On His Own
If there’s no river, no glacier, no village, no another traveler ahead... I’m screwed
Randy de la Serna, September 9, 2192
A third of the canteen left.
How the hell does that much water disappear in just two days? And when would there finally be a patch of snow—just a handful along the way?
Randy rubbed his neck, his throat burned as if lined with shattered glass. One mercy: it was a cold desert, not the scorching kind his parents used to mention in fairy-tales when he was a kid. He took a tiny sip—just enough to freshen his mouth.
If there’s no river, no glacier, no village, no another traveler ahead... I’m screwed.
Photo: Elizabeth Endicott
Two days before, his “air lifeboat” had been caught in a whirlwind. It had come down in a rocky desert framed by red and black cliffs. Then again, come down made it sound far too gentle. In the final seconds, it had turned into a crash. The ground rushed up, the flimsy basket cracked, and Randy barely managed to shield his head before being thrown clear. His thick felt clothing had spared him from serious injury, but the rocks still left his ribs, elbows, and knee bruised and raw.
He’d barely gotten to his feet when a gust of wind filled the balloon again, lifting it—just enough to drag the basket along the rocks. His supplies were still inside.
Gasping and cursing—silently, always silently—Randy ran after it, as fast as his aching body allowed. The basket skidded away like it was teasing him. He managed to grab a sleeping bag and an axe that had fallen out, then tripped and hit the ground hard.
The gust carried the balloon remains all the way to a deep ravine. The basket slid lazily over the edge and vanished.
Crawling to the cliff’s lip, Randy watched his pack tumble down—his mother’s carefully packed provisions: food, medicine, bandages, and a hundred little useful things that could’ve been traded for others. Gone. Lost to a place he had no way to reach. One more step and the wind would’ve taken him too.
The night was bright, but nothing looked familiar. None of the landmarks from the map were anywhere nearby. His compass had flown from his pocket during the fall, and it took an hour of crawling to find it wedged between two stones—cracked, needle gone.
Realizing there was nothing left to find, he picked up a piece of seaweed flatbread from the dark sand. Hissing from the pain in his knee, he turned east—navigating first by the stars, and then, when day came, by the sun.
For two days, he trudged through the snowless valley, nibbling on tiny pieces of the flatbread. The bruises faded, hunger did not. And loneliness pressed down like a hammer.
He hadn’t imagined what it would be like to stay alone for this long. There had always been someone around. Masako, grumbling. His family. Home. Sometimes it had gotten so stifling he’d sneak away—to fish, to gather shellfish, to scavenge the Dump for scraps and parts. But never longer than a day.
Now the worry for his family grew heavier with each hour—and there was no one to talk to. If survival hadn’t demanded so much focus, it might’ve crushed him.
Even the sound of pebbles underfoot became painful after a while: it sounded like walking on bones. No moss, no grass, no trees. No fuel for a fire, no wood, not even a dry branch. Just rock and thin lichen. A wasteland.
The remaining piece of flatbread was smaller than his palm, and Randy had to keep his mind busy—any thought would do—just to stop himself from stuffing it into his mouth. He pictured Mirny. Imagined himself standing before its iron gates (of course they’d be iron—what else?), rehearsing the speech he’d give to Reynard Lutz and Colonel Zorin, hoping they’d share their precious medicines.
That was worth enduring hunger for. Worth rationing every bitter sip from the canteen.
After scrambling over a ridge, Randy finally spotted it—a thin, lonely line of track, slicing across the landscape like a scar: the Mainline. It stretched the length of the continent, once linking all the ancient cities. In its golden age, trains thundered along this path; now, what remained were rusting cars turned into homes for the Railmen or stripped down for parts. Alongside it moved caravans, pulled by dogs, muskoxen, or yaks.
All he had to do now was figure out which section of it this was. Which grid square on the map—his biological father’s only gift—he’d landed in.
And then—a small miracle.
