The Frozen Sky

by Jeff Carlson

  “What do you propose?” Koebsch asked.

  “Let me have the display, please.” Vonnie brought up real-time surveillance of the Brazilian camp.

  The place looked deserted. FNEE, the Força Nacional de Exploração do Esp, had sent less people and less mecha than any of the other three nations on Europa. Their activities had been limited, which made them easier to monitor, and yet they’d chosen a location above a more extensive system of vents than the crevices beneath the ESA camp.

  “Typical,” Metzler grumbled. “We should have predicted they were up to something.”

  “If five of them went in, they only left two people behind for command-and-control,” Vonnie said, highlighting one of the Brazilian hab modules where ESA satellites detected the most electronic noise. “Here.”

  “You’re not talking about storming their base,” Koebsch said.

  “Nothing so heavy-handed. They’ll be overwhelmed with their telemetry, and I know we’ve hacked into their net,” Vonnie said, looking at Ash and Frerotte.

  Ash pursed her lips, but she nodded.

  “We can shut down some of their mecha and lose the rest,” Vonnie said. “That’ll stop ’em.”

  “We don’t want to hurt anybody,” Koebsch said.

  “If they get stuck, they’ll send a mayday and we can walk them out. Piece of cake. That’s why we need to stop them before they go too far.”

  “What do the Americans say?” Metzler asked.

  “They’ll help us if they can, but we’re right on top of the problem,” Koebsch said. The ESA and Brazilian camps were only sixteen klicks apart, whereas the Americans and the Chinese were closer to the southern pole. “Ash?”

  “Sir, we’re lightyears ahead of anything Brazil has in AI,” she said. “We can do it.”

  26.

  Vonnie’s crew went on the offensive even as they continued to send urgent queries to Earth. Koebsch wanted the cover of waiting for instructions. Later, if necessary, he could present a convincing record that his team had been frantically, helplessly observing the Brazilians and nothing more.

  Ash spearheaded the assault. She already had her elements in place. Part of her job was to ensure the ESA camp was equipped to repel cyber invasions. By necessity, some of those guardians were made to counterstrike. The most insidious weapons in her arsenal were SCPs. Sabotage and control programs were dark cousins of AI, as far evolved from their origin — computer viruses — as people were evolved from the first small hairy mammals of the Mesozoic Era two hundred million years ago.

  A malevolent, replicating intelligence whose sole purpose was to corrupt healthy systems, an SCP normally included the seeds of its own destruction, a kill code, like a fuse, to prevent it from coming back at its master. Now Ash specifically tailored fifteen SCPs to pirate and transmit the Brazilians’ datastreams to the ESA camp, which would let her substitute her own signals into the Brazilian grid.

  Koebsch swiftly double-checked and authorized her plan. But when she began her uploads, he questioned her.

  “What were those? You sent five packets that weren’t on our list, didn’t you?” Koebsch asked, and Ash said, “I always have a few tricks up my sleeve, sir.”

  Listening to the group feed, Vonnie, Metzler, and Frerotte donned their armor and walked outside, needing room to operate. They entered a maintenance shed where they would be hidden from spy sats.

  Inside the shed, Vonnie studied her companions, itching to go, remembering Bauman and Lam. For the moment, no one said anything. They simply monitored their link with Ash.

  She danced.

  Surrounded by a virtual display, Ash tapped her gloves into a hundred blocks of data, moving like a conductor. “Slow down, slow down,” Ash said to one program as she cut her fingers through its yellow alarm bars.

  Most of her SCPs operated at speeds beyond human understanding, but others required checkbacks or multiple launches. All but the most sinister fed reports to her station. Three AIs helped her govern this mayhem.

  “We’re in,” she said. “Go.”

  They could have used five people in armor — one each for the five Brazilians — but Koebsch needed most of their crew to generate a hubbub of ordinary activity to maintain appearances. At short notice, they also lacked the structures to conceal more than three sets of armor from the satellites overhead.

