The Frozen Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

this resource-limited environment, the carvers had found at least two ways to encode information, both by shaping the ice and in their own chemistry.
    When she started down the tunnel, it was with the thrill of history.  She would always be first to walk inside this moon and a slavecast kept a swirl of tiny mecha around her feet, sounding the ice, recording everything.  Unfortunately she wasn't so graceful.  The passage dropped steeply but she tended to crash into the ceiling, misjudging the gravity.  Worse, the opening shrank until it wasn't much bigger than her suit, and twice became too narrow for Vonnie to continue on without roughly shouldering through the brittle walls. 
    Their telemetry betrayed them, as expected.  The men on the radio questioned her movement and ordered her back.  She kept going.  Sonar showed an end to the tunnel after four hundred meters, yet infrared revealed that it was a shade warmer than its surroundings, with a hot pinprick of gas leaking through.
    Vonnie preempted any debate.  "There's something behind here," she said.  "My sonar's going crazy."
    "Something alive?"  That was Lam.  
    "I don't know.  But this is an airlock.  Look at it.  So smooth."  It was definitely not a formation caused by slow melt or tidal pressures.  Amazing.  Vonnie would have cringed at the idea of placing such responsibility in anything as flimsy as ice, but there were no metals here.  What else could the carvers use? It spoke again of their inventiveness and determination, and she couldn’t wait to see more.
    It was a test of sorts, a chance to prove herself the way that Lam and Bauman had already done.  Every step deeper, every  challenge met, showed her worth to the team.
    To get through without losing the air, she would need to trap herself between this block and a new seal of her own making — and every surface in the ice showed old scars and stubs.  Irregular holes marred the walls where building material must have been dug out.
    "I say 'go,'" Lam said to the men on the radio.  "We're picking up some kind of reading.  Noise.  Heat.  There's no telling what we'll miss if we just sit here."
    “I can get us in,” Vonnie agreed.
    Her friends had less than two hours to live when they joined her near the airlock, grinning like kids.  Bauman was last in line, so Vonnie took control of Bauman’s suit, dropping frozen blocks into place and soldering the stack together with her laser finger on a minimum setting.  "Slow work," she said, apologizing, not wanting to blunt their energy.
    Lam only shrugged, running sims on his visor as he waited.  "Think what they used," he said.  "Body heat?  Urine, maybe. There are organic contaminants all through here."  
    "Some good DNA," Bauman agreed, restless and happy.  
    Finally they were sealed in, and Vonnie eased through the original lock.  Immediately she saw another ice plug further on. That was good engineering, but she was disappointed to realize how many lifetimes it must have been since the carvers had come here or even considered this tunnel important.
    Long, long ago, the top of the second lock had slumped open and her suit analyzed the low-pressure atmosphere bleeding over her as nearly one hundred percent nitrogen — a gas so inert, no creature could have evolved to burn it as an energy source.  This seemed to be a dead place.  Why bother to block it off?
    "Nobody home," she said.
    "No."  Lam was cheerful, even buoyant, bumping her shoulder as he tried to look past.   
    But maybe the air here was bad because this place was unused, she thought.  Maybe they controlled oxygen content with flood-gates.  It could be their most precious resource.
    Lam and Bauman were beyond listening, though, lost in the invisible chatter of data.  Some of their tiny mecha had run ahead while others lingered to taste the ice, and Lam especially was in his element, pulling files, fitting each little perspective into a working whole.  
    Vonnie was