Free Rebel Ice by S. L. Viehl

and how he had spied on them. He couldn't find Cherijo if he was imprisoned or dead.
    There was much about his past that Reever had concealed from his wife. In the beginning, it had been caution that kept him from confiding in her—he felt vulnerable enough, forming such a rapid and intimate connection with a female who was a total stranger to him—and then a curious dragging, weighty sensation that his psychological database indicated could be guilt or shame. Because Reever's childhood had been spent on a succession of alien worlds, and his Terran xenobiologist parents had left him entirely in the care of drones or the nearest sentient species, he had never learned how to feel human emotions. Meeting Cherijo had changed that, but Reever was still something of a novice at recognizing them.
    Akkabarr's white and blue colors filled the launch's viewer panel. Reever's hand clenched, and then he pressed the key that erased the voice recorder's storage chips.
    When I find her, I can tell her everything.
    "Disengage autoflight stabilizers," he told the helm computer as he left orbit at a near-parallel course with the surface of the ice world. Once the launch was under his manual control, he bypassed the safeties and angled the nose down four degrees.
    The launch shuddered as it began the long slide into the lethal upper atmosphere.
    The ride was still as much of a bastard as it had been ten years ago; Reever had to fight to keep the launch from rolling as he located, and then maneuvered the ship in the exact center of, a narrow conduit of dead air between two of the widest, most powerful upper wind currents. The secret of penetrating Akkabarr's atmosphere was not to enter the kim-wide wind streams, but to slide along their periphery through the dead-air zones and use their enormous energy at precisely the right place and moment to jump through an interior vortex to another, lower pocket of calm.
    Starry darkness blackening the port and starboard viewports lightened to deepest violet, streaked with white and silver striae: streams of icy dust that had been trapped forever between the endless winds.
    "Recommend reverse course," the helm computer advised him. "Increase engine output to achieve escape velocity."
    Gradually Reever made his descent, the launch bouncing and rocking as he used the Toskald technique of sliding from one elongated dead-air pocket to the next. The same manner in which throwing flat rocks permits them to skim the surface of a body of water , he thought as he skirted a current strong enough to disintegrate the launch around him. Another solitary practice he had taken up as a youth during the four years his parents had forced him to spend on Terra in an educational facility.
    Something tightened inside him. "I never told you that I know how to skip stones, either, did I?"
    "Unable to process," the helm panel replied. "Please restate request."
    Give me back my wife . "Cancel request."
    The launch lurched wildly as Reever forced it through a vortex almost too small to be useful. At the other end lay a fury of blasting hail that buffeted the hull with the force of pulse fire. Although this airspace was as dangerous as those above it, Reever relaxed. Reaching the hail stream meant he had descended through the last of the upper atmospheric currents. Beneath the hail lay the region that the Toskald occupied with their habitat vessels, and from there it was only a short and violent flight through the far more dangerous lower atmospheric currents to reach the surface.
    He had yet to transmit his final relay to the Sunlace .
    "File transmitted."
    Hail dust occluded the view panel for a few more minutes before the launch leveled out in the clear, temperate zone. Beneath the calm air, the lower winds permitted only the briefest glimpses of planet Akkabarr's glacial features.
    Reever could not feel her from this distance, and still he reached out with his mind to her. Beloved, I am here .
    There was no answer. There never