Winter Song (39 page)

    "Whatever the reason, it happened," Bera said, clearly growing bored with the lecture, or impatient for the conclusion.

    "So much so," Karl said with a grin at his heckler, "that with some stripping away of the planet's ozone layer, the cloud is about to donate a nasty little leaving present."

    "How so?" asked Orn.

    If you'd let me speak, I'd bloody well tell you! Karl thought. He took a deep breath. "The magnetic field has just 'flipped' from warming to cooling, which will have catastrophic results."

    "What can we do about it?" Ragnar asked.

    "That's why we're here," Karl said. "We're going to steer the comet toward Isheimur, then, as we're approaching the planet, dump the ship's reactor into the comet, smashing it to fragments."

    "You're what?"

    "You'll kill everyone on the planet!"

    "That's crazy!"

    "How the fuck are we going to get home?"

    Coeo was the only one not shouting, but he clearly understood from the others' reactions that there was something going on. Karl took another deep breath and translated into Kazakh.

    Coeo seemed unimpressed. "Why should we care about the fake-furs?" he said. "We'll survive. We were made for the cold."

    "Not for this cold," Karl said. "In this everyone dies – everyone and everything."

    
That is incorrect, Karl,
Loki said.
It's very likely that the
adapted can survive.

    But then he has no reason to help us, Karl sub-vocalised, and thought of Bera huddled, dying of cold.

    "Then we must do it," Coeo said. "Though surely throwing down this icy spear will kill many, many people?"

    "We'll keep deaths to a minimum," Karl said. "If we crash the core of the comet down onto the south polar ice-cap, we avoid everything but a few straggling rockeaters, as most of the adapted will have migrated northward."

    "So this comet…?" Bera prompted. It was hardest of all to meet her gaze. The others had barged into his mission, but she'd accompanied him in good faith. Now that might be her death warrant, although if she survived, it would paradoxically be her salvation.

    "We push it toward Isheimur, then dump the reactor and detonate it to break the comet up," Karl said, "and ride the biggest fragment all the way down, using emergency power to jump off when we hit the atmosphere."

    "What?" Arnbjorn yelped.

    "Are you scared?" Karl said, with a grin.

    "No!"

    "Then trust me – I have no desire to die, either," Karl said.

    "What good does one comet do?" Orn said.

    "It'll blast carbon dioxide and water vapour into the atmosphere," Karl said, "which will form a protective cloud and seed the ozone layer with water and debris, thereby raising the temperature and moisture. It's only a stop-gap, but it will buy another decade or two, while someone comes along, or until the magnetic field reverses again. Someone will come along to investigate," Karl said. "There's been enough chatter coming out of a supposedly deserted system to attract their attention." He hoped that he was right, but in all likelihood, he wouldn't be around to worry about it.

    He explained it all to Coeo, who said, "But it will kill our people! They'll boil or suffocate!"

    "No," Karl said. "It will only be temporary." Karl wished that he could be honest, could tell them about the harmonic tremors oscillating through Isheimur's lithosphere, but that would raise too many questions. "By breaking the comet up on the way down, we'll avoid the worst of the fall-out from one huge impact. Larger chunks will still fall to earth, but most will evaporate in the upper mesosphere, like handfuls of glittering dust thrown into the air."

    "That's beautiful," Bera said. The others nodded.

    Karl sub-vocalised, You have the flight trajectory? And you've calculated the point where we jettison the reactor?

    
You should be aware that even running simulations of these
plans has raised the Idiot's levels of activity to unprecedented
levels. I hesitate to anthropomorphise it, but the nearest anal
ogy would be to say that it's going frantic. It's testing my
control of every sub-routine. It seems intent on gaining control
of the reactor in case we dump it into space.

    Can you keep it out?

    
If I can't,
Loki said,
you'll learn of it at the same time as I
do.

    Karl looked up to find the others studying him. "OK," he said. "We'll need to sit down again." More groans met the statement. "So we'll take just a few minutes while you stretch your legs, urinate or pray." Blank looks greeted his feeble humour. "Sorry, the jokes are due to nerves. I'll shut up."

