Deep Freeze

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

At first the Watcher considered the silencing of the female aboard the orbiting ship to be a mistake. The swift and deadly reaction of the intruder had caused serious damage to the network. Repair facilities were inadequate to counter total destruction. However, the trespasser had localized his attack in an area where the consequent thinning of the concealing cover of ice would reveal nothing more than a rocky plateau. In time, power could be increased in neighboring installations to extend the ice thinly over the affected area.

A hum of activity surged around the globe as a system of rerouted impulses isolated the mangled ganglia in the damaged units. When disrupted communications had been reestablished with all modules the Watcher reconsidered and determined that having seized the opportunityto strike within the enemy's ship, rather than having been ill-advised, had been the catalyst needed to gain a measure of control over the situation.

The raging emotions rising from the death of his mate gave the Watcher total access to the male who was the leader of the latest group of intruders. Influencing the others aboard the ship was proving to be more difficult. The inability to take command immediately, as had always been possible from the beginning, caused the Watcher to work to full capacity seeking an explanation. There were two interesting possibilities. Although the Watcher was self-renewing and thus for all practical purposes immortal, there was, as had been predicted by the Designers, a small amount of erosion of efficiency due to age. That was one feasible explanation for failure to command the intruders until they were distracted by strong emotions. It was possible, too, that the Designers had not properly anticipated the results of passing ages on the process of creation and evolution.

This last prospect was not to be seriously considered, for the Watcher's reasoning ability was based not only on the knowledge of the Designers but reflected their attitudes and prejudices. The Designers had known that the Sleepers would not be left to their dreamless rest for eternity. It was in the nature of things that someone would come. Somewhere among the stars the processes that had produced the Sleepers had been, were and would forever be in action and it was inevitable that beings of intelligence would be curious about the ice-shrouded planets, for life zone planets were the prized jewels of the galaxy, and as rare.

They had come and while it was true that certain aspects of their technology were impressive, it was still as the Designers had predicted.

The newcomers were not the equal of that which had been. In fact, the inferiority of Man was easily illustrated by his lack of understanding of the silencing cold, and by his unawareness of the Watcher's intrusion into his mind.

However, several aspects of the confrontation with the beings who called themselves Man generated accelerated activity in the Watcher's reason center. The purpose was clear, to silence, to protect the Sleepers. It had seemed simple at first and the ease with which the first two intruders had been silenced had lulled the Watcher into complacency. When the second ship landed, the web of complications had become apparent and logic had dictated—since family ties had instigated its coming—thatothers of the same family would follow. It had been deemed necessary to silence brothers and sisters of the two who had come seeking their parents, and as quickly as possible. Extensions had been sent to the alien worlds to expedite that desired end by implanting in the minds of the other members of the family the compulsion to find their missing relatives.

That the brother, Joshua Webster, was a representative of government was an unfortunate coincidence, and that was one of the Watcher's concerns. The likelihood of further complications became more probable when the female left in charge of the enemy ship placed a communications device in space where the next searcher would be sure to find it. The Watcher had tried and failed to prevent that action, but even as Joshua Webster approached the two dead ships on the planet's surface, measures were being taken to prevent the distribution of the information contained in the device. From the south polar region an extension lifted into space, shielding itself from the enemy's detection instruments by keeping the mass of the planet between itself and the alien ship's sensors. And at installations situated in a circle around the two frozen vessels on the surface instruments that had not been used since the beginning were activated and held ready for animation.

Josh was the first to step out of the launch onto the ice. Pat Barkley followed him. Pat and the two crewmen who completed the landing party were armed with heavy duty saffer rifles. Josh felt heavy and clumsy, for he had ordered that thermal shells be worn over the E.V.A. gear. The addition of the space armor added fifty pounds to the weight of the gear.

The shell's special alloys would have allowed a man to work safely on the sun side of the first planet, where the storm of the solar wind flared down with lethal force. Scientists had used the thermal shell to walk within spitting distance of the lava flow of an active volcano. The shell would deflect a direct blast from a small laser weapon and would be intact, although the man inside might be dead from concussion, after a direct hit from a saffer.

Josh was taking no chances. He led the way to the Old Folks. Barkley and the two crewmen maneuvered two specimen recovery vehicles toward the ships, left one of them at the bow of the Fran Webster. The other, its small flux engine purring, floated under guidance into the open lock of the Old Folks.

