Netlink by William H Keith

want them to. I’m flattered that you think I possess so much power, but I don’t, and I’m sick of hearing your whining!”
    She was angry with herself for losing her temper, but the anger was tempered by the realization that she was already upset by the possibility of losing Kara.
    Oh, Dev! she thought, a little wildly. Where are you now, and why didn’t you stay here with me, with us? I need you!
    It was all she could do to keep her men in place.

Chapter 7
     
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.…

    — Fire and Ice
    R OBERT F ROST
    C . E . 1923
     
    Frost had it right, he thought. Some chance crossing of memories had led him to download the ancient poem during the flight toward Nova Aquila’s orphaned, inner world. Now, standing on the ice plain beneath a black and star-strewn sky, » DEVCAMERON « recited the lines to himself once more.
    Some say the world will end in fire…
    The planet was as dead as he had expected. As his walker stepped off the grounded DalRiss ship, his upper body sensors took in a dim panorama of ice and broken, blackened rock. The two suns were only just visible, a close-set pair of bright but minute pinpoints close to the zenith. With a thousandth of the luminosity of Earth’s sun, they were by far the brightest of the sky’s stars, twin beacons casting eerie shimmers of light across the rolling plain of ice, with a radiance carrying no warmth at all. Though it was nearly local noon, the landscape was so poorly lit, only by the stars, that even with enhanced vision » DEVCAMERON « found it difficult to penetrate the shadowy landscape.
    The temperature, he estimated, was around minus two hundred Celsius.
    He remembered a popular expression from his human life: iceworld. It meant… be calm. Be cold. Don’t let it bother you. Standing here on an icy plain, impressed by the preternatural stillness of the place, he knew more than ever what that expression meant.

But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great…

    This world had perished twice, first in fire as its twin suns exploded nearly two thousand years ago, then in ice as those stars dwindled away to hot but tiny fractions of their former light and warmth. The expanding shell of gas from the nova had probably widened the planet’s orbit, but more, white dwarfs simply didn’t have the surface area to provide the heat necessary for life.
    He began moving away from the grounded DalRiss ship. The rest of the fleet remained in orbit over the planet or near the Device, watching for further appearances of the mysterious spacefarers who’d built—or who at least presumed to use—the Device for their own ends.
    It always felt strange having a body, familiar but with odd and sometimes contradictory sensations. » DEVCAMERON « took a cautious step on the ice and then another, still working to get the proper feel and balance for his radially symmetrical body. The ice was not as slippery as it looked; it was far too cold and was as hard as granite. Too, » DEVCAMERON’S « new feet, all six of them, possessed stubby, rubbery projections that gripped even the smoothest surface and gave him excellent traction. He was aware of the cold through various sensors embedded in his skin, but his brain registered the temperature as chilly only and not as a cold bitter enough to liquefy oxygen.
    The walker was a biological construct specially grown for him by the DalRiss’s master biologists, but it was not even remotely human. It resembled one of the DalRiss themselves, a starfish shape two meters across, supported well off the ground by six blunt, spiny arms, and with a crescent-shaped sensory package and a forest of delicate manipulatory tendrils perched on top.
    » DEVCAMERON’S « original human brain and nervous system had evolved to handle only two legs, two arms, and two eyes; the DalRiss had written a special software package that let him handle six of everything,