by James Axler
The speakers hissed for a moment.
“This is General India,” a male voice growled at them. “I order you to shoot down that hovertruck and engage any survivors.”
“But, sir,” Adam said, “it’s possible most of the fleet has been destroyed. Don’t we need that aircraft back and fully functional?”
“Secure the hovertruck if you can, but don’t come back here without those bastards’ detached heads.”
Chapter Eighteen
Ryan watched as J.B. struggled to get the hovertruck under control and stop the side to side wobbling. He couldn’t get the altitude adjustment right, in part because of the gusting side winds. Now that he had the machine in the air and moving forward, he was understandably reluctant to mess with more guesswork, trying to fine-tune the sets of turbos, or engaging the onboard computer to handle manage the task.
“Where the heck are we going, J.B.?” Mildred said over his shoulder.
“I do believe Argentina is the other direction,” Doc added.
“Do you want to fly this thing?”
“They’re right, J.B.,” Ryan said. “We’re headed one-eighty wrong.”
Muttering to himself, J.B. tipped the yoke, making the stubby left wing dip. As the nose started to come around, the buffeting increased, but they all saw the red dot hanging in the distant sky ahead of them. It grew larger and larger.
“Looks like we got company,” Ricky said.
J.B. twisted the yoke back. Pushed by the wind, the nose came around much faster, making them sway in their seats.
“What now, pray tell?” Doc said.
They were all looking behind them, out the back of the cockpit canopy.
“We definitely are their target,” Ryan said. “And they’re gaining on us even though we have a tailwind. We can’t turn back until we get rid of them.”
“That plane looks just like this one,” Krysty said.
“Cargo ship,” Ryan agreed. “Without onboard heavy machine blasters or cannon. Once they get close, all they can do is open the door to the hold and shoot at us with conventional weapons.”
“Yeah, and we can do the same right back,” J.B. said.
Ryan had the identical thought. He jumped from his seat and climbed down the gangway.
Ricky and Jak were huddled near the prone, unmoving body of Lima. It was much colder in the hold. The three corpses they had moved were nowhere to be seen.
“What happened to the bodies?” he said.
“They crapped their pants and the stench was overpowering,” Ricky said. “I’ve had enough of that stench to last me a lifetime.”
“Opened door, threw out,” Jak said. “Closed door.”
“We’ve got another plane chasing us,” Ryan told them. “It’s coming up fast. Like this one, it probably doesn’t have fixed cannons or an air-to-air missile system. We have to fight it with what we’ve got in the hold—RPGs, grens and submachine blasters. When they get close, we’ll throw open the cargo door and let them have it. In the meantime move some of the drums close to the opening. We can use them for cover. Prep some rocket launchers and lay out extra MP-5s and mags.”
The ship dipped and recovered, rising steeply, sending Ryan staggering and reaching out for a handhold.
“Better tie the cover drums down extra tight,” Ryan instructed.
“J.B. needs him some flying lessons,” Ricky said.
“Just get it all ready as fast as you can. I’ll bring Doc, Krysty and Mildred down when we’re in position.”
He climbed back up the gangway. Looking out the back of the canopy, he saw the other aircraft had already halved the distance between them. It was approaching from a higher altitude, coming at them on a down-angled intercept course.
Ryan turned and took in the landscape ahead. In the distance on the left a thin dark line extended into the frozen sea. As they rushed onward, it materialized into a finger of bare, freeze-blasted rock backdropped by low, white-dusted peaks. On one side of the finger there was ice; the other, a churned-up deep blue sea. In seconds they were close enough to make out the vague outlines of a landing strip, the tops of buildings, power poles and oil storage tanks under a deep carpet of snow.
“I know that place!” Mildred said. “I saw it on a National Geographic special back in the day. That’s McMurdo Station—it’s got to be. That low mountain behind it is called Observation Hill.”
When Ryan gave her a puzzled look she added, “It was a big predark, polar research station.”
“More whitecoats?” Krysty said.
“Dead ones, by the look of it,” Ryan said.
“Dead and buried a long time,” Doc agreed.
Glancing over his shoulder at the descending enemy hovertruck, Ryan said, “J.B., we’ve got to gain altitude. We need room to maneuver.”
The Armorer reached out with one hand and advanced the throttles while he leaned back on the yoke. The response from the turbos was instantaneous. Ryan’s stomach lurched as the craft leaped upward. The increase in speed was extra unsettling, given J.B.’s lack of control, but J.B. managed to gain three hundred feet in a matter of seconds.
As he did so, the other plane loomed large behind and above them, its red belly blocking out most of the canopy’s view of sky.
Ryan could see the other crew already had their cargo door open. He could see clustered blaster barrels sticking out.
“J.B.,” he said, “there’s only one cargo door in that aircraft, and it’s on the right side, like ours. That plane has to come down on our left side to line up their blasters. Whatever you do, keep that ship on the right, and their cargo door facing away from us. That way we can shoot at them, but they can’t shoot back.”
He waved to Mildred, Doc and Krysty. “Come on, time for us to do some damage.”
