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Chapter Three: Stormcaller
Joanna
Three days. I had been on Chalice for only three days, and already things had started to go wrong. Some admittedly pessimistic wise old man once said that no plan survived first contact with the enemy. If that was the case, then all the carefully laid training and plans set out during years of training as a Former shot straight to hell the moment my heavy, armored boot first touched the frozen hell that was Chalice Colony. It became immediately apparent that the moon I was to tame hated me, personally, and would be doing its best to kill me until one of us succeeded in our goal. On the first day, I'd built up a windbreak wall, using the nigh-indestructible Fabricator to change the ice around me into a ring of high, seemingly impervious barriers. I'd even crenelated them like a castle wall from a fairy tale, and when I'd laid down at the base of one to sleep that night, I'd been satisfied with a first day's work well done. When I woke the morning of the second day, they'd been broken down around me by the raw force of a two-hundred kilometer-per-hour gale, and I'd had to start over. By the time I slept again, I had created a new wind barrier. This time, I had gone all out. I sunk a half-kilometer circle I would use as my workspace down into the ice fifteen meters, and then raised the very edges of the pit into small hills so that the wind would pass harmlessly over me. I had woken this morning entombed in something I had originally thought was snow- until Barbas had diffidently informed me that it was actually a drift of tiny flakes of ice. The ice had been scoured from the surface of the vast, planet-spanning glacier by the howling winds and deposited into my pit, burying me. To make this planet even remotely livable, I had to fabricate and deploy a Terraformer Engine, and without adequate protection from the elements, it would never work. Thankfully, I had been wise enough to sink the remains of my bullet into the ice, where weather patterns couldn't tear away the precious reserves of refined metal that I had brought with me. I would need those rarer elements, particularly the gold, silver, platinum, and plutonium, if I wanted to get anywhere with this.
Clearing the pit of its blanket of "snow" was a simple enough effort. I powered up the Fabricator, and with a few short commands, directed its nanite swarms to churn up a tiny whirlwind at my command. Within seconds, the nanites were blasting the ice dust out of the pit in a silvery plume. A simple wall wasn't going to be good enough. "Barbas," I said out loud- as if he were reachable by my suit's helmet radio. "Do you have any ideas?"
There was a silence for a moment, just long enough that I didn’t think he would respond. Perhaps sentient programs have to sleep too. But then his voice came through my helmet’s speakers, tinny and laced with static. “I’ve got one, but it’s going to be tricky. I had to dig up the blueprints from my back archives. This thing was designed by Chinese- a proof of concept weapon that no one even knows if they tested successfully. They certainly didn’t use it during the War.”
I frowned, watching an indistinct shimmer like a mirage flicker around the edge of the pit and towards the short, unimpressive looking Fabricator. The nanites were returning, finished with their imitation of a snow-blower. “Okay, I’ll bite, what does this thing do?”
“Well,” began the AI. “It’s going to need some modifications, especially if we want to run a T.E. inside of the field it creates, but I think-”
“Barbas,” I sighed. “What is it?" He got like this when he thought something wasn't the greatest of ideas. I had heard the exact same tone when I had told him I wanted to BASE jump off the Pan-American space elevator. In the end, he had been able to render the event in amazing clarity, despite his warnings that if something went too crazily wrong in the constructed dream world, I could suffer a catastrophic aneurysm.
Barbas sighed, resigned. “It’s a hurricane machine.”
“Uh, ‘Bas, you know that we’re trying to stop the storms on this planet from killing us, right? How does adding a new storm help us?”
Suddenly, my Heads Up Display lit up with a holographic construct, a weather map showing me a fearsome-looking storm vortex. Before I could ask any questions, Barbas spoke. “This is a storm cell, like that of a typical hurricane back on Earth.” A second vortex appeared in the simulation, crawling across my vision toward the first. “When two storms meet, typically, the weaker storm will fail, since they’re drawing from the same well of energy to exist- in the case of a terrestrial hurricane, that energy is from warmer waters.” The two holographic storm cells met in a splash of blue across my HUD, and one of them dwindled, seemingly devoured by its cousin. “Now I don’t actually know what source the storms on Chalice are taking their energy from. There isn’t much heat on this moon and I doubt tidal forces could make storms this large and persistent, even if the planet wasn’t tidally locked. But if these storms behave at all like terrestrial ones, we can generate our own storm, a big one, with an eye more than fifty kilometers across.”
