by Paul Kenyon
It wouldn't take long — ten or fifteen minutes at best. She would be dead.
Chapter 15
Skytop wedged his bound wrists down as far as he could into the space between the saddles. The soldier riding behind him didn't notice. It was hot down there from the heat-exchange fins of the air-cooled engine — hot enough to cook flesh.
Deliberately he pressed his wrist against the scorching metal. He gritted his teeth at the searing pain. He'd be a hell of an Indian if he couldn't take a little burned flesh. It wasn't half as bad as the burning coals the shaman had put on his chest during his manhood rites.
The line of snowmobiles roared across the tundra, bouncing and jolting, occasionally lifting straight up at some surface contour and slamming down hard again. Holding on with his knees was child's play to Skytop; it was a picnic compared to some of the ill-tempered broncos he'd ridden. But the man behind him was holding on for dear life, hugging Skytop like a long lost brother.
They were fifth in line. There were four snowmobiles ahead and only one behind, there to keep an eye on the prisoner. That was good; it would make things easier when the time came.
It took about forty seconds. He could smell the burnt hair of his wrist, the first suggestion of roasting meat.
And then there was something writhing like a serpent on his wrist. His watchband. It snapped straight out into a hard, rigid shape, eight inches long.
Memory plastic. A thermal-set resin that Wharton described as a neo-methylmethacrylate co-polymer. It was cast in the form of an eight-inch blade with a sharp point and a serrated cutting edge. Then it was softened and textured to masquerade as a leather watch strap.
But when you applied heat, the plastic "remembered" its original shape. The molecules flowed, and the strap became thin-edged and sharp and rigid.
He twisted his right thumb and forefinger and caught the blade by the buckle end. He began sawing away at the rope around his wrists.
A minute later his hands were free. He reached behind him and caught the Chinese soldier by the family jewels.
Instinctively the man let go of Skytop's torso and clawed at the hand that had him between the legs. Skytop squeezed, and the man screamed in his ear. Skytop tugged the soldier sideways by the tender handful and the man tumbled off the rear saddle. Skytop grabbed the rifle slung across the man's shoulder as he fell.
In front of him, the driver turned his head to see what had happened. Skytop drove the plastic knife into his kidneys and pushed him off to join his mate. He caught the steering bar with a strong thumb and forefinger, his leftover fingers still gripping the knife, and spun the machine around.
Lifting the rifle one-handed, he fired without sighting, and caught the driver of the following snowmobile squarely in the chest. The buzzing machine tumbled over, spilling its two riders.
Skytop sprang from his own machine before it stopped moving and dived into a snowbank. The four machines ahead were making a sharp turn and coming back to see what had happened.
The rifle was a .300 Weatherby Magnum De Luxe with a scope — a strange weapon for a Chinese soldier to be carrying. Skytop got the driver of the first snowmobile in the crosshairs and let him come close. Then he squeezed the trigger.
The rifle butt slammed into his shoulder, and the driver flung his hands up to claw at the hole in his chest. Somehow the body remained in the saddle, a limp doll, while the snowmobile weaved out of control. The man in the rear saddle fired his submachine gun wildly at Skytop's general position. Skytop ignored him. There was small danger from an M-16 at this range. Instead he concentrated on the other three drivers.
He picked them off like targets in a shooting gallery, one by one. He snapped the three shots off in as many seconds. The high velocity bullets splintered windshields, tore through flesh. One of the snowmobiles tipped. The second slid to a stop, while its passengers jumped off and dived for cover. The third, its rider leaning forward to grab at the controls, turned and tried to get away. Skytop shot the survivor in the back.
One of the Chinese gunners was obviously dead, crushed under the tipped snowmobile. The one who'd been on the lead snowmobile had recovered and was shooting. The bullets, almost spent, spattered at Skytop's feet. Skytop raised the long-range rifle and shot the man through the head.
There was one more man out there to kill. Skytop couldn't see him. He'd burrowed into the snow, holding his fire. Skytop didn't dare walk away and leave him. He couldn't afford to let the Chinese hop on a snowmobile and get away.
