The Frozen Sky (5 page)
17.
The cavern seemed to stretch as her fear grew and Vonnie stayed near the wall of hieroglyphs, trying to anchor herself. Deep radar let her track the new creatures while they were still out of sight and there were twelve bodies in the swarm, banging off the walls and ceiling of a gap.
—
Sixty meters. Fifty
.
Vonnie held her explosives. There were too many entrances and she had only four half-sticks. She couldn't throw one until they were almost on her, until there was no chance they'd bounce back out of whichever opening they chose.
—
Forty
.
They would catch her if she ran, she knew that, but the adrenaline was like a hundred blades inside her. It was like them, savage and quick.
—
They're in the second tunnel
.
Suddenly there was less rock in the way and Lam drew each body into clear resolution. They were no longer just overlapping blobs. They were amphibians.
"Christ, you said..."
They were bigger, with longer arms and different skin, cousins of the ones she'd fought but their own breed. There was no question about it. To creatures that saw and spoke in sonar, this breed would stand apart from the others, if for no other reason than the pitch of their voices — and it wasn't this race that had written on this wall. The size of the carvings was wrong. The surface texture.
These hieroglyphs belonged to the smaller species.
War. It explained so much. Even when the environment was calm they had been tearing at each other, fighting for ground and for resources, and that competition had been more than either side was able to withstand.
—
Here they come
.
In an instant her chance to kill them cleanly would be gone, and Vonnie had learned not to hesitate. But she had also remembered who she was and why she'd ever come here.
"Lam, talk to them! You have to try to talk to them!” she yelled, and the suit bent down even as the amphibians swept into the cavern, a crisscrossing wave of bodies high and low. At the same time Lam emitted sonar bursts in exactly the same tone as theirs, greeting them, ducking one shoulder as he drew on everything he’d learned.
It was the right decision. She believed that. This was a new population altogether and there was every reason to hope that they would answer her.
18.
Alone, in silence, she thought about her dead friends too much and kept as busy as possible with maps and data instead. The atmosphere in these big lava tunnels was mostly water vapor, carbon dioxide and the ever-present nitrogen, along with trace poisons. It was also warm, only a few degrees below freezing. Vonnie assumed she must be inside the fin mountain, stoked by thermal heat. Giant lumps of ice grew up from the floor beneath long stalactites, and slow-flowing lakes made waves and swirls against the humps of rock. Beautiful. She tried to let it cheer her as she picked her way through the jumble, following a soft wind. The pressure differential indicated an even higher temperature somewhere ahead, maybe a vent.
First Contact was a jolt. She had seen a few pale spores of fungus but only the ice truly grew and thrived here, so when her radar picked out another sun-shape on the wall she assumed it was a carving. Then it moved.
"Hey—" She started closer, stopped. She didn't want to scare the little thing. She was three hundred meters off and there was some chance she was still unobserved.
Maybe that was best. She didn't have the training and the choice she made could affect eight billion lives across the solar system, the human race colliding with another for the first time. It was tremendous beyond imagining. But she didn’t waver long. She just didn’t have it in her to walk away, not here, not now. More than that, she needed this success to balance everything that had gone wrong.
Besides, what the hell was the starfish breathing?
Vonnie felt a stab of longing and pride at the thought, a bittersweet mix. Lam and Bauman would have given anything to be here, but she would do the job alone.
The creature had disappeared so she paced slowly in that direction, sweeping radar and x-ray up the wall. Nothing. Nothing. Then she found one cold crevice full of bodies, eight of them, and yet she saw no exhalations in infrared.
For that moment she forgot everything else, though she was careful not to get too close or even to let her smile show inside her visor, because teeth might be threatening. She knelt to make herself small and drew one finger in the dirt, trying to communicate just the idea of communicating. She must be a complete surprise.
Furless, streamlined, they had almost certainly evolved in water. No skeleton and a lot of muscle. No front or back that she could see, only top and bottom. In fact they had no visible orifices except on their undersides, a few slits that she took to be gills and a single, well-protected beak evidently used both as mouth and anus. Very basic digestion. Two hearts. Brain.
They were perfect, she thought, small enough to subsist, big enough to build. Clever and brave. For creatures this size to cover as much distance as they had was remarkable, and spoke again of strategy and engineering, the incredible success of mastering this environment.
Their lungs were too compact to hold air for long, so they must have evolved some trick of oxygen compression... saturating their blood... breathing water or good air before leaving one safe place for another... homes and farms... but where?
That was all the time she had.
Their assault was immediate and Vonnie twisted back, stunned. The first body struck her helmet off-center, attacking the gear block. Others collided with her arms and chest, trying to bring her down. Vonnie staggered but the suit's musculature kept her upright.
Her retreat was confused. She tripped over a boulder and fell, three bodies still clawing at her. She stood like a drunk, overwhelmed. But most of them had leapt away and Vonnie struck wildly at the one on her face, anything to break free.
They pushed the roof into her. A hundred flecks clattered against her suit and she looked up just as a ragged hunk the size of a car slammed down. The missing ones had gone straight up and scrabbled in the rock, digging and prying, using themselves as pistons to accelerate their weapon.
They were ruthless. Impact killed two of their own and hurt three more. It also destroyed her.
Inside her helmet her skull crashed against the buckling armor, where raw circuitry scraped open one cornea. Then she hit the ground. Systems failure was total for 3.3 seconds and Vonnie gasped in the dark, bleeding, twitching.
