Ice Station ss-1

by Matthew Reilly

  For a full second Schofield could do nothing but stare. It had happened so fast. It was as if somebody had laid down a trail of gasoline on the B-deck catwalk and then lit a match.

  Then it clicked and Schofield immediately spun around to face?

  ?the air-conditioning room.

  And in that instant, it all suddenly made sense.

  The air-conditioning cylinders had no doubt been substantially damaged by the detonation of the rocket grenade minutes earlier. Thus punctured, they had immediately started spewing out their store of chlorofluorocarbons.

  Highly flammable chlorofluorocarbons.

  That was what had happened when Schofield had seen the two-meter length of fire spew forward from the muzzle of Gant's machine pistol only moments earlier. It had been a warning of things to come. But at that time the CFCs hadn't yet filled the station. Hence the small two-meter flame.

  But now... now the amount of flammable gas in the station's atmosphere had multiplied considerably. So much so mat when the French had opened fire on the Marines on B-deck, the whole deck had gone up in flames.

  Schofield's eyes widened.

  The air-conditioning cylinders were still spewing out CFCs. Soon the whole station would he contaminated with flammable...

  The horror of the realization hit Schofield hard.

  Wilkes Ice Station had become a gas oven.

  All it needed was one spark, one flame?or one gunshot? and the whole station would spontaneously combust.

  Rivets began to pop out of their sockets on B-deck.

  Spot fires burned all over the B-deck catwalk. Agonized screams echoed out across the open space of the ice station as soldiers and civilians alike lay writhing on the catwalk, their bodies alight.

  It looked like a scene from Hell itself.

  The three French soldiers on the western side of the station?the ones who had opened fire on Mother, Rebound, and Legs?had been the first to go up in flames, the gaseous air around them having been ignited by the white-hot tongues of fire that had burst forth from the muzzles of their guns.

  The twin fireballs had immediately shot out from the barrels of their guns. One had surged forward while the other had turned on them and rushed with all its fury back at their faces.

  Now two of those French soldiers lay on the deck, screaming. The third was frantically banging himself against the ice wall nearby in a desperate attempt to put out the flames on his fatigues.

  Mother and Rebound were also on fire. Beside them, Legs was already dead. His motionless body lay flat on the catwalk as it was slowly devoured by crackling orange flames.

  Over by the north tunnel, Buck Riley was trying to smother the flames on Abby Sinclair's pants by rolling her over on the metal catwalk. Beside them, Sarah Hensleigh slapped frantically at a cluster of flames that had ignited on the back of Kirsty's bulky pink parka. Warren Cordon just screamed. His hair was on fire.

  And then, suddenly, there came a sickening sound. The lurching, wrenching sound of bending steel.

  Riley looked up from what he was doing.

  "Oh, no," he moaned.

  Schofield also looked up at the sound.

  He scanned the catwalk above him and saw a series of triangular steel supports that fastened the underside of the B-deck catwalk to the ice wall.

  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, those supports began to slide out from the wall.

  Under the intense heat from the fire on B-deck, the long rivets that fastened the supports to the wall were starting to heat up. They were melting the ice around them and were now starting to slide out from the wall!

  The rivets began to expand?thwack! thwack! thwack!? and in rapid succession began to crack open the ice-cold notches of their steel supports and fall to the catwalk below.

  The rivets clanked loudly as they dropped down onto the C-deck catwalk.

  One.

  Then two. Then three.

  Then five. Then ten.

  There were rivets everywhere, raining down on the C-deck catwalk. And then suddenly a new sound filled Wilkes Ice Station.

  The unmistakable high-pitched squeal of rending metal.

  "Oh, shit," Schofield said. "It's gonna go."

  B-deck went. Suddenly. Without warning.

  The entire catwalk?the whole, flaming circle?just fell away, dropping with a sudden jolt, taking everybody who was still on it down with it.

