by Brian Lowe
I sat straight in my pilot's chair, Rose cinching the straps so tightly they bit into my flesh, but I wasn't complaining. I was a blind ape riding a flying coffin to a crash landing in an unknown country of solid ice. Even assuming I managed to survive touchdown, if the hull was breached I would freeze to death within hours--sooner if night fell. Not that any of that would matter if I was splattered across the cabin by the impact. The seconds stretched like hours as I waited for the shuddering jolts that would mean we'd hit the ground.
"Rose! Do you have any topographical charts?"
"I've been drawing them since we crossed the continental shelf, dear boy, and using them to avoid those mountains I told you about. But as to what's below all this snow, I'm afraid your guess is as good as mine."
Well, that was reassuring.
"Now, please be quiet so I can work."
I shouldn't have opened my mouth to reply, because right then we hit the ground.
My teeth snapped together so hard I thought they cracked, but I didn't have time to worry about it because the ship was bouncing at what felt like a very high rate of speed. Bouncing--as in hitting solid ice, not snow.
This was not good. I had been hoping for skidding, or sliding, not bouncing. Things that skid or slide tend to slow down and stop on their own, but things that bounce don't stop until they hit something.
Even though Rose had tucked me in as tight as she could, my arms and legs were still being thrown against the straps every time we hit the ice, not to mention my head, whipsawed back and forth and sideways until I made a concerted effort to jam my skull against my seat and keep it there. It was a fight, and I got banged against the padded headrest about a hundred times before I noticed that the bounces were becoming less frequent, and less violent. Were we actually slowing down?
The final impact almost threw me into the console, straps or no. I yelled in pain; I was going to have bruises under my fur, that was for sure.
"Wait a second," I thought. "Dead people don't bruise…"
So I was alive! And the ship had stopped moving! And then I realized the blood was rushing to my head because I was upside down.
"Rose! Release the straps!" But she wouldn't, because I was upside down and safety protocols wouldn't allow it--unless she couldn't hear me at all…
If Rose was--I didn't want to say "dead," but it would have been pretty accurate--then I was dead, too. She controlled everything on the flyer. I might not even be able get out of this chair without her help. There were manual overrides, sure, but the way she'd tied me down I wasn't certain I could reach them, and even if I got out, under the circumstances I didn't think I could fly without her.
It didn't seem as if it was getting colder, which was a relief. I wasn't looking forward to being found a hundred years from now, frozen upside down like a side of meat. No, I was going to freeze sitting up, like the damned fool I was. Flying over the South Pole alone, with no locator beacon and no charts? What kind of idiot does that?
My mother would have lectured me. My Uncle Balu would have laughed. I shivered.
Wait a minute--shivered?
"Nerves," I told myself. "Just nerves." All the same, I strained to feel the air around my body. Was it colder than I remembered? No matter, it was time to move. Where was Rose? Was she de--down? Or was she just acting like my mother, waiting for the proper moment to lecture me on my male helplessness?
"Rose… Honey, are you awake? Because I could really use some help right now…" If it turned out that she had left me hanging here because of some slight that was only obvious to her over-romanticized programming, I wasn't going to rest until Lottric and Skull knew exactly how it felt. But there was no response.
Suddenly the ship rocked sideways, and I was thrown to the side, hanging off my chair, which was attached to what had abruptly changed from a ceiling to a wall. Then it rocked again, and I was slammed into an upright position. The blood rushed back out of my skull and I became light-headed.
When I blinked my way back to normal, the only sound I could hear was my own labored breathing. But the flyer had righted itself, and that had to mean that Rose still owned sufficient control to have aimed and fired one of the maneuvering thrusters. She was alive!
"Unless something outside moved us," whispered a little voice deep in my brain. "Something that's trying to find a way in through that little crack that's letting in cold air..."
"Okay," I said out loud and with more force than I needed to drown out a phantom voice in my head. "First, nothing of any size could live in this frozen desert. And second, anything big enough to push a flyer is too big to get in through any little crack you think is in the hull."
