by Jeff Carlson
Vonnie laid on her belly, facing outward, trying to eat and trying to rest, trying to ignore the nasty, anesthetized pressure of the med beetles slithering in and out of her temple, her cheek, and her eye socket.
Both eyes were damaged, yet she’d elected to deal with her left eye first in case something went wrong. The nanotech might need to scavenge one eye to save the other. Step by step surgeries had been Lam’s idea. He’d also agreed that her helmet would retain its integrity if she broke off her gear block and stripped it for parts. What else would he have tried?
The plastisteel of her suit should contain all sound, but there was another risk in talking, a risk she ignored just to be with someone.
"Are you still there?" she whispered.
His voice was uneven and rushed, too emotional for an artificial intelligence:
—Von, listen. Don’t close me down again, please.
"Tell me what Lam would do," she said. "Am I safe here? I need to rest. I laid down a false trail with my spotlight."
—They’ll catch us.
"Did you check my map? I made it almost three klicks."
—They will. The probability is eighty-plus percent, but I can talk to them. We have enough data now. With temporary control of the suit, I could at least establish…
"No."
—Vonnie, most of their language is postures and shapes. I can’t tell you fast enough how to move.
"No. Self-scan and correct."
—Von, wait.
"I said scan for glitches and correct. Off."
Could a ghost be crazy? If so, it was her fault. Lam was the first she’d ever made. She’d rushed the process because she was angry with him — the real him. She’d let him remember how he died, and it had made him erratic. Maybe he’d never doubted himself before.
Bauman would have been a better friend. Bauman had been older, calmer, another woman, but she was a geneticist and Lam’s biology/ecology skills were too valuable. The decision had been obvious. Vonnie didn’t have the resources to pull them apart, then build an overlay with Bauman’s personality and Lam’s education.
She was alone.
She itched her fingertips inside her rigid glove. Too soon, she prompted her clock and was discouraged. It would be six minutes until her skull was repaired, thirty before she regained her optic nerve.
Can I improve him? she wondered. I can’t give him more capacity, but maybe I can talk him through his error lists. He’s a learning system. He should respond.
Patience was supposed to be one of her strengths. Four years ago, she’d been a top instructor at Arianespace. She’d led classes in cybernetics, although her specialty had been ROM welding and construction, using remote operated mecha in low gravity environments, zero gravity, underground, or underwater. Then she’d been recruited by the European Space Agency for the same job with better pay and better students.
Vonnie enjoyed working with her hands. She loved igniting a spark in people who wanted to learn. Tailoring her approach for each new individual kept her job interesting. The ESA was full of ambitious, hyper-educated men and women who challenged her with their egos, their experience, and their own expectations.
"You can’t wait until you can see," she argued with herself. "Otherwise he’ll keep trying to take over the suit. Run more voice checks. Keep command. If he gets twitchy, just lock him down again."
A noise echoed through the blackness like two rocks clacking together, barely audible in the distance.
On my left, she thought.
Was it a rock fall? Tremors and avalanches regularly split these caverns. The noise could have been a natural event, but Vonnie knew better.
Something was coming.
4.
Europa’s volcanoes added to the unrest in the ice. Below many of the "dome" and "melt" environments, subsurface peaks of lava had proved common, elongated fins and spindles that could not have existed if this moon had more than a thirteenth of Earth’s gravity. The movements in the ice eroded the rock, then distributed it everywhere.
Rock was a problem for the mecha. It damaged blades and claws. It jammed in pipes. Even dust would make a site unattractive, and ESA Rover 011 was quick to give up on a wide area of the southern plain when it brought up contaminants in its drill cylinder.
But the rover was well-engineered. Belatedly, it noticed the consistency of shape among the debris. Then its telemetry jumped as it linked with a tanker overhead, using the ship’s brain to analyze the smattering of solids.
Finally the rover moved again, sacrificing two forearms and a spine flexor to embrace its prize, insulating the sample against the near-vacuum on Europa’s surface.
Impossible as this seemed, given the preposterous cold and the depth from which the sample came, the contaminants were organic lifeforms, long dead, long preserved: tiny, albino bugs with no more nervous system than an earthworm.
5.
Vonnie opened her blind eyes to nothing and her ears were empty, too — but she was sure. Something was coming. Inside the rigid shell of her suit, she moved but could not move, a surge of adrenaline that had no release.
Trembling, she waited. Brooding, she cursed herself. She’d spent her life making order of things, and she couldn’t get her head quiet. She made everything familiar by worrying through the mechanics of her trap again and again.
She’d snapped her next-to-last excavation charge in two and rigged a second detonator, setting one charge in the ceiling beyond her rock shelf, the other below and to her left. The blasts would shove forward and down, although in this gravity, she could expect ricochets and blowback.
