Ice Sky Storm

by Craig Delancey

  “Improbable,” Bria growled, “for single impact.”

  Tarkos nodded involuntarily, making the view shake. “Yes, that is strange. Shrapnel depressurized this main crew structure. But the weapon seems intact. So that’s odd, isn’t it? That shrapnel would leave the gun mostly operational, but kill every Neelee here.”

  “Radiation?” Bria asked.

  Tarkos had his suit’s shields set to maximum deflection. “I’m seeing a lot of background radiation. But not so bad that it would kill in a few hours. And their suits should have had shielding as good as mine. Wait. I see something odd.”

  Tarkos climbed over banks of hard controls. The Neelee had wisely not entrusted the weapon to virtual controls. But it meant that they would need a dozen sentients up here in this control center to manage the weapon. The controls glittered with blue and green lights. With the sound only of Tarkos’s breathing, the place had a strangely quiet solemnity. The Neelee casualties drifted slowly through the room. The colorful lights glittered off their space suits.

  Tarkos stopped before a long scorched cut in one control panel. He moved close, so that the burn filled his view.

  “Bria, you see this? It’s on the underside of a downward-facing panel. This is a laser burn, and could not have come from outside. The angle is from….” He backed up, till he floated a few meters away. “From here.”

  “Small weapons fire,” Bria said.

  Tarkos nodded. “What do you think? A warrior drone?”

  “Perhaps several,” Bria growled.

  Tarkos told the weapons on his armor to warm up and run diagnostics. “Tiklik,” he said. “You have three tasks. Get this weapon operational, determine how we can use it to burn the rings, and plan our trajectory.”

  The black Kirt AI sent him only a single ping in reply.

  Tarkos overheard Captain Shirazi shout in the background, “What trajectory?”

  “I’ll let you answer that, Commander,” Tarkos said. “I’m going to organize the bots, and then do a walking tour to evaluate our progress. That’ll give me a chance to look for this Ulltrian drone. I’ll call you back.” He cut the line. “Tiklik, what’s the status?”

  “The device will be operational,” Tiklik said. “Its neutrino output remains high. There is a crack in the fusion chamber. Probability of shock explosion will rise exponentially after initial firing of the weapon.”

  “How long can we run it, realistically. Say, assume 95% safety margin.”

  “There will be a greater than 5% chance of catastrophic failure after forty seven minutes.”

  Tarkos hissed and slapped the side of the desk beside him. It sent him careening back, and he bounced off the clear ceiling and floated back toward Tiklik.

  “Can we burn the whole ring in forty minutes, Tiklik? Assume we use the Zoroastrian to move this thing. It’ll be hell on the Kirt ship, but what then?”

  “Given the mass of this structure, it can be done, with a 17% chance of hull failure for the Zoroastrian.”

  “Do me a favor,” Tarkos told Tiklik. “Keep that number to yourself.”

  Tiklik did not reply, but crawled quickly toward the other robots. The nine all drifted toward the central controls in the room, and the air filled with their furiously fast radio chatter.

  _____

  On the bridge of the Zoroastrian, Bria lowered her head and looked over her nose at the human captain.

  “What trajectory?” Shirazi repeated.

  Bria closed her nostrils and held her breath. She did not explain orders. But she saw now that it wasn’t just Tarkos who wanted to know always everything before acting. This must be a human failing. Well, she did not have time to teach discipline to this crew. She would explain to the captain. Just this once.

  “Ulltrian self-replicators infest rings of Neelee-ornor,” Bria said. “Weapon will burn rings. Weapon must be moved through appropriate targeting trajectory.”

  “I thought you just wanted to move it from here to somewhere else, like above the pole. That’s madness—but this is worse: you want to keep towing it, all around the planet?”

  “Yessss,” Bria said, resisting the temptation to close her top eyes because the captain insisted on stating the obvious.

  “It’ll shake this ship apart.”

  “Perhaps not,” Bria said.

