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"EX: The Maiden in the Ice (Acts I-V of X)"
 
   LAST EDITED ON Nov-26-13 AT 10:39 AM (EST)
 
I: The Stone Bridge

Wednesday, June 17, 2336
Karafuto, Rigel Sector Co-Prosperity Sphere

It was typical of Sir Victor Creed's open-handedness that he would not only take his niece, Laura Kinney, to spend a month among the mountains and hot springs of Karafuto's rugged Shikuka district, but also insist that her particular friends Mairwen Porter and Rhian Lewis should come along if they wished, and not concern themselves a bit with what it might or might not be costing him. Sir Victor was a wealthy man, and besides, he found it such a delight and a relief that Laura had particular friends, he would gladly have gone to much more preposterous expense so that they could vacation together.

Karafuto was one of the Rigel sector's most obscure and remote colonies, a "back-to-basics" sort of place, settled by people from Japan and her first-wave colonies who sought a simpler sort of life than could be found closer to Earth. The Karafuto-jin didn't shun modern conveniences like some of the seriously retro societies - they had electric lights, computers, the latest medical technology - but theirs was a way of life that gave preference to the traditional. In dress, in manner, in folklore and custom, the people of Karafuto deliberately and for the most part successfully hearkened back to pre-spaceflight days.

In such a setting, Laura and her friends stood out like palm trees in a pine forest. Of the three, petite and raven-haired Laura was probably the least noticeable, but little blonde Rhian was plainly a foreigner at any distance and redheaded Mairwen, who at fifteen was already more than five feet, nine inches tall, was more obvious still. They weren't letting it bother them, though - particularly Mairwen - and the locals, after a day or two of puzzled reservation, had been charmed by their cheerful directness almost to a one. Laura was the only one of three who spoke Japanese - quietly, precisely, with no discernible accent - but Mairwen did most of the talking anyway, and if most of the people she was talking to couldn't understand a word she was saying, many of them seemed to enjoy the cadence of her Snowdonian lilt all the same.

For their part, the three girls were greatly enjoying their vacation - even Laura, though her response to it, as to virtually everything, was a very quiet and contained sort of satisfaction rather than the transports of rapture her friends occasionally experienced. All three were members in good standing of the Llanfair Regiment of Girl Guides of New Snowdonia, one of the most active of the planet's famously venturesome Guide regiments. By training and inclination, they enjoyed rugged wildernesses, craggy peaks, and all the rest. This part of Karafuto was, Rhian had declared with delight, "like Llanfair with decent weather," and the three had spent most of virtually every day exploring the wilderness around the resort town where they were lodging, often enjoying the novel and exotic sensation of hiking without being rained upon.

It was the middle of their second week on Karafuto when Laura met the little boy. He was sitting on the stone bridge over a stream, partway up the area's biggest mountain, Shikukayama, when Laura arrived at the bridge. He was perhaps seven or eight years old, old enough to be surprised by the appearance of a stranger on the trail, but not old enough to be dismayed or suspicious. He looked up at her approach and said,

"Hi."

"Hello," Laura replied, nodding. She stopped in the middle of the span and looked around. Then, evidently satisfied, she brushed a few pebbles away from a spot at the bridge's edge, not far from where the boy sat with his feet dangling above the stream, and lowered herself into seiza in the space she had cleared, neatly arranging the folds of her utility kilt about her.

The boy regarded her with the vague amazement many of the local children had shown toward the visitors from New Snowdonia. Too young to attach any baggage to the fact, he found her beautiful and intriguing in exactly the same way he'd have though it of a cloud or one of those cool rocks with the sparkly crystals inside. He had never seen a girl dressed in camouflage clothing or wearing military-style boots before. She had a yellow neckerchief knotted at her slim throat and a dark green beret on her head; on the right shoulder of her battle-dress-style tunic, there was a patch representing a flag he'd never seen before either, green and white with a depiction of a red creature that might've been a dragon.

"Are you a soldier?" he asked.

She turned her head to regard him with calm eyes of a remarkably clear jade green, then replied, "No."

"Oh. ... You look like you're wearing a uniform."

"I am," she said. "I am a Girl Guide."

The boy looked puzzled. "What does that mean? Do you guide girls? Or is it just that you're a girl who guides? And what do you guide people to?" He went a little red. "Sorry, am I bothering you? Are you here to meditate or something?"

Laura shook her head impassively. "No. I am waiting for my friends."

"Oh." A pause; then the boy offered pensively, "My dad says I ask too many questions."

"Your father's assertion is a reflection of his tastes, not objective reality," said Laura. "I do not mind. To answer your earlier question, a Girl Guide is a member of an organization dedicated to the promotion of healthy living, self-reliance, and the cultivation of useful life skills in young women." For the first time, she smiled very slightly. "That is a quotation from the handbook."

"Oh," said the boy. "I'm Toru."

"I am Laura."

Another pause, this one faintly awkward, at least on Toru's part. The boy seemed about to say something three or four times, but each time he looked away instead, fidgeting. Laura was not the galaxy's most adept judge of human emotions, but she suspected he was dismayed about something that had nothing to do with her - a suspicion that was confirmed a few moments later, when he suddenly blurted,

"They're taking her away."

