Frozen Sky- Battlefront

by Jeff Carlson

  Ben.

  "Nonessential personnel to ESUs," Ribeiro said. "Troutman, Hunt, Sierzenga, Johal and Vonder--"

  "Permission to stay at the helm!" Ash shouted.

  "Vonderach, what are you doing?" Ribeiro had seen her on camera. "Sierzenga, evacuate."

  "We can seal the damaged areas! Don't evac!" She keyed the hatch, overriding its emergency protocols. She climbed into decon one and gashed her palm on a sharp scrap of metal.

  The sunfish screeched at the acrid, crackling light and smell of a welding laser. Above them, magnetically attached to the wall, her GP was fortifying the hatch into the central corridor. Her GP had ripped apart the ultraviolet and airco units used for decontamination, using anything it could find to reinforce the hatch.

  Bleeding from her arm, Vonnie glanced back. Angelica and Hans were trying to soothe Harmeet, plucking at her hair, crooning in her ear. They would protect her.

  "We'll die outside!" Vonnie yelled. "Stay in the sub!"

  Harmeet looked up. Their eyes met.

  Vonnie shut the hatch on her friend. She stood up. She climbed toward ready room one, scaling up the gutted airco units like a ladder.

  "We don't have long," Ribeiro said. "We're in the tail of the rock storm. If we're hit again--"

  "--at least it'll be quick," Vonnie finished for him. "Would you rather die alone? Or starve? ESUs won't last out there. Even if they do, the rations in an ESU last twenty days. The Jyväskylä can send mecha into the ice, but the currents will take ESUs across this entire moon. They'll never find us."

  "Maybe the Chinese will rescue us," Hunt said. He reminded her of Peter. Human beings would pay any price to live, including prison. "We're worth a ton of intel."

  "More likely they'd carve out your brain and plop it into an AI." Her tone was brutal. "Their HKs fired on sight! They herded us into this sea! What makes you think they're interested in keeping us alive?"

  Smoke curled from the GP's laser. It tasted like aluminum and fire. Each breath was painful.

  The Lewis swayed. Vonnie's ladder tipped away, then swung hard into her body. Tom threw himself over a jagged strip of alumalloy before she cut her belly. Then he laid an arm beneath her feet. She stepped on him, the smooth arch of her foot on his raspy skin. Somehow she'd lacerated her knee. Her thumb. Her elbow. She could have been climbing on knives, and she cursed the maze of the Lewis. The compartmentalized layout had saved them but she felt like a rat in a dead-end maze.

  She reached the hatch. Someone had overridden its protocols for her. She shinnied through with Brigit and Tom. The scout suits were secured on the wall overhead. She pointed at one. "Drop it to me!" she cried.

  The sunfish leapt. They detached her suit from its assists. Two hundred kilos of armor crashed beside her.

  Dripping sweat, smearing blood, Vonnie crammed herself into the suit as Tom hauled on the chest piece, keeping it open for her. She didn't bother with the plumbing. Out of place, the tubes poked her stomach and the back of her thigh.

  The cortical jack went in like a blunt drill. She seated her helmet, and the HUD came online as she locked her collar assembly. Only then did she allow herself to cry out, her fists shaking in agony. The jack felt like she'd been stabbed at the top of her spine, but she staggered up.

  The sunfish screamed their praise at her. --Young Matriarch! Courage and tenacity!

  Gasping, she radioed the conn. "I can do this. I'm going to fill decon one with a controlled flood. Then I'll patch the corridor and pump it dry."

  "Sir, propulsion is improving," Ash said. "We're near fifty percent."

  "Options," Ribeiro said.

  "I can't get us out of the current but I can ease against it. There will be less stress on the hull. I think she'll take two or three kph, sir. If she holds together, we can put a little distance between us and the rock storm."

  "Try it. Slowly. Vonderach, you're a go. Troutman, suit up." There was a single scout suit in the conn. "After she pumps the corridor, you'll escort everyone to the ready room. Our people can suit up and mend the ship."

  "We only have four suits left in ready room one," DeBrun said. The others had been in ready room two or in storage and everything in those rooms had been destroyed.