  “Perhaps not!” the captain shouted.

  Bria showed her teeth. But, before she could speak again, Tarkos radioed back.

  “Commander, these bots are fast. They say they’ve got the tow line in place, that they’ve got the maneuvering engines warmed up, and Tiklik has our trajectory.”

  A data packet followed his message. Unpacked, a graphic filled the bridge: Neelee-ornor and its moon, with their own position at the Lagrange-1 point marked with a brilliant blue diamond. A blue line sprouted from their location and shot toward the north pole of Neelee-ornor.

  “It’s a bit odd,” Tarkos said. “It’s a gravity turn, powered the whole way to keep us off a proper orbit and to keep us moving over the rings as fast as possible, counter to the rings’ rotational direction.”

  The trajectory turned around the pole and dropped toward the equator, crossed through the rings, and swung back around the world over the southern hemisphere.

  “They think they can manage the dispersal of the beam so that we are always hitting an entire swath of the ice. When we come back around to this side of Neelee-ornor, we should have burned the whole ring.”

  “This is madness,” the captain repeated.

  “Start weapon engines,” Bria said.

  “Aye, Commander,” Tarkos called.

  “Prepare engines,” Bria growled at the bridge crew. “Ease acceleration. Slowly.”

  The humans said nothing. Bria could smell their fear: sweat made their pungent human odor grow oppressively strong. But they did as she asked.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Fire the engines,” Tarkos radioed.

  He watched as the robots around him sank to the floor. One green bot, a centipede of gleaming iridescent segments, landed on its back and twisted, righting itself.

  Tarkos could not help but wait for the creaks and complaints of the giant weapon, but of course none came. They stood in vacuum, and his suit resisted any vibration transmission through its own structure.

  “Full power and maximum acceleration achieved” Tiklik sent.

  “Not much, by the feel of it,” Tarkos said.

  “Equivalent to one tenth of a gravity of your planet.”

  “We’re stable?”

  Tiklik waved an arm. “The engines were unharmed. They can continue this thrust indefinitely.”

  The floor seemed to jerk upward.

  “That’s the tow line?” Tarkos asked.

  “The Zoroastrian is applying thrust.”

  Tarkos held his breath. He had reports coming into his dataspace from several of the robot teams, but the data fell through his vision as raw numbers. It meant nothing to him yet.

  “It’s holding together?”

  “There is structural damage to the Zoroastrian,” Tiklik said.

  “But the weapon?”

  “Structural damage has not extended to the weapon systems.”

  Tarkos opened a channel to Bria. “Looks like it’s gonna hold, Commander.”

  The Sussurat made a noise that seemed to mix a growl and a purr.

  _____

  Tarkos wobbled across the floor as they eased the Zoroastrian, with the weapon in tow, up to a quarter of an e-gee, and then after an hour they increased the acceleration to two thirds of an e-gee. They kept it there, and Tarkos did not ask his Commander why she did not try to move faster. He knew Bria would be pushing the ship to the threshold of failure.

  Tarkos walked the length of the weapon on its outside surface, using the gecko grips in his suit to scale like a fly over a wall. Each robot team he passed worked busily to repair some damaged caused by a laser cut or shrapnel impact. Most did not acknowledge his presence until he asked
for an update.

  “It doesn’t seem we have enough time,” he cursed aloud. The planet loomed, swallowing the sky as they approached. It seemed to urge them on, as if they had to get their task done before they fell into its atmosphere and burned up, as if the huge weapon were one more bit of the detritus of war that blazed now toward the fragile envelope of Neelee-ornor’s air.

  His suit relayed the fragmentary reports from Neelee-ornor. Several fission weapons had been detonated in orbit close enough to shower major cities with radiation. The second wave of the Ulltrian fleet remained distant, firing missiles down at Neelee-ornor and harassing the fleet of Alliance ships, but they did not move closer. The strategy perplexed Tarkos. During one of his check ins with Bria, he asked her about it.