One of Laura's eyebrows arched slightly. "Who is taking away whom?" she wondered.

"The other foreigners. The mean ones. They're taking away the glacier girl."

Laura looked more intrigued, for this was the second time in as many days she had heard that name.

II: A Bathtime Story

Tuesday, June 16, 2336

Laura, Rhian, and Mairwen were relaxing in the tub of their inn's public bath, letting the hot water soak away the aches of another day's hard scramble up and down the peaks of the Shikuka range, when the proprietress, Mrs. Arata - a cheerful, middle-aged lady who had taken a liking to her peculiar guests - bustled in with towels and whatnot. As had become her wont in the last few days, she asked them where they were planning to go the next day while she laid out the things.

"We thought we would try the Western Col," Mairwen replied.

The landlady's eyebrows went up. "Oh my," she said. Then, smiling, she put the towels down on a bench near the tub and went on, "Well, mind you don't disturb the glacier girl."

"Who's that?" Rhian wondered.

"You haven't heard the story of the glacier girl?" asked Mrs. Arata. "It's one of my favorite legends from these parts. I first heard it from my grandfather when I was just a little girl. Would you like to hear it?"

"Yes, please!" said Rhian. Mairwen eagerly agreed; Laura, with a slight smile, merely nodded.

"Well," said Mrs. Arata, taking a seat on the bench. "High on Shikukayama, there is a girl frozen in the ice of the Shikuka Glacier. It's said that she's near the glacier's face, in a branch that stopped flowing ages ago, and that if you know where to look, and you wipe away the frost and snow and polish the surface of the ice, you can see her clearly with a strong handlamp. She's supposed to be the most beautiful girl on all Karafuto, as perfect and pristine as the day she was frozen, as though she were simply asleep and one could reach out and wake her up. And this is the story my grandfather told me of how she came to be there.

"You see, many centuries ago - long before humans left Earth - there were other tribes of humanity living among the stars, and one of them lived on Karafuto. One day a princess of that tribe fled her village to escape her wedding, arranged by her father, to an evil man she could not love. She was pursued by her would-be husband and his retainers. One of them wounded her with an arrow early in the chase, but she managed to escape into the mountains. For a whole day she climbed ever higher into the frozen wastes of the Shikuka Glacier, until finally she could endure the cold, the exhaustion, and the pain of her wound no longer."

Shaking her head mournfully, the innkeeper went on, "Realizing that her husband and his men would have no trouble following the trail of her blood in the snow, she knew that she would either have to go back and be captured - with all that that entailed - or simply lie down and die on the spot. In desperation, she prayed to her people's ancient gods, pleading with them to intervene."

Rising from the bench, Mrs. Arata raised her hands to the ceiling as if in prayer herself and declaimed, "'O spirits,' she cried, 'I beg of You, deliver me from this impossible choice. Am I to return in chains to a life I do not choose, or is my life to end now, in this place? Both are equally abhorrent to me! I cannot decide. I leave my fate in Your hands. Choose!'"

"Oooohhhh," said Rhian quietly, her blue eyes wide.

"A moment later the gods answered," said the innkeeper, more soberly now, as she sank back down to resume her seat on the bench. "With a terrible roar the ice beneath her feet rose up and engulfed her, sealing her up for all time - out of her husband's grasping reach, beyond the length of her father's arm, where no man could ever touch her again. She is there still, entombed in the branch of the glacier that lies within the northern spur of Shikukayama's Western Col. Her name is forgotten now - the branch of humanity to which she belongs is extinct, but possibly for her - but among us today, she is known by many names. The glacier girl... the Witch of Shikuka... the Maiden in the Ice."

"Wooooooow," Rhian whispered.

"Have you ever seen her?" Mairwen wondered.

The innkeeper shook her head. "Lord, no, dear," she said. "I've never been adventurous enough to climb so high."

"Do people go and look for her, though?" asked Rhian.

"Sometimes they do," said Mrs. Arata. "It's always been considered something of a rite of passage around here, particularly among the boys, to go and find her... but all they do is look. As far as I know, no one's even dared photograph her; it would be disrespectful. Everyone in Shikuka knows you trifle with the Maiden at your peril. Some maintain that the story I've just told you is a fairy tale for children, and that she's really not a human girl at all, but a renegade spirit, entombed by the other gods as punishment for some terrible, nameless crime. Either way, she's very dangerous. If she is ever released from her icy tomb, all the legends say, a fiery doom will come to Shikuka."

She laughed lightly then, as if to invite them to join her in thinking, How quaint and silly these old legends are! - but Laura sensed an undercurrent of real anxiety there, as if the landlady weren't quite sure she didn't believe it after all.

Now, listening to Toru tell her about his encounter with the surly strangers farther up the mountain, Laura felt a sensation that was still new to her, less than a year into what she considered her life as an actual human being: intrigue.

"They say they're archaeologists from Earth and they just want to study her, but I saw some of the stuff they had with them," Toru said. "If they're just going to look at her, what do they need those saws for? They're going to take her away and put her in a museum or something. It's not right!" he protested. "She's not theirs."

