Cold as Ice

by Charles Sheffield

  "I've heard of it. Thousands of ships were wiped out by Seekers."

  "They were indeed. Inner System ships. The Seeker was a Belt weapon." Battachariya moved to Magrit's side and gently laid the listing in her lap. His arrogance and pomposity had vanished, subordinated to intense curiosity. "So a Belt ship was blown apart by a Belt weapon. The Pelagic was destroyed by its own side. Why?"

  * * *

  The Great Bat was not the only one with an evening meeting. As the cabinet-level officer in charge of transportation, Magrit Knudsen could not afford to stay away from the evening's General Assembly meeting, although she was already tired. She left the Bat Cave at six-fifteen, allowing herself just forty-five minutes to eat, shower, change, and review her position on the main issue before the Assembly.

  Further development of one of the Galileian satellites, particularly on the scale proposed, would change traffic patterns all around Jupiter. Irrevocably. How could that be justified? Not easily. She felt herself tilting toward opposition of the project, but she wanted to hear all of the evidence before she made up her mind.

  There were others in the General Assembly, though, to whom evidence mattered not at all. Snakes, she thought as she gulped down a few mouthfuls of soup and a handful of crackers. Empire builders, who would publicly oppose development but promote and lobby for it strongly in private. Snakes and wolves. Tonight's meeting would be packed with them, because development projects brought them out in packs, scenting profits. She glared at her face in the mirror and brushed her long black hair harder than necessary. Snakes and wolves and pigs. They didn't give a damn what happened to the Jovian system thirty years from now, as long as the hogs could roll in the money today. She could name a dozen of them who were sure to be there tonight.

  And, like it or not, she had to work with them. It was that, or give up and let them have their way.

  Magrit thought of Rustum Battachariya and his goulash. The meal was sure to be delicious. Bat was as much a gourmet as he was a gourmand. No handful of crackers for his dinner.

  As usual when she came away from a meeting with Bat, she was half irritated and half envious. He didn't care about promotions. He had no interest in political infighting or power struggles. If he were given a line position at Cabinet level, he would not survive for two days. But tonight he was the one who would be working his way through four or five portions of goulash, lounging in the Bat Cave and showing off all his toys to Inspector-General Yarrow Gobel while Magrit was sitting and nodding politely at people whose company she hated.

  She checked her appearance, checked the time, and headed over to the assembly hall. Battachariya lived a peaceful, intellectual, stress-free life, doing just what he wanted to do and refusing to consider anything else. Now and then Magrit thought it might be nice to change jobs with him.

  Now and then. About once a year. The idea lasted at most for an hour.

  She quickened her pace. Her juices were already stirring. Magrit couldn't wait to meet those greedy sons of bitches and jump into the middle of the hassle over the Europan development project.

  6

  An Offer You Can't Refuse

  By the end of the week, Jon Perry had seen too much of Arenas. His meeting at the Admin Center of the Global Ocean Monitor Service had been scheduled, postponed, confirmed, and postponed again. Three times he had appeared with an appointment at Manuel Posada's office, only to learn from anonymous underlings that the undersecretary of GOMS was detained "indefinitely." Twice Jon had been bumped by "the imperatives of highest authority," whatever that meant.

  After the fourth day and fifth aborted meeting, he had moved from puzzled to seething. By design or by accident, someone was telling him that he was of negligible importance.

  He left GOMS HQ in a foul mood at five P.M., when everyone except the guards at the door had gone. They were itching to leave, too, for it was opening night in Arenas for the Midsummer Festival, and the streets were-already packed with musicians, floats, and noisy celebrants.

  Jon was in no mood to participate, and in his plain dark-green uniform he felt conspicuous among the vivid, flower-bedecked costumes. The buildings of the city thinned out to the west and he headed that way, toward the smoky orange eye of the sun. Before it finally clipped to the horizon he had walked to the crest of the line of hills, over the brow, and all the way down the gentle western slopes to the seawall. He reached the embankment, a hundred feet above turbulent water, and stared down at the white-caps in Otway Bay. As he watched, the surface broke to a glittering line of foam.