  Vonnie thought, We have six suits and seven people.

  "Sir, there aren't enough," DeBrun said.

  "I know," Ribeiro answered. "It will be my privilege to give those suits to our crew."

  19.

  Slowly, slowly -- too slowly for her spinning mind -- Vonnie and the GP worked to finish fortifying the hatch between decon one and the central corridor.

  Brigit and Tom helped her define the stress points in the wall. They also cast their high-pitched sonar through the weaknesses in the ceiling and floor. The hatch itself was rated to withstand explosive decompression in a vacuum, and the hull was tougher, but the pressures of the Great Ocean were worse than any blowout in space.

  As her GP welded the hatch to the wall with irregular hunks of alumalloy. Vonnie added struts along the length of the ceiling. She was afraid the whole wall could fly apart.

  Next they erected baffles within a few centimeters of the hatch. Some were steel. Some were plastic. They used any and all materials at hand. The baffles would probably collapse as the water shot in, but, again, her goal was to keep the entire room from flying apart.

  Ribeiro knew her repairs would take time. Nobody could leave the conn until she was done. He'd ordered Troutman to suit up in case more sections in the Lewis failed. If so, Troutman might buy a little time to help the others reach their ESUs, although he wouldn't fit into an ESU while wearing his suit.

  Those in ESUs would float toward the surface. Vonnie and Troutman would sink. They wouldn't die instantly, but soon the increasing pressure would crush their suits.

  How soon? At a depth of ten klicks? Fifteen?

  Stop torturing yourself, she thought. Her GP had fetched containers of the anechoic coating from a locker. They sprayed it on their struts and baffles like glue. Then she sent Brigit and Tom into the corner.

  The sunfish screeched at the hatch into hab one, their voices warbling as they exchanged calls with Angelica and Hans. --Older Matriarch calls for good hunting! Brigit cried. --She is quiet now. She is ready.

  "Tell her I love her," Vonnie said.

  If they were going to die, she regretted leaving Harmeet alone with Angelica and Hans. Harmeet wasn't comfortable with the sunfish. Waiting with them must have been a nightmare.

  --The Lewis is quiet, too! Brigit cried. --Angelica hears! Biting Female took us into a safe zone.

  "Angelica is in the sonar interface?"

  --Yes! Yes! There are no rocks or mantas. We drift inside dirt and salt. We hide. We heal. Biting Female hides us and Young Matriarch rebuilds!

  Vonnie smiled. As usual, the sunfish wasted no energy on second-guessing or recriminations. She wished she was a sunfish. She wished she had their halcyon inner peace, although it came with a price. She couldn't have found such joy in Ben if she also couldn't feel misery and shock. She'd led a richer life than the smartest matriarch, but it hurt.

  Oh, it hurt.

  "Stand by," she told the radio. She drilled a microscopic pinhole. Water jetted through. The laser-tight stream tore into the baffles. The stream might have pierced her suit, but Vonnie and her GP were positioned on either side.

  They leaned against the wall. The wall vibrated as the hole widened. The stream grew into a fire hose. Two of her baffles fell, then another. The water shot sideways. It slammed into her.

  "Vonnie!" Ash shouted.

  Her boots were clamped to the floor, her gloves to the wall. One foot wrenched loose. Her hip stung. Meanwhile, the room was filling up. The water enveloped her. It rose above the spraying hole.

  Her hip throbbed as she was submerged. Tom and Brigit swam to her. They reset her boot on the floor, where her magnetic heel secured itself.

  "I'm okay," she said. "We're going to be okay."

  She waited w
ith her sunfish and the GP while the corridor equalized. While waiting, there was time to think. Scanning with her radar, she began to hope.

  "I'm opening the hatch." A minute later, with the hatch ajar, she heard herself say, "I'm entering the corridor."

  The portside wall had large ragged holes opening into hab one, decon one, and the storage room. Beyond decon one, Von could see through more holes into ready room two, lock two, and the ocean beyond.

  Mashed against the bent walls were flecks of gear and larger chunks of the hull. The wreckage looked like what was left of her baffles, crooked and mangled.

  Maybe he's alive. Maybe he hid in an ESU.