He sent them hurrying down the gangway first. Over his shoulder he said, “On the right, J.B. I don’t care how you do it. Keep them on the right.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it.”
As Ryan joined the others, they were lashing themselves in behind the barrels. Jak and Ricky already had a pair of RPGs pointed over the tops of the drums. When the moment came, they were going to unleash serious, concentrated firepower.
When Ryan pulled open the cargo door, a rush of frigid wind filled the hold. After tying a tether line around his waist, he picked up one of the MP-5s. “The RPGs should do the job,” he said. “But if they don’t, concentrate your fire, blast the shit out of the canopy, aim for the pilot.”
The hovertruck lurched and dipped, throwing them around behind the barrels, as J.B. jockeyed for position.
When the underside of the red craft appeared at the top of the doorway, Ryan saw the turbo’s double row of circular cowlings. Their scream at such close range made pain lance into his ears. In the downblast of the engines, J.B.’s flight path became even more erratic, sawing from side to side.
“Too close!” Ryan bellowed at the upper deck, but his voice was lost in the howl of wind and engine noise coming through the doorway.
A terrible, metal-on-metal grinding noise erupted.
Then things went very wrong, very fast.
Too fast to be sure whether the two aircraft had actually collided in midair, whether a critical system, damaged as the wing of their plane scraped against the hangar roof, had finally failed or whether it was due to an error on the part of their novice pilot.
The deck tipped over hard to the left, hurling them backward. It kept tipping. The other hovertruck disappeared under the belly of their aircraft. They fell away, plummeting sideways toward the ice.
Somehow J.B. managed to level them out, but it was too late to regain altitude. Out the cargo doorway Ryan saw the frozen sea coming up fast. He threw an arm around Krysty, protecting her head with his hand. Strands of prehensi
le hair wrapped tightly around his fingers.
The landing was a high-speed belly flop. On impact, they flew up off the deck. If they hadn’t been tied down, they would have been smashed against the ceiling of the hold.
Forward momentum hardly slowed on the second and third bounces.
The skids dug into a landing field decorated with moguls and gullies. The vibration and jolting made everything blur. Ryan couldn’t focus his one good eye.
Then the skid on the right jumped a hump of ice, forcing the left wingtip down. It dug into the surface and instantly the craft began to spin counterclockwise. It was like being caught in a tornado. Some of the barrels tore loose and went flying out the doorway, leaving the companions clawing at the deck to keep from being thrown out after them.
The undercarriage hit something even bigger, a mogul of ice or a barely covered rock, and the craft was in the air again, completely out of control. When it came down on its belly, it stayed down, but the crash split the seams of the walls, sending the rivets flying. Cold air from the gaping slits rushed over them in a torrent.
When the plane finally came to a stop, Ryan couldn’t move from the floor. His head was reeling. There was blood in his eye and in his mouth. He knew he had to get up. He had to get the others up, or they were all going to die.
Scrambling to his knees, he started shaking them back to consciousness. “Come on! Come on!” he shouted. “Grab blasters and ammo! J.B.! Get your ass down here. We’ve got to bail!”
He couldn’t wait for them to come to. Grabbing an RPG, he rolled out of the cargo bay onto the ice. The skids had buckled at the struts. There wasn’t enough clearance for him to crawl under the ship’s belly.
Peering around the tail, he saw the other craft hovering inches above the ice some two hundred feet behind them. The opposition was keeping a safe distance. And why not? The crashed target was caught in the open, with nothing but ice for more than a hundred yards in all directions.
“Gather up weapons and ammo!” he shouted into the hold. “We’ve got to get away from this plane now!”
Shouldering the RPG, he looked through the optical sight. With the nose of the ship centered in the crosshairs, he slowly and smoothly squeezed the trigger. As the rocket whooshed away, he saw men in orange with longblasters bailing from the cargo doors, but the ship was moving. Whoever was at the controls was either a mastermind or was just triple lucky. The hovertruck juked up and peeled off to the right an instant before the rocket’s trajectory crossed its path. Ryan watched the exhaust trail keep going, and going. Forty yards past the intended target it angled into the ice and exploded harmlessly.
Ryan stuck his head into the hold and said, “Let’s go, let’s go!”
J.B. slid down the gangway. His glasses hung by one earhook and the crown of his fedora was dented. There was blood on his chin from a split lower lip.
Dragging Lima behind him, Jak led the others around the front of the hovertruck. All but the whitecoat were loaded down with MP-5s; their side pockets bulged with extra stick mags. Ricky had an RPG slung over his shoulder, and Mildred carried the backpack of explosives on her back. Using the wreck as cover, they made a beeline for the spit of land ahead.
Ryan reached into the hold for a pair of submachine blasters, and turning back, he sprayed bullets downrange with both hands, forcing the orange suits to dive onto the ice. He could see they had assault longblasters. The additional accuracy and range that offered was going to be a problem.
Their crashed hovertruck stopped being cover when the orange suits reached it. At that point there would be nothing but air between their blaster muzzles and the companions’ backs. Ryan knew that the orange suits could take braced shooting positions against the frame, isolate their targets with bracketing fire and zero in for the kill.
