The Frozen Sky

by Jeff Carlson

  “Koebsch, I know there are religious leaders calling for peace. I’ve talked to them.”

  He reached to shut off their connection. “I don’t have time to fight with you. There are two hundred requests on my station that won’t wait—”

  “What about your soul?” she asked. “Are you going to be able to live with yourself?”

  When he met her gaze, his eyes were livid. “Why do you think you’ve had such a free hand with the media until now?” he said. “I stepped over the line for you. I sent the best media contacts to your station, and I made sure they received every sim you’ve put together. I’ve held off Berlin as long as I could. I probably would have lost my job by now except there isn’t anyone else here. They can’t fire me.”

  “I…” She spread her hands. “I’m sorry.”

  “You have to realize, Beijing hasn’t suspended their operations. Our government is concerned China’s ahead of us in developing the genetic applications Dawson’s talked about. Unless the sunfish change their behavior, until they can prove they’re not just wild predators, we’ll go ahead as planned.”

  Vonnie kept her mouth shut, studying Koebsch’s face and his blazing eyes. He was being recorded, of course. As their administrator, he’d never been allowed to speak from his heart, not personally, not professionally.

  “Thank you,” she said, curious if he’d reveal more.

  He nodded. “Let’s get back to work. We both have a lot to do.” Then he signed off.

  Was he encouraging her to stop the FNEE? If so, one of her crewmates must have told him about Lam… or he’d detected their signals and kept quiet.

  ’We’ve dreamed about finding aliens since we were kids,’ she thought, trying to forgive him.

  They needed conclusive evidence that the sunfish were sentient. With it, Koebsch could make a stand. The political, business, and religious leaders on Earth might start to rearrange their positions, however slightly.

  The balance of power was close. If a few senators changed their views, if more of the top pundits spoke differently, the prime minister might instruct the ESA crew to stand down. They could withhold their mecha. That should be enough to delay the FNEE, who expected ESA support. Emergency negotiations could begin between the new partners on Earth, followed by discussions in the Allied Nations… but what would be unshakeable proof? Recent carvings? A city?

  Vonnie didn’t believe they would ever find a tidy metropolis with roads, stores, and a ruling class. Maybe the sunfish were too alien. Many people seemed incapable of viewing them as anything except monsters.

  Some of the most strident voices on the net were demagogues who warned that the sunfish might overrun the human camps, raping and disemboweling everyone. The worst of these delusional attention-seekers shouted that the sunfish would invade Earth. They were either unwilling or unable to conceive of the distance between their worlds or Earth’s crushing gravity.

  Nice guys finish last because bad people cheat and steal, Vonnie thought. What does that make me?

  Lam, the real Lam, had no problem breaking the rules to protect Europa. I’ve been doing the same, but now it comes down to his ghost.

  I need his help. I need it soon.

  Her display held ten in-progress reports for the mecha they were building. Sweeping aside these datastreams, Vonnie examined the limitations Koebsch had established on her ability to receive and transmit.

  Traffic with Earth was prohibited. Internal signals were restricted, too, but Lam’s frequency remained active among her mecha links.

  “Okay,” she said to herself.

  For the next few minutes, she ignored her assigned duties to craft a new, less understated, more basic slavecast.

  Like Johal had said, they couldn’t be sure where Lam had gone. Vonnie intended to amplify her slavecast through their mecha in the pit. Koebsch would notice the activity, but she thought he’d look the other way.

  Did I misread him? she worried. If I’m wrong, he’ll kick me off the team. I’ll serve meals and fix suits for a year while they hunt sunfish…

  She broadcast her signals into the ice.

  48.

  The machines beneath the surface were a helix of active sensors and data/comm. Their formation had changed little in four days. The mecha above the ice regularly altered their positions, burrowing into the pit — but below, the few machines with any range of motion tended to be imprisoned in small holes or crevices. One mecha had rescued a listening post and a rover, bringing them into the shaft it was patiently digging upward. Two beacons had also united in another gap.

  Vonnie watched intently as all of them responded to her commands. There was a single outsider among their grid.

