Winter Song (35 page)

    "So I did," Karl said, as Bera joined the search.

    "Are these what you're looking for?" She rattled a box.

    "Yes!" Karl ransacked the contents and pulled out two or three, comparing the width and shape. "These look to be about the best fit…" He lifted the flap of skin on the back of his neck and uncovered a socket. "See if you can get any of these to plug in."

    Grimacing as she did so, Bera tried all three. "This one's just too wide – oh, that's it," she said.

    "Adaptive socket," Karl said. "As long it's the right configuration and about the right size, the socket will stretch or shrink within certain parameters. These have mostly been semi-standardised since forever. Built-in obsolescence died with the Age of Waste, before star-flight." He grinned. "You could say it became obsolescent." He puffed out his cheeks. Holding the jack in his left end, he took a deep breath. "Moment of truth time." He pressed three switches at the same time and waited, wondering if he'd hear the answering grumble in the ship's bowels. "Yes! Power's on!"

    He waited, then pressed another half-dozen switches and buttons and what he silently prayed was the right sequence. "And there's the datarealm re-booting. Hah!" He held up the lead, then inserted the jack. "Aagh! That's still horrible!" he cried.

    "Still?" Bera said. "You poke wires into your head all the time?"

    "Not all the time," Karl said. "Only when something goes horribly wrong, or you're on an antique like this." At her shocked look, he grinned. "It was probably state-of-the-art when they fitted it, but even then it would have been bloody unpleasant for the user."

    "Will… would I have to plug in like this if I came with you?"

    Karl shook his head. "Everything's voice-activated now, lovely."

    He blinked several times, widening his eyes further each time. "I'm going into a trance for a time, but it's all part of the interface." He patted Bera's hand. "Don't look so worried! This is all part of the plan." He hoped she didn't know that he was making "the plan" up as he went along.

    At the back of his mind, an image: of Loki straightening, sniffing the air… The download stepped forward–

    "We're in," you said to Karl, revelling in the purity of the glorious crystalline world of data-streams and iceberg-shaped databases. There! The history of the Kazakh government's attempts to build an interstellar empire, doomed to failure by relativity and distance. There! The meteorite, the oldest and most cliched of interstellar hazards, punching its way by sheer size through the ice-canopy intended to protect the ship. There! The routines that you need! Loki sensed the wonderful space within the datarealm; hosts of longsilent systems.

    Karl's head snapped back and he opened his eyes wide. "There!" he said with a huge grin at Bera. "We have power!" The grin faded with the power.

    
Damnation,
Loki said.
Some of the connections are not
there. I'll need to find bypasses – unless you can go and repair
them?

    Karl sub-vocalised, You must be… He tailed off as he saw the Cheshire Cat image from antiquity hovering in the air. Joking.

    
I am following the channels through. I believe that we have
connectivity: the ship shuddered like someone feeling the cold,
and lights split the gloom. We also have fuel. The tank in the
engine pod is full to capacity, although the water's frozen solid.
If we can thaw it, it'll split nicely into oxygen for us, and hy
drogen for the drive.

    "What about the hangar we entered through?" Bera said. Won't the air vent?"

    "Not as long as the airlock we passed through holds," Karl said. "And it should – no reason why not."

    From outside, blows banged against the door.

    Karl sat in the chair next to the console. "Sit down," he called. Watching over their shoulders, Bera and Coeo did as instructed. "They can hit it with whatever they want," Karl said. "I assume they've got axes from their packs, but whatever they're using, they'll still bounce off it!" He stared at the door. "Huh, hitting the lintel – that won't help!"

    The ship juddered as the roar of the engines kicked in. "There's smoke coming from the door!" Bera said.

    The engine tone changed from a roar to a whine. Steam billowed past the window. "Whatever they're planning, they're too late!" Karl said.

    The ship tilted further, lurched, and fell back again with a spine-jarring thud. Karl cursed. Give me more power, he told Loki.

    Bera glanced at the door. "They're burning flares! That must be what the banging was – hammering flares into the lintel. They must have emptied Skorradalur of them to have got so many!"

