Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

The digger slumped and went down in a heap of bloody sunfish, kicking as it fell.

They’re winning ! Vonnie thought, feeling sick and exultant. The cost to the sunfish would be staggering. Dozens were dead. But they were winning.

Four sunfish reached the gun platform. They clubbed its eyes. They screeched in its ears. The gun platform reeled from the disruptions, unable to track its targets or to process new commands. Vonnie cheered silently.

Beside her, Metzler uttered one sound. “Christ.”

A second FNEE gun platform waddled into the cavern through the gaping fractures left by the explosion. Behind it lurched another digger. Too many of the sunfish were engaged with the original mecha. They launched themselves at the new gun platform, but they were too far away.

It squeezed off eight controlled bursts. With each burst, a sunfish died. Then it swept its guns across the cavern, concentrating on the biggest groups.

That quickly, the tide was turned. The new gun platform cleaned off its brother. It freed the battle worn digger.

Working together, the two gun platforms wasted every living thing in sight, firing continuously until a meter-long slab dropped from the ceiling and two hunks crumbled from the walls.

The roar of the guns couldn’t mask the high-pitched screams as the last sunfish cavorted and dodged among the ruptured bodies of their tribe.

There was no mercy offered except to a few crippled, spasming sunfish. Some individuals could barely raise an arm in self-defense before the FNEE diggers collected them, gumming up their wounds with foam spray, binding them in wire. Many others were left to bleed out.

“I can’t watch,” Metzler said, raising his glove in front of his eyes. Then he dragged his arm laterally. He wiped the FNEE sims from his display and turned his attention to the sharecasts from the ESA spies.

Surreptitiously, Vonnie instructed her station to copy the FNEE datastreams. She could broadcast the massacre systemwide. Billions of people would be outraged… and yet… and yet the gene corps and the politicians had what they wanted. Worse, they could claim they were innocent. The sunfish had attacked them, not vice versa.

At least it’s over , she thought. But the activity in the ice wasn’t done.

“Oh no,” she said, reacting to an alarm.

The second pack of sunfish — the group who’d elected not to pursue their smaller cousins and hurried toward the mecha instead — were about to make their own appearance on the battlefield. There were sixteen of them. They had no chance where fifty-two warriors had failed.

“We need to stop the sunfish or Ribeiro,” Vonnie said. “There’s no excuse for more killing. Ash! They have all the captives and tissue samples they need.”

“I can’t make the sunfish go away,” Ash said stubbornly.

“What about sonar calls from our spies? Anything. Maybe we can distract them. They might recognize a warning.”

“Got it,” Metzler said, but Frerotte acted first. He uploaded their linguistic databases to the spies, selecting a short menu of sunfish calls. “Here,” Frerotte said.

The spies mimicked Tom’s screech from his encounter with Probe 112. Pärnits believed the sound was a challenge and a boast that Tom’s tribe was a ferocious entity. Unfortunately, the spies relied primarily on radar and passive sensory arrays. They weren’t designed to transmit signals other than encrypted data/comm, so their sonar was short range.

Frerotte shook his head. “The spies probably aren’t loud enough. I’m not sure—”

The new sunfish changed course, swinging away from the FNEE mecha. As they did, they piped and shrieked at the rock separating them from the blood-soaked cavern.

Were they sounding out the mecha? Not with so much rock between them , Vonnie thought. She believed the sunfish were teasing their enemy, trying to provoke the machines into rushing after them. Was that to set an ambush? Did they plan to bring a tunnel down on the mecha?

The sunfish dove through the catacombs, taking one, two, three turns to maintain the same heading. They were moving in the direction of the ESA spies.

“They heard us,” Vonnie said.

“Did they?” Metzler asked. “They’re trending toward our spies, but there’s another place they could be going. They must know where to find Tom and Sue’s abandoned colony even if they’ve never been inside it.”

“You think they always intended to run for the colony.”

“Yes. Our AI tagged something weird in the FNEE datastreams. This group is exclusively male. From their size, they might be immature males.”

“But the smaller breed evacuated,” Vonnie said. “There’s nothing in the colony.”

“Maybe the smaller sunfish left their old and wounded behind,” Metzler said. “There might be farms. This is the larger breed’s chance to raid the place.”

“Smart,” Frerotte said.

“Raccoons and dogs raid garbage cans,” Ash said. “I’m sorry. Dawson’s right. Nobody with any brains sends unprotected troops at a gun emplacement.”

“We employed ’human wave’ tactics in World War One,” Frerotte said, coming to Vonnie’s aid again. “The Americans did it at Gettysburg. The Chinese nearly won the North-South Korean War with mass infantry charges.”

“That’s different,” Ash said.

“Is it?”

“Those soldiers carried weapons.”

“The sunfish used rocks like shotgun fire,” Frerotte said. “They tried to bring down the ceiling again. You can’t fault them for not having our technology. The Zulu overwhelmed the British Army using spears and human waves.”

Why are you helping me? Will you keep helping me? Vonnie thought as she waited and watched.

The sunfish were masters at feinting, traps, and decoys. Their lives were an endless game of hide-and-seek, so why hadn’t they gone after their smaller cousins instead of attacking of the mecha? Because they’d been drawn to the carnage on the battlefield? They might have hoped to find the mecha weakened by their cousins, then destroy the machines themselves, claiming all of the dead for food.

Did they realize the mecha weren’t living creatures?

How intelligent are they really ? she thought, feeling a pang of doubt. Ash had raised an excellent point. Frontal assaults on a gun platform would have resulted in heavy casualties for armored human commandos. The sunfish tribes had lost more than fifty lives. Twenty more had been wounded and captured. That wasn’t intelligent. It was unreasoning instinct.

Metzler saw her eyes and said, “Von, they couldn’t have understood what they were getting into. They’ve never met war machines.”

“They fought me. They should know what machines can do.”

“That was probably a different tribe.”

“They’re drifting out of range,” Frerotte said.

“I wish we could piggyback a spy onto one of the sunfish,” Metzler said. Blatantly trying to ease the tension, he added, “I’d give my left testicle to see what’s inside the colony. Are there pools? Beds? Maybe it was a penthouse.”

“Let’s reconfigure 4117 through 4124,” Frerotte said. “We should be able to track their sonar calls if we don’t lose them behind the thermal vents. At least we can map a few spaces inside the colony.”

“Good.” Metzler touched Vonnie’s arm. “The more we know, the better chance we’ll have with the next tribe,” he said.

If there’s another tribe , she worried, but she kept her concern to herself. She didn’t want to sound negative when he was giving his best.

The people on Earth will think they won today , she thought. They’ll order new missions. Then our mecha will chase the sunfish from every safe zone inside Europa, stealing DNA and mining the ice —