Moonsteed (8 page)

“Focus,” said Vladimir. “Easier said than done.”

Verity touched her heels to her mount’s flanks and gave the thought-prompt to move off, and they were away, out through the compound’s gates and onto the black ice plain that gleamed like obsidian in the morning sun, hoofs clapping on the ice, snorts of breath rushing from the horse’s nostrils over her shoulders and Verity’s knees. With the swaying motion of the gallop and the undulating ground opening before her at exhilarating speed, Verity felt the horse’s heartbeat as if it were her own, as though the beast and she were one.

About here would be right. She leaned back, tightening the reins and giving the command to slow. When the horse had come to a halt, she looked back to see Vladimir following some distance away, at an uncontrolled and wobbly canter.

“There’s no point trying to go medium speed in this gravity!” she shouted as he closed the distance. “Trotting and cantering has too much up-and-down movement! If you just gallop flat-out it’s smoother!”

Vladimir’s horse slowed to a jolting trot before stopping beside Verity’s. He looked uncomfortable and unnatural in the saddle, leaning too far forward and with his legs bent at the wrong angle. Verity kicked her feet out of the stirrups and slid off. She pulled the bore kit from the bag and began connecting the rods.

Vladimir slithered off his horse, landed off balance on his heels and grabbed hold of his horse to steady himself, wisps of vapor escaping the dehumidifier-warmer on the mouthpiece of his helmet.

“What’s this for again?”

Verity set the drill point on the ice and fastened the handle onto the rod. “It’s for monitoring the temperature and composition of the ice. The idea with this moon is that the Meritocracy eventually wants it for a permanent colony. Callisto’s not like Earth and Mars. It’s made of ice and dust, and if it heats up too much it’ll melt and turn into a ball of slush. One of the base’s functions here is to monitor the temperature and make sure it remains stable.”

“So what happens if it isn’t?”

“If it gets past twenty below, that’s not good. There’ll be a report on that and it goes back to MANTIcore, then probably the Electorate will nominate it for referendum, and then it’ll have to be decided.”

Vladimir set his arms akimbo and turned his head to survey the landscape. “It’s not my field, but I’d imagine heating it up to a habitable temperature, but not going so far that the ice melts, must be a pretty delicate balance.”

“It is.” Verity leaned on the handle with both hands, pressing down on the drill. She turned the handle and felt diamond teeth bite into the ice. “When they terraformed Callisto, they extracted carbon, nitrogen and ice from the crust, split the ice into oxygen and hydrogen, and burned the carbon in the oxygen to produce a nitrogen, oxygen, carbon-dioxide atmosphere to kick-start global warming.”

Vladimir looked vacant for a moment. Verity fancied she could see gears turning in his head. “What about the hydrogen?”

“That’s what’s used to power the fusion engine that generates power for the compound.” Verity turned the handle again. “Here, you have a go at this. You’re heavier than me so it might work better.”

Vladimir grasped the handle and twisted it. The point slid out of its indentation and scratched a white scar across the dark ice. Verity rolled her eyes.

“This thing’s rubbish!” he argued. “Why don’t you have a machine for doing this?”

“There’s a motor in it. You need to start it off by hand. You hold the bottom of it and I’ll do it.”

Vladimir knelt on the ice and held the rod with both hands. Verity leaned on it, turning the handle again. After a few turns it was in deep enough to start the motor. They held the bore mount still and watched as the depth gauge on the readout in the center of the handle rose.

The motor stopped and a few seconds later a figure flashed on the dial, and the handle beeped.

“Do you need to write that down on a computer or something?” Vladimir asked.

“No need. I just record it real-time into a spreadsheet on the ANT.” Verity had already sent the recording back to the base with a thought-prompt. She pressed the button to retract the drilling shaft and pulled the bore up from the ice. “Let’s move on to the next one.”

They took five more readings in this fashion on the route toward the scarp where Verity and John Aaron had chased the spy. As she came into the shadow of the great ice protrusions, Verity looked back to see Vladimir still lagging behind. “Hurry up!” she shouted. “Don’t be such a wimp!”

After he caught up, he asked, “Is there any reason for this?”

“I just told you what the reason was!”

“Not the bores! What I mean is, why use horses? Why not use a vehicle? It’s warm inside and you can’t fall off.”

