EDEN by Dean Crawford

live or die, understood? There’s nothing to gain by us hating whoever decided to leave us out here.’
    ‘Got to be worse for Brad and Sauri,’ Charlotte said. ‘Their own comrades abandoned them. Their own countrymen.’
    Cody thought for a moment and then made a decision. ‘I’m heading back out.’
    ‘Back out where?’ Bethany asked. ‘It’s late and there’s a storm building up.’
    Cody fastened his jacket. ‘We’ve got to assume that they didn’t abandon us out of spite — there are only eight of us. We were five clicks away across the ice, an hour’s snowmobile trip for them to fetch us. My guess is that there just wasn’t time for them to come and get us and clear out before the storm stranded them too. They had to cut and run, or die out here themselves.’
    ‘So?’ Charlotte demanded.
    ‘So there’s a chance they had a plan and may have ridden out the solar storm,’ Jake guessed Cody’s train of thought, ‘and may come back.’
    ‘Hell of a long shot,’ Cody admitted. ‘But if there’s a chance that they’ve survived this, we’ve got to try to let them know we’re alive.’
    ‘How?’ Bethany asked.
    ‘I’ll set up a distress beacon at Alert Five,’ Cody explained, ‘and start using Alert’s radios to search for signals from the outside world. If somebody hears us, especially our absent military friends, it may be reason enough for them to come back and get us.’
    Charlotte frowned.
    ‘If satellites are down surely there’s no way for people to hear the beacon at a ground station? They might not hear us.’
    Cody smiled grimly as he pulled his hood up. ‘What if we don’t bother to send a signal at all?’
    ‘We should do it all from here,’ Jake cautioned him. ‘No sense in risking an accident out at the observatory.’
    ‘It’s just a few clicks to Alert Five,’ Cody said. ‘But that might be the difference between a signal being picked up and being missed. It’s not a chance I want to take.’
    He yanked open the block door and strode down the gantry onto the solid ice. Jake’s hand rested heavily on his shoulder as he climbed onto his snowmobile.
    ‘I’ll back you up.’
    Cody shook his head. ‘We need to conserve fuel. If I get caught out by the weather, I can still overnight at Alert Five.’
    ‘That’s not good procedure, Cody,’ Jake replied.
    ‘I know it’s not good goddamned procedure,’ Cody shot back, and then reigned himself in. ‘I just need some time to myself, okay?’
    Jake’s gloved hand remained on Cody’s shoulder for what felt like an age, then it slipped away.
    Cody gunned the snowmobile’s engine and the headlights blazed strips of white fire through the falling snow.
    ‘If I don’t see you back here within twenty-four hours, we’ll all be coming out to find you, understood?’ Jake shouted.
    Cody turned away and accelerated out of the compound. He took the road at full throttle with his hands gripping the throttle as tightly as he could, his teeth grinding in his jaw as he rode at a pace that he would once have never dared to attempt.
    The blizzard swept across the ice plains, obscuring everything but the reflective markers placed every ten feet to guide him toward Alert Five. Thick snow caked his jacket and hood and tumbled endlessly around him, encrusting his goggles in delicate geometric patterns as he rode until he could no longer feel his hands or feet.
    Alert Five loomed almost without warning ahead of him, its radio masts quivering in the tremendous winds as Cody slowed the snowmobile down and turned it to park in the shelter of the station’s leeward wall. He left the engine running as he got out of the saddle and looked out toward the south. The temptation to keep going was almost unbearable, but somehow his rational mind prevented him from racing hell for leather toward the sun that he knew was out there somewhere beyond the blinding veils of snow and endless night.
    Cody turned to the observatory and struggled up