Free Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) by Robert Buettner

that ran the suits ’Puters, air-conditioning, heater, and miscellaneous life-support systems. I didn’t miss the air-conditioning, and my exertions plus the armor’s passive insulation kept me warm, though feeling in my fingers and toes had gone AWOL hours ago. My biggest problem was the loss of those miscellaneous life-support systems. The dry cold of a Weichselan blizzard sucked an exercising human dry like he was crossing the Sahara. Scoops on Howard’s boots sucked snow in, melted it, ran it through his purifier, and stored the resultant drinking water.
    I had to stop periodically, pack snow into my helmet’s spare barf bag by hand, then tuck it inside my armor until my body heat melted it. The worst of it was that a crate full of Weichsel’s extra-dry powder melted down to just a glass of water.
    I had knelt to scoop snow into my bag with ice-cubed fingers. That left Howard, who flunked out of Cub Scouts, on point. He plodded ahead, like a tin Saint Bernard. While I scooped, I watched him, to gauge visibility. By the time he got ten yards away from me, he had faded to a shadow. I panted into my mike, “Hold up, Howard. Don’t get too far—”
    He vanished. The Slug on the saucer, tied to him, disappeared an eye blink later.
    SIXTEEN
    ONE MINUTE AFTERWARD, I paddled through the powder to the spot where Howard had disappeared so fast that I nearly went over the edge myself.
    I jacked my optics and saw Howard, spread-eagled, face-down, fifteen feet below, at the base of a short cliff. The Slug saucer rested alongside him, bottom-up.
    “Howard?”
    Nothing.
    “Howard?”
    “I certainly didn’t see that coming!” Howard’s arms and legs flailed, scouring an inadvertent snow angel at the cliff’s base.
    “You okay?”
    “I think so.”
    I picked my way over the cliff lip. Ten feet above Howard, the lip turned under altogether, and I slid off into a half-ass parachute-landing fall alongside Howard.
    I righted the Slug saucer. Our friend shivered there on the vibrating plate, betraying no hostility and less inclination to flee. The cliff broke the wind down to a sixty-mile-per-hour swirl and stretched away to the limits of vision in both directions. Most significantly, in the cliff face directly behind us, over which Howard and I had tumbled, loomed a black opening twenty feet wide and ten high. “Howard, you found a cave.”
    He pointed through the snowflakes. “Just resistant limestone above eroded shale. Probably hundreds like it along this outcrop. I doubt there’s much depth to it.”
    I wrapped my rope around my glove again and pulled toward the cave mouth. “There’s enough.”
    Ten feet under the overhang, the wind gave way to calm, and the twilight outside gave way to blackness deep enough that I paused to let my optics adjust. The ceiling even opened up a bit, rising to fifteen feet by my ’Puter. My visor’s outside temp gauge shot up to a balmy thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit and continued to rise. I tugged off my gauntlets so I could rub circulation back into my fingers. Toes were next on my agenda. I popped my visor to enjoy the coziness.
    I sniffed. I said to Howard, “Smells like—”
    From the shadows, something rumbled.
    I froze.
    Howard said, “Uh-oh.”
    On further listening, the rumble was more a growl, but a very large growl. A boulder along the cave’s back wall moved, then grew, as it resolved into something brown, furry, and grumpy. The exobiologists had briefed us about Weichselan fauna, observed as well as anticipated. They noted that no analogue to the cave bear of Ice Age Europe had yet been observed on Weichsel, but the probability that such an analogue had evolved calculated at seventy-two percent. The bear reared on hind legs and snarled at its uninvited guests. The largest modern Earth Kodiak bear mounted out fourteen feet tall. Paleontologists estimated Earth cave bears could have been thirty percent larger than Kodiaks.
    I can only report that the first observed