“I think it’s a sonie . . . also called an AFV,” said Harman, his own voice hushed.
“What?” said Daeman. “What do those words mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Harman. “But people in the lost ages used to fly around in them.” He touched the forcefield; it parted like quicksilver under his fingers, flowed around his hand, swallowed his wrist.
“Careful!” said Ada, but Harman had already lowered himself first onto his knees and then onto his stomach, then prone and settling into the black material. His head and back rose just slightly above the curved upper surface of the machine.
“It’s fine,” he said. “Comfortable. And warm.”
That settled it for the others. Ada was the first to crawl onto the craft, stretching out on her stomach and grasping the two handgrips. “Are these controls of some sort?”
“I have no idea,” said Harman as Hannah and Daeman crawled onto the disk and settled into the outer impressions, leaving the two rear-center depressions empty.
“You don’t know how to fly the thing?” asked Ada, a bit more shrilly this time. “From the books? From your reading?”
Harman just shook his head.
“Then what are we doing on it?” said Ada.
“Experimenting.” Harman twisted the top off his right handgrip. There was a single red button there. He pressed it.
The wall ahead of them disappeared as if it had been blown out into the antarctic night. Cold wind and flying snow swept around them in a blinding implosion, as if the air in the room had been sucked out and the storm pulled back in in its place.
Harman opened his mouth to say “Hang on!” but before he could speak, the sonie leaped out of the room at an impossible velocity, pressing the bottoms of their boots back against metal and making them each cling wildly to the handgrips.
The forcefield bubble over their heads kept them alive as the sonie, the AFV, the thing, flew out from the white volcano with its ice-crusted and shattered buildings clinging to its seaward side. The night-vision lenses in their thermskin hoods showed them the fir forest along the coast gone back to ice and death, the abandoned and drifted-over robotic equipment along the curve of a bay, and then the white sea—the frozen sea.
The sonie leveled off about a thousand feet above that frozen sea and hurtled out away from land.
Harman released one of the handgrips long enough to activate the direction finder on his palm. “Northeast,” he said to the others over their suit comms.
No one replied. Everyone was clinging and shaking too fiercely to comment on the direction the machine was headed while taking them to their deaths.
What Harman did not say aloud was that if the old maps he had studied were accurate, there was nothing out this direction for thousands of miles. Nothing.
Ten minutes of flight and the sonie began losing altitude. They had passed beyond the ice and now were flying over black water scattered with icebergs.
“What’s happening?” said Ada. She hated the quaver in her own voice. “Is this thing out of energy . . . fuel . . . whatever it uses?”
“I don’t know,” said Harman.
The sonie leveled off a mere hundred feet above the water. “Look,” called Hannah. She raised a hand from its grip to point ahead of them.
Suddenly the back of something huge, alive, barnacled with age, flesh corrugated-tough, broke the cold sea, its mammal heat radiating like throbbing blood in their night-vision-enhanced sight. A spout of water shot high toward them and Harman smelled fish on the fresh air that the forcefield allowed through.
“What . . .” began Daeman.
“I think it’s called . . . a whale, I think that’s how to pronounce it . . . but I thought it was extinct millennia ago,” said Harman.
“Maybe the post-humans brought it back,” Ada said over their suit intercoms.
“Maybe.”
They hurtled farther out to sea, always east-northeast, and after a few more minutes of the sonie holding its altitude, the four passengers began relaxing a bit, adapting, as humans have done since time immemorial, to a strange new situation. Harman had rolled on his side and was looking up at the brilliant stars becoming visible between scattered clouds when Ada startled him by shouting, “Look! Ahead!”
A large iceberg had become visible over the dark horizon and the sonie was hurtling straight toward it. The machine had flown over or past other icebergs, but none this broad—it stretched sideways for miles like a gleaming blue-white wall in their night vision—and none this tall—it was apparent that the top of the monstrous thing was higher than their current altitude.
“What can we do?” asked Ada.
Harman shook his head. He had no idea how fast the sonie was going—none of them had ever traveled faster than a voynix-pulled droshky—but it was fast enough, he knew, that the impact would destroy them.
“Do you have other controls on your handgrip?” asked Hannah. Her voice was strangely calm.
“No,” said Harman.
“We could jump,” said Daeman from behind and to the left of Harman. The sonie tilted a bit as Daeman got to his knees and elbows, his head just within the forcefield bubble.
“No,” said Harman, putting the force of command in the syllable. “You wouldn’t last thirty seconds in that sea, even if you survived the fall . . . which you wouldn’t. Get down.”
Daeman dropped to his belly again.
The sonie did not slow or change course. The face of the iceberg—Harman guessed that the thing was at least two miles across—rushed at them and grew taller. Harman estimated that it rose at least three hundred feet above the water. They would strike it two-thirds of the way down its cold face.
“There’s nothing we can do?” said Ada, making it more a statement than a question.
Harman pulled his hood off and looked at her. The cold air was not so bad within their forcefield cockpit. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He reached across with his right hand to take her left hand. She swept her thermskin hood off to show him her eyes. She and Harman interlaced fingers for a few seconds.
A few hundred yards before fiery collision, the sonie slowed again and gained altitude. It whisked over the top edge of the iceberg with ten feet to spare and banked to the right until it was flying south above the icy surface. It slowed more, hovered, and settled onto the surface, snow hissing under its heated underside.
Harman and the others lay where they were for a silent moment, hanging on to the handgrips, not sharing their thoughts.
The forcefield bubble disappeared and suddenly the terrible cold and wind burned at Harman’s face. He pulled his hood down in a hurry, glancing at Ada as she did the same.
“We should get off this thing before it decides to take us somewhere else,” Hannah said softly on the comm.
They scrambled off. The wind shoved them off balance, relented, shoved at them again. Spindrift pelted their outer clothing and hoods.
“What now?” whispered Ada.
As if in answer, a double row of red infrared beacons winked on, outlining a ten-foot-wide path from the sonie for a hundred yards to . . . nothing.
They walked together, holding each other upright in the wind. If the beacon lights had not burned so brightly in their night vision, they would have turned their backs to the wind and been lost in seconds—lost until they stepped off the edge of the iceberg somewhere to their right.
The path ended in a hole in the iceberg’s surface. Steps had been hacked out of the ice and disappeared toward another red glow far below.
“Shall we?” said Hannah.
“What choice do we have?” asked Daeman.
The steps were slippery under their street boots, but some sort of climbing rope had been attached to the right wall with metal spikes and loops, and the four clung to the line while descending. Harman had counted forty steps when the stairway ended in a wall of ice. No, the steps continued to their right and down—fifty steps this time—then left and down again for fifty more, the whole descent illuminated by spaced infrared cold-flares set into the ice.