  None of the sub's Emergency Survival Units had fired, but in her imagination she invented a scenario in which Ben had jumped into his ESU. It might have saved him even if the ESU was caught in the snarled hull.

  She was rehearsing what to say to him -- how she would kiss him -- their laughter -- his eyes, his hands -- when streamers of black guck flowed through one of the holes in the wall.

  Her suit and the GP were testing closely for native life. Decontaminating the Lewis would require a painstaking effort, likely impossible. The water was permeated with traces of the mantas and other bacterial growths.

  The AIs identified this guck as human. The ultra-compressed filth had been bones and tissue.

  Ben?

  She didn't scream. She stared silently as the gore dissipated around her. The sunfish bit and snatched at the water, tasting it.

  She didn't say a word. Detached from herself, she gazed at Tom and Brigit, who had been squeezed by the otherworldly pressure. With their lungs collapsed, their round bodies were more tubular. Their arms seemed flattened, too. They resembled squids more than octopi -- squids with ribbon arms. That was interesting. Yes. She remembered being interested in the possibility that the sunfish originated in the Great Ocean.

  Ribeiro was talking. Ash was talking. DeBrun. Hunt. Their chatter reminded her of the chaos inside the Lewis as the storm had whipped toward them. She'd preferred that chaos to the deadly quiet she now faced.

  Repairing the central corridor wall felt like drudgework. It felt like a dream.

  Thirty minutes passed. An hour.

  She toiled alongside her GP and the sunfish, patching the rents in the portside wall of the corridor where the ocean had poured through. Next she added roughhewn struts to the wall. Tom and Brigit brought steel from decon one. Her GP ripped out ceiling plates where doing so wouldn't affect the Lewis's spine.

  Gingerly, Ash righted the sub. The floor became level again as Brigit and Tom called to Angelica and Hans, their shrieks resonating through the starboard wall.

  They relayed kind words from Harmeet for Vonnie. They told her what Angelica heard as the Lewis ascended over five kilometers, although their path was a long northward hook from the killing sea into an immense whirlpool between other seas.

  The whirlpool was a broad, deep calm. Revolving slowly, it carried them further north and around to the west. Ash and DeBrun estimated the whirlpool was twenty klicks across. They couldn't see or hear a bottom.

  Clouds of small rocks fluttered down into the depths. The mantas spun and clumped together, forming long strands with the silt. Troutman described lumpy braids in vertical, rotating columns. Some were taller than five klicks. He'd never seen anything like it, he said reflectively. It looked like the ocean was dancing, he said like a man in search of meaning.

  Troutman was religious, Von remembered. Troutman and Harmeet. She wondered what they felt or tried to feel that could explain three more deaths.

  The Lord works in mysterious ways?

  Harmeet pretended she was accepting and fatalistic of God's plan, but she'd sobbed when she thought she was going to die. What did that mean? Her faith was an act?

  A more forgiving interpretation might be that the corporeal body and the divine soul had different yearnings. Vonnie didn't know if there was an answer to this riddle. She did know Harmeet's terror was pardonable. Her friend had been swamped by adrenaline, which was the nervous system's method of superseding the brain. Harmeet was a sweet, cultured woman who didn't know how to channel her own visceral response to danger.

  On her own, Harmeet might have given up. She was a genius without raw courage, which Vonnie saw as a waste. Harmeet would never reach her full potential until she learned to fight.

  Nobody was worth more than a fighter, although aggression untempered by reason was another weakness.

  The solution was to walk between both worlds, sampling from each, balancing each, expanding your self-awareness, morals and conscience while holding onto the lessons of the ape: to provide for and defend your tribe.

  Mastering this challenge was the meaning of life. Some people

  (Dawson, he's dead, too)

  were mired in the ape's competition for stature and possessions. Some

  (like me)

  weren't as realistic about the necessities of money and rank. They found less common avenues of success. Everyone had weaknesses and strengths, but the best of humankind were the avenging angels, the unique few who strove to elevate society as a whole even when that meant, at times, confronting an idiot or an asshole. Many of these people were beyond reach. You couldn't reeducate them. You could only punish them, or, if necessary, kill them. Angels detested violence, but they needed to excel at it. They needed to learn when to become aggressive before they were overcome by evil.

