The Icerigger Trilogy: Icerigger, Mission to Moulokin, and The Deluge Drivers

by Alan Dean Foster

  “As I feared.” They were inside the complex now. Curious engineers and technicians looked up from their work as their supervisors walked past. Corfu was already getting hot, but he followed anyway. He had nowhere else to go.

  “There’s got to be something we can do,” Antal muttered. “If they take us back, it means mindwipe at least.”

  “Better to die. The body lives on but the soul perishes.”

  Antal eyed him askance. “What do you mean, ‘soul’? Mindwiping just removes whatever the psytechs identify as criminal tendencies. When it’s over you’re still the same person you were when you went in.”

  Bamaputra was shaking his head. “Are you so credulous as to believe the government’s propaganda? They leave you enough to function with, but you are not the same person. Something vital has been taken away.”

  “Sure. The criminal part. Just the criminal part.”

  “But we are not criminals, you and I. We are visionaries. I do not think I could stand to lose the visionary part of myself.”

  The foreman frowned, but Bamaputra appeared to be completely in control of himself. “Yeah, well, I’ll take care of securing the station, making an announcement about what’s happened and what we can expect. There’s only the pedestrian entrance and the cargo dock to seal. No matter how much portable firepower they can bring to bear I still think we can keep ’em out long enough to do some bargaining. Meanwhile you can start shutting stuff down.”

  “Shutting down, yes, of course,” Bamaputra murmured softly. “There are records to destroy, chips to erase, people to protect.” He turned on Antal so sharply that the foreman jumped in spite of himself. “Whatever you do, do not negotiate with this September person. Try to talk to the scientists. If we are fortunate, there may be a government official among them. Such types will go to almost any length to avoid bloodshed. I will see to the pumps and reactors while you brief the staff.”

  “Got it.” They separated, leaving behind a confused and panting Corfu ren-Arhaveg.

  Only much later did Antal reflect on his supervisor’s words. Seeing to the pumps and reactors did not necessarily mean shutting such systems down.

  There was some desultory resistance put up by the ragtag imperial armed forces of Yingyapin. It didn’t last long. Spears and swords weren’t much of a match for beamers and energy rifles. Despite the pleas of Hunnar and Elfa, Colette directed her troops to shoot only to wound. After all, as Hwang explained to her, the citizens of Yingyapin were as much victims of the visiting humans’ deceit as anyone aboard the Slanderscree. Once the truth could be explained to them they should become useful members of the expanding Tran union.

  When the last soldier had dropped his weapons and fled, those on board the skimmer considered what to do next. Iriole was studying the entrance to the buried installation through a monocular.

  “Door looks pretty solid. I’m not sure we can blast our way past.”

  “We shouldn’t have to,” said September. “They know it’s in their best interests to surrender peacefully. They can’t go anywhere. The threat of busting in should be sufficient to induce the lower echelons, at least, to come out with their hands in the air. Can the skimmer make the climb?”

  Skimmers were designed to travel no more than thirty meters above a solid surface. They were not designed for ascending steep inclines. They were not aircraft. Still, if they moved slowly, Iriole thought they might be able to make it to the level area fronting the entrance. He looked to his employer for instructions.

  “Let’s give it a try.”

  Ethan put his arm around her. Somehow it seemed the right thing to do. Didn’t feel bad, either.

  “Everybody take a seat and strap down,” Iriole told them. “We’re going to tilt some and I don’t want anybody falling out.”

  When the awkward climb had been accomplished and they landed outside the massive doorway, Grurwelk Seesfar wanted to go back down and make the exhilarating ascent all over again.

  “Mr. Antal, sir?”

  The foreman turned to the young technician who’d barged in on him. “What is it? I’m busy?”

  “I think you’d better come with me, sir.”

  “Can’t. I’m trying to do a dozen things at once right now. Didn’t you hear me over the com system? Don’t you know what’s going on?”

  “Yes, sir. But I still think you’d better come with me. It’s Mr. Bamaputra, sir.”