  Trapped near the bottom of the pit was Relay 021, one of the two transmitters she’d surrendered to Lam. Since then, 021 had remained inactive. It was visible on radar and X-ray, but as far as they could tell, it had been passively monitoring their datastreams. Lam must have reprogrammed it to wait for his authorization, which never came.

  The other relay she’d surrendered, 027, crept off days ago. It had chipped its way through a sheet of ice, located a chasm, and disappeared after its master.

  Could she find him by connecting the dots?

  All mecha were designed to resist cyber assaults, but 021 wasn’t a FNEE or PSSC device. They’d built it themselves. Vonnie found a toehold by causing 021 to ping back when the other machines peppered it with false nav alerts. Collision avoidance systems were autonomous in lesser mecha. Lam had scrambled 021’s encryptions, writing his own command codes, but he hadn’t been able to subvert its base components.

  The toehold became a foothold. Vonnie’s slavecast invaded 021. Moments later, it belonged to her again.

  In unison, 021 and the other mecha turned away from the pit. Their individual sensors became a larger array. First they oriented themselves west, the heading in which Tom’s colony had evacuated. There was no response, so Vonnie angled them downward. The silence continued. She rotated them to the southwest at the same steep angle.

  Contact. Her false nav alerts provoked another response. The signal was faint but recognizable.

  It wasn’t Lam. It was 027. Vonnie felt like she was running through the dark on a maze of stepping stones. If Lam realized she was stalking him, he might move or shut himself down — she might miss him — but she needed to leap again.

  “Priority One CEW lists, authorization Alexis Six,” she said. The electronic warfare codes allowed her to initiate maximum strength transmissions among their mecha in the pit. If necessary, they would draw on non-vital power sources such as their engines and weapons systems, shutting down everything except their sensor arrays.

  Simultaneously, Vonnie hijacked four rovers on the surface. She sent them racing toward 027’s position beneath the ice as they synchronized with the other mecha, adding to the transmission of her slavecast.

  Her actions didn’t go unnoticed.

  Metzler, Ash, Johal, and Dawson appeared on her display. Her three friends wore pressure suits or armor, so they were in close-up, whereas Dawson stood at a camera inside Lander 05.

  “Von!” Ash said. She sounded scared.

  “What in the name of all that’s holy are you doing?” Dawson interrupted. “Administrator Koebsch, this is William Dawson in 05. Some sort of rogue operation is underway at—”

  “Oh, shut up, Dawson,” Metzler said. “Von, what did you see? Are there sunfish?”

  “She found two more of our relays in the ice,” Johal said, her gaze skimming back and forth across her visor. “They’re both damaged. One is close by. The other looks like it was taken six point four kilometers by the flood.”

  Vonnie nodded, cherishing the warmth she felt. Her friends were trying to cover for her, but the lie wouldn’t hold up. Ash was right to be scared. Their careers were on the line. Lifetimes of education and service would boil down to whether or not Vonnie could reach Lam, fix him, and lead him to evidence that no one else had found. It was a lo
ng, shaky bridge to cross.

  “Those are CEW codes,” Dawson said. “Why would you launch cyber attacks on our own mecha?”

  “You’re a gene smith,” Ash said. “You don’t know how this works. 027 is nearly out of range. She’s trying to reestablish control before it—”

  “You’re sabotaging our own grid!” Dawson said. “Why? To keep us from finding your precious fish? I suppose you’re trying to drive a wedge between us and the FNEE.”

  “Leave her alone,” Metzler said.

  She reached Lam. He appeared as a blip labeled Unidentified Mecha, which told her more than a non-engineer might understand.

  “What is that?” Dawson said.

  Her slavecast had elicited the barest response. Lam involuntarily answered with a single radar pulse, enough for Relay 027 to place his general vicinity, but no more. The ESA grid regarded him as a foreign construct.

  He was fighting her — hiding from her — resisting her slavecast in a turbulent battle with himself.

  I need to pin him down, she thought. But how?

