Ice Sky Storm Read online

  Contents

  Front Matter

  Prologue

  Ice Sky Storm

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogues

  The Predator Space Chronicles

  Other works by Craig DeLancey

  About the Author

  Title Information

  Craig DeLancey

  EVOLUTION COMMANDOS:

  ICE SKY STORM

  Predator Space Chronicles 3

  In memory of Dominic Calabresi

  PROLOGUE

  Amir Tarkos, human warrior of the Harmonizer Corp, floated in the center of a crystal prison, adrift in space. It was a single room, about the size of the bedroom he’d had as a child on Earth. But it had clear walls, so that Tarkos experienced the disconcerting illusion that he drifted in high orbit with nothing between him and the vacuum.

  In one direction, the arch of the galactic arm stretched through black space, a mist of stars so distant that generations had come and gone before their light fell now into his eyes. In the other direction, the bright green planet of Neelee-ornor filled half the sky, its silver rings binding the view. The huge Neelee spaceship, Savannah Runner, orbited the planet, a few kilometers away from Tarkos’s prison. It shone, a white snowflake, just visible against a blue sea on the planet below.

  Tarkos waited. When he’d first been isolated in this chamber and ejected from Savannah Runner, he had raged and shouted, demanded communication services from the transparent machinery hidden within the walls, and transmitted demands for release using the weak radio in his brain implants. But eventually he had calmed as he floated alone with his thoughts. And then calm had turned to despair, because all he could do, while waiting in the dark, was remember all that he had lost, and reflect on what all of humanity might be about to lose.

  He ignored the clocks in his implants, and ignored the passing of the hours. The light did not change, as his orbit around Neelee-ornor kept him always just on the edge of the sunrise: a sliver of the red dwarf sun Wee-ouhout cast rich amber light that glittered off the walls of his cell. He had almost managed to clear his mind, he had almost managed to fall asleep, when the crystal walls turned dark, dimming his view.

  Before Tarkos, three figures shimmered into apparent solidity: a trim, deer-like Neelee with huge, blue-green eyes; a black, bird-like Velerit, more than two meters tall; and a seQua, a seething heap of red insects, each the size of Tarkos’s own head. The three aliens stood upside down relative to his orientation. Tarkos swung his arms to generate some spin, and drifted with annoying slowness until he matched their orientation. The Neelee’s ears tilted toward him attentively and it clacked a hoof in greeting. In the microgravity Tarkos could not stamp a foot. He settled on folding himself slightly in an attempt at a bow.

  Tarkos sometimes found it difficult to distinguish Neelee. They usually had similar pelts of undistinguished tan, and similar eyes of dark brown and green. But he recognized this Neelee, by the black stripes on his arms, and the blue striations in his green eyes. This was Nereenital, captain of Savannah Runner.

  “Captain,” Tarkos said, speaking Galactic, the lingua franca of the Alliance, “Let me out of this prison.”

  “This isolated habitation is a place to wait,” Neerenital barked softly. His voice swallowed consonants and the vowels came fast and high-pitched.

  Tarkos resented the euphemism, but he suppressed his pride and said, “Captain, please let me out of this waiting area and allow me to return to Savannah Runner.”

  Nereenital waved a hand with thin, fur covered fingers toward his two companions. “I appear now here as Council member, not as captain of Savannah Runner.”

  Tarkos frowned, not sure what the captain meant to say by this. “Where is my commander?” Tarkos asked. “And where is my superior, Special Advisor Preeajitala?”

  “Not members!” the Velerit screeched. Its words neared the upper frequencies of human hearing. Tarkos’s implants translated them into a soft monotone. “Not members of the Council, either one. You will answer queries now.”

  Tarkos considered the black bird, with its wide, hunched shoulders. He wished he were in the Council chambers with it, instead talking to its hologram; there was something cold and distant about not being able to smell the Velerit, not being able to sample the free DNA from his three interrogators.

  The Velerit were renowned because most of them—it seemed all of them, in Tarkos’s experience—had a genuine love of bureaucratic detail. If this Velerit matched Tarkos’s past experience, then it would not be a sympathetic audience. But the Velerit were also considered incorruptible, so this one might be a fair audience.

