Ice Sky Storm

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

Floating alone in his small prison cell, with only the stars for company, Tarkos heard voices.

No. He didn’t hear them. He… felt them. Through his implants, like a trickle of current teasing his brain.

Hours had passed since his interview with the Councilors. He’d slapped at the crystal walls and cursed in English after they left. He’d sent angry demands to Savannah Runner on the only radio connection allowed him. No reply had come. Finally, he quieted and drifted, miserable with his own thoughts. He closed his eyes. He neared sleep.

That’s when he felt them. Voices. Neelee voices speaking Galactic, and AIs buzzing with accelerated communication in mathematical protocols. The signals seemed slightly stronger when he floated over to one side of the room—the side of the room, he realized, where the hologram projector thrust through the crystal wall.

He was sensing the network traffic from Savannah Runner. When the Councilors had questioned him in this cell, they had left the network connection open. It was weak, not designed for communication with his implants and so not sensitive to their paltry signal. He pressed his cheek against the projector, and the signals grew slightly stronger. He had access to Savannah Runner’s network. To test it, he sent a request for communication with his cruiser.

In two seconds the cruiser answered. Tarkos exhaled, only then realizing he’d been holding his breath. He smiled widely, unable to suppress a sense of triumph and relief when the familiar protocols locked with his own. He missed his ship, he wanted out of this cell, he wanted to do something.

The data came slowly, but he downloaded a stuttering status report. The starsleeve and the cruiser both remained where they had docked with Savannah Runner. All airlocks were closed. Ship robots performed standard maintenance, but otherwise nothing moved in his ship.

Tarkos sent an activation order to his vacuum armor, stored in the cruiser. It answered with a scrolling list of system initiation reports. He waited until the list completed. Then he told the armor to climb out of its closet. It did so, pulling hand over hand down the narrow hall till it reached the ventral port, just a few steps behind the starboard airlock. The port did not have an airlock, but with the cruiser docked inside the starsleeve it was the only port that opened to space. The cruiser sealed itself from the starsleeve and began drawing down the atmosphere, pumping what it could into storage. When only a few millibars of atmosphere remained, the ship vented the rest of the gas into space. Tarkos knew this might attract the attention of Savannah Runner, but he gambled that the Neelee crew, although vast, was occupied with far greater worries.

Moving very slowly, careful to control the armor precisely over the low bandwidth and delay of this network connection, Tarkos had the armor remove a rocket pack from the stores closet and attach the single engine to its back.

The floor port irised open. The armor climbed out and pushed away from the cruiser. It used the small, weak jets built into the armor—essentially vents that released suit atmosphere—to turn till the armor faced him, head first. Then he ignited the rocket pack.

Tarkos opened his eyes and pulled himself over to the facet of his crystal cell that faced the Savannah Runner. He strained his eyes, looking for the armor. For long minutes he waited, staring at featureless black. He began to worry that the armor had been intercepted, even though his implants showed it free and in flight.

Then a small point of reflected light emerged out of the dark background of Neelee-orner’s twilit continent below. He watched the point grow until it resolved into a rectangle of metal formed by the shoulders of the armor. It came directly toward him.

Tarkos sent the command to cut the rocket pack’s engine, then he turned the armor so that it faced him feet first. He gave the rocket pack a short, intense burn to slow its approach. When the armor approached to a hundred meters out, he killed the engine again, flipped the armor and made it spread its limbs wide. The gecko grips extended from the boots and gloves.

It hit the crystal cell hard and sent them both spinning. But the armor gripped the exterior hull and held. They tumbled a long while. Tarkos pushed off a wall and floated in the center of the room, nearly stationary in a cell that spun around him. He used the armor’s jets to slow the spin. It a few moments, after a long series of white bursts of freezing gas emitted by the arms and legs of the suit, the walls came to a stop relative to the stars and planet below.

The armor climbed along the cell exterior until it found the portion of the hull that transmitted status reports back to Savannah Runner. The armor extruded a laser and using wide beam dispersal heated the comm system till it failed. Tarkos reasoned his jailers would reply quickly to a report that he had escaped, but slowly to an absence of reports.

“Now,” he said aloud, “now comes the hard and dangerous part.”