  He had wanted solitude and had expected to find nothing more than sea and sky; but he had arrived when the management team of Plankton Unlimited was assembling to head out to the krill farms. They were in a wild mood, even for professional jokers. As he watched, a score of them started to play follow-the-leader, swimming nose to tail, faster and faster, hurtling toward the sharp-edged rocks before turning at the last moment. Once all of them disappeared for half a minute, to emerge in a giant cascade of spray and blown spume. They had changed underwater from the serial motion of the chase to the parallel efforts of a chorus line. Four hundred tons of gleeful, muscular mammal rose in a perfect arc high into the air, turned, and smashed back in unison into the sea. The thrown water glowed with phosphorescence. Ten seconds later, twenty black heads bobbed up, bowed, and began a stately pirouetting dance in matched pairs.

  The baleens were putting on a show—but for whom? Jon had watched them and waved to them a hundred times from the Spindrift, but there was no way they could know that one of their friends from the submersible was on the seawall. They were doing it for nobody. For sheer joy.

  He found himself grinning down at the cavorting black bodies and the waving flukes. Maybe he should be feeling lucky, not peeved. Nell Cotter had left Arenas for Stanley three days earlier, but she had told him that he could stay at the studios for as long as he liked. Suppose that she had not done that? His GOMS dormitory permit had been good for one night and one day's meals. As far as anyone at the Admin Center knew, he was sleeping out on the sidewalks and starving to death among the flowers. It was no thanks to them that he was living in a luxury unknown on the floating bases.

  The only real thing to be annoyed at was the waste of time. He had never thought to bring work to Arenas, never dreamed that he would have the time for it. Meanwhile, his office desk was piled with unread papers and unreduced smoker observations from earlier descents.

  When he turned to go home it was quite dark. Jon allowed the rising southern constellations to guide him back east until the moon rose. It was close to the half, and bright enough for him to pick out the stark-black saber-cut of the Armageddon defense line across its mottled northern face.

  The night was warm, and Jon had no reason to hurry. It was close to midnight when he reached the top of the hill and the first of the buildings. Now the moon had to compete with the gaudy lights of Arenas. The party was far from over. Jon was a mile outside the town and a thousand feet above it, but already he could hear the marching bands.

  The main thoroughfare of Arenas descended in a huge double curve, turning north as though heading for the airport, then twisting all the way back to the south and finally turning again to run east to the great piers and jetties that flanked the Strait of Magellan. The slope of the road had been carefully chosen by its construction engineers. Never more than a degree or so, it presented no problem for even the most delicate and ungainly of the mobile floats.

  Jon did not follow the broad, curving avenue, with its gleaming spheres of bioluminescence. Instead, he descended one of the darker and steeper crossing streets. These streets headed straight for the shore and were restricted to pedestrian traffic.

  One of the guards on duty at the GOMS Admin Center had told him that this year's festival would be the biggest ever, with more than two hundred floats. When Jon reached the main street, he could easily believe it. There were moving behemoths visible in both directions as far as the eye could see.
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  The huge-wheeled figure of a sleeping giant came rumbling by at no more than two miles an hour. "Earth Mother!" droned a cavernous, amplified voice. "Bow down to the Great Earth Mother. Number one-seventy-eight." Pink smoke rose from the nostrils, white smoke jetted from the gigantic jutting nipples. Half a dozen near-naked women danced on the bare belly in the glowing red light issuing from the deep navel. They were carrying a gigantic phallus, striped red and white like a barber's pole. The men and women on both sides of the road cheered and made obscene gestures. As the giant passed them along the avenue, they entered their scores for Entry 178 on their electronic cards and waited for the next float to arrive.

