Maximum Ice (47 page)

He came closer to her, and she couldn’t back up any more because the divan was right behind her. She’d picked the wrong name. He wasn’t Swan anymore. There were no swans. But she wasn’t listening. He locked on to her upper arm. “Come over here.”

She leaned away from him, mistaking his intention. No, he wasn’t making a move on her, asking for her body. But it hurt that she thought so and signaled her distaste, pulling away from him as much as she could.

He yanked her into the middle of the room, dragging her over to the window. She cried out in pain. He might have dislocated her shoulder. She moaned.

He had forgotten his own strength. He’d hurt her, and hadn’t meant to.

He pointed out the window. “Ice is very sick. That’s a fever, out there. A brain fever. What did you think it was, a pretty show for fun?” He forced her to look.

“My arm…” she whispered. “You’ve broken it.”

He looked at her in distress. Now she would never listen. If he thought his heart was ragged before, now he learned that there was no end to how much it could hurt.

The window latch was a simple affair. As he swung the window open on its hinges, winds of light swept across the deep reveal onto their faces. “Ice is sick. That’s what the storm is. The kind of EEG you get from a grand mal seizure.”

“Let me help you,” she whispered. “We can redirect Ice. Don’t give up.”

No. He didn’t want fresh hope. It was worse to hope, to open windows onto what you so desperately wanted, only to find there was nothing but smiling men pointing their rifles at you, nothing but a woman pulling back from you.

“No,” he whispered. He knew he was going to kill her. There was a reason for this. That he would hate himself for doing it. Finally, and at last. Then he could die.

He said softly, “You never liked me, did you?”

She saw that his mind was made up. Her face composed itself, now in shadow, as she turned away from the window and faced him. “No,” she said. Her chin came up, eyes meeting his, her voice steady. “Not my type.”

He snapped her neck.

The brother was conscious. His expression was terrible.

Swan wiped his mouth. Then he wiped his teeth, pulling shreds of meat out of them. Once Solange was dead, a desperate hunger had come over him. Now he was satiated. He felt drowsy. His mind wandered. He looked at the brother.

“Do I know you?” Swan asked.

The brother shook his head.

But then Swan thought he knew. This was the brother who was on the roof with the gypsy

Swan stood up and stripped. Donning the other brown
robe, the one thrown over the divan, he approached the bed where the bound man lay

“You know where the gypsy Zoya is?”

The brother shook his head.

But eventually, he did know.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Zoya looked at Kellian in the dim spray of light from their lantern. Despite her exposure on the barrens, the young woman looked fresh and strong. For her part, Zoya wasn’t nearly as able-bodied.

They stood on the loading platform in front of the sleek steel train. Zoya shone her light on the engine’s side.
East Is East, was its name. And under that, UrboLink.
It was a well-preserved example of twenty-first-century rail technology Daniel said they kept it in repair. It could whisk them to core-text in minutes. Zoya was sorely tempted.

“Kellian, a man is following me,” she said. “It’s Lucian Orr. He broke into the Zoft. I managed to escape, but he won’t give up. You’ll be in trouble if you’re with me.”

The younger woman smirked. “There’s trouble in either direction, then. The nuns will kill me if I go back.”

“Knowing Lucian Orr, I’d take my chances with the nuns.”

Kellian’s smile fell away. “I wouldn’t.”

“He’s a snow witch.”

Now Kellian was silent. At last she said, “Let’s take the train.”

“Daniel says the nuns will know if it’s in use.” Zoya glanced at the train. It was a choice between stealth and speed. But it was also a question of whether she could walk fourteen kilometers.

Zoya considered her options. They were all fairly ugly. “To
hell with the nuns,” she said. “Do you know how to operate this thing?”

“Bet I could figure it out.”

Zoya liked the woman more and more.

But the first problem was how to get into the train. The doors were closed.

“Emergency access,” Zoya said. “There’s always a way inside public transport from the outside.”

It was the window. In their hurry, they dropped the window on the landing, setting off a deep echo down the tunnel. Zoya hoisted Kellian up, then Kellian helped Zoya clamber inside.

Kellian said, “When the nuns detect the train moving, it’ll take them a few minutes to shut us down. By that time we’ll be way down the track. With them on foot, we’ll have a good hour’s head start on them.”

“No, we won’t.” Zoya looked over to a large, arched opening on the other side of the train platform. “You don’t know much about train systems, do you, Kellian?”

There was a pause while her companion seemed to consider whether there was something she didn’t know much about.

Zoya went on, “The nuns didn’t build this as a shuttle system. Daniel said the Ecos built it for Seetol and the other local cities. If so, this system might have two sets of tracks, one for each direction of travel. The name of this train is
East Is East. If there’s another tunnel next to this one, I’m betting it’s got a train called West Is West.”

Kellian considered that news for a moment. “Parked on the other end, in the west, like its name?”

“If you were in charge of the Keep, where would you park your trains?”

The young woman’s face fell. “Both of them here, in the east.”

Zoya nodded.
Like a two-car garage.

Daniel hadn’t been nearly as tall as Swan.

His robe hit Swan at mid-calf. The few nuns who were still awake so late at night glanced at the ill-fitting robe. But the short robe suited better than the gory one. And what were they going to do, sound the alarm over bad dress?

