Maximum Ice (9 page)

Kellian went on, “You’ve got to crash about sometimes, if you hope for something new.” It was awful to beg, especially under the smirks of the young nun.

Sister was gazing at her intently, as though searching for a sign.

Kellian was aware that she had a bad reputation, that she was older than the nuns liked for recruits, that her future depended on this nun’s whim. “Please,” she said, swallowing her dignity.

“Well,” Sister Patricia Margaret drawled, “I’ll take you, I suppose.”

“But Sister,” the young nun began.

The other waved her off. “I’m too tired to argue. I’ve been at this all day, Sister. We’ll take her. If worse comes to worst, she’s strong and can work in the kitchen.” The old nun stood, smoothing her black robes around her.

Kellian thought, Thank God. Unfortunately, she also said it out loud. A spike of stomach acid greeted her mistake. The nuns were devout atheists.

“Don’t thank God, young lady,” the sister said, “thank
me.
God has nothing to do with it.”

Kellian could not bring herself to say,
Yes, Sister.
She remained silent.

Narrowing her eyes, Sister Patricia Margaret said, “We will expect obedience, Kellian Bourassa.” As she swept past her, heading for the door, she added, “If you come with us, please leave your
gods
behind.”

I’ll take you
, the nun had said. She was in. Kellian grinned at
the younger sister as Sister Patricia Margaret left the room. She was in, but she’d have to watch her step. She had no intention of abandoning her faith, but she’d keep it to herself. The sisters were touchy about God.

Palm to Ice, Swan called for light.

Cloaked in shadows, he had followed an icy arterial. Ice was quiescent here. But he summoned a flow of data, and this was enough to lighten the tunnel. He trudged on.

Stronger now, Swan roamed farther from his little den in the Heart of Ice. It was remarkable, these elaborations Ice had made to coretext in his absence. Originally, they had called the place coretext. But that was engineers for you. Swan preferred Heart of Ice, with its ring of strength and poetry.

Hunger bubbled in his stomach. While exploring, he was on the lookout for a cache of food. He’d exhausted what little he had. Perhaps he would find a pantry stuffed with canned goods, or a meat locker. OK, maybe the meat locker was a remote possibility, but the engineers
did
work here at one time and might have left provisions—freeze-dried meals, candy bars, dried fruit, cans of tuna, sardines, peaches, beans, that sort of thing. Some might still be edible.

He was in dreadful shape, but he resolved to be patient. After ten thousand years of suspended life, one did not become— animated—in four days. Aside from his general weakness, he’d noticed that he entirely lacked a sense of smell. Ice would have to fix that. Because of the arrival of the ship, Ice had awakened him early, not quite ready. Bad timing indeed. What was the ship called?
Star Road.
An odd name. And they had wasted no time in coming to the surface, sending a crew member to one of the major preserves. From the radio transmissions, it was a
woman. Solange had a delegation at that preserve.
Leave the woman to me
, she’d said.

So he would, for the moment. A familiar euphoria came upon him, a giddy yet simple happiness. He was alive. Alive, when so many had died. He had escaped the bad death of his associates, poor bastards, and the great death on the surface.

His stride grew longer as he passed side tunnels where Ice, itself giddy with what it could do, exuded its body

The whole of coretext was a grand construct, a palace. It had its own brand of symmetrical beauty, one that pulsed with infusions of light, depending on the logic sequences of Ice. Not even the designers could have said what Ice was now, or how much it had accomplished. Ice knew many things, yet it didn’t know that it knew them, so it couldn’t quite convey the whole of itself. It responded to queries. So he must think of the right questions. OK. All in good time.

Swan stopped to gaze into a side gallery. Something odd about the place.

Entering, he stopped to get his bearings. Around the perimeter of the trapezoidal cavern something was buried in the wall, behind a flat plane of Ice. Perhaps it was a cache from the time before. He walked forward and knelt in front of the nearest window. Inside, was an oblong form of black. Hand on the ice bulging overhead, he brought light to the place.

Lying inside was a woman. Around the woman’s neck a heavy circlet chained her to her pallet. His stomach rose in nausea. Fighting the urge to run—he mustn’t run, it could break his bones—he drew closer.

