Rebel Ice (22 page)

"I have not said where I intend to go."

Kuorj glanced at the stained
ice
. "From this place, there are few destinations." He called to one of the hunters, and asked for his bow, which he handed, along with an elongated pouch of bolts, to Reever. "Ensleg weapons do not always work out on the ice," he told him. "Best to carry this, in the event that yours fail you."

Reever slung the pouch and bow across his back, hunter fashion. "I thank you."

"There will be other hunters out on the ice today," the headman said. "They will not cross your path if you keep yourself out of theirs." He sighed. "I begin to sound like my father in his final years. Next you will hear me call for more furs and a larger heatarc."

"I appreciate your concern." And Reever did. The old rasakt had taught him a great deal about the Iisleg, and had the sort of wisdom that came only after many years of leading other men.

Kuorj clasped the top of Reever's forearm with his hand. "May the vral's work not be made wasted today."

"Farewell." Reever inclined his head and started out on the ice.

The sky was a hard, glassy dome of white that settled without seams over the polished bone plate of the world. Had there not been patches of the dense blue ice showing through the surface snow, Reever might not have been able to tell up from down. Even Kevarzangia Two, with its emerald skies echoing the lush verdancy of its surface, had not been so monochromatic.

The magnetic fields on the planet rendered directional-guidance equipment useless, and the ice fields offered little in the way of landmarks. Reever reserved his thermal scanner and used the Iisleg's method of navigating, shadow shifting, which he had learned during his last visit to Akkabarr.

Reever had not taken twenty paces on the ice before the imperative began burrowing in his mind again.
Go. Find her. Hurry
.

He cleared his thoughts and concentrated on the ice. It wasn't enough to watch his footing and keep a steady pace; he also had to look for the discolorations and cracks that heralded crevasses and hidden vent shafts. He regularly came to narrow chasms in the ice that were barely two or three meters wide but appeared to be bottomless and hundreds of meters in length. Probably created by earth tremors and submantle magma shifts, the gaps sometimes sported snow bridges and inner walls lined with innumerable icicles waiting to tear into any flesh falling into or past them. So far none of the gaps had proved to be too wide to jump across, but Reever tested the other side of each gap before he leaped, to assure it would hold. He had ice stakes and safety lines in his survival gear for the chasms he could not go around or cross.

Did she walk this way
? Reever scanned the vista from right to left, trying to imagine his wife following the same path, and her reaction to such a place. It wouldn't have been a happy response; Cherijo didn't like extremes in temperatures. She had been kept in near-total isolation by her creator for most of her life, but as far as he knew, never in such a frigid climate. After living happily on Kevarzangia Two, the garden of border territory planets, and being exposed to the outrageous alien beauty of Joren, the home of her adopted people, Cherijo would hate this place.
There is no color, no life here except where it can cluster and hide from the wind
.

How long has she been here
? Reever wasn't sure. The reports were vague; she might have been trapped on Akkabarr anywhere from six months to two years.
How long was it before they found her
?

Reever knew Cherijo had survived. Because his wife had been bioengineered to be virtually
She doesn't even know Marel and I are still alive
. The rage, always there, burned deeper, until the imperative swept over it, as it did everything.

Go. Find her. Hurry.

Reever stopped at Akkabarran noon, as the sun overhead erased the shadows and created visual whiteout, making it impossible to continue on without becoming disoriented. He ate some of the preserved food Kuorj had given him, and walked in a circle to keep warm until the shadows shifted into view once more.

Kuorj had told him that the skela who served his iiskar lived in shelters built of ice blocks that adjoined the natural caves inhabited by their pack beasts, and after two and a half hours, Reever saw color interrupt the line of the horizon. As he drew closer, he identified the color as a wide patch of stained ice—black instead of dark red and brown, as it had been outside the camp—and several collected salvage heaps and a single pile of bones. Behind the debris stood two large ice caves and the skela's built-on shelters.

Reever waited and watched the open entrance to the caves as well as the narrow space between the ice blocks that made up the shelters. There was no movement, light, or sound, and no sign of heat being used within. He breathed in and smelled cooked food, damp animal fur, and cured hide. People occupied the place.

