Here at the Freezing End
November’s Sunday Morning Transport arrives with a bounty of stories by Benjamin C. Kinney, Kelly Lagor, Andy Duncan, and J.R. Dawson. As always, the first story of the month is free to read.
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In this month’s first, free, story, we welcome Benjamin C Kinney back with a story about survival in the midst of the impossible, making its internet debut.
~ Julian and Fran, November 2, 2025
Here at the Freezing End
by Benjamin C. Kinney
This story first appeared in Analog, June/July 2023.
Avi leaned forward, pulling the toboggan with aching legs and his body’s weight. This trek wouldn’t save anyone; not his little two-person team, not the thirty scientists back home. But at least he might die warm, and doing what little he could.
Another shuttle streaked across the sky, light and smoke in its wake. It passed over the hilltop and struck a slope somewhere beyond. From this distance, the impact sounded like yet another snowshoed step. A short squeaking crunch, haloed by a matchstick crackle. If the hills rumbled, his muscles had gone too dull to feel it.
“Sixteen shuttles,” he said. “Sixteen crashes.”
Erin huffed behind him. “We’re still only getting to one. I’d feel worse about missing the salvage if those fuckers’ landing computers were any good.” They matched Avi’s stride, the two of them together dragging the toboggan upslope toward the one wreck they could reach.
Avi said, “I’d feel worse about the people.”
“This isn’t a rescue mission, Avi.” Erin’s snowshoes crunched against snow, their sound indistinguishable from his.
Their survey outpost had no hospital, not enough power or food for the mouths they had. Nobody on those shuttles would survive, and no point pretending otherwise.
Triage was the only option left on this planet: when there wasn’t enough help to go around, save it for where it’ll do the most good.
“Fair.” Step, crunch, crackle. “Force of habit. Been doing this job a long time.”
Illusions were for the outpost’s scientists, not for him and Erin. He and they had the impossible jobs now. Erin was logistics and security, serving the doomed and starving. Avi was mountaineer and repairman, first aid and rescue.
No rescue coming for the outpost. If the Federation still had starships of any kind, they were defending the homeworld four wormholes away. Bigger empires fought over its body now, the bones not yet cold in the ground.
Avi activated the mapper on his wrist. Its screen flickered to life, and he cranked down the brightness. He measured the bearing to their destination, picked out a landmark, and turned off the mapper. Twelve percent battery. He guided them over the last ridge until the copper-bark trees opened to the crash site.
A boxy shuttle lay right side up, bent like a broken spine, with a long ragged crack along the side. The air carried the acrid smell of evaporated fuel. Blue and red lights flashed around the shuttle’s nose, automated systems begging for salvation.
He and Erin unclipped the towrope from their snowsuits, disconnected their boots from their snowshoes, and pulled their packs from the toboggan.
Erin drew a pistol. “Looks like there could be survivors.”
“Hell.” Avi paused, his pack still in his arms. It swayed awkwardly, a pistol buried in the bottom. Erin had insisted, and his pack had room enough. Not many supplies left in his first aid kit. And this was always going to be a dangerous salvage. The only ships still in this system were enemy warships.
Avi slung his pack onto his shoulders, pistol and all, and loosened the knife in his belt.
Erin’s boots sloshed in the churn of mud and melted snow, and Avi plodded one step behind. Warmth was good. Warmth was safe, for a little while. No titanwolf would come near water-melting temperatures, no matter how tempting the smell.
On a metal-rich planet like this, where trees grew tall with as much copper as wood, not even a shuttle’s hull could stop a hungry animal.
Nor would an outpost’s walls, once they ran out of power to radiate heat. A few more weeks at most, and triage would call everyone beyond help.
Avi and Erin turned off their heat-repellers, unzipped their snowsuits’ outer layers, and pried their way into the shuttle. It was packed with broken chairs and bodies thrown from acceleration webbing. Emergency lighting flashed in a disorienting pattern, backed by the quiet screech of a half-dead speaker.
Erin winced. “Avi, shut down that alarm?”
He squeezed past a dead body. One display screen still glowed, covered in text in different scripts.
