Quinn popped the door and stuck his head out of the idling Hagglunds.
“Listen up, people. We’ve got a storm incoming. A big one. If you want to keep it, then you tie it down.”
“Christ, boss! You’re kidding.”
“What’s the matter, Reichel?”
“It’s the Beakers,” he replied. “We’ve got a bunch of them down in that hole. What if the tripod’s blown down?”
Quinn chewed his cigar. “Hell. Then I guess the goddamn Beakers are on their own.”
“But Weyland’s down there, too. So is that limey Stafford. Connors went with them.”
Quinn cursed. “Then you better make good and sure nothing happens to that rig. Get a team together and secure the tripod, pronto. Put an apple tent up around the mouth of the tunnel if you have to, that should hold the tripod in place. And hustle, damn it…. If we lose Weyland, we won’t get paid!”
Rappelling down the icy walls of the shaft, Lex was forced to perform double duty. She supervised the descent, which meant swing-running from her safety line to make sure no ropes got snarled, and making sure every one of the two dozen people making the descent was keeping pace.
Still concerned with Weyland’s physical condition, Lex also checked on him intermittently. From long experience, she knew that no descent was easy—and this one was being made in virtual darkness, in temperatures colder than the inside of a deep freeze. She wasn’t sure Weyland was up to the task, but so far he’d managed to keep pace with the rest of the group.
Using her feet, Lex raced along the sides of the ice tunnel until she reached Weyland’s side. She dangled for a moment, steadying herself. Then she leaned close to the billionaire’s ear. “How’s it going?”
He grinned at her, his face pale in the harsh light of her helmet lamp. Max Stafford deftly rappelled himself to Weyland’s side, along with two burly men with shaved heads and Weyland Industries logos on their ice-blue Polartec outerwear. In Stafford’s hand, an ICOMIC-4 UHF transceiver crackled.
“It’s Quinn. Says there’s a storm headed our way.”
Weyland turned to Lex. “Will it affect us?”
“We’re seven hundred feet under the ice, Mr. Weyland. Quinn could be setting off an atom bomb up there and we’d never notice.”
She slapped Weyland on the back, then descended farther down the shaft to check on Miller’s progress.
“Tough descent?” she asked.
“A cinch for us heroic types.”
“Just keep away from the walls,” she told Miller. “Try to stay in the middle of the shaft. You’re on a winch— let the machine do the work.”
The engineer gave Lex a thumbs-up.
Lex unfastened herself from the winch and attached her harness to one of the safety lines. Then she rappelled down about thirty feet ahead of the expedition, her helmet lamp lighting the way. When the gloom became too intense, she drew her piton gun from its sheath and drove a spike into the ice wall. Then she hung a small battery-powered light there, to help guide the others.
All went uneventfully until they reached a depth of seven hundred feet. Then, as Weyland glanced at his tablet PC, he felt the rope that was lowering him jerk tight. The jolt was so powerful that he was slammed against the ice wall. The wind knocked out of him, Weyland tried to push himself away from the wall when a second jerk of the rope snapped his safety harness and sent him plunging down the shaft.
Max Stafford reached for his boss and missed, tangling himself in his own safety line. Below him, Sebastian saw Weyland dropping toward him. He reached out to catch the man, but his sudden movement—and Weyland’s PC bouncing off his shoulder—sent him spinning helplessly on the end of his rope.
“Man down… Lex, watch out!” yelled Sebastian.
Lex looked up in time to see Weyland plunging down the opposite side of the tunnel. She kicked off the ice and swung across the void, reaching the other side of the shaft just in time to pin Weyland to the wall with her own body. Before he slipped from her grasp, Lex plunged her axe into the ice and pressed closer. They were locked in an embrace, face-to-face against the cold wall.
“You okay?”
Weyland, trying to catch his breath, nodded weakly.
“Thank you,” said Lex.
Weyland blinked in surprise. “You saved
“Not for this. For what you said… about my father.”
The scene was interrupted when the beam from Stafford’s helmet lamp sought them out. Max rappelled down to their level and found Lex still hugging the wall like a spider, Weyland shielded in her grip.
The industrialist’s complexion looked wan in the harsh light. Weyland gasped, and his wide mouth gaped like a fish. Lex could feel his pulse racing through two sets of winter gear.
“Having second thoughts? It’s not too late to go back up.”
Weyland shook his head and even managed a smile. “With you taking such good care of me, Ms. Woods? I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Meanwhile, Max Stafford keyed the ICOM transceiver and shouted into it, “What the hell is going on up there, Quinn?”
Topside, shreds of an insulated apple tent—so named because they are round and bright red to be visible on the snow—had become entangled in the winch. Quinn shoved one of the roughnecks aside and examined the pulley mechanism himself. Then he raised the transceiver to his lips.
“It’s the storm, sir,” he said, loud enough to be heard over the wind. “A jam in the winch caused by debris.”
Quinn waited for a response. It didn’t take long.
“Well, see that it doesn’t happen again,” Stafford said in a clipped, angry tone.
Quinn lowered his eyes and stared at his boots. He spit, then put the transceiver to his ear.
“It won’t,” he promised. Then he broke the connection, muttering, “English asshole…”
On the catwalk outside, Captain Leighton scanned the horizon through a pair of heavy-duty Weyland Industries ALM-35 GPS-enhanced night-vision goggles. A savage wind was already battering the icebreaker, and in the distance, the captain could clearly see curtains of snow—tinted green by the NVGs—roaring off Olav Peak toward the whaling station.
Much of Bouvetoya Island was already obscured by the weather, but the Weyland-35 had a built-in geo- positioning system that computed distances. A pipper on the heads-up display highlighted the approximate location of the settlement, which appeared to the naked eye as if it was already buried under an avalanche of snow.
“This is going to be bad.”
The hatch swung open, and Gordon poked his head out. “Captain Leighton? I think you’d better take a look at this.”
Leighton crossed the catwalk and entered the bridge. His executive officer was crouched over the radar screen, waiting for him.
“What is it? The storm?”
“No, sir, something else.” The XO had a troubled look on his face.
“Spit it out, son,” Leighton demanded. The executive officer tapped the radar screen, just as the blip appeared again.
“I just picked this up,” he said. “It’s three hundred miles out and bearing one three zero. Whatever it is, it’s traveling at Mach 7.”
“What?”
“Accelerating to Mach 10, Captain.”
Leighton pushed Gordon aside and gazed at the radar screen. “This is impossible. Nothing travels that fast— nothing! It must be a meteorite.”
“I don’t think so.” Then Gordon blinked. “I-I think it just changed course…. Yes, it has definitely changed course.”