  “I am a Harmonizer,” Tarkos said, “I serve the Alliance. I am eager to comply with any request of the Council. But Councilors, we are at war. The Ulltrians have returned. I saw a thousand Ulltrian ships and more launch on a mission to attack us. They’re going to attack all our worlds. We are not prepared. We do not have war ships on that scale, we do not have enough warriors prepared to fight. You cannot afford even to lose one Harmonizer.”

  “I say: worse, worse,” several of the parts of the seQua said. “It speaks in ignorance it should answer questions not offer counsel make it waiting-silent make it answer questions make it be succinct accurate relevant, homeworld-destroyer, I say.”

  Tarkos frowned. The epithet “homeworld-destroyer” was one of the worst that a Galactic could use to insult a species. It meant that the seQua believed humans unworthy of equal citizenship, because they had harmed the ecosystem of their home planet. Tarkos felt an urge to protest, but the urge passed quickly. He’d heard such insults before, and it never paid to answer them. The response was usually an exhausting litany of the terrestrial megafauna that humanity had driven to extinction. So Tarkos settled for, “Neelee-ornor is in danger.”

  Nereenital scratched at the floor with a hoof. “Dangers crowd the stars” he said. “Attacks have already fallen upon our worlds. Your fears are tardy. The second war against the Ulltrians begins.”

  “What? Here?” Tarkos looked around, as if expecting to see ships blazing between the stars as they fell into the Neelee-ornor system.

  “In seven systems known at this time; sorry battles, many lost. But not yet near this star.”

  Tarkos knew it showed prejudice unworthy of a Harmonizer to favor his world over others, but he could not help himself: he spoke before he could reconsider. “Earth? Has Earth been attacked?”

  Nereenital flattened his ears. “Quiet your clade concern. We have no warning that harm falls on Earth.”

  Tarkos took a deep breath. “Councilors, throw me in prison after the war—if, against all probability, I survive the war. Right now you need every Harmonizer, and every soldier of the Executive, to defend our planets. My cruiser is quantum locked to me and to my commander. You won’t be able to re-fit it in time.” He pointed at the ringed green globe now seemingly above them. “Let me do my job and help protect Neelee-ornor.”

  “You may be charged with murder,” the Velerit cackled, its voice rising to urgent, painful volumes. “The Council formally demands that you explain why you destroyed an OnUnAn embassy ship, killing all ambassadors aboard.”

  Tarkos sighed. “As I have already told the Executives who put me in here: I don’t know what happened. I just don’t know. I wasn’t in the cockpit of our cruiser when the embassy ship was destroyed.”

  “Complicity? Were you complicit in this killing?” the Velerit asked. “A planner? A
killer? An enabler?”

  “I learned of it only as it happened.”

  “Your Commander acted alone?”

  “But we don’t know if Bria did it.”

  The red heap of bugs that constituted the seQua surged forward. “I ask: I do not understand its barbaric speech patterns it growls it mumbles it says nothing it denies: is this organism professing ignorance or—alternative—is it refusing to comply to answer? I ask.”

  Tarkos frowned at the seQua. It was a methane breathing colony organism; it would be in a different room from the other Council members, in a methane environment, but the hologram generated the illusion that the elder race members stood side by side in his cell. Tarkos could not tell which of the seQua’s many parts had spoken, but only one had—there had been no chorus effect. He felt disconcerted by the many pairs of eyes that looked at him from the heap of red bugs that formed the colony. But Tarkos gambled that its question was sincere. He’d not met many members of elder races that were prone to sarcasm.

  “I sincerely profess ignorance. I do not know how it came to be that our cruiser fired on the OnUnAn embassy ship,” Tarkos said. “Commander Bria was in the cockpit of the cruiser at the time. I was not. That is truly all I know.”

  The Velerit’s big rounded shoulders bobbed with agitation. “We command you to provide new and significant information.”

  “All I can tell you is what I saw,” Tarkos said. The long wait in micro-gravity had made him feel weak and fuzzy-headed. His stomach gurgled and churned, as if uncertain of which way to push food through his body. But he drew a deep breath, straightened, and gathered his thoughts.

