The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (84 page)

He pulled a parchment from his coat pocket, struggling to unroll the cold-stiffened sheet. With a charcoal stump held crudely in a mitten, he wrote: Boy very tired. Soon night. Make camp bottom of hill.

Tochee moved about behind the windscreen, lowering its head so that Ozzie could look into its forward eye segment. The patterns flexed and twisted. Roughly translated they told him: ALSO TIRED. CAMP GOOD.

When Ozzie looked along the path, he could just see a few twinkles of topaz and jade light through the trees below as the Silfen moved ever onward. Their singing had long since faded from the air. That was when he realized that the skier who’d fallen far behind hadn’t caught up yet. If the man had any sense, he’d try and make it back to the covered sleds tomorrow. Ozzie didn’t even know which one of the five it was. Some of them had modern camping gear with them—that might see them through the night. His own confidence was bolstered by knowing their own air-insulated tent was good enough, especially with a heatbrick.

Orion was taking a big drink from his thermos.

“Yo, man, can you make it down to the bottom?” Ozzie asked.

“Yes. I’m really sorry, Ozzie. You two should go on. I can probably make it back to the Ice Citadel.”

“Don’t be so stupid. It’s almost time to stop anyway. I want to be in the tent before the sun goes down.” He picked up the tow rope and handed it to the boy.

The track down to the bottom of the hill was undemanding. They kept going for a few minutes more until they found what passed for a small glade. The heavy ice-smothered trees soaked up the red sunlight, turning the forest floor a gloomy crimson. Ozzie pulled their tent from the back of Tochee’s sledge, and gave it to Orion to sort out, while he set up the rudimentary bone frame and fur covering. Once more he lit a couple of candles in front of the sledge windscreen. He saw the alien pull the tab on a heatbrick just as he wormed his way back out of the covering.

Orion had pitched their tent a few yards away, and was already inside. Drowsy yellow light from the kerosene lamp shone out of the open flap. As he hurried over, the impact of how isolated they truly were struck him. Alone in an arctic alien forest, without any natural light or heat, where unknown creatures possibly lurked close by. This was the eternal child-nightmare that never quite left once adulthood had been reached, not even after three hundred fifty years.

It wasn’t just the cold that was making him shiver as he crawled inside and sealed the flap. Orion made a big show of pulling the tab on a heatbrick. The two of them slowly took off their bulky fur coats and over trousers, then their outer layers of sweaters and trousers. Ozzie plucked at his cold, sweat-sodden checked shirt, wrinkling his nose in disgust. As soon as they’d stopped their exertions, he’d begun to get cold very fast, despite the fur coat.

“I’d forgotten how bad it is out there at night,” he grumbled.

“I thought we’d be away from here by now,” Orion said sheepishly. “We traveled so far.”

Ozzie squeezed the boy’s shoulder. “Remember the kind of progress we made when we arrived here? You did really well out there today. I was ready to call it a day anyway.”

“Thanks, Ozzie. Do you think the others made it?”

“I don’t know. Most of them were keeping up with the Silfen.”

“I hope they did.”

Ozzie opened the bag containing some of their food packages. “What would you like for supper?”

Ozzie really didn’t want to wake up when his insert alarm went off. Lying snug in the soft warm folds of the sleeping bag, every limb ached abominably, and as for his abdominal muscles … It was pitch-black inside the tent, so he switched his retinal inserts to infrared, and searched around for the kerosene lamp. It lit with a flare that made him blink, casting its dreary yellow glow around the interior. The flame from the icewhale oil they used as fuel was soon puffing out a little twist of reeking black smoke.

“What’s wrong?” Orion coughed.

“Nothing. It’s morning, time to get up.”

“You’re wrong. It’s night, still. I’ve only just got to sleep.”

“ ’Fraid not, man.” Ozzie unzipped the top half of his sleeping bag. His thermal undergarments had dried out, as had the checked shirt and sweaters that were squashed into the bag with him. But the heatbrick was all but exhausted, so the gradually cooling air had allowed condensation to form all over the inside of the tent fabric. He tried to put his checked shirt on carefully, but every time a hand caught the side of the tent, little droplets rained down. Orion complained some more as he struggled into action, dressing himself.

They pulled the rings on packets of scrambled egg and bacon. For a few glorious moments the smell of hot food overpowered the dreadful oil.

