Ice on the Wire

The climb up the mast is a slow agony, your crampons biting into rungs glazed with black ice that swallows the beam of your headlamp. Wind howls through the lattice in a single sustained note, like breath drawn through clenched teeth. Forty meters up, you find what you came for, and wish you hadn't.

The main coaxial cable hangs in two pieces. The break is clean. Surgical. No frost-shatter, no fray, no scorch from a lightning strike — just a single, deliberate cut, as if someone took shears to it and climbed back down before you woke.

You hang there, harness creaking, staring at the severed copper. The polar night presses against your back like a hand. Below, the station's lights look very small, and very far away. Whatever did this is either still out here on the ice with you — or it was never out here at all.