Ice Sky Storm Read online

  The inner airlock door opened and the wet smell of mold, laced with burnt sulfur, filled the cruiser. The smell of the OnUnAn ship’s atmosphere made the slugs hurry. First the large gray warrior slug, then the mute coordinator slug, slipped along the ceiling above Bria and wriggled over the airlock doorway. They left a gleaming trail of mucus along the hull.

  As Tarkos watched, the leader slug, the part of Gowgoroup that usually talked, stopped above Bria. It drew its head and tail ends together, forming an arch that pushed it away from the ceiling. It drifted down. Bria shifted slightly aside, to let the slug move not toward her face but toward her arm. It touched her arm and wrapped around her bicep. Bria’s four nostril’s flared and she got a distant look, all four of her eyes wide open but focussed into the distance. The slug waved its eye stalks. They floated like that for one minute, then two minutes, before Bria reached forward, pulled the OnUnAn slug from her arm, and pushed it into the airlock. It drifted away, into the OnUnAn ship.

  Bria looked at Tarkos. “Harmonizer,” she said, “monitor docking release.”

  Tarkos unfastened his seat hold and flipped over the top of his chair. He pushed off the seat’s back, and shot out of the cockpit. He stopped himself on a ceiling handle just at Bria’s side.

  Bria pushed herself forward and climbed into the cockpit. She strapped into the pilot’s seat.

  Tarkos looked down into the darkness of the OnUnAn ship. The single leader slug of Gowgoroup faced him, drifting backwards into the brown air. It retracted its eyes, the eye stalks fattening into low bulbs, as if it shrunk back from from an approaching threat. Its vertical mouth flexed. Tarkos thought it might be about to speak. But the outer airlock door closed. Tarkos frowned and closed the inner airlock door.

  Bria liked to follow protocol closely, and protocol required that Tarkos be in the cockpit when they began to accelerate. It was against protocol to ask Tarkos to stay here, by the airlock. But Tarkos assumed that the unusual request meant that Bria expected something strange to happen. So he tried hard to pay close attention to everything he could. He reviewed the airlock procedures and found they all worked correctly. He instructed the ship’s small robots, which crawled around on the inside and outside of the ship like metal mice, to ensure that no foreign objects were left in the airlock or were attached to hull. He used his implants to send a message to his vacuum armor, waiting in its closet a few steps away, instructing it to boot up and run preparation checks. Then he turned on the monitor by the door and told the cruiser to give him the perspective from just outside the airlock door.

  With a ringing sound, the docking sleeves disconnected. The cruiser drifted back, pushed by its jets. Tarkos’s feet pressed against the hull. The OnUnAn ship rotated slightly and then began to accelerate away. Tarkos watched it recede a moment.

  A flash made him start. The monitor shone white, blinding and featureless. The exterior camera adjusted to sudden glare and darkened the image, making the OnUnAn ship seem to form in contrast, as the space around it returned to black. A sparking line burned across the OnUnAn ship, and in its wake flames spurted from the hull, burning with fierce intensity. The deep cut spit gas that pushed the ship into a tumble.

  Then the laser beam that cut into the ship reached the engines, and the embassy of the OnUnAns exploded.

  _____

  “That’s all I know,” Tarkos said to the holograms of the three Councilors. “I wasn’t even sure our cruiser had shot the OnUnAn ship, though the angle looked right. But when I got to the bridge, the lasers were hot and the firing command was still there in the list of recent computer commands.”

  “So you observed Commander Briathursiasalientiormethesess fire on the OnUnAn ship,” the Velerit squeaked.

  “No. I didn’t see Bria give the command. It could be that someone managed to take control of the firing system.”

  “You told us: the ship is quantum locked to you and the commander,” the Velerit said.

  Tarkos frowned. “Yes. That’s true.”

  “What did you then, confused and ignorant, say to the commander?” Nereenital asked.

  “I demanded Bria tell me what had happened. When she did not answer me, I grew angry. I shouted. But she refused to talk.”