I nodded, understanding. In my armor, the motion was more of a strange forward shrug, but it was the thought that counted. “Inside this storm, the weather would be calm, and any other winds that passed through this place would either be subsumed by our storm or deflected around us. Though we’re going to need one hellacious heat source to keep this thing going.”
Barbas chuckled. “That’s the elegant part. I’ve been combining the design with that of the Terraformer Engine. A T.E. puts off a gigantic thermal bloom- at least when it’s configured to transform a place similar to this. If we do this right, we can use our hurricane as a dispersal system for the changes that the T.E. needs to make to the atmosphere.”
“Damn,” I chuckled, smiling as I imagined the look of triumph on Barbas’ face. “Damn, ‘Bas, what would I do without you?”
“Go insane, very quickly,” he answered, his tone light.
“Good thing you’re here then.”
“Indeed.”
We began construction of our “enhanced” Terraformer Engine immediately, drawing up some of the reserves of refined metal from the buried shape of the Bullet. It took shape faster than seemed possible, the stories-high, monolithic bulk of the Engine’s tower stretching up into the sky. It was like a time-lapse video of a fungal stalk growing from the corpse of an ant. All along the length of the structure, strange protrusions and spikes branched out from the main shape, mixed in with more familiar sampling instruments and a vast multi-spectrum sensor array. The T.E.’s fusion reactor came on three hours into the process, and though I knew my suit was thoroughly insulated against thermal change, I thought I could feel the air around me get markedly warmer.
Barbas didn’t speak much to me during this time, preoccupied with the intricacies of his project, but I didn’t mind. During our “vacation”, we had become comfortable with each other, and with companionable silence. Sometimes spending hours reading different books at opposite ends of the cabin’s wide porch, content to simply be near each other. The niggling thought that all of that was illusion didn’t seem relevant to the point. We worked all day, Barbas toiling in the machine mind of the Fabricator and its growing skyscraper child, even as I walked the perimeter of planned hurricane eye, setting sensor stakes and static manipulators into the ice. I listened to an audio book with half an ear as I worked, my brain caught up in the repeated motion and the woes of Edmond Dantes.
It wasn’t until I drove the last of the sensor stakes into the ice that I realized that something had changed. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was- perhaps something about the quality of the light, perhaps a shift in the tone of the wind’s perpetual whine against my suit- but I knew something was wrong. “‘Bas?”
"Yes, Joanna," he responded, his tone distant with concentration.
“Is there a storm coming?”
Barbas made a sound that was halfway between a startled grunt and a little yelp. “Where the hell did that come from? Yes, there’s a storm coming fast, a big one, less than one-hundred fifty clicks from your position!” He sounded both frustrated and confused. “I was tracking all of t
he nearby storm cells, there shouldn’t be one near enough to threaten you- I don’t know where the hell that thing-”
“Barbas!” I snapped, interrupting him. “I’m exposed here. Can we start up the Engine yet?”
"Not quite," he hissed, clearly stressed. "I need you to make manual adjustments to the projection arrays of at least half of the spikes you set." He swore. "I meant to run some stress-test simulations before we actually used this fucking thing! If our storm collapses, the whole damn tower could come down, and I don't know if we would have enough of the rarer elements left to rebuild it without mining for them!"