    "You're nervous?" Bera said. "How do you think we feel?"

    Karl said, "Yes, you're right." He grinned. "I thought that you were all Viking warriors?" He raised his hands to fend off Bera's rain of playful slaps. "I surrender!"

    He turned to the men. Arnbjorn was impassive. Orn looked as scared as ever, while Ragnar seemed lost in thought.

    Karl was the last to visit the urinal. Then he retook what had become the captain's seat.

    "Start the landing," he told Loki in a loud voice for the others' benefit. The engines fired a short burst, and they drifted toward the comet's ragged, battered surface.

    
The Idiot's reacting,
Loki said.
So far I am able to repel its
attempts to seize control of the lateral vents.

    They eased toward a wall of white. Loki fired the forward thrusters as they drifted gently, lazily toward the surface.

    
It's provoked a counter-attack on all fronts. Karl, it's trying
to regain con–
Loki went silent. Karl saw the construct's view of cyberspace, with jagged mountains of data hurtling across black, silent voids.

    There was a bang from behind them, and all heads swung to look toward the corridor.

    "What the hell was that?" Karl forgot to subvocalise, and simply asked it aloud.

    Loki was silent, and Karl had the mental image of someone concentrating, with no time to answer. There was another bang, and Arnbjorn, face drawn, began unbuckling his restraints. Karl heard a distant whistle.

    "Stay where you are!" Karl said.

    
Uh-oh
, Loki said.

    What? Karl sub-vocalised.

    
The Idiot isn't such an Idiot,
Loki said.
It's not after the re
actor controls at all. It's fooled me. It wanted the access codes
– it's blown the hatch on the roof of the corridor.

    The whistling grew louder, and turned into a roaring wind.

TWENTY-ONE

The gale howled, tugging at them with greedy fingers, almost paralysing Karl with its insistence. The nanophytes would – by switching to emergency mode and pumping blood to his brain and limbs – give him two or three minutes of exposure to vacuum. But to stay where he was meant a swift and inevitable death.

    Maintain position but tilt left ninety degrees, he told Loki. The W
inter Song
responded.

    Karl emptied his lungs as much as he could and, releasing the catch on his harness, dropped to what was now the floor. The howling storm pulled him along, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the others unbuckling. "Stay there!" he yelled, emptying his lungs still further, but it came out as only a croak.

    He ran through the vacant doorway and careered along the corridor toward the next door, the wind pulling him along so that he almost toppled over. That door was blown outward into the corridor, presumably by the W
inter Song
's idiot datarealm detonating catches in the door-frame, and too late as he hurtled past, he realised that he could have held on to it and used it to patch the gaping hatchway through which the air howled. His skin already felt cool, where whatever moisture had been on it evaporated. Two doors passed, one – maybe two if you're lucky – left. He got ready.

    He leaned into a crouch as he rushed toward the next doorway, and hooked his fingers around the prone door's edge, stubbing them hard enough to draw blood, but he screened out the flaring agony and concentrated on tightening his grip. Had he not, someone thudding into his back would have knocked him loose.

    It was Coeo. Fortunately Karl had slowed the adapted man's headlong flight, and Coeo flailed, grabbed and hung onto a metre-long projecting handle in the wall that was fixed at both ends.

    Moments later, Ragnar in turn bumped into Coeo, almost jarring the adapted man loose. Coeo released one hand, and Karl saw the muscle-snapping effort that Coeo needed to hold on while clutching Ragnar in the crook of the adapted man's free arm.

    "Told you! Stay behind!" Karl gasped.

    "Others have!" Ragnar replied, equally breathless, then coughed. Blood trickled from his nostril. He looked pale and his eyes bulged.

    Karl guessed that Ragnar had less than half his lung capacity. You have maybe a minute before it's too late for him, Karl thought.

    Coeo nudged Ragnar into a position where the settler could grab and hold on to the bar. Coeo looked to Karl who beckoned him. Coeo dived for the door to which Karl was still grimly clinging, and with a whirlwind of scrabbling fingers, gained a purchase on it against the howling gale tugging at his back.

