“Sons of bitches!” Tanner yelled.
Plath worked her hand into the webbing and held on as the plane rolled, rolled, and she hung suspended in midair while baggage and vomit flew everywhere and grown men screamed.
Wilkes was yelling something that Plath couldn’t hear. “What?” she yelled.
“I said: I can’t say it’s been fun, Plath, but it was good knowing you!” Wilkes made a little mock-salute.
Plath reached her free arm across and took Wilkes’s hand. Plath was not afraid to die, in some ways it spelled relief. But she was furious at the idea that Lear would win. “I’m not dying until I’ve killed that bitch!” she yelled to Wilkes, who smiled wryly and squeezed her hand.
Then, with a series of bone-shaking jerks, the plane slowly, slowly leveled off, but all the while it drifted lower.
The pilot, voice wracked with pain and fear, yelled, “Hard landing! Hard landing! Brace! Brace!”
The impact rattled Plath’s spine and chipped one of her teeth as her mouth slammed shut. The webbing seat held her, but Anya was knocked from her seat and fell to the metal floor of the plane. A metallic shriek went on and on and on.
And that’s when a spinning propeller—almost twenty feet from tip to tip—exploded through the flimsy fuselage, tearing Anya Violet and two of Tanner’s men apart.
The plane skidded to a stop.
A giant gash made by the prop had nearly split the plane in two. Jagged metal edges were everywhere, blood and pale viscera was sprayed around the fuselage like some demented Jackson Pollock painting. A man with his leg gone at midthigh bellowed like a dying bull and tried futilely to cover the pulsing wound with his hands.
Smoke rolled back through the cargo bay, whipped away by a brutally cold wind coming through the gash.
Vincent stared at the place where Anya had been. He picked up something white and red, some unrecognizable part of her, and held it cradled on his lap.
Tanner was among the first to recover. “Get ready! They may send someone to finish us off!” He drew his pistol. It looked small and irrelevant in his hand. Dazed men responded, drawing their few weapons. One was trying to draw a gun with a hand that was no longer there. Another man gently eased him into the webbing and took the gun from him.
“You okay?” Plath asked Wilkes, and got a shaky nod in return. “Vincent?”
Vincent stared at her as if he’d never seen her before, maybe wasn’t seeing her now. His shallow breathing formed a small cloud of steam.
“Anyone who can, follow me!” Tanner said. He wound his way through tangled metal to leap from the gash. Half a dozen men followed. Plath and Wilkes went to Vincent. “Come on, Vincent. Stay alive now, grieve later.”
He flashed a look of pure, unadulterated fury that Plath at first thought was directed at her.
“Come on, Vincent. We have to get off this pl—”
A machine gun, sounding like a chainsaw, opened up. A line of holes appeared at the tail end of the cargo bay and walked its way forward. Metal was flying everywhere. The air stank of cordite, steel, blood, and human waste.
Plath grabbed Vincent by the jacket and yanked him to his feet as Wilkes undid his safety harness. Vincent let the gruesome body part drop, hesitated as if he might go back for it, and then Plath shoved him out onto the ice and jumped after him.
Wilkes landed on Plath, rolled off, and slithered on her belly. Plath glanced back and saw a Sno-Cat with a machine gun mounted on its roof, still firing from the far side of the wreck.
Then, with a woosh of searing heat, the starboard-side fuel tanks exploded, billowing out over the Sno-Cat. The man firing the machine gun was aflame, twisting, writhing, trapped somehow, and the machine gun stopped.
They were three hundred feet from the nearest building, which was one of the four gun emplacements.
“Run run run!” Tanner yelled, and led the way, slipping and staggering across the ice with the wind blessedly at his back. Plath saw immediately what he was doing. The gun tower was opening, shutters rising mechanically, revealing a long black muzzle. Tanner was trying to close the distance and get below the place where the gun could be depressed to target them.
It took twenty seconds for the shutters to open fully. Another ten seconds for the gunners to ready their weapon, and at that moment the gamble had failed. The gaggle of freezing survivors were in pointblank range.
The machine gun fired. Two rounds, killing one man instantly and hitting another in the thigh.
