The Frozen Sky Read Online Free PDF Page A

priceless information everywhere across this moon.  There must be life in other places.  The mining would never stop, he accepted that, but it could be heavily restricted. It could be more careful.
    Bauman only argued for a day.  She was too much like them or she wouldn't have been there in the first place, and the men on the radio talked like slaps in the face, hard and quick, controlling.  She didn't appreciate that.  She had Lam concoct a sim that showed the hieroglyphs in danger, which wasn't untruthful.  The mecha had resealed the hole but the hieroglyphs were still reacting to near-vacuum, and who could say what data was being lost as the ice slowly boiled away?
    They were given permission to enter the trench, only the trench, and Lam laughed and ran for his armor. 
    "Game over," he said.  "Game over.  I mean, once we're inside there'll be all kinds of reasons we have to keep poking around, right?"
    "Wait," Vonnie said, and hugged them both, Bauman first, blushing a little as she turned to Lam.  "You can't feel anything in a scout suit," she explained.  
    "Yeah."  He smiled, looking for her eyes.
    They dropped in through a small cut in the roof and instructed the mecha to close it again, Lam and Bauman already bickering contentedly.  He wanted radar and x-ray.  She insisted on passive microscopy.  Vonnie just grinned and flipped through a heads-up of the preliminary soundings taken by wire probe.  Their visors were modifying sonar feedback into holo imagery, to avoid burning the ice with light.
    It was densely, overwhelmingly textured: an irregular quilt of dewdrops, smooth spots, swells and depressions.  Only the hieroglyphs held a pattern.  
    She seemed to be standing at the end of a tunnel, which made the symbols even more intriguing.  Why invest such effort marking the walls of what must be a low-traffic area?  Could this be some sort of holy place?  Lam would say that was just more anthropomorphism... and it wasn't impossible that at one time the tunnel had continued on from here, until the tides collapsed it. But what had the carvers been doing so close to the surface?
    "You'll never pack up the whole wall and put it in a museum," Lam said.  "We're damaging it just by standing here."
    "All the more reason to be careful."  Bauman shook her head, the big gear block on one side like a misplaced hat.  "We don't know how finely detailed the top layer—"
    "Exactly.  So we get it all in one burst, full spectrum."
    "The heat—"
    “Specialist Lam," a new voice said.  The other ships were still more than two light-minutes away, which could reduce conversation to a series of interruptions.  "We'd like to see the first column again, please stand by for auto control."
    "Roger that," Lam answered on the coded frequency, and in a moment his suit carefully adjusted his upper body, aiming the gear block with machine precision.  It was a little spooky.  The suits weren't supposed to accept remote programs without an okay from whoever was inside, but Vonnie wondered.  When they started deeper into the tunnel, would their suits lock up?  When they tried to send their data on public channels, would the broadcast come out clean or garbled?
    Lam had switched back to suit radio.  "There's something embedded in the ice!"
    "What?"  
    "Their computers must've seen it in our telemetry.  Pellets. Everywhere.  Probably organic.  Look."  
    The tiny spheres were as translucent as the ice itself.  Eggs?  Food?  "What if—"  Vonnie tried to get a word in edgewise but Bauman was beside herself, rattling her gloves against her thighs as if to grab and hold the little things.
    "We can't pull them, not yet,” Bauman said.  “We'll have to record and map it first, so I guess your full spectrum burst is the best way to go, Lam, what do you think?"
    "I think you're right," he said generously.
    "Can we get a wire in, get a sample?" 
    Vonnie pointed.  "What if we pick through the debris against that wall?"