  Tarkos sighed. He looked from the seQua, to the Velerit, to Nereenital. “After that, we docked with Savannah Runner again. A group of Executive robots seized Bria and seized me and separated us.” Tarkos had been led through a maze of decks and then thrust to the end of a dead-end hall. He had stood there, perplexed when the robots stepped back, and then he had been shocked when the crystal walls sphinctered closed and the end of the hall where he stood pinched off, separated from the ship, and began to drift away. He had not imagined such a thing was possible; the hull of the Savannah Runner appeared to be brittle crystal. “And so I wait here, useless to the Alliance, while the war that will decide our survival begins.”

  The holograms of the three Councilors watched him, silent.

  “Councilors,” Tarkos pleaded. “I don’t know what happened on the cruiser, but I know that Commander Bria is absolutely loyal to the Alliance, to the Harmonizer Corp, and to the balance of life in the Galaxy. She would do nothing but what was in your interest.”

  The Velerit and the seQua faded. “No!” Tarkos shouted. He reached toward them, as if wanting to seize their images and force them to remain. But they were gone.

  “Harmonizer,” Nereenital said, “you must remain here until the Council is satisfied that you are not complicit.”

  “Please, let me help. If you won’t let me fight, then let me talk to Bria,” Tarkos said. “Or let me talk to Preeajitala.”

  “Special Advisor Preeajitala isolates herself in silence.” The Captain’s image began to fade.

  “Surely she’ll talk to me. She’s the leader of the Harmonizers here. Surely I can—”

  The flagship’s Captain disappeared.

  Tarkos cursed and threw up his arms in frustration. The action made him begin to drift through his cell. The walls grew clear again, and the stars of the Galaxy spun around him, all of them very, very far beyond his reach.

  CHRONICLE 3:

  ICE SKY STORM

  CHAPTER 1

  Floating alone in his small prison cell, with only the stars for company, Tarkos heard voices.

  No. He didn’t hear them. He… felt them. Through his implants, like a trickle of current teasing his brain.

  Hours had passed since his interview with the Councilors. He’d slapped at the crystal walls and cursed in English after they left. He’d sent angry demands to Savannah Runner on the only radio connection allowed him. No reply had come. Finally, he quieted and drifted, miserable with his own thoughts. His eyes closed. He neared sleep.

  That’s when he felt them. Voices. Neelee voices speaking Galactic, and AIs buzzing with accelerated communication in mathematical protocols. The signals seemed slightly stronger when he floated over to one side of the room—the side of the room, he realized, where the hologram projector thrust through the crystal wall.

  He was sensing the network traffic from Savannah Runner. When the Councilors had questioned him in this cell, they had left the network connection open. It was weak, not designed for communication with his implants and so not sensitive to their paltry signal. He pressed his cheek against the projector, and the signals grew slightly stronger. He had access to Savannah Runner’s network. To test it, he sent a request for communication with his cruiser.

  In two seconds the cruiser answered. Tarkos exhaled, only then realizing he’d been holding his breath. He smiled widely, unable to suppress a sense of triumph and relief when the familiar protocols locked with his own. He missed his ship, he wanted out of this cell, he wanted to do something.

  The data came slowly, but he downloaded a stuttering status report. The starsleeve and the cruiser both remained where they had docked with Savannah Runner. All airlocks were closed. Ship robots performed standard maintenance, but otherwise nothing moved in his
ship.

  Tarkos sent an activation order to his vacuum armor, stored in the cruiser. It answered with a scrolling list of system initiation reports. He waited until the list completed. Then he told the armor to climb out of its closet. It did so, pulling hand over hand down the narrow hall till it reached the ventral port, just a few steps behind the starboard airlock. The port did not have an airlock, but with the cruiser docked inside the starsleeve it was the only port that opened to space. The cruiser sealed itself from the starsleeve and began drawing down the atmosphere, pumping what it could into storage. When only a few millibars of atmosphere remained, the ship vented the rest of the gas into space. Tarkos knew this might attract the attention of Savannah Runner, but he gambled that the Neelee crew, although vast, was occupied with far greater worries.