  “The Ulltrians seem to have almost all their ships here,” he said. “At least, the majority of the ships that we observed leaving the World Hammer. But they don’t mount a straight attack. Why?”

  “Caution,” Bria said. “Most of their fleet. Dangerous to Ulltrians if fleet is destroyed. Wait.”

  “They wait for what?”

  “Ice sky storm,” Bria said.

  Tarkos nodded to himself. That had to be it. They could not risk their whole fleet, but they had so much faith in their secret weapon, hidden down in the rings, that they waited now for it to activate, and do whatever it was going to do. But then, what did that mean they expected the symbionts to do?

  Meanwhile, Neelee-ornor grew in the sky, getting inexorably closer. They would begin to adjust their course toward the pole soon. Messages to the planet were not getting through. Too much radiation and virtual radiation still showered through the space around the planet, making reliable communication impossible. And, given the chaos of battle and the civilian deaths below, the Zoroastrian’s odd activity did not manage to interest any AI. The machines that handled communication traffic prioritized each message that managed to get through to the network. They based rankings on some immediate life or death problem in local space. Bria’s warnings about the rings, and explanations of the Zoroastrian’s actions, could not get attention to climb up the queue, when so many more immediate concerns drowned network traffic.

  “Bria,” Tarkos said. “I’m going back inside the control center and climbing down into the interior of the weapon. I’m hoping comms will continue, but I may have to rely on relays through some of the robots.”

  Bria did not answer. After a moment, the ground seemed to pull and twist slightly under Tarkos’s feet. They were making a course correction. That meant they were shifting their trajectory to rise up over the northern hemisphere now. He looked to Neelee-ornor. It’s rings reached off to each side, to the limits of his view. He peered at the rings, wondering if he could see anything by naked eye. But he could not: they remained pure, white, innocent.

  Then he saw a ripple pass through the rings. He touched his helmet, thinking that something had happened to this visor, or to the tactical visual overlay projected on the interior of his helmet. But the ripple came again. And again. It settled into a oscillating wave through which the rings and the planet beyond seemed to shiver.

  “Oh,” Tarkos whispered, “that can’t be good.”

  _____

  Bria took a step forward on the bridge of the Zoroastrian. She peered at the tactical display.

  “Confirm sensors,” she growled. Because the image was trembling, a wave going through their tactical view of the planet.

  “Yes, Commander,” one of the humans said. It had pale skin and hair cut close to its head. Bria lowered her head and looked at the small brown eyes of this human, where it sat behind a wide console dense with data displays.

  “Report,” Bria said.

  “Sensors are fine, Commander. But something strange is happening on the planet. Or rather, in the rings. We have a spike in neutrinos. But there is… well, it looks like a gravitational disturbance.”

  “Magnify,” Bria said.

  The human hesitated, but then mumbled, “I think there is a visual effect.” It touched several icons. The tactical display in the room faded into a clear, bright view of the space outside: Neelee-ornor, green and aqua, filled the bridge; and below, the white, snowy rings. But as they watched, a ripple went through the planet and then the rings.

  Tarkos’s voice came over the comms. “Commander, are you seeing this?”

  “Space time warping,” Bria said.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Tarkos said in English.

  Bria looked at the captain. The human’s eyes were wide open with surprise.

  “That looks very bad,” the woman whispered.

  “Yessss,” Bria hissed, surprising the captain by using English as she said it. “Very baaaaaad.”

  “That’s it, that’s Ice Sky Storm?” Tarkos said. “Some kind of gravity weapon maybe? Who the hell knew the symbionts could affect space time? That could do terrible damage to the planet. Please tell me we have some good news.”

  Bria growled impatiently. “Tarkos, continue mission.”

  “Aye commander. Entering the weapon now.” His connection went silent.

  “Commander, Savannah Runner has moved into view,” the human at operations said. Bria looked over at the small human, who spoke with a loud voice, a hint of panic in her tone.

