Maximum Ice Read Online Free Page A

Next to Fyodor lay the man in bloody rags. He had long black hair, no beard. And he was thin; bones of a oncelarge frame almost poked through his skin. Dripping from his mouth, shreds of bloody tissue.
    “Mother of God,” someone whispered. Around her, the crew were just realizing that the man had been eating Fyodor’s flesh.
    “Cover him,” Zoya said, nodding at Fyodor’s body. She placed her hand on the arm of the young crewman to steady him.
    She turned back to the crew holding the sled man by the arms. “You really should let him go. He killed our attacker.”
    As though he knew he was being discussed, he made eye contact with her. “Widgen,” he said. He nodded at the impaled body. “Malid widgen.”
    Bad… something, Zoya guessed. Yes, very bad.
    Amid the carnage, one of the crew said, “The man was starving to death.”
    Someone answered, “What starving man has the strength to do
this?”
    Janos put an abrupt end to the macabre speculations, ordering them to bring the bodies on board, all but the murderer.
    Zoya turned to Janos. “I think the man with the harpoon did us a favor. It came too late, but he wasn’t threatening us.”
    Janos murmured at her, “We’ll get his story—if you’d be so kind as to translate, instead of playing soldier.”
    “Yes, Lieutenant.” She had no will to snipe back at him, here, with three of her people lying dead.
    Janos nodded at the crew, and they released the man. The sled man’s face was impassive, but turned dark when he glanced at the man holding his harpoon. Then he looked over at Zoya as though he blamed her for his loss.
    She allowed a crewman to lead her up the ramp. Turning back at the hatchway, she met Janos Bertak’s cold gaze. There was no mistaking it, she had just made an enemy.
    But it was for a good cause. Janos couldn’t be trusted in command. In the crisis, his impulse was to fire before aiming— before thinking. Anatolly had wished to present a peaceable face to the world, and it was a good inclination. One that Janos Bertak didn’t share.
    As she turned to enter the shuttle, a glint of light caught her eye.
    A few hundred feet away, Zoya saw, through the windblown shards of crystal, a violet pulse of light rise to the surface and disappear again like a drowned shooting star.
—2—
    Captain Anatolly Razo walked down Ship corridor at the head of a gaggle of officers and techs, all talking at once. Cluck, cluck, cluck like geese.
    Did he wish to call a general meeting? Did he wish to meet with the families of the murdered crew? Would he answer a radio call from Janos Bertak? Should the shuttle crew go into quarantine upon their return? And what about Tereza Bertak? The first mate’s wife was in hospital. Suicide or accident, Ship’s priest wanted to know.
    That last was one he could answer. He turned in mid-stride to Sandor, his assistant. “Tereza is not dead; therefore, she is not a suicide.”
    “No, sir,” Sandor replied, “but…”
    Lieutenant Andropolous elbowed Sandor a bit to one side. “Janos Bertak is on the comm sir, waiting.” As a group they turned down a connecting corridor, where knots of crew members were gathered in fretful clusters.
    “He doesn’t know about Tereza?” Anatolly asked.
    “No, sir.”
    That was well. Janos had his hands full, planetside. And Tereza would recover. No point burdening his first mate further just then, with his wife’s latest act of despair. Or, some would say, stupidity
    With all the disasters, there was no time for sleep. He’d been awake since the middle of his sleep shift, when the shuttle crewwere murdered. Then Tereza, with spectacularly bad timing, tried to kill herself. Finally, over breakfast, came the report from the geophysical survey
    The survey chief who gave him the briefing looked like he’d rather be someplace else. He stated the basic bad news first, and built up to the main calamity
    Global temperatures were, on average, thirteen degrees cooler than baseline