Yarrow ignored her suit, clawing the hull until her fingers spooled blood.
“Fight it,” I said. “It’s just demons triggering our fear centers, trying to drive us out!”
Of course, knowing so didn’t help.
Somehow I stayed still long enough for my suit to slither on. Once sealed, I purged the tainted thick with the suit’s own supply—but I knew it wasn’t going to help much. The phobia already showed that hostile demons had reached my brain, and now it was even draping itself in a flimsy logic. Beyond the ship we’d be able to think rationally. It would only take a few minutes for the thick’s own demons to neutralize the invader—and then we’d be able to reboard. Complete delusion, of course.
But that was the point.
When something like coherent thought returned I was outside.
Nothing but me and the splinter.
The urge to escape was only a background anxiety, a flock of stomach butterflies urging me against returning. Was that demon-manipulated fear or pure common sense? I couldn’t tell—but what I knew was that the splinter seemed to be beckoning me forward, and I didn’t feel like resisting. Sensible, surely; we’d exhausted all conventional channels of attack against the defector, and now all that remained was to confront her on the territory she’d staked as her own.
But where was Yarrow?
Suit’s alarm chimed. Maybe demons were still subjugating my emotions, because I didn’t react with my normal speed. I just blinked, licked my lips, and stifled a yawn.
“Yeah, what?”
Suit informed me: something massing slightly less than me, two klicks closer to the splinter, on a slightly different orbit. I knew it was Yarrow; also that something was wrong. She was drifting. In my blackout I’d undoubtedly programmed suit to take me down, but Yarrow appeared not to have done anything except bail out.
I jetted closer. And then saw why she hadn’t programmed her suit. Would have been tricky. She wasn’t wearing one.
I hit ice an hour later.
Cradling Yarrow—she wasn’t much of a burden in the splinter’s weak gravity—I took stock. I wasn’t ready to mourn her, not just yet. If I could quickly get her to the medical suite aboard the defector’s ship there was a good chance of revival. But where the hell was the wreck?
Squandering its last reserves of fuel, suit had deposited us in a clearing among the graveyard of ruined wasps. Half-submerged in ice, they looked like scorched scrap-iron sculptures, phantoms from an entomologist’s worst nightmare. So there’d been a battle here, back when the splinter was just another drifting lump of ice. Even if the thing was seamed with silicates or organics, it would not have had any commercial potential to either side. But it might still have had strategic value, and that was why the wasps had gone to war on its surface. Trouble was—as we’d known before the attack—the corpses covered the entire surface, so there was no guessing where we’d come down. The wrecked ship might be just over the nearest hillock—or another ten kilometers in any direction.
I felt the ground rumble under me. Hunting for the source of the vibration, I saw a quill of vapor reach into the sky, no more than a klick away. It was a geyser of superheated ice.
I dropped Yarrow and hit dirt, suit limiting motion so that I didn’t bounce. Looking back, I expected to see a dimple in the permafrost, where some rogue had impacted.
Instead, the geyser was still present. Worse, it was coming steadily closer, etching a neat trench. A beam weapon was making that plume, I realized—like one of the party batteries aboard ship. Then I wised up. That was Mouser. The demons had worked their way into its command infrastructure, reprogramming it to turn against us. Now Mouser worked for the defector.
I slung Yarrow over one shoulder and loped away from the boiling impact point. Fast as the geyser moved, its path was predictable. If I made enough lateral distance the death-line would sear past—
Except the damn thing turned to follow me.
Now a second flanked it, shepherding me through the thickest zone of wasp corpses. Did they have some significance for the defector? Maybe so, but I couldn’t see it. The corpses were a rough mix of machines from both sides: Royalist wasps marked with yellow shell symbols, ours with grinning tiger-heads. Generation thirty-five units, if I remembered Mil-Hist, when both sides toyed with pulse-hardened optical thinkware. In the seventy-odd subsequent generations there’d been numerous further jumps: ur-quantum logics, full-spectrum reflective wasp armor, chameleoflage, quackdrive powerplants, and every weapon system the human mind could devise. We’d tried to encourage the wasps to make these innovations for themselves, but they never managed to evolve beyond strictly linear extrapolation. Which was good, or else we human observers would have been out of a job.
Not that it really mattered now.
A third geyser had erupted behind me, and a fourth ahead, boxing me in. Slowly, the four points of fire began to converge. I stopped, but kept holding Yarrow. I listened to my own breathing, harsh above the basso tremor of the drumming ground.
Then steel gripped my shoulder.
She said we’d be safer underground. Also that she had friends below who might be able to do something for Yarrow.
“If you weren’t defecting,” I began, as we entered a roughly hewn tunnel into the splinter’s crust, “what the hell was it?”
“Trying to get home. Least that was the idea, until we realized Tiger’s Eye didn’t want us back.” Wendigo knuckled the ice with one of her steel fists, her suit cut away to expose her prosthetics. “Which is when we decided to head here.”
“You almost made it,” I said. Then added: “Where were you trying to get home from?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Then you did defect.”
“We were trying to make contact with the Royalists. Trying to make peace.” In the increasingly dim light I saw her shrug. “It was a long shot, conducted in secrecy. When the mission went wrong, it was easy for Tiger’s Eye to say we’d been defecting.”
“Bullshit.”
“I wish.”
“But you sent us.”
“Not in person.”
“But your delegate—”
“Is just software. It could be made to say anything my enemies chose. Even to order my own execution as a traitor.”
We paused to switch on our suit lamps. “Maybe you’d better tell me everything.”
“Gladly,” Wendigo said. “But if this hasn’t been a good day so far, I’m afraid it’s about to go downhill.”
There had been a clique of high-ranking officers who believed that the Swirl war was intrinsically unwinnable. Privy to information not released to the populace, and able to see through Tiger’s Eye’s own carefully filtered internal propaganda, they realized that negotiation—contact—was the only way out.
“Of course, not everyone agreed. Some of my adversaries wanted us dead before we even reached the enemy.” Wendigo sighed. “Too much in love with the war’s stability—and who can blame them? Life for the average citizen in Tiger’s Eye isn’t that bad. We’re given a clear goal to fight for, and the likelihood of any one of us dying in a Royalist attack is small enough to ignore. The idea that all of that might be about to end after four hundred years, that we all might have to rethink our roles… well, it didn’t go down too well.”