The Frozen Sky

by Jeff Carlson

  They’re taking out the bodies, Vonnie thought with pride. Koebsch is doing the dirty work himself. It’s his duty.

  Why are they yelling?

  She aimed some of the mecha’s sensors to the emergency bubble that Metzler was steering toward her lander.

  The bubble held a grotesque shape approximately the same width and depth as the inflatable kids’ pool her parents bought when she was five. She and her brothers had splashed in the shin-deep pool for days, tracking grass and dirt into the water, crowding it with buckets and toys. This shape was a lumpy, frozen disc. Bones and clothing jutted from the black ice.

  “Oh God.”

  “Turn off your station,” Ash said.

  “No,” Vonnie said, opening a new comm link. “Ben? Ben, it’s Von. I’m here.”

  Metzler kept shouting at Koebsch. “How am I supposed to fit this thing into the lander? Are you going to thaw him?”

  “Ash, I really need you,” Koebsch said.

  “I’m on my way, sir,” Ash said. “Von’s awake.”

  She felt like she was dreaming.

  Pärnits and Collinsworth hadn’t made it to their pressure suits, although having air wouldn’t have mattered. The linguists had been squashed. Their tissues had boiled in near-vacuum, then merged with the native ice.

  Strung out on stims, Metzler wouldn’t stop raving. “He looks like a fucking pancake! He’s two meters wide! The blood—! His body—! He doesn’t even look like a person anymore!”

  Ash switched off their craft-to-suit data/comm and turned to Vonnie with contrite, downcast eyes. “Take the pilot’s seat,” she said. “I have to go outside.”

  “He’s right to be upset,” Vonnie said.

  “He’s refusing tranquilizers and he’s scaring Koebsch. He’s scaring all of us.”

  “I can help,” Johal said, rising from her seat.

  “Let’s go.” Ash sent her virtual controls to Vonnie’s station, where the pilot’s command designation switched to Alexis Vonderach. “Do you see our alerts? Frerotte has an early warning system patched into the AI. We might have thirty minutes before the next aftershock.”

  “Roger that,” Vonnie said.

  “Get into the air five minutes before it starts. A mid-range hover is fine. We haven’t seen any more ejecta, and the pit hasn’t spread. It’s just a precaution. We’re carrying more people and armor, so 05 will keep a tether on 03.”

  “Roger that.”

  Ash stood up, then paused to bring her mouth down to Vonnie’s ear. “Skim through our mecha,” she whispered. She and Johal walked into the ready room.

  Vonnie frowned, but she didn’t alter her pilot’s display. She was prepared to fly at a moment’s notice. What did Ash want her to see? Did she suspect the FNEE rovers were pirating codes from the ESA while they were vulnerable? Vonnie opened new windows on either side of her station, examining the signals from their mecha on the surface.

  From the ready room, she heard the assists clicking as Ash donned her scout suit. Johal had taken a pressure suit. Then the women exited. Ash hurried to join Metzler while Johal stayed on the lander’s deck, where they’d erected a temporary tent as storage space.

  Leaving Pärnits and Collinsworth in the pit would have been cleaner than exhuming their corpses. The ice could have become a mass grave of humans, sunfish, and mecha.

  There was a cold beauty in the idea, but they hadn’t fallen as deep as Bauman and Lam, and people had trouble letting go of anything that belonged to them. When all was said and done, wasn’t that why they’d fought with the sunfish? Because they believed they owned a part of this world after paying for their crews and mecha?

  Vonnie needed to convince everyone on Earth to change. It would be several days until they were organized again, maybe longer before they finished their next batch of probes, but they should bring down the food and oxygen they’d originally allocated as gifts. They had an obligation now more than ever.

  “The sunfish proved they’re intelligent,” she said, baiting the men on either side of her.

  O’Neal glanced up, but Frerotte doggedly focused on the telemetry from the ESA mecha trapped in the ice.

  “They knew what they were doing,” she said. “I think they’ve done it before to seal off air leaks or to separate themselves from an enemy. The larger breed must have scouted the mountain beneath Tom’s colony during raids or negotiations. They remembered the weak place in the rock, but they didn’t destroy Tom’s colony. They saved the possibility for when they needed it. Those aren’t the actions of an animal.”