There. That ought to put him in his place. But I strained against the straps anyway. If something came at me, I wanted to be able to defend myself. There had to be a manual release somewhere…
The straps fell away, and this time I knew Rose had done it because I hadn't found the button. I leaped out of my chair and pounced on the nearest weapon--okay, actually I pushed myself out of the chair and wobbled a bit. But all the time I was listening with all my might and testing the air temperature by checking if I could see my breath. The results were dead silence and no visible breath, so probably nothing was trying to get at me and the interior of the flyer was secure and warm.
I started to wonder how much food I had on hand.
"Rose? Can you hear me?"
Silence. It wasn't going to matter how warm I was, or how much food I had, if I couldn't fly out of here, and without my computer that could be tough. I wouldn't have any idea where I was going if I couldn't see. For that matter, I didn't know what it was like outside. What if I tried to lift the ship and I was buried in a tunnel?
Well, there's more than one way to trip a Nuum, as my uncle used to say. Just because Rose couldn't talk didn't mean she couldn't communicate. I knew she could hear me, and she could still operate some of the ship's controls, so I dug into the lockers around the pilot's compartment until I came up with a diagnostic pod with an input screen. It could interact with the ship's internal systems when the main AI was down; it should allow me to talk to Rose.
Rose? Are you there?
-Yes, I am, thank you for asking. But if you stand around making idle conversation, I won't be much longer.
Uh-oh. What does that mean?
-The inner hull is intact, but either because of something in the digestive tract of the creatures that brought us down, or the crash landing, the outer hull has a breach very near one of my outer nodes. The weather has super-cooled that particular node so that it is operating at 198% efficiency.
Is that a problem?
-Normally it wouldn't be, sweetheart, but my main engines have shut down and that node is pulling a great deal of energy. I can't turn off the node and I can't power the rest of my systems while it's going on. If it burns out, you won't be able to re-boot me.
What can I do?
-You can download my essential systems into the diagnostic pod. I won't be able to do much, but it will save enough of me to re-boot the system if you can make repairs. Then you can fly the ship yourself. I would have done all that already, but I need you to authorize it.
Do it.
The screen went dead.
VIII
-Hello, dear. The screen had lit up again.
You scared me.
-I'm sorry. Not to nag you, but don't you think you should be getting to those repairs? They're not going to attend to themselves.
Seriously, Skull's sense of humor needed some major adjustments.
I don't have much to say for the Nuum (having taken over the world and all), but they sure know how to make survival gear. You wouldn't think that anything designed for a Nuum to wear would fit me--they're pretty puny, as a rule--but my suit stretched until I could get it around me, then it went rigid. There was a clear helmet that was actually designed for a bigger head than mine, so it left me a lot of room. As soon as I was sure I everything was tight, I grabbed
a rifle and opened the hatch manually. It was a good thing Rose had managed to right the flyer, or I might not have been able to get out.
Just before stepping outside, I glanced back at the pod that Rose now inhabited. It had a retractable strap on it; I could loop that over my shoulder and take Rose with me. I shook my head. Too much change of her being damaged. I left her inside the flyer.
I was to replay that decision in my head many times in the coming weeks.
Placing my feet carefully in case we were sitting on soft snow turned out to be unnecessary; the ground was crunchy and solid. Of course it was. The ship had just skidded hundreds of yards. Anything soft would have flown away. Moving away from the flyer, I took a look.
There was nothing to see. Rose had told me the wind-creatures had pretty much enveloped her, but they were so sheer I couldn't see them. I dragged my gloved finger along the hull and came away with a film that wafted on the breeze, so something really was there. My job was to find the most critical spots on the hull and burn off this garbage without damaging my ride home.
