Cold as Ice (42 page)

"Are they alive, doctor?" That was the only question that mattered.

Europa's chief medical officer stared right through her and went across to sit on the bench next to Cyrus Mobarak. He put his hands to his head and rubbed his temples until his carefully styled hair was a rumpled mess.

"I think it is time," he said quietly, "that I retired to Callisto. I own a deep farm there, you know. A big one." Shumi wasn't replying to Nell's question. She realized that he wasn't talking to Mobarak either, or to anyone else on the bench. He was babbling.

Nell went to stand directly in front of him and placed her face close to his. "How are Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer? The people in the submersible—
are they alive
?"

He glared back at her. "Alive? Why, don't you know you can't kill a visitor to the Europan ocean just by freezing her body solid, or by cutting off his air supply? I'm beginning to wonder if you can do it by chopping somebody to bits. But if you're going to ask me
how
anyone can possibly be alive, when every rule in the medical book says they must have died over a day ago . . ."He stared mournfully across at the
Danae.

Shumi had chosen the worst possible time to lose his grip. "You
are
saying they're alive, aren't you?" Nell grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him, as he again stared right through her. "Doctor Shumi! You must answer."

He was nodding absentmindedly. "They were dead, you know, when I opened the hatch. Both of them. No pulse, no heartbeat, stone dead. The air inside was poison. Too low in oxygen, too high in carbon dioxide, quite unbreathable. I declared them dead. They
were
dead. We began to pick them up, so we could move them out. And the second we lifted them they both gave a little body twitch, and then they started to breathe. First the man, then the woman. And now—"

Nell didn't wait to hear any more. She ran around the submersible to the side away from Tristan, found a toehold on one of the
Danae
's free-swimmer supports, and hoisted herself high enough to reach the front window. One of the men holding Tristan started after her. She climbed higher, up onto the roof, where it was difficult for him to reach her, and hung head down to peer into the cabin and to allow her handheld minicamera a view of the interior.

Jon and Wilsa were still in their seats. Their faces had a curious purple-red tinge, and their eyes were half-closed. Upside down, Nell could not read their expressions, but she could see that they were breathing. And they were laboriously moving their hands and feet at the medical team's urging.

"Get
off
there—right now." The man following Nell had reached the roof and grabbed her arm. She meekly allowed herself to be helped down and led back to the group sitting on the bench. It now included Tristan.

Nell went to his side and gripped his hand. "I saw them. They're alive and moving. They're going to be fine. That's all that matters."

She spoke softly, but Gabriel Shumi somehow heard her. "All that matters to
you
,"he said mournfully. "But I will be asked to produce reports detailing just what happened. I will be called upon to provide explanations for all this. When no explanation is possible."

"Ah.
Explanations.
A most timely word." Bat had been sitting motionless, staring straight ahead. He had seemed as far out of things as Shumi was. Now he roused himself. "With Wilsa Sheer and Jon Perry rescued and recovering, it is time to think of explanations. They are surely overdue. But this is not the place for them."

He turned to Hilda Brandt. "If you would be so kind as to make available a warmer compartment within this vehicle, and find for me some alternative and less revealing form of body covering, both would be much appreciated. For although I am now ready to admit that I have misjudged you"—his glance included Cyrus Mobarak as well as Hilda Brandt—"I believe that we have much to say to each other. It is time . . . to talk."

24
Monsters

The biggest unoccupied room that the Europan mobile lab offered was a data-review station, about three meters square—roughly the size of Bat's bed.

He stared at the six people crowding in on him—sitting on
top
of him, by Bat standards—and decided that this was the worst day of his life.

It was not his departure from the treasures and safety of Bat Cave, although he had missed them before he was three paces from his front door. It was not the ride from Ganymede to Europa, although he had been shoehorned for seven hours into a seat designed for some human shrimp one-third his size. It was not the ignominy of being led—near-naked, chilled, purblind, and encased like a monstrous green sausage—across the bleak prospect of Europa's surface. It was not even the presence, normally intolerable to him, of so many other humans close enough to touch, nor the narrow, uncomfortable seat on which he was now perched.

It was something worse than all of those. It was knowledge that he had been guilty of basic error.

He had obtained the first hint of a problem in his logic when the arrival at Europa went unquestioned and unimpeded; he had suspected a major blunder when he peered through the insulating green plastic of his improvised suit and noted the composition of the group assembled around the frozen-over circle of Blowhole. He had confirmed his error when he saw Hilda Brandt commanding Camille Hamilton, and observed the latter's dreamlike trance.

And yet—he tried to comfort himself—he must also be at least
partially
right. Surely there were limits to how far logic, strictly applied, could have led him astray.

He glanced around at the people crowding in on him: David Lammerman and Camille Hamilton, close together physically and, he suspected, now closer than ever mentally; Nell Cotter, her eyes noting everything; Tristan Morgan, impatience written on his face, fidgeting, on the point of speech; Cyrus Mobarak, staring steadily at Bat and quite impassive—but still Torquemada, and therefore neither to be underestimated nor taken for granted.

And finally, Hilda Brandt. She nodded to him.
Go ahead, it's your move.

She was right. This was Bat's show. And he was not sure where to begin. He might never be able to restore his self-esteem, but if he botched this he could certainly make himself feel even worse.

Then go slowly.
The desperate run from Ganymede was over. No one was going anywhere, and there was no need for haste.

"I would like to tell you a story." His dark eyes flickered from person to person, and his voice was little more than a whisper. "To at least one of you, it will already be familiar. To others, it may be incomprehensible. Still others among you may even find it boring. For this is not merely a story, it is a story of long ago. A
war
story, in fact. A tale of the last days of the Great War."

