Polestar Omega

by James Axler

  When he flipped the third, the multiple turbo engines rumbled, then started up with a roar that set the whole craft vibrating. Though the hovertruck was heavily loaded, the skids tap-danced against the ice, as if the aircraft wanted to jump straight up into the sky.

  “Now, we’re talkin’!” J.B. said, giving the control yoke a slap.

  * * *

  RYAN, JAK AND Ricky spread out behind the line of aircraft, maneuvering to get the best angles on their targets across the aisle. The rockets whooshed, and the explosive impacts sent the smaller hovertrucks not only flying apart, but hurtling over the ice on their skids, crashing into the larger ones. It was like dominoes falling. When the small ones blew up, the fireballs engulfed the larger craft, and then they, too, exploded. Flurries of cannon rounds cooked off in the blaze. The additional gashes they cut in the walls let in a frigid wind. It whistled high and shrill over the roar of the fires.

  Returning to the idling hovertruck for more RPGs, Ryan and the others finished the job. The hangar was rapidly filling with black, oily smoke. Every aircraft but theirs was in flames. If they succeeded in blowing off the roof and flying out, not only could no one else follow, but Ryan knew the colonists were doomed—their arsenal and supplies destroyed, their transportation destroyed, their plans for world conquest destroyed.

  Down to the last man, down to the last child, whether it was from starvation, muties or icequake, they were all going to die here. He felt a brief pang for the children, then it passed.

  The total destruction wasn’t simply revenge for what had been done to him and the others. It wasn’t to keep colonists from taking over Deathlands. It was the only way Ryan could guarantee the safe escape of the companions. That it accomplished the other ends was just the bloody icing on the cake.

  He had learned from his mentor, Trader, that the consequences of an act were unpredictable. A limited step here, a limited step there, and suddenly there were no limits. It was the horror of Virtue Lake all over again—a smoking hole in the ground surrounded by legions of bloated dead. No one, nothing spared. Not even the flies on the dog shit.

  A simple act became a legendary, generation-spanning tale of vengeance.

  And to the whole world you were the boogeyman.

  Unlike Virtue Lake, no one would ever find this place, make an accounting and live to spread the story. It was not likely that anything human would ever pass this way again. And even if it did, even if ice and snow didn’t bury all the evidence, the primary causes of the disaster—the grandiose ambition of the colonists and the actions of seven Deathlanders—would not be evident.

  Cosmic justice was a funny thing. Not ha-ha funny, though.

  Ryan, Jak and Ricky stepped over the pile of black suit bodies and into the cargo bay.

  Lima was staring at the burning aircraft. The shock and disbelief on his face gave way to anger, which was understandable. His hopes, and the hopes of his people, were going up in flames.

  “What kind of people are you?” he cried.

  It was a question they had all heard many times before in the hellscape.

  And the answer never changed.

  “We are the wrong kind to mess with,” Ryan said. He shoved the whitecoat up the gangway ahead of him.

  On the other side of the hatch, Mildred and Krysty sat in two of the six seats, J.B. was in the pilot chair.

  “We need the location of the hangar roof jettison switch,” Mildred told the whitecoat. “We need it now.”

  “Why would I give you that after what you’ve done?” Lima said.

  “What does it matter now?” Ryan said. “None of the other aircraft is going to fly anywhere ever again. There is nothing left to save.”

  The three-hundred-sixty degree, elevated view from the cockpit revealed the full extent of the devastation. The hangar was awash in fire and smoke. Lima’s jaw went slack and the emotion drained from his eyes.

  He looked like a man on his deathbed.

  “Every hovertruck is equipped with a jettison switch,” he said woodenly, “in case of an emergency evacuation.”

  “Where is it?” Mildred said.

  He nodded toward the right side of the control panel. “Behind that hatch you’ll find the trigger keypad. A code sequence activates the explosive charge.”

  J.B. opened the compartment, exposing the small electronic unit.

  “What is the trigger code?” Ryan said.