  He removed his right hand from the sensor screen and turned to her. “What about Mr. Bamaputra?” he asked quietly.

  “You’d better come quick, sir.” That’s when he noticed that she was so frightened she was shaking.

  A crowd had gathered outside the central control room. It contained the master panels for programming reactor output. Armored glass enclosed it on all four sides, standard protection for the sensitive heart of the installation. Except for Bamaputra the room was deserted. It was also locked from the inside.

  A single speaker was set in the glass next to the transparent door. “Shiva, what are you doing in there?”

  The supervisor turned to smile back at him. “Preserving a vision, perhaps. Surely you recall our discussion wherein we talked about greatly accelerating the melting of the ice?”

  The technician who had fetched Antal pointed into the room. As the foreman scanned the readouts she’d indicated the small hairs on the back of his neck began to tense. The figures he read belonged only in manuals, not on green screens. They continued climbing even as he stared.

  “Shiva, you’re going to overload the whole system! You’ve probably gone beyond several limits already. You need to let us in so we can emergency override and shut the system down.”

  “If we do that now, we will not be able to start up again,” Bamaputra explained quietly. “I have ample food and water in here with me. I really can’t allow override and shutdown at this point. It would interfere with the vision.

  “I believe you underestimate the system’s integrity. It will hold at these levels and we will accomplish fifty years’ work in a few months. I am counting on you to bargain with these people to buy me that much time.”

  “You’re going to blow the whole place!”

  “I am not. Talk to the engineers.”

  Frantically the foreman sought out one of the installation’s chief techs, asked her for an unbiased appraisal.

  “He’s right,” the woman said. “Nothing will explode. It will melt. Not just the reactor cores: everything. If containment fails, there’ll be a short, quick release of heat. It will dissipate rapidly.”

  “How much heat?”

  She didn’t bat an eye. “Millions of degrees.”

  “What do you think the chances are of maintaining containment?”

  The woman turned to the older man standing behind her. His jaw and neck displayed the marks of an addict. “I’d say about one in ten.”

  Antal whirled back to the speaker. “Did you hear that? Your chances of bringing this off are one in ten.”

  “A better chance than a Commonwealth court would give us.”

  “The opposite side of that,” the foreman shouted, beyond frustration now, “means there’s a ninety percent chance you’re going to turn the inside of this mountain into slag.”

  “Then you’d better hurry and leave, wouldn’t you say?” Bamaputra’s tone was icy.

  “He is crazy.” Antal stepped away from the speaker and the transparent wall. “He’s gone crazy.” He turned to the engineers. “What do you think we ought to do?”

  The older man was sweating profusely. “I think we ought to get the hell out of here.”

  The foreman hesitated a moment longer, then jabbed the red alarm button nearby.

  Bamaputra watched calmly from the director’s chair as the panicky exodus commenced. He was not surprised. You couldn’t blame them. None of them, not even Antal, was a real visionary. Throughout history those who had made the great discoveries, accomplished the memorable scientific feats, never had better chanc
es than one in ten. Most of them began their experiments with worse odds.

  This was the only way. The calculations had to be adjusted to take into account the greatly reduced time factor. He turned to the multiple readouts. The ice sheet would begin melting rapidly now. Very rapidly. At the same time, the quantity of water vapor and carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere would rise twenty fold. The system would hold. A magnetic fusion containment field wasn’t like a stone or metal wall.

  Let them all leave. He could hold out alone, if need be. Despite the interference he would accomplish everything he’d set out to do. If you had vision, you sometimes had to take a chance. Turning dreams into reality always entailed a certain amount of risk.

  Better to depend on machines. The instrumentation surrounding him functioned silently and without complaint, doing its job in a predictable and dependable manner. He’d never liked people much. Come to that, he’d never been very fond of himself.

  Better to risk one’s life in search of the perfect abstract than to surrender to temporal temptation. He might die, but his vision would live on in the form of a transformed Tran-ky-ky. The money had never meant anything to him. Revelation lay only in achievement.