Laura considered this, then nodded.

"No," she said. "She is not."

Then, rising smoothly to her feet, she dusted down her kilt and said, "Toru, will you do me a favor, please?"

"Uh, OK," said Toru.

"Do you speak Standard?"

"Sure. Sort of. I mean, we study it in school... "

Laura seemed to think that was good enough. "My friends will be here in sixteen minutes," she said, and Toru wondered how she could be so precise about it without even looking at her watch. "You will not mistake them; they are gaijin like me, and they will be dressed very similarly." Toru nodded. "Please wait here and tell them that I have gone to look into this matter, and that they should leave it to me for the moment. I will return to the inn by 1800 hours this afternoon. If I do not appear by 1830, then they may come and look for me. Can you remember that?"

"What time is 1800?" Toru wondered.

"Civilians call it six o'clock PM," Laura explained, "but my friends are also Guides; they will know what it means."

"OK. I can do that. You'll be back by 6 and if you're not back by 6:30 they should come looking."

"Correct. Good." Laura smiled fractionally, then nodded and set off up the trail toward the Western Col.

III: Some Quick and Shocking Violence

Without having to moderate her pace for any companions - Mairwen and Rhian were in excellent condition and experienced hikers, but they lacked the almost limitless physical endurance Laura enjoyed - it took her less than an hour to climb to the entrance to the north spur, where the offshoot of the Shikuka Glacier that contained the Witch was reputed to lie. Shortly before she reached it, she slipped automatically into tradecraft, leaving the trail and making a stealthy approach by a circuitous route. This habit, long ingrained by the rigorous training that had taken the place of her childhood, showed its grudging value once again, as she immediately perceived the pair of guards standing where the trail entered the mountain notch.

Those are no archaeologists, she remarked grimly to herself as she observed them silently from a safe distance. Archaeologists, in her admittedly limited experience, did not carry heavy blaster pistols, nor wear light body armor. She supposed they might be hired guards, brought along because the dig team feared trouble from the locals, but her instincts told her no. These two, a man and a woman, were mercenaries of a different, more highly evolved clade. Not freelance guards of the type that would be hired by scientists worried about hostile natives, but hardened soldiers. Hired killers.

Laura could have eliminated them in a number of different ways, quietly and without alerting their colleagues, but it was easiest and safest just to bypass them and carry on. She didn't know yet that the situation actually called for violence. Not too long ago, that wouldn't have mattered to her, but then, not too long ago, she wouldn't have been interested in this business at all.

She carried on deeper into the col. Presently she found herself on a small ridge overlooking the glacier's face. Down there perhaps 20 feet, a group of people had set up a small base camp - portable shelters, a small fusion generator, the works. She watched for perhaps half an hour, getting an idea of their numbers as they came and went from the shelters and worked at setting up their equipment by the face. Three of them: one human, one Salusian, and a man who appeared to be a) a Zregdan and b) in charge.

To her mild surprise, Laura recognized him from a mass of underworld dossiers she'd once been required to memorize: Lefortovo "Lefty" Szoroda, slaver, purveyor of illegal substances and restricted technologies, and sometime pirate. A non-affiliated utility player in the criminal continuum of the Terminus sector, with known associates in the Blue Suns and Eclipse mercenary syndicates.

Szoroda and his team had already completed much of their work before Laura arrived. Using saws and thermo-axes, they'd cut back a section of the glacier's face, removing a ragged block with the unmistakable shadow of a figure within it, which now lay horizontal on the ground in front of the breach. Now, based on fragments of their conversations she overheard, they were trying to work out the best way of transporting it from the site to wherever their ship was, so as to minimize the possibility of running into any more nosy locals.

Laura wondered whether this was something she should really be getting involved in. What was happening down there was clearly a crime. The United Galactica might be gone, and its replacement still uncertain, but the Co-Prosperity Sphere had its own laws about antiquities and local rights to same, and these people were plainly engaged in - at the very least - grave robbing, if not archaeological plunder. Was that, though, something Laura needed to concern herself with? No one was in danger here, apart from the corpse of someone who had been dead for... well, at least a century; she doubted that the legend of a previous civilization was actually true, but the legend went back to their innkeeper's grandfather's childhood, if not further.

She was just about to start making her way back out of the col, with an eye toward returning to town and informing the local constabulary, when the entire calculus of her decision suddenly changed. One of the guards from the end of the trail walked into camp, dragging a small, struggling form along with him by the arm - Toru.

"It's that kid from before," the guard explained to the faintly incredulous Zregdan. "He tried to get back into the camp."

"So you thought you'd help him out by escorting him here?" Szoroda asked acidly. "How thoughtful of you."

"No," the guard explained patiently, "but when I told him to get lost, he said he was going to tell the local cops. He saw more of the operation when he was here before than you thought."

"Ah. That changes things." Szoroda hunkered down to regard the guard's captive. "That wasn't a very smart move, son," he said conversationally. "I'm afraid you're going to have to stay here as our guest until we finish our work now, so you don't cause anybody else to interrupt us. Don't worry, though. Once we've got what we came for, you'll be free to go. It doesn't matter to us if you tell everyone what we did once we're done doing it."

