Ice Sky Storm

Prologue-2

Bria and Preeajitala stepped aside, and the robots hurried up the bright docking hall, tapping at the plates to gently guide them as they drifted along the way. In a minute they were gone, out of view inside the flagship.

“If the Alliance survives the first wave of attacks,” Tarkos muttered, “those are going to be trouble.”

Bria turned to Tarkos. “Remain here.”

Tarkos frowned but did not move. Bria followed Preeajitala into the gleaming crystal passages of Savannah Runner. The airlock door closed before him with a hiss.

An hour later, Bria returned. She seemed to Tarkos even more sullen than usual. She squinted all four eyes. Her lips were drawn tight over her long, sharp teeth.

“Put OnUnAn Gowgoroup into cruiser,” Bria told Tarkos. “Set path: intercept docking with OnUnAn embassy ship.”

“What?” Tarkos said. “They’re letting Gowgoroup go?”

Bria said nothing.

“Did you explain that the ambassador murdered a crew member?” Tarkos said. “Did you explain how Gowgoroup betrayed us to the Ulltrians? Don’t they care that this surely means the OnUnAn government has betrayed the Alliance?”

“Many citizens met,” Bria said, “Discussed, agreed. Done now.”

“Well, we don’t have to agree. We can refuse to do it. I don’t understand the point of all this democracy and anarchy if we’re always just doing as we’re told.”

Bria stared at him, her top two eyes squeezed nearly closed. Tarkos knew the expression well: a Sussurat closing her top eyes meant, you are being so stupid it shames me to see you with all four eyes. Tarkos growled in frustration and pulled himself down the starsleeve’s hall to the door of Gowgoroup’s quarters. His own g*n waited outside the door, clinging to the floor on three thin legs and guarding against escape. He picked the pistol up and cancelled its orders to kill Gowgoroup if any part of the OnUnAn left its quarters. Then he holstered it.

The door opened. Methane and sulfur dioxide wafted into the hall. Tarkos coughed. “Gowgoroup. Come out.”

A gray slug, the size of a large Terran dog, slid toward him. Its pseudopod made it able to cling to surfaces in microgravity, and it moved as if it had weight. It lifted its eye stalks and waved them a moment, considering. Its acrid odor enveloped Tarkos, making his eyes water.

“Where have we slid to?” it gurgled through its vertical mouth.

“We are in orbit of Neelee-ornor.”

Two other slugs slithered out of the smog. They pressed against the one that talked. Gowgoroup was an OnUnAn, a colony being. Most OnUnAn had six members. Gowgoroup had been six members, at the beginning of their mission. But its betrayal had gotten three of its members killed. It was a cripple now—half a mind, by OnUnAn standards.

“Has war slid here?” the lead slug asked.

“Not yet,” Tarkos said.

“But do you stretch your eyes and see battle?”

Tarkos thought about that a moment before he said, “Sure. Stretch your eyes far enough and battle has already begun. War is coming here soon. They’re already preparing for it. Now, get in the cruiser. You’re being returned to your ship.”

Gowgoroup waved its six eye stalks, not moving. The hesitation surprised Tarkos, and then it filled him with hope. If Gowgoroup asked for asylum, maybe it would talk. Maybe it would tell them about other OnUnAn betrayals. Tarkos opened his mouth, ready to say something, anything, to encourage the OnUnAn to stay.

But the central slug, a silent gray coordinator, slid forward, dragging its long mouth tentacles along the sides of the other two slugs, as if encouraging them. The other two followed, each leaving a wet slick along the floor as they pulsed along.

_____

The OnUnAn’s ambassadorial ship floated a few kilomeasures from Savannah Runner. A gray and black irregular shape, like a moss covered stone, it tumbled slightly as it orbited the flagship. A small cloud of detritus and gas collected near the ship, making the space around it seem dirty.

Sitting alone in the cockpit of the cruiser, Tarkos steered close, a few dozen measures away, and then sent a ship-to-ship request for a docking port. No answer came, but the ship stopped tumbling, then shifted till one smooth facet faced them. It extruded a docking port. Tarkos feathered the maneuvering jets till the ships tapped, their docks aligning. Electromagnets made the docking sleeves clang together with sharp force.

Tarkos looked back down the narrow hall of the cruiser. His commander floated in the hall, next to the OnUnAn. Bria reached a claw forward and slapped the control for the starboard airlock. In the microgravity, the action pushed her away from the wall. In the back of the cruiser, the OnUnAn’s acceleration couch opened. The three parts of Gowgoroup slid over onto the wall and clung to it with their pseudopods. Pulsing slightly, they moved up the wall and over the ceiling.

The inner airlock door opened and the wet smell of mold, laced with burnt sulfur, filled the cruiser. The smell of the OnUnAn ship’s atmosphere made the slugs hurry. First the large gray warrior slug, then the mute coordinator slug, slipped along the ceiling above Bria and wriggled over the airlock doorway. They left a gleaming trail of mucus along the hull.

