Burnt Ice (49 page)

In the darkness, with light
enhancement operating, Jan flew them back to the wreck and hovered fifty metres
above it. The winds had picked up, with waves starting to break over the wreck
as the tide turned.

‘Veg, I have enhanced the
biological gains on our gear. I am patching the feeds into your systems,’
Stephine announced.

Looking at the screens everyone
groaned as they saw the seafloor around the wreck was now alive with roiling
balls of the eels, interspersed with more outlandish aquatic creatures, which
appeared to be short, fat versions of the eels with long, feather-like fins
terminating in spines.

‘Shit, Stephine! That is not a
pretty thing. This is a powerful machine, but hell, even it will not be able to
fight that lot for long. Suggest we pull up to a sensible altitude, Jan, before
one of them makes a jump for us.’

Jan needed no further encouragement
and they climbed to hover again at two hundred metres.

‘Fritz, have you any joy in
getting through the control systems in the wreck? We still need the cryo unit
to eject.’

‘Nope, it is literally frozen in
place. Still no good, but give me an hour, then I may be able to tell you what
happened in that ship.’

‘OK.
Basalt,
this is Veg.
You watching this?’

‘Yes. You appear to be in a bit
of a pickle.’

‘Why are we in a pickle, Michael?
I like pickles, but we are not floating in vinegar. Why would you say we are in
a pickle?’

‘It is a figure of speech, Glint.
It means that you are in a state of dilemma.’

‘You humans are just too weird
with your speech. Yes, we are in a dilemma. We don’t know how to get to the
crew or the AI.’

‘Glint, I hope that one day when
Marko decides to take a few journeys with me, you will come along!’ said Rick. ‘I
have a solution. Stand off the wreck. I am going to cut it into pieces, to
isolate the AI and cryo units.’

Jan moved the lifter until they
were five hundred metres away. Stephine’s ship was opposite the lifter as four
large cones of laser beams flashed onto the wreck. A fraction of a second
later, as soon as the air inside the cones had become ionised, particle beams
were fired from
Rick3,
who was still two hundred kilometres above them.
As they watched, the beams slowly started at the outsides of the wreck’s hull,
generating great plumes of superheated steam and vaporised material as they cut
their way to the centre of the semi-submerged hull, finally intersecting. Within
a few minutes the entire rear section of the wreck shuddered and slipped away
over the side of the underwater cliff face, disappearing into the depths,
creating a great boiling mass of dust and mud. The cut segment of the wreck
settled a little further then stopped moving.

‘OK, that’s impressive. But what
now,
Rick
? There are even more scavengers and hunters arriving to join
the feast of bits, now that you’ve sliced and cooked a few hundred more.’

‘Yes. Now you shall see something
I rather like. I am extending a lifting hawser down to the wreck. It will be
with you in two hours. So relax and watch the fun. Fritz, you claim that the
crew is already dead. Are you able to verify that yet?’

‘No,’ said Fritz. ‘But I think
that their deaths have something to do with the AI being in a state of
gibberish. Consider that they have been in this system for nine years standard.
OK, the only way any of them could back up their Soul Savers would be to do
normal uploads to the ship’s computers and AIs. Now, here is the kicker. Why
did they construct another special AI to look out for anything in orbit? Any
normal configuration AI could do that easily.’

“That is strange,’ said Veg.

‘Strange, all right,’ said Fritz.
‘Looking at how those bloody eels went after us, I think the ship was probably
invaded early on after they crashed. They rigged up a series of freezing plates
and surrounded themselves with ice — a smart idea as it would be forever
replenishing itself. That would explain why so much of the hull is frozen, and
that it’s centred on the cryo units. Problem is, there is no clear space around
the cryo suite. All our gear shows it as solid. And I mean
solid.
There
are no gas cavities in the cryo units, so they are frozen solid, right through.
And there is no way I know of that ordinary ice temperatures can support a
person in cryo., It’s too warm. It also means that each unit has been breached.’

‘Breached? Oh no.’ said Stephine.

‘I think.’ said Fritz, ‘they lost
the computers and the ship’s AI. And I think that they knew they wouldn’t make
it out, so they individually gave up a big Soul Save per person into the
special AI. That, boys and girls, is a lot of data. Stephine told me that there
were twelve other crew. They’d been away from their base two years before
coming here. That AI’s gibberish is twelve souls and all their information
trying to make contact to upload, all at once — and they’re caught in a loop
because they can’t hear each other, and are all being fed the information that
someone is here. Something that I would consider a really true hell.’

There was a long silence as
everyone considered Fritz’s theory, then
Rick
spoke.

‘This is why you’re a genius,
Fritz — even by today’s standards. OK, so how the hell do we separate twelve
life streams, and the AIs as well? Fourteen life streams all welded together.
That calls for a special AI to be built expressly for the task of separating
and restoring each. I have started construction of it. I am going to sever out
the housings of the ship’s computers and primary AI.’

Three cone lasers, working in a
staggered line, stabbed again into the wreck, scribing a ten-metre-diameter
circle with a five-hundred-millimetre gap all the way around it. As soon as the
lasers shut off, the plug of material subsided a little into the wreck.

‘Veg, Jan, go grab that for me
please. If I have done it right it should remain intact.’

