The Frozen Draft Dodger
The air in the Wicked Quasar was thick with the stench of recycled oxygen and stale lagers. Alix hunched over at the bar, holding a glass of something amber and toxic. The liquid rippled each time the city's deep-ice machinery broke through another glacier, causing tremors to reverberate for miles around.
He could see his reflection shimmering back at him: hollow eyes, a jawline sharpened by too many skipped meals, and a faint scar above his left temple; a reminder of what he encountered on the surface.
Rayegan, the bartender, was a grizzled person of ambiguous gender with a chrome prosthetic arm where a carbon one should be. They wiped down the counter with a perpetually damp rag.
"Haven't seen your face around here before," they spoke in a low rasp. "Are you new to the Core?"
"Been here a while," Alix grunted before taking another slow sip.
"Figured," Rayegan shrugged. "Most fresh meat comes in with a uniform, or just out of it. Plenty of places to get lost around here if you're looking for that kind of thing."
Alix ignored the comment. He'd been in the city core for cycles now, though he wasn't keeping count. Days and nights blended together under the constant dim glow of the arcology’s artificial lights. The war was an endless, aimless grind on Europa's ice sheets outside, yet its presence was everywhere. Posters glorified "Duty" and "Sacrifice". The faces of clean-cut recruits beamed from public screens.
Their naive smiles were like a cruel joke to Alix. Every time he applied for a legitimate job, one not requiring a military service or demand he break his back, the hiring agent just gave a dismissive glance. He knew what they were silently telling him. Nobody wanted a ghost, especially not a deserter.
There was a flicker of movement in his periphery and he glanced over to see a woman laughing with a factory foreman with her hair wrapped up in a tight bun. Alix subconsciously straightened and ran a hand through his unkempt hair. He had tried, in the early days. A friendly introduction. An offered drink. But the responses were always the same: a cold stare and a turn of the back.
Coward. Weak. they would whisper.
On Europa, in a city forged by endless conflict, masculinity wasn't just about physical strength. It required unwavering purpose.
He quickly drained the remnants of his glass and felt the fiery pain in his throat.
"Another?"
He pushed it forward without saying a word. Rayegan affirmatively refilled it.
"You got that look," the bartender noted. "That one that says you saw the ice, and the ice saw you right back."
Alix snorted. "They say it's glorious," he said spitefully. "Fighting for... I don't even remember what the reason is this cycle. Geothermal vents? Or was it for deep-sea extremophile plants that will cure every illness?"
He took a long swallow.
"Neither was true for me. It was always just frozen rock and the sound of your breath fogging up in your visor."
He leaned closer, speaking in a low whisper exclusively to this barkeep.
"We were just kids when they drafted us. Me and my whole block. Right out of high school, still sophomores. Thought it was an adventure, that we were going to make a difference. Then you see the first one go. There wasn't a blaze of glory. No brave act of self-sacrifice. He just vanished in a flash of light. He couldn't even finish screaming."
Alix's gaze became distant as memories flooded back.
"My buddy, Torvin, lost his legs to an unstable ice bridge. They med-vac'd him, sure, but he never really recovered. He would just sit there in the hospital, watching propaganda holos, still believing in everything."
Alix slammed his glass down.
"I just couldn't do it anymore. I just kept asking what the point of it all was. To get a few more meters of territory? We were constantly being fed to the grinder, promising victory, but the grinder kept turning. One patrol, I was walking out to the edge of the camp and then... I just kept walking. Turned off comms. Dropped my rifle. Reached the city's outer shield. They never bothered to find me. I guess they weren't running low on fresh bodies," he let out a humorless laugh.
"The ice changes a man," Rayegan noted unremarkably as she rubbed the rag on the counter. It was unclear if that was cleaning the bar or cleaning the rag. "Yeah, some folks come back believing they're heroes. Some come back utterly broken and defeated. And some just... come back. The only question is which kind are you?"
With her chrome arm, she pointed at a battered notice board hanging on the entrance.
"They're looking for help at the Northern Spire Factory. It's heavy lifting and hard work, but it's not combat. Tell 'em that Rayegan sent you and you might be able to get your foot through the door."
Alix pushed away the empty glass and looked over at the board. There was a sense of dread of becoming a physical laborer, but he knew it would be even worse to lose himself to an endless cycle of tap pours.
The next morning, he looked up at the Northern Spire Factory as he dealt with a hangover. The building was a massive, brutalist structure of reinforced steel and concrete. The air had a scent of metallic tang and a strong sense of ozone. As he stepped closer, he could see murals on the walls depicting stoic soldiers and industrious factory workers supporting them. The propaganda made him nervous.
Alix glanced down at the napkin Rayegan had given him, with the directions to help him through the maze of hallways. The perfectly square corridors filled in white made him uneasy. Everything felt artificial. All kinds of industrial noise echoed from unknown rooms. Everything was geared towards the war.
Finally he reached Annex C, a cavernous space that built cryo-mechanical components for surface vehicles. Several unfinished military rovers sat in a corner of the room like a pile of junk. It didn't give him a lot of hope for the quality of the work. Several workers moved around the room with a grim efficiency. Their faces were covered in grease and their clothes full of tatters and bespoke patches.
The foreman was a burly man whose face appeared to be in a permanent scowl. He handed the napkin over and mumbled Rayegan's name. The foreman looked down at the napkin, then at Alix, and only gave a quick nod as confirmation.