Third line from the bottom said, “Please help. I am the shuttle AI Lightning Arcs to Trees of the Conservancy’s New Homeland Fleet. I am in need of emergency assistance, and I believe my passengers are also. If you can read this language, please tap here.”
Erin rapped their pistol on bulkhead panels, ear against bare metal.
In a moment between audio screeches, one of the bodies groaned.
Avi pressed his gloved fingertip against the legible text.
“I am so glad someone is here. My mother was killed in a malware attack, and I am badly damaged. My internal sensors are malfunctioning and I cannot report the status of my passengers. My databases are also corrupt; if we knew anything about current occupants of the world we call Respite, that information is inaccessible to me. I hope we are not enemies. Is your nation at war with the Conservancy?”
Avi’s finger hesitated above the screen. There was a Yes and a No, but he’d never heard of a Conservancy.
Even if this Conservancy hadn’t broken the Federation themselves, they were happy to fight over its corpse.
The question vanished. “I am sorry, I hope I did not sound hostile. This is all very difficult. I have served with my family for my entire life. Now my mother is gone, along with who knows how many of my siblings.”
The text paused. Too long for an AI to spend choosing its words. But this thing might not be anything like the Federation’s AIs, language modelswrapped around data analysis, like a person-shaped snowsuit with nobody inside.
What the hell kind of trick was it, to make AI’s call each other mother and sibling?
A text cursor flickered like a deep-drawn breath. “Enemy or no, may I surrender to you? Once I am safe, I will be able to assist my passengers. I am likely infected by malware, and need a manual restore. My core and backup can be found in the panel with the double-triangle symbol.”
Avi opened the panel. Inside were the circular heads of two computer cores, surrounded by unreadable labels. Didn’t matter which was which; if he swapped them, the backup would end up in the active slot.
He drew his ceramic knife and popped both cores loose. After the second, the shuttle’s sounds and lights fell silent.
Avi left the cores there, cylinders half out of their sockets.
Erin groaned with relief. “You’re a lifesaver.” They tapped their pistol against another panel, and a hollow thunk echoed in the quiet shuttle. They pressed their fingers around the edges, lifted the panel away, and drew out a block of foil-wrapped bars. “Food! Oh thank fuck, Avi. Food.”
In the ear-ringing silence, someone groaned. Not just pain, but words in some foreign language.
Erin dropped the food and raised their pistol.
Avi found the living. The woman’s eyes were raised but unfocused, her breath frosting weakly in the air. Her lips were pale, and her leg had an open fracture, white bone amid blood still seeping.
Erin’s face fell. “We can’t—”
“Stop. Not your call.” Avi ran his hands over the woman’s head. When his fingers pressed against the base of her neck, she winced.
“Fine,” Erin said. “What’s your plan, Rescue?”
He could do so little, here at the freezing end. The wars, the dying outpost, all too big for a man like him. But he could rescue this woman.
Moisture dripped from his beard. A little bit of melt in the fleeting warmth of a dead shuttle. Soon the cold would set in, and the titanwolves would eat anything he left behind. That AI thought this world was a paradise, but human life didn’t last long here. Too damn cold for a person to lie to himself.
This woman, she wouldn’t make it. He could stop the bleeding and stabilize her spine, but he didn’t have oxygen or bonebuilders or anything that could keep her alive through hours of getting dragged downslope in the cold.
If he told himself any of that mattered, that’d be a lie, too.
“Plan is, we do our jobs.”
“So you’re going to, what? Cart her back home?”Erin lowered their pistol. “You got a hospital you’ve been holding out on us?”
Avi sat on a crumpled acceleration chair and slung his pack down between his legs. Why did the end require so much talking?
He said, “We’re dead either way. Might as well do what we can.”
Erin dropped onto the warped metal next to him. Side by side, they stared at the dead, the wounded, the wreckage. Soon enough, nobody would remember how any of them spent their final days.
They said, “When you put it that way. Yeah, let’s do it. Why the fuck not? I always wanted to be the kind of person who—” Their voice caught. “We’re not getting any more chances.”