Three nearly perfect, circular lakes came into view, wreathed in thick, curling steam. Through the mist, he caught glimmers of impossibly vivid blue. Hot springs. Just seeing them made his skin prickle. He imagined filling his canteen, stripping down, sinking into the water until the heat reached his bones—carrying it with him into the cold again. Please, just this once—let something go right.
But as he jogged toward the nearest lake, unscrewing his canteen with trembling hands, something crunched underfoot. He paused.
Bones. White against the dark volcanic sand. Tiny ones—birds. Larger—goats. The biggest—dogs.
The closer to the water, the more there were. Restless winds had scattered them, but Randy could now make out entire skeletons—gnarled, picked clean, and undisturbed.
He froze. The realization hit him like a slap. These weren’t springs but graves. The animals had come to drink—and died where they stood. The water was poison. The scavengers who followed? Choked to death on the steam.
That’s why the bones stretched out for half a mile in all directions—the sand itself was littered with death.
Randy backed away in horror, pulling his mother’s scarf up over his nose, trying not to breathe.
“Holy sunshine,” he grunted. “What a fool I am! These are the Deadly Lakes. They’re even marked on the map.”
His hands trembled. But at least, he knew exactly where he was.
Unfortunately, the road beneath him wasn’t the Mainline—just one of its branches. A spur road, once leading to a mine. Long ago, they’d pulled diamonds, coal, uranium, and rare metals from these lands. Some of the mines near the Mainline were still exploited for coal. But others, like this one, were silent now, their names surviving only on tattered maps.
This one was called Silver Palace. The name alone told you what people sought down there.
Now, Randy faced a choice—strike northwest, back toward the Mainline, or head to the Silver Palace, gambling that water might still flow deep underground.
He looked toward the road, wind tugging at his coat.
Where the earth is dug deep… there’s always water.
As a boy, after meeting Rakhmanov, he’d spent many days hanging around the old tavern and soaking up the chatter of travelers, hoping to hear any tides of the old man. The stories he overheard were always the same recipe—one part truth, two parts wild fantasy—and not everyone could tell where fact ended and fiction began. The tales about the Silver Palace were the darkest: haunted mines, savage mutants, and the Ice Maiden who drained warmth from wanderers to heat herself.
Randy never put much stock in those legends. Real life, he’d learned early, could be worse than any horror story.
Picture: Pierre Roudier
Still, he chose to risk it—better to push on toward the Mainline while he still had water. On the road, he might find traders, a tavern, or at least some clean snow. He turned northwest, same direction as McMurdo. But every step gnawed at him—he felt like he was backtracking, losing precious time he couldn’t afford, time his people might not have.
Soon the rail spur entered a narrow gorge, hemmed in by jagged rocks shaped like titans frozen mid-scream. It was still daylight above, but in the gorge, shadows clung like oil. The silence grew suffocating. Cold and still and tomb-like. An irrational dread began to take hold—the kind that came with true solitude.
The first stretch passed without incident. Then—a faint noise. A small stone tumbling from the slope behind. He turned, expecting a rockfall, but spotted something far stranger. One of the boulders wasn’t rolling. It was crawling.
“Just the hunger screwing with my head,” he whispered, quickening his pace.
A fine snow began to fall—dry, sharp flakes like powdered glass. He scooped it from his clothes and let it melt on his tongue. But it fell too slowly to count on. Worse was the feeling growing behind his neck: the sense that something was watching him.
He turned again. High above the gorge, something circled. A bat, maybe. Or at least—it looked like one.
“Spring’s not for two more weeks. Bats should still be hibernating,” he whispered. “What the hell?”
If he had a crossbow—or even a slingshot—he’d try to bring it down. If that thing was edible, it could mean the difference between surviving or freezing three miles from the Mainline. He picked up a heavy stone, held his breath, and waited for the thing to dip low.
Only then he spotted a man, lying with his face exposed to the sky, its lower part covered with a Golden-age warming respirator. Hoping to help and coming closer, Randy saw that someone had driven a metal spike into the center of his forehead. A second, identical spike was lodged in his left eye socket.