Good.
The sunfish fought like a handful of rubber balls slammed down against the floor, spreading in an instant, closing on her from every angle. Their group coordination was beyond belief. To a species whose perceptions were based on touch and sonar, language consisted of gesture and stance. They always knew each other’s mood and seemed to share it like a flock of birds.
Without her eyes, their synchronized attacks were an even greater threat. Her terahertz pulse was better at sounding out large, immobile shapes than at following objects in motion. Vonnie knew she would lose track of some of them, so she’d smash everything within fifty meters.
Her armor could sustain indirect hits from the porous lava rock. She planned to bait them, bring them close, then roll into a crevice behind her and hit the explosives, after which she would slash any survivors with her laser.
It was a cutting tool, unfortunately, weak at the distance of a meter. Worse, if she overheated the gun, she would probably not be able to repair it. Her nanotech was limited to organic internals. Most of the tool kits on her waist and left hip had been torn away.
"Stop thinking. Damn it, stop talking," she murmured, the words as rapid as her heartbeat.
Just stop it.
Could they really hear her mind? She’d studied the sunfish with the acute concentration of a woman who might never see anything else again, and with all the skills of a teacher evaluating her newest class.
The sunfish definitely had an extra sense, maybe the ability to… feel weight or density. That would serve them well in the ice. So they would be able to differentiate her from the environment.
For once, she wanted them to find her. Vonnie reactivated her suit and rose into a crouch, strobing the chasm below with a terahertz pulse. She thought her signals were outside the sunfishes’ range of hearing, but she’d revealed herself as soon as her armor scraped against the rock.
Nothing. There was nothing.
"Oh God." She choked back the sound and swept the bent spaces of the chasm, quickly locating pockets in the ceiling that she hadn’t anticipated and couldn’t reach with her signals. The angle was too steep. Using her terahertz pulse was like turning on a light in what she thought was a closet and finding instead that half of the house was gone — and her enemy needed only the thinnest openings to surround her.
Were they already too close? She’d seen it befo
re, a dozen sunfish upside down on the rock like fat creeping muscles.
Vonnie aimed her laser at the ceiling even as she groped with her other hand for a chunk of rock. There was gravel, too, and a head-sized boulder. She’d gathered every loose piece of lava she could find.
Should she throw it now? Try to provoke them? Her thumb gritted in the rock as she clenched her fist.
She was a decent shot with a ball. She’d grown up with three younger brothers. But the suit itself was a weapon. The suit had low-level AI programs that could make her something like a passenger inside a robot. There were voice menus designed for activities like climbing or welding because human beings got tired. The suit did not. It also had radar targeting that she could not see, and it would limit the velocity of its throws only to avoid damaging her shoulder and back.
She didn’t trust it.
She’d used most of her AI programs to hold an imprint of her ghost. The suit was rotten with Lam’s mem files. Twice the ghost had caused interrupts, trying to reconfigure itself, trying to seize control, and yet Vonnie was afraid to purge him. Deleting his mem files might affect her suit’s amplified speed and brawn.
"Are you still there?" she hissed.
—Von, listen. Don’t close me down again, please.
That was the same thing it always said. God. Oh God. She didn’t have time to hassle with him.
"Combat menu," she said.
—Online.
She hesitated. Right now, the ghost was somewhat contained. That would change if she gave it access to defense modes. Doing so was a bad gamble. The extra capacity might be precisely what the ghost needed to self-correct… or the stupid, miserable AI might corrupt the most basic functions of her suit. Was there any other way?
"I need auto-targeting only,” she said. “Fire by voice command."
—Von, that drops efficiency to thirty percent.
"Fire by voice command. Confirm."
—Listen to me.
Four slender arms reached out of the ceiling.
For more of The Frozen Sky...
About the Author:
Jeff Carlson is the international bestselling author of Plague Year and Long Eyes. To date, his work has been translated into fifteen languages worldwide.
His next novel is apocalyptic thriller Interrupt, coming July 2013 from 47North.
Readers can find free fiction, videos, contests, and more on his website at www.jverse.com including a special Europa-themed photo gallery featuring images from the Voyager 1, Galileo, and Cassini probes.
Jeff welcomes email at [email protected].
He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter at www.Facebook.com/PlagueYear and @authorjcarlson
Reader reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, and elsewhere are always appreciated.
About the Artists:
Jacob Charles Dietz (www.jacobcharlesdietz.com) is an art director, illustrator, and matte painter who specializes in science fiction and fantasy work for digital, film, and print. Working in both traditional and digital mediums, Jacobs work encompasses everything from future noir and science fiction to technology and the plight of man, making it very accessible to a broad audience. Bridging the gap between the now and the then, Jacobs work is constructed with layers upon layers of intricate detail and almost always includes elements of the 21st century in whatever time and place he is depicting, making the foreign seem strangely familiar.