  Entry 179 did not use wheels. It was a re-creation of an apatosaurus, forty feet high and eighty feet long. The beast padded along smoothly on four vast articulated legs, beautifully matched in their movements. Although a dozen men and women rode on the broad grey back, the model's control was too precise to be anything but a single person operating from within its interior. The head on its immense neck swung out and swooped over the crowd, passing no more than three or four feet above Jon. He could see glittering red-rimmed eyes dipping down at him, and a quiet voice from the three-foot maw said, "Number one-seventy-nine. Remember one-seventy-nine." The number was painted on the great body in letters eight feet high.

  Then there was a long wait, enough for the float that finally appeared to be greeted with hoots and jeers. It had obviously been having problems. The internal mechanism was squeaking, and the head-high outer lip had a crude and amateurish look, a contrast to the polished perfection of previous entries. The driver was visible in an open and unfinished box in the center, a skinny, dark-haired man crouched worried over the controls. The float bore the number "65" on its side, and it should have passed this point in the route hours ago. Now it was moving fast, trying to catch up. The effort was hopeless, because there was no way that the entries ahead would offer passing room.

  The float was a miniature solar system installed on a carousel. Ten six-foot open baskets rotated on long metal arms, and inside each basket sat the living emblem of a planet. Mercury came past the audience first: a man—or was it a woman?—dressed in the garb of an ancient messenger. The face was hidden by a glittering visor, and nothing could be seen but a silver apron, two bare brown legs, and waving arms clothed in silver mesh. Venus was certainly a woman, never a doubt about that. She was naked, painted all over in gold but shrouded by long, cloudy-white tresses. Earth was her sister, clad in filmy blue-white drapes.

  Mars was a muscular, red-painted male, as bare as Venus but in his case, totally exposed. From their reaction, the crowd preferred him to the women. They were warming to Entry 65, with its shaky, homemade look. The basket for the Asteroid Belt received the biggest cheer so far. Inside it sat not one person, but a dozen riotous dwarfs, brawling, waving, mooning the crowd, blowing farts, and fighting to stand on each other's head for better visibility.

  The basket for Jupiter was just swinging into sight when the whole structure made a sudden lurching right turn. The crowd booed as Mars came back into view, waving his arms wildly to keep his balance, followed by Earth, flat on her back in her basket. The driver had made a spur-of-the-moment decision to leave the main avenue and take the float down one of the narrower streets. The strategy was clear enough: The float would catch up with the procession on the southbound leg, closer to the strait and the final rallying point, and try to regain its original position in the parade.

  And it was clear to Jon at least that the decision was a disastrous one. He had walked the narrow, dim-lit crossing street and he knew how steep it was. While the bystanders were still jeering and waving at the departing Sixty-five, he sprinted across the avenue in pursuit. The float was picking up speed fast, in spite of a screeching from its wheels as loud as any of the marching bands.

  The driver had realized his mistake. The brakes were on, but they were not enough to stop the vehicle, not even to slow it. The long arms, designed to operate horizontally, came gyrating crazily above Jon's head as he approached the float's rear. The baskets were missing the buildings on each side of the street by only a couple of feet. The driver knew that he was in desperate trouble, but he was helpless. All he could manage to do was to hold the vehicle in an exact line down the center of the street as its speed increased.

  Faster and faster. Control would hold for another twenty seconds at most. Jon was running alongside now, flat out. The street was rough-paved but he hardly noticed. His feet scarcely seemed to touch ground, his balance adjusted without effort to the uneven road. He stared ahead to the main avenue. He could see a dense pack of spectators there, and a shape like a gigantic green grasshopper moving just beyond them. If Number 65 held to its present path, the juggernaut it had become would roll over hundreds in the unsuspecting crowd, then plunge through the middle of the parade itself.

  The smooth side of the float was head-high, too tall for Jon to scale as he ran. He waited until an unbalanced arm swung over him, then leaped and grabbed it one-handed. He caught a glimpse of the gilded Venus, breasts bare, her tresses torn away, crouched helpless in the bottom of her basket. And then he was swinging hand-over-hand inward along the metal arm, toward the center of the carousel.