  Vonnie’s helmet showed her an environment that was not the crowded interior of the maintenance shed. It seemed like she was beneath the ice. Ash had ghosted Vonnie’s systems into the armor of the FNEE commander, Ribeiro, allowing Vonnie to look and listen through his sensors.

  Static leapt across her visor as the muscles in her left arm clenched into a severe, painful knot. The hack was imperfect. She began to get a headache.

  “Ash, can you correct my feed?” she said. “Cut my neural contacts until you do.”

  “I’m trying!”

  Ribeiro’s squad was 1.9 kilometers in. They’d navigated a slumping old labyrinth of vents, cutting through veils of stalactites. The ice was coated with minerals in this area. The minerals made the ice more durable, which had helped preserve these catacombs. The map on Ribeiro’s heads-up display showed they were pushing toward the upper reaches of a distorted rock mountain another 2.2 kilometers down.

  They’d left beacons and sentries behind them. That was more than enough for Ash to piggyback into their net.

  Her take-over was subtle at first. Four mecha reported integration failures. They came back online, failed again, then repeated the pattern.

  Inside Ribeiro’s helmet, alarm codes winked on and off like white noise. At the same time, Vonnie introduced contrary movements to Ribeiro’s stride. When he swung his leg forward, she kicked it to the left. As he lifted his arm to compensate, she resisted. The conflicting feedback caused an interrupt. His armor shut down to run emergency diagnostics.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said in Portuguese, Vonnie’s suit automatically translating his words. “Santos, I’m getting a lot of interference.”

  His lieutenant couldn’t answer. Beside Vonnie, Metzler and Frerotte were randomizing the Brazilians’ communications.

  “Base, this is One,” Ribeiro said. “Do you copy? Base, this is One. I’m switching to open channels at max gain. Can you hear me?”

  Malfunctions took three more of his mecha off-line as Vonnie kicked his leg again. There was no need for her armor to move in reality. Her suit conveyed Ribeiro’s actions to her body and likewise transmitted her intent to him. Inside the maintenance shed, Vonnie’s armor remained still except for the most dramatic gestures. Frerotte waved his hands again and again as he scrolled through FNEE internal menus.

  They harassed Ribeiro’s squad for thirty-six minutes.

  Alternately blind, deaf, or lame, the Brazilians verged on losing themselves in the ice. Vonnie didn’t want to sympathize, but those memories were too fresh. Inside her suit, she began to sweat. Her hands balled into fists, cramping and stiff. It was another impairment that haunted Ribeiro. He became unable to open his gloves.

  He was very brave. He rallied his squadmates with crisp, rapid-fire decisions, consolidating their few unaffected systems. He obviously suspected their problems were no accident, and he thoroughly cursed the Americans, the Europeans, and the Chinese in turn. “Cowards!” he said. “Rapists! You lick between your sister’s legs!”

  Ash snickered at that. “Oh, yuck.”

  Ribeiro was almost a cliché, a swarthy macho man, but there was more to him than his bluster. Like the ESA crew, the FNEE were the best of their best. Someday he might learn who was behind the raid on his team, which could be unpleasant. He would make a dangerous foe

  “Okay, Koebsch says we’ve done enough,” Ash said. “Looks like Ribeiro’s about to get the order to pull out.”

  “Nice work,” Vonnie told her.

  Ash hesitated. “On my mark, let’s slam them one more time. Ready? Mark.”

  Vonnie blinded Ribeiro again as she caused interrupts i
n both legs, causing him to crash against the tunnel wall — but in the next heartbeat, she reactivated his radar and infrared. She needed to see.

  Behind him, a digger and two gun platforms were convulsing. The digger shook so ferociously it bounced from the tunnel floor. As it rolled over, Vonnie realized what had drawn her attention. Its legs writhed in familiar patterns like a sunfish.

  But that’s impossible, she thought.

  Although the digger was shaped more like a scorpion than a sunfish with its claws and a cutting tail, the Brazilians must have programmed their mecha to mimic everything they’d gleaned from the public data of her time beneath the ice. If not, there was only one explanation for the digger imitating sunfish shapes.

