Cold War

one big happy human family, their baser impulses and ambitions renounced. But in practice it didn’t change a thing.

Nimec’s people were under attack, taking fire, and getting killed by a bullet was the same the world over.

Gordian’s words surfaced from recent memory: They can’t always be protected from violence. But we have to keep our watch.

“Guns on max settings,” Nimec told his men over their comlink.

He pressed a stud over the trigger guard of his own compact variable-velocity rifle-system assault weapon, an action more than slightly hampered by his thick cold-weather gauntlet. The baby VVRS, as Tom Ricci called it, used embedded microelectromechanical circuitry to switch the gun’s muzzle speed between less-than-lethal and deadly-fire modes with a touch. At the low-speed setting, its subsonic rounds would remain enclosed within plastic sabots designed to blunt their penetrating capacity. Shot from the barrel at a higher pressure, the frangible sabots petaled off to release 5.56mm tungsten-alloy cores that struck with the murderous force of standard submachine- gun ammunition.

Now there was another spatter of fire, closer than before, barely up ahead.

Nimec heard a gaining whoosh from over to his left, and snapped his eyes in that direction, but saw nothing except dense, whipping white fans of snow.

And then, suddenly, the whiteness bulged out at him.

“Everybody, heads up—”

That was all Nimec had time to say.

His semiautomatic rifle raised, spitting angrily, Burkhart’s storm-rider made his pass.

* * *

The half-dozen men Nimec had chosen for the fire-suppression team advanced on the dome, their bikes pushed to top speed against the wind, treads slinging up snow in rapidly collapsing arcs. Strapped to their backs were eighteen-pound canisters of FM-200 and inert-gas flame extinguishant. As instructed, they’d locked their VVRS rifles into man-killer mode.

They’d expected a fight, knowing their access to the dome would be blocked regardless of whether their cover teams managed to draw off the opposition. What they did not yet know was how much resistance they would have to tackle… but that was certain to become evident in short order.

They glided on, the curve of the dome rising before them, tendrils of smoke scratching into the white around it.

Then they saw snowmobiles crossing the flat, open span of ground between themselves and the water- treatment plant, a row of machines spreading out to the left and right in bow-wing formation.

The fire-out team’s designated leader, a veteran of Operation Politika named Mark Rice, knew the score the instant he observed their widening pattern of movement.

“Scatter!” he shouted into his mike. “They’re trying to outflank us!”

* * *

Nimec had a chance to register the bike coming on fast from his left, darting out of the snow, its rider a blur as he triggered his first rounds, then sharpening in his vision like a wraith assuming form and substance.

The Sturmgewehr rattled out a second volley, and Nimec banked sharply off to elude its fire, leaning hard into the turn — almost too hard. He overbalanced, keeling his snowmobile sideways, but somehow managed to recover an instant before the bike would have leaped out from under him, spilling him from his seat as its handlebars wrenched free of his grasp.

Nimec heard the whine of his pursuer’s engine from behind now, and glanced over his shoulder, wind slapping his masked, goggled face. The rider had stayed at his right rear flank, his sleek helmet visible behind fluttering tapers of whiteness. His throttle was wide open, and smoke spewed from his exhaust into the sheering wind.

Nimec swung evasively again as his pursuer’s gun barrel emitted a third staccato burst, staying looser, trying not to fight the machine.

This time he held it in control. Gliding clear of the gunfire, he saw sugary powder gout upward where the bullets intended for him pecked the ground, felt what he thought might have been flying, splintered chips of ice lash across his coat sleeve.

His eye caught a flash of orange ahead of him — Ron Waylon’s coat — and then glimpsed the streaky white uniform of another apparitional rider hurtling at Waylon, the two of them engaging, maneuvering around each other, dueling in snow-spraying, cat-and-mouse circles.

Several yards to Nimec’s left, the figure of a third attacker had swung toward Mitchell at a full tear. Mitchell launched his bike’s front end off the ground like a motorcyclist pulling a wheelie, one hand on its rubber grip, then started firing VVRS rounds over the top of the rider’s windshield. The rider sprawled from his seat, his helmet visor shattered and bloody.

Nimec raced on straightaway, trying to put some distance between himself and the man at his back. Then he heard a prolonged exchange of fire between Waylon and his opponent stitch rhythmically through the wind. For an interminable moment both were lost from sight, surrounded by a spreading, churning cloud of kicked-up snow.

A shrill scream. Plucked away by the cheating gusts.

The gunfire stopped.

“Waylon, you all right?” Nimec exclaimed into his mouthpiece.

Silence over his radio. The snow cloud drifted milkily in the unsettled air.

“Waylon, do you copy…?”

Nimec was still moving rapidly on his own bike, no more than fifteen seconds having elapsed since the riders launched their attack. He turned back to see the one on his tail accelerate and pull alongside him to the right, staring at him through his tinted visor, the bore of his Steyr rifle practically in Nimec’s face.

His heart knocking, his fingers easy on the bike’s left handlebar grip, Nimec flicked up the baby VVRS with his right hand, leveled it, released a tight spurt of ammunition. Blood boiled from the rider’s chest and he flew from his seat, landing spread-eagled in the snow cover, his bike careening off in a skidding, plowing, crazily weaving run.

Nimec returned his attention to where he’d last seen Waylon just as a white cammo snowmobile came shredding out of the cloud of raised snow, riderless, its headlights blown out, its chassis studded with bullet holes. It plunged ahead for the barest of moments, then flipped over twice to land on its cowling and handlebars, the wraparound windshield breaking away, its upended skis pointed skyward on their extended struts.

Waylon in his headphone: “Okay here, sir.”

Then Mitchell: “Check.”

Nimec breathed hard, and took hold of both handlebars again, his weapon hanging from its shoulder strap.

“We better get on over to the dome, see what help we can be there,” he said.

* * *

“I’m sorry everyone’s been inconvenienced, and realize most of you were pulled out of bed,” Megan Breen was saying. “But as you know, we’ve received a fire alert from one of the outbuildings. It’s our normal practice to gather all non-base personnel into a single area during occurrences of this sort. Having you in one place benefits our ability to coordinate a response.”

Annie Caulfield, Russ Granger, and the entire Senatorial gang of three looked at her from their respective chairs in the small, pleasantly furnished common room provided to guests sharing Cold Corners’ DV accommodations.

It was now fifteen minutes since Pete and his men had gone out into the storm to face God only knows what kind of threat, and Megan was thinking that if she could somehow get this next piece of business done without revealing her agitation, she could probably keep a grip on herself through anything.

Still in his robe and slippers, Bernard Raines wrinkled his face, snuffling as if he’d gotten a whiff of something foul.

“You say a fire,” he said. “I hope it isn’t serious. For the sake of your people’s well-being, of course.” He cleared his throat. “It seems to me getting outside assistance in the storm would be difficult.”

Megan responded to the fear in his eyes.

“I appreciate your concern, Senator,” she said. “But a strong point of pride throughout UpLink International’s