  The air was thick with black smoke, and his nostrils filled with an unpleasant smell of burning plastics. The overloaded brakes were on fire . . . and failing. As Jon reached the open control cockpit, the float shuddered and began to pick up speed.

  It was no time for half measures or courtesies.

  Jon thrust the skinny driver out of the way without a word. The man fell to the flat body of the carousel. Jon ignored him. He turned the wheel, angling the float to graze the wall of the building on the left. One of the metal arms crashed into it first, along with the basket and its contents—Uranus? A bearded figure in glittering thaumaturgic robes fell into the street. Then the left front wheel scraped along the wall, twisted, and broke off.

  The float listed steeply. The steering wheel jerked and turned in Jon's hands. He held it against a half-ton torque, dragging it back to the right. At last the heavy mechanism responded. The crippled vehicle lurched back toward the right-hand wall. Another turning arm smashed into a building. A basket and its human contents—the Belt this time, with its dozen cursing dwarves—went spinning away and out of sight. The right wheel hit, harder and more directly. The impact bounced the float back toward the center of the narrow street.

  With both front wheels gone, the vehicle skated forward until it reached a break in the pavement. The forward edge dug in with a scream of twisting metal, and the float canted to forty-five degrees. There was a moment when Jon thought that the whole machine was going to turn over, but it collapsed backward and hit the roadway in a jangle of broken parts.

  It settled motionless. And caught fire.

  Burning insulation added to the smoke of cindered brakes. Jon glanced around. The driver had rolled away over the side. The people in the remaining baskets were swarming out of them, dropping to the floor of the carousel and jumping down to the street.

  Only one basket was still occupied. Mercury. The radial metal arm was bent low, and the basket hung over the densest smoke. Jon ran across to it. The floor of the carousel was hot beneath his feet.

  He swung up into the open basket and bent over the unconscious Mercury. He pulled off the figure's visor and found himself looking at a young woman. She had no obvious injuries. He lowered her feet-first onto the carousel and heard her moan of pain. In spite of the silver mesh and the apron, she was going to have burns from contact with the hot metal. Jon could do nothing about that. Choking on foul black smoke, he followed her from the basket, dragged her to the edge of the float, tipped her over, and jumped free. He lifted her again and carried her twenty yards down the hill toward the avenue.

  And there he paused. The world steadied, came into different focus, and speeded up to normal.

  The crashing of the float against the walls and pavement ha
d finally drawn attention from the main parade. Scores of people were hurrying up the hill. At his feet Mercury was beginning to sit up, and she put a hand down to her seared bare leg. She did not seem to be badly hurt.

  What about the others in the baskets? He could not see uphill past the smoke of the burning carousel, but those who had escaped to the downhill side were up and moving about.

  Jon walked across to a shaded wall and stood with his back to it. He breathed deep and rubbed his smoke-irritated eyes. In just a few minutes, the worst part—for him—would begin. He was no longer useful, because others with better medical training than he would be arriving; but he would have to explain what he had done—over and over, to the parade organizers and the float operators and the Arenas police. And then to the press . . . and to the passersby . . . and to who knew how many others?

  How could he explain to them that he did not know what he had done? As always in an emergency, another part of him seemed to take over his actions. They would ask him how he was feeling, how it had been for him when he was chasing the float. How could they understand that the incident already seemed as though it had happened to someone else? He remembered everything, but it was seen through the wrong end of the telescope. Every detail was clear, yet distant.

  He turned to look down the hill. Maybe it didn't have to be like that. The people hurrying up toward him had their attention on the burning float and its injured crew. They took no notice of the soberly dressed individual quietly leaning against a shadowed wall.

  Jon waited for a minute longer, until a score of people had passed him; then he walked quietly down the street to the main thoroughfare. The floats were still passing there, gaudy and enormous. People were cheering as though nothing had happened on the hill behind.

  He merged into the crowd and felt vast relief.