  Moving very slowly, careful to control the armor precisely over the low bandwidth and delay of this network connection, Tarkos had the armor remove a rocket pack from the stores closet and attach the single engine to its back.

  The floor port irised open. The armor climbed out and pushed away from the cruiser. It used the small, weak jets built into the armor—essentially vents that released suit atmosphere—to turn till the armor faced him, head first. Then he ignited the rocket pack.

  Tarkos opened his eyes and pulled himself over to the facet of his crystal cell that faced the Savannah Runner. He strained his eyes, looking for the armor. For long minutes he waited, staring at featureless black. He began to worry that the armor had been intercepted, even though his implants showed it free and in flight.

  Then a small point of reflected light emerged out of the dark background of Neelee-orner’s twilit continent below. He watched the point grow until it resolved into a rectangle of metal formed by the shoulders of the armor. It came directly toward him.

  Tarkos sent the command to cut the rocket pack’s engine, then he turned the armor so that it faced him feet first. He gave the rocket pack a short, intense burn to slow its approach. When the armor approached to a hundred meters out, he killed the engine again, flipped the armor and made it spread its limbs wide. The gecko grips extended from the boots and gloves.

  It hit the crystal cell hard and sent them both spinning. But the armor gripped the exterior hull and held. They tumbled a long while. Tarkos pushed off a wall and floated in the center of the room, nearly stationary in a cell that spun around him. He used the armor’s jets to slow the spin. It a few moments, after a long series of white bursts of freezing gas emitted by the arms and legs of the suit, the walls came to a stop relative to the stars and planet below.

  The armor climbed along the cell exterior until it found the portion of the hull that transmitted status reports back to Savannah Runner. The armor extruded a laser and using wide beam dispersal heated the comm system till it failed. Tarkos reasoned his jailers would reply quickly to a report that he had escaped, but slowly to an absence of reports.

  “Now,” he said aloud, “now comes the hard and dangerous part.”

  _____

  The cell had no airlock. He presumed that whatever trick made the walls collapse and meld together and separate from Savannah Runner would reverse if pressed back against the ship. But out here, and not under his command, the cell had no exit. It was an aquarium with no top.

  He could think of only one solution. The armor would have to cut a hole, decompress the cell, and then climb through. The armor would then have to depressurize, open to admit him, he would climb inside, and then the armor would close up and pressurize. Tarkos well knew that exposing the interior of his armor to vacuum would damage the service robots that crawled around inside the suit. But he could not think of another alternative.

  He gave the armor clear instructions with a trigger command. He took off his shirt, went to the toilet in the corner of the room that had been extruded by the floor after the cell had separated from the ship—that toilet had been the thing that had made him realize the Galactics had essentially just arrested him. He tied one arm of his shirt around his wrist, and the rest of the shirt he tied around the toilet. It used all of the shirt: he had to crouch in the corner. He pressed himself against the walls, hyperventilated with a dozen fast breathes, and squeezed his eyes shut. He sent the trigger command.

  Two heavy particle beam weapons, one in each of the armor’s forearms, popped up from under a small panel. The barrels swiveled foward and fired two beams into the cell. The hull smoked and burned. The escaping atmosphere clouded around the armor and whisked away the heat and fumes.

  Tarkos first heard the hiss of escaping air, then felt a terrible shocking cold as the pressure plummeted. He squeezed his eyes painfully shut. His ears roared, and then a stabbing pain in each eardrum was followed by hollow silence.

  With his implants, he could track the progress of the armor, seeing through its cameras. The ticks of his internal clock slowed to a crawl. Tarkos felt a terrible need to exhale, surprising him because he expected and needed to hold his breath for at least a minute. Ten, eleven seconds passed. He felt his skin bruising. At seventeen seconds, the armor completed its cut. A round disk of the cell wall drifted off, pushed by the last escaping atmosphere. The armor climbed inside.