"You can't take her away!" Toru protested. "She doesn't belong to you!"

"Yeah, well, she doesn't belong to you either, and I'm bigger," Szoroda replied casually.

Then, straightening up, he turned and put a hand on the guard's shoulder, leaning toward him. What he said into the armed man's ear was inaudible to Toru - would have been inaudible to anyone with normal hearing apart from the guard - but it was as plain to Laura as if she'd been standing in his place:

"Take him to the spoil heap and grease him."

It was, Laura thought, truly remarkable how often other people were willing to help her make these decisions.

Another thing that had lately changed about Laura's way of working was that she now gave some consideration to the reactions of onlookers. In the old days, if she had involved herself in this matter at all, it would have been to strike as fast and hard as possible, applying the maximum available force so as to get the job done in the shortest time. How an eight-year-old boy might react to seeing her slaughter these people would not have entered into her calculations at all.

Now, though, she hesitated for the barest of instants before launching herself into action (all the time it took to reformulate her battle plan), then leaped down from her perch with her bionic blades undeployed. The boy was still going to see some quick and shocking violence - there was really nothing she could do about that - but she would at least do what she could to keep the blood spatter and potential for dismemberment to a minimum.

The way the "archaeologists" reacted to her attack did much to confirm her suspicions when she'd sighted the first two guards. These people were mercenaries of a fairly high order. They were fit, had proper training, were well-equipped.

They stood no chance.

/* John Debney
"Sledgehammer"
Iron Man 2 Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (2011) */

The one Szoroda had instructed to deal with Toru fell first. With Laura dropping from the top of the ridge squarely onto his shoulders, he went down without ever realizing what was going on, as she essentially used his shoulders to break her fall, and then his face to break his. The Zregdan sprang back, uttering a surprised profanity, and reached for his weapon, but Laura had never stopped moving. She rolled off the crumpled guard's shoulders before he'd even finished hitting the ground and came up fighting, seizing Szoroda's gun arm at the wrist and applying torque.

He was pretty well-trained, enough that he was able to maintain his self-possession despite his surprise and the crippling pain Laura's joint lock on his wrist was inflicting. Teeth gritted, he drew a vibroknife with his off hand and slashed at her face. She leaned back just far enough to clear the arc of the blade, then stepped to her left and executed a complicated maneuver, which ended with Szoroda face-down on the ground with his gun arm broken and his knife in her hand.

By this time the other "archaeologists" were alerted by the sounds of the scuffle. They downed their tools and rushed to their boss's aid, shouting. Laura straightened, dragging Szoroda up with her, and used his body as a shield long enough to close with the Salusian. She hadn't bothered drawing the pistol at her hip, plainly assuming that her superior strength was the only advantage she was going to need. This was a conceit she had cause to regret a moment later. Laura discarded the semiconscious Zregdan, met her charge, and left her sprawled full-length on the snowy ground with a concussion that would've been a fatal stab wound to the back of the head if Laura hadn't held her captured vibroknife the wrong way round.

That left the human, a beefy male specimen. He roared an inarticulate challenge and swung the thermo-axe he'd been working on the glacier face with as though he intended to chop her clean in half. It couldn't have been more blatantly telegraphed if he had drawn her a schematic diagram first. There were nine different ways she could have made him dead before he even realized he hadn't connected, but just based on the mass of him, subduing him non-lethally was probably going to take a bit of work.

Laura decided to save him for last, so that she could give him her undivided attention, and simply avoided his wild attack, darting past to close instead with the other trail guard, who was just arriving at a dead run. She was armed and quick with a handgun, but Laura had no particular fear of handguns. She didn't want to get shot - it would be painful and inconvenient - and so took all prudent measures to avoid it, but to her, that had a lower priority than neutralizing her adversary. The woman seemed to read that in Laura's eyes as she approached, and it appeared to rattle her. Her first shot missed high. She didn't get a second one.

That left the man with the thermo-axe, and as Laura had expected, bringing him down took a bit of doing. He wasn't a skilled combatant, as his choice of weapon might have indicated, but he was very strong, very tough, and very angry. Laura let him flail, figuring he would exhaust himself that much quicker waving his awkward demolition tool around that way, and simply stayed near enough to harm's way to keep him interested. Between them they managed to wreck much of the campsite; one of the man's swings brought down a shelter module completely, smashing it into a flattened heap of fractured, partially melted plastiform panels.

That gave Laura an idea. She faded back toward the other side of the campsite, drawing him after her, and then timed her next dodge carefully. When he was absolutely committed, all his considerable bulk and momentum behind a huge, whistling overhead chop, she dove aside and rolled, tumbling out of his way -

- and he brought the axe squarely down on the fat feed cable connecting the generator to the main shelter's thermal unit. With a harsh white flash and a sharp pop, the thermo-axe's element burned out. The man couldn't even scream, all his muscles thrown into spasm, as the generator's automatic safeties cut in and prevented him from absorbing more than a few dozen microseconds' worth of its output. That was enough to knock him cold and send him flying, though; he lurched violently backward and crashed into the face of the glacier a few yards from the breach, bounced, and fell face-down to the ground.

