Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

Vonnie heard her say something to Metzler in the next compartment. Metzler laughed, and Vonnie raised a privacy screen around her display.

She’d decided to up her own gamesmanship. She needed to be cagey even with her friends, delaying what they knew, earning favors, and, most of all, uniting them against Dawson.

I’ll be a spy, too , she thought — a spy on her own — a spy by herself — as sensitive and paranoid as a sunfish.

Cutting into the channel between Koebsch and Frerotte took longer than she’d anticipated. Frerotte’s encryptions repelled her hack. Trying a new strategy, she mastered control of his audio, then used this opening to further her gains into his virtual station. Unfortunately, his display went blank as soon as she broke in.

“—eep tracking,” Koebsch said before he looked at Vonnie. “This is a secure call, Von. Get out.”

“I need a minute.”

“I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

“We’re set to go with our new probes, but they’re not right for carrying supplies down into the ice,” she said. “I need to know if I should be building more probes or larger mecha.”

“Build the new probes. We’re not bringing down food or anything else.”

Vonnie shook her head. “I think we’re past holding back. It’s right to worry about cultural contamination and pushing the sunfish too fast, but this colony represents our best chance for a breakthrough, and they’ll never go back to the lives they had before we came along.”

“Von, I’m dealing with bigger problems.”

“Like what?”

“Sir, she might as well know,” Frerotte said. “We need our engineers.”

Koebsch grunted and reopened his display, giving Vonnie access to their datastreams. “This is for your eyes only until we decide how to handle it,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

The map was Frerotte’s. It showed their perimeter with the Brazilians, where Probes 114 and 115 had coordinated the actions of their spies.

“This is thirty minutes ago, then ten,” Frerotte said, playing two sims for Vonnie. In the first segment, the telemetry from 114 spiked across the board — radar, sonar, seismographs, and data/comm.

“That’s not sunfish,” Vonnie said.

“Not unless some of them have radios,” Koebsch said.

Something lunged toward 114, a bear-sized mass that had crept impossibly close, without noise, without vibrations, using a vein of rock to shield itself until it was within two kilometers of the probe. Then it lumbered forward in a blaze of electromagnetic activity, masking itself with sabotage and control programs.

The intruder’s SCPs must have been underway for hours. It was sophisticated enough to have blinded the spies to its presence altogether. 114 suffered the same false reads and distortions. 114’s sensors were unable to get a clean picture. There were only shadow-like glimpses.

Whatever it was, it was ten times larger than the probe. It hooked two arms above itself like weapons, and yet physically, it was slow. It covered the last kilometer in eight minutes, which was an eternity to mecha.

114 should have had time to run if it couldn’t defend itself. Instead, 114 shut off.

“We’re under attack,” Frerotte said.

Vonnie scrolled through their maps, measuring the unguarded space left by the loss of 114 and most of its spies. “How close is 115?” she asked. “Do we know where the intruder went?”

“No,” Frerotte said. “115 is on the move, but it’s three minutes away. I had 14 and 15 in different catacombs to spread our coverage.”

“They should have been together,” Koebsch said. “That’s why we sent them down in pairs. We probably wouldn’t have lost 14 if the probes were able to support each other.”

Privately, Vonnie doubted it. Whatever hit 114 would have walked right over 115 as well. Frerotte’s decision to separate the probes was the sole reason they had the ability to bring new eyes and ears to the scene quickly.

There were two more probes in the ice, 110 and 111, but those mecha were seven kilometers northwest of 115. Except for their spies, there were no other ESA mecha beneath the surface other than a hundred beacons and relays, none of which were mobile, equipped with AI, or combat capable.

“I want you to call Sergeant Tavares again,” Koebsch told Vonnie. “Maybe you’ll have better luck than I did.”

“You called the Brazilians?”

“Yes. They’re not answering. But I can’t figure out what they think they’ll accomplish. That’s why I want to keep this quiet. Mecha can be replaced. What we don’t need is an international incident.”

“Tavares said they didn’t like us monitoring their grid,” Vonnie said. “Maybe this is the end of it. They kill our spies. Then they retreat. You don’t think they’d invade our zone, do you?”

“Maybe they’re distributing their own spies. Right now they could march a hundred probes through the border without us knowing it.”

“115 will reach the gap in thirty seconds.”

“We’ve been blind for nine minutes. Even if nothing’s there now, I’ll be forced to waste time and resources hunting FNEE mecha inside our lines.”

Vonnie nodded, considering Koebsch’s change from ’ we ’ to ’ I. ’ For him, the attack was a blemish on his record.

“115 is on site,” Frerotte said.

She looked through the probe’s eyes. As always, the environment was as dark as obsidian. Her display was modifying 115’s radar into holo imagery.

Sprawled on the rock were the battle-scarred remains of a FNEE digger. It had been a sleek, six-legged machine with two cutting blades like a scorpion’s claws. One leg was missing. Two more appeared inoperable, shredded and crushed. There was also laser scoring on its head where its sensor array had been slashed open.

“114 couldn’t have caused those burns,” Koebsch said. “They must have hit some of their own diggers while they were blasting. Then they decided those mecha were expendable. They used their damaged mecha to lead the assault.”

“I guess.”

Scattered nearby were pieces that may or may not have belonged to different FNEE mecha. 114 was missing. There was not a trace of ESA wreckage. There were no sounds or vibrations of mecha leaving the site in any direction. Nor did 114 respond to 115’s signals.

“I think 114 fought the digger and won, but there were other FNEE mecha,” Koebsch said. “They took 114. That’s what they were after. They want to copy your design work, Von.”

She watched as 115 crawled up the side of the cavern, trying to analyze the scuffing and chip marks in the dusty floor. There were marks in the wall, too, where 114 had vaulted onto the rock like a real sunfish.

Microdating the prints was impossible. Too many tracks had been laid within seconds of each other, and yet 114’s tracks were all on the ESA side of the perimeter.

That means our probe wasn’t led away by a Brazilian slavecast , Vonnie thought. Had they carried it? Or did 114’s last set of tracks lead back into ESA territory?

“Let me call Tavares,” she said, leaving her station.

The showphone was on the other side of the compartment, no more than three steps away. She didn’t make it that far. Frerotte left his own station and said to her, quietly, “It wasn’t the Brazilians.”

Vonnie didn’t answer.

“There’s no way their software could trump ours, especially not in a stand-off between 114 and a wrecked pile of junk like that digger,” Frerotte said. “Its gear block is half gone. You heard its signals. It was modifying its SCPs to broadcast through every transmitter it had left — infrared, sonar, X-ray. Hell, I saw coherent light signals like Morse code. It couldn’t have been less efficient, but it subverted our probe anyway. It knew exactly how to hack in.”