The woman inside was alive. One had no need to chain the dead. She was cocooned, imprisoned. His stomach twisted around itself as he leaned over and retched bile. Tears sprang out of his eyes, and his nose sprayed the contents of his stomach, all acid.

He backed into the rear of the gallery, staring at the display before him. The other six windows all revealed a similar horror. Women—they were nuns by their dress—all chained and waiting—for what? Why chained? He gulped air as the cavern walls seemed to squeeze together, forming a ditch around him.

Memory came back to him, heralded by the stench of rotting flesh. The ditch, the great, deep ditch where…

He fell to his hands and knees, and began crawling out of the chamber.

Only it was a ditch, an unspeakable trough where he was trapped.

There were too many bodies to bury, during those weeks when the virus stalked the town, killing and killing. The townspeople came and took his mother and father and brother and threw them in the big truck with all the other bodies.

He was eight years old. He was so sick they thought he was dead as well, and into the truck he went, and then it was lifting up in the air, and down they slid into the great ditch. People in the streets were crying and screaming, demanding proper burial for the dead, but soldiers kept them back.

When he struck the ground, he fell next to a foot protruding from the dirt, where yesterday’s dead lay covered with a shallow layer of soil. He jerked away and groped toward the bank of the trough, crawling, scrambling over bodies.

Finally reaching the bank, he cried for help, but the soldiers laughed and shoved him back down with shovels. “If you’re not dead yet, you will be.” He climbed up, and they pushed him down. Up, and pushed down again. When they tired of the game, they raised their rifles to stop him. Then he slunk away under the shelter of the overhanging bank. When night came, he managed to haul himself out and run away from the mass grave.

He waited nearby for his parents to climb out too. If he
could come back from the dead, so could they. But they wouldn’t come.
Father, he called out. Mother.
They had always been with him. Where were they now? How could they stay dead and not come to him, wrapping him in their safe arms? Darkness engulfed him, and his body filled with tears. When the hot, salty water got as high as his eyes, tears spilled out. Near dawn, when he saw dogs and birds feasting in the pit, he began to run, and then he couldn’t stop running.

He ran through the streets of Copenhagen, shunned by people who were afraid of him. Afraid of one come back from the dead. But he wasn’t afraid anymore. Once you’ve died, you don’t have to again.

Now, here in the Heart of Ice, the living were buried once more. He slumped against the wall. A cool mask covered his face, where the sweat had congealed. His stomach felt like it had been stapled to his spine. But sense was returning.

He asked, in the subvocal manner that was as swift as thought:
Who buried these women?
But he got no answer. Ice, which knew so very much, didn’t know everything.

Standing at last, he considered smashing the windows, liberating the poor creatures, rending apart those circlets and chains. Perhaps they would truly die when taken from their vaults; perhaps they would thank him with their dying breath. That image was a comfort. He thought that when he was stronger, he would do just that.

Swan shuffled back to his quarters, stunned by what he’d seen. He thought it could only be Solange Arnaud who had chained her own people. To what possible end? That she could subject her followers to such torture made her a more terrible ally than he had imagined. And she dared to talk of ethics. A strange and chilling mix, that woman.

He reached his den. He had returned unsuccessful in his search for food. Picking up one of the cans that lay open on the
floor, he pulled back the flap of the lid and peered inside. It was empty, except for flecks adhering to the sides. He began licking it clean.

A steady, scouring wind beat at the lean-to Wolf had devised against the side of the forward sled. Their passenger was unconscious again, and bound in the rear sled in Zoya’s former place. She had treated his wound as best she could, but there was little she could do.

To escape what Wolf called
the pack
, he had taken them up into a region of hills, stopping on a promontory from which they could look down on the valley. The man insisted there was a pack of animals in the vicinity, a notion that Zoya found both exciting and unsettling. His word for the creatures, however, was beyond her translator as yet.

The radio transmitter crackled: “…
the storm, if it gets worse. Over.”

“What’s that?” Zoya asked, “What about the storm?”

“…
send the shuttle, if necessary. Over.”