As Tarkos watched, the leader slug, the part of Gowgoroup that usually talked, stopped above Bria. It drew its head and tail ends together, forming an arch that pushed it away from the ceiling. It drifted down. Bria shifted slightly aside, to let the slug move not toward her face but toward her arm. It touched her arm and wrapped around her bicep. Bria’s four nostril’s flared and she got a distant look, all four of her eyes wide open but focussed into the distance. The slug waved its eye stalks. They floated like that for one minute, then two minutes, before Bria reached forward, pulled the OnUnAn slug from her arm, and pushed it into the airlock. It drifted away, into the OnUnAn ship.

Bria looked at Tarkos. “Harmonizer,” she said, “monitor docking release.”

Tarkos unfastened his seat hold and flipped over the top of his chair. He pushed off the seat’s back, and shot out of the cockpit. He stopped himself on a ceiling handle just at Bria’s side.

Bria pushed herself forward and climbed into the cockpit. She strapped into the pilot’s seat.

Tarkos looked down into the darkness of the OnUnAn ship. The single leader slug of Gowgoroup faced him, drifting backwards into the brown air. It retracted its eyes, the eye stalks fattening into low bulbs, as if it shrunk back from from an approaching threat. Its vertical mouth flexed. Tarkos thought it might be about to speak. But the outer airlock door closed. Tarkos frowned and closed the inner airlock door.

Bria liked to follow protocol closely, and protocol required that Tarkos be in the cockpit when they began to accelerate. It was against protocol to ask Tarkos to stay here, by the airlock. But Tarkos assumed that the unusual request meant that Bria expected something strange to happen. So he tried hard to pay close attention to everything he could. He reviewed the airlock procedures and found they all worked correctly. He instructed the ship’s small robots, which crawled around on the inside and outside of the ship like metal mice, to ensure that no foreign objects were left in the airlock or were attached to hull. He used his implants to send a message to his vacuum armor, waiting in its closet a few steps away, instructing it to boot up and run preparation checks. Then he turned on the monitor by the door and told the cruiser to give him the perspective from just outside the airlock door.

With a ringing sound, the docking sleeves disconnected. The cruiser drifted back, pushed by its jets. Tarkos’s feet pressed against the hull. The OnUnAn ship rotated slightly and then began to accelerate away. Tarkos watched it recede a moment.

A flash made him start. The monitor shone white, blinding and featureless. The exterior camera adjusted to sudden glare and darkened the image, making the OnUnAn ship seem to form in contrast, as the space around it returned to black. A sparking line burned across the OnUnAn ship, and in its wake flames spurted from the hull, burning with fierce intensity. The deep cut spit gas that pushed the ship into a tumble.

Then the laser beam that cut into the ship reached the engines, and the embassy of the OnUnAns exploded.

_____

“That’s all I know,” Tarkos said to the holograms of the three Councilors. “I wasn’t even sure our cruiser had shot the OnUnAn ship, though the angle looked right. But when I got to the bridge, the lasers were hot and the firing command was still there in the list of recent computer commands.”

“So you observed Commander Briathursiasaliantiormethesess fire on the OnUnAn ship,” the Velerit squeaked.

“No. I didn’t see Bria give the command. It could be that someone managed to take control of the firing system.”

“You told us: the ship is quantum locked to you and the commander,” the Velerit said.

Tarkos frowned. “Yes. That’s true.”

“What did you then, confused and ignorant, say to the commander?” Nereenital asked.

“I demanded Bria tell me what had happened. When she did not answer me, I grew angry. I shouted. But she refused to talk.”

Tarkos sighed. He looked from the seQua, to the Velerit, to Nereenital. “After that, we docked with Savannah Runner again. A group of Executive robots seized Bria and me and separated us.” Tarkos had been led through a maze of decks and then thrust to the end of a dead-end hall. He had stood there, perplexed when the robots stepped back, and then he had been shocked when the crystal walls sphinctered closed and the end of the hall where he stood pinched off, separated from the ship, and began to drift away. He had not imagined such a thing was possible; the hull of the Savannah Runner appeared to be brittle crystal. “And so I wait here, useless to the Alliance, while the war that will decide our survival begins.”

The holograms of the three Councilors watched him, silent.

“Councilors,” Tarkos pleaded. “I don’t know what happened on the cruiser, but I know that Commander Bria is absolutely loyal to the Alliance, to the Harmonizer Corp, and to the balance of life in the Galaxy. She would do nothing but what was in your interest.”

The Velerit and the seQua faded. “No!” Tarkos shouted. He reached toward them, as if wanting to seize their images and force them to remain. But they were gone.

“It is my right to talk to the Council as a whole!” Tarkos said. “Or to talk to the crew of Savannah Runner as a whole. I should be able to state my case, before I’m punished like this.”

“You are not being punished,” Nereenital said. “These meetings you request will be arranged. But later. War leaves little time for gatherings.”

“Then please let me help. If you won’t let me fight, then let me talk to Bria,” Tarkos said. “Or let me talk to Preeajitala.”

“Special Advisor Preeajitala isolates herself in silence.” The Captain’s image began to fade.

“Surely she’ll talk to me. Surely I can—”

The flagship’s Captain disappeared.

Tarkos cursed and threw up his arms in frustration. The action made him begin to drift through his cell. The walls grew clear again, and the stars of the Galaxy spun around him, all of them very, very far beyond his reach.