Rebel Ice

by S. L. Viehl

  Was it her? He had always thought the ghost he had encountered there a true spirit. Spirit made flesh.

  The long-haired healer gave him a level look. “What do you want, Raktar?”

  He had already planned to keep Duncan Reever on the planet. No one on Joren could know that Teulon was alive. One of these women was Reever’s wife. The solution was a simple one. “You may join us and fight for the rebellion.”

  “Oh, yes, that is what I wish. Arm me. Let me shoot the men I have healed.” Jarn made a disgusted sound and turned her back on him.

  “We cannot fight,” Resa reminded him softly. “We are healers.”

  “You came closer to killing me today than any assassin the Toskald have sent after me for the last year,” Teulon told her. “I would not ask you to fight. You can follow the army and treat the wounded.” While he kept Reever busy elsewhere, away from Resa and Jarn.

  It was a cruelty, perhaps, but not a permanent one. Teulon could also safeguard both women until it was safe to permit Reever to leave Akkabarr.

  “Just like that?” Jarn asked. “While you keep us well supplied with patients? Permit me to express my lack of gratitude now.”

  “War is upon us, Healer. Men will die whether you wish it or not.” He saw something dark move in her eyes. “You will go on healing whether you are with the army or not. With us, you will be protected.”

  “While we watch you butcher them. I thank you, no.” Jarn covered her face. “Are we permitted to go now?” She walked to the entry and waited there.

  “Before the patrol came here, they fired on an iiskar to the north. Sverrul, it was.” Teulon saw her back tense. “Do you know the camp?”

  “I know the Sverrul, yes.” Jarn turned around. “What happened?”

  “What usually happens when a fully armed Toskald patrol decides to punish the Iisleg. The rasakt and every woman and child in the camp were incinerated.” Teulon glanced at Resa. “They were not armed. Their men had left to join the rebellion. I doubt the women even came out of their shelters when they heard the ships.”

  Jarn was shaking her head slowly.

  “If we went with you, your men will not permit us to treat them.” Resa picked up the blob that had rendered her faceless. “That is why we use these. So that they will think we are vral.”

  Something else that Teulon now found very convenient. “You will have to maintain the vral illusion except when you are alone or with me. Would it be so difficult?”

  Resa turned to Jarn. “He is right.”

  “He is a killer.” Jarn went to Teulon. “What do you want from us?” she demanded. “You are a man. You would not be this generous without a reason.”

  “A general who commands two vral will encounter very little resistance from the loyalist tribes,” Teulon said. “You will give me the final sanction I need: the sanction of the Iisleg God.”

  The two women looked at each other.

  “I cannot decide this,” Resa told Jarn. “This is your work. I follow you.”

  “They will discover what we are—who we are,” Jarn protested.

  Resa thought for a moment. “Not if we are careful. We must have our own shelter. We cannot share it with anyone else.”

  “You will have it,” Teulon said.

  “I don’t have enough medical supplies.” Jarn rubbed her eyes. “I have used here today most of what I have been able to salvage.”

  Teulon nodded. “I will obtain that which you need.”

  “We will also need shelters that we can set up near the battlefields, so that the men can be treated under cover,” Resa suggested. “Someone to help us with moving and treating the wounded.”

  “The skela,” Teulon said. “No one would question their presence, as they are death handlers. The skela already know what you are.”

  “The ensleg,” Resa said suddenly. “We cannot leave him.” To Teulon, she said, “An ensleg came to the crawls looking for us. He believes we know where his woman is. She was lost here, on Akkabarr. He is Terran, and wounded.”

  Teulon wondered how Reever could have found both women and not realized one of them was Cherijo. He would have to lie now, something that disgusted him, but could not be helped. “Terra is part of the League. The Toskald are forging an alliance with the League. Whatever reason he has come here, it is not to look for a woman. That is only an excuse.”

  The two women fell silent. Jarn’s expression was not visible, but Resa’s was troubled.

  “There may be more that we require,” Jarn said to Teulon at last. “It will not be a simple thing to conceal us.”