The exposed node was first. I either had to shield it from the cold, or cut it off from the rest of the system. I was fairly sure it was going to be the latter, and I wasn't looking forward to it. The flyer was equipped with a fairly complete repair kit, but not with any kind of patches; it wasn't designed to leave the atmosphere, after all, so nobody had foreseen the need. But if I severed the node from Rose, I wasn't at all sure what effect it was going to have, or what capabilities she would lose.
Given Rose's directions, I found the damage easily, a tiny gash on the top of the ship, probably caused when we came in upside-down. It was hardly anything; I couldn't have gotten my finger in there.
But I couldn't get a ray-blast in there, either.
In order to sever the node, I had to be able to see the node. Could I remove more of the hull to expose the inner workings? Sure, assuming my rifle was powerful enough to do the job--and if I wanted to risk opening the inner hull as well, or damaging something else, or burning out the node myself.
My time was running out. Even if I had saved Rose's essence, I couldn't re-boot her while the node was still drawing a charge. If the system burned out, there was no way I'd be able to fix it. I sighed, and the inside of my helmet fogged up for a second in spite of the warming elements. The ship wasn't trapped, it was upright, and there were no obstacles in sight if I had to make a horizontal take-off. If only I had something I could use to insulate that node and calm it down. But what could I use for a patch?
I looked at my glove, at the hull I was standing on, then got down on my knees and started scraping.
It was frustrating and slow. The sky-creature stuff was like cobwebs, sticky and incredibly thin. Fortunately, the cold seemed to stiffen it, and by running my hand along the hull in long stretches, I was able to scoop it up in small batches. As soon as I got a reasonable amount, I climbed up to where the crack was and stuffed the hole, scraping every bit off my glove. Then I did it again--and again and again.
There was no way to know if I was making a difference, if the sky-foam (as I started calling it) was thick enough to insulate the node, or if it was just mucking things up worse. But I kept at it. It wasn't like I had anything else to try.
The sky-foam was so fine I had pretty much cleaned the hull by hand, and I was breathing so hard the helmet was working overtime to keep clear. For all I knew the node had burned out the system an hour ago and I was exhausting myself for nothing. I decided I was done.
One way or another.
I slid down the hull, landing on my weary feet on the trampled snow, taking a moment to catch my breath. I would go inside and try to connect Rose to the flyer. Either she would signal that the node had been calmed down, or she wouldn't. If the answer was "yes," I'd re-boot the ship enough to fly, find the nearest civilization, and hope for the best. If she said "no," I would fix myself the best meal I could and wait for the inevitable.
Neither of those alternatives took into account a bunch of snow mounds bursting open and surrounding me with a ring of spears.
IX
We all stood perfectly still, the spears around me threatening, but not making any overtly menacing movements. For myself, I didn't dare move; those glittering points looked razor sharp, and the slightest tear in my environment suit could kill me just like if I were out in space. I looked from one to another of my captors, waiting for someone to act.
There were six of them, shorter than me, but even allowing for the thick furs they wore, they looked broad-shouldered and powerful. Each one's face was completely covered with a mask, even the eyes, which made sense in this cold. It was obvious they could see, though; I could feel their eyes on me. In fact, I could feel the telepathic communications racing back and forth between them. They were talking to each other, but I couldn't breach their shields to hear what they were saying. And they were using pure telepathy, unlike the Nuum and Thorans I had always known. Were they human, or something else entirely?
The fact that they could live in this ice-hell argued for "something else," which didn't make me any more comfortable. The sky-creatures had been so hungry for warmth that they attacked an aircraft and brought it down. What would these guys do for a piece of warm meat like Yours Truly?
I didn't have to wait long for an answer. The spear-carrier directly to my left backed off a couple of feet, and at the same time I felt a prodding from my other side. I jumped, thinking I'd been stabbed, but quickly realized I had only been treated to the butt end of a spear. The figure to my left stepped back further, and I didn't need any encouragement this time to follow him. The crowd moved with me, keeping the spears at a uniform distance as I walked.