  Twenty one seconds. When the armor had clambered half way inside, the hole in the wall began to close. Tarkos felt a surge of panic: the wall could close on the armor, locking it half in, half out of the cell, so that he could not get into the suit. Then he would be die for sure.

  Twenty-three seconds.

  The walls continued to close. The armor pulled its torso through, and then the shrinking wall touched the armor’s thigh.

  The wall pulled away, as if uncertain by the contact with the strange material. This provided enough time: the armor pulled all the way into the room. Twenty-seven seconds.

  Tarkos looked at himself through the armor’s visuals: he sat crouched in the corner, his face compressed into a horrible grimace, his skin visibly bruising to purple. He tried to rise. His mouth opened. It seemed involuntary, something he could not attempt or prevent. But air ripped out of him before he clamped his mouth shut. He felt dizzy. Almost nothing remained in his lungs. Thirty-four seconds.

  He struggled with the shirt tied to his wrist. The knot had been pulled tight. He couldn’t undo it. In a panic, he yanked at the cloth, drawing the knot tighter. His view through the armor via his implants grew dim. Consciousness started to slip away. He should have given the armor instructions to prepare for that possibility: he should have told it to draw him in if he were unconscious. Too late. He….

  The wall sealed closed behind the armor. Air roared into the cell.

  Tarkos felt the pressure return. He gasped. The air felt thin and worthless, but as he gaped like a fish on land the air thickened. He opened his eyes.

  The cell had resealed and repressurized. He floated there a long while, all his body throbbing with pain. He gasped, gasped, feeling that he could not breath enough air.

  After a minute his lungs no longer burned, and his breath came almost at a normal pace. “Well,” he croaked. “That turned out worse and then better than I hoped.” Speaking started a fit of violent, painful coughing. His lungs hurt with a dull ache. His throat burned. His voice sounded distant, barely audible: damage to his eardrums. He felt angry with himself for having panicked and for having tied a slipknot over his hand. He was glad his partner Bria had not been there to see him.

  The armor opened along the front, revealing the soft green interior. Tarkos untied the shirt easily now. He pulled it on. He pushed off the wall. He bumped into the armor, but climbed into it as together they spun in the cell. The armor closed around him and sealed.

  He cut another hole in the wall. As the crystal oval of hull drifted away, its edge sparkling from shorted circuits, he activated the rocket pack and shot through the gaping hull. The cell tumbled away behind him. He burned straight at Savannah Runner.

  CHAPTER 2

  Commander Briaathursiasalientiormethesess of the Harmonizer Corp
watched with all four eyes as Special Advisor Preeajitala pulled herself along the hall. The walls to Bria’s room were transparent, as were most of the walls on Savannah Runner. Bria would have chosen to darken the walls, if the room would obey her in this, but it did not. So she had watched the eager traffic of Neelee, svelt brown herbivores with huge and knowing eyes, as they hurried about their business. Now Bria watched the Special Advisor kick off one wall, then another, till she bumped the door to Bria’s room. It opened at the Special Advisor’s touch.

  Preeajitala did not tap a hoof in honored greeting to Bria. Instead, she closed the door, instructed the walls to darken, and told the AI to stop monitoring their conversation. Bria lowered her snout and looked through her brows at the Special Advisor. Preeajitala intended a frank discussion, apparently. A discussion between the two of them, Predator to Predator.

  Preeajitala was a Neelee of average size, with dark fur and very green eyes. She smelled like other Neelee: a strong and pleasant musk, Bria found, that unfortunately most Neelee obscured and ruined by washing in floral scents. Preeajitala’s mass was perhaps a fifth of Bria’s own, but her precise movements and intense stare revealed a fearlessness in Bria’s presence. She had earned it; the Special Advisor was a intimidating and independent leader of the Harmonizers, given complete freedom by authorities that believed they needed the cunning Neelee’s brilliant tactical mind, even if it meant undermining their own authority.