The Man between my crosshairs (girl X assassin)

Chapter 39/Fire and Ice

Like any professional assassin Mother had arrived with about six return flights booked at different intervals in a diffrent name. As soon as Zoe returned she had the sent Mother to the airport with the firm words 'I work alone remember'. When Zoe got back from the space poor Jeeves had arrived with some cold weather ski gear. So Zoe spent the evening in virtual reality practising skiing and figuring out ways to kill Styles and make it look like an accident.

She felt dead inside but when she was working, planning, practising she felt less dead. Ryder would have wanted this. After the Styles kill she would move on to the kill's,  Ryder had asked for. She would do them perfectly, something dramatic. The kind of kills you had that when someone got together years later the other assassins would remark. 

"Do you remember that funeral we went to who was it?..." some old assasin would say " Remember Ryder's funeral? Yeah, when that fat one got killed.. that was an awesome funeral hit. People don't hit like that anymore. " 

Possibly Zoe wondered if that was Ryder's plan his final gift to her. Doing a hit at a funeral full of assassins. That's going to get your name around. Just as she through this she felt another hammer blow. She realised that Ryder was dead again.

****

The next morning Max accompanied Zoe over to the Styles building. Styles had ordered a super drone to fly him his family to the dark shadow. Zoe was pleased they hadn't noticed her weapons. The ship had no guard robots, she could take them all out now but that would leave her as the prime suspect. They flew south, the done ship's four props worked at full speed against the headwind. As they flew they passed over more cities crawling over the plane. Below them were a number of lines the cities left behind like giant slug trails. It took a few hours but eventually, the crawling cities passed below them there were small packs of moving trucks and caravans. Only the herds of bison were left. As they travelled the sun became lower in the pure sky. The sky turned red, pink, orange all reflected by the clouds. On the horizon, Zoe noticed a huge white cloud stretching from the edge of the land. Harry sat at the controls.

"That's the birth of the sky as they say." Harry said pointing it out "the atmosphere freezes when the planet turns to darkness. When the first light hits it the air melts then boils to gas. If you look close in the distance you can see these blue clouds - the air distils here and boils at different temperatures, that's the oxygen."

Soon they found themselves flying over snow. It was patchy at first but then it became a huge white field light by the sunset. They began to fly in a mountain landscape, patches of black peeking out from the Edition mountains. 

EStyles pointed out an odd shape on the horizon. That seemed to be Styles home. The drone landed outside the building. It was low, angular like a group of concrete chocolate boxes which had been cleverly pushed together. A second ship was waiting for them. This contained a group of robots which had been carrying furniture into the lodge. As she emerged onto the frozen landscape around them, Zoe pulled her thick winter coat about her.

"Wow it's wonderful," Zoe said admiring the rich colours of the sunset reflected from the snow. It seemed odd to be in a place permanently frozen in sunrise. She shuffled through the bitter snow. The lodge looked out over a huge valley below.

"Restores the soul doesn't it?" Cathy said smiling as she walked towards them with Jericho holding her hand. She was smiling confidently. "But be careful there are crevasses in places. The ground can give out if you don't know your way around."

'Really?' Zoe thought storing that up for later.

Cathy kissed Jericho. Their breath mixed in trails of vapour between them somehow it added to the grave inside Zoe. 

Zoe looked around surveying the world around them with her expert eye. In many ways, it looked more like an ice moon than the kinds of winter she was used to having in the space habitat. On Earth, there would be trees bent heavy with the weight of snow. Here under the snow, there was nothing but rock. The building stood on the edge of a mountain overlooking a valley below them. The cold blue-grey of the concrete echoed the pure white landscape around them. The lodge had long full height glass windows which reflected the landscape back. Robots worked to install items which would not survive the winter. There was a flicker and the warm yellow lights came to life in the building.

Jericho looked out holding on to Cathy. "From whose womb has come the ice? And the frost of heaven, who has given it birth?" He said in awe and paused, "Say so what makes all the patterns in the snow?" said.

He was looking into the floor of the valley. The snow had complex patterns like the scales of some strange fish. It was that kind of pattern which only nature could produce, to complex for the hand of an artist or the most dedicated of craftsmen. It was like a more flowing version of a snowflake had been in printed on the snow again and again.

"That - the witches writing we used to call it? It's beautiful, isn't it? oh, it's left when the air which was on top of the ice, boils away. Tomorrow I might take you booly hunting. If you look around you can find shaded pools of liquid argon which haven't boiled away yet. When I was young my dad had a trick of freezing a banana in one."

"You be careful," Zoe said absentmindedly while she was hypnotised by the environment around her. "You fall in. You could freeze your self."

The lodge was a concrete shell designed to survive the cold of Zarmina's night. Anything not designed to survive dipping in liquid nitrogen was being carried in by the robots. While they continued to finish the ice hotel, Harry decided he would go for a walk. Cathy announced she would go with him while Jericho, Max and Alex would stay in the warm. 

"I'll go with you," Zoe said. 

Afterall who knows what could happen out of the sight of the others. 

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A/N A strange feeling of bleakness this week - which matched the chapter. We are going to be putting down a special thanks for all our regular readers who are picking up chapters as they go out. Your special and you know it. Hugs RK&Reb.