Snow crunched behind him, but he turned a moment too late. The tip of a blade pierced his clothing and stopped short of inserting itself between the second and third ribs on his right side.

A woman dressed like a hunter but wearing a modified face wrap stared up at him. "Drop the bow." Reever allowed the weapon to slide from his shoulder. The woman kicked it out of the way but kept her knife in place. "To the crawl. Slowly."

Reever could have disabled her with one sweep of his arm, but decided to humor her and began walking toward the crawl. "I thought you respected men on this world."

The knife jabbed him, drawing blood. "You are not a man. You are stupid. Men never travel alone."

The narrow opening in the ice blocks was actually a hatch that had been recovered from a troop freighter. It slid inside, and a familiar form appeared.

"Malmi, what—" Daneeb peered at Reever and took a step back when she recognized him. "You."

"Me." He glanced down. "Would you ask this woman to remove her knife from my abdomen?"

"Malmi, leave him." Daneeb pulled the hood of her parka over her head before stepping outside. "Go inside and wait."

Malmi removed her face shield, revealing her features. Her skin had the bloom of a young woman, but milky cataracts covered one of her eyes. She turned her head slightly, looking at Daneeb out of the clear cornea. "Skrie, he is
ensleg
."

"Go." Daneeb waited until the door to the crawls closed again before she spoke to Reever. "We meet again. Why is that?"

"Again?" Daneeb glanced at him. "We tended your wounds and kept the hunters from killing you. Is that not enough?"

"I will explain, but I am not as accustomed as you to this climate," Reever said, and gestured toward the salvage piles. "Will you walk with me while we talk, so that I may keep from freezing?"

"Skela do not have conversations with ensleg," she pointed out.

Reever saw her mitt slip into a side seam of her parka. "No, I believe you only remove the faces from their dead bodies. I am still alive, fortunately."

She gave him a disgruntled look. "Fortunate for whom?"

Daneeb did walk with him out to the salvage piles, which were an interesting jumble of useless components, scorched scraps of alloy, and melted lumps of plas. Reever stopped to pluck a length of frozen wire protruding from one-third of a stripped communications panel.

"How is your friend?" He inspected the pile of bones, but they all appeared to be from small to large animals, not humans. "The other woman who poses as vral?"

Daneeb shrugged. "She is as she always has been."

"She cannot speak, can she?" Reever waited for an answer, and when he didn't get one, he added, "I got the sense that something is wrong with her mind."

"She can speak. She is quiet, that is all." Her tone changed. "What of it?"

Now, why would she lie about the other woman's disability? Was it some sort of taboo? Or—"There is something wrong with many of you, isn't there?"

Daneeb took in a sharp, quick breath. "Wrong, you say. Is it wrong to be born blind in one eye, as Malmi was? Or to lose a hand to flesh rot, as old Ganna did? Not pretty, perhaps, not womanly, but wrong?"

Reever could feel the tension vibrating from her, and quickly wrapped one end of the component wire around his left hand. "I had not realized."

"You are ensleg. Why would you?" She stared out at the ice. "You had better leave now. It will take you the rest of the light to make it to a camp."

"I have one more question for you," he said. "When you came to help me, the last time we met, why did you not tell me that you and Jarn are skela?"

Daneeb snorted. "Why would I? You are ensleg. You know nothing about us."

"Kuorj told me about you and the skela. How you are the only people on this world permitted to handle the dead. How you are sent to search every crash site for the dead." Reever saw the tiny flinch she gave. "If anyone had found the woman for whom I am searching, it would have been one of you." He waited a beat. "Was it you, Daneeb? Did you find her in the wreckage, still alive?"

"I do not know of what you speak, ensleg. I am going back; I have work to do." Daneeb started back for the shelter.

"No." Daneeb turned away and dipped one shoulder.

Reever caught her by the throat and wrist, using the loop of component wire to hold the dagger in her fist away from his face. "Where is she?"

