once the ride became quiet and smooth, as if we had emerged from a tunnel. There was no light through the viewports. This could only mean one thing: We were outside the bubble and racing across the sea. I could hear distant-sounding concussions, like fireworks.
Saying, 'You must be freezing,' Lowenthal handed me a hot-water bottle and went forward. I took the opportunity to peer out the nearest viewport. Falling away to our rear was the dome, partially caved-in like a rotten pumpkin, and within it the submarine. I prayed for its escape, weeping a little for myself, but so grateful for the boys' sake.
All around us, explosions lit up the winter night-the ice was a battlefield. Giant hovercraft were colliding like bumper cars, and the sky was full of airplanes and tracer bullets. Flaming ice fountains shot to the heavens. Other vehicles charged in formation behind us as if we were part of a convoy, or so I thought, until I noticed they were shooting at us. A volley of rockets slashed through the air overhead. The force of their detonations rattled the tank like a garbage can.
Up front, Lowenthal shouted, 'Goddammit, where are those UCAVs? Does Boyleston know we're out here? Tell him we need air cover!' Facing forward, he pounded the gunner's leg. 'Schneider! Return fire, dammit!' Then he looked back.
What he saw was as astonishing to him as it was to me. Schneider was dead, with my blue hands around his neck. I looked at those hands, then at the plum-colored blood running down my legs-my blood-as if they belonged to someone else.
'Aw shit,' Lowenthal said, as a blinding light shone in the front viewport.
Then the wave hit: The cockpit blew in, and glass and smoke billowed toward me, enveloping everything. I was weightless, the floor underfoot burst upward like the flaps of a cardboard box-it was so sudden there was no fear or pain or surprise-and in the peculiar lull that followed, I and every other loose object in the tank whirled in space, a dirty blitz of crushed ice, hamburger, and hot metal, all ricocheting off each other and flying apart in a perfect illustration of atomic fission. Gravity returned with a wallop as the armored truck landed upside down and plunged into the fractured sea. Gray ice water rushed in, covering the mess and driving out the smoke. We sank to the bottom.
CHAPTER THIRTY
It was taking an awful long time to die. I wasn't in any discomfort, but worried about the grievous pain to come. Death by drowning, twice in one week! But it was different this time. For one thing, I seemed to acclimate quicker to the temperature. The water was cold, yes, but the effect was not so much torturous as vividly sensual… and not really that bad. I was surrounded by a flowing corona of warmth, with tendrils of incoming cold twining around and through me like a time-lapse film of roots growing. The cold had a calming, grounding effect, which I was grateful for.
My eyes idly roamed the flooded interior of the overturned tank. It was like a shaken snowglobe, full of drifting particles. Everything was so totally smashed I was amazed to be in one piece. The gunner, Schneider, was inextricably tangled with the cannon works, having been stuffed up into the turret by the force of the blast. Lowenthal and the other men I couldn't see at all, the whole cockpit area being lost behind peeled-back flooring and machinery.
Soft light filtered down from the gaping hole in the ice. Forcing my creaky joints to bend, I reached out and carefully took hold of a buckled sheet of steel, leery of jagged edges, and eased partway through the opening.
The sea. I was buried in depths of silty green dusk, looking through paler heights to a weblike membrane far above. Streamers of bubbles and lava-lamp blobs of oil rose to that circle of light, but my body felt anything but buoyant-it was stiff and heavy as that of a rusting Tin Man.
In molasses-thick bewilderment, I realized I hadn't caught a breath in… how long? Minutes. Ten minutes at least. Longer than I'd ever held my breath before, that was for sure, and I didn't feel a thing. Come to think of it, I was not actually even holding my breath-my mouth and nose had been open to the sea the whole time, slowly cycling frigid, salty, diesel-tainted water in and out. Was I breathing water? I consciously stopped doing it, but it didn't seem to make any difference.
Hovering there at the bottom of the ocean, half-in and half-out of the tank, I felt a pang of intense loneliness: I was dead, but I lived. I was a Xombie. Duh.
I let myself sink languorously back inside the vehicle, pondering the change, wondering what would happen to me in this cold, cold water. Things were gradually ticking down to some kind of stop: not death, but a cessation of motion in which the glowing ember of my consciousness would remain, dreaming, as the tissues and fluids of my body congealed at the freezing point. This was what I had read about black holes in space, that to be sucked into one was to have time stretched to infinity at the 'event horizon.' That was where I seemed to be-nearing the event horizon, never to escape.
And I was not alone. Someone else had awakened in the confines of the vehicle: the upside-down gunner, Schneider. Unlike me, he was squirming around, his gloved hands slowly clenching and unclenching, releasing trapped puffs of blood from his clothing, his head and torso compressed into the squat bell of the tank's cupola by the upthrust seat platform.
As I looked down in fascination, his limbs stretched out like probing feelers, each seeming to have an inquisitive life of its own. The right hand located a belt tool-an oversized pocketknife in a leather holster-and both hands speedily extended the blade. With quick, violent chops, Schneider used the knife first to cut through the seat harness, then any offending bone or joint that was pinned in place, tailoring himself to squeeze out. I thought of trapped animals gnawing their own limbs off, but Schneider did it completely mechanically, with the cool deliberation of a surgeon.
Even so, the cold was affecting him as well-he was ebbing-and when he finally jerked free it was only to lie writhing in place, black eyes staring, mouth working silently. Looking at him, I felt nothing. He was nothing. Nothingness was the main impression I had of everything, a never-changing infinite void in four dimensions, stretching out before me with no possibility of relief because I, too, was nothing.
Then something long, white, and slender, an enormous skeletal finger, reached in from the blocked cockpit. Tapping along the junk pile, it found an opening and began to emerge, one great finger after another until the entire monstrous hag's hand was visible, larger than my body-a giant spider crab. It moved over Schneider's twisting form, its claws seizing and picking at the ragged edges of his wounds. As it ate, its eye-stalks remained fixed on me, not warily but brazenly. Then a second crab came through to join the feast. Soon the opening was all pointed legs, as crabs crowded the narrow space. I was bait in a crab trap.
Schneider wasn't finished. As the creatures covered him, he pushed against them, fended off their claws, tried to get out from under, but they were strong and blandly determined, clamping tight and digging in. Soon I could barely see him. When there was no more elbow room at the table, the next crab came for me.
It was a challenge to move-I was almost completely inert and could forgive the crabs for mistaking me for a drowned corpse. Propped stiffly in the far corner of the compartment, hair swaying like moss, I was even in the semifetal posture of the dead.
The crab's extraordinarily long, bony pincers, each one a grasping six-foot tong thick as my arm, stretched out and took hold of my hair and left hand. It pinched hard as tinsnips, but I felt no pain. Nor was I numb-my body registered every nuance of the injury, yet it was a clinical, detached analysis. It did not 'hurt.' There is no way to describe it except perhaps to say my body was a country under siege, and I its queen. I felt a certain stewardship, but that was it. The stolid-faced crustacean began pulling me toward its mouth to feed. Others were coming as well.
With glacial speed I began to move. Far more agile than I, the crab anchored its legs and improved its grip-I wasn't going anywhere. Reaching for a place to lodge the deadwood of my right hand, I encountered one of the hot-water bottles and clutched it to me like a toddler with a security blanket. It was still warm, the chemical heating element still circulating. By taking it, I surrendered to the crab, and was drawn head-first to its bristly mandibles.
Taking the bag's drain valve in my teeth, I tore it open and squeezed with all the strength I could still