Wolf, digging in a sack for food, glanced at her, as though he understood the words,
send the shuttle
, and disapproved.

“No, no need,” Zoya said, “We’re snug in a tent, waiting it out.” In any case she didn’t want to jeopardize a shuttle during a storm like this, though it was sweet of Anatolly to worry.

“Kkkkkkkkk,”
sputtered the radio.

Zoya enunciated: “Can’t hear you. Everything’s fine, Anatolly. We’re having lunch, actually. Zoya out.” She shut down the radio and turned to face Wolf.

He had laid out a simple meal. For the sake of goodwill, she was sharing it with him, trusting her inoculations. She smiled at him, and said “Thank you,” in his tongue. The dried meat
was tough, but savory. Clearly, there were animals to be hunted somewhere, and that was more heartening than anything.

“The storm will hide our tracks. And our scent,” Wolf had said. Nevertheless, he craned his neck now and then, listening.

She wondered what else he might be listening for. It was perhaps a good idea Janos had, to bring that gun.

A noise outside, a soft flapping sound, caused Zoya to jump.

Wolf said, “Snow collapsing from a stack.”

He called it
snow…
and it did seem more apt from a visual standpoint, if not a molecular one.

She took another morsel of meat.

“Where do you come from, Wolf? Where is home?” She whispered the words to her translator, and took its rendition. The phonetic inventory of Wolf’s language was changed yet familiar, more a dialect than a different tongue.

“No home but Ice,” he replied right off.

“Everyone is from somewhere. No family?”

“No.”

She gazed at him. “That’s sad.”

His face looked younger in the shade of the tent, and the lines of his face, softer. But his eyes were sterile blue—not unfriendly—but nothing more, either.

“Where were you born?”

“On Ice.”

“Some people live—on the surface, then?” she asked.

“Traders do. Not many. On the barrens, you die young.”

“The barrens?”

He spread a hand, indicating the snowy land.

She asked, “The snow witches live on the barrens, too?”

Wolf pulled a bone toothpick from one of his coat pockets and dug at his teeth. “Until I catch them.”

“Why do they choose to roam the surface?” It was hard to imagine they found many travelers to loot—and murder.

He narrowed his eyes, pausing as though doubting she could know so little. “It’s their way,” he said finally

“So you hunt them down.” She took another piece of meat. She wanted to keep him talking, and it was surprisingly good jerky.

“One in particular.” He gouged at a piece of food lodged in his teeth. “Snow Angel, I call it.”

“Ah, a grudge, perhaps?”

He offered her the toothpick, which she declined. Sometimes, when he didn’t answer her, she thought she had spoken poorly, that he didn’t understand her. At other times she thought him openly evasive.

“What was the crime?” she asked.

Replacing the toothpick, he began repacking the remains of their meal. After cinching the pack closed, he turned to face her. “The snow witch killed my family.”

Zoya nodded slowly. “I’m sorry.” Sitting there next to him, she felt a moment of openness between them. “Children?” she asked, hoping there weren’t.

“Two,” he said. “Two children. The witch showed no mercy.”

“Why did—the witch—do such a thing?”

He shrugged. “It’s what they do. Until I catch them.”

So, there was the story. Sorrow and revenge. She felt an ache for him. And knew better than to show it.

They were quiet then for a long time, listening to the fine crackle of grit blown against the tent. Wolf turned his head, listening intently. When he listened like this, his eyes seemed to cloud over, as though he gathered all he had into one sense, leaving the others abandoned.

After a moment he got up and left their shelter. She rose too, stepping out into a high wind, thick with pelting sand.

Wolf was standing a short distance off, on a promontory
overlooking the valley. With his barrel chest and his great fur jacket, he looked like a bear reared up on hind legs.

When he came back, she asked, “The pack?”

He nodded. “Close.” He walked back to the rear sled. Throwing off the tarp, he gagged the unconscious passenger, then replaced the covering.

Zoya watched him, knowing she had pushed humanitarian measures for a witch about as far as she could. “How many are there?”

“Thousands.”

Zoya peered into the frenzy of blown sand. Thousands. She had taken some comfort in being armed. That comfort suddenly grew cold.