_____

The cell had no airlock. He presumed that whatever trick made the walls collapse and meld together and separate from Savannah Runner would reverse if pressed back against the ship. But out here, and not under his command, the cell had no exit. It was an aquarium with no top.

He could think of only one solution. The armor would have to cut a hole, decompress the cell, and climb inside. The armor would then have to depressurize, open to admit him, he would climb inside and the armor would close up and pressurize. Tarkos well knew that exposing the interior of his armor to vacuum would damage the service robots that crawled around inside the suit. But he could not think of another alternative.

He gave the armor clear instructions with a trigger command. He took off his shirt, went to the toilet in the corner of the room that had been extruded by the floor after the cell had separated from the ship—that toilet had been the thing that had made him realize the Galactics had essentially just arrested him. He tied one arm of his shirt around his wrist, and the rest of the shirt he tied around the toilet. It used all of the shirt: he had to crouch in the corner. He pressed himself against the walls, hyperventilated with a dozen fast breathes, and squeezed his eyes shut. He sent the trigger command.

Two heavy particle beam weapons, one in each of the armor’s shoulders, popped up from under a small panel. The barrels swiveled forward and fired two beams into the cell. The hull smoked and burned. The escaping atmosphere clouded around the armor and whisked away the heat and fumes.

Tarkos first heard the hiss of escaping air, then felt a terrible shocking cold as the pressure plummeted. He squeezed his eyes painfully shut. His ears roared, and then a stabbing pain in each eardrum was followed by hollow silence.

With his implants, he could track the progress of the armor, seeing through its cameras. The ticks of his internal clock slowed to a crawl. Tarkos felt a terrible need to exhale, surprising him because he expected and needed to hold his breath for at least a minute. Ten, eleven seconds passed. He felt his skin bruising. At seventeen seconds, the armor completed its cut. A round disk of the cell wall drifted off, pushed by the last escaping atmosphere. The armor climbed inside.

Twenty one seconds. When the armor had clambered half way inside, the hole in the wall began to close. Tarkos felt a surge of panic: the wall could close on the armor, locking it half in, half out of the cell, so that he could not get into the suit. Then he would die for sure.

Twenty-three seconds.

The walls continued to close. The armor pulled its torso through, and then the shrinking wall touched the armor’s thigh.

The wall pulled away, as if uncertain by the contact with the strange material. This provided enough time: the armor pulled all the way into the room. Twenty-seven seconds.

Tarkos looked at himself through the armor’s visuals: he sat crouched in the corner, his face compressed into a horrible grimace, his skin visibly bruising to purple. He tried to rise. His mouth opened. It seemed involuntary, something he could not attempt or prevent. But air ripped out of him before he clamped his mouth shut. He felt dizzy. Almost nothing remained in his lungs. Thirty-four seconds.

He struggled with the shirt tied to his wrist. The knot had been pulled tight. He couldn’t undo it. In a panic, he yanked at the cloth, drawing the knot tighter. His view through the armor via his implants grew dim. Consciousness started to slip away. He should have given the armor instructions to prepare for that possibility: he should have told it to draw him in if he were unconscious. Too late. He should have…

The wall sealed closed behind the armor. Air roared into the cell.

Tarkos felt the pressure return. He gasped. The air felt thin and worthless, but as he gaped like a fish on land the air thickened. He opened his eyes.

The cell had resealed and repressurized. He floated there a long while, all his body throbbing with pain. He gasped, gasped, feeling that he could not breath enough air.

After a minute his lungs no longer burned, and his breath came almost at a normal pace. “Well,” he croaked. “That turned out worse and then better than I hoped.” Speaking started a fit of violent, painful coughing. His lungs hurt with a dull ache. His throat burned. His voice sounded distant, barely audible: damage to his eardrums. He felt angry with himself for having panicked and for having tied a slipknot over his hand. He was glad his partner Bria had not been there to see him.

The armor opened along the front, revealing the soft green interior. Tarkos untied the shirt easily now. He pulled it on. He pushed off the wall. He bumped into the armor, but climbed into it as together they spun in the cell. The armor closed around him and sealed.

He cut another hole in the wall. As the crystal oval of hull drifted away, its edge sparkling from shorted circuits, he activated the rocket pack and shot through the gaping hull. The cell tumbled away behind him. He burned straight at Savannah Runner.