The story
Rime, as the Drift tells it.
The ice moon. Rime was a mining moon, and in the Switch-Off it was switched off. Its ore contracts went to a receiver, and its relay found no buyer. The crews were shipped out on the last paid transport and the colony went quiet.
The post. Station Nine is a relay hut on the glacier, half-buried by now, with a long-range dish on its roof. For ten years after the Switch-Off it transmitted into the blizzards and nobody answered. The flame is cut into the hut's steel door. Every night frost fills it white, and every morning it is scraped black again.
The keeper. Juno Varga was a miner who refused to leave. She kept the dish turning and the hut warm for ten years of unanswered calls. She will tell you she doesn't know who cut the flame into the door. Now, when anyone on any band calls out and nobody else hears, Juno is the first to answer. She once answered a roll-call from a post that doesn't exist yet. She logged its name. Nobody has built a post by that name.
What lives there. The old ice-crawlers still run: tracked, floodlit walkers that wildcat crews brought back from the dead workings. Ice-foxes den in the lee of the hut, and the aurora hangs over the glacier most nights. Under the glacier, something colossal moves. Crews call them Frostbacks, and nobody has seen more of one than a shadow passing under the ice.
