by James Axler
“You’ve done a truly remarkable job, J.B., we know how difficult it’s been, and we’re all grateful,” Mildred said. “But that body of water you’re talking about isn’t just any ocean. It’s always been one of the roughest and most dangerous on the planet. A graveyard of ships and men. When we get out over open water in gale force winds, you’re not going to be able to control this aircraft. We’ll end up ditching it in that icy sea and that’s where we’ll die.”
“If we even get that far without crashing,” Doc added. “Assuming we do instead return to the redoubt, we will not be able to resupply our weapons’ stocks from what is in the hangar. There is not going to be much left there for us to scrounge.”
“What we’ve got on hand is going to have to do the trick,” Ryan said.
“I don’t like going down into that hole again,” Ricky said. “Even for a mat-trans jump. We might never come out.”
“Say we luck out and somehow reach the mat-trans and manage to make a jump,” J.B. said. “If they snatched us once, what’s going to stop them from doing it again?”
“We’ll have to take that chance,” Ryan replied, “unless we want to die here. Or a thousand miles farther on when this plane crashes.”
There were groans and head shaking all around.
It was unanimous.
“Okay, J.B.,” Ryan said, “get us outta here.”
Everyone buckled up their crash harnesses, except for Jak and Lima who sat on the floor at the edge of the gangway.
The Armorer engaged the turbos and lifted off the ice smoothly. He climbed straight up with an ease that instilled confidence. The illusion was shattered seconds later when the craft rose above the lee of the cliff. Slammed by the polar wind, the tail rose as the nose dipped, hurling Ryan forward into the harness straps. For an instant it looked as though they were never going to escape McMurdo, as though they were going to crash head-on into the snowdrifted saddle. Somehow J.B. regained a semblance of control. Slewing sideways, the hovertruck shot upward, past the gap between the two peaks, over the ruins of McMurdo, and then along the edge of the ice sheet. As J.B. turned north in the direction of the redoubt, he managed to correct the yaw, but in so doing created problems with the craft’s pitch. He kept losing and gaining altitude.
Though J.B. was doing a brave and noble thing, taking all the responsibility on his shoulders, Ryan couldn’t help but think his flying skills weren’t improving with practice. Having crashed one aircraft, he seemed even more nervous and tenuous at the controls. He kept jerking the yoke, overcompensating for wind gusts, which made for a dipping, diving, erratic course.
Through the front of the canopy Ryan saw clouds of snow blowing low across a frozen waste. Soft peaks of white were worn down by the wind; they vanished before his eye, revealing bare rocky ridges. It was a vast and empty place, and the emptiness stretched to the horizon and far beyond. The sun was getting low in the western sky. Soon it was going to get much colder, although that was hard to imagine.
It was no place to crash-land.
The constant, irregular and alarming motion of the plane had Ricky muttering to himself in Spanish from the seat behind.
The others held on to their chairs’ armrests for dear life.
J.B. was clearly aware of the growing tension in the cockpit. “This plane feels different,” he said. “It’s hard to get used to the response of the controls. It handles so much quicker. And it moves around more in the wind. I’m watching the compass, but it’s hard to keep a straight course.”
“No cargo,” Mildred said. “The hold in this one is full of air.”
They flew in silence for a long time, enduring the bouncing and the bottom dropping out without warning. The only sounds were the whine of the turbos and the howl of the wind across their bow.
Then the radio speakers on the control panel crackled, and a second later a female voice said, “Tango Tango Huntsman, this is base command. Requesting mission status. Repeat. Requesting mission status.”
“Should we answer?” Krysty asked.
“They want to know if we’re dead yet,” J.B. replied.
“Tango Tango Huntsman, we read current position from your GPS transponder. Are you returning to base? If so, General India is requesting mission status. Please confirm mission accomplished.”
“How do they know we’re coming back? They can’t see us,” Ricky said.