For long moments Josh stood looking down at the frozen remains of his parents. He had seen them on the ship's viewers and it had not seemed real. His reason had told him they were dead, but it was not until he stood over them, saw through the coating of ice the terrible damage that had been done to flesh by rupturing cells, that the total impact of their death hit him.

"Shall I begin, Captain?" Pat Barkley asked.

For a moment he was tempted to say no, to leave them as they were with his father's arm around his mother's waist. Yes."

Barkley used a small molecular disrupter to cut the frozen bodies free from the ice that bound them to the deck of the ship. Finished, he secured the torch and stood back as the crewmen positioned the specimen recovery bin near the bodies. Working space was limited in the control room of the tug, and completion of the task was slowed by the awkwardness and bulk of the thermal shells. It took all four of them to lift the two frozen bodies and the ice that still encased them. The two crewmen let their burden slip from their hands before it touched the bottom of the bin and ice shattered. Josh sucked in his breath, for he feared that the impact would cause the frozen flesh of his parents to shard and splinter like the ice.

"Okay, fine," Pat Barkley said, as he closed the recovery bin. "Let's get the hell out of here."

A crewman guided the bin toward the open hatch.

"Imagination is a powerful thing," Pat Barkley said as he stepped out of the ship. "I can almost feel the cold."

Josh shivered. He, too, had been thinking that it was his imagination.

The thermal shell protected against cold as well as heat.

The Watcher waited until the four men were inside the smaller of the two ships. They were in contact with the surface through the ice-encased hull. The Watcher flowed the energy of the silencing into the metal of the ship. Nothing happened. The answer was found in the mind of Joshua Webster. The Watcher recorded the data regarding the thermal shell andordered still another total review of all information. The density of the silencing cold was amplified. For hundreds of miles around the site silencer modules were brought to full power.

As the four men moved heavily toward the larger ship, taking with them the bodies of the first two intruders, the Watcher ordered animation of the newly activated mobile extensions. The cold, the weapon that had never failed, was ineffective against the thermal shield. The action that was ordered was risky. Timing had to be exact. It would take time to reach the orbiting ship. The men on the ground must be prevented from giving alarm. The Watcher was certain in his logic center that Man's claim to be able to reduce a planet to rubble was vainglorious boasting, but there was certain knowledge that the warship above had weapons that could cause bothersome damage.

The first of the mobile extensions was lifted to the surface from an underground chamber. It was the color of the ice. It moved quickly and smoothly toward the invaders. It had been fashioned in the image of the Designers, but was more sure-footed as it leapt from hummock to hummock, ran smoothly across a flat plain, and approached the downed ships from the blind side.

Meanwhile, mobile extensions as black as the face of space lifted off under their own internal power to angle upward toward the orbit of the alien ship.

The Watcher saw all, recorded all, and while functioning on several different levels probed into the mind of the man to whom access had been attained. The emotions which were known to the man as anger and sadness were still in dominance. It was a simple matter to keep the man to his purpose. The group of four entered the larger of the two ships, the empty specimen collector floating along easily in front of one of the crewmen.

"So far so good," Josh radioed to the Erin Kenner. "We have the bodies from Old Folks. We're going into the Fran Webster for the others." He avoided calling the dead by name. That would have been too painful. He led the way. When he saw David and Ruth frozen in sexual union, his throat was so dry that he could not swallow.

Pat was feeling the cold. His lips were numb. He looked at the frozen mass, the female legs locked around the back of the man, all of it made more than obscene by the damage done when freezing cells expanded and ruptured.

"Cap'n, what in hell are we up against?" Pat asked.

Josh shook his head.

"Kirsty Girard swept this ice ball from pole to pole looking for life signals," Pat said. "She didn't find any."

"Well, it will be up to the big brains from headquarters to figure it out,"

Josh said. "Let's do it."

Once again the cutting beam of a molecular disrupter was used to separate the frozen bodies from the deck. Once again four men strained and slipped and grunted to put the mass in the specimen bin.

"Erin Kenner, "Josh sent, "this is the captain. Mission accomplished.

We're coming up."

"Acknowledged, Captain," said Kirsty Girard from the Erin Kenner.