Deliberately he stood up. Even an almost-spent slug could kill him. And if the Chinese kept his weapon on full automatic, he could spray him like a garden hose. Accuracy wouldn't count.
The temptation was too much for the Chinese. Up ahead a machine gun chattered. Snow and ice kicked up at Skytop's left, moving toward him. Coolly, Skytop lifted the Weatherby and fired three times at the movement against the snow. The firing stopped. Skytop could make out a twisted shape in a white camouflage outfit through the scope.
He turned around to see what had happened to the gunman who'd been riding the rearmost snowmobile. On the way back he found the soldier he'd yanked off the saddle behind him. The man was writhing in the snow, clutching at his crotch with both hands, his face a sickly yellow. Skytop bent over and sliced his throat open with the plastic knife.
The last man was lying in the snow with a broken leg. He tried to crawl for his automatic rifle, a few yards away. Skytop kicked the gun further away and grabbed the man by the hood of his parka.
"Who the hell are you, buster?" he said. "What's going on at the Russky germ factory?" He tried to assemble a few words of his primitive Chinese, frowning at the effort.
But the man understood English. He stared at Skytop and said defiantly "Long live the thoughts of Chairman Mao!"
Skytop sighed. He never could stand bores. He drew his blade across the man's throat and wiped the knife on the white tunic. There wouldn't have been time to question him, break him down, anyway. He had to find the Baroness.
He loaded a few supplies on one of the intact snowmobiles, and took along the Weatherby and a couple of automatic rifles. He started the engine and got going, backtracking to the place where the Chinese had captured him.
He picked up the tracks of the borzois and started following them. Maybe they'd got onto the Baroness' trail, maybe not. But it was the best chance he had. Probably the only chance.
Only it was going to take hours.
* * *
Igor's collar dangled from the Baroness' numb fingers, a broad limp strap, glittering with gems, useless to her in its present form.
Memory plastic. All her team wore watchbands made of it. It was colored and textured to look like leather. Apply heat and its complex molecules twitched and flowed. It became a knife, rigid and sharp.
All she had to do was pass it through fire, and she'd be able to skin a couple of wolves, wrap herself in the fur that would save her life.
Penelope smiled wryly. If snow would burn, she'd have it made. If she had a match to ignite it.
There wasn't much time to lose. Her fingers had almost stopped working from the paralyzing cold. She had one shot at saving her life, and she had to be damned quick about it. If it didn't work, her fingers would be too numb for her to try again.
Sobbing with cold, she used the point of the metal spike to pry the artificial gems out of the dog collar. The cold steel burned like a branding iron, and when she tried to put the spike down, it stuck to her palm. She pulled it loose, and a strip of skin came with it.
The jewels spilled out of her deadened fingers and scattered in the snow. She tried to pick them up, but she couldn't seem to make her fingers work. There! She had one between thumb and forefinger. Damn! She dropped it again.
The cold was like a knife now, piercing through to her bones. The two wolfhounds sat a little distance away, their heads cocked, watching the strange activities of their mistress with doggy curiosity.
The wolfhounds! A dog's bo
dy temperature is 101 degrees. She called them over to her and plunged her paralyzed fingers into their thick fur. Their bellies felt feverish with heat.
A little feeling returned to her fingers. But the rest of her was getting colder. It was excruciating.
She returned to the scattered gems and swept them into a little pile, on the flattish piece of bare rock poking out of the snow. Using the rounded head of the spike as a pestle, she pounded the jewels to powder.
Magnesium powder. The stuff used for photographic flash powder, signal flares, incendiary bombs. You could also cast paste jewels out of it. It was a handy way to get a bomb through Customs.
Now to set it on fire. She giggled: fire to make fire… She brought herself up short. Her mind was growing fuzzy with the cold; this wasn't funny. With a supreme effort of will, she picked up the other dog collar.
