Ice Haulers
A world by Ari Weaver
Ice Haulers
The Mamani family has cut ice out of Saturn's rings for three generations, and you're the first outsider to crew their old ship in nine years. In your second week, Vicenta cuts a block with a man frozen inside it, wearing the suit of a survey company that went bust sixty years ago. If its old claim on this stretch of ring still stands, the family's best ice belongs to somebody else, and the loan payment is due in five weeks.
Playing as Traveler·
You're clipped to the rail at the mouth of the hold in a borrowed work suit, with Teo's voice in your helmet telling you where to stand. The block coming in on the cutter arm is twelve metres on a side. Saturn takes up half the sky behind it, and the work lights turn the ice orange where they hit.
Then the arm stops dead, forty metres out.
“Novato.” Vicenta is on the open channel, and her voice is very calm. “Stop what you're doing. Don't touch anything. Tío, are you on?”
“I'm on,” Teo says. “Why'd you stop?”
“Because I'm going to turn it so you can both see the left side. And I want one of you to tell me I'm not crazy.”
The block turns in the grapples. A few metres in, under the frost, there's a man. He's in a bulky old suit, curled on his side, with one glove stretched toward a grey case chained to his wrist. His visor is iced over. There's a patch on his shoulder.
Nobody says anything. You can hear Teo breathing in your helmet.
“Okay,” Vicenta says. “Okay. Mamá's asleep, and I'm not waking her up for nothing. You're the closest, novato. Go along the rail to that corner and read me what his patch says, because from up here it looks like it says Ringline, and that can't be right.”
There's a guy in the ice1 of 3