Rebel Ice (28 page)

The skirmish Reever and the rebel had survived had been intense and bloody. There were still men straggling in from the ice, wet and exhausted.

"No, I thank you." Reever took some emergency rations he had salvaged from a patrol ship the week before and put a liquid pack to thaw by the heatarc. "How long have you fought for the rebels?"

"Two seasons, since the beginning of the war." The rebel was an older man with the dark skin and callused hands of a builder. "You?"

"The same." Reever had woken up in Iiskar Kuorj to find he had been knocked out and operated on by one of the skela. Kuorj knew nothing of how he had been brought to the camp, only that he had been found by one of the renser women going to gather clean snow for meltwater. Reever had gone back to the crawls as soon as he was well enough to travel, but found them abandoned. Stories of the vral on the battlefields had already begun to circulate by then, and when Kuorj's men had been summoned to fight, he had gone with them. "Have you seen the vral? Have you seen a Terran woman with them?" he asked the rebel, as he asked every Iisleg he met.

"Once, yes." The hunter shuddered. "
I
fought beside them. They make a man feel like a woman. What is a Terran?"

"There are more vral than rebels on the ice now," another man listening to the conversation put in. "They appear on every battlefield to kill our enemies before they heal those Iisleg found worthy."

"Not every battlefield." Reever had yet to encounter the faceless healers, of which there were stories that numbered them in the hundreds.

"They only fight with the Raktar's army," the hunter beside him said. "Mind your pack before it melts, ensleg."

Reever plucked the liquid pack from the trench floor and held it between his fur mitts. It had grown too hot to open, so he waited for it to cool and studied the faces around him. They were thin, dirty, and tired, but so was every face on Akkabarr.

Victory was near, but whose it would be was still undecided.

The Toskald began attacking as soon as they had learned that the Raktar had emptied their armory trenches, evidently overnight, during the worst of the seasonal storms. How the rebel general had accessed the heavily guarded bunkers, let alone moved the massive amounts of ordnance out of them, remained a mystery. Reever had seen some of the tunnels the rebels had burned through the ice by redirecting vent shafts. The process of tunneling had not been easy, for the water from the melted ice had to be relocated. Reever estimated it had taken the Raktar's forces close to a year to tunnel their way to the trenches.

No one knew where the weapons had gone, and those who did would not speak of it. It was, as every rebel said, the Raktar's will.

Reever was far more interested in the vral. Since the beginning of the war, they had been sighted regularly, and then constantly, wherever the fighting was worst. They came to heal at first, and then they were seen fighting alongside the rebels. They were always accompanied by special detachments of heavily armed rebels who flanked them on either side. Reever had never heard of a vral who had fallen in combat.

Somehow the two vral had multiplied. Reever had verified from other rebels who had survived large-scale engagements all over the inhabited territories that the vral now numbered in the hundreds.

"They kill the windlords, and save us," one rebel who had survived an enormous skirmish in the west told Reever. "That is how I know our cause is just. If it 'were not, they would kill everyone."

"Hundreds of them," one wide-eyed rebel whispered to Reever in the dark of an ice cave they had shared as temporary shelter. "They drift over the red snow, but it never touches them. They kill faster than anything I have ever seen. Then they lower their cradles for our worthy, and carry them away." He swallowed. "Some of our men are seen again. Some are not."

Reever understood that the rebel general was using the vral both as his field medics and an attack force; that much was obvious. But how he had managed to turn two into hundreds, and make them kill as well as heal, remained a mystery.

A trio of pilots climbed out of the tunnel into the trench. "We need men to defend Iiskar Bjola," one called out. "All who are able, come with us."

Reever was conscious and not wounded, which counted as able, so he rose with the others and went out onto the ice. The transport waiting for them was a refitted Toskald scout ship, captured and reconfigured "Patrols attacking from the north, forty ships," the pilot shouted over the sound of the engines. "Ground forces have surrounded the camp and are returning fire, but they are outnumbered. Your skimmers carry two plate charges. Land when you have planted them and support the ground defense."

