Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

“This isn’t over,” Vonnie said. “I want to talk to your contacts in Berlin or I’ll make as much noise as I can. Tell them! You don’t need living sunfish. We can find intact specimens frozen in the ice. It’s asinine to ruin the progress we’ve gained with the local colony.”

“You’re incorrect,” Dawson said. “Dead sunfish won’t have the metabolic activity essential to our research. If they’re decomposed or crushed, they’ll be even more useless. There are also political considerations you’re missing.”

“I know we want to work with Brazil. That doesn’t mean we can’t conduct search and salvage—”

The floor vibrated.

“What was that?” Metzler said. A delicate bass roar filtered through the lander. Oom . The sound was as ephemeral as a thought, but it repeated itself twice as the floor shimmied again.

Boom. Oom.

Alarms filled Vonnie’s station with red bars. The same alerts flashed on Dawson’s screen, creating a haze of targeting systems, threat analysis, and hull integrity checks. As his gaze flickered through the data, Dawson’s expression was pleased.

“You bastard,” Vonnie said.

Frerotte issued a Class 2 alert, overriding every data/comm channel in camp. “We’re tracking explosions almost directly below us at a range of two point three kilometers!” he said.

Vonnie couldn’t access the links between the ESA and FNEE without Koebsch’s authorization, but she was able to open the datastreams from their spies near the sunfish colony. The spies’ radar signals were obstructed by tons of rock and ice — but using sonar, the spies were able to draw crude sims to estimate what they were hearing.

Each explosion washed through the sims like an eraser, blanking parts of the spies’ calculations. Between these waves, the spies traced a maelstrom of gunfire, lesser vibrations, electromagnetic activity, and ultrasound.

Vonnie watched in anguish as small dots pounced at two bulkier outlines. The spies identified the larger shapes as a digger and a gun platform.

Twenty sunfish swarmed the rock overhead, screeching as they dodged twin streams of gatling fire. They were trying to pull down a section of the roof.

The Brazilians anticipated it. Their mecha spun aside as three packs of sunfish shoved chunks into the floor. The digger slapped two sunfish from the air with its cutting arms. Seconds later, the gun platform caught the groups above. The thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk of its bullets striking the rock turned to wetter, plopping sounds as seven sunfish came apart.

Vonnie put her hand over her mouth. On her display, the sunfish and the mecha were monochromatic outlines. But when the dots representing the sunfish shattered, she remembered the visceral shock of blood and entrails.

The sunfish were dying.

Dawson wins , she thought. It’s happening. Oh God, it’s happening exactly like he wanted.

She’d tried everything to keep her people on course. From the beginning, their mission’s objectives had been science and diplomacy — good, intellectual goals separate from the myopic demands of Earth.

Until this morning, she’d thought she was succeeding in bringing the FNEE to her path. She’d thought they could move forward together. But even here, they weren’t far enough from their past. Maybe they never would be. The angel strived for better, but the ape corrupted.

Once again they’d invented the destiny they wanted with their fear and their greed.

The human race had found a new war inside the frozen sky.

The fighting escalated as a third FNEE mecha plunged into the fray behind the sunfish, barricading any retreat. It was another digger. It cut one sunfish with its legs and swatted two more with its cutting arms.

Before the digger leapt at the rest of the sunfish, it wedged an excavation charge into the cavern wall. If shoving the explosive stick into the rock made any sound, the noise went unheard beneath the gunfire, but the ESA spies picked up a new radio signal between the digger and the charge. The spies traced it to its source.

“They’re going to blow the cavern if they—!” Vonnie quit shouting when she turned her head.

Frerotte had altered his display to show Koebsch’s link with the Brazilians, revealing their sims. Had he forgotten his privacy screen or had he purposefully shut it off?

Beside Vonnie, Metzler had accessed a different datastream, scrolling through the ESA beacons and listening posts. What was he looking for? As Vonnie stared, Ash sprinted into the compartment and took her station. Somehow that broke Vonnie’s spell.

“We need to jam the FNEE det codes!” she said.

“You can’t interfere,” Frerotte said, but he allowed Vonnie to clone his display.

She swam through fifty reports salted with white noise. FNEE sims were poor compared to ESA sharecasts. The Brazilians’ mecha-to-mecha radar targeting included a half-second lag, which left false images in their net. Their diggers tended to stab at sunfish who’d moved farther than the mecha anticipated, whereas the gun platform overcompensated, leading its targets too far.

The lag was increased by modifying FNEE signals into holo imagery for the benefit of human controllers. Vonnie needed five seconds to pinpoint the active key among a myriad of inventory, select, arm, and detonation codes, partly because the writing was in Portuguese.

In that time, another sunfish died. Two more scored hits against the digger, bashing its sensors with rock clubs.

One of those sunfish was Sue. Clinging to the digger with four arms, she stretched and contracted and stretched again, hammering her primitive weapon on its gleaming alumalloy skin. For an instant, Sue seemed to have stunned the machine.

The digger shrugged her off. It tossed her into the wall. Simultaneously, it stabbed up with its arms, slicing open the belly of Sue’s companion. Then it advanced on Sue.

Run ! Vonnie thought. She reached for the FNEE det code, hoping to countermand it—

—and the digger decided it was clear of the blast zone. Its telemetry winked. The charge exploded, bringing down two hundred meters of rock in a shuddering chain reaction. Rubble clanged against the digger. The machine stumbled, lunging through the ricochets and blowback.

Where was Sue?

Dead and wounded sunfish mingled with the rock. The digger snared two small, twitching bodies as it clattered from the avalanche, then squeezed them tight against its underside. It rejoined the battle, using its arms to chase a third sunfish toward the gun platform.

The chain guns fired. The sunfish fell. The digger also took five rounds, which killed one of its captives in a splash of blood. The mecha looked pitiless, but Vonnie knew there were human beings behind every decision.

Who was controlling the FNEE gun platform? Ribeiro?

Ash was equipped to stop them. If she hacked into the FNEE grid, the combat would end — but the young woman’s face was like stone. She’d become the strict, sober Ash again, not the secret friend who’d whispered and laughed with Vonnie.

That left Metzler and Frerotte. Frerotte had said he wouldn’t interfere, and yet in the same breath he’d given Vonnie access to the ESA/FNEE command feed. Part of him must be glad to see the Brazilian mecha destroyed. Would he help her?

“The FNEE used the noise of their guns to conceal the second digger’s approach,” Vonnie said. “My guess is the rest of their machines are closing fast.”

“Leave them alone,” Ash said.

“Can our spies generate sonar calls for the sunfish? If we locate the other mecha, the sunfish might run before they’re boxed in.”

“Don’t do it.”