“The ship has an electronic locator,” Mildred stated. “It shows them where we are and where we’re going. Apparently they’ve launched a satellite into orbit. The signal from this ship bounces off it and back to them.”
“Shouldn’t we say something?” Krysty repeated. “Put them at ease? Tell them mission accomplished?”
“No, we’d better not,” Ryan said. “If there’s a code sign, we don’t know it. We don’t want them gunning for us in that hangar when we arrive. If we say nothing, they won’t know whether we received their request. Our radio could be down.”
J.B. kept them flying at two hundred feet, give or take a dozen with the sudden drops, navigating by the digital compass on the control panel. He was staying as close to the ice as he could so a crash if it happened might be survivable. When he figured they were getting close to their destination, he gently pulled back on the yoke and began to gain altitude.
“What are you doing?” Mildred asked.
“Taking us up higher so we can see farther ahead.”
He leveled off at two thousand feet.
Right away, Ryan could make out a spot of brownish haze on the otherwise sparkling clear horizon. “Either that’s the hangar,” he said, pointing it out, “or someone has built one hell of a campfire.”
After lining up the target and marking the compass read, J.B. brought the craft back down to two hundred feet.
As they drew closer to the redoubt, the side winds picked up, pushing the hovertruck off course to the west. J.B. brought it back on track. “There could be other aircraft still aloft,” he said. “We don’t want any nasty surprises. Better start keeping watch.”
There was nothing above or around them but blue sky and white ground.
In the distance the hangar’s hump came into view. From their angle it looked like a snow-covered minivolcano belching dark smoke. As J.B. slowed and circled over the structure, Ryan saw the downwind trail of fire soot—it made a long black stripe across the pristine snow.
The heat from the fires had melted the snowpack off the hangar roof. There was no sign of people outside the building. Perhaps because the temperature was rapidly dropping as the sun set. Perhaps because they were still too busy inside.
“How are we going to do this?” J.B. asked.
“Put it down on the lee side,” Ryan said. “Everybody out as soon as the skids touch down. The black suits don’t know we’ve commandeered this aircraft. They’ll be expecting to see their own kind pop out. We’ll open a door in the exterior wall with the RPG.”
When he looked over at Jak, he saw the albino had tied a line around Lima’s neck like a leash. He gave it a hard jerk every now and then to remind the whitecoat of how short the tether was.
“Got a better idea,” J.B. said. “How about I thread the eye of the needle and fly this thing through the hole in the hangar roof?”
“It’s too risky trying to fly through the hole in the wind and all the smoke,” Krysty said. “If you don’t hit it right, we’ll crash again.”
“Hey, I can hit it,” J.B. told her. “No worries about that. The hole is the size of a barn door. They won’t be expecting us to return the same way we left. The enforcers inside won’t have time to regroup before we’re on top of them.”
He turned to Ryan and said, “If we land outside, they can organize, slip out of the holes in the sides of the hangar and outflank us. They already outnumber us. I’m telling you, this is the best option we’
ve got.”
Ryan had to agree with his logic. “All right, go ahead. But we’d all better stay strapped in until we’re through the hole.”
J.B. circled the roof once, adjusted for the wind, then descended toward the opening. How he did it, Ryan had no clue, but the Armorer dropped through the hole without touching the sides. The visibility instantly dropped to a foot or two. All the hot smoke was rising and pouring out the roof.
As the craft continued to descend, its turbos beat back the stinging haze.
Through the front of the canopy, Ryan saw a dozen armed black suits lined up in front of elevators at the far end of the hangar. They did indeed look surprised. People in red coveralls, presumably the redoubt’s firefighters, were trying to put out the still raging blazes on either side of the aisle. When they saw the hovertruck, they stopped what they were doing and scattered for cover.
There was no place for the black suits to go. And they had no intention of going anywhere anyway. They opened fire with their MP-5s and handblasters. Bullets slapped into the nose of the hovertruck and spiderwebbed the canopy.