Laura looked around the site. Of the five opponents she'd faced, all were unconscious, but none was mortally injured. She allowed herself a single moment's pride in her craftsmanship - not a bad 68 seconds' work, particularly given the handicaps she'd set herself - and then looked for Toru. She found him standing by the cutout block of ice, gazing at her with wide eyes.

"Toru?" she asked him. "Are you all right? I am sorry you had to see that, but - "

His face lighting up, the boy cried, "That was amazing! Can all Girl Guides do that?!"

Laura blinked, unsure quite how to take his enthusiasm; then she replied hesitantly, "Not... as such, no. Are you injured?" Toru shook his head. "Why did you return here?" Laura wondered.

"I was worried," Toru said. "I saw your friends and told them what you said, and after they went away again, I kept thinking about what I saw. About her," he added, gesturing to the glacier girl. "I thought they might hurt her. Or you. Or... or something."

She considered asking him how he thought he was going to prevent that, but decided against it. It wasn't a question that had an answer, so the only purpose in asking it would be as a passive-aggressive way of berating him for an incautious decision. Instead she told him flatly,

"This is no place for you. You should return home now."

"But... what are you going to about her?" he wondered.

"I do not know," Laura said honestly. "Go now, Toru. This place is still dangerous, and I have work to do."

Toru hesitated, then nodded, a little reluctantly. "Well... all right. Should I tell Judge Okada about this?"

Laura shook her head. "No. There is nothing a local magistrate can do about this situation now."

"If you say so," said the boy dubiously. He lingered for a moment at the edge of the campsite, looking like he might change his mind and ask to stay, but then waved and ran off down the trail.

With him gone, Laura set to work securing the scene. Working quickly and efficiently, she dragged the unconscious "archaeologists" into the main shelter, tied them up with the cables from their work lights, and removed anything that might be of use to them before locking up the structure. This was just as flimsy as the others, and would provide no real security in itself, but at least she would know immediately if one or more of them came to and tried to escape - not, she judged, that there was much chance of that within the next three hours, by which time she would be long gone.

IV: The Maiden in the Ice

She was standing by the ice block they had excavated, considering the shadowed form within it, when her sharp ears caught the sounds of people approaching. At first she thought it might be more members of Szoroda's team returning, having been sent off on some expedition or other, but by the time they came into view at the trail end of the campsite, she knew that wasn't the case.

Instead, the new arrivals were a pair of girls, around her own age, dressed like Laura in the field dress (regular) uniform of the Llanfair Regiment of Girl Guides - a tall redhead with a collapsible bow in hand and a composite quiver of arrows on her back, and a petite blonde carrying a stout (and, Laura knew from experience, well-balanced) walking stick.

"What ho, comrade," said Mairwen brightly, raising her free hand in greeting.

"You've been off having fun without us again!" Rhian chided her, a note of cheerful accusation in her voice.

"I thought I left word that you were to leave this to me," said Laura without rancor.

Mairwen rolled her eyes. "Right, like that was going to happen," she agreed, then collapsed her bow and racked it alongside the quiver. "So! What've we got?"

Rhian's eyes widened at the sight of the darkened figure in the ice. "Ooh! It's true!"

Laura turned back to the block, abandoning as futile the notion of remonstrating with them further, and nodded. "Yes. It does appear to be true, at least in part."

As her comrades flanked her, she stood and regarded the ice. Its surface was irregular where it had been roughly chopped away by the diggers, and through it, the figure inside could be seen only indistinctly. All Laura could tell for certain about this was that it was a humanoid shape, roughly her own size.

"Now what?" Rhian wondered. "We can't leave her like this."

"What else can we do?" Laura inquired rhetorically. "We cannot reconstruct the glacier - "

She stopped speaking then, her eyes going thoughtful, and walked closer to the block, moving her head slowly from side to side. Yes - she hadn't imagined it. There were two distinct surfaces there. The jagged, axe-hewn ice on the outside was clinging to an inner surface that was smoother, more regular.

Without thinking about it, she extended the claws of her right hand (which evinced no particular reaction from her friends, apart from startling Rhian slightly with the suddenness of their appearance), and then slowly, almost gingerly scraped them against the block, holding them edge-on to the surface. This made a disagreeable noise and an even less pleasant sensation in the bones of her forearm, but it confirmed her suspicion. The outer ice fell away, revealing the smooth, curved surface beneath. Laura retracted her claws and placed her fingertips against it, then rapped it gently with a knuckle.

"This is not ice," she said.

"What?" Mairwen asked.

"The outer layer is," Laura explained, gesturing to the fragments on the ground that she'd just scraped off, "but this inner surface is not. It is much harder, almost metallic." She tapped it with the tip of a fingernail, making a sharp ticking sound. "Crystallite."

"What does that mean?" Rhian wondered.

"It means this is not the work of gods or spirits," Laura told her. "It is a technological artifact."

"Techno - someone made it?!"

"Yes."

