The first harpoon struck, punching the reaction drive array clean off the lander. The little craft went spinning helplessly out of control towards the pristine ice below.
8. Ghost Translation
“There's someone out there on the ice.” Her voice was strangely thin in the freezing air.
The low curve of the sun's limb shone through a ragged hole in the fuselage, blinding her before the filters kicked in within her left eye. She was hanging upside-down by her seat-restraints, and she was still alive. How was she still alive? This time she'd lost conscious thought for a period of thirty-two seconds, the shock of the imminent crash-landing and the extreme deceleration of the impact too much for her biology. Telemetry streaming into her brain from the ruined lander's systems and down from the array of orbital nanosensors allowed her to build up a view of what was happening. They'd crashed near the pole, brought down by the high-g harpoon strike. The weapon had been launched with no warheads; its mass and velocity were all it needed to inflict its damage on the lander.
She sought for data streams from the Dragon, looking for a status report on local space. There might be a sky of Concordance ships up there. She got nothing, no signal from the Dragon at all. It wasn't in its orbit above Maes Far anymore. It was gone, their only way to get off-planet and out of the system.
Fuck. Fuck fuck. Fuck.
Her attention moved on. None of the other three missiles had struck them; one was buried a metre deep in the pack ice some seventeen kilometres away, while the other two were still in the air. Their reaction drives spent, they were plummeting harmlessly to the ground fifty-five kilometres away. It made no sense; the harpoons were far more manoeuvrable than the lander, with guidance systems easily capable of adjusting to the ship's ponderous dodging.
She turned her attention back to the figure on the ice, glimpsed from low orbit by a drifting nanosensor. There was a ship there, a whole craft buried in the ice, once concealed but now out in the open, its camouflaging carapace of snow sloughed off. Only a turret protruded from the ice, but the fogging field that had hidden the craft was deactivated. Whoever was inside no longer needed to remain concealed; the trap had been sprung. A high-powered energy wall curved over the ship in a half-dome, shielding it. Actually, judging by the electromagnetic fields displacing around it, it was a full dome, protecting the ship against attack from above and below.
“Who is it?” she asked. “What are they doing?”
Ondo still hadn't replied. She craned her neck around sideways to look at him. In the freezing air, her ragged breath billowed out in front of her, clouding the scene. Her artificial systems had compensated for the icy grasp of the polar air, ramping up exothermic chemical reactions to spread warmth through her tissues. Ondo had no such protection. He hung by his straps from the other seat. His eyes were closed and he wasn't moving. His muscles were shivering involuntarily. She queried the flecks in his brain to check his biological status, something he'd granted her privilege to do. His nervous system was sluggish, but active. He was alive, physically undamaged, but succumbing to frostbite and hypothermia as his biology withdrew precious heat from his extremities to keep his core alive.
She queried the lander's systems to see if the voidhull could be sealed, the air within warmed, but got no response. The lander was dead.
She reached across and touched Ondo's hand, uselessly willing heat to cross from her flesh to his. Unable to manipulate its immediate environment, his biology was reacting as it should, but it was a flawed strategy. He would never emerge from his oblivion. She had to override his natural reactions, rouse him, take control of his body's responses. She sent instructions into his flecks, instructing them to rouse him to consciousness, at the same time grappling with the restraints that held her pinned to her seat.
She fell to the floor that had once been the ceiling, landing in an undignified heap. In the same moment, Ondo's flecks reported that he was responding, slowly surfacing to awareness. She reached up above her head to free him from his restraints, catching him as he fell to cradle him to the ground. She wrapped her body around his to give him her warmth.
She saw the moment his eyes flickered open. From his far-away stare she guessed he was also studying the telemetry, pulling in all the data he could just as she had, assessing his situation. His augmentations were nothing like hers, but they were capable of passively monitoring his surroundings while his natural brain slept. Now, finally, he answered the questions she'd asked him while he was out of it. They were close enough for his words to be communicated brain-to-brain, with no prospect of anyone else listening in.
“It's a Void Walker.”
“Here?”
“So it seems.”
“How can that be? You've been monitoring the planet intimately since my escape, watching for possible traps.”
He thought about that for a moment, his larynx bobbing in his neck as he worked his throat into life. “They must have embedded him in the ice-cap during the chaos of the initial attack. My guess is he's been here ever since you escaped, waiting for the moment I, or someone, came for the fragments.”
“We might never have come; the Walker could have been here for years, for his whole life.”
“The Void Walkers are fanatics, unquestioning, used by Concordance as it sees fit. One would happily sacrifice themselves on the spot if a First Augur instructed them to.”
“Concordance knew about the ship in the ice all along.”
“Yes.” A troubled look flashed across his features as his words streamed into her mind. “I've mentioned before how they often seem to know things they should have no way of knowing. How did they discover
