War Games (26 page)

Not if I could help it.

“Go to max thrust!” I yelled at Grychn, and kicked my own skis to the maximum. I leaned forward over my ski tips to keep them down as the gravthrusters kicked. I forgot to tell Grychn to do the same. It wasn’t something you thought about—you did it instinctively because of Corps training. But Grychn had never used powered skis before, nor had she had any hypnotraining. She wasn’t ready. Her skis shot out from under her, sending her sprawling on her bottom in a meter of powder snow.

“Frogs!” she cursed in my mind. “Save yourself, Marc, I’m lost for sure.”

Luckily, I didn’t take the time to think. I had already cut my thrusters back. Then I did a telemark turn, dropping one ski back, unweighting it, and planing the leading ski by canting it into the snow. A conventional parallel turn wouldn’t have worked in such deep snow at the speed I was going. A telemark turn was my only chance.

The maneuver caused me to make a tight circle, cutting around and behind Grychn. It was tricky—if I caught the edge of my ski I’d go sprawling myself. You had to plane the bottom of the ski on the snow like it was a slalom water ski. I’d never made that kind of turn before, but hypnotraining didn’t fail me. The right reflex arcs had been conditioned.

All the time, a river of snow rushed down its chute toward us. I only saw it out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t want to be distracted—or terrified.

When I completed the turn I was behind Grychn, skiing in her tracks. She had managed to get back on her feet, but both ski bindings had released when she fell and her skis were only attached to her boots by safety thongs. She wallowed waist-deep in snow. She’d never get them on in time.

I held my skis as far apart as I could and nudged a little velocity out of my thrusters.

“Turn around! Quickly! Face me. And hold out your arms.”

Grychn complied.

As she turned, I reached her. I let my poles dangle by their straps from my wrists, then scooped my hands under her outstretched arms, pulling her against my chest. Her legs hung between mine and her skis trailed behind on their straps.

Then I hit my thrusters to maximum. We shot forward. I damned near fell myself, trying to ski and hold on to Grychn both. But I didn’t. A cloud of blue snow swirled around us. Chunks of ammonia ice clattered against my helmet. Others struck my body but felt as gentle as real snowflakes through combat armor. We rose on a wave of snow like a catamaran on an ocean swell. Lateral drag nearly pushed me over. I had to lean toward the wave.

Then we burst out of tumbling snow. Behind us, tons of snow and ice flattened out on the canyon floor, obliterating our tracks. I coasted to a stop, safely out of range of the slide.

Only then did I wonder about the avalanche coming just when we were underneath it. We weren’t making enough noise to trigger it—not on combrid skis, wearing combat armor. But it must have been just a coincidence. Some coincidence.

Grychn pulled herself up so she could peer into my visor. She didn’t say anything. I held her until she stopped trembling, then helped her get back into her skis.

We stood side by side. Grychn looked back at the snow-slide.

“Why did you come back for me?” she asked.

“It seemed like the right thing to do.”

“Be serious for a minute. I already know you can be as quick on the comeback as anyone. Why did you risk your life to save mine?”

“Do I really need to say it?”

“I think you do. It would be nice to hear, anyway.”

“OK.” I glanced away, then back. “I guess I love you. Is that enough?” It didn’t sound quite so trite at the time. You had to be there.

“I suppose,” she answered, but her voice was happy in my mind. “You never told me that before.”

“I didn’t think I had to.”

“Sometimes it helps. Once, anyway.”

“Besides, I don’t think that slide was meant for you. I was the one it was supposed to get.”

“You mean ...”

“Maybe. I don’t know for sure. But let’s be more careful from now on.”

We started out again, gliding up the canyon on silent skis, slowly climbing toward the pass. I stopped a kilometer from the summit, at the mouth of a steep chute coming down from Mt. Themis. The head of the chute was blocked by an ice cliff a hundred meters high—the leading edge of a glacier clinging to the side of the mountain like a giant amoeba. The body of the glacier was about a kilometer wide before the basin in which it lay funneled into the chute. Fingers of blue ice reached up to the very summit of Mt. Themis, three kilometers distant, clawing deep rents in the face of the mountain. Huge chunks of frozen ammonia and hydrocarbon formed a rubble at our feet. Below them lay rock tailings.