  027 was six kilometers west of the pit. Lam had traveled in the same direction, angling down from the surface, but he could be five kilometers beyond 027 or as much as eight.

  He was inside a field of crumbling rock islands that stretched away from a mountaintop. Based on previous rover and satellite readings, they believed the mountain was dormant. Any volcanic activity had petered out decades ago. The complication now was that the rock would shield him. It interfered with her slavecast. Vonnie hoped to encircle Lam from above, but even accelerating at breakneck speeds, the rovers wouldn’t close on him for nine minutes.

  “Administrator Koebsch!” Dawson said. “Administrator!”

  “Here,” Koebsch said, joining the group feed.

  “Vonderach is causing noise and cave-ins at the pit. She’s trying to scare off any sunfish in the area.”

  “I need a minute, Dawson. I’m in discussions with Colonel Ribeiro. Von, you’d better have a good explanation for this,” Koebsch said. Then he muted his link with them, although his window scrolled with ESA telemetry, which he was delivering to Ribeiro as evidence that none of their abrupt signals were aimed at the FNEE.

  He’s covering for me, too, Vonnie thought as the rovers sped over the ice. Their wheels jarred and bounced.

  “You won’t get away with this,” Dawson said. “You—”

  “What can we do?” Ash said. Outside in her suit, she’d started to run, hustling toward Lander 04.

  “Got it!” Metzler said. Unlike Ash, he stood motionless in his armor, his visor leaping with data. He pulled three files and sent them to Vonnie’s station. “These are our best charts of the area, radar, tidal, and thermal analysis,” he said.

  “Thank you.” Vonnie forwarded the sims to her rovers, rerouting them into a spread formation. Since she wasn’t sure of her target, several weak signals were better than one focused source. It was critical to keep Lam off-balance even with the most trivial scratch or nudge at his defenses. If she could transmit through clean ice beneath the surface, slanting her broadcasts past the thickest rocks and gravel fields…

  …if Lam hadn’t shut himself down…

  Where are you? she thought, acutely aware of each ticking second. Too much time had passed. There should have been another response.

  “I’m turning the rovers ten degrees south,” she said.

  “Make it twelve.” Metzler’s voice was low and taut as he highlighted the ice on the rovers’ left flank. “It’ll be tough hunting down there. If Lam gets beneath enough rock, he can wall himself off from us.”

  “Ben!” Ash said. She’d entered the lander’s air lock, but stopped to yell at Metzler. He’d been popping stims again, trying to work eighteen-hour days.

  The drugs made him careless.

  “This mecha you’re pursuing contains the mem files of Choh Lam?” Dawson asked, snapping at the words like a snake. On their group feed, the crafty old man glanced between Metzler and Ash. “How did you know it’s him? Is he inside Probe 114?”

  “We think so,” Vonnie said.

  “You didn’t activate our standard countermeasures.”

  “Lam isn’t near the pit, much less our new base. We’re trying to reach him, not the other way around. We need all the mecha we can get.”

  “This is just another recovery effort,” Ash said.

  “No,” Dawson said. “I don’t believe you.”

  Vonnie ignored him. Behind her, Ash stepped into the ready room, heavy in her armored suit. Mecha assists clanked on her shoulders and hips, securing her weight before she unsealed her collar assembly.

  “I have something,” Vonnie called over her shoulder.

  Three of the rovers had focused on one peculiar blip among the rubble in the ice. It looked like metal.

  Dawson jabbed his fingers at his display. “This is Doctor William Dawson,” he said. “I’m making a full record of actions taken by Engineer Vonderach and an indeterminate number of the crew including Sierzenga and Metzler.”

  Vonnie cut her group feed. It had been four minutes since she’d initiated her slavecasts. That meant she had about seven minutes before Earth saw her datastreams, eleven more before new orders could travel back to Europa. Koebsch was the immediate hurdle. How long would he look the other way? Not long.

  A new radar pulse swept up from the ice.

  “Lam, it’s me,” Vonnie said, adding her voice to the barrage from her mecha. “If you’re hearing this—”

  Another pulse.

