Free The Frozen Sky by Jeff Carlson

1.    
    Vonnie ran with her eyes shut, chasing the sound of her own bootsteps.  This channel in the rock was tight enough to reflect every noise back on itself and she dodged through the open space between, weeping, crashing one shoulder against a slant in the wall.  She fell.  She glanced back, forgetting the danger in this simple reflex.
    The bloody wet glint in her retinas was only a distraction, a useless blur of heads-up data she couldn't read.
    Worse, her helmet was still transmitting sporadically, the side-mount and some internals crushed beyond saving.  She'd rigged an ELF pulse that obeyed on/off commands, but her sonar and the camera spot were dead to her, flickering at random.  And the spotlight was like a torch in this cold.
    Vonnie clapped her glove over the gear block on her helmet, trying to muffle the beam.  Bootsteps were one thing.  This entire moon groaned with seismic activity, rattling, cracking, but heat was a give-away.  Heat scarred the ice and rock, and for her to look back was to increase the odds of leaving a trail. Stupid.  Stupid.
    Even now she didn't want to fight.  They were beautiful in their way, the amphibians — quick little starfish rippling with muscle.  Rippling with ideas.  They'd outmaneuvered her twice and more than anything what she felt was regret.  She could have done better.  She should have waited, instead of letting her ego make the decision.
    In some ways Alexis Vonderach was still a girl at thirty-six, single, too smart, too good with machines and math.  She was successful.  She was confident.  She fit the ESA psych profile to six decimal points.  
    Now all that was gone.  She was down to nerves and guesswork and whatever momentum she could hold onto.
    She lurched forward, groping with one hand along the soft volcanic rock.  Her face struck a jagged outcropping in the wall and then her hip, too, safe inside her armor.
    Vonnie didn't think they could track the alloys of her suit but they seemed able to smell her footprints, fresh impacts in the ice and lava dust, and there was no question that they were highly attuned to warmth.  She'd killed nine at the ravine and covered her escape with an excavation charge, losing herself behind the storm... and they'd followed her easily.
    Could she use that somehow?  Lead them into a trap?
    She was no soldier.  She had never trained for violence or even imagined it, except maybe at a few faculty budget meetings. That was an odd flicker of memory.  Vonnie held tightly to it, because it felt clean and bright.  She would've given anything to have that life again, those tiny problems, her tidy desk.
    She fell once more, off-balance with her hand against her head.  The suit protected her, though, and she scrabbled over what appeared to be a cave-in. 
    Maybe here.  Burn the rock, leave a false trail, then drop the rest of the broken wall on them.  They'd give up.  Didn't they have to give up?  Nine dead at the ravine, two more in the ice, could they really keep soaking up casualties like that?
    Vonnie could only guess at the amphibians' psychology.  Even blind, she knew there was light.  Alone, she knew someone would find her.  Yet she thought the history of this race was without hope.  Unrelenting strength, yes, but the idea of hope requires a sense of future .  The idea of somewhere to go.  
    They'd never imagined the stars, much less reached up to escape this black, fractured world. 
    This damned world.
    No less than four Earth agencies had landed mecha here to strip its resources, then sent a joint team in the name of science, and Lam and Bauman were both dead before First Contact, crushed in a rock swell.  Would it have made any difference?
    The question was too big for her.  That the amphibians existed at all was a shock.  Humankind had long since found Mars and Venus forever barren, not just stillborn but never started, and after more than a century and a half the SETI radioscopes had yet to catch