  “We had just come back from the World Hammer,” Tarkos said, “the world where the Ulltrians had hidden their war fleet….”

  _____

  The starsleeve—a specialty starship designed to carry only their cruiser and its crew—had limped back into the space of Neelee-ornor, damaged and leaking atmosphere. Commander Bria said nothing as they raced down into the system, diving toward a slingshot around the red dwarf sun Wee-ouhout. She rested her huge claws on the cockpit controls, prefering always to be near hard interfaces instead of relying on virtual ones. Data glowed in her four eyes as she fine-tuned their trajectory.

  Tarkos was well accustomed to his commander’s silences: the huge, bear-like Sussurat preferred to be quiet, often for days at a time. She worked constantly and quickly, but her demeanor remained always that of a patient predator, sitting in wait. Other than the thrum of engines, the halls of their starsleeve were as silent as a tomb as they sped through Neelee space.

  They gravity braked around the sun, and then slung toward the planet Neelee-ornor. The Neelee flagship Savannah Runner waited in high orbit of the planet. Bria flew a perfect docking run, deaccelerating the cruiser till it matched the huge ship’s trajectory just as they touched. A thin, seemingly tenuous crystal arm of the giant ship clasped their airlock. When they opened the heavy doors, a Neelee and a dozen robots of the Executive waited in the corridor.

  The Neelee was Preeajitala, Special Advisor to the Harmonizer Corp, and the superior who had sent Bria and Tarkos on their mission to track down the hiding place of the Ulltrians. Preeajitala did not greet them, except to barely raise a single hoof in the minimal gesture of a tap.

  The Special Advisor’s reticence matched Tarkos’s mood. In the long weeks of their journey home, he had come to feel emotionally numb. But now, boarding Savannah Runner, Tarkos felt again the intense shame and guilt that had overwhelmed him when they completed their mission. He and Bria had accomplished all the goals assigned them, and much more. But one crew member—the old Kirt AI Tiklik’al’Takas—was imprisoned in quarters for what was either a malfunction or treason. Another crew member—the OnUnAn hive organism Gowgoroup—was imprisoned in quarters for actual treason. Their other two crew members had died, and their bodies had been left behind: the Kirt astronomer Ki’Ki’Tilish and the human scientist Pala Eydis. Tarkos would eagerly change places with either of the lost crew, if he could. But instead he had lived, while the people he was supposed to protect had died.

  Bria pushed out of the ship and floated to Preeajitala’s side. The Sussurat dwarfed the slim Neelee, but Preeajitala held her head and ears high, clearly unintimidated. Neither of them even seemed to notice Tarkos existed.

  “You carry back dangerous cargo,” Preeajitala said, “records of ancient animus.”

  Bria blinked agreement. She knew what the Special Advisor referred to: when Tarkos and Bria had found the hiding place of the Ulltrian fleet, the Ulltrians had retreated but had left behind two ancient treaties carved on metal monument plates. The Ulltrians had clearly meant for Bria and Tarkos to find the plates, exposing embarrassing facts from the Alliance’s past. No doubt the Ulltrians hoped that the plates would sow dissension among the Alliance members.

  “The Executive will take the plates,” Preeajitala said.

  Bria sent the commands to tell the two ships to allow the Executive robots aboard. The thin black robots streamed past Preeajitala and Bria, their blade-like arms extending and gripping any nearby surface to get a pull in the microgravity. Tarkos had to push aside to get out of their way as they rushed through the cruiser.

  In a minute they returned, guiding the two monument plates, black legs bent to cautiously guide the large masses. The robots had wrapped each of the plates with a gray sheet of plastic, hiding the writing that covered their faces. Tarkos had the sudden thought that the plates seemed like giant tombstones. Fitting then that there were two of them: one for Pala Eydis and one for Ki’Ki’Tilish.

  Bria and Preeajitala stepped aside, and the robots hurried up the bright docking hall, tapping at the plates to gently guide them as they drifted along the way. In a minute they were gone, out of view inside the flagship.

  “If the Alliance survives the first wave of attacks,” Tarkos muttered, “those are going to be trouble.”