  “Von,” Frerotte said. He and O’Neal traded an uncomfortable look. “During the blow-out, we heard new signals from a safe area west of the flood.”

  She stared at them, stunned. “What signals?”

  “The connection is weak. It’s not routing through emergency channels, so I managed to hide it from Koebsch. Then I locked it down.” Frerotte tapped at his display, revealing an active mecha 3.6 kilometers from the rest of the ESA machines beneath the ice. “It’s Probe 114,” he said.

  Lam, she thought. He survived.

  More important, Frerotte’s sims had recorded changes in the signal’s location. Lam was mobile.

  Vonnie leaned forward, grilling both men like she’d caught them in a lie. “You told me Lam is dangerous,” she said. “Why would you hide him from Koebsch?”

  “Ash wanted to, and I agreed,” Frerotte said. He gestured at O’Neal. “All of us did. You risked your life for us when everything that happened… Ash said you’re a better person than we are. I think she’s right. You’re right. The sunfish are intelligent, and we couldn’t have screwed up any worse.”

  Vonnie almost said ‘A hundred of them died with our crewmates.’ She almost nodded. Instead, she gave him an excuse. “You didn’t cause this,” she said.

  “Ash and I…” Frerotte ducked his head, leaving his confession hanging in the air.

  Nobody works harder than someone trying to make up for accidental deaths, she realized. They want redemption, like I did.

  “Right now Lam is the last asset we’ve got,” Frerotte said. “If we’re going to find the sunfish, it starts with him.”

  “Then what?” Vonnie said.

  “We apologize to them. We try to help.”

  “Tell me about Lam.”

  “I snuck some diagnostics into our telemetry. For the most part, he countered with the correct responses. He seems up-to-date on our situation, but he’s glitchy. He’s hostile. He says he has to talk to you.”

  INSIDER

  45.

  Vonnie glanced outside as Ash walked Metzler to the lander, where his mecha set the emergency bubble on the deck. Talking to him on a private channel, Ash tugged at his arm, urging him to walk into the air lock. He shook her off and marched back toward Koebsch and Module 03.

  “Where is Lam in relation to the smaller sunfish?” Vonnie asked.

  “He’s close,” Frerotte said.

  “That’s why he wasn’t obliterated,” O’Neal said. “Either he lucked into running from the FNEE in the right direction or he heard Tom’s colony evacuating and realized he’d better move with them.”

  “Let me see your diagnostics. I need your transcripts, too.”

  Vonnie’s evaluation was quick. She didn’t listen to the conversations between Lam and Frerotte, not yet. She uploaded their files to an AI along with Lam’s involuntary, partial responses to Frerotte’s diagnostic, then added her own gut hunch to the AI’s conclusions.

  When Lam transferred from the FNEE digger to Probe 114, he’d reassimilated at an integrity rate of seventy to eighty percent.

  “Crap,” Vonnie said. “Given the probe’s limitations, I’d say the lower score is accurate. Lam won’t reach human equivalence again until we can give him more capacity. He’s smart, but he’ll lack imagination or intuition.”

  “How about a remote link?” O’Neal said.

  Vonnie tensed. Using remote memory to augment their probes with the c
entral AIs in camp had been Pärnits’ idea. “We don’t have enough relays or spies left,” she said. “Lam would need to dig his way closer to us, then stay there, which doesn’t do us any good if we want him to approach the sunfish. We have to fix him. Did Ash show you where she stores her back-ups?”

  Frerotte touched a menu on his display. “Yes.”

  “If we can feed him corrective sequences, he might rise to ninety percent. Why didn’t you try it?”

  “I told you. He’s erratic. He’s spooked. We only got in a few words before he shut off his data/comm.”

  “It’s been four hours since you heard from him?”

  “We didn’t want to fake your voice. You two have a lot of history. We couldn’t be sure what he’d ask. What if there was a personal reference we missed? He refused to talk to anyone else, and you were in surgery.”

  “You should’ve woken me sooner.”

  “Von, some of your procedures were significant. Did you see your notes?”