The crewmen started the bin toward the hatch. Josh looked around and felt his anger surge again. The Fran Webster had been a beautiful ship.

His brother had worked hard for decades to be able to own such a masterpiece of the shipbuilders' craft and it had been taken from him without apparent reason. At the moment that seemed almost as offensive as David's death. Four members of the Webster family had come to DF-2 without warlike aims and they were dead. He took one last look around.

The beautifully constructed instrument panel of the Zede Starliner was distorted by a layer of clear ice. The ship was dead. Even the residual power in the blink generator had been drained away, and that was damned odd. As long as a generator was within view of a star it collected and held power.

Suddenly the image of a star cluster with sterile orbiting planets flashed into his mind and he looked over his shoulder quickly as he felt a flush of disease. Killing a blink generator down to cold stop was not nearly as difficult as cooling the molten core of a world, but the images were similar.

He saw that the crewmen were almost at the hatch. Pat was directly behind them. He shrugged his shoulders under the load of the thermal shield and took one step.

One of the crewmen cried out in surprise as the hatch was filled with whiteness that resolved itself into humanoid shape.

"Captain?" said the other crewman as the white figure moved.

"Watch it," Pat Barkley yelled, trying to bring the muzzle of his saffer to bear on the thing in the hatch.

"Fire," Josh ordered, lifting his own rifle only to find the body of one of the crewmen between him and the hatch.

The explosion was contained within the hull of the Fran Webster. A

shock wave rushed past the white figure in the hatch without displacing it.

It leapt forward and pushed the floating specimen bin out of the way. The four men had been tossed about by the explosion. Quickly the extension opened the visors of the thermal shells and with its fist smashed the helmets of the E.V.A.s.

Josh Webster was conscious when he looked up into the icy face, saw a pair of glowing eyes, saw dexterous fingers moving toward the visor of his shell.

"Kirsty," he whispered, as he nudged open the communicator with his chin.

"Yes, Captain."

"Kirsty—" He could not form the words he was bellowing in his mind.

He was thinking, "Shoot, shoot, shoot. Blast him, Kirsty. Max force."

He said, "Kirsty, we're coming up."

"That's an affirmative," Kirsty said. "We have the launch on viewer."

The cold ended Josh's agony of self-blame.

"Bridge, Weapons."

"Go, Weapons."

"Kirsty, I'm getting ghost images on short-range detection."

"Show me," Kirsty said.

A viewer came to life. Against a black background a glowing image moved.

"Mass about two hundred pounds," Weapons said. "Size roughly three by six feet. And the sonofabitch is invisible, it seems."

"What shows it?"

"Infrared only."

"Shoot it," Kirsty said.

"Shoot it?"

"Now," Kirsty ordered.

A lance of fire went out from the bow of the ship. There was a distant flare.

"Scratch one ghost," Weapons said.

"There are others?"

"Only seven."

"Shoot them, too," Kirsty ordered.

"Aye, aye," said Weapons.

This time it was not so easy. The ghost images had begun a frantic dance of movement that flitted them from side to side in all directions, but one vector of their movement kept them coming toward the ship.

"Kirsty," Weapons said, "three down. The others are closing. I suggest we up shields."

"Can't. The launch is just ten minutes away from the lock," Kirsty said.

"That's going to be cutting it close. There's another wave of those things coming up out of atmosphere. I hate to be the one to tell you this, Lieutenant, but my guess is that we're under attack."

"The captain will be aboard in nine-minutes-five seconds. As soon as we have the launch inboard, we'll blink the hell out of here," Kirsty said.

"Erin Kenner," said Josh Webster's voice, "prepare to accept launch entry."

"Lock is open, Captain," Kirsty said.

Kirsty looked at Sheba and winked. "Don't you think I'm pretty cool under stress?"

"Magnificently so," Sheba said, with one of her blazing smiles.

"Inside I'm a quivering mass," Kirsty said. "Hurry, Captain, hurry."

The minutes were eternal until the ship vibrated ever so slightly with the landing of the launch in its cradle. Kirsty closed the outer hatch and lock, fed air into the cradle chamber. "Hold onto your stomach," she said, as she pushed in a blink that took the Erin Kenner six light-years away from DF-2.

"That's funny," Kirsty said.

"I'm not sure I want to know," Sheba said.

"The beacon we just planted is dead," Kirsty said.