Bat stirred in his hard chair. He had been provided with adequate clothing: a vast cylinder of cloth with holes cut through for his arms and head. But there was nothing to eat; he was still cold; and he yearned for his kitchen, his own robes, and the comfort of the padded seat deep in Bat Cave.

"Both sides performed weapons development throughout the war," he went on. "That is well-known. And new weapons, almost by definition, are
secret
weapons. Full advantage cannot be gained from their use if the enemy knows of their existence, since then they can build defenses against them.

"One such secret weapon had been in development on a small asteroid called Mandrake." Bat scanned the group. Every face wore a look of mild interest or polite incomprehension. No information there. "From its designer's point of view, the weapon was almost perfected. But when it was described to the Belt leaders, they decided that it had two big problems. The first—a minor point to them—was that it involved a form of biological experimentation strictly forbidden by all military and civilian codes. The second, and from the leaders' point of view much the more important, was that the weapon would be of no
practical
use for years. With the war going badly for the Belt, this could not be the secret weapon to snatch victory from defeat.

"Now permit me one general observation: In the Great War, Earth and Mars were the big losers in terms of casualties, but it was the other side—the Belt colonies—that was forced to surrender unconditionally. The Belt lost the war. Its production facilities were shattered, its people starved to submission, its leaders in danger of postwar trial as war criminals. After the war, popular sentiment said that the Belt leaders were human monsters. They deserved their fate of annihilation in the final battles. The only pity was that they were not available to be put on trial.

"That is a typical postwar attitude of victors. War history is written by the
winners.
But suppose that in this case, the written history were true? Suppose that the Belt leaders were truly cold, ruthless, and self-serving?"

Cyrus Mobarak was nodding. "They were. I was there, and I remember the situation clearly. You did what you were told, or that was the end of you."

"Very well. So those leaders would not have hesitated to employ an awful weapon, or been averse to destroying a useless one—especially a weapon that after the war might cause them more trouble. Of course, the Belt leaders did not alert anyone on Mandrake to their plans. They simply arranged for a full-scale attack on the asteroid, one that would reduce all evidence of experiments to ash and lifeless rock.

"But somehow, almost too late, the science chief of those biological experiments—who happened to be away from Mandrake at the time—learned of the plan to destroy the asteroid. Word was sent secretly to Mandrake. A few of the scientists managed to find a ship, a converted ore-carrier named the
Pelagic.
They fled, taking some of their experiments with them. But they were too late. A Seeker missile had already been commanded to destroy anything that tried to escape from Mandrake. It followed the
Pelagic
and blew it apart. Everyone on board perished.

"That should be the end of the story. All of the Belt political and military leaders died in the final days of the war. Good riddance, surely, for everyone in the system. The labs on Mandrake were destroyed. Records of the work, stored on Pallas, had already been purged. The
Pelagic
had been vaporized. The developer of the destroyed biological weapons was still alive, but no more eager than any other human to be offered as a scapegoat for war crimes. It was better by far to leave the Belt, lie low, and later build a new career somewhere else.

"And that is exactly what happened. It was as though the experiments on Mandrake had never been. The past vanished, for a full twenty-four years. And then, two years ago, a routine search of Belt debris came across the flight recorder of the
Pelagic.

"The recorder showed that although nineteen people had embarked on the ship at Mandrake, only ten were on board when the
Pelagic
was annihilated. Where were the other nine? They must have been jettisoned, dead or alive, into space.

"All that would mean nothing to almost anyone in the system. It meant little to me, when I first learned of it a few months ago, even though I am far more interested than most people in relics of the Great War. I am
very
interested.

"Ah, but then why was I so delinquent? Only because I could find no record of the recovery of a life-support pod within a reasonable time of the
Pelagic
's destruction, and at a place consistent with the ship's final position. I concluded, quite reasonably, that anyone in a survival pod was long dead.

"The information from the remnant of the
Pelagic
might mean something more to just one person—to someone who had waited for a quarter of a century for new information about that ship, without any real hope that it would ever be forthcoming. That person did not conclude, as I did, that those in the pods must be dead. Why not? Because there was another relevant fact."

Bat was interrupted. The door of the room opened in a blast of cold air. Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer, pale-faced but otherwise apparently normal, were ushered in by Buzz Sandstrom. He glanced questioningly at Hilda Brandt.

She nodded. "Sit down. Not you, Buzz. You go and make sure that Blowhole is opening up all right. Apply heat from on top if you have to. And close this door behind you. It's too cold in here already."

She turned back to Bat as Nell and Tristan squeezed room between them for the two new arrivals. "Very well, Rustum Battachariya. There is no need for you to continue. I am ready to end this charade. I admit my guilt. After what I did with Camille out there on the surface, in front of witnesses, it would be pointless to deny it. I led certain biological research projects in the Belt during the Great War." She ignored Cyrus Mobarak's head-jerk of surprise. "If I also tell you that I had to cooperate with the Belt government or die, and that I opposed the whole war, it does not alter the facts. Now tell me what you propose to do with this information."

"I, personally? Very little." Bat stared sadly down at his rolling belly. "Not now. One day ago—one
hour
ago—I believed that murder would soon be committed on Europa. I thought that Jon Perry's life was in danger, and from something far more inimical than an accidental oxygen shortage. I rushed here from Ganymede for that reason. And I learned, within minutes of my arrival at Blowhole, that I had made a gross error. To save Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer, you proved willing to risk exposure. That was not the action of my war crimes perpetrator. I had been wrong in thinking you
dangerous
simply because you are
devious.

"I could and should return at once to Ganymede. But I must satisfy my own curiosity. Be assured, I will take your answers no farther. I cannot, of course, say the same for others here, or ask their silence. What you say to me may have direct relevance to them."

"It does indeed. But ask on. The time for silence is past."

"The survival pods. Nine were launched. What happened to the rest of them? I found evidence of only three having been recovered."