Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

“Are you still there!?” she shouted.

— Von, listen. Don’t close me down again, please .

She was already yelling over the ghost. “Auto assault, max force!” she shouted. “Lam! Lam! Combat menu AP, auto assault! Confirm!”

The delay felt like another kind of blindness and separation. Vonnie screamed again, beating at the arms covering her face. The sunfish’s cartilage skin was like pounding on leather. Her cutting tool would pierce that hide, but she was afraid to use the laser.

Something yanked her sideways, hurting her spine. At first she thought she’d been hit by a mass of sunfish.

— Auto assault .

The suit threw her in a cartwheel. As it rolled, it put her fist to her temple and drew the laser across the sunfish’s arms, a precise stutter of four burns. It tossed her onto her hip and met the incoming wave with a kick.

Impacts shook Vonnie’s boot and shin. Then she was up again. Three arms clunked against her back. Some of the sunfish must have gone overhead when she dropped — they must have surrounded her — and the suit spun and rammed into the rock, scraping itself clean.

Whatever triumph she’d felt gave way to claustrophobic terror. The suit did not use its shape like a human would. It pinned one monster with its chin, then used its hip like a club against another. Again and again it hurled itself against the rock. It wasn’t squeamish. It did not flinch at the wretched shrilling of a sunfish caught between its hands or even turn from the burst of entrails. In normal gravity, against larger enemies, Vonnie would have been seriously injured. Even here she was so shaken, she didn’t immediately realize the fight was over.

Nor did she remember when she’d regained her left eye. She felt elation, then shock.

“I can see,” she said. “Lam?”

Her visor was peppered with chip marks and abrasions. It was opaque in the middle. A gouge the length of her finger ran across her nose. The sunfish had almost bashed through.

Given another chance, they might succeed.

Vonnie glanced through two unmarked portions in the synthetic diamond, bending her head to improve her vision.

She stood at the top of the landslide beneath the cliff near her explosive charges. The rock was streaked with rimes of salt. Crusty white patches had seeped from the ceiling, but she was unable to peer into all of the holes overhead. Were there more sunfish above her?

Half of her display was inoperative. The rest of her visor glowed with heat signatures, although the only living shapes were fading as the sunfish retreated. Eleven bodies lay impaled against the black lava. In the minimal gravity, the air was fogged with blood.

Mute, she tried to turn away. Crying out, she knew she was paralyzed. The suit didn’t respond to her arms or leg or head.

“Lam?” she said. “Lam, it’s over. Off-line. Lam, off-line.”

If the sunfish attacked again— If the ghost controlled all suit functions— Her body choked with that heavy new fear, and she fought without thinking inside her shell. She screamed when she was unable to move even slightly.

He spoke in a hush:

— I have an additional threat .

“Let me go!”

— Von, quiet. Something’s coming .

“What?”

— There were new sonar calls right before the sunfish withdrew. Something scared them off .

“Is it one of our probes?”

— No, these are new lifeforms .

Vonnie nodded bitterly. Food here was scarce. Any commotion would draw every predator within hearing.

If there was good news, it was that the ghost’s voice had changed. He seemed cooler and more confident. This was the first time he’d called them sunfish . That he’d said no instead of negative was another indicator of health. Had he actually written out his glitches? With access to more systems, he could have duped himself and then cut away his flaws in a microsecond. She was overdue for a little luck.

He said:

— Do you want to stay and fight? I estimate they ’ re four hundred meters away .

“How fast are they moving? Are they big?”

— Judging from their sonar calls, they’re at least as fast as the sunfish. They’re also louder. They may be larger. They’re within two hundred meters now.

Each breath came in a short, tight rhythm. Vonnie tried to calm her lungs and failed, hating her own seesaw of emotions, hating the darkness and her pain. She felt like apologizing even though he was a goddamned program. She felt grateful.

Would he pass a diagnostic? If he’d attained full logic, the two of them would be a force to reckon with now that she could see again, but she was reluctant to put him to the test, not in combat, not even for the chance to take recordings of another major lifeform.

“Run,” she said. “All these bodies, that should be a fat meal for whatever’s coming. They’ll stay to eat. Let’s get out of here.”

Her suit leapt down from the cliff and hurried away, putting distance between them and the new predators. Unfortunately, Lam changed course seven times in five minutes through the spongy, jagged rock.

Vonnie tracked their progress with a heads-up display as they scrambled through gaps and pockets, jumping a crack and two loose hills of debris.

The ghost sought every possible way up, but they kept losing as much elevation as they’d gained, ducking and weaving for open space. They were forced left, then down, then down again through a pit laced with dry crunchy webs of mineral deposits. It felt like they were running in circles.

“Go back! Lam, go back to that last branch.”

— Radar suggests another upward trend ahead of us .

“Aren’t you headed where we came from?”

— We’ve paralleled several caverns, yes .

“Christ.”

She’d taken the explosive charges with her, so it would be easy to blow the channel behind her and shut off any pursuit, but what if she encountered another foe? What if this tunnel was another dead-end?

Between radar sims and actual footsteps covered, Vonnie’s maps went twenty-two kilometers, although most of that was tangled into a pyramid just eight klicks on a side. Some sections of her trail had also gone unrecorded or were literally nonexistent now. Colossal shafts of ice had been pulverized when the sink hole collapsed. It was unlikely she could retrace her steps even if she wanted to.

“What can you tell me about the new lifeforms?”

— They used many of the same frequencies as the sunfish. I estimate there were only six of them, but the sunfish retreated within seconds of hearing the other sonar .

Vonnie examined a wide vein of rock as they approached. It looked like an excellent place to drop the roof. All she wanted was out . No more data, no more diplomacy, no more trying to vindicate her friends’ deaths. No more guilt.

“If they’re ahead of us, we need to be prepared.”

— I’ve continued to see traces of prints and spoor. Look there. And there .

Across her display, the ghost highlighted four smears of feces on a level spot on the tunnel floor. None was more than a few frozen blotches. In the frozen sky, nothing went to waste or was left behind.

That made her feel awful again. Compared to Europa, her planet was unspeakably rich. She wasn’t sure if it was even possible for her to comprehend how their poverty affected them.

Did the sunfish routinely scout the impermanent, snarled labyrinths in the ice? That could account for why they appeared to know these dead zones so well even when there was no food, no breathable air, and only a few drips of liquid water for them to use for oxygen. She’d seen no food sources other than the bugs, bacterial mats, and a few blots of fungi.