Maximum Ice (22 page)

Of course, in those instances, the victims had been
dead…

“You’re looking better, Swan,” she said when they were alone.

Between his fingers he felt the fine wool of his shirt. “Yes,
thank you.” The clothes she had brought him were a major improvement.

“Not the clothes,” she said.
“You
are looking better.”

“It wouldn’t take much,” he allowed. He winced, inwardly It
had
taken much. It took several of her colleagues. Why had she buried them in there? He had asked, but she was in no mood to answer. Instead she had the entrance to the room sealed with polymer matrix, assuring that the remaining sleepers had no nightmare awakenings.

Her eyes flickered, but she said evenly, “If I’d known you were starving, I would have brought food earlier.”

Something about the simple offer touched him. It had been so long since he’d had any human comfort. “Thank you,” he said.

“You have been asleep,” she said, still in that soft tone.

“Yes.” He had the inclination, for a moment, to talk.

“That’s why you command Ice.”

He tensed. Her only concern was for Ice. It was ludicrous for him to imagine it would be anything else.

Veering away from the topic, she said, “Your accent…”

“Danish.”

She smiled. Her face was handsome when she wasn’t frowning. “After all this time, the accent remains.”

“It all remains,” he said, surprised at himself. His memories were all intact, reconstituted body or not. He pushed away the sudden emotions, aware that he was visited by profound mental swings. Ice must adjust that, eventually

She was quiet then, as though sensing the topic was too personal. Swan had forgotten the subtle interplay of conversation, how much was held in the silences, how tone painted the words. He wanted to talk to her. But he could never trust her. It was the dilemma of too much power.

Perhaps sometime they would get to know each other better. For now, there was business.

He took a seat on a bag of food pellets, so that he wasn’t towering over her. “The ship,” he said. The ship’s crew was industrious. They had set up a permanent camp in an Ice-free locale, and wrestled with encryption. Jiggling the locked door. “Your progress is slow, Solange,”

“We have time to do it right, I hope.”

“What’s right about slow?”

“I’m making friends. That takes time.”

“Perhaps you would do better to make friends with the captain than his first mate.”

“The captain is too limited. No imagination. Janos Bertak, though, is a different sort.”

“Ambitious?” Swan thought how basic most people were.

“It’s not that simple. There’s his wife. She wants a child.”

Curious, Swan sat back, letting her report.

“There hasn’t been a live birth on that ship for nineteen years. They want children, and normalcy. Many of them would be happy to get a family and never see that ship again.” She spoke earnestly, as though their predicament mattered to her. He could see that she might indeed win people over, as she liked to say.

She went on, “I’ve promised them a number of young children. Most want babies. I don’t have any infants. It will take a few days to accumulate them.”

Time. She seemed to think there was enough of it. Swan said, “Work as fast as you can, then. The ship, as you point out, is also working fast. They’re worried about Ice.”

“Do they have the know-how to access Ice?”

She
would
wonder that. “I hope not,” he said. “Find out what you can, Solange. So far, they haven’t got far.” Watching her, he realized she would be eager not to need him anymore.

Solange went on, “This ship representative, Zoya Kundara,
is still two days away from my Keep. We do have time for all our plans.”

He paused. “Zoya Kundara is her name?”

“They call her Ship Mother. The ship psychologist.”

Kundara. Zoya Kundara… the name sounded familiar. He hadn’t heard, or hadn’t paid attention, to her last name. An unusual name. How odd that any name from that ship would be known to him.

“My people report that she can be disruptive. I find others from the ship more respectful.”

“Ship Mother…” His voice trailed off. “They call her that?”

“It’s a strategy for providing continuity and what they think of as traditional…”

He interrupted. “What kind of strategy?”

“A biological stasis. Deep sleep, waking as needed over generations.”

A gate opened in memory.
“Star Road,”
he murmured. His voice sounded like it was coming from a long way away

He rose from his seat. Reacting, she stepped back.

Closing his eyes, he concentrated. There was a ship, a famous ship.
Star Road.
Long before his time. One hundred fifty years earlier than his own historical time, a ship had left… He groaned. It was a louder sound than he intended, and he heard the rustle of the nun’s robes behind him. She had moved a distance away from him.

His size frightened her. He didn’t want to agitate her, but his own emotions were whipping inside him. Hard to control. A sense of dread rose inside, like a memory that had found a pipe. Memory, that swelled beneath the surface, seeking an outlet.

He ran to the wall. Placing a hand to Ice, he called for some history. Oh, to be wrong. He was often wrong about history, not his favorite…

Ice was swift in retrieval. His hand filled with jade green light.

Information flooded in. Yes, that was the ship, the ship with the plague-carriers. To his disgust, his eyes began watering. Liquid flowed down his face. Memories would out.

Solange was talking to him. “Swan? Swan?”

Hand to the wall, he ignored her. More information, confirmed by Ice. The Rampage had lasted two hundred years. The gypsies had left by his time, but not before harboring the virus, spreading it everywhere. They were chased off the earth. Too late. Too late for him and his family

The gypsies were back.

There were thousands of them, loaded on that ship. Seeping with infection. Immune themselves, but destroying everything they touched. Turning the streets of Copenhagen to the land of the walking dead. He walked. He was dead. The pits. Pour them in, pour in his parents. Cover them with soil. He found himself sitting on the floor, sobbing.