    Karl was lucky – with his enhanced lungs he still had maybe a minute left, but he was unsure how much longer Coeo could last. Fortunately when Karl gasped, "Lift!" Coeo reacted immediately. Even so, it took everything he had to get the door to chest, then to shoulder height.

    Ragnar squeezed between them, and Karl and Coeo lifted again with the old man's help. Karl felt the spasm of a muscle-strain in his back, Coeo grunted and Ragnar moaned softly, but they levered the door upright and pushed it over the gaping hatchway.

    The wind dropped immediately, the howl fading to a whine, and no longer sucked along by the miniature hurricane, weightlessness again exerted its influence. Ragnar ripped a piece of his tunic off and stuffed it into the main gap. The whine quietened, and Coeo slouched, drawing a bushel of air into his lungs. Ragnar drifted against the wall, gasping.

    Karl took a deep rasping breath until he felt giddy. Mustn't hyperventilate, he thought. "OK." He wiped a trickle of blood from his nose. "Need to get back, stop this happening again."

    He helped Coeo to his feet, and turned to Ragnar, whose face had turned a muddy, ashen colour, but who shook off any offers of help, and bumped and barged back against them as they swaggered slo-mo through the snowstorm of debris that had swept out the bridge, toward where the others waited in the doorway.

    Arnbjorn and Orn pushed themselves to his father's side. "You stubborn old bugger," Arnbjorn said. "I told you to let me take care of it."

    Ragnar shook his head. "You're needed to run the farm. Yngi's not up to it, much though I love the boy. Orn will help you as well."

    "No need for talk like that," Orn said.

    Bera took Karl's arm. "Are you OK?"

    Karl smiled. "I was about to ask you the same question." She looked unaffected by the experience, apart from being slightly pop-eyed from higher blood pressure. Karl pressed the small of his back where the muscle had torn, and winced.

    "What now?" Bera said. "It seems to have gone quiet."

    "That's because the Idiot thinks we're dead," Karl said grimly. "That changes now."

    
Are you sure you wish me to do this?
Loki said. It was an all but rhetorical question – they had discussed it already on the way back.

    Positive, Karl sub-vocalised. We've lost too much time already. But only if you're sure that you can do it. A botched attempt will be worse than no attempt at all.

    
I'm certain,
Loki said
. And content to do it now. As soon
as the Idiot made an attempt on our lives, it legitimised any
response.

    Then let's stop talking and start doing. With his usual grimace, Karl plugged the jack into the nape of his neck and sitting down, said to Bera: "I'll seem to go out for a few seconds. Don't worry about it." He slumped.

You ran down the vast corridor that was no corridor at all, but a representation of the connection.

    Karl was far behind you, at the mouth of the corridor, arms folded. "Good hunting!" His voice echoed down the corridor. A breeze blew softly from ahead of you. You lifted a hand in acknowledgement.

    It felt strange, as if you were part of conjoined twins suddenly split asunder by a surgeon's laspel. But there was no going back, and you knew that being back in this sort of environment – even one whose setting was as impoverished as this one – was really, secretly, what you'd been waiting all these weeks of confinement for. You hefted the plasma-carbine one-handed, feeling its balance. It was symbolic of course – no more real than your lean, muscular body, but it was a potent symbol, which made it in many ways as real as you were. As real as the little canvas bag that you'd visualised into existence that was slung crossways over your shoulder, and which bumped against your opposite hip.

    You turned, leaving the corridor and entering the tunnel into the city.

Karl returned to consciousness like a drowning man clutching at a rope.

    "I thought you said catatonic," Bera snarled tearfully, tugging at his earlobe. "You didn't say anything about dying!"

    He gave her a broken grin. "Mere details," he said, rubbing his head. "Ach, no Loki lurking at the back of my mind. It's weird to feel empty-headed again, if you know what I mean."

    "Your head
is
empty, judging by that folly," Bera said. "What's happened to him?"