  Vonnie saw two more diggers caught in identical seizures — only the diggers. None of the other mecha used sunfish shapes. They shuddered and jerked. Ash must have hit the diggers with the same SCP while she used other weapons against the rest of the FNEE mecha.

  In unison, the diggers quit shaking. The nearest one hunched on the floor with sudden poise, scanning back and forth as if waking up for the first time. The other two assumed standby positions, although none of them acknowledged the abort code relayed through Ribeiro’s suit.

  “Get out,” his people radioed from camp. “Get out.”

  The Brazilians retreated with less than half their mecha. Some might be saved later. Five kept dropping their response codes or were destroyed internally. Before Ribeiro lost sight of the abandoned machines, Vonnie thought the diggers turned to scurry deeper into the ice.

  She opened a private channel to Ash. “I’d like to buy you a drink,” she said.

  “Nobody brought any money, did they?” Ash said. “I appreciate it, but I’m going to be swamped with cleaning up data/comm and writing my report.”

  “One drink,” Vonnie said. “Later.”

  27.

  That night, instead of alcohol, Vonnie brought Ash a piece of carrot cake she’d baked herself after running over to Module 02 and its small oven. “Better for you than vodka,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Ash said cautiously.

  “What happened to their mecha at the end?”

  “Total systems override,” Ash said. “I burned out their AIs with disposable subsets of our own.”

  “You appreciate a good program.”

  “It’s what I do.”

  Vonnie glanced over her shoulder, but the two of them were alone. “I think you couldn’t bring yourself to kill Lam,” she said.

  Ash stopped eating the cake. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Maybe you broke Lam into components like Koebsch said, making him look like an SCP, but you kept all of his files, and you knew you couldn’t hide him in our system forever. That’s why you uploaded him into the Brazilian diggers.”

  Ash was either a superb actress or innocent. “That sounds like a lot of work,” she said, looking Vonnie right in the eye. “Nobody but a top programmer could fox our system and the FNEE grid at the same time.”

  “Someone like you.”

  The corner of Ash’s mouth ticked with a smile. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, and Vonnie laughed.

  Lam was alive somewhere inside the frozen sky.

  ESA and FNEE Camps

  DOWNSIDER

  28.

  “We don’t want to cause problems for you back on Earth,” Vonnie said, “but your team needs to stop the bombing.”

  “We have no bombs,” the Brazilian woman said.

  “That’s a lie. We know you’re blasting in the ice.”

  “Our mecha have been tunneling, yes. Sometimes there are cave-ins. We have no bombs.”

  “Are you killing sunfish?”

  The Brazilian woman frowned, then looked to her left. Vonnie wished they were standing face-to-face instead of talking on a showphone. Vonnie couldn’t know if someone else was standing off-camera, and, in truth, Vonnie might have acted differently herself if she was alone.

  Hiding teammates off-camera was only part of the deception allowed by electronic communications. Seated beside Vonnie in Command Module 01, out of sight, Ash was both recording and hacking the FNEE transmission while Koebsch stood ready to upload any of eight different sims.

  Twenty-two days had passed since they’d stopped the Brazilians’ incursion into the ice. All four Earth agencies had begun to send their own mecha beneath the surface, including the ESA, but there were seismic shocks radiating from the terrain explored by the FNEE.

  The job of approaching the Brazilians belonged to Koebsch. Vonnie had convinced him to try another way, allowing Ash to open a comm link in the Brazilians’ main hab module when she thought their only female crew member was alone.

  “I’ll ask again,” Vonnie said. “Are you killing sunfish?”

  “Why have you called me?” the woman asked. “You are not the European commander, and I am not in charge of our base.”

  “My name is Alexis Vonderach.”

  “I know who you are. Everyone has seen your mem files.” The woman frowned again, then said, “I am Sergeant Claudia Tavares.” “Claudia. Call me Von.”

  “My name is Sergeant Tavares,” the woman said. She was barely older than Ash, and yet she seemed a hundred times more prim. Was that due to FNEE training, a difference in national character, or her concern that Ribeiro would catch her talking to the enemy?

