'Go, go, go!' Lewis shouted to the others. 'Get as far away as you can!'
Someone screamed. They were running.
Then a reflected flash as the flare gun went off, releasing red light like a glimpse of hell. With a gassy roar, the fuel arch blew up.
The shock wave of the blast kicked Abby and Lewis the last few feet up the ramp and knocked the scattering group as flat as a strike of bowling pins. The violence hit an instant before the sound did, and then for another instant everything at the Pole was noise. The pulse of superheated air that was now beyond the flattened winter- overs kicked up a wall of loose snow that expanded outward across the station like the penumbra of a star, an expanding blizzard, rushing a half mile in all directions before puffing out.
The snow over the fuel arch erupted like napalm, its wall of flame shooting skyward in an upside down curtain. BioMed disintegrated instantly, its fragments spewing into the entryway. The opposite wall guarding the generators blew inward into kindling and a gout of flame and plasma gases seared into the generator room like the exhaust of a rocket, melting the electrical connections and setting the gym ablaze. In an instant, power to the dome was snuffed out.
Fire leaped over the crude dike and flashed through the dome itself, the gases igniting and the resulting energy punching vents in the dome as if it were made of foil. Smoke and heat shot up through the ventilation hole at the top of the structure in a volcanic plume, spattering the complex with a rain of debris. Thousands of icicles broke off and rained down on the arena below like breaking glass, a maniacal tinkle against the thunder.
The fireball knocked the habitation modules askew from their foundations. Pipes were torn off, electrical cables snipped, and each metal box was seared with flame, roasting from orange to black in seconds. Crates flared into torches, banked ice cream flashed into steam. For a minute, the entire dome was an inferno.
Yet the explosion was a mere spark in a universe of implacable cold. Antarctica, for a brief moment punched aside, imploded back inward once the shock wave passed. The ice was determined to reclaim its dominance. Snow turned to steam and slush. The most volatile gases had vaporized and what was left began to burn more sluggishly as the heat consumed itself by turning a tinder-dry environment into a melting one. The blast had created a stinking lake. Fuel leaked down into the ice cap and spread into the surrounding snow. Flames roared, smoked, melted, and sputtered out. The ruptured tanks burned fiercely, sending a column of smoke boiling a mile high into the sky, but the blaze retreated to its heart almost as swiftly as it had expanded. With it went the stored energy that was to have kept them alive for the rest of the winter. There'd been a flash of oily violence, and now a grim guttering.
Their lifeblood had been consumed.
Shakily, the survivors stood. Miraculously, none had been seriously hurt and none had caught on fire. The searing heat was already a dim memory, replaced once more by relentless cold. They shivered.
Their spaceship had been destroyed.
Wordlessly, Geller handed over to Lewis some papers he'd snatched from Norse's dying hand.
There was some kind of scribbled account of a mountain climb, Lewis saw as he leafed through them. And a cover sheet with a scrawled message:
Thus Samson killed many more when he died than when he lived.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The dying fire lit their way as the tiny tribe trudged wearily back toward the Spryte. They were silent in their weariness, Skinner using the shoulder of an exhausted Hiro to guide him back across the snow. So many had been lost! More than a third of them. The rest alive, staggering like blackened zombies, exhausted, shivering. Left to what kind of fate?
When they got to the snow tractor Geller climbed up on it and caught the corpse of Norse by the boot, dragging him off the cab roof without ceremony. His blood was frozen so there was no trail. His limbs were already stiff. He toppled like Raggedy Ann into the snow, and man and mannequin lay together.
'I'd leave the sonofabitch for the buzzards but there ain't buzzards down here,' the maintenance man said bitterly.
'It's just his shell,' Lena whispered. 'The demon is gone.'
Lewis stooped to look at the tractor treads. Gears were bent, a sprocket broken. The track had snapped. Still, the basics were there. 'Can we fix it?'
The support personnel clustered around. 'Maybe,' Calhoun said. He glanced back toward the burning dome. 'Maybe the garage escaped the worst of it. With some tools, if we can get the generator at Bedrock running- '
'What the hell for?' Geller interrupted. 'Why the hell try?'
Calhoun shrugged.
'I mean, can you fix the Spryte to run a thousand miles?' clarified Lewis. 'Towing that sled, and maybe another, with a shelter and some food and tents. Drive to Vostok, like Bob was going to do. Or better yet, drive to the Americans at McMurdo.'
Calhoun looked at the rest of them, emptied by the struggle. 'It's winter, Jed.'
'I know it would be hard.'
'More than hard,' Mendoza spoke up wearily. 'Some of us are banged up pretty good. Clyde's blind. Abby's half dead. We'd have to melt drinking water, ride out storms. Winds can hit two hundred miles per hour on the Beardmore glacier. Windchill is, what, two hundred and fifty below? We'd be dependent on a single engine.'
'I know it would be risky.'
'But six or eight of us in the cab, in shifts,' Dana said, coming to life at the thought of escape. 'The rest towed in a covered sled. Better than Scott had.'
'Scott died, and that was summer.'
'Better than Amundsen had, then. He lived.'
Several of the others were nodding at Dana. Escape!
'Yes, but not McMurdo across the mountains. Vostok,' Molotov said.
'Suicide,' countered Hiro. 'We would have no chance.'
Lewis looked at the huddled group. They were as haggard as war refugees, spent, fearful. It was calm now, but the next storm would be along soon enough. Yet the emergency Hypertats appeared to be intact, and with them the generator. That meant heat, and some food. Norse was dead. The immediate emergency had passed. They had time to repair the Spryte. Time to try to rig a radio and computer from the outer buildings. Time to make a less exhausted decision.
'We can't agree now,' he said. 'We can't think straight now. There's no need to decide now. The first thing to do is get warm.'
'What are you saying?'
'That we need to get back to Bedrock.'
They staggered toward the emergency camp, arm in arm, body leaning on body. Skinner kept his hand on Hiro's shoulder, stumbling after him. Lewis half carried the woozy and nauseous Abby and kept thinking covetously about the wounded Spryte. It hurt to even walk away from it. Maybe they could rig a radio to let everyone know what had happened and to alert potential rescuers of their plan to attempt escape. Maybe the rescuers could arrange some airdrops along the route. It would be wildly desperate, but it was a chance to go home.
Home. It was hard for Lewis to remember what it looked like. Smelled like. The scent of earth, grass, flowers. He ached for it, could hardly remember it. Home! He imagined being in such a place with Abby, not the stricken woman he was dragging but the bright, funny, optimistic woman he'd first met.
What would that be like?
Yet just the quarter mile to Bedrock was endless. Every step was leaden, every footstep sidelighted by the oily flames still burning in the arch. The majority stumbled into the huts while Molotov and Mendoza called on the last of their reserves to help Lewis start the generator again. It was easier this time, having been run by Lewis not that long before, and the generator's cough and rumble was like the restart of a ruptured heart. Their own blood surged at the sound of it. Heat and light were the gift of life.
Then they went inside.