  I can try harder, she promised. I can...

  Without realizing it, she'd stopped moving in the flooded corridor. She stood with her welding laser by her side, Tom on her shoulder, listening to the unfathomable whispering of the ocean. Minutes passed. Five. Ten.

  "Vonderach, can you hear me?" Ribeiro asked.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Do you need to rest?"

  "No, sir."

  "You've stopped moving."

  "Did I, sir?"

  On his orders, Vonnie ate from a tube of steak and potato paste. Protein and carbs. She drank, too, but she laughed and coughed onto her faceplate at the paradox of drinking inside a fishbowl. The water in her mouth was contained by the air inside her helmet and yet she was entombed by the water in the corridor and the dark ocean.

  "Shit." She shook her helmet from side to side, shaking droplets from her HUD. She laid her glove on Tom. He squirmed contently. He was glad to share her pain. He only wanted to be with her. She chuckled again, envisioning him as the parrot on a pirate's shoulder. She was the pirate, no eyepatch or peg leg, but her wounds were legion.

  She would have cut herself off at both knees to save Ben. She looked at her welding laser. She looked at the legs of her suit. She shut her eyes and pictured his happy, speed-addled grin. Ben had been an angel, all right -- a lusty, brilliant, combative angel.

  I'll live for him, she thought, but it would take only one small mistake to join him. One miscalculation. One slip. If the corridor collapsed, she would be crushed. The Lewis would sink. She could stop hurting.

  Shaking, she brought her laser up to the wall.

  20.

  Alone with her thoughts, the sunfish and her GP, she labored in the corridor as the Lewis stayed in the whirlpool for most of an hour, riding it around.

  Delicately, patiently, Ash nosed against the whirlpool's leisurely yet powerful currents, bringing them outward from its center.

  They were caught by an undertow. The hull creaked as they were pulled down. Currents pressed into the raw openings in their port side. The central corridor strained around Vonnie, the water thrumming.

  She shut her eyes again. Will it kill us now?

  Suddenly, Ash accelerated at a precise angle. They bobbed away. Ash took them upward and outward as Ribeiro said, "Vonderach, my compliments on your repairs. I thought the Lewis might break apart, but it held. Can you keep going?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "As soon as you pump out the corridor, Troutman will relieve you. All of us are watching. You're almost done." He spoke like
a man offering a lifeline, a rope to follow back home.

  Vonnie squinted at her laser as she laid another brace. They'd escaped the whirlpool on its western side and Ash continued west because the current took them in that direction.

  The current added 1 kph to their cruising speed of 3 kph. They were near the ice, less than two klicks below the surface. In fact, the whirlpool had carried them almost to where they'd started. They were 5.7 klicks northwest of the point where they'd battled the HKs.

  Ash couldn't run silently. Water scoured the gaping hole in their side and the dents and cracks in their nose. The sound was like the wind through the trees. Banging in the wreckage, Vonnie and the GP added harder noises.

  All over the Lewis, their anechoic coating was damaged or missing. Enemy sonar would light them up.

  Their arsenal was gone.

  As for mecha, they had her GP and the two units in propulsion. Even if they made it to the chimney, three units couldn't haul the Lewis up through the ice... and the chimney was blocked near the surface... and there weren't enough scouts suits for all of them.

  Maybe her shock was a blessing. She knew their odds of survival were poor, but she worked. One thing at a time. In a moment, she'd move to the other side of the wall. Ben's side. Earlier, she hadn't thought she could do it. Now she felt like a zombie, a drone. Finishing the job was all she could think about. She needed to trim the hull and reclaim some of the wreckage before she pumped the corridor.

  "Stand by," she said. "I'm entering hab two."

  The hatch was warped. She sliced with her laser, then pried it open. A puff of black flakes washed through. Silt? Blood? Foolishly, she hesitated. She didn't want to meet a corpse or body parts, although everyone and everything had been mashed into paste except for the hardest metals.

  Tom and Brigit swam past her. Would they keep going? They could vanish into the ocean if they wanted.