When they were almost ready to venture back outside, Orion asked, “Do you think we’ll get there today?”

“Honestly? I don’t know, man. I hope so. But if not, we just keep going, it can’t be far now. Not even the Silfen can survive here for long.” In his head, their own limit was a constant worry. Between them, they had another eight heatbricks, that gave them three more guaranteed safe nights. They might be able to survive in the tent without one, but it would be an evil night, and Tochee would be finished. How they’d carry the tent and food and other stuff after that was a moot point.

They emerged from the odor of the icewhale oil into the numbing cold of the dark forest. It had snowed again overnight, depositing a thin layer over the fur sheet protecting Tochee’s sledge. Once again, anxiety plucked at Ozzie as they pulled it back to see if the big alien had survived. It had. Manipulator flesh gestured happily to them from behind the windscreen.

The tent and coverings and bags were packed away within half an hour. Fortunately, the snowfall hadn’t been heavy enough to completely cover the tracks left by the Silfen. Just before they started, Ozzie held up the little friendship pendant. Its sparkle wasn’t as strong as yesterday, but tiny slivers of blue light still crawled around inside it. He took that as an encouraging sign, and pushed off.

A wind picked up, drifting through the forest all morning. It carried little flecks of snow with it, forcing Ozzie to wipe his goggles free every few minutes. Whenever he paused for his drink, he had to go and brush solid flakes off the sledge windscreen. He wasn’t sure if it was actually snowing up there above the treetops, or if this was simply residual swirls that the wind was rearranging. It had always puzzled him why the ground here wasn’t covered by several feet of snow and ice. Then Sara had told him that once or twice a year a gale would blow for days, scouring away the loose snow and tiny ice pellets. Somehow that didn’t surprise or even bother him, this whole planet was weird; privately he considered that it might be as artificial as Silvergalde.

He deliberately set a slower pace that morning. Yesterday had been a determined effort to keep up with the Silfen, grasping the faint chance that they might lead him away off the planet before nightfall. There was still an urgency to their trek, but a constant and realistic pace was more important now than pure speed. His new concern was how the little zephyrs were steadily eradicating the compacted footprints. Although, as if in compensation, it did seem like the trees had parted slightly to form a rudimentary path through the forest.

Lunch was soup again, snatched in the paltry lee of one of the clustered sphere trees; with its snow coat disguise it could have passed for a swollen Christmas pine. As before, even a short stop hauled their body temperature down, for which the hot soup seemed unable to compensate. Ozzie hated the sensation of cold sinking into his toes, he couldn’t stop worrying about frostbite. When they reemerged from behind the tree, the falling snow was thicker, eliminating almost all trace of the tracks they’d been following. To make matters worse, it was starting to adhere against the fur of their coats. The sledge was like a small lumpy mound of snow on runners.

Ozzie could feel the tiny particles working their way around the rim of his hood. Slender lines of ice were burning against the skin of his cheeks. After a few minutes, the trees began to thin out. While it made skiing slightly easier, it reduced their protection from the wind and ice flakes. It wasn’t long after that when the Silfen tracks vanished completely. He slowed to a halt, then had to push off again quickly as Tochee’s sledge nearly slid into him.

This was what he’d feared happening right from the start, this world’s weather closing in on them, and losing the path. He fumbled with his mittens, pulling out the friendship pendant. A small bluish glimmer still lurked below the surface. Ozzie turned a complete circle. He thought—possibly—it was a fraction brighter at one point. It was a pretty tenuous assumption to gamble three lives on, but he had nothing else.

He went around to the rear of the sledge and found a length of slim rope. With one end tied to his waist and the other to the front of the sledge, he set off again. The wind at least seemed to have died down somewhat. But if anything the snowfall was thicker. He was stopping constantly to check the pendant, while the whole time a treacherous thought in his mind kept asking
why bother?
At least when they arrived on this world he had the comforting ignorance of believing that nothing bad could happen to any traveler on the Silfen paths. Now he knew his life was on the line, and he was trusting it to a piece of alien jewelry. How tenuous was that?

His timer told him they’d been out in the open for forty minutes, though it felt like most of the afternoon, when he came to the edge of another forest. As soon as they were inside and under the protective boughs, the swirling ice flakes abated considerably. Ozzie kept the rope tied to the sledge though.

