by Alfred Wurr
Spittle flew from its maw as I regained my feet and stood unsteadily.
“All right, numbnuts,” I said under my breath, dusting myself off with my free hand. “Catch frost.”
My arm blurred, and a solid line of blinding bright white vapour appeared in the gloom. The creature moved as I threw; instead of striking its nose, the gob of frost plowed into its right ear. Its hand flew to the side of its head. It grimaced and howled as I continued my attack, hitting it in the nose and eyes.
Scrunching its eyes tight, it charged toward me. I shuffled to the side, trying to get out of the way, but the monster threw its arms out wide like a net and gathered me into a crushing embrace. I slugged it in the chest and face with frost-charged hands. Sparks of white flared in the murk with each impact. The troll winced and grunted, then grabbed me around the waist, squeezing me like he was trying to get the last bit out of an empty tube of toothpaste.
Right, like this guy’s ever brushed his teeth, I thought.
My body constricted, thickening its outer layer of ice to resist the crushing force. Cracking sounds, like an iceberg falling from a glacier emanated from my lower half, making me cringe. Desperate to escape its crushing grasp, I routed deep cold through my body, super cooling it. The troll hollered, but instead of letting go, it leaned back and chucked me into the trees. I saw stars as I slid into a large moss-covered boulder. Dazed, I pushed myself upright, using the rock for support.
The troll waggled its fingers, then rubbed its hands like it was trying to start a fire. Cupping its meat hooks together, it blew hot breath into them and gave me the stink eye while I shook my head to clear it. Then it clapped its hands three times and went down on all fours again, kicking up earth behind it.
Here we go, I thought.
The giant lumbered toward me like a defensive end eager to sack the quarterback. I stepped back, bumping into the boulder that had stopped my trip through the jungle. Unable to retreat further, I crouched low and bellowed a challenge of my own.
“Come on,” I snarled, taunting it.
Trying not to flinch, I waited until it had a full head of steam, then thrust my hands out, palms up. Snow and ice welled from the ground beneath my feet, expanding outward in a circle twenty feet in diameter. I ran at the behemoth, shouting like a lunatic. Its massive arms reached out, trying to grab me in another bear hug. At the last moment, I dropped into the snow and felt a rush of air as its outstretched hands swiped past, almost taking my hat with them.
The troll ducked its chin into its chest to glare at me as it sped by. It looked up and squawked, braking at the sight of the rapidly approaching boulder, but kept sliding forward on the slippery snow. Milliseconds later, a sound like meat hitting concrete reached my ears as the creature crashed into the unyielding rock. I swam forward through the snow to the circle’s edge, resurfaced and spun a hundred and eighty degrees, readying a frost ball.
The troll lay unmoving at the base of the stone. I nudged it with my foot. No reaction. I walked around to its massive head. The troll’s eyes were closed, its face scrunched in a rictus of pain, its tongue lolling. I crept closer, leaned in, and held my hand in front of its mouth. Warm air blew across my outstretched hand.
I patted its huge arm. “Play with the bull, my hard-headed friend, you get the horns.” The troll’s eyelids twitched, and I jerked away, backing away on tiptoe, keeping an eye out for further movement. Belatedly it occurred to me that this guy might not be alone, so I looked and listened but didn’t see or hear anything else unusual or threatening. I exhaled a breath that I hadn’t realized I was holding.
What are you doing here my oversized friend? And why didn’t Hanale know you were here? They were good questions, but I knew that the troll wasn’t going to answer them, and I certainly didn’t want to wait for him to wake up so that I could ask them. I realized that I’d have to take it up with the big man when next we met.
I hurried away, following the trail of destruction back to the path and racing along it, eager to put as much distance between me and the sleeping giant as I could before it recovered. My legs ached and my chest heaved as I ascended the steep slope moving, I presumed, higher up to the dormant volcano.