Verity frowned. “Because most of the terrain’s no good for vehicles. It’s all right over there and around the base, but most of it’s all ravines and mess.” She pointed up the near-vertical cliff. “Last time I came here, chasing the spy, I went that way.” She paused to relish his daunted expression. “But this time, we’ll go the slow way. Now keep up with me!”

She kept to a slow canter as they followed the narrow path edged with sharp protrusions of ice and jagged outcrops. It wasn’t really safe to go flat-out with this little margin of error, anyway, and she’d be held accountable if Vladimir managed to skewer himself on the ice or, even worse, if he hurt the horse through his ineptitude.

Verity could see through the horse’s vision that Vladimir was twisting and shifting in his saddle to get a good view of the surroundings. “This really is quite spectacular! It’s got to be in the same league as the Mariner Valley, or the Grand Canyon!”

“Ya, whatever.”

“But look at it! It’s amazing! People would pay good money to come and look at this and have photographs of it.” He added, in a more pensive voice, “I hope it
doesn’t
melt. Does it have a name?”

Verity had slowed her horse to a walk. “We just call it the scarp. They run all around the Valhalla crater. This happens to be the closest one to the installation. These towers and pointy bits of lighter ice are unusual, though. They come from when there’s an impact and molten stuff from the mantle gets forced up through the crust and crystallizes fast.”

“I suppose before the moon was terraformed, they just used to sublime away, into those blunt columns you see on the plain?”

“Ya, that ice is older.”

“We ought to think of a name for it.”

Verity threw a glance over her shoulder. “They can call it Sergeant Verity’s Canyon.”

“Like they’re going to call it after you...”

“Well, they’re not going to call it after
you
!”

“You never know. I could become a famous geneticist. Like Pilgrennon.”

Verity’s horse snorted. “What do you know about Pilgrennon? He wasn’t Russian, and he did genetic engineering on humans, not horses.”

Vladimir stared up at the glittering crags. Verity followed his focus to the sharp cliff edge. “You know what else this reminds me of?” he said. “Torrmede.”

Verity grimaced. “How can it look like Torrmede? Stop name-dropping Torrmede into everything! Just because you went there doesn’t make you
special
or anything like that.”

“You know what I mean! Torrmede’s built on a steep rocky piece of land, and the rhododendrons all grow up it.”

“I never saw any rhododendrons at Torrmede or anywhere else that looked like ice spikes!” Verity checked the surrounding landmarks. This looked like the right place. On the ground she saw a lighter stripe scratched. Could that mark where a horse had slipped? She dismounted.

“Perhaps it’s your imagination that’s not up to task. Now where are you going?” Vladimir asked from behind her. There was that smashed stand of ice she’d kicked over to pack the head in. There, the broken points where the horse had gone down. At the memory of the horse’s death, a queasy sensation started in Verity’s stomach and began to spread upward into her chest. The base had recovered the horse’s body, but a dark patch on the ice, frozen blood, showed where it had died. Here was where John Aaron had attacked her, and she had spared him. With a sudden apprehension, she raised her eyes to the empty hollows and jagged shadows of the scarp, sensing something unfamiliar and sinister about them. What if he had a way to survive out here and he still lived, still hunted her?

She looked the other way, to the edge of the crater. That was where the spy’s body had fallen. Crystals sprouted like crenellations from the edge of the path, and she could see no sign of a descent, as she’d suspected. It wouldn’t be worth ordering a party to climb into that crater and drag out a corpse when all the information the Inquisitor needed had been in the spy’s mind.

“This is where I killed the spy,” she told Vladimir as she pulled the mountaineering gear out of the bag. “Do you know how to abseil?”

“No. And if that’s an offer, I don’t want to, either. I think learning to ride is enough for one day.”

Verity picked up the chisel and hammer, and pressed the heating switch on the chisel. “It’s probably best if you stay up here, anyway, for safety reasons.”

Vladimir got down from his horse. “Good.”

When the metal rod of the chisel glowed red, Verity pounded it into the ice with the mallet, the tip pointing downward toward the drop. The ice hissed as the chisel went in. She pulled it out and banged one of the pins into the hole, the water sealing it there as it refroze. She repeated this at another point two feet away and parallel to the first pin. After donning a climbing harness, she secured the rope to the pins.