I still had my rifle strapped to my back, but it would have been suicide to attempt to bring it to bear. Then, as if they had read my mind, I was stopped. I felt someone behind me lifting the rifle strap over my head. Had they read my mind, or had they simply recognized the weapon for what it was?
Where they were taking me I couldn't guess, but it was away from Rose. I had left the diagnostic pod inside; it didn't seem to matter now. It wasn't likely I'd ever get to see if my makeshift repairs had worked. We moved on, my feet crunching on the brittle snow. My captors made as much sound as a swarm of ghosts.
They were marching me toward a long, low ridge in the snow. Although I had no way to measure distance, I felt as if we had covered less than a mile. Perhaps when we topped the ridge, I could see far enough to get an idea where we were headed. Wherever they were from, it couldn't be too far away. The idea that they had simply stumbled upon me was highly improbable. They had to have seen my crash and come to investigate.
We walked right up to the ridge and halted. I looked around, but none of them was moving. Despite the cold, I was starting to feel warm. If I'd been human, I'd've been sweating. As it was, my breath was coming in quick pants, and it wasn't from the exertion. My shoulder blades began to itch from an imagined spear plunging into my back.
And then a piece of the snow ridge slid aside, revealing a black hole leading into the interior.
"In for a penny, in for a pound," my friend Keryl used to say, and while I have no idea what he was talking about, he always seemed to say it right before we would jump headlong into a huge problem, usually of a violent nature. That saying came back to me as I stepped through the doorway into darkness. There was nothing they could do to me in the dark that they couldn't do in the light, after all.
And then there was light.
We were crowded, all of us, into a room so small that they had to stand their spears straight up or else impale each other, not to mention me. Still, I was outnumbered, surrounded, and unarmed, so I kept my peace. While three of them watched me closely, the other three carefully set their spears aside out of my reach and pulled off their furs and masks.
They were Thorans, a man and two women, but as I had theorized, they were bigger through the body and shoulders than any Thorans I had seen before, even Skul
l, who was about the biggest one I knew. Most Thorans had abandoned heavy physical labor generations ago, and it showed, but these specimens had sinewy arms and stood like they did not expect to be knocked down. From experience I estimated I could probably fight any two of them if they were unarmed, but three would be hard, and taking on all six would be suicide.
As soon as the first three had stripped down to short sleeves and shorts, they took over guarding me so their fellows could follow suit. And when they were all out of their furs, they stepped back to the edges of the room and nodded to me to do the same.
I could have comfortably stayed in my environmental suit regardless of the conditions, but they were having none of it. As it happened, I usually went around without a shirt myself in the flyer; I don't find them comfortable and I've never gotten used to them, although I wore them around Thorans when I wasn't crewing The Dark Lady, because it seemed to put them at ease. Here, though, I fit right in. My hairiness didn't seem to bother them at all.
Once I was ready, I felt the floor below me fall away almost imperceptibly. I was on an elevator in the middle of the Antarctic desert, surrounded by armed guards, and descending into the bowels of Thora.
This is what you get when you go looking for adventure.
X
When the door opened again, I understood why the Thorans had taken off their furs for shorts.
We had started on the surface and gone down. A long way down. But I was looking at a sunny day.
Rather, I was looking out a window at a sunny day. The elevator had opened onto a huge hall, the far wall of which was a giant glass window showing the view outside. But there was sun, where there shouldn't be any, and there was no snow where there should be nothing but snow. Instead, there were trees: palms and house-sized ferns and flowering bushes with blossoms that looked to be the size of my head.
My escort didn't leave me any time to stare, or wonder where the hell I was. They had stacked their spears in a rack on the wall and traded them for my rifle, which one woman was handling with an ease that said she knew exactly what she was doing. They led me into a transverse corridor full of people who parted for us right down the middle. I could see a door at the end of the hallway, and I had an uncomfortable certainty that it was our goal; there might have been something about the two guards flanking it that gave me that feeling.