They would indeed sound the alarm when they found the two bodies. Or, three, counting the first brother he’d killed. That was bad, losing track of how many people you’d just killed. But such considerations were behind him. No pretenses at goodness. He’d killed and killed. It didn’t matter anymore. They were all dead in an hour anyway.

He felt sick to his stomach. The look on Solange’s face. Despising him. But still, to have broken her neck… it sickened him. And he fell upon her, hungry. It didn’t bear thinking about, and the joy was, he wouldn’t have to think about it, ever again. Too much thinking. That was the whole problem of life in three words.

Pass through the east wing, into the first door at corridor’s end, down the stairs to the brothers’ wing, find the fourth door on the left, the secret door to the rail station…

He found the door he was looking for. Entered.

Rushing to the forward driver’s station, Zoya and Kellian found the driver console studded with switches and controls beyond what seemed strictly necessary to turn on a train and let it run down the track.

Kellian studied the console, brow furrowed.

“Let’s start pushing buttons,” Zoya said.

Kellian was calmer. She was analyzing, as though enjoying the challenge.

“Hurry,” Zoya suggested.

The console lights strobed on as Kellian threw a switch. “Ready, then.”

Kellian punched at the controls, once, twice. Lights came on overhead and the engine began with a whine.

“Hang on,” Kellian said optimistically. The train started groping down the track as though it was dragging the world behind it.

“I could jog faster than this,” Zoya muttered.

“Inertia.”

“We haven’t got time for inertia.” Zoya kept looking behind, out the window.

At last inertia switched in their favor, and they were flying down the tunnel.

Swan was in the brothers’ domain, the basement of the Keep. The corridor was empty for now. He rushed onward, according to Daniel’s directions, entering the storage room:
the façade of shelving… the hidden lever…

Through the soles of his boots, Swan felt a tingling. The floor was vibrating. He threw the lever upward, opening the wall, revealing stairs leading down. He pounded down the stairs, into the earth.

At the station platform, the train was gone. OK, then, she had taken the train. Of course she had.

Well then, he would catch up with her at coretext.
Tell Ice that I am immortal. He knew well enough the ruse she planned. None of that could matter now. She’d have her wish that Ice stop growing. But like most desires, it wouldn’t happen in the way
that she wished….

An ornate archway led into the adjoining tunnel, the one Daniel had described. There Swan found his personal transport, a monster of a vehicle, a one-man train. With a nod at Kipling,
West Is West.

In front of him, the engineering control panels bristled with knobs and switches. He found the power switch, toggled it on.

Flipped another switch. Nothing. Then another. The whole console lay speechless and sullen.

Get moving, you great cow. He flipped another toggle. Nothing. He turned away from the control panels, trying to control his breathing.

In another moment he’d torn the driver’s chair apart. Bits of stuffing from the upholstery settled around him, rushed up his nose as he breathed.

He swiped at the dust, clearing his eyes. A small screen on the dashboard showed a light moving down a straight path. That would be the other train. In a rage, he slapped the console, hurting his hand.

But the train started to move.

The dim light of the coach interior threw a strobelike flicker onto the walls of the tunnel, as
East Is East
sped onward.

Kellian, seated at the controls, looked up at Zoya, still hardly believing she was on a train with the star woman. She had lots of questions of this woman. But one stuck in her mind. “Zoya,” she asked, “what is the damage Lucian can do? You said he can do a lot.”

Now Zoya knew how the Ship captain felt, every time he had to awaken Ship Mother and give her bad news.

“Kellian, I told you about the longevity program, the reason that Ice is in a runaway state. That immortality program has failed. Snow witches are the result, half-mad, living to eat. I think Lucian Orr would rather die than live like that. And he’d rather we all went with him.”

“How?”

“There’s an ancestral program. A self-destruct program. It was designed for a time when it was still possible to destroy the bulk of Ice without—side effects. At the beginning the programmers worried about runaway growth. But given the
entropy threat, they went ahead with spreading Ice as fast as they could.” She paused. “There was a fallback program. To destroy Ice.”

“How? It’s everywhere. It’s everything.”

“Nothing is indestructible, Kellian. Not even Ice is immortal.” They were passing a substation platform, one of no doubt dozens along the corridor between the railhead and the great city. “The self-destruct mechanism is a simultaneous firing of the body of Ice. When Ice covered only a few patches of ground, the result would have been a series of small eruptions. Now, it would be catastrophic. But invoking that program would destroy everything Lucian has worked for. And right now, he’s focused on me, it would seem. I’m keeping him going. I mean to keep him from suicide.” It sounded good, spoken aloud. Sounded confident, brave. All the things she didn’t feel.

Kellian stared out the window into the black maw of the tunnel. “Suffering,” she murmured.

“Suffering?”

“It’s the optical storm outside,” Kellian said. “I’ve never seen it happen before. So something new is bothering Ice.” She turned to face Zoya. “It’s the suffering. Killing the world may seem like suffering to Ice.”

“This is a smart machine?” Zoya muttered.

The young woman said, “Lucian Orr’s been testing the self-destruct program. Ice is upset about it. That’s what the optical storm is.”

Zoya closed her eyes. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Then she opened them. “Step on it,” she said.