  Some sections of the catwalk managed to stay attached to the ice walls. Their fall ended abruptly, almost as soon as it had begun. They ended up pointing downward at a forty-five-degree angle.

  The remaining sections just slid out from the ice walls and dropped down into the central shaft of the station.

  Nearly everyone who had been standing on B-deck dropped with the collapsed sections of catwalk?eleven people in all.

  A tangled mix of civilians, soldiers, and three broken sections of metal catwalk sailed down the central shaft of Wilkes Ice Station.

  They fell a full fifty feet, and then they landed. Hard. In water. In the pool at the bottom of the station.

  Sarah Hensleigh plunged underwater.

  A stream of bubbles shot up past her face and the world suddenly went silent.

  Cold. Absolute, unforgiving cold assailed all of her senses at once. It was so cold it hurt.

  And then suddenly she heard noises.

  Noises that broke the ghostly underwater silence?a series of muffled whumps in the water all around her. It was the sound of the others falling into the pool with her.

  Slowly, the curtain of bubbles in front of her face began to disperse, and Sarah began to make out a number of unusually large shapes moving smoothly through the water around her.

  Large black shapes.

  They appeared to glide effortlessly through the silent, freezing water?each one frightening in its size, as large and as wide as a car. At that moment, a wash of white cut across Sarah's field of vision and suddenly an enormous mouth, full of razor-sharp teeth, opened wide in front of her eyes.

  Pure fear shot through her body.

  Killer whales.

  Suddenly Sarah broke the surface. Gulped in air. The cold of the water meant nothing now. One after the other huge black dorsal fins began to rise above the choppy surface of the pool.

  Before Sarah could even get a bearing on exactly where in the pool she was, something burst up out of the water next to her and she spun.

  It wasn't a killer whale.

  It was Abby.

  Sarah felt her heart start again. A second later, Warren Conlon also came up beside her.

  Sarah spun around in the water. All five of the French soldiers who had been on B-deck when it blew were scattered around the pool. Three Marines were also in the pool. One of them, Sarah noticed, was floating facedown in the water.

  A scream echoed down through the central shaft of the station.

  A shrill, high-pitched squeal.

  The scream of a little girl.

  Sarah's head snapped to look upward. There, high above her, hanging by one hand from the downturned railing of the B-deck catwalk, was Kirsty. The Marine who had been with them when the catwalk had collapsed was lying facedown on the broken metal platform, reaching down desperately, trying to grab Kirsty's hand.

  Just then, as she was looking up at Kirsty, Sarah felt the immense weight of one of the killers rush through the water between her and Conlon. The massive animal brushed against the side of her leg.

  And then suddenly Sarah heard a shout.

  It had come from the other side of the pool, and Sarah spun around just in time to see one of the French commandos?his face blistered and scorched from the fireball? swimming frantically for the edge of the pool, his terrified, panicked whimpers interrupted only by short, desperate breaths.

  It was the only movement in the whole pool. Nobody else had even dared to move.

  Almost immediately, a towering black dorsal fin appeared alongside the desperate swimmer. After a second, it slowed, and then it ominously sank
below the surface behind him.

  The result was as violent as it was sudden.

  With a hideous crack, the French commando's body suddenly snapped backwards in the water. He turned in the water and opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out. His eyes just went wide. He must have seen that the whale had crushed the whole of his lower body with its bite and was now holding him firmly within its mighty jaws.

  The whale's second yank was even more powerful than the first. It pulled the Frenchman under with such force that the man's head jolted backward and slapped down hard against the water as he went under and disappeared forever.

  Sarah Hensleigh gasped. "Oh, Jesus...."

  Buck Riley's section of catwalk was still attached to the ice wall. Just. It hung downward at a steep angle, out over the central shaft.

  The three scientists?Riley didn't know their names?had all been too slow. The sudden collapse of the catwalk had caught all three of them by surprise. Too slow to get a handhold, they had all fallen down into the shaft.