Gross, he thought, kneeling and gazing around in search of a threat. Antarctica’s unspoken ethical code demanded that one helped another person in the wild —even a stranger—as long as they posed no danger.
This kind of weapon was unknown to Randy. He was familiar with firearms and able to repair some of them, but this was not a firearm and hardly anything like a crossbow. He thought of the blowgun. He used it to scare off skuas by shooting small pebbles at them. But to drive a needle through the frontal bone, the air pressure in his lungs would have to be monstrous.
“Who did that to you?” Randy whispered. “Another man or that tiny flying thing? A drone, a desmodus…That’s what they used to call them…”
He remembered old stories of machines from the Golden Age turning on their creators. He’d always thought of them as spooky bedtime tales. Not that he wanted to find himself in the center of one.
The young man spotted no signs of fighting or agony, no footprints other than his own and the ones of the dead guy before him. Most probably, the traveler lost his life in a blink. Randy forced himself to search the body: being squeamish was a luxury you could only afford after you’d survived.
First, he took two nearly full canteens from the man’s belt—he must’ve found a water source nearby. In the backpack, Randy uncovered solid fuel tablets, powdered drink mixes sealed in gray paper packets, and energy bars that gave off a sweet, almost vanilla scent. There was also a sleek metal case of batteries, and—unbelievably—an actual notebook with a built-in pen holster. A treasure beyond compare.
Then, inside a large leather envelope, he found a smooth, glassy rectangle framed in plastic. It looked like a slab of thick glass, but Randy guessed it was a tablet.
He needed to start thinking about weapons. After all, fate had just handed him the chance. In the pocket of the man’s dark blue jacket, Randy found a pistol-shaped object with a small button on its side. Seeing Rakhmanov in combat, he’d learned that the deadliest weapons often looked the most harmless. This gun radiated danger—even dormant. He pressed the button once. Twice. Nothing happened.
The weapon was massive—no surprise there. A lightning weapon would need a serious power block and coil. On the grip, the word Термен was etched in Cyrillic. A switch, where a standard safety catch would normally be, toggled between three firing modes. The textured handle had molded finger grooves, snug and comfortable. But no matter how he twisted or pried, Randy couldn’t eject the hypothetic magazine or turn the switch.
Fine. He’d figure it out later in a Railtown workshop. There was no way in hell he’d leave a thing like that behind. He tucked the gun into his belt.
Stripping the man of his clothes or boots felt like crossing a line, like defiling what was left of him. In the end, Randy settled for taking the gloves.
Then something else caught his eye: a silver band around the man’s wrist. A bracelet—thin, smooth, with a concave disk in the middle. It looked like a watch face, only blank, without hands or numbers. On a whim, Randy pressed on it. Nothing. Just like the other tech, it stayed cold and silent. And it didn’t come off, either.
“If only I could figure out the catch,” he whispered, curiosity burning now, pushing aside fear and grief like a rising tide.
He stuffed the gloves into his belt and took hold of the cooling hand, turning it gently. He remembered Ilya Osokin once showing him old diagnostic tools that only activated when touched by their registered user (they made it past the Blackout thanks to being stored in a cellar). Some long-lasting batteries had survived as well, lightening the medics’ hard work, but each year there were less of them.
What if the man came from Mirny? If so, could he have known Ilya Osokin? He would’ve been a kid when the doctor left, but Randy presumed, he would’ve been old enough to remember. What a bitter irony—to discover the man hours, or rather minutes after something brutally killed him!
Burning to find out, Randy pressed the tip of the dead man’s index finger to the smooth "watch face."
A soft, high-pitched chime rang out. Suddenly, a glowing blue screen shimmered to life in midair. At its center was an intricate white emblem: a sun disk flanked by outstretched wings. Glowing words appeared above and below each wing—Communication, Tools, Map, Medical Stats.
“Winged Sun… the Winged Sun,” Randy exhaled, awe blooming into grief. “I wish I knew who’d want to harm you. A person? A machine?”