    The ice creaked and groaned, and two lights flashed red. "Shit," Karl muttered.

    "What?" Bera said.

    "Temperature around the vents is going critical – the steam from the ice can't vent fast enough." The W
inter
Song
pushed and heaved and writhed, battling the ice that held it on one side.

    For a moment Karl was afraid that the ship would break up, and thought about powering down.

    
If you do,
Loki said,
our best chance is gone. Better to die
trying, surely?

    Karl increased the power to full thrust.

    "I don't like that groaning," Bera said. "Will the ship hold?"

    "If it doesn't, we're dead," Karl said. "But if they take us, we're dead anyway."

    The flares detonated. A series of bangs punched the air together so rapidly that they merged into one long percussion, building to a blast that blew in the door from the top lintel. Ragnar and his men piled through the gap.

    And with a mighty lurch, the ship broke free, ice falling from its hull, passing the windows in great mansized shards. The ship tilted, and Karl glimpsed white-peaked mountains, then sky.

    Inside his head Karl screamed at Loki: Give me every last drop of power that you can wring from these fucking engines!

    And the W
inter Song
roared into the sky on great kilometre-long columns of fire.

NINETEEN

A giant hand seemed to press on Karl's chest while its owner roared in his ears as the W
inter Song
climbed from the lake.

    
We're only climbing at three standard gravities,
Loki said.

    It felt like more. I'm just out of condition, he sub-vocalised. Karl reached for and squeezed Bera's hand. Somewhere, wiring or perhaps some dust exposed to heat was burning, and the smell of it catapulted Karl back to the attack on Ship, when he'd been dreaming of Karla. He realised guiltily that he hadn't thought of his partners for far too long, but concentrated on slowing his hammering heart, wiped his hands on his leggings, and took deep breaths to crush the panic that threatened to overwhelm him as his cheeks were pushed toward his ears.

    The W
inter Song
banked slightly, making a minute adjustment, and Karl looked out the window at mountains to the north, glaciers marching down to the lake, while to the south the desert stretched away to infinity. He felt an unexpected pang at leaving Isheimur, which he crushed, ruthlessly and quickly. Streams of ice shards flew earthward past the window.

    
I'll ease back on the thrust now,
Loki said. The ship gradually flattened its angle from a seventy-five-degree climb to thirty degrees, and Loki throttled back to about a half of one standard gee.

    Karl exhaled a slow breath, clearing out his lungs. The jack prevented him from moving more than a couple of metres from the seat, so he twisted around, looking down the corridor at where Ragnar's men had been thrown by the take-off, and were now clambering to their feet. They shook their heads, trying to clear them.

    Ragnar looked up, his face a warring battleground of fear, wonder and delight. "Nowhere to run now, utlander!" Behind him, the others looked more scared than gleeful. Ragnar tottered toward the bridge, leaning into the slope exactly as he would in climbing a steep hill. His left hand was a bandaged mess, the cloth soaked with blood from amputated fingers.

    Karl grinned at the evidence of Bera's knife-work, but thought, The urge to impose his will has so narrowed his mind that he can't see the wonder in this. Even Karl – to whom the W
inter Song
was as archaic as a medieval sailing ship – was awed by her sheer brute power. Then Karl saw the look of wonder sweep across Ragnar's face and knew that he'd misjudged the man.

    With no physical means to steer the W
inter Song
, Karl thought, Bank to port, Loki. The ship tilted through ninety degrees, but still climbed, even on her side. The manoeuvre hurled Ragnar's men against the wall – now their floor – knocking them senseless.

    "That should quieten them for a few minutes!" Karl straightened the ship again. Bera nodded, beads of sweat glistening on her forehead, a tic in her cheek pulsing. "Are you coping?" Karl asked, and she nodded again. "It's a bit scary, the first take-off," Karl said. "But don't worry; after the thousandth time, it's as dull as doing the laundry."

    Bera smiled dutifully at the feeble joke.

    "I'm keeping the acceleration slow so as not to do anyone any damage," Karl said.