I felt myself grinning. This had always been how I had reacted to crisis. When I was a kid, and the war had come too close to wherever I had been living at the time, the sound of falling bombs or passing bullets had always brought to my brain an icy calm and a maniac's certainty that nothing could happen to me. So even as the fear flooded my brain, fear of dying, fear of being flensed down to a smear on the ice by the incoming storm, the terror froze over into hard, obdurate certainty. I was Joanna Fucking Angeles, and I wasn't going to be killed by some two-bit asshole moon in the back end of some no-name star system. "Well, ‘Bas," I cackled. "I guess we're stress-testing the old fashioned way. Give me the navigation points for the bad stakes on my HUD, and I'll run. Let's see what this armor can do!"
Within moments an array of orange arrows popped up in my field of vision, hovering in a gradually curving line over the sites where I had placed the perimeter of stakes. I leaned forward and ran, speeding across the terrain in great, bounding strides. It was a strange sensation since I was used to being less than two meters tall, strange to eat up the distance with the legs of a nine-foot-tall armored titan. I was thankful for it, nonetheless, and before long I was at the first of the series static manipulators, I had to readjust. Barbas projected instructions into my field of vision, one at a time, and I worked quickly, using the array of micromanipulators fitted into the index finger and thumb of my suits left gauntlet. The adjustment work seemed to take a minor epoch, and all the while the howling wind became louder, more insistent. We didn't have much time.
"It's good! Go!" Barbas snapped, and I jumped to my feet immediately, taking a short skipping step to avoid the machine I had just recalibrated. I ran to the next one and repeated the process, which seemed to go more quickly, then I stood and ran to the next, and the next, and the next. All the while I determinedly ignored the environmental hazard warnings that had begun to flash to the far left of my HUD. I worked this way for what must have only been fifteen minutes. It felt like an eternity, each step taken before a darker, angrier sky, each hurried repair job punctuated by a little beep to let me know that the temperature had dropped another fifteen degrees Celsius. And then, I was at the final stake, and I found myself slowed by a growing wind. Every movement was hindered by a gathering force that pushed and shoved and tugged at me, and my actions became rough and sloppy. I was forced to restart that calibration twice before I finally managed to get it right, shifting the instruments into the right configuration before snapping shut the protective cowling. I'd done it. I breathed out a sigh of satisfaction and relief, straightening up, and froze. I could no longer make out the horizon. Instead, there was a storm rushing toward me on the teeth of the shrieking and it was like nothing I had ever seen before.
The storm was piled hundreds of meters into the sky, in a towering, pillar of bulbous, seething black clouds, lit from within by a nearly continuous strobe of luminescent green. Hissing sheets of lime-tinted lightning blasted the ice beneath its towering bulk, and with every flash, I saw boulder-sized chunks of ice flung high into the air. It hurtled towards me with a ground-shaking roar of cascading thunder, and for a moment I just stood there, transfixed. My body was paralyzed, not by fear, but by overwhelming awe at the spectacle of incoming doom. Barbas was screaming something in my ear, but I didn’t hear him. I just couldn’t process the scale what I was seeing. I doubted very much that our machine, grand as it was, could possibly create something to rival this thing.
“JOANNA.” Barbas’ voice boomed directly into my skull, actually setting my ears to ringing by some kind of subconscious reflex. I snapped out of my trance. I didn’t know how long I’d been standing there, but the vast, alien stormwall was approaching, carrying a cloud of flesh-shredding ice and debris in its wake. I needed to get to shelter or I would die, armor or no armor. I opened my mouth to reply to Barbas, but something out there, in the direction of the incoming storm, caught my eye. I turned back towards the onrushing darkness, and I saw something impossible.
Someone was walking towards me from beneath the storm, her pace unhurried, her movements unconcerned, and her body utterly naked to the wind and the cold. She seemed unaffected by the temperatures, which should have made her skin freeze solid within seconds. She looked human, after a fashion- with two legs, two arms, a symmetrical head with two eyes- and she was even beautiful. In the same way a long distance runner or a gymnast would be. She was all slim lines and understated but perfect curves. She moved with the sure-footed grace of a dancer. Her skin was very nearly translucent, as her hair was. Both refracted the bright streaks of lightning behind her into an aura of other-worldly green. Her canted eyes were dark, all the way through, and at this distance, I couldn't tell what the iris was, and what was the pupil. The storm was coming, and I needed to get to shelter, but this…
“Barbas,” I whispered into my helmet mic, unsure why I felt the need to lower my voice. “Are you seeing this? Is she real?”
