Burnt Ice (24 page)

‘No more or less than any other
crewman, Marko. I am most interested in this project. I would very much like to
be involved in the process. I know that Veg would like to have a little input,
as well. Would you consider that, Marko?’

‘Certainly. Thank you, Stephine.
I’ll consider it, if I make this creature.’

‘Marko, could I see you in the
mess please? I need you to talk with Fritz,’ interrupted Harry.

‘On my way Thanks for the tour,
Stephine. I really like what you’re doing. So, when are the first lessons for
cooking?’

‘As soon as we are fully under
way.’

He walked down the stairwell and
onto the food storage and mess deck. Fritz was slumped over the main table.
Harry looked at Marko, shrugged, then pointed to Fritz. Marko nodded, walked
over and sat down across the table from Fritz. The tech sergeant lifted his
head and looked across at Marko with bloodshot eyes, cheeks still wet with
tears.

‘I really, really liked her,
Marko. I knew that Sirius was super-different from me, but I got to know her,
and she was a really good person. I
miss
her. She had an amazing mind
and could pick up stuff so quickly. And she was really interested in me. In
me,
Marko. Me, the short, big-headed, angry
freak.
I don’t know what I’ll do
without her. Don’t bullshit me about time healing and all that crap. It won’t —
not the way I am wired anyway. I’m still pissed off at you. I really wanted to
see her for one last time.’

The captain walked into the mess
and across to the table.

‘And you can fuck off, captain. I
don’t want to talk with you, just Marko and Harry. So go away.’

Marko looked across at the
captain, knowing that he would not do or say anything about the outburst. They
all liked Fritz, in spite of wanting to beat him with a stick — frequently.

The captain looked at him. ‘Fritz,
first thing that you should know is, if you get killed, you are not coming
back. That is the ruling from the Administration. They created you; they own
your arse. You are only alive because you are an asset to them. Now, they are a
very long time away. I have a proposal for you. If you want Sirius back you
will effectively have to go into the tank with her. Jan is preparing the
emergency life continuation tank right now. Stephine has considerable
experience with this technology, as well. I just had a conversation with her.
She believes that an intact mind and body could greatly assist the speed of
someone being re-lifed. Now, I’ll have a conference with Lotus about re-lifing
Sirius. Lotus does not think that it’s a good idea to re-life a monitor,
because she would emerge fully human. Type S.’

‘And there’s a problem with that?’
said Marko.

‘Only that I’m sure as hell not
going to allow anyone around me to chop her up and attach her to that monitor
ironmongery again, though she will still be Games Board as we cannot get into
her mind with our systems. Not that I would want to anyway. Those changes are
up to her if she wants them.’

‘Yeah, that’s a given,’ said
Harry.

‘But listen to this, Fritz. You
will have to look after her, every step of the way. You will be linked to her
for the next six months, while a new Sirius is created. The other thing that
you must acknowledge is that when we get back to the Sphere, Sirius goes in one
direction and us in the other. You are part of this team. She can never be.
That, Fritz, is cast in stone. There is no debate here. None. Jan and Harry are
not happy about it either, but they will do it for you because they care about
you. Stephine and Veg don’t have a say in the matter. Marko, how do you feel
about it?’

‘Big ask, boss. But I believe
Fritz can handle it.’

‘Right, Fritz. Those are the
rules. Are you in?’

Fritz, his face still ruddy,
looked at each of them and then back to the captain. He straightened in his
chair and nodded.

‘Yes, captain. I understand.’

With that the captain clapped
Fritz on the shoulder and walked out, leaving them. Marko tried talking with
Fritz about what had happened on the comet but Fritz just stared at the table,
so he gave up and watched the drones working in the ice outside on the large
screens.

Some time later he returned. ‘Lotus
very reluctantly agrees. We went through all the cases of this sort of thing in
the past, and looked at some of the more obscure protocols as well. The good
thing for you in all of this, Fritz, is that Jan, and her bag of tricks, will
place a Soul Saver in that empty, ceramic housing at the base of your skull.
Veg — of all people — knows how to make one. Harry, go have a yarn with him
about that, and get it sorted. Marko, they may need your help as well in
fabricating it, as Fritz will need that in place before immersion, so stay
available. Fritz, go and see Jan after you have put all your affairs — and your
cabin, it’s a bloody mess! — in order. Marko, could you oversee the drones?
They are all working at attaching the new comet to the front of this one. I
need to talk with Jan and Stephine about how this is all going to work.’

The drones were working well
under the control of Lotus, so Marko guessed that the captain just wanted them
all busy while Fritz and Sirius were getting organised. Nothing worse than a
bunch of hangers-on, he thought. He watched as the main comet was pushed up
against the new one. The Crab Nebula he had seen from the beach when he was
with Helena was still visible in the starscape beyond it. The drones with the
landers and the skuas, all under remote control, were slicing pieces off the
huge ball of ice and rock with the lasers. The stone and iron ore pieces were
being welded together, forming an enormous shield, with the valuable ice being
fused underneath it against the original comet. He watched the spectral
analysis of the materials rolling down the screen.

‘Lotus, I am seeing useable
quantities of iron, molybdenum, gold ... and ... silver. Wow, platinum! Big
chunks, plus a whole raft of other good stuff. But minuscule amounts of rare
Earth materials. What’s your intention with any of this?’