There were two big glassy gems on opposite sides of the collar. They weren't paste. They were optical glass. With the buckle at that notch, just so, the focus was exactly correct.
She propped the collar in the snow, focusing a ray of sun through the two lenses to the little heap of incendiary powder. She waited. A little curl of smoke appeared, and then there was a bright hot flash that almost blinded her.
The incendiary powder flared, hissing. She picked up the first collar and thrust it into the flame.
The heat was as unbearable as the cold had been. She felt it all the way up her forearms, thawing out the frozen flesh. Her face tingled. The returning circulation was agony.
But the dog collar was changing before her eyes. It writhed like a living thing. It lifted its point end and became straight and hard. The edges flowed and became razor thin with little serrations. In seconds she was holding a formidable-looking knife, a foot and a half long.
She toasted herself by the dying magnesium flare as long as it continued to throw heat. Then she turned to the carnage. Knife in hand, she set about to skin herself some wolves.
* * *
It was good to be warm again. The Baroness jogged at an easy gait over the snowy landscape, a strange apparition wrapped in wolfskin, two enormous white dogs loping at her heels.
The fur was soft and comforting against her naked skin. She'd wrapped the first layer around herself inside out, the bloody hide facing outward. The second layer was pelt side out. The big floppy moccasins, fastened with pieces of the wire flex that had bound her, supported her almost like snowshoes on the crunchy surface. She'd devised primitive-looking leggings, wrapped and tied with wire, and a pair of arm-length muffs, long enough to curl her fingers into when she wasn't using them. There was a hood, and a mask for her lower face, and a poncho-like coat, belted with one of the borzoi's chains.
Her belly was full of raw wolf meat, giving her strength. She pitied Penkin if she ever met him again.
She was following the tracks of the vezdekhod. They'd lead her in the direction of the laboratory. She had to get close enough to find out the meaning of those explosions, of the gunfire she could hear faintly when the wind was right.
Could it be her own team? Had they become worried and gone in to get her?
It didn't seem likely. Wharton and Skytop would have waited a little longer before disobeying orders.
How many miles to go before she got within hailing distance of them? Twenty? Thirty? Perhaps another four hours of this steady mechanical pace, this dreamlike rhythm that made running seem effortless, as if she were watching someone else do it. She'd left her team in a small declivity, about fifteen miles on this side of the germ laboratory. Without the direction finder in the kit that Penkin had confiscated, she'd have to rely on her memory of the featureless landscape, and on the noses of the dogs. How had they found her? Traces of her scent must still have been clinging to the outside of the vezdekhod.
She bounded like a running deer over the barren wastes, her long legs rising and falling, a bobbing gray shadow against the dazzling snow. The dogs kept pace, occasionally darting ahead or running playful circles around her.
There was something else out there on the tundra keeping pace with her. The wolves. The tattered remnants of the pack that she and the borzois had decimated.
They were no longer a threat. They were wary of her now, and kept their distance. But they were hungry — ravenous. She'd seen their ribs. There was too much competition for too little game, here on this barren peninsula. The migrating wolf packs were close to starvation. So they kept her in sight, at a safe distance, in case she fell and became injured, or ran herself into helpless exhaustion. She was the only prospective source of meat for miles — too tempting to abandon entirely.
Something caught her eye — there on the fringes of her vision. She turned her head to scan the horizon. It was the wolves. They were making a wide circle around her, cutting ahead of her, yelping with excitement.
In a moment she saw why. Penkin's vezdekhod. He hadn't made it back to the laboratory after all.
The big snow vehicle had thrown a tread. She could see the deep circle it had gouged out of the snow as it went round and round helplessly, like some giant injured beetle, on its remaining tread.
She kept running toward it. She could make out two tiny figures struggling at the base of the tided machine. Penkin and Viktor. They were trying to jack the thrown tread back onto the drive gears. The tread sprawled like a scaly serpent across the snow. It would be hard work with a heavy wrench in the cold to fasten the severed ends back on their bolts and tighten the tread over the gears.