19.
She saw the new breed react to Lam’s greeting as they came across the cavern. There was no mistaking it even in flight, the ripple of motion. Their bodies shared an idea — maybe a command? — and Vonnie realized for the first time that they also used the fine cilia beneath their arms to convey information, lifting one tentacle or more to show dense, wriggling patterns.
Lam was crippled by her shape, of course, and was also canny enough not to try to mimic the hieroglyphs exactly or what they'd seen of the smaller amphibians. The warring breeds might have separate languages, so he was left to improvise and held Vonnie down in an uncomfortable ball, stuttering her fingers alongside her belly. Her visor churned with sun-shapes as he compared these twelve individuals with sims and real data. And there was another ripple among them.
Please, she thought. Please.
But he'd kept the half-sticks against her forearms with a magnetic lock, and now released two with a click.
—
Watch out.
The split wave of amphibians struck the ceiling and floor, and did not cling there or bounce away. Instead, the wave collapsed, ricocheting straight into her.
"Please!"
They came with their beaks open, shrieking. They came with their arms thrown wide to grasp and tear.
—
Auto assault
.
She wept for them, monsters all of them, no curiosity, no patience. No promise. The intelligence she knew existed here was stunted and cold like everything inside this world.
Lam smashed her fist up through the one in front and then turned to swat the next. The rest never reached her. “Do it,” she said, and he put both charges into the wall of hieroglyphs and ducked under a wide blast of shrapnel.
Then she turned and ran.
The four survivors kept after her, of course. Vonnie had seen it before, using most of her explosives against the smaller breed, hoping the show of force would be enough, but this clan was no different. Even with two-thirds of the group dead or bleeding out, they were relentless.
She reached a tunnel and jumped straight into the ceiling, crushing the one on her shoulder. Lam pulled at the rock with both hands and nearly cancelled her momentum, ripping debris out over her head. The shower hit the next two and Lam kicked down again, arms out, clubbing the last of them.
Vonnie left the wounded to live or die, knowing it was probably a mistake. Knowing she would always be wrong for trespassing.
For nearly an hour she heard them behind her, crying into the mountain. The echoes faded as she climbed, except once when there were fresh voices. Reinforcements? A new breed altogether? The sonar was too diffuse to be sure and she was glad, dimly, muffled in exhaustion and grief.
She climbed. She climbed without end, and even carried by the suit she passed her limit, tendons straining. Something in her back gave out above the pelvic bone and seemed to grind there — and in her mind it was the same, one hurt that went deeper than the rest. In the monotony of the catacombs, even after she dug her way into a vent, there was no escaping it.
The leaning shaft up through the ice could have been exactly where Lam and Bauman had died, although her radar showed almost no dust or mineral deposits within the melt. Good. Geysers and swells meant instability. This vent looked solid and she thought she could make it even without bolts and wire, although her hands were sore and beaten.
She climbed. She climbed slowly, testing the ice, scanning ahead. At last there was a new sound, the rescue beacon of a probe overhead.
Vonnie tried to laugh and Lam returned the signal the only way he could, a cacophony of ELF and radar pulses.
—
We made it, Von
.
“Yes.”
—
Let’s wait here. Can you wait? This hand is damaged in four places and the elbow’s not much better. I don’t want to risk a fall
.
“Yes.”
But she still couldn’t sleep, hanging there, several hundred meters in the air and so much further to go. She kept one file open on her visor and let the data burn into her, staring through it even when she lifted her head to watch above.
Lam had put together a rough translation of the hieroglyphs, and with it the beginnings of the truth.
She was wrong. The amphibians’ all-or-nothing behavior was not animal stupidity or rage. It was deliberate. It was a survival trait. They had been confronted with aliens throughout their existence, creatures from other catacombs and separate lines of evolution. That they had never seen anything like her before, that she aped their language or wore metal... none of this would ever stop them for a moment.
Outsiders were rivals. Outsiders were food. Until they could understand,
if
they could understand, they would always react that way.
The warring breeds she’d fought seemed to be the remnants of an empire that had once reached the top of the frozen sky. At one time there had been a long, calmer period in Europa’s lifespan. Maybe someday there would be again. The hieroglyphs were short histories intended to aid the next alliance to rise from the chaos, and Vonnie had been nothing but a path of destruction through whatever civilization they had managed to hold onto.
It wasn’t what they deserved.
The mecha gathering above her were American but relayed ESA signals. In a heartbeat Lam had the search grid and told her how far she’d strayed from where she went in. Nine kilometers. She was also still two-thirds of a kilometer beneath the surface, so the mecha rigged a molecular wire and dropped other lines around her, life support, suit support, data comm.
Vonnie let go of the ice. She spun slightly as the machines lifted her away, but the surge of voices was more intense. The men and women up top had accessed her records as soon as the data line connected, and at a glance her mem files must be a running nightmare. She still had blood and black rock caught in every joint of her suit, the ruined helmet and battleworn gloves. She knew what it must look like.
Someone murmured, “Vonderach, my God—”
But she was still thinking of the amphibians’ potential and of the debts she owed, both to her friends and to the colonies she’d devastated. “We have to help them,” she said.
END
Jeff Carlson is the international bestselling author of the
Plague Year
trilogy. To date, his work has been translated into fourteen langauges.
Plague Year
has also been optioned for film. He is currently at work on a new stand-alone thriller. Readers can find free fiction, videos, contests and more on his website at
www.jverse.com