  Riley's reflexes had been quicker. When the catwalk had fallen away beneath him, he had hit the deck and immediately garnered a fingerhold in the grating of the catwalk itself.

  The little girl had also been fast.

  As soon as the floor had dropped away beneath her, she had fallen to the catwalk and immediately started to slide toward the edge.

  Her feet had gone over the edge first, followed quickly by her waist and then her chest. Just as her head fell clear of the railing, she threw out a desperate hand and miraculously caught hold of the hand railing.

  The railing held for a second, but, weakened by the force of the gas explosion, it suddenly buckled and snapped and swung out over the edge of the catwalk, so that it now hung upside down out over the shaft.

  And so the little girl hung there, one-handed and screaming, from the upside-down railing of the catwalk, fifty feet above the killer-whale-infested pool.

  "Don't look down!" Riley yelled, as he reached for her hand. He had already seen the killer whales down in the pool, had just seen one of them take the French commando. He didn't want the little girl seeing them.

  The little girl was crying, sobbing, "Don't let me fall!"

  "I won't let you fall," Riley said as he lay on his stomach stretched out as far as he could, trying to grab her wrist. Small, isolated spot fires burned on the remnants of the catwalk all around him.

  His hand was about a foot away from the girl's when he saw her frightened eyes begin to dart around.

  "What's your name?" Riley said suddenly, trying to distract her.

  ""My hand is hot," she whimpered.

  Riley looked back along the railing. About five yards to his left, a small spot fire licked at the point where the downed railing met the catwalk.

  "1 know it's hot, honey. I know it is. Just keep holding on. What did you say your name was?"

  'Kirsty."

  "Hi, Kirsty. My name's Buck, but you can just call me Book like everybody else does."

  "Why do they call you that?"

  Riley cast a sideways glance at the spot fire licking against the railing.

  Not good.

  Under the intense heat of the explosion, the black paint on the railing had broken out into dry, paperlike flakes. If the fire came into contact with those flakes, the whole railing would go up in flames.

  Riley kept reaching out for Kirsty's hand, stretched harder. Half a foot away. He almost had her.

  "Do you always"?Riley breathed a weak half-laugh? "ask this many questions?" He grimaced as he stretched. "If you"?breath?"really wanna know"?breath?"it's because, once"?breath?"one of my friends found out I was writing a book."

  "Uh-huh...." Kirsty's eyes began to wander again.

  "Kirsty. Now listen to me, honey. I want you keep your eyes looking right at me now, OK. Right at me."

  "OK," she said.

  Then she looked down.

  Riley swore.

  Rebound had been less than three yards away from the French commando when he had been taken under. The sheer violence of the Frenchman's death had scared the living shit out of him.

  Now, the whole pool was silent.

  Rebound hovered in the pool, looking desperately about himself. The water was cold and the bullet wound in his shoulder stung, but he barely even noticed them now.

  Mother was treading water next to him, her face watchful. Waiting, with tense anticipation. Legs's body floated facedown in the water next to her, a halo of blood slowly fanning out from its head, seeping into the clear, blue water around it.

  The four remaining French commandos were also still in the pool. They completely ignored Rebound and Mother, their battle forgotten, at least for the moment.

  Last of all, Rebound saw the scientists?two women and one man.

  Ten people in all were in the pool, and not one of them moved.

  Not one of them dared to move.

  They had all had seen the French commando go under moments before.

  The lesson: if you don't move, they might not take you.

  Rebound held his breath as three massive shadows glided slowly through the water beneath him.

  He heard a sudden click and turned to see Mother holding her MP-5 poised above the surface.

  Jesus, Rebound thought. If there was anyone in the world who had the balls to take down a killer whale with a gun, it had to be Mother.

  More silence.

  Don't move....

  And then suddenly there came an incredible roar as one of the whales exploded out from beneath the surface, right next to Mother.