"Go with Meldy," he ordered. "She needs a hand with the heavy lifters in Annex F. Help her out. Do not slow her down. But she'll tell you that herself."
Alix felt a bad feeling spreading from his stomach. He wasn't a mechanic. He didn't know how to do this kind of work. But all he could do was nod and accept the work that was available.
He spotted Meldy quickly in the Annex, a short woman with a headlamp on her head and her red hair pulled back into a tight bun. She was standing over a mining extraction drill which was half-assembled. She moved deftly and confidently as she handed the complex wiring.
"Excuse me," he called out to her. She ignored him until he was right in front of her face.
"What do you want?" she asked dismissively.
"The foreman sent me. He said you could use help with the heavy lifters," he said, straining his voice to be heard over the dull roar of the factory.
She looked up at him and stared with large eyes the color of glaciers.
"You're a new one," she observed. "I bet Rayegan sent you. Well, the lifters are over there. We're on a tight schedule, so don't break anything and don't get in my way. Every unit that doesn't roll out on time is one less that can protect our borders against the invaders."
Her emphasis on "our borders" gave him a bit of guilt over his abandonment. Did she know? Probably not. But he wasn't the first person sent here by Rayegan.
He spent the next few hours moving heavy parts back and forth. His muscles burned and even his head ached from Meldy's critical commands. When the alarm blared, threatening to shatter his eardrums, he barely heard Meldy say that it was lunchtime as his ears rang.
Alix found himself sitting at the same communal table as her in the noisy cafeteria. As soon as he stepped in the room, the only thing he could smell was recycled nutrient paste. It was like he was back in the camp, getting exactly the nutrition he needed. He held his nose the way he learned as he shoved a spoonful in his mouth.
She was quiet, picking at her food while ignoring everything else around her.
"Rough day?" he asked, trying to develop some comradery.
"Days are for working, not complaining," she answered neutrally.
Alex knew this would be a lot harder, like pulling a tooth out of a sky-whale.
"For me it's a lot different. Out there, on the surface, it was more dynamic."
"Dynamic? Probably you mean inefficient. Out here we build things. We contribute. We create a communal means of survival. This isn't some aimless squabble. This is for all of us to have a continued existence under the ice. There's a hidden strength there I keep coming back to."
Her eyes lingered on him for a moment too long. It was clear she saw him as a failure. She saw him as weak, someone who was too individualistic to appreciate their collective purpose.
He turned away and looked down at his ration. He was just a deserter, not a warrior or a builder. He didn't fit in with this society.
Work resumed half an hour later, barely enough time for Alix to sit and chew and digest. He went back to the monotonous grind of heavy lifting and the relentless shrieking of machinery. The physical exhaustion was a welcome distraction from the shame hiding inside him.
He was positioning a particularly unwieldy fusion core when the first tremor struck. It wasn't the usual rumble from the center of Europa. This was sharper and closer. The metal floor beneath his feet rattled.
Meldy, who was soldering old electronics together, froze. The cacophony of the factory dimmed as everyone waited to see what would happen.
"WARNING!" the alarm shouted out in a synthetic voice. "PRESSURE BREACH DETECTED IN PRIMARY COOLANT LINE. EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY!"
Workers panicked immediately, dropping their tools and equipment wherever they were and pushed towards the small emergency exit. On the surface, a pressure breach meant a geyser of supercooled liquid methane. You'd get instant frostbite and structural collapse. But here, deep under the ice, the entire section could freeze solid.
Meldy ran towards the sparking coolant lines. Her headlamp beam cut through the dust now filling the air.
"No!" he yelled towards her, but his voice was lost in the rising alarms and shouts. She was already wrestling with a manual override valve. Against the massive wheel, she looked as small as a sky-rat. Sparks jumped from a failing conduit near her, showering her jumpsuit.
Alix could smell burnt ozone and a sickly sweet scent. This was glycol-based cryo-fluid, something that gave him a jolt of terror. This was the same fluid that shot out of their heavy tanks, a fluid that would flash-freeze the target in an instant. In addition to the smell, there was the hiss of high-pressure gas escaping growing louder by the second.
His body reacted before he could make up his mind. This wasn't the enemy, not a direct threat he could run away from. This was the chaos of a broken machine, just like the war itself. The swirling vortex of fear and noise reminded him of being back on that battlefield. The shouts of workers became the bloodcurdling screams of dying comrades.
He remembered the feeling of being trapped and the impossible odds. His feet moved, not towards Meldy but away. Away from the pressure. Away from the responsibility. He scrambled over an abandoned tool cart, pushed past a frantic worker, and through the exit doors. He had seen too much meaningless death already. He couldn't take any more.
He didn't stop running until he burst through an emergency hatch into a dimly lit maintenance tunnel. He leaned against the cold wall and gasped to catch his breath. His lungs burned and his hands trembled. He had run again, and he felt a deep shame. Meldy was probably still fighting the valve with a grim determination to save everyone. And now that she saw him leave, any offer to be her friend was irrevocably gone. He was a coward in the face of a simple mechanical error.
He wandered back to his cramped, utilitarian shelter. The tiny cube was barely enough for a cot and a desk, but at least he had a semblance of privacy. He sank into that cot and stared up at the blank ceiling. The future, his future, felt terrifyingly empty. No matter where he went, he always felt the urge to flee. The war would continue. The factory would continue. But what about him? The only thing he could count on was the deep loneliness of his shame.
Recently I came across this meme about a forever war on Europa and thought I’d write a short story that deals with the same topic.