  “No path worth traveling is simple.” Or entirely revealed to the traveler, but Teulon kept that portion of the Jorenian adage to himself. “We seem to follow the same direction.”

  “No, we do not.” Jarn pulled the wrap from her face and looked into Teulon’s eyes. “I will not kill, ensleg. Not for you. Not for anyone.”

  She seemed to believe the words she spoke, and yet she carried the blade of a Death Bringer. “Agreed.”

  Jarn closed her eyes. “We will join your rebellion.”

  WAR

  SIXTEEN

  “You fight well, for an ensleg,” the rebel in the abandoned trench said to Reever as he offered him some of the dried meat from his pack.

  The skirmish Reever and the rebel had survived had been intense and bloody. There were still men straggling in from the ice, wet and exhausted.

  “No, I thank you.” Reever took some emergency rations he had salvaged from a patrol ship the week before and put a liquid pack to thaw by the heatarc. “How long have you fought for the rebels?”

  “Two seasons, since the beginning of the war.” The rebel was an older man with the dark skin and callused hands of a builder. “You?”

  “The same.” Reever had woken up in Iiskar Kuorj to find he had been knocked out and operated on by one of the skela. Kuorj knew nothing of how he had been brought to the camp, only that he had been found by one of the renser women going to gather clean snow for meltwater. Reever had gone back to the crawls as soon as he was well enough to travel, but found them abandoned. Stories of the vral on the battlefields had already begun to circulate by then, and when Kuorj’s men had been summoned to fight, he had gone with them. “Have you seen the vral? Have you seen a Terran woman with them?” he asked the rebel, as he asked every Iisleg he met.

  “Once, yes.” The hunter shuddered. “I fought beside them. They make a man feel like a woman. What is a Terran?”

  Reever leaned back, resting his head against the trench wall. “An ensleg, I meant. It doesn’t matter.”

  “There are more vral than rebels on the ice now,” another man listening to the conversation put in. “They appear on every battlefield to kill our enemies before they heal those Iisleg found worthy.”

  “Not every battlefield.” Reever had yet to encounter the faceless healers, of which there were stories that numbered them in the hundreds.

  “They only fight with the Raktar’s army,” the hunter beside him said. “Mind your pack before it melts, ensleg.”

  Reever plucked the liquid pack from the trench floor and held it between his fur mitts. It had grown too hot to open, so he waited for it to cool and studied the faces around him. They were thin, dirty, and tired, but so was every face on Akkabarr.

  Victory was near, but whose it would be was still undecided.

  The Toskald began attacking as soon as they had learned that the Raktar had emptied their armory trenches, evidently overnight, during the worst of the seasonal storms. How the rebel general had accessed the heavily guarded bunkers, let alone moved the massive amounts of ordnance out of them, remained a mystery. Reever had seen some of the tunnels the rebels had burned through the ice by redirecting vent shafts. The process of tunneling had not been easy, for the water from the melted ice had to be relocated. Reever estimated it had taken the Raktar’s forces close to a year to tunnel their way to the trenches.

  No one knew where the weapons
had gone, and those who did would not speak of it. It was, as every rebel said, the Raktar’s will.

  Reever was far more interested in the vral. Since the beginning of the war, they had been sighted regularly, and then constantly, wherever the fighting was worst. They came to heal at first, and then they were seen fighting alongside the rebels. They were always accompained by special detachments of heavily armed rebels who flanked them on either side. Reever had never heard of a vral who had fallen in combat.

  Somehow the two vral had multiplied. Reever had verified from other rebels who had survived largescale engagements all over the inhabited territories that the vral now numbered in the hundreds.

  “They kill the windlords, and save us,” one rebel who had survived an enormous skirmish in the west told Reever. “That is how I know our cause is just. If it were not, they would kill everyone.”