His work has been published internationally on numerous book covers and magazines including Ballistic Publishing titles and MacWorld. Jacobs work can also be seen on limited edition tees at Barneys New York and Fred Segal Los Angeles and can be counted as part of Steve Wozniaks personal art collection. Hes done work for Virgin, Penguin Publishing, USAToday, Discovery Channel and more.
Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, Jacob now makes his home in the Sonoran desert with his wife, son, and two cats, far away from the gray skies and soggy ground of Seattle. Jacob studied visual communications at the University of Washington and has a ridiculous collection of Star Trek toys that he still manages to store at his parents house. He dreads the day they send him a bill for years of back storage fees.
Born in the post-industrial wastelands of northern England, Tom Bevan was reared on Shoggoth milk and received a drinking man's degree in the West of England. Currently residing in a leaky garret in East London, he spends his days laboring in fashion advertising and his evenings hunched over a desk drawing monsters (those two things being not so different after all). Readers can find more of Bevan’s work at http://www.tombevan.co.uk
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Margus Lokk is a professional artist living in Estonia. His illustrations appear frequently in publications from Fantaasia Press.
Award-winning illustrator Billy Tackett hasn’t always been referred to as "The Creepiest Artist In America." With humble beginnings in rural Kentucky, darkness came a-callin’ early on. His fondness for Famous Monsters Of Filmland over Little Golden Books hinted at a dark future to come. After publishing over two hundred illustrations and book covers he created his signature piece, Zombie Sam, giving birth to his Dead White & Blue series. Those paintings then became the inspiration for the Dead White & Blue Comics graphic novel released in 2011. For more, please visit his web site at http://www.billytackett.com.
Persia Walker is the author of a several acclaimed historical novels, including Harlem Redux, Darkness and the Devil Behind Me and Black Orchid Blues. She is a former news writer for the Associated Press. In addition, she designs book covers and author websites. Visit her online at http://persiawalker.com.
Frank Wu is a Hugo Award-winning artist and writer who lives near Boston with his wife, game designer and artist Brianna Spacekat Wu, and their insane bichon Crash. Frank's latest project is a graphic novel of "Guidolon, the Giant Space Chicken," which is about a giant space chicken making a film about a giant space chicken. Visit him at http://frankwu.com.
Karel Zeman lives in Jeviněves near Mělník in Central Bohemia. Trained as a mechanic of printing machinery, in the beginning he considered his artwork a hobby. At that time, he was better known as a soccer player. Today, his illustrations focus mainly on sci-fi and fantasy. He also creates caricatures of current affairs. He is an avid collector of comics. His love for ancient artifacts is reflected in his paintings and drawings in which he often depicts railways, trains and engines, especially from the era of steam power. He is interested in old books illustrated by well-known Czech artists such as Miloš Novák, Bohumil Konečný, Zdeněk Burian, and Gustav Krum. He is also interested in history, movies, and the work of Czech writer Jaroslav Foglar. He is fascinated by old Prague, especially on the paintings of Jaroslav Šetelík, Václav Jansa, and Jan Minařík. From the contemporary painters, illustrators, and cartoonists, he prefers Lubomír Kupčík, Pavel Čech, Jiří Grus, Tomáš Kučerovský and many others. Readers can find more of Zeman’s work at http://www.karelzem.cz
Raccoons Go Here
FOR THEIR HELP IN DECIDING THE COVER ART FOR "LONG EYES"...
Five thousand years from now, when sentient raccoons rule the Earth, they may find this collection on a rust-eaten e-reader.
(Yes, the battery will still work. And their scholars will understand English.)
If so, in order to preserve these names, the author would like to thank the following family, friends and fans for weighing in on the Great Art Debate:
Chris Africa; Anne Allen; Mike Baldwin; Lewis Bornmann; Johnny Bowen; Lars Bringemo; George Brown; Gus Carlson; Stephen D. Covey; Lara Endreszl; Emily Flint; Gail and Paul Ford; Joanna Gottfried; Peg Hanna; Penny Hill; Debra Davis Hinkle; Steven Hoffman; David Hoyer; Geir Lanesskog; Linda Leach; Christina Lihani; Lani Longshore; Ben Metzler; Ben Morrison; Louise Morrison; Jan Myers; Kym Pectelidis; Anne Peterson; Jeff Quiros; Jeff Sierzenga (our land was populated with Bens and Jeffs, o Great Raccoons!); Alex C. Telander; Kat Templeton; and Nathan Woods.
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