that they were smugglers and they would get in trouble. So they had to park us for a while. They knew we’d object. So they’d left us no choice.
Brajj had caught up with me. He had produced, from somewhere, a small weapon. But as he and I both understood, there was no point in taking potshots at the back side of the tractor. Only it, and the two men in it, could get us out of here.
When Brajj and I got back to the sledge dragging the fuel and the energy bars, we found Laro and Dag kneeling, face to face, holding each other’s hands and mumbling so rapidly that I couldn’t make out a single word. I had never seen any behavior quite like it and had to watch them for a few moments before I collected that they were praying. Then I felt embarrassed. I stepped back to get out of Brajj’s way in case he wanted to join them, but the look on his face as he regarded the Deolaters was contemptuous. He caught my eye and jerked his head back toward the flaps. I joined him outside. Both of us were hooded, goggled, and swathed against the cold. Frost grew with visible speed on our face-masks as we talked.
Brajj had been checking his watch every few minutes since we had been abandoned. “It’s been a quarter of an hour,” he said. “If those guys haven’t come back for us in two hours, we have to save ourselves.”
“You really think they’d leave us here to die?”
Brajj chose not to answer that question but he did offer: “They might get into a situation where they have no choice. Maybe they can’t get fuel. Maybe their tractor breaks down. Or the military commandeers it. Point being, we have to have our own plan.”
“I have a pair of snowshoes—”
“I know. We have to make three more. Load up your water pouch.”
The suitsacks had pouches on the front that could be stuffed with snow. Over time it would melt and become drinking water. That consumed energy, but it was sustainable as long as the body had food or the suitsack had fuel. We had both—for the time being. We packed ours as full of snow as we could. We replenished our fuel bladders from the cache that the drivers had left for us. Brajj interrupted the others’ prayers and insisted they also take on water and fuel. Then he had us each eat a couple of energy bars. Only then did we get working.
The tent was held up by flexible metal poles. We collapsed it and drew them out. This had the side effect of getting Laro and Dag’s attention. Our shelter was gone; they had no choice but to join in our plan. Brajj had a pocket tool with a little saw blade; he went to work cutting the tent poles into shorter segments. Once the others saw that there was work to be done, they joined in cheerfully. Dag, who was the sturdier of the two, took over the sawing of the tent poles. Brajj had Laro get to work scavenging every inch of rope and twine at our disposal. Then—perhaps leading by example—he undid the yellow rope that he had used to gird his suitcase. This turned out to be some thirty feet long. He undid the latches and dumped out the contents: hundreds of tiny vials, all packed in loose nodules of foam. I hadn’t seen such things before but I guessed that these were pharmaceuticals. “Child support,” Brajj explained, reading the look on my face.
The panels of the suitcase were a tough leathery material that we cut into slabs to make the platforms of the snowshoes. We bent the tent poles to make crude quadrangular frames and lashed the suitcase-panels to them using twine from Laro’s and Dag’s improvised baggage. This took a while because we had to do it with bare fingers, which went numb in a few seconds. The contents of Laro’s and Dag’s baggage were mostly old clothes, which they were willing to abandon, and keepsakes of their families, which they weren’t. I pulled one of the benches off the sledge, flipped it upside down, and kicked its flimsy legs off. It would serve as a toboggan. We loaded it with the supplies and wrapped them up in what remained of the tent. My pack had already been stripped of its metal frame and of anything that would serve as rope. I added my energy bars and my stove to the supplies, threw away my extra clothes, and put my bolt, my chord, and my sphere (pilled down as small as it would go) into the cargo pockets on the body of my suitsack. I considered adding my chord to our stock of rope, but we seemed to have plenty—Laro had found a fifty-foot coil stored under one of the sledge’s benches and we’d been able to make up another fifty by splicing together odds and ends from the tent’s rigging and so on. That plus Brajj’s thirty feet of yellow stuff gave us enough that we were able to rope ourselves together at intervals of thirty or forty feet, which Brajj explained would be useful if one of us lost his footing on a steep slope or fell into a crevasse.