He couldn’t let that happen. Shouldering the submachine blasters on their slings, he reached into the hold and grabbed an RPG. Then he took off after Jak and the others, slipping and sliding on the ice until he found his stride.
If he could have, Ryan would have waited until the orange suits were lined up alongside the wreck to touch off the RPG, but that was too much of a risk. He was out in the open. If they picked him off before he fired the rocket, the companions, yellow and black forms running against the white background, would be easy targets.
Ryan sprinted for another fifty yards, turned, knelt, then shouldered the RPG and fired.
This target had no pilot. It was a dead duck.
The downed ship blossomed in a ball of flame. A secondary, much larger explosion of the contents tore the superstructure to confetti. As a mass of smoke rose into the sky, debris rained down over a wide area. There was nothing left of the aircraft but the remains of the turbo housings.
Ryan dropped the launcher, grabbed the submachine blasters by their pistol grips and ran as hard as he could. Ahead of him the companions had almost reached the edge of the bare rock where the ice sheet ended and the shoreline began. Bullets started whining past his head, digging up puffs of ice in front of him. Legs pumping, adrenaline flowing, Ryan wasn’t cold anymore. He ran as hard as he could, zigzagging a couple of feet either way at random intervals, trying to cut an erratic course the shooters couldn’t anticipate.
The RPG blast had either made them jumpy, or his zigzags put off their aim. Bullets zipped around him, but none came close. When he made it to the rocks and took cover with the others, he looked back, expecting to see pursuit closing in. But the orange suits had given up the chase and were returning to their ship, which had landed near them on the ice.
“We better find some hard cover, and quick,” the one-eyed man said when he’d joined his companions.
Single file, they scrambled over the rocky shoreline and headed toward the ghost town of McMurdo Station. From altitude it had been easier to make out landmarks buried under the snow: ancient roads, storage yards, airplanes, vehicles. At ground level it all looked the same. Power poles stuck up out of the white, lines drooping or broken. The tops of buildings were visible. Some of the vehicles were visible, too, peeking out from under deep drifts of trapped snow. A century of Antarctic weather had turned everything to rubbish. Everything was rusted, decayed or rotted. Many of the roofs had caved in.
As they trudged up the slope, it was obvious no one had set foot there since the last snowfall. Not even a bird.
“They’ll follow tracks in snow,” Jak said.
“Why would they come after us?” Krysty asked. “Why wouldn’t they just leave us here to die of exposure? Gaia knows, it wouldn’t take long.”
“All they have to do is fly off,” Mildred said.
“Perhaps someone wants our blood for a milkshake?” Doc said.
“Gee, I wonder why,” J.B. said.
“We can bring down the aircraft with this,” Ricky said, patting the nose of the RPG over his shoulder.
“That’s the last thing we want to do,” Ryan told him. “That hovertruck is our only way out of here.”
He turned to Mildred and said, “What’s on the other side of those oil tanks?” They sat at the highest point of the slope above them, nestled at the edge of the valley between the two peaks.
“More Ross Sea, frozen solid,” she said. “I know it’s hard to visualize, but we’re standing on an island.”
“We’ve got to draw the pilot out, make him join the fight,” J.B. said. “That way we take the aircraft out of the equation.”
“Or get in the hovertruck and take him out,” Krysty stated.
“We’re not going to last long in this cold,” Mildred said. “Jak’s lips are already blue. I’ve lost feeling in my feet.”
“We keep moving,” Ryan said, “until we find a place where we can isolate and ambush them with concentrated fire.”
“And if that does not work?” Doc said.
From behin
d them, in the distance, they could hear the building whine of the hovertruck as it began to lift off.
Time was running out.
“That way,” Ryan said. “Triple-time. We have to get out of sight.”
Facing them were the drift-covered ends of four, side by side, three-story buildings. Heads down, legs driving, Jak and Ricky slogged through the knee-deep snow, cutting a path for the others to follow.
When they reached the nearest building, the companions tore at the packed drift with their bare hands to expose the door.
In the same instant they heard the hovertruck above them, bullets zinging down and smacking into the front of the building above their heads. Ryan reared back and booted the door open.
He held back for a second, letting the others jump for cover before he dived into the darkness behind them.
Mildred’s face popped into view, underlit by the flashlight she held. Ryan dug into his pocket for the light he had taken from Echo. A quick play of the two beams told them everything inside was frozen solid. The floor of the interior hall was a sheet of ice.
“I think these were apartments for the research workers,” Mildred said, looking through an open door.
“The orange suits will land their hovertruck behind us and drop off most of the shooters,” Ryan said. “The aircraft will takeoff again and circle, keeping us penned in here with blasterfire from the cargo door while the others go room to room. We’ve got to find a way out while we still can.”
“There’s light coming through in here,” Krysty said, waving them toward an open doorway farther down.
The apartment wasn’t much, just three cramped rooms. A frost-covered laptop was open on the tiny kitchen table, its screen fractured. There was no sign of the scientists who had worked at the station.
Jak broke the glass from a window on the outside wall. It was in the lee of the prevailing wind and protected by the flank of the building opposite. The snowdrift hadn’t covered it.