Reever had never attached the explosive devices on the Toskald ship, so he mounted behind a rebel who had, to provide cover. The crossbows the rebels used were useless in the air, but he could man the pilot controls while the rebel planted the charges.

The sun was just beginning to rise, showing a fiery horizon line where the Toskald patrol was firing on the encampment.

"Stay low," was the carrier pilot's final instructions. "They have improved their targeting devices. The ice and God protect you."

The mission was a simple one. Reever and the other rebels would fly in under the patrol ships, mine them, and land to join the infantry. The Toskald still had difficulty tracking the skimmers in the air, but equipment modifications allowed them to lock on for short periods of time. The skimmer pilots, who were accustomed to flying in linear formation, had to compensate by resorting to degrouping and flying in erratic, zigzag solo patterns.

Reever looked down to see the rebel forces encircling the defenseless iiskar. Bjola had been evacuated some weeks ago, as had many other large camps. The women and children were now kept safely hidden in empty trenches far outside the battle zones. The rebels still used the shelters left behind, however, and if there were enough warm bodies, their thermal signatures would attract a Toskald patrol.

"Ready?" Reever's pilot shouted.

Reever slapped his right shoulder, and the pilot engaged the engine. The skimmer launched from the open side of the carrier into the icy air, and dropped immediately and changed course to prevent attracting attention to the larger ship.

The Toskald's forty-ship patrol was now only some thirty in number, with a dozen ships grounded or smashed into debris. On the ice below, four clusters of rebels with antiaircraft cannon were firing up at the patrol. In the air, skimmers darted around the attack vessels, weaving between pulse blasts until they could maneuver beneath a ship. The reinforced lower hulls had defeated the rebels' attempts at sabotage for a time, until commanders began issuing explosive charges that would blast through the alloy.

Reever's pilot found a hole in the cross fire and shot through it, coming up beneath a ship already partially crippled by ground fire. "Take over," he called to Reever as he engaged the stabilizer clamps and throttled back on the engine before standing up.

Reever slid forward, taking hold of the controls and watching for spot gunners. The Toskald had mounted pulse turrets on the back of every patrol ship, with gunners whose sole duty was to spot, target, and destroy rebel skimmers and their pilots.

The plate charge clanked as it adhered to the hull of the patrol ship, and the pilot grinned down at Reever. "Disengage the—" The rest of what he said was lost as a drone arm seized him and dragged him off the skimmer.

Reever snatched at the pilot's leg, but the hull drone, a spiderish, former maintenance device that crawled along the outside of the ship, dragged the pilot out of reach. Reever drew his pistol and aimed for the Half-blinded and deafened by the blast, Reever disengaged from the patrol vessel and dropped down. He wasn't injured, but he couldn't see well enough to fly to the next target. He rolled the skimmer out from under the ship and made for the surface.

The landing was rough, but the skimmer stayed intact. A man rushed up to help him off, while another checked the skimmer. "How many?"

"One," Reever told him. The ice all around him was dark with scorch marks, debris dust, and old blood.

"We have the other." The two men mounted the skimmer and took off, leaving him where he stood.

The patrol was still hammering the surface with a barrage of pulse, deton, and incendiary blasts. A huge blast went off near Reever, deafening him and throwing him to the ground. He tried to wipe the blood and sweat from his eyes as he crawled for cover. Most of the iiskar's shelters had been razed, but the debris heaps still afforded a small amount of protection. He discovered a gash on his forehead was responsible for the blood that kept running into his eyes, and pressed his palm against it hard, hoping to stanch the flow.

His vision blurred, sharpened, and then blacked out.

The stench of blood, carbon, and cooked flesh pressed in around him. Somewhere a latrine pit had been uncovered or overflowed, and was burning. The wind cut through his threadbare furs, but it blew much of the odor away from his face. The noise was not so bad, either, but Reever could not hear anything clearly.

He was blind, and almost deaf.

"Wounded?" someone asked him, voice muffled as if by a heavy cloth.

Reever shook his head. He didn't have to see to know that there would be far worse casualties than he here.

