out of a burning hill. On its mother’s broad back rode the alpha-Alien, eyeless head upturned, teeth bared in a savage snarl. When it spotted Scar, it leaped off its mother’s back to scale the shaft on its own.
Scar activated his shoulder gun, but the armor sparked and the red aiming lasers went dim. Roaring, he yanked open a panel and fumbled with the controls. After a moment’s work, he aimed the plasma gun and fired again. This time a bolt arced into the shaft and an Alien exploded. The Queen hissed angrily as gore rained down on her.
As the weapon on Scar’s shoulder began to spark again, the Predator stepped away from the shaft and shed the last of his battered equipment, including his now-useless plasma gun and what little remained of his pitted and broken armor. When he was done, only Scar’s mask, a loincloth, boots and chest plate remained from his original gear. Even the mesh netting—rent with a dozen tears and robbed of its energy—was beginning to cool in the relentless Antarctic conditions. The frigid wind bit into the Predator, sapping his body heat and reducing his internal temperature to a dangerously low level.
With one last glance down the shaft, Scar retreated, to wait for the explosion that was mere moments away….
Lex stirred, moaning. She felt the winds burn her naked cheek, and the sting of snow on her face. Then a strong hand grabbed the collar of her jumpsuit and hauled her to her feet as if she were a helpless kitten.
Awareness returned quickly, and Lex blinked up at a familiar face mask.
“Hold on,” the Predator said in an electronic voice muffled by the wind.
Hoisting Lex off her feet, Scar ran away from the shaft, toward the abandoned whaling station. Boots crunching in the snow, the Predator carried Lex through the center of the compound. The buildings were all nearly buried by drifting powder. Lex looked backwards, over Scar’s bleeding shoulder.
She saw the alpha-Alien emerge from the mouth of the tunnel. The creature hissed when it saw them. Then a bright green flash of light nearly blinded her. She quickly averted her eyes. A hot jet of burning energy surged up the tunnel, scorching all the Aliens in its wake. When the plasma washed over the alpha-Alien, it didn’t even have time to scream before it was blown to bits.
As the force of the blast rolled over them, Scar redoubled his pace. But almost immediately, a massive aftershock threw human and Predator to the ground. The force tossed Lex free of the Predator’s grip. Staggering to her feet, she saw Scar down on one knee, his shoulder gushing green more intensely now. Then a third shuddering shock wave sent them both reeling to the ice again.
When the blast vaporized everything in the underground cavern, millions of tons of ice were instantly transformed into steam, which melted more ice to create even more steam. Suddenly the ice pack around the mouth of the shaft and the mess hall next to the pit were catapulted into the air. Like a house of cards, the weathered timber splintered and pitched to the ground, fully collapsed.
Then the ground began to cave in on itself as the ice grotto and the pyramid were obliterated. Into the spreading crater, more sections of the whaling station, the abandoned base camp, and the mobile drilling rigs all tumbled, sucked deep into the bowels of the Earth.
Lex watched anxiously as the caving ice continued to spread outward, like ripples in a pond—ripples that swallowed more and more of the landscape as they flowed inexorably toward her and Scar.
Scar grabbed Lex, forcing her to her feet even as the ice pack shattered under them. Pulling her along, the Predator stubbornly ran on, despite the fact that there was no hope of outrunning the widening tide of destruction.
Lex stumbled as the ice shifted under her. Falling helplessly into the abyss where the collapsing ice threatened to bury her forever, she yelped as she was yanked upward so forcibly that her arm was nearly pulled out of its socket. Before she could react, Scar threw her like a rag doll onto a patch of unbroken ice. She spun, then crashed limply into a snowdrift.
Then the Predator made his own desperate leap to safety as the ice disappeared under his feet.
CHAPTER 30
Lex tried to open her eyes, but her lashes were caked with snow. She had to blink several times to clear them.
She was on her back, looking up at the sky and the heavy, black, cast-iron vat still teetering on wobbly legs at the edge of the cliff, despite the earthshaking violence that had rocked the vicinity.
With a moan, she felt something digging into her back. The spear Scar had fashioned from an Alien tail and the shield made from their armor were still strapped there. Lex sat up and looked around. She and Scar were lying on the very edge of a mammoth crater that had swallowed the whaling station; only the huge vat for cooking whale blubber and the wharf and docks over the frozen harbor remained intact. Around the perimeter of the crater a few tiny shacks leaned precipitously, on the verge of collapse.
Lex got to her feet and gazed out at the devastation. Through the fog that curled around her, it was difficult to determine the full extent of the damage. But the crater itself was vast, stretching farther than she could see.
Deep down, near the center of the pit, Lex could make out a few of the timbers from the old buildings and a high-tech drilling machine lying on its back—all that remained of the whaling station and the Weyland expedition base camp. A dozen paces from Lex, a snow-covered building still stood, though it now leaned precariously. An oil lamp, no doubt lit by one of the expedition’s murdered members, still burned behind a frosted window with a warm yellow glow.
With an undulating warble welling up from within his throat, Scar rose and shook off the snow, to stand beside Lex. As she smiled up at him, Lex heard a dull plop. Then something hissed and sizzled in the snow near her boots. She looked down to see a great, bleeding chunk of Alien flesh—Lex recognized the grid pattern burned into its hide and felt relief.
More gouts of flesh landed in the snow around them. Still dazed, she watched Scar dig through the snow and carefully lift an object, which he cradled in his misshapen hand.
When Scar opened his fingers, Lex saw the grisly thing he held—a severed Alien digit, somehow thrown clear of the blast, its shattered joint still oozing acid blood. He held the bloody thing in front of her face, and shocked awareness dawned in Lex’s eyes.
She nearly recoiled from it, and what Scar wanted to do with it—but in the end Lex decided to accept the honor. She’d earned it, and after all, this final pain would pale in comparison to what she’d already been through.
As the caustic chemical burned her flesh, Lex winced but uttered no sound. The pain seemed endless as the Predator carefully traced the distinctive thunderbolt scar on her forehead.
For a brief moment, human and humanoid stood facing one another in the vast polar expanse, sharing a ritual that was already ancient when mankind was still living in caves and hunting wooly mammoths with fire-hardened spears and stone axes.
But the solemn moment was interrupted when an explosion sounded at their backs and they turned to see the Alien Queen burst out of the crater in a shower of snow and ice.
Snarling, Scar pushed Lex to the ground and hurled the last of his throwing disks at the slavering Hive Queen. The whirling blades slashed the Alien’s throat, severing tendons and opening a gaping wound. Acid blood popped and crackled in the frigid wind and drops rained down, to pockmark the snow.
One disk remained lodged in the Queen’s flesh. The other passed through her black hide and made a wide arc in the air, returning to Scar like a boomerang. But as the Predator reached to catch it, the Alien Queen lashed out with her tail and batted him into the side of the small building. Wooden beams shattered, and splinters impaled the Predator’s flesh. From somewhere inside the tangle of broken wood, smoke and flames erupted from the smashed lamp. Within a minute the entire building was ablaze.
The Predator tore himself loose from the burning debris and staggered to his feet, even as the Queen closed in on him. Before Scar could get out of the way, the Alien dashed the Predator to the ground and crouched over him,