  It lifted half of its enormous body out of the water, turned onto its side in mid-air, and then plowed into Legs's motionless body. There was a series of sickening crunches as it caught the dead body in its mouth and clamped down hard with its teeth, breaking nearly every bone in it. And then the whale's head went under and its tail appeared, and then the tail disappeared and only frothing water remained.

  And Legs's body was gone.

  Rebound just stayed where he was, hovering in the water, his mouth agape. And then, slowly, it dawned on him.

  Legs hadn't been moving.

  An unspoken understanding instantly spread throughout the nine remaining people in the pool.

  The killers didn't care whether they were moving or not. ...

  The nine people in the pool moved as one, breaking out into frantic swimming strokes as the killer whales rose to the surface beneath them and commenced their feeding frenzy.

  Up on what was left of B-deck, Book Riley swore again.

  When Kirsty had seen the pool, seen the enormous black-and-white shapes in it, her lower jaw had started to quiver. Then, when she saw the first killer leap up out of the water and crunch through Legs's dead body, she started to hyperventilate.

  "OhmyGod, ohmyGod," she sobbed.

  Riley began to hurry. He quickly lowered his upper body out over the edge of the down-turned catwalk, so that he was now practically hanging upside-down, reaching for Kirsty with his free right hand.

  Their hands were now only two inches apart.

  He almost had her.

  And then all of a sudden he heard a soft whooshing sound from somewhere to his left.

  Riley's head snapped round.

  "No___"

  The spot fire had ignited the flakes on the railing. The response was instantaneous. A small orange flame began to race along the length of the railing, devouring the dried paint flakes in its path, leaving a tiny trail of fire in its wake.

  Riley's eyes went wide.

  The trail of fire was rocketing along the length of the railing.

  And heading right for Kirsty's hand!

  Kirsty was still looking down at the killer whales in the pool. She swung her head up to look at Riley, and in an instant their eyes met and Riley saw the absolute terror in her eyes.

  Riley stretched down as far as he could, his whole upper body dangling upside down off the downturned catwalk, in a desperate effort
to grab her hand.

  The orange flame raced along the black hand railing, its fire trail lighting up the railing behind it.

  Riley's hand was an inch away from Kirsty's.

  He stretched again and felt the tips of his fingers brush against the top of her hand.

  Another inch. Just another inch...

  "Mr. Book! Don't let me fall!"

  And then suddenly the bright orange line of fire cut across Riley's field of vision and he yelled in frustration.

  "No!"

  The fire trail sped across the railing in front of him, right underneath Kirsty's hand.

  Riley watched in helpless horror as the little girl squealed with pain and then did the only thing her body knew to do when it came into contact with fire.

  She let go.

  Kirsty dropped fast.

  But as she did so, Buck Riley released his grip on the catwalk above him and lunged forward after her. He dropped three feet straight down?one arm pointed down, the other pointed up. His lower hand snatched the wool-lined hood of Kirsty's pink parka while his upper hand caught the flaming railing behind him.

  Both of their bodies jerked to a sudden halt, and Riley did a jarring 180-degree spin that nearly pulled his arm out of its socket. He was now right side up, hanging from the same burning railing that had, only seconds earlier, caused Kirsty to fall.

  And oddly, despite the searing heat seeping through his leather-gloved hand, he managed a relieved smile.

  "I gotcha, baby," he breathed, almost laughing. "I gotcha."

  Kirsty just hung there below him with her arms held out awkwardly on either side of her body, held up only by Riley's grip on the wool-lined hood of her parka.

  All right, Riley said to himself, how the hell are we gonna get out of this?

  There came a sudden popping sound and abruptly Kirsty lurched downward. She only dropped an inch, and for an instant Riley couldn't understand what had happened.

  Then he saw it.

  His eyes zeroed in on the join between Kirsty's pink parka and its pink wool-lined hood.

  Riley's eyes went wide.

  The hood wasn't actually part of the parka.