“We’ll make camp in a couple of hours,” he told his companions. He’d really hoped they could have kept going for longer, but once again this world had thwarted them. He was exhausted by two days of battling his way across hostile terrain, and he knew Orion was never going to be able to take much more of this. As for Tochee … well, who knew? But tonight, they would have a long rest, which would at least enable them to keep going for another full day. Beyond that, there was nothing to think about.

He kept going, moving heavy arms and aching legs in slow rhythm. His feet were numb now, the cold cutting off all feeling below his ankles, which allowed his imagination to summon up the worst-case images of what he’d see when he took his boots off that evening. At least the forest was on a gentle downward slope; there were mounds and ridges, of course, but the overall progress was helpful. He wasn’t sure if he could manage another big uphill slog. The snow was deeper, too, covering all the usual stones and snags. Several times he shook it off his fur coat where it was clinging.

“Ozzie!”

He turned at the shout, seeing Orion waving frantically.
Now what?
Despite nerves that were getting badly stretched, he signaled Tochee to stop, and skied around to the boy.

Orion pulled his goggles off. “It’s wet,” he exclaimed.

Instead of shouting at the boy to put the goggles back on, he leaned in closer to see what had happened.

“The snow,” Orion said. “It’s melting. It’s warm enough to melt.”

Sure enough, the ice on the goggles seemed to be mushy, sleet rather than ice. Ozzie snatched his own goggles off, and looked straight up. A million dark specks were falling out of the uniform coral-pink sky. When they landed on his exposed skin, they didn’t sting and burn as they had before; they were wintry, yes, but they quickly turned to slush and dribbled over his skin.

Ozzie propelled himself over to the closest tree. He raised a pole, and whacked it hard against the trunk. The snow loosened, falling away. He hit it again and again until the bark was exposed. Real, biological bark. It was a proper wooden tree. He laughed with more than a touch of hysteria. It was a stupid irony that he’d gotten so cold he couldn’t actually tell when the environment warmed up to a mere ten degrees below freezing.

Orion had churned his way over. He looked at the exposed patch of crinkled bark with trepidation.

“We did it!” Ozzie shouted, and flung his arms around the boy. “We fucking did it! We are gone from that bastard world. Out, out, out. I’m free again.”

“Are we? Have we really escaped?”

“Oh, goddamn yes! You bet your sweet ass we have. You and me, kid, we did it. Oh, hey, and Tochee, of course. Come on, let’s go tell it the good news.”

“But Ozzie …” Orion glanced up. “The sky’s still red.”

“Ur, yeah.” He squinted up at it, not wanting to damage the image, although it was a very bright pink, especially for this time of day—that is, the time of day on his digital timer. If they were on a different world—“I dunno; there’s more than one red star in the galaxy.”

He tugged out his battered parchment as he slid over to the front of the sledge, and wrote: I think we made it. Can you keep going a little while longer?

AS LONG AS I LIVE.

When Ozzie held the friendship pendant up, the spark of light had almost vanished. “This way, I think,” he said, and pushed off once again, not that he was really worried about direction now. Physically, the conditions had hardly changed, but simply knowing they were clear of the dreadful Ice Citadel world allowed his body to tap some previously unknown energy reserve.
Just like an icewhale,
he told himself.

Of course, now he knew what to look for, the signs were obvious. The thick snow, different types of tree with bony branches outlined against the sky, the lighter sky itself. With every yard they moved forward things changed. It wasn’t long before he saw thin henna-colored wisps of grass sticking out above the snow. Then there were little rodent creatures scampering about around the trees. Branches shed little piles of snow to fall around them with constant wet thudding sounds as the thaw grew. They were heading down quite a steep slope now, losing height rapidly.

The end of the forest was abrupt. Ozzie shot past the last trees and onto a snowfield that was broken by boulders and widening patches of orange-tinted grass. They were halfway along some massive valley created by Alp-sized mountains. A lake of beautifully clear water stretched out below him, extending for twenty miles on either side. Its shores were also ringed with trees, whose dark branches were just starting to bud. The snowfield died out completely about half a mile ahead of them, with the grass sliced by hundreds of little seasonal streams as the melting edge slowly retreated upward. On either side, the tree line was almost constant, drawing a broad boundary between the lower grass slopes of the mountains and their rocky upper levels.