Coretext echoed with the terrible sound.

Solange came forward, staying well away, but asking, “Swan, what is it?”

He looked up at her. She was afraid of him, wanting him to be quiet, to be normal. That angered him. He whispered, “Get out.”

“But what is it about the ship? Something I should know?”

The tears were finished. He looked up at her, seeing a refracted nun, multicolored, through prisms of liquid. She was monstrous. “Get out,” he repeated.

When she hesitated, he charged forward and lifted a sack of food, hurling it against the stacked cans, sending them rolling across the floor. She wanted meaning. He’d give her
meaning.
Take the ship and kill it. There’s meaning for you. Someone was roaring. His throat hurt. He ripped bags of food open, spilling their guts.

The nun was staggering back from him, her mules clustered around her.

One of them came forward with a large stick.

“No!” she ordered. “Let him be.”

Swan was breathing heavily. He looked around him. The fit had passed.

“We’ll take that ship,” he said, voice shredded.

“Of course we will.” By the look on his face, Solange decided to say no more. Then she and her mules fled. Down the long stairs, into the tunnel.

He was exhausted.

Both exhausted and on fire. He spun around. What to do? He hurried to his den, grabbing a stuff sack. Into it he began packing things. Warm clothes, food. But not cans, too heavy OK, packets then. No, too bulky. He emptied the sack again and stuffed in bottles of water. He’d have to travel light to climb the crevasse. Food could be found on the surface, one way or another.

He set out down the corridors of coretext, immediately, before he lost his resolve. All along he’d thought the earth was clean and safe, it was part of what he liked about Ice.

This Zoya Kundara wasn’t clean and safe.

She shouldn’t have come back.

CHAPTER TEN

At first Zoya thought that there was blood on the snow. They had entered an array of information stacks—what Wolf said was the Taga. He slowed their pace, maneuvering around jumbled outcroppings of crystal facets—like the undergrowth of a crystal forest. There, in the shadows of the pale obelisks, crimson stains followed seams in the Ice.

Dismounting from the sled for a closer look, she identified it as red algae, possibly
Chlamydomonas nivalis. Lieutenant Mirran had already reported on finding this genus as well as its green cousin, Chloromonas
.

Zoya bent down to scoop up a handful of pinkish snow. Somehow, in this sun-blasted landscape, the chemistry suited blooms of algae, especially in crevasses or crystal palisades affording some shade. They had exploited the niche, migrating during relatively moist times from several meters below the surface to ripen in any slush brought on by rare precipitation or dew.

Queen Ria’s tears
, Wolf had named the streaks. Blood tears, for her exiled child.

It was a sweet fancy, turned sour when they found the first bodies in the snow.

Two young children lay wrapped in a blanket. Pitifully thin, they were intact, as though sleeping.

“Starved,” Wolf had said.

Later they found three other bodies, along a trail formed by many sleds.

“The pack will come to feed,” Wolf muttered. “The Taga hides them.”

As they drove on, Wolf shared with her his surmise that a whole preserve was on the move. “Heading to Ancou preserve. Hoping to get in.” He added, “Ancou won’t take them. Too poor.”

“Why are they traveling?” Zoya asked.

“Food bender, usually.” he answered. Food bender—the chemical plant that converted recycled cellulose to edible carbohydrates. The heart of any preserve, Wolf had said. “Maybe it broke.” Nostrils flaring, he put his head up, into the stiffening wind.

They topped a hill, and Wolf pulled to a stop. Below them lay a vast forest of crystal stacks—her first full view of the Taga. Far off, their ranks closed, like an army barring the way. In the day’s bleached light, the formations were colorless, with no visitations of color. It was a dead forest—or perhaps a resting one.

In a small clearing below, a caravan of sleds could be seen winding into the forest. Two of the caravan’s sleds were separated from the train, leaving a small knot of people behind.

“They’re dropping sleds now,” Wolf said. “Less weight, more speed.”

But he was distracted by something else. He jumped down to the ground and walked off a few paces, kneeling to inspect a dropping of scat. He prodded at it with his knife.

“Something?” Zoya asked.

He stood up. “Yes.” He was quick to start the sled up again, and they lurched down the embankment into the valley

“I have food to share,” Zoya said. “I’m willing to part with some supplies.”

As they approached the two sleds, it was clear they were laying out a body, wrapping it in blankets.

They came abreast of the sleds, and passed them.

“Wolf, I want to stop,” she told him. But Wolf wasn’t interested in the sleds.

“No time to trade,” he said.

“We’re not going to
trade, we’re going to help.”

They were moving up on the main caravan. It was doggedly plowing through the valley at a pace that suggested their sled batteries might be low.

Wolf turned to regard her. His eyes had hardened to frost. “A bad trade, to give things away.”

Zoya muttered an imprecation at him in her tongue. Her ear lex whispered the translation, but she didn’t repeat it. Wolf knew he’d been insulted. “You have no pity,” she said.

“Pity can kill you on Ice.”

Whatever made her think the man had a heart? He was a bounty hunter, a cold-blooded broker of goods….

The caravan occupants watched as the smaller sled passed them. They had the remote, dazed look of people who expected no succor. Nor would they have any from Wolf.