  “Any chance they can help?” Captain Shirazi asked.

  “They have fired four missiles at us,” the woman at ops said.

  “What?” Shirazi shouted.

  Bria looked at the human at comms, lowering her head to meet its eyes.

  “Contact Savannah Runner,” Bria said.

  “Commander, we’ve been trying,” the humans said. “But Savannah Runner’s AI won’t expedite our message. They don’t seem to know that we are here, with the weapon. It’s likely they see the weapon moving of its own accord, and assume the Ulltrians have control of it.”

  Bria called up a wide tactical view, one that they could all see. Four missiles sped from the Savannah Runner on independent and diverse trajectories to hit them. Bria showed her teeth.

  The woman at ops spoke up. “The AI on the weapon—uh, the one identified as, uh, Tiklik’al’Takas—is sending a message. A countdown. We’re moving into a close pass over the planet. It says they will fire the weapon soon.”

  “We’re moving in the opposite direction of everything else in orbit,” the Captain said.

  “Opposite of ring’s orbit,” Bria said. “Cover more area per time, as ring passes beneath.”

  “Even this ship,” the Captain said, “hitting debris at that speed, will be destroyed.”

  Bria blinked agreement. She turned and pushed her snout near the human at helms. She showed her teeth. “Don’t hit debris,” she told the human.

  The human swallowed and blinked. “Yes, Commander,” she whispered, her voice failing.

  “All crew into vacuum suits,” the captain called.

  Bria examined the tactical situation. The only thing that might be able to stop the incoming missiles would be the cruiser. But with Tarkos out on the weapon, only she was close to the cruiser. She would have to go. That would mean leaving this bridge. She growled in her throat. That was an unpleasant solution. She did not trust the human captain. But what choice did she have?

  Bria rose to her full height. She looked at each bridge crew in turn, focussing on their tiny two eyes. In Galactic she said, “If Neelee-ornor dies, then Alliance dies. If Alliance dies, then all worlds die. Earth dies.” Her gaze stopped on the captain. “Maintain trajectory. Neelee-ornor and all worlds depend on you. Fire weapon as Tiklik’al’Takas instructs.”

  “What? Where, where are you going?” Shirazi said.

  “After missiles.” Bria turned and sprinted on all fours through the door in the back of the bridge. The gasps of the humans followed in her wake.

  _____

  Tarkos climbed back through the gash in the hull where he had first entered the control deck. He nodded to Tiklik, uncertain whether the AI noticed or under
stood the gesture, and then he located and opened a hatch in the floor, and stepped down a ladder with very close rungs, suitable for Neelee steps. One of the robots had found interior plans for the weapon, and Tarkos followed a path laid out in the map now, striving to get to the central chamber where a vast engine would generate the particle beam.

  The ladder ended in a black hall that opened onto a dim blue glow. As he walked toward the opening, the floor seemed to shift again. He paused while he was jerked side to side. They were struggling with the course correction. Tarkos knelt and pressed his hand to the floor. He could feel, just barely through the haptics of his glove, great shuddering of the vast weapon.

  “Hold together,” he whispered, a prayer to Neelee tech. “Just hold on a little while longer.”

  He stood and walked quickly to the end of the hall. It ended at the huge firing chamber, a long hollow space that stretched nearly the length of the whole weapon. It really was a cannon, he mused. At his feet, a metal rail made a narrow path that ringed the interior of the firing chamber. He stepped out and looked down, into what now appeared a huge, vertiginous abyss, the mouth of the weapon white because it aimed at the snowy rings. He could see a robot team clinging to the wall below, with a torch of some kind sparking on the metal. Above, the weapon’s particle generator reached down, an inverted spire glowing an evil blue-white. Another team of robots crawled along the wall near the generator’s central element, tracing a fracture through which he could see black space.

  “Bria,” Tarkos called. “Bria, can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” the Sussurat replied. But her voice sounded different, as if she were in a smaller space now.

  “Good. We have—”