A hand touched his shoulder, squeezed it. A heavier fur dropped on top of him, covering his torso and the upper part of his legs. "Stay here and rest, brother."

Brother
. That was how all the rebels referred to each other. As if the war had made them all one large, affectionate family. In a way, Reever supposed it had. There were no ranks in the trenches, or out on the ice. The battle cry of the rebels was one of union, too. A union upon death.

We fight, or we die.

Time passed. The blood coagulated on Reever's scalp and stopped seeping into his eyes. He dozed, but he couldn't sleep, not with the noise, which was growing louder by the moment. The patrol was throwing everything it had at the cannon, but they were firing off twice as many blasts. The ice shook and trembled beneath Reever as ships crashed. There were shouts from the rebels, and screams from the Toskald. Both sounded desperate and furious. Together they cleared the last of the ringing from his ears.

"They're coming from the north fields."

"Over there—release the cats."

More shouts. Growls. Voices in anger, cries of pain. The business of killing was not a quiet one. The arena had been silent only when the last slave fell. Reever had never fallen. He would have crawled through hell for his wife, but this hell would not end. He

had told her he would wait, and he had. Almost three years now. He had promised her. It had been the last thing he had said to her.
I'll be waiting for you
, Waenara. And she had made her promise as well.
Not for long
, Osepeke. Cherijo wouldn't have lied to him. She loved him. She had given him a child. She had saved him. She

would never have made him wait like this. She would have run naked into hell after him.

Go. Find her. Hurry.

Silence settled all around him, as deep and still as the thought crystallizing in his mind. What if he never found her? He hadn't found her. Had he failed? Was this the moment he had dreaded since the
CloudWalk
?

"Open your eyes, ensleg." Reever obeyed the low, feminine voice speaking Iisleg. A shape hovered in front of him, a shape without

a constant form, a thing of light. He wanted to tell it to go away, that it had no business here. It would end up smeared on the ice, like everything else that lived and spoke and cared. "Head injury. Reacts to sound." The weight of the extra fur went away, and small hands searched him.

"Malnourished. Lacerations. This one can go to the unit. Where is the next?" Reever knew that voice. Knew it as he knew his own. "
Waenara
?" "I need transport over here," his wife said. No, it could not be her. He was hallucinating. He seized one of the hands and dragged it to his face. On

the fingers was her scent. "Cherijo." "Delirious." The hand tugged gently, trying to free itself. "You will be well, soldier." "Cherijo." Reever clamped his hand around her wrist. "I can't see you.
Cherijo
." "You can't see anything. You're battle-blind." The hand twisted, a little more insistent now. "Infuser." Someone else was there with her. Reever squinted, trying to make out her face. But there was no face.

There was nothing but a smooth patch of ivory. Then he felt the instrument at his throat, and fell back against the rubble. "Cherijo?"

"Rest now." The fur covered him. "All will be well."
Of course it will
, Reever thought as the drugs dragged him down into the dark. The imperative driving him mad was now silenced forever.

Reever had found her.

Orjakis paced the length of his balcony, not bothering with privacy screens. These days few people had time to walk the streets of Skjonn, and those who hurried along below did not spare the time to look up anymore. The Kangal stunned himself by how little he cared about the lack of homage. How could a ruler pay attention to the proper priorities when half of his army was dead and the other half was losing a war they should have won the second day it was declared?

Losing to slaves. To slave animals, left to breed unchecked. How was this possible?

All the mirrors in the palace had been smashed by Orjakis and the pieces removed, and the Kangal had not bothered with a full-body treatment in weeks. He did not dare look upon his image now. The strain alone had been enough, he was convinced, to have turned him into Gohliya's twin.

"I see Janzil Ches Orjakis, Kangal of Skjonn," a protocol drone said from the arch leading into Orjakis's bedchamber. "Representatives from the Allied League of Worlds have arrived to offer crystal and assistance to the great Kangal and his cherished kindred."

"They were supposed to come here last season," Orjakis snapped at the drone.