A few minutes later, the trail opened into a large clearing: a rough semicircle thirty feet wide. The floor was covered in snow, glistening with wetness. The top layer looked a bit slushy, melted by the jungle heat, but thick snowfall fell from thin air ten feet above the ground, replenishing it as fast as it melted. Near the centre sat a circular platform of stone like the one in the Nevada Allfrost Chamber. Similar runes, mostly nonsense to me, decorated the innermost ring, lit by the cool blue that emanated from the material itself. Also, as at the Nevada Chamber, a pulsating globe of white energy hovered a few feet above it at the epicentre.
I moved out onto the snowy ground, stepping from a steam bath into an icebox. I glided deeper into the clearing and held up a hand to savour the cold radiating from the pulsating globe. I slipped off my jacket and turned my back to the orb, letting the cold sink deeply into my pores, massaging away aches and pains like magic. The sound of my skin crackling into icy hardness was like footsteps on crushed glass. Beautiful. Tossing the jacket onto the wet snow, I held out my hands, palms up, and caught snowflakes as they fell, then turned my head to the sky and opened my mouth to catch them on my tongue.
Feeling rejuvenated, I looked around. Whatever this clearing was, it wasn’t the Allfrost Chamber. For one, it stood in the open air, making it hardly a chamber.
And there’s no tholos, I thought. Is this just an oasis of ice and snow for people like me—a resting ground or temporary sanctuary—or did it serve another function? The former made sense. Snow people like me, living in the tropics, I reasoned, would need to escape the heat now and then. There’s just no way of knowing for sure. What I need to do is get my memories back and I’ll know what this is and a lot more.
I grabbed my jacket from the snow and put it back on. I zipped my jacket up to my neck and walked from the clearing, taking a path at the far side that continued uphill, deeper into the island. The warm air hit me like a punch in the face as I stepped from the snowfall onto the bare forest floor, but I took it in stride, re-energized from the cold oasis. Eager to get this over with, I broke into a run, racing through the tropical jungle like a lunatic, trailed by a cloud of steam, heading, I hoped, for much drier, even warmer Nevada air.
Ten minutes later, the trees fell away, presenting another clearing, larger than the last. A wall of greenery rose steeply from the other side, hiding all but a few bits of volcanic rock that peeked through intermittently. The barrier was rough and irregular, rising into the mist overhead fifty feet up the wall. A large crooked opening, fifteen feet high and thirty feet across, sat in the middle, reminding me of the troll’s gaping maw.
Shadows danced within as I approached, descending into the cave. Fifty feet inside, the walls gathered close, narrowing to about arm’s length, forming a tunnel that was soon blocked by a wall of solid ice. Eyes wide, I ran my hand over the surface, savouring the sensation. The ice seemed impervious to the warm air of the tropical night, showing no signs of melting. A few tendrils of misty water vapour drifted lazily off the surface, but the cave floor where I stood was virtually dry.
This must be it, I thought.
I leaned forward, pushed against it, and slipped into the hard ice as if it were mere fog. I followed the tunnel down into the earth for several hundred feet before emerging from the ice back into open air. The walls here glowed, lit by some unknown substance or process from beneath a thin layer of ice and the air felt well below zero. I doused my inner light, relying instead on the tube’s built-in illumination, and continued my descent.
Now this feels like home, I thought, sighing.
A few minutes later, the lava tube gave way to a vast roughly oval chamber, three hundred feet across, rising a hundred feet overhead. Clouds of fog filled the far spaces of the chamber and floated a foot off the floor, ill
uminated by a halo of bluish-white light that shone through the thick coating of ice that covered its walls and floor. Like the Nevada Allfrost Chamber, the room contained a large tholos at one side, near the centre of a sunken amphitheatre. Unlike in the damaged Nevada Chamber, a huge ball of snow, glowing a bright blue-tinted white and emitting a powerful thrumming sound, floated up and down, floor to ceiling, at this tholos’s centre. Across the room rested another raised circular dais like the one in the forest outside. This one’s surface also displayed a variety of intricate runes and a pulsating ball of white energy floating five feet above it.