Grychn followed my gaze. “Do you think we should be standing here?” she asked nervously. “There’s lots of ice up there. It doesn’t look particularly stable to me.”

“This is it.” I could see a dark round hole in the side of the mountain.

“The mine?”

“Yes. About halfway up that chute.” Permaplastic bolts protruded in two rows from one wall of the chute. At one time, scaffolding must have been attached to the bolts, but there was no evidence of it now. Chunks of ice falling from the cliff above had knocked it down. It was buried under meters of ice now.

I took off my pack and pulled out a climbing rope and a sack of snap hooks.

“Why don’t we just blast up there with thrusters?” Grychn asked.

“The p-grav might set up a resonance in the ice cliff and jar it loose. It looks unstable to me, too. I think climbing will be a little safer.” I unslung my rifle and set it beside my pack. I coiled the rope around my waist.

I began climbing. It was an easy climb because of the bolts already drilled into the rock wall. They were spaced at a proper interval and provided adequate hand and footholds. I inched my way up. A piece of cake. Grychn waited at the bottom.

When I was about halfway up, she spoke in my mind: “Look out, Marc!”

I knew what had happened. Her thoughts had told me. I ducked my head and flattened out against the wall, clinging to a pair of bolts. Fist-sized chunks of rock rattled against my helmet. No big deal. Combat armor protected me from the impact. They would have to be big enough to knock me loose to cause any harm. But I had no doubt chunks that big sometimes did break loose. There were ice boulders as big as houses in the canyon below. They had come from somewhere.

After about a minute the shower ended. I hoped most of the loose stuff had come down. I started climbing again. I could see the tunnel mouth a hundred meters above me. Permaplastic planks timbered its entrance. I continued to climb, slowly and carefully.

Like I said, a piece of cake.

After another fifteen minutes, I hauled myself into the tunnel.

I set a self-tapping eyebolt on one of the timbers. It screwed itself secure. I snapped a hook to it, then looped my rope through the hook before tossing the free ends to Grychn.

In a few minutes she stood beside me in the tunnel. “Is the stone here?” she asked.

“Oh, yes. It’s here. It’s been waiting a long time.” I heard an eerie song in my mind. I pushed it away. I didn’t need any distractions now. My quest was almost over.

We advanced down the tunnel. It was well timbered at first. After a few meters, the tunnel was dark except for dim phosphorescence emanating from the walls. But there was plenty of other radiation for us to see. Helmet sensors perceived more than the visual spectrum. Gamma rays made their own black light. Alpha particles danced like fireflies. Beta particles swirled like shining dust motes.

At the first branching, the tunnels were no longer timbered. Bare rock ribs were scarred from the claws of a mining machine. Rock rubble littered an uneven floor. I knew which branches to take. We crept ever deeper into Mt. Themis, until our way was barred by a wall of jumbled rock.

“A cave-in,” I whispered, afraid to speak out loud.

“The stone?”

“Behind the cave-in.”

“What now?”

“We dig.”

“With no tools.”

“We have our hands.”

I began clawing at the loose rock near the roof of the tunnel. Battle gauntlets could punch a hole through a concrete wall. They easily served as pick and shovel.

I gradually opened a passage large enough for me to crawl through. I scooped handfuls of loose rock between my legs like a rodent digging a burrow. Grychn cleared them out behind. We talked no further. I concentrated on digging, trying to keep songs, and the images they brought, out of my mind. Mind and body worked smoothly. Chip away loose rock. Push it behind. Pull free more rock.

Finally I broke through to the other side. The blockage was only a few meters thick. I rolled into a clear tunnel beyond. Grychn waited on the other side. The tunnel ended twenty meters away.

“Is it there?” she asked.

I didn’t answer.

I saw the timestone, lying atop a pile of rock at the base of the tunnel’s raw face. Blue fire sparked from a thousand facets. I picked it up carefully, as though afraid of being burned. I held it in my hands in front of me. Light flickered from the walls of the mine shaft.

I looked into the timestone.

I knew I should not have, but the urge to do so was overwhelming.

A stream of images darted into my mind, like an infinite kaleidoscope. Past and future blurred into one interminable present. I saw all wars, all plagues, all famine, all cataclysms since the beginning of time. And all future ones. History, past and future, was an endless orgasm of death.