  Bria turned to Tarkos. “Remain here.”

  Tarkos frowned but did not move. Bria followed Preeajitala into the gleaming crystal passages of Savannah Runner. The airlock door closed before him with a hiss.

  An hour later, Bria returned. She seemed to Tarkos even more sullen than usual. She squinted all four eyes. Her lips were drawn tight over her long, sharp teeth.

  “Put OnUnAn Gowgoroup into cruiser,” Bria told Tarkos. “Set path: intercept docking with OnUnAn embassy ship.”

  “What?” Tarkos said. “They’re letting Gowgoroup go?”

  Bria said nothing.

  “Did you explain that the ambassador murdered a crew member?” Tarkos said. “Did you explain how Gowgoroup betrayed us to the Ulltrians? Don’t they care that this surely means the OnUnAn government has betrayed the Alliance?”

  Bria stared at him, her top two eyes squeezed nearly closed. Tarkos knew the expression well: a Sussurat closing her top eyes meant, you are being so stupid it shames me to see you with all four eyes. Tarkos growled in frustration and pulled himself down the starsleeve’s hall to the door of Gowgoroup’s quarters. His own gun waited outside the door, clinging to the floor on three thin legs and guarding against escape. He picked the pistol up and cancelled its orders to kill Gowgoroup if any part of the OnUnAn left its quarters. Then he holstered it.

  The door opened. Methane and sulfur dioxide wafted into the hall. Tarkos coughed. “Gowgoroup. Come out.”

  A gray slug, the size of a large Terran dog, slid toward him. Its pseudopod made it able to cling to surfaces in microgravity, and it moved as if it had weight. It lifted its eye stalks and waved them a moment, considering. Its acrid odor enveloped Tarkos, making his eyes water.

  “Where have we slid to?” it gurgled through its vertical mouth.

  “We are in orbit of Neelee-ornor.”

  Two other slugs slid out of the smog. They pressed against the one that talked. Gowgoroup was an OnUnAn, a colony being. Most OnUnAn had six members. Gowgoroup had been six members, at the beginning of their mission. But its be
trayal had gotten three of its members killed. It was a cripple now—half a mind, by OnUnAn standards.

  “Has war slid here?” the lead slug asked.

  “Not yet,” Tarkos said.

  “But do you stretch your eyes and see battle?”

  Tarkos thought about that a moment before he said, “Sure. Stretch your eyes far enough and battle has already begun. War is coming here soon. They’re already preparing for it. Now, get in the cruiser. You’re being returned to your ship.”

  Gowgoroup waved its six eye stalks, not moving. The hesitation surprised Tarkos, and then it filled him with hope. If Gowgoroup asked for asylum, maybe it would talk. Maybe it would tell them about other OnUnAn betrayals. Tarkos opened his mouth, ready to say something, anything, to encourage the OnUnAn to stay.

  But the central slug, a silent gray coordinator, slid forward, dragging its long mouth tentacles along the sides of the other two slugs, as if encouraging them. The other two followed, each leaving a wet slick along the floor as they pulsed along.

  _____

  The OnUnAn’s ambassadorial ship floated a few kilomeasures from Savannah Runner. A gray and black irregular shape, like a moss covered stone, it tumbled slightly as it orbited the flagship. A small cloud of detritus and gas collected near the ship, making the space around it seem dirty.

  Sitting alone in the cockpit of the cruiser, Tarkos steered close, a few dozen measures away, and then sent a ship-to-ship request for a docking port. No answer came, but the ship stopped tumbling, then shifted till one smooth facet faced them. It extruded a docking port. Tarkos feathered the maneuvering jets till the ships tapped, their docks aligning. Electromagnets made the doc sleeves clang together with sharp force.

  Tarkos looked back down the narrow hall of the cruiser. His commander floated in the hall, next to the OnUnAn. Bria reached a claw forward and slapped the control for the starboard airlock. In the microgravity, the action pushed her away from the wall. In the back of the cruiser, the OnUnAn’s acceleration couch opened. The three parts of Gowgoroup slid over onto the wall and clung to it with their pseudopods. Pulsing slightly, they moved up the wall and over the ceiling.