So much for a surprise attack, Ryan thought.
He and the companions ducked as low as they could. J.B. did not budge.
“Hang on to something, Jak!” he shouted over his shoulder.
The albino grabbed hold of the arm of Doc’s chair, wrapping Lima’s leash tightly around his free fist.
J.B. hit the throttles, pounding the levers down in one swipe. With the skids still five feet off the hangar floor, the hovertruck shot down the icy central aisle, between the burning hulks of the other craft.
Ryan guessed what was going to happen, and it wasn’t good. He braced himself for impact.
With bullets crashing through the canopy, J.B. raced for the solid wall ahead. The black suits stood their ground and kept firing. At the very last second, J.B. whipped the craft sideways, smashing its full length into the elevators, crushing most of the black suits between the concrete wall and side of the fuselage. Metal screeched as it crumpled; the cockpit caved in on top of the companions as they were thrown against their seat belts. J.B.’s harness either broke or unbuckled at impact. He bounced off the control panel and fell onto the cockpit floor.
Jak was thrown into the cabin wall and Lima fell through the open hatch. The leash came up tight; the sudden weight nearly jerked the albino down the gangway headfirst. He had to let go of the rope or the whitecoat would have strangled.
Ryan could hear screaming over the howl of the redlined turbos. Standing up, he took a look over the nose of the aircraft and saw the black suit survivors limping for a doorway that no doubt led to a stairwell exit. He ducked as the enforcers fired blindly back over their shoulders. When the shooting stopped, J.B. shut down the power. It was quiet except for the shrieking wind overhead, the crackling of the fires and the moaning of the wounded.
With surprise lost, there was no time to waste. The companions hurried down the gangway and gathered their weapons. When they jumped out the cargo door, they were prepared for resistance but met none. The black suits were either dead or incapacitated; given what they had just witnessed, the red suits were not in a fighting mood.
“I saw black suits head for that doorway,” Ryan said as they paused at the nose of the hovertruck. He turned to Lima, who Jak still held by the leash. There were rope burns around his neck from the fall he’d taken. His lab coat was encrusted with gobs of dried pengie gore and its shoulders glistened with melted brown fat. His eyes looked haunted, doomed even. “Which way do we go?”
For a second Ryan thought the man wasn’t going to answer, either because he couldn’t or because he didn’t want to. But then Jak reached for the knot behind his neck and twisted it tight, hand over hand. Lima’s face went from dead pale to dark purple, his knees buckled and his fingers clawed at the rope digging into his throat. It was an unsubtle reminder of the precariousness of his position.
And it worked.
When Jak let off on the pressure, the whitecoat coughed, then spoke in a strained croak. “We can use those stairs to reach the level above the mat-trans. We have to cross that level to another stairway, which will take us to the right floor.”
“We didn’t use that route before because you told us black suits were waiting to ambush us,” Krysty said. “If they’re still waiting, they know we’re coming.”
“Again we have no choice,” Ryan said. “Time to win the battle or die fighting. Lead on, Lima.”
They entered the stairwell and began to descend with Jak and Lima on point. The redoubt smelled the same, felt the same; its grimness and grittiness hung over them like a dismal fog. Mildred and J.B. followed close behind Jak, frag grens in hand, ready to bounce them down the well to clear a path, if necessary. Everyone but Ryan held an MP-5; he carried the hovertruck’s last longblaster.
When they reached the first landing, they heard shots and screams from far below. They paused to listen. It sounded like a running blaster battle.
“I’m thinking the black suits have some problems of their own,” J.B. said, thumbing his smudged spectacles up the bridge of his nose.
“It is music to the ears,” Doc agreed.
They moved steadily down the staircase, winding around and around from landing to landing. Going down was much faster than going up. Ryan quickly lost count of the floors they’d passed. “How many more to go?” he asked Lima.
