Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

— There are four lifeforms in pursuit. The closest is ten meters behind us .

“No!”

— Radar indicates several branches from this tunnel, but your instructions were to remain on your path.

“Turn! Lose them!”

— Displaying options .

“Just turn! Run! Don’t let them catch me!”

The suit wrenched sideways, yanking Vonnie to her right, left, right, and right again. Reeling in agony and shock, she fought to hold onto a plan.

“Where are they now? What does the tunnel look like?”

— The nearest lifeform is twenty-five meters behind us. Displaying holo imagery .

“Fuck you! Fuck you! I can’t see!”

— Twenty meters .

“Keep running! Tell me what the tunnel looks like!”

— Radar indicates multiple side channels and cavities around the main tube, which is at least another kilometer in length. There is ice beyond it.

“What do I do?”

— Define request .

Vonnie screamed at him, using rage to overcome her panic. “How can they be so close!? You’re stronger than them! You should be faster!”

— The lifeforms are jumping from every available surface, gliding through trajectories as short as one meter or as long as thirty. Their grasp of spatial relations appears significantly more advanced than the same ability in human beings.

That helped. She was able to picture the chase. Her suit ran in leaping bounds as the sunfish flew after her. She was obstructed by boulders and pits. They acted more like arrows or balls, using long and short angles interchangeably.

“When all four of them are in the air, change course! Run into one of the side channels!”

— I anticipate such an instance in six seconds. Five. Four .

“Why don’t I feel my med systems? Fix my eyes!”

— One .

Vonnie winced as the suit flung itself backward. She thought she felt a tick of contact on her shoulder. Had a sunfish grabbed at her as it flew past?

“Where are they?”

— We’ve left the main tunnel for a chasm as instructed. The nearest lifeform is ten meters behind us and gliding further away. I’ve lost radar signals of the other three.

“Keep running! What about my eyes!?”

— Medical response appears to have been subverted by unknown packets and overrides.

“That’s you. Oh, shit, that’s you,” she whispered with a cold new sense of dread. At some point, the ghost had outfoxed the checks she’d established and tried to expand itself, fragmenting as it battled with her computers.

— Initiating diagnostics.

“No. Wait.”

— Corrupted files identified in life support nodes .

“I said wait! Off!”

Her suit froze. Vonnie toppled forward until her arm struck something. She spun around and hit twice more, bruising her leg and her back. Her face throbbed.

The pain was nothing. It was her terror that consumed her. Like a child, she reached for something to hold onto. The suit responded to manual function, letting her clutch at the rock and churn her legs.

She went four meters before her head clanged into the wall. She moved to her right, then struck something else.

What could she do?

Vonnie didn’t want the ghost to reabsorb whatever packets it had lost in its fight to control her suit. Some of those packets would be junk code. Others would be sleeper cells. If the ghost reconnected with enough of those cells, her suit’s firewalls might not win the next battle for control. But she couldn’t crawl alone through the blackness.

“Are you there!?” she shouted.

— Online .

“Where are the sunfish?”

— Radar shows no indication of pursuit.

Vonnie exhaled in a trembling gust. Were they lurking outside the chasm? Was it a dead end? The next question was the most urgent, and she fixated on it with that child-like desperation. Why ? Why? Why are they trying to kill me ?

If they were intelligent, they should have felt the same magic she’d experienced when she stood in front of them. They couldn’t have met anything like her before — a tall, bipedal creature in plastisteel — and she hadn’t done anything wrong. Had she?

Vonnie patted at her armor, bewildered by the mangled shapes of her torso and abdomen. Suddenly she reached for her shoulder mount. “Is my electrolysis unit intact?”

— Affirmative .

For an instant, she’d been afraid she couldn’t recharge her air cylinders. She didn’t know if she had enough gear to build a replacement.

“I should have three mecha on my chest plate.”

— Negative.

“What happened to them?”

—One was lost in the attack. Most of your tool kits and sample cases are also damaged.

“But I have two mecha left.”

— Affirmative. 1084 is missing its infrared camera and laser. 1085 registers intact.

“Detach and activate. Slavecast this suit to 85. Your function will be to translate its signals into voice mode and relay my commands.”

— Von, listen, I am more efficient than the mecha .

“What did you just say?”

— I am more efficient .

The ghost had used her name and sidestepped a direct order. How long did she have before he interrupted her suit’s systems again?

“Detach and activate 85,” she said. “Wipe all other initiatives and confirm.”

— 85 activated.

The tiny mecha separated from her chest plate with a pop.

Vonnie turned her head, trying to situate herself, yearning to see. “Send 85 ahead of me into the chasm, then follow it,” she said. “Move as fast as it’s safe. Our first priority is to get away from the sunfish. Confirm.”

— Confirmed, Von .

Using her name was a simple development, and yet it was also sinister and wrong. Did he think he was her equal?

Following 85, her suit ducked and bent and hopped. At the same time, the ghost narrated 85’s advisories, describing a gully, a slide, a crevice, a hill.

“I need medical attention,” she said.

— Von, I can fix the corrupted nodes .

“I want you to withdraw from life support. That’s the problem. You’re interfering.”

— Incorrect. This suit’s basic functions are compromised by external and internal damage. If I withdraw, you will lose all AI-directed systems.

So she continued to bleed. She couldn’t let the ghost work on her face. If something like her little finger had needed attention, she might have granted him access as a way to evaluate him, but she couldn’t let him repair her skull. If the procedure failed, if the ghost intentionally damaged her or shut down in the middle of surgery, it could leave her mentally stunted as well as blind. Then she might be lost down here until she starved, an idiot and a cripple, barely able to comprehend her own suffering.

Could she use 85 to reverse hack her suit? She had virtual keyboards in her gloves. She knew she could tap into 85, but she would have to do so by touch alone, without watching her key strokes on her heads-up display. She also hadn’t figured out how to keep the ghost from noticing her signals.

She needed to divert him. “How did the sunfish chase me?” she asked. “Were they talking to each other? I didn’t hear anything, and they don’t have eyes.”

— The lifeforms were emitting ultrasound.

“Sonar. Do you have recordings of it?”

— Affirmative .

“Analyze those recordings for meaning and context. Is it language?”

— Unknown.

“I want an alert as soon as you hear them again. Scan for more carvings. Anything. What else can you tell me about them?”