‘As we find it, I am dumping it
all into one prepared area in the ice. Once under way we shall tunnel up and
across to it, using and refining it as we please. I discussed this with Captain
Longbow. The decision was made to get under way quickly, and worry about this
later.’

‘Thanks, Lotus. Captain — we
could use that platinum and a chunk of the other located materials right now,
for the fusion units,’

‘You want it, you go get it,
Marko. I want us under way in seventy-two hours tops. That’s all the time you
have, chap. And I cannot spare you any of the drones.’

‘Understood, captain. Hey, Veg.
You feel like a look outside? Come up and see me on the bridge. Have a
challenge for you.’

He started to prep his heavy
engineering unit from his console as Veg arrived.

He looked through the lists of
valuable materials, grinning. ‘Good call, Marko. We’ll go have a look, eh? I’ll
grab some equipment from our ship and meet you in the engineering bay in thirty
minutes. Fritz’s Soul Saver is being grown by Harry using a direct feed from
our ship’s computers, so you and I are not needed anyway.’

Marko sent a quick message of
their intentions across to the captain. He detoured by the accommodation deck
to check on Fritz, who was cleaning his mess of a cabin.

‘This is me getting “my affairs
in order”. Shame I can’t come with you, Marko. Jan and Stephine have already
started the re-life of Sirius and I need to be in the tank within a couple of
hours. Here, take this. I’ll be wearing one as well. Something I’ve been
working on in my spare time with Sirius. It’s a communicator based on light
frequencies. Something I pinched from the octopoids. As long as one unit can
see the other, they will communicate. I have coded it so that it’s unbreakable,
interception-wise. I have linked it into my neural tap, so I will think my
responses and you will hear me talking. You just have to talk, OK? That way you
can also send me music. I would die without music, Marko — you know that. I
need your help please, mate. You just have to listen to my music, so while you’re
within line of sight to me, I can hear it too. Jan won’t let me take the
standard comms links in the tank for music, so you’ll have to do that for me.’

‘OK, mate. This I will do for
you, but, shit man, you will owe me big time, right? See you soon, Fritz.’

Marko walked back to the
engineering bay. He pulled his light engineering suit out, stripped and lay
down in it. It was similar to the combat suit, although this one carried the
links and controls to the heavy engineering oversuit. After it had formed
around him, he climbed out and then pushed up against the general-issue heavy
engineering suit container which, over the next few minutes, attached a
high-powered skeletal structure to him, together with a high-rated power pack
incorporating all sorts of equipment. The HUD came alive as the suit asked for
the mission parameters. Marko advised ‘raw material recovery’ and additional
modules, including a mini mining unit, were selected and attached to him. He
also requested a larger hopper, which was also clipped on. Veg arrived wearing
a similar unit to Marko’s, but sleeker and more refined. Feeling heavy and
cumbersome, Marko clumped across to the airlock. They crosschecked each other’s
equipment.

‘Lotus, could you cycle us
through the airlock please?’

The inner doors closed and sealed
behind them, the airlock was evacuated of atmosphere, and then the outer door
opened to present them with a tunnel through the ice, and the outside of the
comet, some hundreds of metres away. Using the MMUs, they powered out and flew
over the surface of the ice until they located the large crater where all the
ore was being placed and locked in position using ice. They; used Lotus to
identify the most valuable materials first, leaving the gold and silver behind.

Over the next sixty hours, with a
few breaks for sleeping and snacks, they amassed three and a half tonnes of
material and stored it in the engineering bay. On their last trip, Veg grabbed
a few kilos of gold, ‘to play with’. Back on board, with the gear serviced and
stowed, they watched as the main rock shield was fused against the ice.
Everything was ready to go. Marko checked on the progress of the diamond
chemical thrusters and was impressed to see that the first of Stephine’s hugely
altered pumpkin flowers, complete with piping, was only a week away from being
available to put in the nanote bath. He also checked Topaz — he had ramped
enough power into the unit for it to be on the threshold of sentience again.
Nothing was amiss with the programs, subroutines and diagnostics. He ramped the
power up again, without waking the unit, placing it in a state of dreaming
sleep, and established the monitoring levels for the next few weeks.

~ * ~

Four

‘This
is a ten-minute warning, people. Everyone to their stations please.’

After a quick drink of what
Stephine called tropical fruit juice, which did not taste like any fruit he
knew of, and a pickled meat sandwich, which he decided was so delicious that he
grabbed another, Marko hustled up to the flight deck.

‘Right. All stations, I note
green across the boards. Let’s burn some ice. Marko, one per cent power please.
Increase by a further one per cent every hour. Let’s get this bus moving.’

As they were effectively welded
into a huge ball of ice that already had its own momentum and a rock hat, the
main concern was that the engines could tear loose as they pushed against such
a mass to change its trajectory and direct it where they needed to go. The
engineering drones, under the control of the captain, Veg and Harry, had spent
a great deal of time re-stressing and beefing up all the structural support for
the primary drives by accessing the basic grown framework within the ship and
feeding it large amounts of carbohydrates. Even so, they ramped up the power very
slowly. Lotus, with the benefit of Patrick’s wide engineering knowledge, had
said that everything would be fine, but like all of those things, the
actualities could sometimes be more complex. As born cynical engineers, this
was something the crew knew all too well.