Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

“We need to get back into the ice and figure out how to talk to them,” Vonnie said.

Koebsch wasn’t happy to see either woman. He met them at the air lock as they stowed their pressure suits, obstructing their way into the module. To his left was the mission’s primary data/comm room. To his right was one of the multipurpose labs where they’d brought Vonnie’s armor.

“I could have sent your jeep back to medical, but let’s get this over with,” Koebsch said.

Vonnie tried to cover for Ash. “She told me not to come,” she said.

“Did you think you could sneak in and steal your AI?”

“No, sir.”

“Nothing happens on our grid without my knowing it.”

“No, sir.”

“All right.” Koebsch gestured for them to go left toward data/comm, not to the lab. Vonnie hesitated, but she wouldn’t get another chance to prove she wasn’t a head case. She dutifully followed him into data/comm.

The cramped room had two chairs. Koebsch leaned back in his seat as Vonnie perched on the edge of hers. Ash stayed at the hatch with her arms folded.

“You want to go back into the ice,” Koebsch said.

He tapped the radio in my pressure suit , Vonnie thought, feeling irate. But she didn’t show it. “I think we should mount another expedition this week,” she said.

“It’s not going to happen. Not yet.”

“I don’t mean people at first. We should send in mecha. The best choice would be probes that are the same size and shape as the sunfish.”

“We’re building them now.”

Vonnie flared at his imperturbable calm. “Then we can program some of those probes with my AI! Lam will have more success than anything new.”

Koebsch shook his head. “You have to realize, there are people on Earth who’ve proposed sealing off the ice.”

Vonnie’s heart stopped. “We can’t do that.”

“Yes, we can. A few explosive charges—”

“We’ve discovered intelligent life.”

“I believe you. I want to believe you. Everyone involved with the agency has wanted to find something like this since we were kids, right?”

Vonnie stared in surprise. Koebsch was a government appointee. She’d thought the ESA was just a job to him.

“We’re not sure the sunfish are intelligent,” he said.

“They use language and engineering.”

“They seem to, yes. There’s good evidence. But their intelligence hasn’t been so well demonstrated that no one is questioning it. If we send in your AI and he’s glitchy, we’ll be giving the wrong people more ammunition.”

“Let me talk to him.”

“You’re acting a little glitchy, too,” Koebsch said, leaning forward and patting Vonnie’s arm. “Do you know what the Stockholm syndrome is? Sometimes a hostage will begin to defend the people who grabbed her.”

“That’s bullshit. The sunfish are amazing. Hell, there’s no question they’ll be profitable , too,” Vonnie said, stewing with contempt. “The military and pharmaceutical lobbies must be screaming for DNA samples.”

“Yes.”

“We need to help whatever’s left of the sunfish empire.”

“How? Are you proposing an evacuation? To where?”

“I don’t know. We should send down food and oxygen. We could lead them to safer areas. They don’t have radar. They might not know the best places to hide. That would be an easy way to demonstrate our goodwill.”

“It might come to that, but there are only eleven of us. My first responsibility is to make sure we’re safe. That includes maintaining our food and air supplies for the duration of our mission.”

“There will be supply ships.”

“Vonnie, the sunfish look like they’ve been down there for thirty thousand years. They’re as old as the last existing populations of Neanderthal Man, maybe older. A little more time won’t matter.”

“They’re telling each other about us right now. They’re telling each other I killed dozens of them!”

“You acted in self-defense.”

“They must think we’re the monsters. The longer we wait, the worse it will be. They’ll build more defenses. They’ll prepare for war. We need to try again before they get too entrenched.”

“We will. Vonnie, we will, but not before we’re ready. Meanwhile, you need to help me. Let us use what we can from your AI’s mem files and delete its personality.”

“I…”

“If the next stages of our operation don’t go right, everything we’ve planned will be in jeopardy.”

Vonnie looked away from him. She didn’t want Ash to see her expression either, because if they were going to work together, Ash needed to believe that Vonnie would always put the team first. In space, a crew was family.

Now she had to let them erase Lam forever. If she needed to choose between her AI or the sunfish, there wasn’t a choice at all.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Take him apart.”

During the next few days, they began to settle in for the long haul. Even if there was no further contact with the sunfish, Vonnie had gathered enough data to occupy thousands of experts for years. Instead, they had eleven people. Datastreams let them back-and-forth with universities, laboratories, and government agencies on Earth and Luna, where other programs were underway, but the eleven of them were the front line.

The pressure might have been overwhelming, except Koebsch was right. The ESA crew were elite volunteers. Every one of them had dreamed of adventure since they were children.

Metzler, the lead biologist, went a hundred hours without rest until he was incoherent with stims and caffeine, and Koebsch ordered him to take the same sedatives Vonnie used to sleep.

She’d been allowed to field ten interviews in which prominent newsmen and commentators gushed over her survival while she tried to cast the sunfish in a sympathetic light. “I smashed through their homes like some kind of giant,” she said. “To them, I was the alien.” But the newsmen were baffled by this point of view, and their feeds tended to play clips of her speaking well of Bauman and Lam, as if her friends had died during her encounters with the sunfish.

It was infuriating. Vonnie recorded her own interviews and asked permission to put them on the net, haggling with Koebsch, yelling at an assistant director on Earth, finally setting the matter aside because she believed the truth would come out as soon as they contacted the sunfish again.

Everybody experienced some level of mania except Ash, who remained cool. Ash seemed to have taken it upon herself to be the vigilant one — the grown-up. At the same time, Koebsch became more and more of a toucher, punching shoulders, whacking backs, participating in their excitement.

Ash had a nice smile, especially when the men were around, but she was intense for someone in her early twenties. As a wunderkind , she’d probably spent her brief adulthood fighting people’s assumptions that she was a child. Vonnie supposed that was why she insisted on Ash , not Ashley , because her abbreviated name was sharp while the longer version sounded soft. The chip on her shoulder was as big as a sword.

Vonnie liked her. She liked all of them. They were honest, dedicated people who embraced their work.

One piece of business took priority. Vonnie had encountered bugs, bacterial mats, and fungi in addition to the warring breeds of sunfish. There were bacteria in the bugs, a parasitic growth on the fungi, and what appeared to be viral infections in the smaller sunfish.