And then, the gun jammed.
Training took over for the ex-soldiers. They quickly closed the distance to the tower’s base and began kicking at the door. One fired at the lock. The door opened and small-arms fire—a pop! pop! pop! sound—came from within.
Tanner, yelling obscenities, picked up a fallen body and threw it through the doorway to draw fire. He was in through the door in a flash. More gunfire as those with weapons rushed the doorway after him.
Silence descended. Tanner and his men had taken the tower.
“Come on,” Plath said to Vincent and Wilkes, “we’ll freeze out here!”
A second Sno-Cat was barreling toward them from the center of the compound, trailing a cloud of ice particles and steam.
The top third of the tower now rotated, bringing the machine gun to bear on the Sno-Cat, which made the fatal mistake of hesitating, slowing, and then blew apart as Tanner poured fire into it.
Plath, Wilkes, and Vincent found themselves in a bare room at the bottom of a steel spiral staircase leading up. “Wilkes, stay with Vincent.”
Plath ran up the stairs to find Tanner still cursing, but also bleeding into his parka, a growing stain.
“Goddammit, goddammit, they shot me,” he said as he tore off his jacket, then burrowed through layers of warmth to find a hole in his left side.
A soldier squatted to take a look. He grinned up at Tanner. “Through and through, Captain. You’ll live if you don’t bleed out.”
“Slap on a compress, Sergeant O’Dell.”
Tanner looked at Plath. “You look okay for your first firefight.”
“Not my first,” Plath said. “Not even my second. It’s been a hell of a week.” She peered out of the shooting hole as the machine gun traversed left and right. Nothing moved. The plane and the two Sno-cats burned.
“All those buildings—shuttered. Bulletproof, most likely.” O’Dell, the ex-soldier who had tended Tanner’s wound.
“Jesus H.,” Tanner said. “It’s a fortress. See what we have here. Inventory weapons and do a head count.”
The bad news was that there were just six battle-ready men, plus Tanner, Plath, Vincent, and Wilkes.
The good news was delivered by O’Dell. “We have all the small arms we could want, plenty of ammo, and a dozen of these.” The “these” in question were shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.
“I’m not familiar with those. Russian?”
“Chinese,” O’Dell said. “And to answer your next question, yes, they can be fused for impact.”
“Okay,” Tanner said. “That is not a professional outfit out there; otherwise, they wouldn’t have driven that Sno-Cat into range and then conveniently stopped. Amateurs with maybe a couple of veterans. Short-handed and poorly led, or we’d already be dead. Let’s not give them time to figure anything out. Sergeant, blow some holes in that first building. Ground level if you can. We need a door.”
The battle lasted two hours, by which time two more men had been killed. Plath and her friends had been given the job of ferrying wounded from the plane into the first tower while Tanner led the assault on the second.
When it was all over, they counted seven bodies of former Cathexis employees.
“A skeleton force,” Tanner said. “So this was just a warm-up.”
They had assembled in the dining hall and Wilkes had helpfully brewed a pot of coffee and popped open bags of chocolate chip cookies.
They were eight now, along with three wounded survivors from the plane wrap
ped in blankets and lying bandaged on empty steel tables. O’Dell and one other had taken a remaining Sno-Cat to what looked like a hangar that lay well outside of the main base.
“Whoever was here pulled out,” Tanner said. “This place was not built for the dozen men left behind.”
Vincent stood up and walked away.
“He’ll be okay,” Plath said, not believing it.
“He’s been through a lot,” Tanner said generously.
“You have no idea,” Wilkes muttered as she poured mugs of coffee.
“We don’t know if anyone got off a message to whoever, wherever … but let me just say that any skepticism about you, Ms. McLure, is officially dead and buried. We have to find wherever they went, chase them down, and stop this.”
“All we’ve got is a Sno-Cat,” a man observed. “Holds four passengers.”
Vincent came back and without pre-amble said, “They left their computers on. There’s another base. Farther south. A couple hundred miles.”
Someone whistled low, and slow, and said, “That’s a hell of a long ride in a Cat.”