  “Hundreds of them,” one wide-eyed rebel whispered to Reever in the dark of an ice cave they had shared as temporary shelter. “They drift over the red snow, but it never touches them. They kill faster than anything I have ever seen. Then they lower their cradles for our worthy, and carry them away.” He swallowed. “Some of our men are seen again. Some are not.”

  Reever understood that the rebel general was using the vral both as his field medics and an attack force; that much was obvious. But how he had managed to turn two into hundreds, and make them kill as well as heal, remained a mystery.

  A trio of pilots climbed out of the tunnel into the trench. “We need men to defend Iiskar Bjola,” one called out. “All who are able, come with us.”

  Reever was conscious and not wounded, which counted as able, so he rose with the others and went out onto the ice. The transport waiting for them was a refitted Toskald scout ship, captured and reconfigured as a mini-troop-carrier and skimmer launch platform.

  “Patrols attacking from the north, forty ships,” the pilot shouted over the sound of the engines. “Ground forces have surrounded the camp and are returning fire, but they are outnumbered. Your skimmers carry two plate charges. Land when you have planted them and support the ground defense.”

  Reever had never attached the explosive devices on the Toskald ship, so he mounted behind a rebel who had, to provide cover. The crossbows the rebels used were useless in the air, but he could man the pilot controls while the rebel planted the charges.

  The sun was just beginning to rise, showing a fiery horizon line where the Toskald patrol was firing on the encampment.

  “Stay low,” was the carrier pilot’s final instructions. “They have improved their targeting devices. The ice and God protect you.”

  The mission was a simple one. Reever and the other rebels would fly in under the patrol ships, mine them, and land to join the infantry. The Toskald still had difficulty tracking the skimmers in the air, but equipment modifications allowed them to lock on for short periods of time. The skimmer pilots, who were accustomed to flying in linear formation, had to compensate by resorting to degrouping and flying in erratic, zigzag solo patterns.

  Reever looked down to see the rebel forces encircling the defenseless iiskar. Bjola had been evacuated some weeks ago, as had many other large camps. The women and children were now kept safely hidden in empty trenches far outside the battle zones. The rebels still used the shelters left behind, however, and if there were enough warm bodies, their thermal signatures would attract a Toskald patrol.

  “Ready?” Reever’s pilot shouted.

  Reever slapped his right shoulder, and the pilot engaged the engine. The skimmer launched from the open side of the carrier into the icy air, and dropped immediately and changed course to prevent attracting attention to the larger ship.

  The Toskald’s forty-ship patrol was now only some thirty in number, with a dozen ships grounded or smashed into debris. On the ice below, four clusters of rebels with antiaircraft cannon were firing up at the patrol. In the air, skimmers darted around the attack vessels, weaving between pulse blasts until they could maneuver beneath a ship. The reinforced lower hulls had defeated the rebels’ attempts at sabotage for a time, until commanders began issuing explosive charges that would blast through the alloy.

  Reever’s pilot found a hole in the cross fire and shot through it, coming up beneath a ship already partially crippled by ground fire. “Take over,” he called to Reever as he engaged the stabilizer clamps and throttled back on the engine before standing up.

  Reever slid forward, taking hold of the controls and watching for spot gunners. The Toskald had mounted pulse turrets on the back of every patrol ship, with gunners whose sole duty was to spot, target, and destroy rebel skimmers and their pilots.

  The plate charge clanked as it adhered to the hull of the patrol ship, and the pilot grinned down at Reever. “Disengage the—” The rest of what he said was lost as a drone arm seized him and dragged him off the skimmer.

  Reever snatched at the pilot’s leg, but the hull drone, a spiderish, former maintenance device that crawled along the outside of the ship, dragged the pilot out of reach. Reever drew his pistol and aimed for the drone’s drive center, but a bright bolt of cannon fire struck it, blasting it and the pilot’s body to pieces.

  Half-blinded and deafened by the blast, Reever disengaged from the patrol vessel and dropped down. He wasn’t injured, but he couldn’t see well enough to fly to the next target. He rolled the skimmer out from under the ship and made for the surface.

