Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) Read Online Free Page B

pretty, too, though nowhere near as glorious. As the last rays of planet-light faded from the surface, ice began to crystallise out again, shimmering across the ridge then fading back to darkness.
    When he got up the next morning, it seemed to him that there was rather more ice on the ridge than there had been the previous day. He didn’t think much of it, till the next planet-rise revealed even more of a glitter than he was expecting.
    Thinking perhaps that he was imagining it, he took a holo, put it from his mind and went to watch holovision. He had a thousand hour package on his personal comp with all his favourite films and series, and the Chanticleer had left him a movie-pack, too, so he had no shortage of choice. Setting a detective drama to run the entire series, he played a card game on his comp, too, trying to keep himself from thinking about where he was, and how terribly alone.
    He couldn’t help it, though. The next day he found himself working out how big his dome was in relation to the moon that it was on. The dome footprint was about fifty four square metres. The moon, he calculated, had a surface area of around six and a half million square kilometres. It was the smallest of the three moons orbiting the planet. The planet itself was at least three hundred and forty two million square kilometres. Beyond that, the other thirteen planets and their moons took the ground area almost beyond human comprehension. And he was alone, in that, in what was effectively a four man tent.
    He didn’t really start to get frightened , though, till the next planet-rise. This time he was able to compare what he saw with the holo he had taken earlier, and there was no doubt about it. There was more ice. It was forming lower on the ridge, bringing it closer to the dome. It had, he estimated, increased perhaps three metres, over the last day and a half.
    It didn’t take much working out that if it continued to expand at that rate, given the distance between the dome and the ridge, the ice would reach the dome in about twenty five days.
    Jermane told himself that that didn’t matter. It was only ice, and very thin ice at that, just a tiny scatter of crystals. And there was no way, he told himself, that Andi and the Chanticleer’s crew would have sited the dome here if the ice presented any kind of danger. They would have checked what would happen in seasonal cycles for the time that he would be here… wouldn’t they? He couldn’t remember them saying anything about it, but then, they’d been so casual about the whole thing, and he hadn’t thought to ask, himself. Who’d have thought there could be seasons on a moon, after all? But it was apparent that, with the days getting shorter, a kind of winter was setting in.
    ‘It does not matter at all,’ Jermane told himself, firmly, and out loud. ‘It’s just ice, it’s no big deal.’
    Next day, though, the ice had crept closer. And this time when the planet-light warmed the surface, there was something eerie about the subliming wisps. It was as if they were moving closer to the dome, sneaking up on it during every period of darkness.
    Jermane told himself not to be so stupid. He was getting spooked, that was all. It probably wasn’t a good idea to have a series full of horrific murders playing on the holovision. He changed it to a series of comic pirate flicks, and told himself that he felt better.
    Within a week, though, he was very afraid. He was afraid that he was losing his mind, for one thing, with the fearful ideas that kept springing from an all-too fertile imagination.
    The trouble was, he couldn’t dismiss all his fears as imagination. Jermane knew that humans had, as yet, explored less than one per cent of the worlds even within the Firewall. There were systems within days even of major inhabited worlds which no human had set foot in, yet. It was truly wild, out here, unimaginably vast and strange, just so much they didn’t know or couldn’t