  The skimmer hovered just off the ground as a squad of Colette’s bodyguards climbed over the side. Those remaining aboard kept their weapons trained on the entrance to the installation.

  Ethan began examining the walls on either side of the door. “There should be a speaker here somewhere. Surely they put in something that would enable them to talk with any Tran who might come up here.”

  Before they could locate the hypothetical speaker the camouflaged door began to open.

  “Back to the skimmer,” snapped Iriole. The squad retreated. Fingers tensed on triggers.

  There was no fighting. The technicians and engineers, support and maintenance personnel who came stumbling out of the tunnel in their survival suits weren’t armed. They kept their hands in view at their sides or held above their heads. As those on the skimmer looked on, the evacuees began staggering down the trail leading to the harbor below.

  There was no sign of Shiva Bamaputra, but Hwang picked Antal out of the crowd immediately. There was no threat in his pose this time. All of the cockiness had gone out of him.

  “We’ve got to get away from here!” he said wildly.

  “Why? What’s the hurry?” September folded his arms and adopted the stance of a man with all the time in the world. “We’ve things to do.”

  “Do whatever you want but don’t do it here. Bamaputra’s gone mad.” He gestured back toward the dark tunnel. “He’s running the whole system on intentional overload, way beyond its design peak. Locked himself in control central. You won’t pry him out of there, not even with rifles. It’s five-centimeter plexalloy paneling, molecular welded.”

  “Now why would he want to go and do that?”

  “He’s trying to accelerate the terraforming process. We talked about it lots of times, but not on this scale. He’s got an outside chance of bringing it off. Way outside.”

  “What happens if the system fails?” Williams asked him.

  “Melt down.” It was the young female technician who spoke. “You get large-scale melt down. The containment fields in the reactors collapse.”

  “You mean the installation melts?” Ethan asked her.

  She stared over at him. “I mean the mountain melts. Maybe more, I don’t know. And I’m not planning on hanging around to work out the calculations. You better not either.”

  “Right. Resume positions,” Iriole told them. They retreated back aboard the waiting skimmer.

  “Wait a minute!” Antal rushed the craft, stopped short as the muzzle of a rifle swung in his direction. “What about us?”

  “You’ve all got survival suits,” September told him as the skimmer slowly drifted over the edge of the steep slope and commenced its downward flight. He pointed to the switchbacked path. Some of the installation personnel were already halfway down. “Better not run too fast or you’re liable to fall and tear ’em.”

  Antal stared at the descending vehicle. Then he turned and joined his former employees in a mad scramble to get down the mountain.

  Those on board the skimmer followed the frantic flight of their former adversaries as they drifted safely toward the harbor.

  “What do you think?” September asked their teacher.

  “I don’t know. We don’t have any idea what their setup here is capable of or where its limits lie. Obviously Bamaputra believes he’s keeping within them.”

  “He seems to be the only one,” Ethan commented.

  “That doesn’t mean he isn’t right.”

  “I don’t like the idea of going off and leaving him holed up in there,” September muttered. “Won’t do us much good to escort this lot back to Brass Monkey if we don’t shut down what they’ve left behind.”

  “Let’s get back to the ship and decide there,” Ethan suggested. “Roger, what do you think our chances are of blasting into this control room and taking him?”

  “Not good, if that other one was telling the truth. Plexalloy’s tough.”

  “The foreman had one good point,” Williams reminded them. “What are we going to do with them now that they’ve put aside their weapons?”

  “Let ’em stumble around Yingyapin for a while,” September said. “Let the Tran there see what their all-powerful friends are really like. By the time they make it to the harbor I don’t think we’ll have to worry about keeping watch over ’em. Maybe we can lash a couple of ice ships together and tow the whole bunch of miscreants back to Brass Monkey. They’ll be too cold to give us any trouble. The trip back may not force confessions out of all of ’em, but it sure as hell will make ’em humble.”

