Under A Winter Sun by Johan Dahlgren (ink ebook reader txt) 📕

Soledad shakes her head. “It's not a simple transfusion, Perez. There are nanites in our blood, remember. Nanites programmed to repair immortal flesh.”

“Yeah, right.”

That could never work. Could it? “Even if you get him to wake up, he can't talk. He has no lungs.”

“Perez.” Jagr looks at me with pain in her eyes. “For once, shut the fuck up and let us say goodbye.”

A deep rumbling background noise starts below the limit of hearing and slowly grows in strength. Yet another strange thing on this strange night. Since it doesn't kill us outright, I couldn't care less.

A sudden movement from the head startles us. Its eyes flutter open and the face locks up in a rictus of silent pain.

“Whoa.” I did not expect that to happen.

“By the tits of God,” the priest cries and covers his mouth with his hands.

Jagr grabs the head and lifts it up. “Father, it's us. We're here. You're not alone. You're not alone.” Tears run down her cheeks as she tries to communicate with the severed head. The muscles of the face contract, rupturing the dried lips. The girls' immortal blood trickles down over its exposed teeth and shrivelled gums.

“Oh, fuck,” Soledad moans. “Turn it off, Jagr. Turn it off.”

“Father,” Jagr calls. “We're here. We love you.”

A strange gurgling comes from the dismembered head, and it's one of the most horrifying things I've ever heard. It's the sound of a man trying to scream in horror at the realisation he no longer has a body.

Soledad looks away. “Turn it off, Jagr.”

Jagr ignores her and Soledad takes matters into her own hands and tears the tubes from the wretched thing's neck. Blood sprays everywhere and the head slips from Jagr's grasp. It bounces off the floor and stops against the wall, mercifully inert.

Jagr and Soledad stare at each other in silent horror.

“That went well,” I mutter under my breath. “If you need me, I'll be in the cockpit.”

I push off from the wall and leave them to their mourning.

I slump in the co-pilot's seat next to Braden.

She struggles with the controls. “Hey Mr P. Back already?”

I look at the screens and realise where the rumbling background noise comes from. We're flying at an angle over the widest river I've ever seen. It's a five-kilometre-wide raging mess of jagged icebergs and pitch-black water. A magnificent aurora lights up the sky from horizon to horizon, bathing everything in hues of green and purple. It's beautiful if you're into that kind of thing.

“What's that?” I point at the river with my good hand. The noise it makes as it thunders down the glacier drowns out even the Sundowner's rattling engines. An immense bridge that looks like it's carved from the living ice looms into view out of the darkness. It spans the river on thick pillars of ice.

“That's the river Hvergelmr”.

Why do all Goliath words sound like clearing your throat?

“And that,” she points at the bridge, “is Bifrost. This river marks a sacred boundary for the Goliaths. All their maps end at this river.”

“How convenient. So why do they have a bridge leading into forbidden lands?”

“Beats me, Mr P.”

Yet another mystery I guess we'll never find the answer to. The Goliaths keep surprising us. Who knew they were this fascinating?

“Do we have any idea what's on the other side?”

“Nope. The remote scans we've done do not have enough resolution.”

We reach the far shore and the noise from the river dies down to a thunderous background rumble.

Braden gives me a quizzical look. “What's with the shouting back there?”

“Bit of a mess. Watch your step when you go back there.”

That poor man. I can't even imagine the horror at realising you are nothing but a disembodied head. Imagine that phantom pain. Are you still yourself without your body?

I look up at the play of ionised particles in the sky and wonder how Gray is doing. Somewhere out there he sits in the cockpit of his ship, hurtling through space with no way to turn back, locked in with a flesh-eating cloud of microscopic robots that tear the flesh off his bones as fast as his nanites rebuild it. Is there still a shred of him in that mess? Or have the patterns that are Nero Gray long since been erased by the endless destruction and reconstruction of his body?

A fascinating question I bet philosophers would debate for centuries if only they knew about it. I shudder and feel a little bad for doing what I did to him. Then I remember what he did to Suki, and I don't feel bad anymore.

Braden turns to me. Her face is serious for once. “What happened back there, Perez?”

“Yes, about that … You should land this thing. You girls need to talk.”

An alarm blares from somewhere and the entire console flashes red. The words engine and failure are prominently displayed on a screen. The Sundowner rolls to starboard and pitches her nose at the ground.

“Not much choice, Perez. We're going down.”

Slap Bang in the Middle of Nowhere

You can't brace for the impact when a hundred-tonne dropship crashes.

When the Sundowner's AI senses a crash is imminent, it swivels the passenger seats to position the soldiers with their backs toward the impact. No such luck for the pilots. But we get one hell of a front-row experience.

Then everything goes black.

* * *

At first, I'm not sure I'm conscious. It's so quiet. With an effort, I open my eyes. It's dark.

I rub my face and glance over at Braden. She hangs forward over the controls, restrained by her seat belt. Her head is suspended on two interface cables that have not been torn from their sockets in the seat. Blood drips from a deep cut above her eyebrow. She curses softly. The cockpit smells of piss and burning electronics. Damage reports scroll down the screens.

“Welcome back, Perez. You have a slight concussion and multiple fractures. One major injury.”

I'm still breathing, so it can't be that major. “Thanks, Aeryn. What