  “No.” She hadn’t had the courage to read her summary in detail. She suspected that her left foot and the bones in her calf were transplants from the clone stock preserved in their medical bins. Those organs, limbs, packets of marrow, and sheaves of skin had been vat grown on Earth and were immunologically nonresponsive, which meant her body had a strong chance of accepting the foreign tissues. It meant she wasn’t her anymore. She was a frankenstein.

  Among Earth’s spacefaring nations, only the FNEE didn’t equip deep-space missions with extra parts grown from stem cells. Even in the twenty-second century, a majority of Brazilians were Catholic. They permitted emergency measures and nanotech, but not clone stock. If one of their astronauts lost a leg, he could be fitted with a cyberthetic, but physical therapy and rehabilitation might take weeks.

  Vonnie would walk again tomorrow, albeit with a limp. The low gravity was a blessing. It allowed her nerve and muscle grafts to adapt to her real body without strain.

  “Let’s get ready,” she said. “I want menu options on voice command.”

  “You got it.”

  Five minutes passed as Vonnie, O’Neal, and Frerotte arranged for an AI to transmit any corrective sequences it deemed necessary. Lam would operate at speeds beyond human comprehension. Vonnie preferred a manual option to adjust or abort, but in all likelihood, the exchange between their AI and Lam would be over before she noticed any complications.

  Outside, their macabre salvation efforts continued. On the lander’s deck, inside the temporary tent, Johal warmed Pärnits’ disfigured corpse without removing him from the emergency bubble.

  The bubble could be deflated. It would become his shroud. They couldn’t afford to thaw him inside the ready room and attempt to reform his skeleton and internal organs before burial or cremation. If he spilled, the smell would permeate their air conditioning and someone would need to clean the mess. Koebsch had been firm. They’d treat their dead with as much respect as possible under the circumstances, but they could not contaminate what remained of their living quarters.

  Forty meters from the lander, on the ice, Ash stood with Metzler and Koebsch beside Module 03 as their mecha labored to separate Beth Collinsworth from a snarl of torn wiring.

  “Koebsch, there’s another aftershock building in the pit,” Frerotte announced. “You have fifteen minutes.”

  “We’ll be done,” Metzler said.

  “We won’t,” Koebsch told him. “Come on. Let’s get inside.”

  “We’ll be done,” Metzler said.

  Vonnie ached for him. She wanted to sit and hold him. She wanted to make him forget. But she stopped herself from breaking into the radio chatter. She thought some of Metzler’s anguish rose from the bond he’d shared with Pärnits as competitors for her love. Their rivalry made them brothers of a kind, which meant her voice would increase his torment. That was why he’d ignored her earlier.

  “Ben, get inside,” Koebsch said. “The module is tethered to 05. We’re a long way from the pit in any case. We’ll come back in half an hour.”

  “I’m not taking off my suit,” Metzler warned them.

  “None of us will,” Ash said. “I promise. Let’s just get inside the air lock.”

  “Johal, you need to carry the bubble into the ready room,” Frerotte said on her individual channel. “We don’t want Ben to see it.”

  “Roger that,” Johal said. “I need two minutes.”

  “Negative. They’re moving toward you now.”

  “He won’t bend, Frerotte. The body’s frozen.”

  “I, uh… I’m sorry. See what you can do.”

  “Shukriya,” Johal said scornfully. Vonnie’s station translated the word as Thank you in Johal’s native Urdu. The mild rebuke was as close to acting impolitely as the matronly British national had ever been.

  In the ready room, the air lock opened as Johal entered with their makeshift body bag. Outside, Metzler and Ash were approaching with Koebsch, who should have gone to the other lander. He obviously didn’t want to leave Ash alone with Metzler, but the three of them would barely fit, and Vonnie couldn’t let him see her display.

  “If Koebsch comes inside, I need to blank my station,” Vonnie said to Frerotte. As the lander’s pilot, safety protocols barred her from using a privacy screen. “Can you keep him on the deck?” she asked.

  “What would I say? We’re taking off.”