Then O’Dell returned. He had two prisoners, held at gunpoint. “Meet Mademoiselle Bonnard and Mr. Babbington.”
“Dr. Babbington, actually.”
O’Dell smacked his rifle butt into the man’s spine.
“They didn’t even know what was going on. They’re out at the hangar out there, working on … well, you’ll want to see this, Tanner.”
“Is it a hovercraft with a jet engine and missiles?” Tanner asked wearily.
O’Dell threw up his free hand in exasperation. “You are no fun to surprise, Captain.”
“We were just completing the assembly,” the Frenchwoman said. “We are not dangerous. You have no need to point guns. We are engineers, just working for the company. Let us go free.”
“Uh-huh,” Tanner said. “Well, ma’am, you, too, Doctor, you now work for the U.S. Navy. You will complete your work, and if you manage to do it inside of two hours, I will not strip you both down to your underwear and send you out onto the ice.”
“The sleighs are coming in,” Stillers reported. He was casting questioning glances at Bug Man, wondering no doubt why his face was swollen, why his teeth were missing, and why he was wearing a bathrobe and flicking between YouTube and Twitter on the big TV monitor in Lystra Reid’s living room.
“Yeah,” Lear said distractedly.
“That will be the last of it,” Stillers said.
“It’s all coming down, Stillers. Um … Tell everyone good job, yeah? Yeah. Tell them all I said well done.”
He nodded. “Did you want to, maybe, come over to the dining hall and speak to them?”
Lear considered the idea, shook her head almost shyly, and said, “No, I have to watch.” She waved a hand toward a shaky YouTube of one of the endless array of riots in one of the endless number of burning cities. “Panic, you know. That’s what gets them killed. It’s like medieval, yeah? Plague. Or cholera.”
She was no longer talking to Stillers, who sensed that fact and stood there stoic and awkward.
“That’s the whole point. Madness leading to panic. If they just didn’t panic, yeah, they’d be okay. Yeah? If they just didn’t panic. But I knew they would.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Mmm. You can go, Stillers.”
Stillers seemed relieved. Bug Man was not. It was better to have at least one extra person in the room in case Lear lost it again.
She flopped beside him on the couch. They had been watching together for the last few hours. Eating and watching in a bizarre parody of a girls’ night at the movies. Bug Man had been half afraid she’d decide to paint his nails or talk about her love life.
“I’m glad you decided to join me, Buggy. Good old Buggy. You get it, yeah. You’ve been down there, down in the meat. You’ve been part of the game for a long time.”
Bug Man did not remember choosing to be here. He remembered being blackmailed and threatened, made a party to yet another crime. If anyone ever lived to tell this story in some history book, he would be labeled as the guy who killed a president and almost killed a pope. Which was unfair. He was, at most, an accessory.
An accessory to the end of the world.
“Get us a drink, Buggy. You know, I wanted to get Sadie here, too. I thought she would be fun to have around, yeah. For a little girl-time, you know? We could talk girl stuff, yeah, that I can’t talk about with you.”
He poured them each a bourbon. She had said they had enough for two years, at least. He hoped that was true, because he felt he was going to need to drink an awful lot.
I’m turning into Burnofsky, he thought. Old degenerate trying to drink away his sins. That’s me now, but not old. So I can live with this for a long time. If she doesn’t kill me.
“What is that? Is that a cross? Oh, that is awesome. They’re nailing that woman to a cross!”
Bug Man was sick so far down into his soul that he wished he could shut down his brain, go into some kind of coma—wake up later, maybe a lot later. He waited for the shaky video to end then navigated to the next clip.
“So Sadie, that didn’t work out. But I’ve got you, Buggy. And it’s all working,” she said. “All working. Except for the self-replicating nanobots. Yeah. The goo.”
“I haven’t seen anything like what you’re looking for,” Bug Man ventured. “Just crazies, no buildings eaten up or whatever.”
“Mmm. Yeah.” Lear was pensive. “Probably all burned up when the Tulip came down. Burned up with the Twins. Wish I’d been able to stay to see even more of that, yeah. Yeah. Burning Armstrongs, that would have been excellent.” She shrugged and sighed, disappointed. “But all it takes is one of those SRNs to survive. Just one.” She bit a fingernail and added a superfluous, “Yeah.”