With the rope connected to her belt, Verity pulled against the pins, testing them. She stepped to the edge of the path and kicked down, stamping off the ice stalagmites to clear a gap through which to descend. The fragments of ice rolled away down the side of the crater, dwindling until they became imperceptible over distance.

Vladimir watched her, fiddling with his armor. “What am I supposed to do if you don’t come back?”

“Well, go back to the base, of course. And I am going to come back!”

“Look, just supposing you die, what am I supposed to tell the Commodore you were doing?”

Verity shrugged. “Tell him the truth. I’m hardly going to care if I’m dead, am I? I’ll be half an hour at most. Keep the horses in the sun and walk them around a bit. It’s only twenty-five below so they should be okay.”

“I thought you said I’m not supposed to touch the big horse?”

“Well, all right, you are allowed to touch her in these particular circumstances. But remember what I told you about them. I don’t want to think up an excuse to tell the Commodore if I come back up here and she’s trampled you.”

Verity took hold of the rope, gave it one more tug and dropped backward off the path and began to abseil down into the crater. She soon fell into the rhythm of pushing off with her knees, letting the rope run, bending her knees and taking up the slack in the rope as her feet came back against the wall. Pockmarks, tiny craters and irregularities pitted the surface--she’d need them on her way back up.

The gradient slowly began to decrease and abseiling became more difficult. When the ground became level enough, she disconnected herself from the rope and turned to look around. The far side of the crag lay in an inky pool of shadow, the sun cradled in a rocky cusp on the rim. A few feet ahead, one of the fragments of ice she’d broken off at the edge of the path lay in a crater. The spy couldn’t have landed far from here. An irregular lump lay in the crater basin some distance away. She could still sense the horse’s signal, although it was indistinct because of the ice in the way. Through the big mare’s vision, she could see Vladimir sitting on the ice near the pins.

She looked up at the rope snaking down from the path above. The crater was huge and looked pretty much the same from any position within it. What if she went down there looking for the corpse and couldn’t find the rope again? That wouldn’t do. Not seeing any other way to mark it, she pulled off her helmet and switched on its lamp, and set it down at the bottom of the rope. Cold air stabbed into the membranes of her nostrils and lungs, and her breath blossomed into white vapor when she exhaled. She felt vulnerable without her helmet, particularly with the knowledge that John Aaron might still be at large. Her eyes followed the rope up until distance swallowed it, to where she knew but could not see the path lay. Aaron might kill Vladimir and follow her down the rope. Or he might disconnect the rope and throw it over, stranding her out here. Tense fear and doubt knotted about her innards. Perhaps it had not been a good idea to come here looking for information she had no right to.

Well, she was here now, so she might as well get on with it. The sooner she found that body, the sooner she could leave.

She shuffled forward down the steep incline. As she drew closer, she saw the irregular object was indeed the spy’s body, lying on its back with the arm still bent over the midriff toward the hip. Looking down on it, she could tell from the unnatural angle of the pelvis that the fall had broken the spine. Needles of ice had crystallized from the neck wound, giving the bloody flesh a fibrous, grainy appearance.

Verity crouched to examine the corpse. He had worn no proper armor, just a standard type of ship-suit made from a closely woven insulating polymer fiber with a lightweight armor waistcoat, boots and gloves over it, all made up of durable fabric covered with plates of thin polymer alloy. A scarf unraveled from the head. He’d probably been trying to breathe through that, keeping his nose warm. He must have been desperate and
freezing
, clinging to the back of that horse as he tried to flee from her and Aaron.

She frowned as she saw where his hand reached over to his hip. She could see no gun there as she’d expected. Perhaps it had detached from him in the fall. From the way his fingers were poised, it looked as though he’d been reaching for a pocket on his waistcoat, beneath the belt. Verity grasped the arm, trying to move it out the way, but it was frozen solid. The hand felt as if it were made of stone inside the glove. She rolled the stiff body over to get a better view of the pocket. The fabric of the waistcoat was still flexible enough for her to reach inside. Through her glove, she could only feel a numb friction. Her fingers slid over something. As she fumbled, her hand closed upon a small flat rectangle. She couldn’t feel anything else in there.