My mind was paralyzed with sensory overload. I stood motionless. I could not move. I had looked into the eye of God.

For an instant, I was totally insane.

I didn’t have time to sort out all the images. No organic brain could function that rapidly. But a billion images were imprinted in memory. Some of them come unbidden yet.

I could not move. I had to allow an infinity of images to stream into my mind. I had no will of my own. I would do the timestone’s bidding. I would be its slave forever. I knew that, but there was nothing I could do to prevent it. I was trapped.

Then stroboscopic flashes of light dazzled my eyes, blinding me momentarily. The terrible images stopped. I could look away.

Grychn stood behind me, holding the assault rifle I had dropped. Its pulsar tube still glowed. She had shot into the stone, where the pulsar quantum had ricocheted from mirrored internal facets. The stone was undamaged. But she had succeeded in freeing my mind from it. I briefly wondered if that was what she had intended. No matter.

There wasn’t time to make a rational decision. But my unconscious mind was not constrained by the slowness of synaptic deliberation. Once freed from the grip of the timestone, it grasped the significance of the confusion of images. It knew how to react. Instinct and intuition took over. Blind panic overwhelmed me. Later I would know why. Then, that knowledge didn’t matter.

Terror was enough.

I dropped the timestone and ran to Grychn.

I grabbed her hand. “Come on,” I yelled. “We’ve got to get out of here!” We crawled back through the burrow I’d dug. I pulled her along behind me as I ran down the tunnel to daylight. We hardly paused at the mine’s entrance. Grychn picked up the rope and rappelled down the chute. I followed. My mind began to clear. Panic ebbed. But I still knew we had to run. I knew what game the timestone played. It was one of death. For me. For Grychn. For everyone.

I had enough sense to retrieve the rope and pack it away. We shouldered our packs. Grychn slung my rifle. We put on our skis and skied back down the canyon. Out in the open, gliding on powder snow sparkling with sunlight, with tall roostertails rising behind us, panic seemed silly. Until an image surfaced in my mind. Then terror seemed quite reasonable indeed. NeIs had told me the truth about the timestone. It could conserve entropy. I wished I’d believed her. Not that it would have made any difference.

“What happened?’ Grychn asked.

“I’ll tell you later.” I tried to keep my mind clear. Something else had to be done. The circle must be completed.

We continued skiing down the canyon. I stopped when we came to the snowslide. Something was wrong there. We stood for a moment staring at the wash of jumbled snow and ice. A single set of ski tracks crossed it.

“Someone followed us,” Grychn said. “But where is he? There was no place in the canyon to hide.”

“Look,” I said, and pointed back in the direction we had come.

A figure rose from the snow where he had buried himself, appearing like a ghost rising from a grave. He stood in the canyon just a little above the upper chute. He had probably decided to wait for us to come out of the tunnel, then kill us both and take the timestone for himself. When we came out without the stone, he changed his plans and decided to fetch it himself. Why risk a fight unnecessarily?

He began climbing the chute. Distance made him appear like a bug crawling up a wall. There was no way we could reach him in time to keep him from making it up the tunnel.

“Who?” Grychn asked.

“You should know.”
You brought him here.

“Kramr.”

“Who else?”

“Then he’s won.”

“Maybe.”

Images began to reveal themselves. Truth unraveled from a kaleidoscopic weave. I knew what had to be done. There was no other choice. There never had been.

Grychn guessed the same truth. But then she’d known it all along. She emptied a clip at the climbing bug. Bright pulsar quanta flashed up the canyon and into the ice chute. Ice puffed into vapor, enclosing the climber in a cloud of steam that coalesced into a filigree of hoarfrost. He shook off the tendrils of ice and began climbing again. Grychn sprayed another clip in his direction. Again he was not hit. The distance was too great for the accuracy of an assault rifle. I might have been able to hit him if I’d taken a careful rest. But there wasn’t time for that. And there was an easier way to take care of both Kramr and the timestone.

I took the rifle from Grychn and pulled my one minimissile from my ammo pouch. I loaded the rifle, then took careful aim. I had all the time in the world, while a bug clambered up to its burrow, slow and lazy.