The Forever War #5
5 The sun was a hard white point directly overhead. It was a lot brighter than I had expected it to be; since we were eighty AUs out, it was only one 6400th as bright as it is on Earth. Still, it was putting out about as much light as a powerful streetlamp. „This is considerably more light than you‘ll have on a portal planet.“ Captain Stott‘s voice crackled in our collective ear. „Be glad that you‘ll be able to watch your step.“ We were lined up, single-file, on the permaplast sidewalk that connected the billet and the supply hut. We‘d practiced walking inside, all morning, and this wasn't any different except for the exotic scenery. Though the light was rather dim, you could see all the way to the horizon quite clearly, with no atmosphere in the way. A black cliff that looked too regular to be natural stretched from one horizon to the other, passing within a kilometer of us. The ground was obsidian-black, mottled with patches of white or bluish ice. Next to the supply hut was a small mountain of snow in a bin marked oxygen. The suit was fairly comfortable, but it gave you the odd feeling of simultaneously being a marionette and a puppeteer. You apply the impulse to move your leg and the suit picks it up and magnifies it and moves your leg for you. „Today we‘re only going to walk around the company area, and nobody will leave the company area.“ The captain wasn't wearing his .45-unless he carried it as a good luck charm, under his suit-but he had a laser-finger like the rest of us. And his was probably hooked up. Keeping an interval of at least two meters between each person, we stepped off the permaplast and followed the captain over smooth rock. We walked carefully for about an hour, spiraling out, and finally stopped at the far edge of the perimeter. „Now everybody pay close attention. I‘m going out to that blue slab of ice“-it was a big one, about twenty meters away-‚ ‚and show you something that you‘d better know if you want to stay alive.“ He walked out in a dozen confident steps. „First I have to heat up a rock-filters down.“ I squeezed the stud under my armpit and the filter slid into place over my image converter. The captain pointed his finger at a black rock the size of a basketball, and gave it a short burst. The glare rolled a long shadow of the captain over us and beyond. The rock shattered into a pile of hazy splinters.