  The ESA and NASA were civilian operations, although the Americans often seeded their teams with Space Force officers. The Chinese and Brazilian crews were exclusively military. China’s fleet and the FNEE were offshoots of their countries’ armies. That meant Sergeant Tavares was taking a substantial risk. If Vonnie failed in her effort to communicate, she could try again, whereas if Tavares was deemed disloyal, she might lose rank or find herself sent to a courts martial. Vonnie approved of her willingness to stay online.

  It’s got to be difficult being the only woman in their crew, Vonnie thought. Especially in a macho culture. Especially because she’s pretty.

  Even with her black hair woven into tight, cornrow braids and the collar of her uniform buttoned high on her neck, Tavares couldn’t hide her femininity. Her cheekbones were like sculpted bronze, and she had warm brown eyes.

  What was the sexual dynamic in the FNEE camp? Were they celibate or promiscuous?

  Fraternization was discouraged among the ESA but not enforced because they were under enough strain without forbidding Homo sapiens’ most basic drive — to procreate. In the past, the ESA had tried all male and all female crews, chemically neutered crews, and mecha-only ships, too often with subpar results. Sexually active, mixed gender groups brought the highest versatility to any non-combat mission. It was messy, which the bureaucrats hated, and often heated, which the crew leaders didn’t like — but in mixed groups, there was a deep-seated urge to excel, outperform any rivals, and win a mate.

  Harnessed correctly, that motivation led the group to attain its greatest potential. It heightened their stamina. It helped preserve them. The men and the woman struggled to protect each other physically and emotionally.

  Last week, Vonnie had finally begun to date again herself, stealing three hours with Pärnits and then another with Metzler, playing holo games and chess, talking, and watching comedy shows. After preparing two plates of fruit, cheese, and crackers, she’d even held Metzler’s hand across the table as they ate, quietly rubbing her thumb on his knuckles.

  But if the Brazilians were promiscuous, when the hell did Tavares get any sleep?

  Vonnie grinned, which appeared to startle the younger woman. Tavares leaned back from her camera as Vonnie said, “I’d like to send you two sims.”

  “No unauthorized files.”

  Vonnie shrugged. “I’m offering the sims to you as a courtesy. We haven’t shared this data with Earth yet. We don’t want to, but the bombing needs to stop.”

  “I told you—”

  “If you don’t know what your guys are doing, it’s because they’v
e hidden it from you or because you don’t want to know,” Vonnie said. “I’m sorry.”

  Six men and one woman was a bad imbalance. Brazil had hurried its mission to Europa. Maybe they’d experienced a last-minute complication that caused them to switch the seventh man for Tavares.

  She must feel restless, always waiting behind while the men go into the ice, Vonnie thought. She wants a friend. I can see it in her face, but she’ll never admit it.

  I wouldn’t, either. That’s why I have the best chance of reaching her. If the personnel records we filched are accurate, Tavares is a lot like me and Ash, too nosy for her own good, hyper-educated, and committed to doing the right thing. Otherwise she wouldn’t have answered my call, and she hasn’t kept talking to me to practice her English.

  “Please,” Vonnie said. “Just let me send two sims.”

  “I… I will have an AI screen your files first,” Tavares warned her.

  “Understood. I’m transmitting now.”

  “My people are not killing sunfish,” Tavares said. “You will not have proof of it.”

  “We have exact numbers and coordinates of the blasts. If your guys aren’t trapping or fighting the sunfish, what are they doing? Why do they isolate you when they’re programming your mecha?”

  “I do not like you watching us.”

  Vonnie shrugged again. “You’re watching us, too, you know. It’s part of the job.”

  After a moment, Tavares nodded. “Do not leave,” she said. Then she blanked her screen, and Vonnie questioned Ash and Koebsch with one hand.

  “We’re mute,” Ash said. “She can’t hear us.”

  “I think she already suspected what her guys are doing. She resents not being included.”

  “You don’t know how she feels,” Koebsch said.

  “I think I do. It doesn’t help that they put her at the bottom of their totem pole — a woman sergeant with all those captains and colonels.”

  “Ribeiro is the only colonel, Von.”