Then, with the same quick efficiency with which she had dispatched the "archaeologists", Laura retrieved Szoroda's discarded vibroknife and used it, rather than her claws, to clear away more of the ice. When she was finished, the item within stood revealed as a cylinder, six feet long by three in diameter, lying in a shallow "cradle" of ice which Laura had left to hold it in place. A small electronic control panel, fused into the surface near the base, was its only exterior feature. With the ice removed from the cylinder's surface, what it contained was plainly visible.

"Wow," said Mairwen. "I guess the legends were true. She's beautiful."

Laura had little to work with in terms of evaluating her friend's assessment, but her instincts suggested that Mairwen was correct. Just as Mrs. Arata had said, the Maiden in the Ice was a young woman, perfectly preserved, and her face and figure were very well-made. Ethnicity ambiguous, possibly Japanese; age about fifteen; light of build, but evidently healthy (apart from what appeared to be a fresh gunshot wound in her left side) and well-fed. She was disheveled, her clothing ragged, but certain clues gave Laura the impression that this was not a usual state of affairs for her. The cylinder was oriented such that she lay more or less face-up within it.

"She's hurt," said Rhian suddenly.

"Yes," Laura agreed. "She has been shot." She looked more closely at the wound. "With a medium-caliber handgun, only minutes before the crystallite was applied. You can see that the wound was still bleeding freely when she was frozen." She turned to regard the little blonde. "Does it disturb you?"

Rhian shook his head. "No," she said. "I've seen worse, volunteering at Snowdonia General." Cracking a faint smile, she thumbed one of the campaign-ribbon-style decorations above the breast pocket of her FD(R) tunic and added, "They don't give out the Field Medic badge just for reading the book." Then, returning her full attention to the glacier girl, she mused, "I wonder if it hurts."

"She is either in hibernation or dead," Laura told her. "In either case, she feels nothing."

So saying, she crouched by the base of the column and examined the control panel. This was badly weathered, the edges of its metal faceplate worn almost flush with the surface of the crystallite, but enough of it still worked for her to read its status.

"Well?" Mairwen asked.

"What does it say?" Rhian added.

Laura double-checked her findings, then straightened up and faced her friends. "She is alive, but her condition is precarious," she said. "This cylinder is over one hundred years old. People suspended in this way rarely survive so long." She pointed to the badly weathered control panel. "The embedded stasis matrix fails long before the crystallite casing itself. This one, surprisingly, has not - possibly because the cylinder itself has been in a sort of cold storage - but the readings are not encouraging."

"How not encouraging?" asked Mairwen.

"Now that the cylinder has been removed from the glacier, deterioration will progress rapidly," said Laura. "Within days - possibly hours - the stasis system will fail... " She turned her head to regard the sleeping face of the Witch of Shikuka. "... and she will die."

Mairwen's response was immediate, unconsidered, and exactly what Laura would have predicted:

"How can we save her?"

"I do not know whether we can," Laura replied with her typical blunt honesty. "However... " She paused, considering, then said, "Rhian, do you have your kit with you?"

"Of course," Rhian answered at once.

"Prepare yourself, then," Laura said, crouching behind the cylinder again. "I will attempt to trigger the cylinder's release cycle. I do not know whether it will work, but if it does, she will need treatment for that gunshot wound immediately."

Rhian blinked at her friend in momentary astonishment, then nodded firmly. "Right," she said, then unslung her rucksack and set to work. Quickly but not hastily, she spread the groundsheet from her shelter set on the ground not far from the cylinder, then unpacked her medic's kit and began arranging the items within it in a well-practiced formation at one corner.

Laura returned her attention to the cylinder's controls, then carefully manipulated a couple of them before rising and stepping back.

/* Ramin Djawadi
"Better Than New"
Pacific Rim Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (2013) */

At first nothing seemed to be happening. Then, with a suddenness that took Mairwen and Rhian slightly aback, the cylinder turned cloudy, completely obscuring its contents, as if it were hollow glass and the interior surface had abruptly fogged up. A few seconds after that, it began to... the only appropriate word Mairwen could think of was evanesce. It didn't melt into a liquid and run off, like actual water ice would have, but nor did it appear to sublimate into vapor, like dry ice. It just... went away, little by little, like a time-lapse video of an eroding beach, the clouded surface presenting the optical illusion that it was subsiding.

Presently the Maiden's face reappeared, seeming to rise from the clouded crystal as it fell away. As the material released it, so her flesh relaxed, her lips falling slightly open. About half of the crystallite disintegrated in this way before the process halted, leaving her lying free in a bed of clouded glass. Rhian was put irreverently in mind of the contoured velvet, backed with rigid foam, inside her guitar case.

For a long moment, the glacier girl lay utterly still, showing not the slightest sign of life, and Rhian thought with a sinking heart that they were too late. Then, with just the faintest of sounds, her chest rose as she drew her first breath in more than a century.

V: Some Disorientation Is Normal

Mrs. Arata and Sir Victor Creed were not particularly surprised when the girls didn't get back from the Western Col until after dark. It was a fairly long walk, and the three of them tended not to get back in until evening anyway. It had become the innkeeper's habit to have a cup of tea in the kitchen with her guest around nine o'clock and await their return.

This time, the adults were moderately more surprised that there appeared to be four girls now, one of whom was unconscious and being carried on Laura's back.

