Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

Vonnie frowned, but she didn’t alter her pilot’s display. She was prepared to fly at a moment’s notice. What did Ash want her to see? Did she suspect the FNEE rovers were pirating codes from the ESA while they were vulnerable? Vonnie opened new windows on either side of her station, examining the signals from their mecha on the surface.

From the ready room, she heard the assists clicking as Ash donned her scout suit. Johal had taken a pressure suit. Then the women exited. Ash hurried to join Metzler while Johal stayed on the lander’s deck, where they’d erected a temporary tent as storage space.

Leaving Pärnits and Collinsworth in the pit would have been cleaner than exhuming their corpses. The ice could have become a mass grave of humans, sunfish, and mecha.

There was a cold beauty in the idea, but they hadn’t fallen as deep as Bauman and Lam, and people had trouble letting go of anything that belonged to them. When all was said and done, wasn’t that why they’d fought with the sunfish? Because they believed they owned a part of this world after paying for their crews and mecha?

Vonnie needed to convince everyone on Earth to change. It would be several days until they were organized again, maybe longer before they finished their next batch of probes, but they should bring down the food and oxygen they’d originally allocated as gifts. They had an obligation now more than ever.

“The sunfish proved they’re intelligent,” she said, baiting the men on either side of her.

O’Neal glanced up, but Frerotte doggedly focused on the telemetry from the ESA mecha trapped in the ice.

“They knew what they were doing,” she said. “I think they’ve done it before to seal off air leaks or to separate themselves from an enemy. The larger breed must have scouted the mountain beneath Tom’s colony during raids or negotiations. They remembered the weak place in the rock, but they didn’t destroy Tom’s colony. They saved the possibility for when they needed it. Those aren’t the actions of an animal.”

“Von,” Frerotte said. He and O’Neal traded an uncomfortable look. “During the blow-out, we heard new signals from a safe area west of the flood.”

She stared at them, stunned. “What signals?”

“The connection is weak. It’s not routing through emergency channels, so I managed to hide it from Koebsch. Then I locked it down.” Frerotte tapped at his display, revealing an active mecha 3.6 kilometers from the rest of the ESA machines beneath the ice. “It’s Probe 114,” he said.

Lam , she thought. He survived.

More important, Frerotte’s sims had recorded changes in the signal’s location. Lam was mobile.

Vonnie leaned forward, grilling both men like she’d caught them in a lie. “You told me Lam is dangerous,” she said. “Why would you hide him from Koebsch?”

“Ash wanted to, and I agreed,” Frerotte said. He gestured at O’Neal. “All of us did. You risked your life for us when everything that happened… Ash said you’re a better person than we are. I think she’s right. You’re right. The sunfish are intelligent, and we couldn’t have screwed up any worse.”

Vonnie almost said ‘ A hundred of them died with our crewmates. ’ She almost nodded. Instead, she gave him an excuse. “You didn’t cause this,” she said.

“Ash and I…” Frerotte ducked his head, leaving his confession hanging in the air.

Nobody works harder than someone trying to make up for accidental deaths , she realized. They want redemption, like I did.

“Right now Lam is the last asset we’ve got,” Frerotte said. “If we’re going to find the sunfish, it starts with him.”

“Then what?” Vonnie said.

“We apologize to them. We try to help.”

“Tell me about Lam.”

“I snuck some diagnostics into our telemetry. For the most part, he countered with the correct responses. He seems up-to-date on our situation, but he’s glitchy. He’s hostile. He says he has to talk to you.”

Vonnie glanced outside as Ash walked Metzler to the lander, where his mecha set the emergency bubble on the deck. Talking to him on a private channel, Ash tugged at his arm, urging him to walk into the air lock. He shook her off and marched back toward Koebsch and Module 03.

“Where is Lam in relation to the smaller sunfish?” Vonnie asked.

“He’s close,” Frerotte said.

“That’s why he wasn’t obliterated,” O’Neal said. “Either he lucked into running from the FNEE in the right direction or he heard Tom’s colony evacuating and realized he’d better move with them.”

“Let me see your diagnostics. I need your transcripts, too.”

Vonnie’s evaluation was quick. She didn’t listen to the conversations between Lam and Frerotte, not yet. She uploaded their files to an AI along with Lam’s involuntary, partial responses to Frerotte’s diagnostic, then added her own gut hunch to the AI’s conclusions.

When Lam transferred from the FNEE digger to Probe 114, he’d reassimilated at an integrity rate of seventy to eighty percent.

“Crap,” Vonnie said. “Given the probe’s limitations, I’d say the lower score is accurate. Lam won’t reach human equivalence again until we can give him more capacity. He’s smart, but he’ll lack imagination or intuition.”

“How about a remote link?” O’Neal said.

Vonnie tensed. Using remote memory to augment their probes with the central AIs in camp had been Pärnits’ idea. “We don’t have enough relays or spies left,” she said. “Lam would need to dig his way closer to us, then stay there, which doesn’t do us any good if we want him to approach the sunfish. We have to fix him. Did Ash show you where she stores her back-ups?”

Frerotte touched a menu on his display. “Yes.”

“If we can feed him corrective sequences, he might rise to ninety percent. Why didn’t you try it?”

“I told you. He’s erratic. He’s spooked. We only got in a few words before he shut off his data/comm.”

“It’s been four hours since you heard from him?”

“We didn’t want to fake your voice. You two have a lot of history. We couldn’t be sure what he’d ask. What if there was a personal reference we missed? He refused to talk to anyone else, and you were in surgery.”

“You should’ve woken me sooner.”

“Von, some of your procedures were significant. Did you see your notes?”

“No.” She hadn’t had the courage to read her summary in detail. She suspected that her left foot and the bones in her calf were transplants from the clone stock preserved in their medical bins. Those organs, limbs, packets of marrow, and sheaves of skin had been vat grown on Earth and were immunologically nonresponsive, which meant her body had a strong chance of accepting the foreign tissues. It meant she wasn’t her anymore. She was a frankenstein.

Among Earth’s spacefaring nations, only the FNEE didn’t equip deep-space missions with extra parts grown from stem cells. Even in the twenty-second century, a majority of Brazilians were Catholic. They permitted emergency measures and nanotech, but not clone stock. If one of their astronauts lost a leg, he could be fitted with a cyberthetic, but physical therapy and rehabilitation might take weeks.

Vonnie would walk again tomorrow, albeit with a limp. The low gravity was a blessing. It allowed her nerve and muscle grafts to adapt to her real body without strain.

“Let’s get ready,” she said. “I want menu options on voice command.”

“You got it.”

Five minutes passed as Vonnie, O’Neal, and Frerotte arranged for an AI to transmit any corrective sequences it deemed necessary. Lam would operate at speeds beyond human comprehension. Vonnie preferred a manual option to adjust or abort, but in all likelihood, the exchange between their AI and Lam would be over before she noticed any complications.