Another one of Scipio's beatifully written shortstories, this small tale tells of one man's strange thoughts in the Artic.
"Strange things are done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold, and the arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold. The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest they ever did see, was that night on the marge of lake LeFarge, that I cremated Sam McGee."
-Robert Service, The Cremation of Sam McGee
The Medusa topped the rolling drift of snow in the midnight, running lights casting an weak glow into the arctic flurries about it. The huge vehicle clumped down into a shallow valley that formed the courtyard of a small outpost and crouched there like a wolf. Spotlights shot into existence, bathing the snow-camoflauged herc in brilliant white light. If machines could be angels...
Base camp Hero Ghost had a visitor. Georgi Manilov peered carefully at the Herc for a few moments before grunting in relent and hitting the intercom. This was disturbing. The Medusa didn't have a scratch on its shiny white exterior. The intercomm warmed up, started spitting static.
"Pavlov, get Nagana Ashitaka and Katarina out there to secure the vehicle and, uh, bring the pilot inside. Take some of the Coils for insurance eh?"
Pavlov didn't respond right away, which meant that he was putting one Vodka bottle down on his desk so he could answer the intercomm.
"Mhmm."
Georgi scanned the vehicle, sitting out there in the unfathomable darkness like some immaculate seraphim. "Great God gave us the ability to make swords and to make War, and it will be we and our war machinery which delivers up the devine immortal messiah. For as harsh is nature's whetstone, so harsher is War, and it shall smelt anew the human soul in but a blink of holy Darwin's vision."
Georgi remembered. Even all these years out here had not eroded his faith in the Epistle. To him, this vehicle was but a flickering sign of things to come, an imagined angel before she truly existed. Shocked at his own mental ramblings, Georgi promised himself some sleep pills from the comissary later.
The scanner finished with a beep. Vehicle designation: R.H.A.S.P.Med66, callsign Valkyrie Harlot. Communications frequency 5. Lately of Hugo Erebus Spaceport, assigned to Escort Squad 1A, Mission No. 1056. Stated mission purpose: Escort 3 5-ton cargo tankers with replacement parts, munitions, and contraceptives to Base Camp Hero Ghost.
Now Georgi was even more worried. He switched the base intercomm over to frequency 5 and attempted to hail the Valkyrie Harlot:
"Valkyrie Harlot, this is Commander Manilov of BC Ghost Hero, do you copy? Where is the rest of your, uh, mission? Valkyrie Harlot, respond: Where is the rest of your mission?"
It was too insane to believe - one medium Herc, unscathed, apparently the lone survivor of an ambushed convoy. If the Cybrids were up to their Trojan Horse trickery again... Georgi considered trying to recall Pavlov and order the equipping of candleguns and NBC (Nano Biological Chemical) protection gear, but he could see it was already too late. All three were out in the courtyard, staggering toward the Valkyrie Harlot in the stabbing wind. Still no reponse from the Harlot.
"Valkyrie Harlot, please respond. This is Commander Manilov of the HAEF. You have arrived at BC Hero Ghost. If you do not respond I will be forced to deny you access into the base."
"...is is Valkyrie Harlot. Roger."
Georgi jumped in his seat.
"Uh, three of my men are going out to secure your Herc. Just sit tight and we'll have you inside in no time."
The scanner hadn't picked up any danger signs, but that really meant nothing. The unholy weather, the dated software, and the ingenious enemy all worked against it. Georgi was slightly surprised that it had even allowed him to find out the weapons configuration on that boat, although it was readily visible even in the stark glow of the spotlights: Two compression lasers, one Viper Missile pack and an EMP cannon. The missile pack was empty.
Outside, Ashitaka was having a hell of a time clearing the ice off the cockpit. He swore, but his oaths were carried away in the howling wind, and Pavlov could not hear him twelve feet below, where he was hooking up power cables to the Herc's feet.
"What's taking so long, Ashitaka?" he roared, barely hearing it himself. Looking up, he saw that the man had not made any motion of recognition, but instead was intent on hacking off a large bit of ice from the canopy edge. Suddenly a snowball hit Ashitaka in the side - Katarina, a few meters away, brushed off her gloves.
"Hey duster - you get a look at who's inside?"
Ashitaka responded to her query with a prerequisite hail of curses. Then:
"Yeh...there's someone in here alright. It's a she, and pretty small too. I'd imagine... asian or something, but it all looks fucking white from on top of the glass. Here, I'll get off and we'll see if she pops the canopy."