Rhian had been a little worried about this part of the plan, pointing out (and fairly enough) that Mrs. Arata was a civilian, and that it wasn't fair to expect her not to be at least a little shocked by such a development. That concern proved unfounded, though, as the landlady saw the newcomer's bedraggled condition and went immediately into bustling helpful mode, no questions, for the moment, asked.

They got her upstairs, to the room on the corner where Victor had been staying - it had a larger bed than either of those in the adjoining room the girls were sharing - and put her to bed, Mrs. Arata clucking worriedly about the wobegone state of her clothes and her person. She immediately went off to see what she could do to rectify at least the first part of that.

While she was gone, Victor examined the fresh field dressing on the mystery girl's left side, then straighened up and pronounced it sound. "Your work, Miss Lewis?" he inquired.

"Mm-hmm," said Rhian, nodding. "It wasn't as bad as it looked. Surface wound, medium-caliber. Bloody, but it didn't hit anything important."

"Here," said Mrs. Arata, returning with some white fabric draped over her arm. "At least she won't have to wake up in those rags, poor thing." She tsked compassionately and smoothed the girl's disordered black hair a bit. "Whatever can have happened to her?" She looked up at the three Guides. "Do you have any idea who she is?"

Rhian fidgeted awkwardly and began, "Well, we're not," but Laura interrupted her, declaring flatly,

"That is the person you know as the Witch of Shikuka."

"Laura, remember what I told you about easing people into the crazy stuff?" Mairwen muttered as Mrs. Arata stared in amazement at her friend.

"Mrs. Arata is a combat veteran, Mairwen," Laura replied, unperturbed. "She does not require patronizing."

The landlady blinked a second time in fresh surprise - as did Mairwen and Rhian - then shook it all off and smiled, saying, "I won't ask how you knew that. Or whether you're serious about who this girl is, because I can see it in your face." She turned and regarded the unconscious girl again. "How did you come to bring her here?"

With the clipped, succinct efficiency she'd been trained in, Laura delivered a perfect debriefing, outlining the situation on Mount Shikuka as she had encountered it, the measures she had felt it necesssary to take, and the possible tactical situation that would result. Victor listened gravely, then nodded and told her to leave it to him for the moment, departing the room with a sort of contained urgency. He didn't bother chiding the Guides that they should have consulted the authorities and handed their unusual find over to them, or taken her straight to a medical center. There was no medical center in Shikuka, and in a situation like this, he wouldn't have gone to the local authorities either.

"There is a possibility that we have made your establishment a target by bringing her here," Laura said to Mrs. Arata when he had gone, then bowed slightly in the Japanese fashion and added, "I apologize for the potential risk. If the people who seek this girl do track her here, I will do whatever I can to protect you and your inn."

Mrs. Arata received this remarkable promise with the gravity it deserved, then smiled and told her, "Don't worry about that, dear. My days in uniform may be behind me, but I've never been one to be afraid of the likes of them." Then, her smile becoming wry, she added, "You three are certainly the most interesting guests I've had here in a while."

"We do what we can," said Mairwen, only a little awkwardly.

With the Guides' help, Mrs. Arata got her mysterious guest cleaned up, into a clean nightdress, and properly put to bed. Then, after enjoining them to call on her at once if any new need arose, she went to bed herself.

The three Guides camped in Victor's room that night, pitching their bedrolls on the floor around the bed as if at a campsite, and took it in shifts to sit by the glacier girl and monitor her for signs of waking, or of turning for the worse. In the event, neither thing happened until shortly after dawn the next morning, when she began to stir and mutter in her sleep.

Rhian was on watch when it happened, but at the lightest touch of her friend's hand on her shoulder, Laura instantly came fully awake. Mairwen took a few seconds longer, but by the time the glacier girl's eyes opened, all three were standing by her bedside.

They were a remarkable color, those eyes; a prosaic bureaucrat might have put them down as brown, but that would be to do a great injustice to what was really a rich amber. They flickered open with a faint groan from their owner, then failed to focus on anything, gazing blankly up at the ceiling. Trying and failing to sit up, the glacier girl mumbled something in a voice like a dry gate hinge, coughed, and tried again, looking around with a confused expression that was rapidly taking on an edge of alarm.

"What language is that?" Rhian wondered.

"Mandarin," Laura replied at once. "Somewhat archaic." Then, switching to that language herself, she said, <Be calm. You are injured, but safe now. Try not to move.>

Mairwen glanced at her in faint surprise. "You speak - " she began, then rolled her eyes at herself and said, "What am I saying, of course you speak Chinese."

The girl tried to raise herself up, her gaze darting uselessly around the room, then fell back onto the pillow with an exhausted groan.

<I'm... I can't see,> she said. <I can barely move.> Then, unexpectedly, her lips curved into a nasty little smirk as she went on, <Well played, whoever you are. How have you done this to me? Poison? That would be Mother's style.>

<I am not your mother,> said Laura.