The larger of the two figures straightened his back and looked up. He hadn't seen her yet, but he could see the circling wolves.
He tapped the little hunchback on the shoulder, and they both scrambled for the safety of the enclosed cabin. The wolves surrounded the disabled machine, pacing restlessly.
Penelope drew closer. The wolves swung their heads toward her, respectful of her and the borzois, and turned back toward the vezdekhod. The leader threw back his head and howled.
A few moments later, the cabin door swung open. The dwarf clambered up onto the roof of the vehicle, a machine gun huge and unwieldy in his spindly arms. Penkin had sent the little man outside to deal with the wolves, too fearful to leave the safety of the cabin himself. Penelope was willing to lay odds that Penkin was remembering his childhood nightmare — the ghastly two days he'd spent locked in a wooden cabinet while the wolves who had eaten his parents tried to get inside.
Viktor braced himself against the kick of the weapon and fired a burst. It tore into one of the wolves, spattering blood and fur across the snow.
But the starving wolves were too desperate to be intimidated. They rushed in on their fallen mate and gobbled him up, fighting over scraps of flesh. Viktor fired another burst, but they refused to be driven away.
And then one wolf who had been circling around to the other side leaped for the roof of the vezdekhod, trying to get at the little man. He got his front paws over the edge and slipped back, falling ten feet to the snow. He picked himself up and leaped again.
Viktor's nerve broke. He dropped the gun and scrambled into the cabin, slamming the door behind him.
Unless Penkin had another gun in there, the two of them were helpless.
Penelope moved in among the wolves. They stood their ground, too hungry to be dislodged from their prey, still acknowledging the supremacy of this strange erect creature and her two deadly white-furred companions. The closer of the wolves assumed a submissive posture, lowering themselves on their front paws, tucking their tails between their legs and whining. Their ears were laid flat in deference. A few tails cautiously wagged.
It was a truce. They were accepting the Baroness as a member of the pack.
The submissive gestures worked on the borzois' own wolfish instincts. Igor advanced and touched noses with one of the wolves. Stasya followed. Their tails wagged. Dogs and wolves sniffed each other all over.
The wolves turned back to the vezdekhod. Some of them, impatient, flung themselves against the steel
sides, making the machine shake.
A pair of frightened faces appeared at the window. Penelope let them see her. She stood among the snarling, snapping wolves and stared back at Penkin and Viktor. She showed her teeth in a gleaming smile.
She must have been an incomprehensible sight in her wrappings of wolf fur, still bloody from the skinning knife. They'd left her staked out and helpless, naked in the freezing cold, live bait for a howling pack of Arctic wolves. And here she was, in the middle of the nightmarish beasts besieging them.
Penkin's face was ashen behind the glass. The oversize lumpish jaw was trembling.
He must have gone berserk with panic then. His face disappeared from the side window, and the vezdekhod's engines coughed. There was a grinding of gears, and the big machine spun round and round on its one intact tread, churning up the snow.
Penelope smiled coldly. Penkin wasn't going anywhere.
After a while, Penkin gave up. The vezdekhod ground to a stop, leaning over at an angle.
The door opened a crack. She could hear Viktor screaming.
"No, Evgeny Ivanovich, no! For the love of God, by the blood of your father, don't do it!"
And then the door was flung open and Viktor was pitched out. She caught a glimpse of Penkin, looking crazed, before he slammed the door shut again.
The twisted little man landed in the snow, among the wolves. They were on him in a flash, teeth slashing and snapping. There was one tiny high-pitched scream, choked off almost immediately, and then the wolves were pressed into a tight mass, feeding.
If Penkin had hoped to satisfy the wolves by feeding Viktor to them, he was disappointed. The little man was barely a snack. The wolves resumed their siege of the vezdekhod, leaping at its sides and snapping at steel. They were all over the machine now, pacing on the broad roof, flattening their noses against the glass of the windshield while Penkin cowered inside.
Penelope leaped for the cabin door and wrenched it open. She hurled herself inside, pulling the door shut after her to keep the wolves out.