Author: David Barber

McMurdo Station’s a rough town.

It had ambitions to be a city one day, with law and order, and schools and churches and such, but meanwhile bullets were cheaper than bread.

Hucksters still sold snow shoes to climate rats fresh off the boat, like the Melt never happened, before we headed south with the promise of gold so common you just tossed the silver away.

The Polar railway began with a fanfare, pushing civilisation southwards, but as they blasted a route through the Queen Alexandra Mountains, they hit that famous mother lode and the rails halted.

Watch your step beyond the Pass, old McMurdo hands warned; remember, there’s no law south of south, where crews of robots drill for oil and cyborg killers prowl the range.

Seb Travis was an Aussie, the only experienced miner amongst us. He was looking for plucky fellows to prospect gold at the Pole. There was safety in numbers, he said, though too many meant less profit for each.

To buy into the group, I put my hard-saved money on the table, but he eyed me up and down and shook his head.

“Find yourself a job here in McMurdo, mate.” he advised, not unkindly.

I bristled and glared round the tent at the half-dozen impassive faces and angrily offered to arm-wrestle any one of them.

“Except for that giant of a fellow there.”

So I found myself sat opposite a tall smiling black man, perhaps ten years my senior and for an age strained with all my might. I had the satisfaction of seeing the smile slip from his face and his jaw clench, but slowly he forced my arm flat.

I would have fled in humiliation, but Seb Travis clapped my aching shoulder.

“You’ll do, mate. We need a gamecock.”

The Polar highlands are a jumble of exposed glacier-gouged rock, where we panned ice-cold meltwaters. I remember the whoop I gave when gold specks first gleamed amongst the dirt, but Travis tossed it away, wading upstream until he pounced on a broad vein of gold.

There was a company town near the Pole, where huge autonomic machinery chewed ore from an open-cast mine day and night, but when we went to register our claim, the works were silent. Antarctic Mining Co. had closed down, the business not economic after all. But the company’s security tinheads has seen their chance and stayed behind.

That’s how it was. No hope for honest miners when the mechs toured each claim telling us we worked for them now.

My friend Chet, the black man who bested me, swung a shovel at one and they shot him down.

Even if we refused to dig, there were always more migrants fresh in from McMurdo. Seeing the writing on the wall, Seb Travis slipped away one night, hoping to avoid the tinheads patrolling the road. Who knows, perhaps he made it.

It was about then the cyborg rode into town on a motorbike, all gleaming alloy and packing twin gatlings. He didn’t give a name.

“Just passin’ through,” he said.

But the tinheads who wanted him out of their town forgot there’s some that can’t be bullied. Reflexes like you never saw left the wrecks of ex-military custom-builds holed and smoking in the street.

We offered him gold to stay, to keep us safe from the killer mechs out there.

“Arm yourselves and organise your own law and order,” he replied. “If you think gold’s worth fighting over.”

Then the nameless stranger rode off into the Midnight Sun.