Puffs of chemical from the extinguishers made the last orange flames snuff out and then their flashlights and headlamps swept the wreckage. Pulaski dropped to the floor, groping for Norse, and touched a body. A wounded man was writhing in agony with his hands over his face, his skin burnt off from an explosion of acid. The cook gripped the man and leaned close, peering through his mask. It was Clyde Skinner, their radioman.
'I'm blinded!'
'What happened, what happened?' Pulaski kept shouting the question through his mask but it was obvious Skinner was in no condition to answer. What breath he could suck in was used to scream.
'Oh my God, I can't see!'
The communications center was destroyed. Its bank of lead batteries had exploded, shattering the equipment and spraying the room with acid. The explosion had caught Skinner full force, dissolving his face. It was almost unlucky he was alive.
Nancy Hodge pushed into the room, took in the wreckage at a glance, and knelt beside Skinner. She looked sickened. 'Where the hell is Bob?'
'We don't know.'
'Well, help me get Skinner to sick bay! We've got to wash him!'
The trio of men lifted the radioman and carried him out to the cold and clear air of the dome. Someone came at them with a bucket to douse Skinner and wash the acid, but Hodge stopped it. 'Not here! It will just freeze on his face!'
'I'm blind! Oh, how it hurts!'
Everyone was looking at him in horror. 'He'll be begging for more morphine than we have,' Nancy said. 'More relief than we can give him. Go on, get him into sick bay!'
Skinner's screams faded like a disappearing train as they carried him off.
'Now I'm really getting pissed,' Pulaski muttered, glowering for a culprit and finding none. Lewis was already locked up. 'Really, really pissed.'
'You can't blame Jed for this one,' Abby told him.
'Really? Let's figure out what happened first.'
'We found Doctor Bob!' someone shouted.
Norse was sitting on the floor of Cameron's old office next to Comms, dazed and coughing in the lingering smoke. He appeared to have been knocked unconscious in the blast. Furniture was awry, papers on the floor like snow. 'I was getting ready to make the call!' he choked. 'What the hell happened?'
'The worst, near as I can tell,' Pulaski told him.
'Clyde said he had to crank up the radios!'
'He cranked them up, all right.'
They lifted the psychologist to his feet, Norse blinking from the concussion of the blast. Losing him would cut them from their last anchor. They led him back into the radio room, where everything stank of burnt plastic and rubber. At a glance it was apparent their normal connection to the outside world had been wiped out. 'I don't understand what happened,' Norse muttered.
'The batteries blew up,' said Charles Longfellow, their electrician.
'Yes, but why?'
'They were probably charging. You told us to pull the plug on this place during the communications blackout and the batteries ran down. Clyde had to bring them up again with the generator. Charging always creates hydrogen and oxygen gases, which is the stuff that blew up the Hindenburg. Normally it vents off okay but a spark or a match…'
'Clyde didn't smoke.'
'No, something else…' Longfellow was leaning over the wrecked radios and computers, looking for a clue. 'There, maybe.'
They looked. Two crossing wires, now blackened and bubbled, had frayed down to metal. 'When Clyde flipped the radios on, the current could have caused a short,' the electrician pointed out. 'If the gases weren't venting, then… bang. But I thought the battery compartment had a vent.'
They went outside. A sheet of plywood had been shot outward by the explosion. Longfellow kicked it. 'This could have been leaning up against the hole,' he said, 'blocking it.'
'Deliberately?' Norse asked.
The electrician just looked at him.
'And the wires. Don't you check them?'
'Twice a year,' Longfellow said. 'At the beginning and end of summer season. They were fine. There's no reason for them to be abraded like that.'
'So what happened?'
He looked at the ruptured building. 'Someone wanted this to happen. The bastard didn't just destroy our radios, he shorted out the linkages to the machines and radios on the rest of the station. This place was a hub. Now we're deaf and dumb.'
'But why?'
'Someone planned this before Clyde ever threw a switch to recharge the batteries. Someone wanted to destroy our communications. Someone doesn't want us talking about Jed Lewis.'
They were panicked now, their vulnerability to accident or sabotage made clear. No one slept for the next twenty-two hours as they fortified their enclosure from a threat they didn't understand. There was no sun anyway, no natural clock, and no place to escape to. Only a suffocating paranoia that seemed to settle on the dome with the weight of the polar night. Pulaski had become transformed by the explosion, a metamorphosis that shed the cook and returned the old soldier. He was Crockett at the Alamo, girding for battle. The garage was ransacked for metal, wood, welding torches, and tools. Brackets were welded in a shower of sparks and beams were placed against the bay doors. Latches were fastened for the smallest doors and fastened with wire, cutters issued to sentries. Their greatest points of vulnerability were the fuel tanks and the generators, and so the fuel arch behind BioMed and the opposite arch leading to Pika Taylor's machines were walled up completely. A frame was built across both half sections of tunnel, and sheets of plywood and metal were nailed across it to prevent any kind of access at all.
'I still know how to get in,' Pika said quietly. 'No one else has to know. No one else has to get to my machines.' He looked from face to face, a slight grin as he regarded them. 'You kill me, you die.'
The work went in shifts, one group hammering and welding while another warmed up in the galley and gulped down coffee to stay awake. No one was sleeping until they were certain Antarctica was walled off: that Buck Tyson or some malevolent ghost wasn't somehow sneaking into the dome to wreak murder and sabotage, revenge and psychic terror. That some traitor in their midst was not plotting a final catastrophe. The rest of the station was to be abandoned for the time being, the Dark Sector and Clean Air left to slumber in the snow. 'We're a turtle,' Pulaski explained. 'We're drawing into our shell.'
The cook insisted that everyone, without exception, be armed. Tyson's old locker was broken into and the knives he'd made were distributed to whoever didn't have one. The recipients regarded them a little dubiously.
'Amundsen-Scott Base,' the blade of one read, the legend bracketed by penguins. There wasn't a penguin within eight hundred miles.
'What if we start going after each other with these things?' Gina protested. Like everyone else, she was so cold and sore she could hardly move. The frenzy of getting the dome sealed was holding off their terror but they were also close to a breaking point. Losing Comms had wrung them out. The damage to their communications would take days to repair, especially with Skinner blinded and Abby morose.
'I am a little concerned about arming people to the teeth,' Norse admitted. He'd deferred to Pulaski's military expertise in locking up the dome but seemed uneasy with the cook's new martial authority. It had eclipsed his own. 'Tempers are short. People are jumpy.'
'And so far no more of us are dead,' Pulaski answered grimly. 'We tried it one way, with all of us wandering around like blind sheep and getting picked off one by one. Now let's try it another way. Strategic deterrence, people. Mutual assured destruction. You take a predator like a mountain lion and they'll back off if you fight back. They don't want to risk injury. They can't risk injury, because if they get hurt they starve. If our murderer is someone other than Lewis, then he or she can't risk injury, either, because they'll be found out. You get jumped, make sure you draw blood. Die if you have to, but scream bloody hell first.'