"She is dead." Daneeb made a strangled sound as his hand tightened. "Dead."

Rage became a silent roar in his head as Reever wrenched the knife from her, threw it away, and dragged her close. "You will tell me." If he had to beat it out of her.

Daneeb's gaze shifted, and Reever heard a whistling sound just before something collided with the side of his head.

The white of the world turned black.

"General Gohliya," one of the subordinate officers said from the strategy chamber's entryway. "The Kangal signals."

It was the Kangal's seventeenth signal of the morning. His last sixteen had come in at ten- and fifteen-minute intervals, with unceasing demands for reports on why the surface defense grid was still off-line from the storm.

Gohliya looked up from the latest recon scans. "I am not here."

The young officer paled. "God be, General, I am not able to lie to the Kangal."

Gohliya turned to one of his senior staff, a lieutenant who was not a native of Skjonn. "Are you able to lie to the Kangal?" The man nodded once. "Go and tell him I am not here."

The lieutenant saluted and left, the anxious younger officer following and protesting in his wake. Once the door panel closed, another staffer secured it.

"Orjakis is going to be trouble," Lopaul, a senior commander and Gohliya's second, said. "Even if we do get the drone communication grid back online today."

Gohliya grunted and changed the surveillance scans to view the next in the series. "He cannot be anything else."

Gohliya had considered killing the Kangal, and had goaded him to the point of committing suicide himself, for over a year. Frustration had run high among the Defense troops, and Gohliya knew precisely who was responsible for it—the Kangal, who knew as much about running a defense force as he did manual labor. He would have assassinated their fool ruler a long time ago, using the men loyal to him to stage a coup and take over the skim city. It had been his father's deathbed request, in fact, that Gohliya do exactly that.

"You can defend the city against the others," General Qohudit had told his son, several times. "They have become weak and self-indulgent above all else. You could take over the world."

The problem was the means with which to do it. The Kangal had severely restricted access to the skim-city armories, cleverly using drone guards as he did with the armory trenches on the surface. Patrol ships were allocated only enough fuel to perform their scheduled flights; weaponry was kept under strict Then there were the command override crystals, which the Kangal kept to himself. He had one for every Toskald ship, and could use them to take control of those ships anytime he wished.

Just as he could use the crystals kept on the planet to summon an army to defend his throne.

The Kangal were more than rulers. They were in complete control of Akkabarr, and all its treasures. Only Orjakis knew how to disarm the drones guarding both the skim city and the surface armory trenches that belonged to Skjonn. Even if Gohliya could take over the city, access to the offworlders' crystals, kept below on the surface, would be lost to him the moment he cut the Kangal's perfumed throat. As insurance, it was enough to stay Gohliya's blade and keep the general on his knees in front of a man whom he'd considered a waste of breathable atmosphere all his adult life.

Gohliya focused on the scans. "There has been no movement for forty-nine hours. You are quite sure about this."

"All of our orbital scanners are functional, General. We have run diagnostics to be certain of it." Lopaul brought up a comparison screen and looped it to show progressive scans. "None of the scanners detected any new heat signatures or topographical changes. It is as if they have disappeared off the face of the planet."

There was something very wrong with that, particularly when it coincided with the first massive failure of the surface defense grid.

They are animals. They have no technology, and none of the equipment they would need to dig down to the trenches. And how would they disable the drones before they sent out an alert?

Gohliya felt better for thinking it through. "What about the camps?" His patrol ships had been menacing the surface for weeks now. The rebels had likely run back to their iiskars to hide behind their cringing women.

"None have relocated," his second said, displaying several scans of the iiskars. "We have seen no increase in thermal activity."

"No." Gohliya struck the screen with his fist, splintering the plas. "Fifty thousand rebels do not disappear into the wind."

"Commander?" One of the junior staffers came forward.

"Leave us," Lopaul said. When the rest of the men had left the room, he brought out the first aid pack. "They may have tried to move during the storm." Carefully he removed the shards of plas embedded in the side of the general's hand. "It was one of the largest and worst of the year. If the Raktar was so foolish as to send his men out into it—"