Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

Vonnie snarled at Ash with bitter reproach. “You have your specimens and your alliance with Brazil. You don’t need to kill the whole colony, do you?”

“Hey! Enough!” Metzler said. “I have some funny readings from our spies.”

Vonnie glanced at the sims he’d posted on her displays. While she was bickering with Ash, Metzler had aimed thirty percent of their spies away from the battle to scan the surrounding area. New blurs of motion and sound were rapidly approaching the fight from below.

“Those aren’t FNEE diggers,” Vonnie said.

“No,” Metzler said.

Is it Lam ? she thought. The signatures were too varied. The blurs weren’t a single entity. Forty distinct contacts bunched and spread and revealed eight more behind them, threading through the catacombs in packs.

“It’s the larger breed of sunfish,” Frerotte said. “Our spies recognize the ultrasound.”

Vonnie smiled a thin, savage smile.

Earth was so far removed from this moon, the men and women who’d given the orders to approach the sunfish had yet to learn the results of their operation. The radio delay meant several minutes would pass before the politicians and gene corps personnel knew if the mecha had been successful. But they must be happy. They must have congratulated each other on arranging the charade between the ESA and the FNEE.

It wasn’t fair. They were comfortable in their board rooms and offices. They had unlimited luxuries and the promise of years more of the same. Their homes weren’t being invaded. Their families weren’t under the gun.

Vonnie imagined them casually checking their datastreams. Would they even bother to look at the reality of their crime? If they found it distasteful to see the guts strewn across the cavern, they could turn off their displays. They could count their numbers instead: how many sunfish captured; how many bodies secured; their stock projections and trade agreements.

I hope the sunfish rip you apart , she thought.

They should have realized other tribes would come. The larger sunfish had heard their cousins screaming. They’d smelled blood and wounded prey. Had they brought every warrior in their colony?

“Tell the FNEE to get out,” Metzler said.

“Too late.”

Metzler looked at her with embarrassment and determination. “If the mecha set more charges, they might be able to seal themselves off from the larger sunfish,” he said.

Frerotte opened a channel to Koebsch. “Sir, there are more sunfish closing on the FNEE mecha — the larger sunfish. I count forty-eight or fifty-two.”

Koebsch nodded. His face was harried. “Let me patch you to Colonel Ribeiro,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” Frerotte tapped at his display, adding the spies’ data to the ESA/FNEE command feed. Through a short audio malfunction, Vonnie heard a blip of male voices shouting in Portuguese. An AI in her station automatically translated Ribeiro’s words: “Regroup. Regroup. Where is Platform 2?”

Their melee with the smaller breed was winding down. The gun platform chattered once more, nailing a wounded sunfish digging pitifully at the cavern ceiling. The intact digger pursued four sunfish to the wall, catching three, pummeling them, but the slower, limping digger dropped its specimens to enact repairs on its breastplate.

The gun platform sidled toward the digger to assist. The mecha hunched together like living animals, although the illusion faded when they extended micro arms and a welding torch between them. All three mecha were splattered with gore and dust.

“Contact in ninety seconds,” Frerotte said.

“I’m picking up another group of lifeforms approaching from the south,” Metzler said.

“More sunfish?” Koebsch said.

“Too soon to tell.”

You wanted a goddamned war , Vonnie thought. You’re about to get more than anyone expected.

Her eyes brimmed with tears. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Ash. Instead, she counted the dead sprawled throughout the cavern, mourning each of their nimble little shapes. Her AI had identified Sue among the corpses.

“There’s a third group in the area to the southwest,” Metzler said. “This one is moving away from the battlefield.”

“Let me see,” Vonnie said.

Beyond the end of their maps, west of the coordinates where they thought Sue and Tom’s colony was situated, vague rustles of movement led away into the ice. There were no sonar calls mixed with the activity. The smaller sunfish were operating with as much stealth as possible even if moving by feel and scent hindered their escape.

“They’re evacuating,” Vonnie said with relief.

“They might be flanking the mecha or trying to intercept the larger sunfish,” Frerotte said.

“Not likely. Too much of the rock collapsed in the blasts. The FNEE only left a few ways in or out. None of those openings connect with the colony.”

“I think Sue led a diversion,” Metzler said. “Her pack went after the mecha to buy the others time to get away. If Sue won, they’d come back. But they heard Sue’s pack dying, and the blasts were too close to their home.”

“The whole region is unstable now,” Vonnie agreed, highlighting the spies’ radar. “We might see a wider collapse.”

“Fifteen seconds,” Frerotte said.

The FNEE mecha separated from each other. The two diggers hurried to form a triangle with the gun platform, protecting it on either side.

Metzler posted sims of the three separate contacts around the mecha — the smaller sunfish in flight — the approaching swarm of the larger breed — and the third, unknown group of lifeforms, who were also closing on the scene. As he sifted through his data, the spies recorded sonar cries from the third group and tagged it: Sunfish, Breed II .

“More of the larger kind,” Vonnie said.

Were they from a new colony or were they a hunting party rejoining their tribe? They were well-positioned to head off the smaller sunfish, but they did not angle toward their fleeing cousins. They dropped through the catacombs toward the mecha.

“They’re confronting the loudest enemy instead of the easier prey,” Metzler said. “Why?”

The FNEE gun platform opened fire as eight sunfish sailed into the open. Its twin guns traversed from low to high. Ribeiro had anticipated the sunfishes’ tactic of bouncing off the floor and ceiling.

His foresight was effective. 20mm rounds pierced the sunfish, killing six. The two survivors didn’t fly much longer. The gun platform crossed its fire again, winging both. One sunfish was dashed against the rock. The other spun backward in a veil of blood.

“Like shooting pigs in a farmyard,” Ash said.

Vonnie turned to bark at her, but what was the use? She has to believe they’re just animals , Vonnie thought. Otherwise we’re murderers.

A second wave leapt into the breach. FNEE radar counted twenty-eight sunfish. Their small bodies rocketed through a new pattern, four high, four low, twenty bouncing sideways or straight at the mecha. Most of them hurled rocks as they jumped, adding to the bedlam in the air.

The gun platform overreacted. It centered its fire on the upper part of the storm. Its programs surely included AMAS surface-to-space defense systems. By default, it considered the overhead targets most critical.

It shot three sunfish and nine rocks unerringly. Then the sunfish in the lower half of the wave reached the diggers. More sunfish entered the cavern as the mecha flailed at their small adversaries — and when the diggers were enveloped, the gun platform raked its fire over the diggers and sunfish alike.

Ricochets sprang from the diggers’ alumalloy frames, shredding sunfish, annihilating a digger’s gear block. Bullets careened from metal and rock like high velocity hail.