  They were moving out across the ice, heading for the Slanderscree, when Ethan pointed toward the mountain that contained the terraforming station.

  “Something’s happening up there. Some kind of activity.”

  September squinted, cursed under his breath. “Can’t see. Eyes are getting old, like the rest of me. Hunnar! Can you see anything up there?”

  The knight joined them. “Truly I can, friend Skua. Clouds are coming out of the mountain. I think mayhap your mad kinsman is making a rifs.”

  Not a rifs in the traditional sense, but a massive storm front was forming with incredible speed above the highest peak. Lightning began to flash inside the boiling mass of cumulonimbus and thunder boomed across the harbor. The cloud bank continued to thicken until it dominated the visible sky. And then something else happened, something so extraordinary it stimulated excited discussion among the scientists and awe among the Tran.

  For the first time in forty thousand years, rain fell on Tran-ky-ky.

  “Liquid ice.” Warm drops pelted the skimmer. “Water.” Elfa stared in astonishment at the tiny pool that accumulated in her cupped paws. “Who thought ever to see such a thing?”

  A shout from the mainmast lookout drew their attention. The heavy metal gate which had barred the icerigger’s flight was slowly swinging open, sliding out of the way on its multiple runners. On board the Slanderscree, Ta-hoding gaped at the retreating barrier, then began bellowing orders. Sails were unfurled, spars adjusted, stays pulled taut.

  “What of the humans who came out of the mountain?” Ethan asked Hunnar.

  “They are …” The knight paused a moment to be certain of what he was seeing. “They are running through the city. The townspeople are staring at them. Now a few begin to throw stones.”

  A new sound, deeper and more ominous than the thunder. Shouts and yells from both those on the icerigger and in the city acknowledged its power. The rumbling arose deep within the solid rock of the continental shelf, a gigantic hiss. It was as though something monstrous was awakening inside the earth.

  “Look at that. Even I can see that.” September nodded toward the docks. In haste and confusion the personnel from the installation were pouring out onto the ice. The
y promptly began slipping and sliding all over the place. Their repeated failures only made them redouble their frantic efforts.

  “Any arms?” asked Colette du Kane.

  Iriole was peering through a military monocular. “None visible, ma’am.”

  “Hell. Pick them up and put them aboard the big ship, I guess. The prosecution’s going to want as many witnesses as possible.” She turned demurely to Ethan. “If that meets with your approval, my love?”

  He didn’t doubt for an instant that the question was rhetorical, but he appreciated it nonetheless.

  “You have my consent,” he replied grandly.

  “Thank you.” She actually batted her eyelashes at him. They exchanged a grin.

  Then and there he decided this wasn’t going to be a bad marriage after all.

  The skimmer had to make several trips to transfer all of the refugees from the ice to the Slanderscree, which fortunately had ample room since it had been traveling with a minimal crew ever since departing Poyolavomaar. Body searches revealed that the technicians and engineers had fled the station unarmed. Most were too exhausted to have offered any resistance even had they wished to.

  The foreman was in the second group. Antal didn’t look in control of anything including himself as he scrambled frantically onto the skimmer’s deck.

  “Move, move, we’ve got to get out of here!”

  “Not yet,” Ethan told him.

  “Why, what’s the hold up?” The foreman was staring worriedly at the storm raging over the mountain.

  Ethan gestured onto the ice. Led by Hunnar and Elfa, a group of sailors from the icerigger were chivaning at maximum speed toward Yingyapin.

  “We still have to warn the people you were going to use.” He eyed Antal accusingly. “You could have done that on your way out.”

  “No time, we don’t have any time. Don’t you understand?”

  “Perfectly,” said Ethan softly. “We’ve talked to your engineering people. If the installation melts, it won’t affect us.”

  “Not the installation, not that.” The foreman was on the edge of hysteria. “You can’t imagine how much heat a complete and sudden melt down up there will release. There are three industrial fusion plants operating on overload inside that mountain, for god’s sake!”