Avi dug out his first aid kit. Enough for the easy parts, so he started with those: an air splint around the woman’s leg, a spray of bandagefoam to stop the bleeding. Her neck was stable as is, so the rest would keep until he could prep the toboggan. Maybe the shuttle had emergency blankets to help insulate her. To keep her comfortable, for as long as they could.
Erin paused their salvaging and pressed a foil-wrapped bar into Avi’s hand. “Eat something, all right? You’ll need it.”
He tore open the bar. Chewy, dense, nutty. God, it tasted good. How sweet it felt to spend a moment alive. He could eat all he wanted, rest in the warmth for as long as he desired. Not a single breath or bite took a resource away from someone else. The limit of their salvage was toboggan space, not the shuttle’s riches.
They could only haul so much. Even downslope, the toboggan’s weight would sink into the snow. Worse yet if it didn’t. They’d struggle twice as hard to keep it from sliding out of control on all the long kilometers back to the outpost.
A rescuer has to take care of himself first. If you get hurt, you help nobody, and you double the problem for the next rescuer.
Heroism was for the selfish. He had an outpost full of people to think about, and they were counting on him for a few days’ respite from their cold graves.
This wasn’t a real rescue. And if he went through the motions of his job out of habit, he’d lose half the toboggan space to a corpse.
He crumpled the half-empty food wrapper. “This is a bad idea.”
“What is? Rescuing her?” Erin paused with a piece of blocky hardware in their hands, upside down and gutted. “Avi, we just decided—”
“Triage.” He forced himself to meet Erin’s eyes. “There’s not enough help to go around. It goes to those who’ll live with less of it.”
“None of us are going to live. You can’t ditch someone because she’s in need.”
“She’ll take a lot more resources, and she’ll still die today. Triage isn’t fair, yeah. But thirty people are counting on us getting home with salvage. We can’t ditch them because we want to feel better about ourselves.”
“I don’t— Fine!” They yanked a battery free from the unfamiliar hardware and threw aside the husk. “Whatever. Rescue’s your call.”
His kit still had painkillers. Only simple anti-inflammatories, but they’d soften the blow. He pushed four of them past the woman’s lips, and then dripped water until she swallowed. One more painkiller each for himself and Erin, for the long haul back. What little he could do.
Erin and Avi filled their bellies in silence, then hauled packfuls of supplies out to the toboggan. Avi wired their heat-repellers to work with ransacked batteries while Erin lashed their prizes into place.
“Hey, Avi. You holding up okay?” Erin strapped down a block of ration bars and looked up at him with weary gentleness. “I mean, none of us are. But I didn’t mean to snap at you back there. Choices like this, they’re fucking nuts. No-win however you cut it. There’s nothing we can do.”
Avi balanced his pack on the toboggan’s edge. They’d stacked it as full as they could manage. By tomorrow, everything else would be gone to the cold and titanwolves.
That woman on the shuttle had parents, friends. Maybe children, maybe siblings. But that was true of everyone, and he needed to triage.
“I’m gonna squeeze a little more in my pack.” He stomped through the muck, into the shuttle one last time.
So many bodies. So many people he and Erin couldn’t save, themselves most of all.
He opened his pack, tossed out a double handful of ration bars, and replaced them with Lightning Arcs to Trees.
Outside, Erin had clipped themself into second position. They watched Avi tie down his pack, then offered him the front of the towrope. “I know you’re not big on talking about your feelings, but I’m not letting you go gruff on this one. You holding up all right?”
“Yeah.” Avi clipped himself in for his last journey down. “Done my job as best I could.”
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Thank you for joining our journey this week.
Benjamin C. Kinney is a SFF writer, neuroscientist, and former assistant editor of Escape Pod. His short stories have previously appeared in Analog, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. He’s recently returned to a home in the US’s frozen north, but this story is inspired by his time volunteering on a backcountry ski patrol in the Oregon mountains. You can find him and his work across the internet via linktr.ee/benckinney.
“Here At The Freezing End,” © Benjamin C. Kinney, 2023.
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