“Greetings, Sentinel Shivurr,” said a voice as I strode down the steps toward the tholos. “Welcome home. It has been five thousand, three hundred and twenty-nine days since your last visit.”
Chapter 26
Hue, Are You?
I peered into the fog, trying to locate the speaker, but didn’t know which way to look; it seemed to come from everywhere, as if broadcast over a loudspeaker. “What the—? Hello? Who is that?” I asked when I didn’t see anyone. “Show yourself.”
“Certainly,” said the voice. A translucent humanoid figure of white light materialized in front of me, ten feet away. Its face was just a hint of a nose, two eyes, and eyebrows suggested by subtle alterations in the colour of the light that defined it. “How can I be of assistance?”
“Who are you?”
“Is this a diagnostic query, Sentinel?” asked the figure as its colour shifted, taking on a light blue tone.
“Uh, sure,” I said. “Why not?”
“My name is Hue,” answered the voice amiably, now tinged a faint green. “I am Allfrost Controller four zero two.”
“Do you live here?”
A slight pause. “I do not so much live here as I am of here. Are you well, Sentinel?”
“Sure, I’m great. Just a bit of amnesia.”
“Understood, Sentinel,” the figure said. “How very interesting.”
“I’m glad you’re entertained.”
“My apologies. My existence has been tedious for many years, since you left. Without you, I have been unable to fulfill my purpose.”
“What purpose?”
“To safeguard and preserve the Allfrost.”
“What does that involve?”
“Careful monitoring and adjustment of its systems to proactively correct problems before they require your attention. When those problems cannot be resolved, they are passed along to Sentinels such as yourself. When such situations arise, I support you and other Sentinels in resolving those issues.”
“This is wicked. I lived here, then,” I said, looking around. “This is my kind of place.”
Hue shook his head. “Some of the time. Sentinels go where they are needed most. Wherever the Allfrost needs to be defended, maintained, or restored. I, and others like me, assist you in those duties, identifying and prioritizing, as well as providing a control interface to the Allfrost itself.”
“And how do I do that? Defend, maintain, and restore, I mean.”
“Using your gifts, you protect its nodes against any entities threatening its operation. Maintenance generally involves ensuring the Allfrost nodes remain cold enough to retain perpetual connection to the Underfrost. Restoration is the process of mending that connection when it breaks down, which sometimes occurs either through natural degradation or malfeasance.”
I wandered over to the platform with the pulsating white sphere. “Sounds like a lot of responsibility. Why is the Allfrost so important? Why do we Sentinels do what we do? I mean, what is it aside from a transportation network?”
Hue stared, raising an eyebrow. “The Allfrost machine was built to create paradise on earth.”
“Paradise? Paradise for whom?”
“For you, and others of your kind,” replied Hue.
“You’re saying this Allfrost, it makes the entire planet colder,” I said. I thought of the hot Nevada desert and sultry jungle outside. “It doesn’t seem to be doing the best job.”
Hue’s voice took on an edge. “Freezing the entire planet is beyond the Allfrost’s design purpose. The original intent was to freeze the northern hemisphere from the pole to the forty-ninth parallel and the southern hemisphere from the pole to the twenty-sixth parallel, while leaving the region between unfrozen.”
“Forty-ninth parallel? That’s the Canada-US border. Lucy said it’s cold there, but not that cold. She said it was hot there even, in summer.”
“Indeed, that is expected. That is due to two main factors.”
“Which are?”
“The Allfrost is operating at suboptimal efficiency.”
“And the other?”
“Human habitation is creating a greenhouse effect, warming the planet. If not for the Allfrost, the globe would be much warmer than it already is.”
“You’re telling me that if the Allfrost was working properly, the earth would be enjoying an ice age. Is that it?”
“That is correct,” said Hue. “Given the Allfrost’s current state, global warming will likely delay the next ice age by several decades, possibly keeping glaciers from reaching as near the equator as in the past. However, this might be temporary should humanity’s impact on the climate decline because of the ice age.”
