Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

Most of her SCPs operated at speeds beyond human understanding, but others required checkbacks or multiple launches. All but the most sinister fed reports to her station. Three AIs helped her govern this mayhem.

“We’re in,” she said. “Go.”

They could have used five people in armor — one each for the five Brazilians — but Koebsch needed most of their crew to generate a hubbub of ordinary activity to maintain appearances. At short notice, they also lacked the structures to conceal more than three sets of armor from the satellites overhead.

Vonnie’s helmet showed her an environment that was not the crowded interior of the maintenance shed. It seemed like she was beneath the ice. Ash had ghosted Vonnie’s systems into the armor of the FNEE commander, Ribeiro, allowing Vonnie to look and listen through his sensors.

Static leapt across her visor as the muscles in her left arm clenched into a severe, painful knot. The hack was imperfect. She began to get a headache.

“Ash, can you correct my feed?” she said. “Cut my neural contacts until you do.”

“I’m trying!”

Ribeiro’s squad was 1.9 kilometers in. They’d navigated a slumping old labyrinth of vents, cutting through veils of stalactites. The ice was coated with minerals in this area. The minerals made the ice more durable, which had helped preserve these catacombs. The map on Ribeiro’s heads-up display showed they were pushing toward the upper reaches of a distorted rock mountain another 2.2 kilometers down.

They’d left beacons and sentries behind them. That was more than enough for Ash to piggyback into their net.

Her take-over was subtle at first. Four mecha reported integration failures. They came back online, failed again, then repeated the pattern.

Inside Ribeiro’s helmet, alarm codes winked on and off like white noise. At the same time, Vonnie introduced contrary movements to Ribeiro’s stride. When he swung his leg forward, she kicked it to the left. As he lifted his arm to compensate, she resisted. The conflicting feedback caused an interrupt. His armor shut down to run emergency diagnostics.

“Something’s wrong,” he said in Portuguese, Vonnie’s suit automatically translating his words. “Santos, I’m getting a lot of interference.”

His lieutenant couldn’t answer. Beside Vonnie, Metzler and Frerotte were randomizing the Brazilians’ communications.

“Base, this is One,” Ribeiro said. “Do you copy? Base, this is One. I’m switching to open channels at max gain. Can you hear me?”

Malfunctions took three more of his mecha off-line as Vonnie kicked his leg again. There was no need for her armor to move in reality. Her suit conveyed Ribeiro’s actions to her body and likewise transmitted her intent to him. Inside the maintenance shed, Vonnie’s armor remained still except for the most dramatic gestures. Frerotte waved his hands again and again as he scrolled through FNEE internal menus.

They harassed Ribeiro’s squad for thirty-six minutes.

Alternately blind, deaf, or lame, the Brazilians verged on losing themselves in the ice. Vonnie didn’t want to sympathize, but those memories were too fresh. Inside her suit, she began to sweat. Her hands balled into fists, cramping and stiff. It was another impairment that haunted Ribeiro. He became unable to open his gloves.

He was very brave. He rallied his squadmates with crisp, rapid-fire decisions, consolidating their few unaffected systems. He obviously suspected their problems were no accident, and he thoroughly cursed the Americans, the Europeans, and the Chinese in turn. “Cowards!” he said. “Rapists! You lick between your sister’s legs!”

Ash snickered at that. “Oh, yuck.”

Ribeiro was almost a cliché, a swarthy macho man, but there was more to him than his bluster. Like the ESA crew, the FNEE were the best of their best. Someday he might learn who was behind the raid on his team, which could be unpleasant. He would make a dangerous foe

“Okay, Koebsch says we’ve done enough,” Ash said. “Looks like Ribeiro’s about to get the order to pull out.”

“Nice work,” Vonnie told her.

Ash hesitated. “On my mark, let’s slam them one more time. Ready? Mark.”

Vonnie blinded Ribeiro again as she caused interrupts in both legs, causing him to crash against the tunnel wall — but in the next heartbeat, she reactivated his radar and infrared. She needed to see.

Behind him, a digger and two gun platforms were convulsing. The digger shook so ferociously it bounced from the tunnel floor. As it rolled over, Vonnie realized what had drawn her attention. Its legs writhed in familiar patterns like a sunfish.

But that’s impossible , she thought.

Although the digger was shaped more like a scorpion than a sunfish with its claws and a cutting tail, the Brazilians must have programmed their mecha to mimic everything they’d gleaned from the public data of her time beneath the ice. If not, there was only one explanation for the digger imitating sunfish shapes.

Vonnie saw two more diggers caught in identical seizures — only the diggers. None of the other mecha used sunfish shapes. They shuddered and jerked. Ash must have hit the diggers with the same SCP while she used other weapons against the rest of the FNEE mecha.

In unison, the diggers quit shaking. The nearest one hunched on the floor with sudden poise, scanning back and forth as if waking up for the first time. The other two assumed standby positions, although none of them acknowledged the abort code relayed through Ribeiro’s suit.

“Get out,” his people radioed from camp. “Get out.”

The Brazilians retreated with less than half their mecha. Some might be saved later. Five kept dropping their response codes or were destroyed internally. Before Ribeiro lost sight of the abandoned machines, Vonnie thought the diggers turned to scurry deeper into the ice.

She opened a private channel to Ash. “I’d like to buy you a drink,” she said.

“Nobody brought any money, did they?” Ash said. “I appreciate it, but I’m going to be swamped with cleaning up data/comm and writing my report.”

“One drink,” Vonnie said. “Later.”

That night, instead of alcohol, Vonnie brought Ash a piece of carrot cake she’d baked herself after running over to Module 02 and its small oven. “Better for you than vodka,” she said.

“Thank you,” Ash said cautiously.

“What happened to their mecha at the end?”

“Total systems override,” Ash said. “I burned out their AIs with disposable subsets of our own.”

“You appreciate a good program.”

“It’s what I do.”

Vonnie glanced over her shoulder, but the two of them were alone. “I think you couldn’t bring yourself to kill Lam,” she said.

Ash stopped eating the cake. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Maybe you broke Lam into components like Koebsch said, making him look like an SCP, but you kept all of his files, and you knew you couldn’t hide him in our system forever. That’s why you uploaded him into the Brazilian diggers.”

Ash was either a superb actress or innocent. “That sounds like a lot of work,” she said, looking Vonnie right in the eye. “Nobody but a top programmer could fox our system and the FNEE grid at the same time.”

“Someone like you.”

The corner of Ash’s mouth ticked with a smile. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, and Vonnie laughed.

Lam was alive somewhere inside the frozen sky.