He scrambled off the clear plasmetal plating and onto the top of the Herc. An icy cracking sound accompanied the rapid opening of the canopy, and then it was silent. Ashitaka suddenly broke this silence, howling in pain. Leaning too far over the canopy to get a look at the pilot, he had hit his face as it had risen and now tumbled off into the snow, holding his gloved hands to his surely broken nose.
Pavlov laughed hard and put a ladder up to the rim of the cockpit. Climbing up and peering inside, he was at first hard pressed to see anything aside from the steam that was blowing out of the cramped space, but gradually he could make out a small female form, somewhat delicate even inside her white quilt-fiber flight suit. Her face was snow white, from natural composition or extreme cold he could not tell, and her eyes were a sort of sky blue that teardrops were fashioned from.
Pavlov could not help himself from shaking as he wiped his gloved finger across her disturbingly red lips, for it was fresh blood which was her lipstick. Katarina was yelling something at him for his sluggishness, but Pavlov could only hold the pilot's lolling head carefully, trying to be still.
She looked like she was fifteen years old.
* * *
It was a BioDerm. One of the new types, the genetically grown body with an organimech criminal's brain. Mature processing center of an adult, superb reflexes of an adolescent. To the Empire, it didn't matter that such Derms had lifespans of about four months, that they were notoriously unstable, or that they were exhorbitantly expensive. What they did offer was a solution to a criminal problem and an instantly competent pilot.
What an Imperial abomination was doing in a Human Alliance Herc, and why was it the sole survivor of a convoy were questions to which Georgi had no answers. At the moment, he considered them immaterial in any case.
What the medical scans and subsequent interviews with the subject had revealed was most intriguing. Her name was Aurora. The blood on her lips had been her own. Subcutaneous tumors had spread throughout her body, and without Detox, she was deteriorating rapidly. What was more, those tumors were of the sort only found under very special circumstances.
Rad Guns.
Gradually the story was pieced together from the various volunteers who would push her wheelchair around Base Camp. To them Aurora would speak a little a time, as her health allowed her, of what had happened in the alien night.
One week ago, by her reckoning, the convoy had departed from Hugo Erebus station. With her had been three other Herculean escorts - One Apoc and two Emancipators. The Cybrids had struck at the midway point of their journey, far from any comm towers and in the obfuscating snowstorm. Like wolves they had circled the convoy, picking off the weaker Emancipators one at a time over the course of a twenty-six hours and then coming for her:
"I equalized my modulator, knowing that they had struck from behind with both of the Emancipators. In front of me, inside the misty ice storm and seemingly outside of time or reason, was an Adjudicator charging me down. I opened up with a linked salvo and Chrissa saw it from behind and opened up too, but she hadn't counted on the attackers from behind and I knew I would have to deal with those at any moment. I did a turn-reverse backed toward the Adjudicator so I could face my rear, and I was hit immediately by two Shepherds with EMP and ATC fire. I could see the glow of a lance in my rear camera and I knew what they planned.'
'It was quick work to weave and keep speed in reverse, toward that Adjudicator, and the Shepherds didn't catch up to me before I gimped one in the leg and Chrissa, always scared into shooting at whatever was closer to her, crushed the other with a full salvo, using up the last of her energy with a linked Q-gun shot. This left the Adjudicator not far behind me with that lance almost in range. I timed myself and threw another turn-reverse back toward the convoy, and the 'brid powered past me with a booster, but my shots connected as it passed anyway. The two PBW's that the thing had crucified Chrissa in seconds, blowing her cockpit away so that she couldn't even scream.'
'I put my booster into action then and got close behind the Adjudicator, working on its reactor. The horror was never able to out- turn me, so I won after a few hard maneuvers. Then I noticed that the convoy was toast."
The rest of the story was far more tattered, and she told it as she deteriorated even further into mumblings and long periods of catatonic silences.
She had gone into the snows. With lowered shields and no sensors, she had stalked the Cybrids then, with a cold kind of efficiency and heartlessness that no human had a right to. Her Medusa's cloak had borne her through the night like some sort of mechanized spirit, invisible, incomprehensible in her existence. It was not stability, it was not madness. Georgi looked into her pure eyes, her innocent eyes, and knew that there was something beyond the reckoning of human thought in the circuitry of her mind.
And this terrified him subtly, like a doll which has too long been dusted with the years.