“As in the past,” I said softly, staring at the snowball rising and falling within the tholos across the room. “The planet was frozen before, then?”
“Many times,” Hue said.
“Yeah, but if it was frozen before, why didn’t it stay that way?”
Hue cocked his head. “It is all part of the cycle. Without change, there is only stagnation. Everything has its time, then has it again.”
“Yeah, if you say so,” I said absently, thinking. Hue waited, saying nothing. “You said this was to create a paradise on earth for me and my kind. Do you mean Sentinels?”
“Sentinels and others of your people. Sentinels are guardians of the Allfrost, but not all your people are Sentinels.”
“I see. Where are they, then?”
“Sentinels?”
“Sure.”
“Unknown,” Hue said in a pained tone of voice. “No Sentinel other than yourself has been seen in several hundred years.”
“And others of my kind? Those that aren’t Sentinels?”
“Also unknown. The Sentinels went in search of them, and they vanished too.”
I rubbed my temples and looked at him. “You’re telling me I’m the last of my kind that you’ve seen in centuries. The last Sentinel. The last…what did we call ourselves? My people, I mean.”
“You refer to yourselves as Borealans,” Hue said.
“And I’m the last Borealan?”
“Apparently so,” Hue said in a soft voice. “Yes.”
“Borealan?” I said, stroking my chin. “Did we name ourselves after Boreas?”
“Quite the opposite. The entity Boreas chose that moniker after meeting your people.”
“Huh, how about that,” I said. “And how many Sentinels were there?”
“Two thousand and forty-eight at their peak.”
“And I’m the last one?”
“Correct,” Hue said. “The workload has been too great for a single Sentinel—hence the Allfrost’s decline. Your absence these past years, coupled with the strain of global warming, has accelerated the decline.”
Hue’s voice cheered. “However, now that you are back, your work can resume, and the degradation can be slowed, if not reversed.”
I shook my head. “Not yet, Hue. First, I need to get my memory back and rescue some friends of mine.” I pointed at the Allfrost Transporter. “To do that, I need to use that and get back to Nevada.”
Hue studied the ceiling briefly. “The Nevada Chamber is compromised. Human invaders have infiltrated it and damaged and removed critical components. It is still on the network, but its power is nearly depleted, and its transporter is non-functional.”
“But this one works, right? I can get there usin
g it, can’t I?”
“Certainly,” Hue replied. “The Nevada Chamber’s power nodes have sufficient strength to assist in the transport there, but you will not be able to use that chamber to travel elsewhere. You will have to travel by other means to another Allfrost Chamber to return. The nearest is in Death Valley, which is more than two hundred miles away.”
“No problem,” I said. “My friends can drive. Tell me more about those power nodes that you mentioned.”
“Each Allfrost Chamber is surrounded by an array of nodes,” Hue said, pointing over my shoulder at the white ball hovering over the dais. “Like that one, over there. The power nodes are connected to the Underfrost, drawing energy and coldness from its limitless supply. They are also involved in the transportation process, improving accuracy, guiding the transport vessel to its destination with increased precision. They act jointly, providing redundancy and coverage. Via their Oculi, they also allow for remote viewing of their location from any Allfrost Chamber.”
“Remote viewing?”
“They allow you to view the power node’s location as if you are there,” Hue said.
“Like watching it on TV?”
“I am afraid I do not know what that is,” Hue said. “Shall I show you?”
“Please do.”
“Come,” Hue said. He floated over to the fountain that sat within a circle of stone at the foot of the tholos. A raised edge ran around the circle’s circumference, forming a lip, as if to hold water. “Stand in front of the fountain, please. You need to select a destination so that the tholos knows where to send you.”
I stepped out of the snow into the stone circle and stood next to him. I looked down at the fountain in front of me, leaning my stomach against the bowl. Half-filled with unfrozen water, two feet in diameter, it reminded me of a large bird bath. I looked at Hue—now magenta-coloured—expectantly, wincing at the glare. “Looking at your face is like staring into the sun, dude.”