  “He’ll be okay if he clips onto a tether. We don’t have room for three people in armor, and we need to signal Lam. Every aftershock could drive him farther away. We don’t know if the rock’s stable down there or not.”

  “Koebsch will hear your broadcasts.”

  “Distract him. Ask him to call the Americans.”

  “About what?”

  “Christ, Henri, I don’t know! You’re the spy. Come up with something.” Vonnie glanced at Frerotte with growing anxiety. He hadn’t been himself since she’d woken up. He’d been indecisive. He must feel as defeated and worn as Metzler and Ash, whereas she’d gained a fair amount of rest.

  “I’ll fill Koebsch’s helmet with data requests,” he said finally. “Can you fly and call Lam at the same time?”

  “Yes.”

  Their sensors indicated Ash, Metzler, and Koebsch were on the lander’s steps. Frerotte said, “You two wait in the air lock. Sir, can you stand by on the deck? We’re crammed tight. I’d also like to call the Americans again as soon as you’re secure.”

  “Roger that,” Koebsch said.

  Ash led Metzler into the air lock. They braced their gloves and boots against the ceiling and floor, preventing any chance of banging together during airborne maneuvers.

  Outside, Koebsch said, “I’m secure.”

  “Lift off in four, three, two.” Vonnie eased their craft up from the ice, keeping note of Lander 05, which was a hundred meters to starboard.

  “Von, it’s great to have you back,” Koebsch said.

  “You hold onto that tether, sir.” She let her sincerity show in her voice. Koebsch was a lunkhead, but he meant well.

  What would happen if they told him what they were doing with Lam? Would he insist on transmitting his kill codes? Or, if he saw the majority of his crew acting in concert, would he reevaluate their situation?

  Frerotte gave Vonnie a thumbs-up before he raised his privacy screen and linked exclusively to Koebsch’s helmet, distracting him with updates.

  Vonnie nodded, then turned to O’Neal. “Less than three minutes before the quake.”

  “Corrective sequences ready,” he said.

  Vonnie raised her hand to a subset of encrypted frequencies on her display and closed her eyes, feeling as if she was sifting through the blackness. “Lam?”

  Nothing.

  She upped the gain even though she was afraid doing so would attract Koebsch’s notice to her transmissions.

  “Lam?” she said.

  His response was immediate:

  —Von, listen. Don’t close me down again, please.

  Her eye
s opened wide as her adrenals spurted, poisoning her body with an old, insidious terror. It was the same plea he’d repeated again and again during their first hours together.

  They’d come full circle. All that remained of him was the fragmented personality she’d constructed after Bauman died with the real Choh Lam.

  46.

  “I won’t hurt you,” Vonnie said as she gestured for O’Neal to launch their corrective sequences. “You and I are friends. Remember?”

  —Yes.

  A low hiss of static crackled through his broadcast. Lam was far away, separated from her by unknown lengths of ice and rock. “Are you somewhere safe?” she said. “There’s going to be another quake in forty seconds.”

  —How many?

  “Thirty-five seconds. Are you safe? Rock should be more sturdy than ice. High ground is better than low.”

  —I’m experiencing skips in my short-term memory.

  Vonnie frowned at the non sequitur. “I can help you determine where you are, but you need to upload your transcripts,” she said.

  —Negative. If I increase my bandwidth, your SCPs will get through.

  Vonnie muted her station and looked at O’Neal. “He’s on to us,” she said. “Did we make any headway?”

  “None of our sequences are complete.”

  She reopened her microphone. “Those weren’t SCPs, I swear it. I can help you. We have your original mem files.”

  Silence.

  The ice rumbled. Outside, below, Vonnie watched as Module 03 trembled and slid. Their mecha clung to the surface. Inside the frozen sky, two of the beacons shut off, crushed by blocks of ice. Another reported a new flow of slush and water as a river broke open above it.

  Frerotte leaned out of his privacy screen, murmuring to Vonnie and O’Neal. “Looks like that was it. There may be another quake in ten minutes. Koebsch wants to stay in the air, okay? We need more time to back-and-forth with NASA and the FNEE.”

  “Okay.” Vonnie kept her eyes on her display, looking for another transmission from the ice. “Lam?” she said.