  The rovers changed course, veering toward a single point like bloodhounds or piranha.

  “Don’t fight me,” Vonnie said. “Please.”

  The rovers’ telemetry jumped with an empty datastream. There were no more erratic radar pulses. Lam hit them with a squeal of white noise. If the blaring static was intended as a defense, it was useless. The rovers continued to triangulate his position as he crawled away, twitching and jerking through a short five meters. Maybe it was all he could manage.

  Vonnie suffered with Lam, praying for him as she blasted him with patches and rewrites — not demolishing his personality but adding to it — reforming it — kneading him like a hand squeezing a hundred irregular hunks of dough into a single ball.

  Beneath the ice, he writhed, distorting their transmissions with more white noise. Then there were two words:

  —Von. Stop.

  “I won’t. These are your own sequences. It’s who you are.”

  —Don’t make me Lam again. Not any more than I am now.

  Ash charged past Vonnie’s chair and threw herself into the next station, activating her display. “Don’t listen to him,” Ash said. “It’s nonsense. He’s fighting the only way he can.”

  —You’ll ruin everything.

  Vonnie stared at her reports. “What are you talking about?” she said. He was almost whole again. But when the white noise dropped away, it transformed into a dense, overlapping feed of sonar calls.

  —I’m inside a sunfish colony. Two days ago, they adopted me as a member of the tribe.

  “They think you’re a real sunfish.”

  —Yes. Yes.

  “Oh shit. And we’re changing him,” Vonnie said to Ash. “Is there any way we can recreate his mental state before our transmissions?”

  As Lam grew more coherent, improving from a deranged AI to a Level II intelligence, her display came alive with new datastreams. He added holo imagery modified from radar signals. He added infrared and X-ray.

  He was surrounded by sunfish. Dozens of them clung to a rock slope below and beside him. They filled a narrow crevice where the lava had been worn smooth by years of use. Radar showed an opening in its highest corner. Otherwise the crevice appeared to be a dead-end.

  Why would the sunfish constantly visit this place? The rock was dead and cold. There were no bacterial mats, no bugs, no fungus.

  The pack clustered in a warm mass. They rubbed at each other and crooned and sang. La
m had been one of them, voicing the same contented harmonies. They’d accepted him as a natural part of their mild, sluggish dance. But when his mind was altered, so was his body.

  As he resisted Vonnie’s slavecasts, his spasmodic movements had alarmed the nearest sunfish. Then a subtle difference fell over him as her corrective sequences took hold.

  Five individuals shrank back from him, their voices sharpening in pitch. Familiar tones of surprise and challenge rose among the tribe. Their song ended. The group turned on Lam with bared, open beaks.

  —Help me.

  Their screeching grew louder. It became a war cry.

  Top Clan Eight-Six Map

  49.

  “Ash, I need an open link to our mainframes!” Vonnie said.

  “Then you’d better call Koebsch,” Ash said. “He’s blocked everyone from—”

  On their displays, a female sunfish slapped at Lam with two arms. Although he weighed more due to his alumalloy frame and internal sensors, she was bulkier. Females had more size than males in both breeds of sunfish. Her slaps were like roundhouse punches to his ears as the pack warbled and shrieked.

  Lam screamed, repeating their harmonies. That seemed to be the wrong answer. The female sunfish wrapped an arm tip around one of his arms. She used herself like an anchor while three more females encircled him.

  He screamed again, frantically signing with his free arms.

  “Please.” Vonnie clutched Ash’s wrist, unconsciously mimicking how the sunfish had snared Lam.

  Ash flinched and pulled away. “I can’t link him to our central AIs, not without checking him first,” she said.

  “If they kill him, our next step is helping the FNEE kill them. This is everything we’ve worked for.”

  Vonnie saw one solution. They couldn’t restore Lam to the irrational state in which he’d somehow befriended the sunfish, but they could transform him into a hyper-fast Level I intelligence, combining their master databases with everything he’d learned during the past few days. He also needed more processing power. Given remote access to their central AIs, Lam should be capable of reproducing the same behavior that had let him fool the sunfish.