He had no idea what to do with the floating menu. But acting on instinct, with hands trembling—this time from something more than just cold—he tapped the word Connect.
The glowing emblem vanished, replaced by the image of a clock ticking in silence. Seconds dragged.
Operator Adela Hagstrom was blinking away tears. Antero Toivonen was dead. It had happened fast—too fast to accept. Port Amundsen’s massacre had faded into the archives, and no one from Winged Sun had lost his life outside the HQ. But now Antero—the cheerful one, the storyteller—was gone.
Her colleagues had retreated to the adjacent conference room for an emergency session, but Adela stayed behind—watching the monitors, still shaken. She couldn’t stop replaying it: Antero’s short scream, his pulse flatlining. Someone looting the body.
Shared ancestry, common fate. That was the External Comms mantra, repeated so often it might as well have been programmed into their kettles. But Adela had never bought it. Now? She was ready to hate those “poor people.” A curse hissed from her lips as she shut off the external feed.
Muffled shouting bled through the glass door. Klaus Freiberg’s voice was unmistakable—furious, bitter—hammering Adela’s chief for his obsession with “saving everyone around.” But Antero Toivonen’s mission had a clear goal: to scout old routes and salvage what was left of the Dry Valleys’ forgotten infrastructure.
The voice of Adela’s chief was perhaps too calm, given the moment. He mildly insisted that without active scouting and intelligence, and more importantly, without winning over the locals, Winged Sun wouldn’t last another decade. However sad it was to lose a young comrade, isolation would take more lives in the long term.
He’d said something like that ten years ago, when he first entered the HQ like a summer snowstorm—unannounced, freezing and barely breathing. He claimed having access to archives most people couldn’t even prove existed; the knowledge had cost him years of slavery. And to the Winged Sun survivors, it was more than disturbing. The whole planet became a playground for an evil digitized mind who used to be known as Geryon Lindon but now proudly called himself “Prophet.” He was the one who had made the Moon Cross Brotherhood a global force and orchestrated the Blackout.
It was nearly impossible to believe, but the man had bothered to bring in evidence. And now, with Vassilevsky’s fresh reports and the new radar returns from Old Novolazarevskaya, they knew that the Moon Cross drones were flying in daylight, and the worst-case scenarios had just gotten closer.
More than once, Adela had wondered if activating the beacon—the one that cost Vassilevsky his eye—had been a mistake. The message to the Martian Republic had gone unanswered, and the beacon had failed after eleven and a half hours. Not exactly failed. But had been hacked.
Adela stepped towards a sink to wash her red face, when suddenly, a soft ping echoed across her screen. A signal from Antero.
She lunged for the interface. A face appeared—young, smudged with dust, serious. Eyes like dark wells, no visible iris, just huge pupils. The thief.
“Hey… can anyone hear me?” the boy asked, voice husky with sorrow. “Hate to say this, but some jerk has killed one of yours. I didn’t get a good look at who did it. Looks like there was a drone nearby.”
He waited. Adela was speechless. But she no longer felt hatred toward him. Just unease. Pity, even.
“I’m only here because there’s a terrible epidemic in McMurdo. We’re desperate. My father’s a doctor… but he can’t handle this alone.”
He sounded candid. No one went out into that kind of wasteland unless life had driven them there. Adela’s throat tightened. Her hand hovered over the Transmit button. The young man spoke again.
“I wonder… did Vassily Rakhmanov ever reach you? Ten years ago…”
The name dropped like a hammer. Ten years. She leapt up. She had to tell someone—now, even if it meant crashing into the shouting match next door.
Out in the ravine, the air before Randy’s eyes shimmered, thickening with light. He stumbled back as it began to take shape—first a figure of flickering blue dots, then color and depth. Blade-sharp cheekbones. Silver hair. Sky-blue eyes going at him with compassion.
He actually made it.
Just a few more wrinkles. But it was him.
Randy couldn’t breathe. He stared, stunned and blinking.
“Hi again,” said the man. “So painful to lose Antero. So good to see you!”
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