"Kirsty," said Weapons in a high, excited voice, "we've got contact. Size and mass consistent with the ship we blasted back on DF-2."

"Hostile action?"

"Not at the moment."

"Get it in your sights and hold it there," Kirsty said. "If it so much as burps, blast it." She buzzed Engineering. "We're going to have to pick up that blink beacon and see what went wrong with it. Stand by to take it aboard."

There was only silence.

"Engineering?"

Silence.

Behind her the door to the corridor that led past the engineering cubicles to the launch cradle was flung open. She whirled. Her first impression was of overwhelming blackness from which glowed two glaring eyes, then she saw a head, an articulated neck, long, hinged arms extending toward her from a powerful armored torso. She screamed as icy, hard fingers dug into her shoulder, penetrating flesh, shattering bone.

The other hand seized her under the chin and pulled. Her neck snapped and tendons tore. As she fell to the deck Sheba tried to run, but a second black, armored extension leapt with startling swiftness to block her way.

Sheba knew with chilling certainty that Josh was dead. On the deck Kirsty Girard was also dead, although her legs were jerking in ragged rhythm. The two things, machines, black demons, stood motionless, their glaring eyes unblinking.

She couldn't believe how calm she was. "Listen," she said, "whoever you are, whatever you are, listen. We did not come here to harm you or to disturb you in any way. We came looking for my mother and father and my sister and brother."

The extension that had killed Kirsty lifted one arm.

"You're going to kill me, too, aren't you?" Sheba asked.

There was only silence. The extension took one step forward, its metal foot brushing aside one of Kirsty's limp arms.

"It's all senseless," Sheba said. "We meant you no harm. The other members of my family meant you no harm."

Now both of the extensions moved slowly toward her.

"Just tell me why," she said, still eerily calm. "Why do you kill us when we came with no ill will?"

Suddenly she laughed. At first it was a thoroughly feminine, throaty sound, a sound that had and would for many years to come excite the libidos of men who watched her on holofilm. She laughed because she knew why she was calm. She was merely playing another scene. More than once she had faced fictional death in some holofilm drama, and this was nothing more than a continuation of her make-believe life.

But as the extensions moved closer, the laugh became brittle and shrill and then faded.

"Why?" she asked, as one black, hinged arm reached out to her. "Just tell me why."

The voice spoke in English, but it was flat and uninflected. "Let them sleep," the voice said, "for when they awaken, the universe will tremble."

She screamed just once. One of the extensions seized her arm, its sharp, metal fingers penetrating. Her pain was brief, however, for the other armored extension seized her head in both hands and simply ripped it away from her neck.

"This is Weapons. What the hell is going on?" One of the extensions left the bridge to seek out the voice. The other studied the controls for a few moments, pushed buttons, set the ship's computer to spewing out data regarding the drive and the ship's operations. Black, sharp fingers punched in calculations. The outside lock opened. Within minutes the ship extension floated into the lock with the Erin Kenner's blink beacon clamped to its side. To make room it smashed into the ship's launch. In the control room the black extension punched instructions into the computer. The Erin Kenner blinked.

And, as had been calculated, she came out of nonspace in the heart of the nearest star. The insignificant mass of ship, extensions, and flesh both dead and alive became a part of the reaction in the nuclear furnace.

Inside the hull of the Fran Webster the tiny flux engine of the specimen container purred on, suspending the bin three feet above the deck. Two animated extensions soared to the site and nudged the other specimen container into the ship. Ice began to hide the exposed metal once more.

The animated extensions returned to the chamber below the ice. The Watcher was busy for a time. The barren rock that had been exposed by the aliens' weapons took on a coating of ice. Alternate routes of communications had minimized the damage. All sensors were working at just under ninety percent efficiency. That level matched the Designers' age deterioration charts and was acceptable.

The Watcher waited. The only evidence to indicate that the Erin Kenner had ever been to DF-2, as the aliens called it, was the dead bodies of the captain and four crewmen inside the Fran Webster. The Watcher considered destroying both the bodies and the pieces of equipment from the Erin Kenner, but decided that the risk of bringing the attention of the government of Man to DF-2 was outweighed by the need to keep the bodies of members of the Webster family to lure that last link in the chain of necessary silencing within reach. Once the last member of the family was silent, the peace that had blessed the planet for millennia would return.