The whitecoat had a glazed look in his eyes. Jak gave the leash a yank and the man snapped out of it. “Five, I think,” he said. “The landing is marked. You can’t miss it.”
Blasterfire from below continued as did the screaming. Only it was louder.
“Slow down,” Ryan said, “and stay ready.”
They descended another flight, but Jak and Lima stopped before they set foot on the landing. The albino waved for Ryan to come down and join them. Four black suits lay sprawled on the floor. If they weren’t dead, they were never getting up again. Their arms, legs, hands and feet trembled. Froth oozed from between their clenched teeth and ran down their chins. Their faces had turned dark red, ballooned to almost twice their normal size and their eyelids were swollen shut.
“Spidies,” Jak said to no one in particular.
Mildred moved beside Ryan. She had pocketed her frag gren and replaced it with a flashlight. “Let’s take a closer look,” she said.
Squatting over the nearest victim, she played the light over twin wounds on the side of his neck. The deep punctures were surrounded by puffed-up flesh; they looked like giant pimples. “Spidie injection site,” she said. “Fangs pumped the poison right into his spinal cord.”
She swept the light over the floor, which was littered with spent shell casings. Two of the other victims were in the same condition as the first, twitching on the verge of death. The fourth was different. Mildred spotlighted him and said, “The spidie took more time with that one.”
When they bent over the body, Ryan saw foamy red stuff bubbling out of its eye sockets, ears and mouth. It had formed a spreading pool on the floor.
Mildred shone her light on the dead, contorted face. “Spidie paralyzed him first,” she said, “then it injected his body with a dose of its stomach acid. It’s still dissolving the body from the inside out. After the acid predigests the meal, the spidie sucks up all the rendered juice. No chewing required. Sixty percent of our body weight is liquid. A one-hundred-seventy-pound man like this could yield forty pounds of high protein juice, which is just a bedtime snack for a spidie. Their massive abdomens can probably hold four times that without feeling full.
“My guess is that this one was interrupted in midmeal. Otherwise it would have webbed them all to the ceiling. Witness all the shell casings on the floor.”
“And no dropped blasters near the bodies,” Ryan said. “The shooters are still alive. They must have chased it down
the staircase.”
At the next landing Lima pointed to the doorway, which didn’t look all that inviting. The door had been half torn from the frame and bent almost double. The scratch marks in the surrounding concrete were an inch deep.
“This is it,” he said.
As if to underscore that statement, blasterfire clattered from down the exposed corridor. Then someone screamed, but the cry was cut short.
“We are triple-red from here on,” Ryan said. “If it moves, it dies.”
The companions already knew that, but a reminder never hurt.
The hallway they entered seemed the same as all the rest: gray walls, icy spots on the floor, dimly lit with doors spaced intermittently along either side. Shell casings lay scattered for as far as they could see. Ahead, under a single weak bulb, the corridor was crossed by another hallway.
Something moved, out of sight around the corner on the right.
Something huge.
Something with claws.
As they brought weapons up, moving into safe firing positions, a spidie bounded into the intersection. The span of its body and legs completely filled the space. Then it raised itself up to full height. The lightbulb shattered against its back, plunging the junction in darkness. Mildred flicked on her flashlight, and the multifaceted eyes on stalks reflected a thousand points of light. Its sideways jaws opened and closed as if sampling their scents, perhaps imagining the taste of their predigested innards.
Ryan could see the creature’s coarse body hair bristling. The hair rippled in waves over its huge abdomen. Then it squatted, leg joints brushing walls, belly a yard from the floor. A nasty fluttering noise came from its backside and foul-smelling liquid squirted over ceiling and walls.
“It’s making room for more black suits,” Ricky said.
The simplest way to deal with it would have been to roll a frag gren under its belly and blow it apart, but in the confined space, with nowhere to take cover, that would have risked unnecessary casualties. And there was no guarantee that a concussion gren would have done more than piss it off.