The glacier girl looked thoughtful. <You sound like a Kyoshi Islander,> she mused. <One of the Avatar's little friends, maybe. Is this your doing, Aang? It has your hallmark.> Her smirk became a bit nastier. <You enjoy keeping your enemies alive, crippled and humiliated, don't you?> she asked, a taunting tone in her weakened voice. <It's the one thing about you I respect.> Her expression hardened into a scornful sneer as she added sharply, <Blinded and helpless or not, I won't be your trophy like Father.>

Laura frowned. <You are not making sense,> she said patiently. <I am not your enemy, nor am I responsible for your condition. The blindness and weakness are symptoms of hibernation syndrome. They should pass within 48 hours. What is your name? I am Laura.>

<Oh, as if you don't know who I am,> the glacier girl spat. <The others pretended they didn't either. The old man and his minions.> She shook her head. <I don't know how long I wandered the Valley, but it can't have been long enough for people to forget the name of Fire Lord Azula.>

<You were frozen in crystallite for more than one hundred years,> Laura told her remorselessly. <Anyone who knew you is probably long dead.>

<What?!> Azula snapped. <Ridiculous!> With a supreme effort of will, she tried to rise, and actually made a decent start on it, much to Rhian and Mairwen's surprise. Her eyes still unfocused but furious, she raged, <You dare even attempt to - >

Unfazed, Laura put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her back down, which was no harder than closing a drawer. <Lie still. You are injured. If you disturb the dressing on your wound, you may bleed to death.>

<That would be convenient for you, wouldn't it!> Azula snarled.

<You have two options,> Laura continued, as if she hadn't spoken. <You can rest quietly, or my friend can return you to a coma. Choose.>

The mysterious girl glared sightlessly in her general direction for a moment; then, like a switch had been thrown, she smiled slyly and relaxed, sinking back into the pillow.

<You intrigue me, whoever you are,> she said. <All right, I'll play along for now. Why not?>

Her fury and bravado notwithstanding, she truly was exhausted; and having stopped trying, for the moment, to force the issue, she lapsed almost immediately back into sleep, the angry lines of her face smoothing out into something like their original icebound serenity.

"What was that all about?" Mairwen asked quietly as Laura came away from the bedside.

"Her name is Azula," said Laura. "She seems to be under the impression we are participants in a conspiracy either to assassinate her, or to keep her prisoner, on behalf of a person called Aang, possibly in collaboration with her mother. She believes we have permanently disabled her, both to facilitate her captivity and to humiliate her. This did not appear to surprise her, as she claims the same person has already done as much to her father."

"That's horrible!" Rhian exclaimed, though she kept her voice down. "Did she tell you where she comes from? Or anything that might help us find out?"

"Very little," Laura told her. "She speaks an antiquated dialect of Mandarin Chinese and claims to be something called a 'fire lord'." She shook her head. "She made little sense. Some disorientation is normal, of course, but after so long in hibernation, I am afraid her memory may be irreparably damaged. I will try again when she wakes, but I can promise nothing."

Mairwen looked past her friend at the sleeping girl, frowning in thought. "How did she get into that glacier?" she wondered rhetorically. "This planet has never had a Chinese-speaking population."

"Even if it had, certain features of her dialect predate Earth Contact, let alone the colonization of the Rigel sector," Laura said. "We may be able to learn more by investigating the remnants of her crystallite stasis block. The control mechanism may be traceable, or at least its manufacturer identifiable." She turned to regard the bed. "At the moment, I am more concerned with her stability. I have the impression that she is troubled in ways only peripherally related to her long suspension."

Rhian considered her peculiar friend for a moment. It had often struck her, in the months they had known each other, that Laura embodied a strange combination of insight and naïveté. A keen observer of people but virtually helpless before most social interactions, she understood the psychology of others in almost inverse proportion to her understanding of her own. She, Mairwen, and Sir Victor did what they could to help her with that, and before them, there had been a man Laura would refer to only as "my benefactor", who had rescued her from a terrible upbringing Mairwen and Rhian had only a sketchy knowledge of and delivered her into the warm and loving home of her uncle in the first place.

Though she was devoted to her uncle and her few close friends in a quiet, undemonstrative way, her mysterious benefactor was the only person about whom Laura could ever be said to show any outright sentimentality. On the rare occasions when she spoke of him, her jade eyes took on an ever-so-slightly wistful look, as of a yearning for a path not taken - a choice not regretted, but its alternative always wondered about. She never said as much - she would not even speak his name, for vaguely defined "security reasons" - but on those occasions, it was plain to Rhian and Mairwen that she missed him.

Now, as she stood looking at the unconscious figure in the bed, Laura had a look in her eyes that was different, but of the same rare family. She wasn't attached to the stranger in the way that she was to her benefactor, but there was real concern there, and perhaps a nascent, not-yet-understood sense of kinship. She didn't understand it - was not even really equipped to explore it - but she felt it, and Rhian saw it in her.

"Hey," she said, touching Laura's arm. The dark-haired girl blinked in faint surprise and turned her eyes to her little blonde friend, who smiled reassuringly at her. "We'll figure it out," Rhian said. "It'll be OK."

To be concluded in Acts VI-X

"Laura Kinney and the Maiden in the Ice" - an Exile Mini-Serial by Benjamin D. Hutchins
special to the Eyrie Productions Discussion Forum
© 2013 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited


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