  The landing was rough, but the skimmer stayed intact. A man rushed up to help him off, while another checked the skimmer. “How many?”

  “One,” Reever told him. The ice all around him was dark with scorch marks, debris dust, and old blood.

  “We have the other.” The two men mounted the skimmer and took off, leaving him where he stood.

  The patrol was still hammering the surface with a barrage of pulse, deton, and incendiary blasts. A huge blast went off near Reever, deafening him and throwing him to the ground. He tried to wipe the blood and sweat from his eyes as he crawled for cover. Most of the iiskar’s shelters had been razed, but the debris heaps still afforded a small amount of protection. He discovered a gash on his forehead was responsible for the blood that kept running into his eyes, and pressed his palm against it hard, hoping to stanch the flow.

  His vision blurred, sharpened, and then blacked out.

  The stench of blood, carbon, and cooked flesh pressed in around him. Somewhere a latrine pit had been uncovered or overflowed, and was burning. The wind cut through his threadbare furs, but it blew much of the odor away from his face. The noise was not so bad, either, but Reever could not hear anything clearly.

  He was blind, and almost deaf.

  “Wounded?” someone asked him, voice muffled as if by a heavy cloth.

  Reever shook his head. He didn’t have to see to know that there would be far worse casualties than he here.

  A hand touched his shoulder, squeezed it. A heavier fur dropped on top of him, covering his torso and the upper part of his legs. “Stay here and rest, brother.”

  Brother. That was how all the rebels referred to each other. As if the war had made them all one large, affectionate family. In a way, Reever supposed it had. There were no ranks in the trenches, or out on the ice. The battle cry of the rebels was one of union, too. A union upon death.

  We fight, or we die.

  Time passed. The blood coagulated on Reever’s scalp and stopped seeping into his eyes. He dozed, but he couldn’t sleep, not with the noise, which was growing louder by the moment. The patrol was throwing everything it had at the cannon, but they were firing off twice as many blasts. The ice shook and trembled beneath Reever as ships crashed. There were shouts from the rebels, and screams from the Toskald. Both sounded desperate and furious. Together they cleared the last of the ringing from his ears.

  “They’re coming from the north fields.”

  “Over there—release the cats.”

  “Target acquired. Fire!”

  More shouts. Growls.
Voices in anger, cries of pain. The business of killing was not a quiet one. The arena had been silent only when the last slave fell.

  Reever had never fallen. He would have crawled through hell for his wife, but this hell would not end. He had told her he would wait, and he had. Almost three years now. He had promised her.

  It had been the last thing he had said to her. I’ll be waiting for you, Waenara.

  And she had made her promise as well. Not for long, Osepeke.

  Cherijo wouldn’t have lied to him. She loved him. She had given him a child. She had saved him. She would never have made him wait like this. She would have run naked into hell after him.

  Go. Find her. Hurry.

  Silence settled all around him, as deep and still as the thought crystallizing in his mind. What if he never found her? He hadn’t found her. Had he failed? Was this the moment he had dreaded since the CloudWalk?

  “Open your eyes, ensleg.”

  Reever obeyed the low, feminine voice speaking Iisleg. A shape hovered in front of him, a shape without a constant form, a thing of light. He wanted to tell it to go away, that it had no business here. It would end up smeared on the ice, like everything else that lived and spoke and cared.

  “Head injury. Reacts to sound.” The weight of the extra fur went away, and small hands searched him. “Malnourished. Lacerations. This one can go to the unit. Where is the next?”

  Reever knew that voice. Knew it as he knew his own. “Waenara?”

  “I need transport over here,” his wife said.

  No, it could not be her. He was hallucinating. He seized one of the hands and dragged it to his face. On the fingers was her scent. “Cherijo.”

  “Delirious.” The hand tugged gently, trying to free itself. “You will be well, soldier.”

  “Cherijo.” Reever clamped his hand around her wrist. “I can’t see you. Cherijo.”

  “You can’t see anything. You’re battle-blind.” The hand twisted, a little more insistent now. “Infuser.”