Flying the lifter in the steadily
increasing winds and obscuring spray required Jan’s full attention. In the
others’ screens the weapon capability and loadouts came up with instructions
from Rick of their individual arcs. Their weapons-control joysticks folded out
of the consoles and presented themselves. They could feel the weapons cupolas
being deployed from the carapace hull of the lifter. Seconds later the images
from the cameras on their individual weapons came up on their screens. Marko
could hear Fritz complaining of having to man a launcher. He also heard Glint
chortling with delight over his assigned weapon. The three humans had rotary
cannons, but Glint, who was obviously Rick’s favourite, had a 100mm
snub-barrelled grenade launcher with a high rate of fire.

‘Jan, you fly. The rest of you
fight, if necessary. Stephine, I am linking you in to control the lifting
claws. Soon as the plug is clear, I want you to climb straight up, Jan. I’ve
sent down a recovery unit to relieve you of the piece at altitude, because I’ll
need you back down at the wreck when the hawser arrives,’ Rick said.

Behind and below the cockpit, the
four jointed arms with claw units unfolded, then moved around, as Stephine took
them through their extensions and capabilities, getting used to how they
operated and felt.

Jan flew the lifter over the nose
of the wreck, moving past the severed piece, and spun the machine hard, dropping
quickly as Stephine reached down with the claws to grasp it. As soon as they
touched the wreck the water boiled with activity. All the creatures lifted
themselves up, seeking anything edible on the lifter.

A writhing mass of sea animals
began climbing over each other in the rush to get at them. Marko instinctively
started firing as soon as they got within twenty metres of the craft,
slaughtering great numbers with the 30mm rotary cannon, raking it backwards and
forwards through his assigned arcs, not concentrating on any one target. He
could also feel thumps above them. Nightmarish creatures launched themselves
onto the top casing of the lifter, most sliding off to crash back onto the
wreck or into the sea, some with bullet holes torn through them.

Fritz and Veg were also firing
continuously. Glint was cheerfully launching short-fused grenades to burst
among the mass of advancing creatures. Jan kept feeding maximum power into the
thrusters and AG units, struggling to keep the machine on position, as Stephine
reached in and locked onto the plug of wreck.

‘Climb, Jan! I’ve got it.’

Looking down at the claws
grasping the piece of wreck, Glint could see hundreds of sea denizens threading
around it, trying to hold it down. Being hard-linked into the weapons board
through one of his fingers, he instantly selected the fuse settings and fired
dozens of grenades around and below the piece. Each detonated in a spiral,
shredding the attacking creatures and releasing the piece. As they rose
steadily higher, the fire from the guns and grenade launcher switched from mass
killing to shooting individual creatures trying to batter their way into the
lifter, swinging off the landing gear.

‘Hold steady, Jan. We have a few
still trying to force entry into the top of the hull.’

Climbing to the designated
altitude, Jan held station as they took stock, checking the machine for any
serious damage, then in turn grabbing a quick visit to the toilet before a hot
drink and a package of sandwiches each. Marko watched the larger moon appearing
to rise up out of the sea, bathing the scene below in reddish light.

‘This is Longbow. We have a
confirmation of what is about to wreck this system, people. The combined
astronomicals and gravitational sensors have located a very fast-moving neutron
star. It’s a wanderer, but its speed is nothing short of remarkable. The mass
is four times that of the local star, so even if it flies right through without
hitting anything, this system is going to be ripped to pieces.
Rick
has
brought forward our departure time by another twelve hours. Within ten hours we
have to be gone.’

‘So how are things going on the
moon, Rick?’

‘Proceeding at pace, Michael. We
should be able to retrieve the core without too many difficulties.’

~ * ~

Harry
listened to the exchanges of his friends on the planet below, smiled to himself
as he luxuriated in blissful suspension in the gel tank.

‘It must be an interesting
feeling to be rejuvenated, Harry.’

‘Yeah, Flint. This is something I
really look forward to whenever I get to see Rick. One of the benefits of
having once been a crew member for this being. Now, when we get back, the crew
will comment on how much smoother my skin looks. You just have to say that Rick
gave me a course of the latest cosmetic skin treatment, but that it is only
temporary, which, as far as my skin is concerned, is correct. Actually it is,
but for the rest of me the treatment is engineered to be considerably more
effective. Pity that it cannot be released to everyone, but the Haulers
maintain their secrets, as do we who crew for them.’

Looking at the screens around the
tank, Harry and Flint watched the action on the planet, and the two other
segments of
Rick,
which were holding station and rotating around the
fixed point that was the library cache. Lasers many times greater in size and
power than the ones used on the Gjomvik wreck were vaporising a metre-wide hole
hundreds of metres deep, cutting a cone of material straight out of the moon
with the cache at its centre. The power of the lasers was such that the
material explosively vaporised, generating two constantly moving plumes of
dust, which slowly drifted away in the tenuous atmosphere of the moon. Harry
looked to another screen, which showed one of the many smaller engineering
ships that Rick had deployed to gather any discoveries located by
Basalt’s
intel drone.

‘There’s some intriguing tech
here, Harry.’ Rick said. ‘I’m analysing everything of interest. There were
three distinctive races in this system, apparently. From what I can see, they
existed in harmony. Well, at least not in a state of war. Then everything was
abandoned — a different type of harmony? I managed to recover the desiccated
remains of some of them from a crashed shuttle-type ship, not far from one of
their bases. Everywhere I go, Harry, I see stories frozen in time. Sentience is
tenacious, is it not? But it doesn’t take the time to record everything it has
done! Sadly, we just can’t hear how the story played out by finding bones and
broken equipment. I very much wish I had more time. Do you think Marko and
Glint will join me one day?’