"I don't know," he said, his voice tinged with anxiety. "I don't know what that is. She's there, I can see her, you can see her, but she's not registering on any of our sensors." He seemed to gather himself because his voice became much steadier as he continued, "But if you stay out here any longer, you're going to die. I have to bring up our storm if we're to survive this, and our storm wall will kill you just as dead as that one in front of you. It's going to hit us in just over a minute."
I raised a hand towards the woman walking out of the storm. She mirrored my gesture. I smiled, forgetting that it was unlikely that she could make out my expression through my armor's faceplate. I took a hesitant step forward and stretched my hand out to the strange figure. Again, she mirrored me, one hand reaching forward tome- and then, without a moment's warning, the woman lunged towards me, fast as a viper. I took a bounding step back, opening up a couple meters of space between us. With mingled astonishment and fear, I watched as the woman turned her missed strike into a spinning motion and slammed her fist down into the hard glacial surface beneath us. A glittering, crystalline layer of ice spiraled up her planted right arm, before my eyes, crossing her shoulders and surging down over her chest and towards her hips. The ice was so deep a blue as if it were almost black. As it grew, it segmented, changing from a rigid crust into a flexible set of armor, not unlike my own. A spiked helm grew up around the expressionless, heart-shaped face, which was quickly followed by a grotesque mask that forcibly reminded me of the Oni demons from old Japanese legends. The frozen features scowled in the nightmare face, and you could only see the woman's eyes They looked like deep pools of shadow, even deeper than the ones in her armor. The warrior stood, and as if it had been hidden there specifically for her use, a spear rose from the ground, made of the same black ice as her armor. It looked like it had been ripped out of the coldest, darkest nightmare. So dark that it seemed to devour the brilliance of the incoming storm. The armored warrior spoke, and despite the oncoming tempest, I could hear the unfamiliar language perfectly, as if we were standing in a silent room. Her words echoed on the rushing wind and seemed to grow. Before I knew it, we were engulfed in the storm wall.
Barbas was yelling to me, bypassing the illusion of the radio, directly into my mind, but I couldn’t stop to listen. Everything was happening too fast. There was a confusion of movement, frozen into random still frames by the teeth-rattling explosions of lightning strikes, all around me and the ice-bound wa
rrior woman. FLASH BOOM! I was barely dodging aside from her attacks, sure that somehow, even my armor would do little to stop the point of that cold black spear. Another flurry of movement and then FLASH BOOM! We were close together for a moment, staring into each other’s eyes. Almost an intimate distance as I seized the edge of her frozen pauldron and slammed my fist down toward her armored skull. FLASH BOOM! This time, the thunder stroke was close, very close, and all sound turned into a monotone ringing in my ears, as my opponent and I were hurled apart in a shower of sparks and shards of ice. The sudden silence gave me the chance to focus on Barbas' words for a moment, and then they blasted into my thoughts, nuclear-hot and sharp as burning knives in my brain. “JOANNA! RUN!”
A directional indicator lit up neon red in my HUD.I pushed myself to my feet, focused on the red triangle in my vision and sprinted. I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears, and despite my helmet's environmental controls, the air tasted like my own sweat. I ran for all I was worth, unable to see in the storm around me. Suddenly my hearing returned again, and somehow the storm had gotten even louder. The explosion of lightning was almost a constant blasting thunder, and all I could see was random flashes of movement interspersed with afterimages and shadows- like a violent rave burning deep into my eyes. The ground shook beneath my feet, and the blast of ice shards against me sounded like iron rain against a battered tin roof. I couldn't tell which was forward, or which way was back. All I could see clearly was the burning certainty of the red triangle leading me to salvation. I stumbled, I wavered, I continued running through the storm.
Alien Romance Box Set: Alien Former: Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Books 1-5) Page 4