“I’m sure—”
“Shut up!” Lear snapped. “You’re not sure. I’m not sure, so you’re not sure.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Gotta exterminate them, somehow. They’ll just … just keep on. Gotta be a way to stop them.”
“Race to the end of the world,” Bug Man said, his tongue loosened by the whiskey. “Choose your apocalypse.”
“I can’t let them beat me, the Twins. Burnofsky.”
An idea occurred to Bug Man. If he spoke it, he would never be able to unsay it. If she liked the idea, she would be happy with him. If not …
“I have an idea,” he said.
“Speak it, Buggy.”
“You have people’s biots. You can send them a message. To the right people. I mean, you have all that cross-referenced, right? I mean, you would know which people were in the Pentagon, or maybe in Russia, wherever.”
She was looking at him with the intensity of a cobra looking at a mouse. “Spit it out of that mush mouth, Bug Man.”
“Okay, say you have some general, or whatever. You fire up his biots, right? He knows now what’s coming. He knows he’s screwed. But biots can see, right? They could see, you know, if you showed them a sign. Held up a sign in front of them.”
She stared at him for a full minute, during which Bug Man wondered if he would have the strength even to resist if she decided to kill him. Did he even want to live?
Then she reached out one hand, pinched his swollen cheek, and said, “Buggy, you are a genius.”
THIRTY-ONE
Plath was in the second seat of the sleigh. Tanner was driving. O’Dell was in the other sleigh, being driven by Babbington, who had been convinced to help when O’Dell shot two of his toes off and promised to keep going if he didn’t.
Three more men plus Vincent and Wilkes were crammed into the Sno-Cat, trailing many miles behind.
“I still don’t see a damned thing, and we’re supposedly right on top of it,” Tanner said. Then, “Ahhh! Shit! O’Dell, stop, stop, stop!” he yelled through his radio.
He killed the engine and fumbled for the brakes that slammed steel claws down into the ice. The sleigh went from a
moderate seventy miles an hour—neither Tanner nor Babbington felt confident going any faster—to zero in five seconds. Even so, the front two feet of the sleigh were over the lip of a sharp drop-off.
“This thing have a reverse gear?” Tanner wondered. If there was, he never found it. “Okay, we get out and push it sideways.”
Tanner and Plath climbed out onto the ice. Only then did they see the brightly lit compound nestled in the dry valley below.
“Under my nose,” Tanner muttered. “They built this right under my nose.”
“Antarctica is a big place,” Plath soothed. “And Lear has a lot of money.”
“Is that another swimming pool?”
O’Dell and Babbington joined them and helped manhandle the sleigh back from the lip of the cliff. Under low power, just enough to raise the weight of the sleigh from the ice, it wasn’t too hard.
“There’s ramp over there,” O’Dell said. “But we could just sit up here and fire down into the base. Twelve missiles, fair amount of thirty-mil cannon …” He shrugged.
“No,” Plath said. “We need to know whether this base is the place she’s using to control events, or just a place to hide while the work is done elsewhere.”
Tanner nodded. “Look at that slag heap over there. That’s way more than you’d get from just leveling. They’ve dug some holes.”
“Yeah, well, that base looks like it will sustain a hundred men,” O’Dell argued. “I’m not seeing the gun emplacements we saw back at Forward Green. Still, we could get a very hot greeting. These sleighs aren’t armored worth a damn.”
Babbington took offense at that. “We needed to keep weight down, obviously. The engine is armored.”
“Yeah? How about the cockpit?” O’Dell asked. “Yeah, I thought so.”
“The house,” Plath said.
“Yep,” Tanner said. “That’s the big-boss house right there. If we catch them by surprise, decapitate them—
“That chopper down there has missile launchers and a cannon,” O’Dell pointed out.
Plath said, “Look, for whatever reason, Lear hasn’t killed me yet. She could have. She wanted me back in the game. She insisted I play an active role. I think … I think she doesn’t want me dead.”