Of Fire and Night - Kevin J. Anderson [51]
Pent-up power boiled within Karla. It seemed to cause her pain unless she released it. The leaden sea froze beneath her every footfall as she walked toward the white shore, accompanied by the pack of pulsing nematodes.
With an empty wail that was half song and half scream, Karla loosed her ethereal energy at one of the implanted artificial suns. The ice cracked around the support framework, and the spherical spotlight dangled for a moment, then swayed and broke free. The bright surrogate sun tumbled into the cold, gray sea, sending up a geyser of flash-evaporated water. Still burning as it sank, the light dwindled, surrounded by a surge of foam.
BeBob groaned. "I wish we'd never escaped from the Moon."
Rlinda wanted to swat him. "If you waste all your pathetic whining, what'll you have left if things get worse?"
"Now there's something to look forward to."
She didn't want to stick around and learn what the ice woman intended to do to all of them. She doubted the Tamblyns had any sort of weapons that might be effective against this demonic apparition. "I really could use a flamethrower or an assault-model jazer right now."
"Here's a shovel," BeBob said, handing her a wide-bladed tool with a long handle. "Or maybe it's an ice scraper."
Rlinda hefted it, frowning at BeBob. "Am I supposed to smack her in the head with this?"
"No." BeBob secured another shovel for himself. "But it might help against those worms she's controlling."
Scarlet nematodes flexed and crawled onto the solid ice--hundreds of them, each one as long as a human leg. The Plumas water miners scattered for the domed shelters, equipment huts, anyplace to hide. Armed with nothing more than the shovels, Rlinda and BeBob huddled behind a berm of piled ice and crystalline snow.
The three Tamblyn brothers faced the woman in a last attempt at reason. "Karla, it's us!" Torin shouted. "Don't you recognize me? This is your home."
"Hoooome," she repeated like a long gust of frigid wind blowing through a tunnel. "Solid walls. Prisons. Break them all down." She casually extended her finger toward two running water miners who fled toward a habitation hut. It was as if she had sprayed a firehose of pure cold that petrified the hapless workers and covered them with a blanket of ice.
"Karla, no!" Wynn screamed. "Please--"
The woman launched a blast at him as well, but Wynn dove out of the way, rolling under a set of thick gas-separation pipes. All three Tamblyn brothers scrambled away in separate directions.
"Return to fluid state," she said. Karla directed her bombardment at more of the running miners, as if finding this more entertaining than cracking a hole through the ice ceiling. Next she destroyed one of the habitation huts, followed by a larger dwelling dome and a generator shed. "Perfect state of disorder."
Linked to her thoughts, the flurry of nematodes squirmed forward, looking very hungry. In the low gravity, the creatures had a strange adhesion with the vertical ice walls, crawling along the pipes and separating columns while leaving trails of slime. Rlinda thought of giant maggots squirming up the walls of a garbage bin.
With a sound like rasping sand, the slithering nematodes crossed the ice pack like hunters. Their flexible bodies swelled, then contracted as they squirted along toward the wrecked complexes and hiding places.
Rlinda heard screams and shouts. A man ran out of a storage shed and fired an ice-melting laser at three of the worms. Instantly hot, they bloated and then exploded, spraying red protoplasm in all directions. Emboldened by his success, he turned the melting laser toward Karla, but the heat had little effect. With a brief gesture, she covered both him and his weapon in a shroud of ice.
On their hands and knees, Rlinda and BeBob scuttled to find better cover. The Roamers weren't paying any attention to their captives right now. "I wish we could do something," Rlinda said.
"I wish we could get out of here. Think this might be our chance?"
"Oh, sure, as long as we survive the next ten minutes."
Another explosion