    "Never mind us, what about the ship?" Bera said. "It feels like it'll fall apart at any minute!"

    "It won't," Karl said. Inside he was terrified, but he thought, If I stay calm, they will as well. He hoped his theory was right. "We should pass fourteen thousand metres in a few seconds. The slow rate of climb should enable us to move around if we're careful."

    "What about them?" Bera jerked her head at Ragnar's men.

    "See if they can fly," Coeo growled. The humanoid had clearly grasped the idea that the ship was no longer a stationary shrine, although the way he hunched as though expecting a blow hinted at deeply rooted anxiety.

    "Show them how merciful you are," Karl said. "That you are a civilised man."

    Coeo shrugged as if washing his hands of the whole problem, but when Karl passed him several lengths of cable, he duly trussed the prisoners.

    Karl realised that he'd forgotten to check the screens. Fat lot of good it'll do to reach orbit if Mizar B's glare blinds us. But the metal screens slid down to cover the windows, though they groaned and rattled and one stuck for a heart-stopping couple of seconds, and one of the four monitors still worked – Karl wondered why it hadn't been removed by the crew. Maybe they had no use for it, he thought, though it begs the question what they used other monitors for. He had a mental vision of a tribe of humanoids sitting watching a blank screen.

    Karl ran through which shipboard cameras were working, showing the pictures from each one in turn. Most were damaged beyond repair, but the fore and aft cameras both worked, as did one of the belly cameras. "Here's a picture of the W
inter Song
," Karl said as an image of the ship appeared on the monitor. Needle-thin central spine, two halves of a globe separated by a fivehundred metre-long lateral lattice. The engine pod is two hundred and ten metres in diameter, the crew pod is one hundred and forty metres across, half that in height.

    As the W
inter Song
crawled up through the atmosphere, their prisoners slowly regained consciousness, Arnbjorn first. He watched Karl the whole time, but said nothing.

    Thorir cursed and threatened them, until Bera crouched and held her knife to his throat. "Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to use this. So be quiet." Thorir glared, but obeyed.

    Orn was also quiet when he came round, but he looked panicked, and Karl worried how the settler would cope with their new environment – particularly weightlessness.

    Ragnar was last to recover, and looked confused, but Karl decided that he would make no concessions to Ragnar's age. He's only himself to thank for whatever state he's in, Karl thought.

    The W
inter Song
continued her steady climb through Isheimur's atmosphere, the world's curvature now obvious on the viewscreen. Karl sub-vocalised, How are the seals holding up?

    Loki came back: We
're about thirty kilometres up, and
the air pressure's only a quarter of what it was on the ground,
but there are no leaks – and we'd know by now. The airlock
to the hangar has held, no matter how primitive it might have
appeared, and we seem to be maintaining our integrity.

"Good," Karl muttered.

But the datarealm is now fighting my instructions.

Can you lock it off? Karl asked.

I'll do my best, but I'm not certain that it will be possible.

    Nonetheless, Karl felt the connection go dead – either Loki had locked it away, or for some other reason – the core itself may have decided to go off-line.

    When Karl looked around again, Ragnar was studying him. "What are you, utlander, that you alone can do something that no one else has ever managed?"

    Bera said, "What he is, is a man you shouldn't have tried to kidnap and hold to ransom."

    Ragnar scowled. "Are you a traitor, or simply bewitched by him, girl? I had my reasons."

    "Be quiet, the pair of you!" Karl snapped. At Bera's hurt look, he patted her hand. "I don't answer to you, Ragnar." He leaned forward. "You keep trying to make this about you. You're missing the point. This ship goes way, way beyond a feud about hospitality, or horse theft. Listen to me now…"

    Ragnar nodded, eyes blazing. "Say your piece, Allman."

    "You need me alive, to fly this ship home. Kill me, Ragnar, and you can forget about ever seeing Skorradalur again."

    "He's right," Arnbjorn said. He looked up at Karl. "But if we worked with you, you could help us, use this ship right and we could use it to push the Formers' policies on."