  Lima shook his head. “It’s my world that’s ending. When the moment comes, I should be the one to do it. Give me that right.”

  Ryan frowned. There were ways of getting the information of course, but they all took time. And time was in short supply. “Move the hovertruck into position, J.B.,” he said, pushing Lima into one of the empty seats.

  Krysty shot him an exasperated look, which he ignored.

  At once it was clear that J.B. hadn’t mastered the controls. The aircraft began to crawl across the landing field, but the wrong way. When he got it headed toward the painted circle, he couldn’t keep it going in a straight line.

  After a series of zigs and zags, J.B. finally brought the hovertruck to a stop in the middle of the designated spot.

  Ryan forced Lima to lean forward and loosened the bonds around his wrists. He kept a hand on the whitecoat’s shoulder as he guided him to the trigger device. Lima reached down and began poking at the numbered pads.

  As Ryan looked up through the cockpit bubble, a tremendous explosion sent the roof directly above flying up and out of sight. One second it was there, off-white corrugated metal, the next he was staring through a vast hole at brilliant blue sky and blowing snow. As the heat from the fires rushed out of the hangar, the hole became a chimney that sucked up and spewed out a column of thick black smoke.

  “We’re clear to go!” Ryan said.

  The hovertruck bounced on its skids and slid side to side as J.B. worked frantically at the controls. “Can’t get elevation,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “Come on, J.B.!” Krysty said.

  The Armorer flipped switches, pulled levers, turned dials. The craft trembled and danced but did not rise. “Got to be one of these,” he said. “Got to be...”

  He guessed right. The hovertruck lifted sluggishly a foot or two off the ice. The wash of the turbos thinned the surrounding pall of smoke.

  Lima shot out from under Ryan’s hand, turned and before he could be grabbed, leaped through the open hatch, half falling down the gangway to the cargo deck. Ryan jumped after him, shouting a warning to Ricky and Jak.

  The whitecoat almost made it out the doorway.

  Ricky seized him by the collar and hauled him back. “Where we go, you go,” he said. When Lima resisted, arms flailing, Ricky hit him in the left temple with the muzzle of his MP-5, knocking him out cold. As Jak rolled him over and retied his hands behind his back, Ricky slid the bay door shut.

  The hovertruck suddenly rose five feet, tipping from side to side like a seesaw.

  “Hang on to something!” Ryan shouted at Ricky and Jak.

  The aircraft dropped, slamming down onto the landing field, nearly toppling Ryan from the gangway. He scrambled hand over hand back up into the cockpit.

  “This isn’t good, J.B.,” he said, getting into the seat behind the pilot’s chair.

  “I got it now, I got it.”

  With a lurch the hovertruck lifted off again. Ten feet up, twenty, forty, sixty. It looked as if they were hitting the bull’s-eye, with nothing but sky above them through the clear canopy. Then the hovertruck slewed to the left and the stubby wing on that side hung up on the edge of the hole. The cockpit tipped down violently to the left; the right wing tipped up higher and higher, turbos straining. It felt as if the aircraft was going to flip upside down.

  “Dammit!” J.B. said, twisting the yoke the other
way.

  With an agonized, metal-on-metal scraping sound, the wingtip cleared the hole. As if they had been fired from a slingshot, they vaulted straight up. The view on the sides of the cockpit was nothing but azure sky and white frozen sea.

  The companions cheered. Ryan clapped J.B. on the shoulder.

  The aircraft kept climbing higher and higher. And it tipped at an odd angle, aft right corner down, left front corner up.

  “That’s plenty of altitude, J.B.,” Mildred said.

  “I know, I know.”

  “We aren’t level, J.B.,” Krysty said.

  “I know, I know!” He wrenched the yoke over.

  The hovertruck shifted back, throwing them against the other sides of their seats, and it continued to gain altitude at gut-wrenching speed.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Adam Charlie, William Yankee and their hovertruck crew had spent four hours trying to refind the big pengie flock of the previous day with orders to harvest as many carcasses as possible. Apparently, the military commanders had decided there was no point in conserving food the colonists wouldn’t be around to eat. When the hunt team couldn’t locate the flock, they followed the implanted trackers to a different area, farther south and to the east of the mountain range. Although the initial pinging indicated marked animals were somewhere below them on the ice sheet, a visual grid search had turned up nothing. Then the tracking signals stopped and they couldn’t pick them up again.

  It seemed clear to Adam that the pengies had disappeared down their escape tunnels in the glacier. The tunnels were so slick they were one-way—essentially winding ice chutes into the polar sea. For humans they were certain death. Once the pengies were in the sea beneath the polar cap, there was no going after them. They could hold their breath for up to half an hour with ease. They had evolved to hunt the Antarctic oceans; they were ten times more dangerous there.

  It also occurred to him that the pengies might have finally figured out how to counter the implanted trackers, perhaps by connecting the sight of the incoming hovertruck with the slaughter that always followed. If true, it was a startling development as it ran counter to their basic instinct, which was to fear nothing and attack en masse.

  The radio speakers crackled. A female voice said, “Tango Tango Huntsman, Tango Tango Huntsman, this is base command. We have a code red... Repeat, we have a code...emergency.”

  The transmission was breaking up badly, which wasn’t unusual in their current location. Adam fiddled with a knob, to try to better tune in the signal. He didn’t take the bulletin all that seriously. Readiness tests were infrequent, but not unheard-of.

  “This is not... Repeat, not a drill. Return to...at once, maximum speed. What is your ETA?”

  He and William exchanged startled looks. A genuine code red wasn’t just disaster; it was battle stations. It was “we are under attack.” Adam grabbed the hand mike from the control panel. “Our ETA is less than ten minutes,” he said. “What’s happened?”

  “We just...a major icequake. There was a lot of dam...test animals from the bioengineering lab escaped. They are very... We have...casualties. We are in the process of sealing off... When you land, come in...full weaponry. And be prepared... You will be...at the south hangar and given orders.”

  “Roger that,” Adam said, gesturing urgently at his pilot. “South hangar.”

  William banked a hard turn and with the wind behind them accelerated the turbos to red line. From Adam’s vantage point in the first row seat of the cockpit, the red nose of the hovertruck seemed to gobble the whitescape.

  “What the heck does that mean, ‘test animals escaped’?” George said from the seat behind Adam.

  “Good question,” Adam said. He pressed the mike’s send button. “Base command, this is Tango Tango Huntsman. What kind of test animals are loose? Can you be more specific? Over.”

  “Roger, Tango Tango. Bioengineering...from the Deathlands. Top...predators. Some...humanoid. Others more...insects. Only...bigger.”

  “Roger that, base command. Over and out.” Adam replaced the mike on its cradle.

  “Fucking A!” George said. “Why would bioengineering bring monsters like that into the redoubt?”

  “Because they’re arrogant idiots?” Adam said.

  “Probably thought they could control them,” William said.

  “Guess they couldn’t,” George said. “Now that’s up to us.”

  When Adam considered the kind of damage creatures like that could do against a largely unarmed population in an enclave as vast and mazelike as Polestar Omega, it made his heart sink.

  Eight very long minutes later the redoubt’s aboveground perimeter came into view. It was all white, but from the air the outline was clear. It was far too regular to be a natural feature. The distinct hump of the evacuation hangar, even buried under fifteen feet of snow, was an unmistakable landmark from two miles away. Theirs was a different hangar, on the other side of the perimeter. It was smaller, with standard access doors, designated to house the fleet of hunting and recon aircraft.

  Over the roar of the turbos, they heard muffled booming sounds coming from the direction of the redoubt.

  “What is that?” William said as the booming continued.

  “Icequake?” George suggested.

  To Adam it sounded more like cannons going off.

  “No sign of anything amiss topside,” William said with obvious relief as they quickly closed on the evacuation hangar.

  As soon as the words left his mouth, there was a brilliant, circular flash beneath the snow in the middle of the hump and the roof of the structure was blown up into the air like an immense tin pie plate. The shock wave of the explosion jostled the hovertruck in flight.

  “Good grief!” George said.

  A gust of gale force wind caught the seventy-foot circle of metal and sent it spinning end over end for a hundred yards before it crashed down, sending up a plume of snow and ice. A haze of oily black smoke streamed from the gaping hole in the roof.

  “Why did they blow the roof hatch?” George asked. “Are they evacuating the redoubt now?”

  “Why would they blow the roof if they weren’t?” William replied.

  “We aren’t ready to leave yet,” Adam said. “This doesn’t make sense. Look at that smoke pouring out. Something big’s on fire in there.”

  William swooped the hovertruck down to two hundred feet of altitude, aiming at the structure.

  They were less than a mile away when they saw the familiar shape of a large hovertruck struggling out of the opening in the roof amid the smoke. It seemed stuck to the roof for a moment, then it popped free and climbed rapidly away downwind.

  “Is the pilot drunk?” George said. “Injured?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” William told him.

  “Get closer, William,” Adam instructed as he grabbed the mike again.

  “Base command, this is Tango Tango Huntsman,” he said. “What is your situation belowground? Repeat, what is going on down there?”

  The speakers hissed static.

  When Adam looked up from the control panel, the other plane was about a quarter mile away, tipped at an odd angle in a steep accent and slowly turning clockwise in their direction. Then he saw a rectangular hole appear in its red side—it was the cargo bay door sliding back.

  Three tiny black objects tumbled out.

  Objects with arms and legs.

  “Those were black suits!” William said.

  Adam hit the send button and tried to contact base command again. He shouted into the mike, “This is Tango Tango Huntsman. We have a code red topside. Confirm. Code red topside.”

  “This is base command. Confirm code red, Tango Tango Huntsman. What are the details?”

  “Not clear, yet. We are moving
closer. Standby.”

  William hovered upwind of the hole in the roof. He angled the craft this way and that to try to get a better view, but the smoke pouring out made it difficult to see anything clearly inside the structure. Smoke was also flowing up through the snow, along the buried sides of the building, presumably through breeches in the metal walls. The intense heat from the fires was melting the snowdrifts on the roof in spots; whole sections of white were avalanching off.

  “It’s all burning,” George said. “Everything is burning.”

  By “everything” Adam knew he meant their future, their survival.

  “Base command,” he said, “the evacuation hangar roof has been jettisoned. Repeat, roof jettisoned. Heavy smoke coming out. There must be massive fires inside the structure. The entire fleet may be burning. Get fire crews up there. Repeat, the evacuation fleet is burning.”

  “Roger that, I am sending fire crews. What happened?”

  “That’s not clear yet. But one hovertruck escaped the hangar before we arrived. It’s flying erratically at high speed. We saw the bodies of three black suits thrown from the cargo doors.”

  “Please repeat.”

  Through the speakers he could hear the sounds of blasterfire and screaming in the background.

  “Three bodies were dumped out,” he said. “Hovertruck moving quickly away. What is going on down there?”

  “The hostiles are being hunted down and terminated. We are securing uninhabited levels. Everything is under control.”

  It didn’t sound like it.

  And if it wasn’t under control, what would adding six orange suits to the fight accomplish?

  “Our families!” George said. “We’ve got to get back to them and make sure they are safe.”

  After a short pause, base command asked, “What is current status of escaping aircraft?”

  “It has lost altitude,” Adam said, “barely skimming the ice now, veering on a course south by southeast. Do you know who is flying the aircraft?”

  “We believe they are escaped criminals the bio unit mistakenly teleported here. They are extremely dangerous and well armed. They have already killed a number of our people. It’s likely they are responsible for the release of the hostile lab subjects into the redoubt. They must have set the other planes on fire and blown the roof to get away.”