Corben recognized Cruz’s voice through his face mask.
“Tie me up, Sam,” he said, nodding faintly.
Burkhart was also ready to pull out of the fight.
He raced evasively astride his snowmobile, followed close on by an UpLink rider, wishing only to end the chase and extract his men before any more of them lost their lives. Considering the dimensions of his blunder, they had gotten off cheaply having taken just three casualties. But the dome’s entrance had been blocked long enough, and their job here was done. They had struck at the UpLink team’s corners, only to be outflanked themselves, a countermove that hadn’t surprised or daunted Burkhart. The thick smoke pouring from the dome told him the flames inside would have devastated its crucial desalinization apparatus — and that had been his single objective. He had no interest whatsoever in continued one-upsmanship.
It was time to finish things.
Squeezing fuel into the snowmobile’s engine cylinders, he leaned partway from its saddle, swung the Sturmgewehr around in his gun hand, and pressed back its trigger. The gun clapped fire at the red bike behind him. There had been two in pursuit moments ago, but he had been able to shake off one of them, losing it after a pitched, breakneck series of evasive maneuvers.
The rider who’d stayed on top of Burkhart was better than the other by far.
He kept right with him now, surging up from behind, swerving to avoid Burkhart’s stream of ammunition, lifting his own weapon above his handlebars to release an answering salvo.
Burkhart heard lead rounds chew at his rear bumper, felt the percussive rattle of their impact. Bits of the snowmobile’s pocked, gouged chassis spewed up around him.
Bent low behind his windshield, he opened the bike’s throttle, accelerated with a rush, and then sharply jerked into a full turn, swinging around to face his pursuer, applying the brakes with gentle pumps of his fist, aware he would tailspin if he worked their lever too hard.
Burkhart could feel his suspension rods quiver from stress as the bike hauled to an abrupt stop, its skis swashing up thick billows of snow.
His feet planted on the boards, he straddled his seat and poured a continuous volley out of his submachine gun, his fire cutting through the encompassing whiteness, aimed directly at the snowmobile coming head-on toward him.
The move caught his harrier off guard. The UpLink rider slewed, tilted high onto the edge of his right ski, then was flung from his bike as it suddenly ran away from under him, overbalanced, and tipped sideways into the snow yards from where he’d landed.
Burkhart released his brake lever, launched forward, brought himself to a second jolting halt in front of the thrown rider, and jumped off his bike.
The UpLink man was badly hurt. Dumped onto his right side, his leg bent where it shouldn’t have been — broken in at least two places below the knee, Burkhart saw — he struggled to pull himself out of the snow, rolled off his hip, and somehow got into a twisted semblance of a sitting position, his VVRS still in his grip.
Burkhart rushed toward him, kicked the weapon from his hand before he could fully bring it up, retrieved it, and pointed his own gun at the rider.
The men looked at one another in silence, their eyes meeting through their dark goggles for the briefest of moments.
Then Burkhart pivoted away from him, scoured the back of the overturned snowmobile with sustained gunfire, riddling the gas tank with bullets, puncturing the spare fuel container on its rear rack. Mixed gasoline and oil blurted greasily into the snow.
Burkhart flicked a glance back over at the injured rider.
You never know.
A moment later he shouldered his weapon, turned to remount his snowmobile, and radioed out the order to withdraw.
As he approached the dome, Nimec heard the chatter of a baby VVRS to his left, and snapped a look through the flowing whiteness. He saw blood erupt from a storm rider’s chest, then saw both bike and rider capsize into the snow. An instant later, the Sword op who’d done the shooting sped over to where one of his teammates had been downed by the storm rider, got off his snowmobile, and crouched beside him, shaking his head in horrified denial.
Nimec braked and sat absolutely motionless, pods of snow bursting in the air around him. He heard a choked-back cry from the kneeling op, and was grateful when the wind pulled it away.
Even from a distance of some yards, he knew it was too late for the guy’s partner. His goggles were shattered and most of his forehead was gone.
“I can’t believe this.” Waylon had slid up beside Nimec and was staring out at the bloody scene. “It’s just so hard to
Nimec said nothing. It was hard, yes. And the decision he needed to make was harder still.
He turned and peered straight ahead at the dome. The smoke lacing from its entrance hadn’t abated, but the fire-suppression squad was almost there now, riding toward it unopposed. And although he could hear sporadic bursts of gunfire at their fringes, CC’s mounted attackers had vanished from sight.
Nimec unexpectedly thought of the day that he and Meg had first talked to Tom Ricci about joining up with UpLink, on a spring afternoon a year or so back. They had met with him at his place in Maine, and were on his deck overlooking Penobscot Bay when a bald eagle had soared from a nearby tree, prompting every other bird in sight to flutter off into nowhere, all of them dispersing at the same time.
Nimec felt an odd twinge. He supposed this was his day for recalling other people’s words.
“They scattered,” he said. “Just like that.”
Waylon glanced out toward the dome, then faced Nimec.
“The men who hit us,” he said with understanding.
Nimec nodded.
“They did what they wanted. And now somebody’s given them the word to retreat.”
Waylon looked at him.
“We have to go after them—”
“No.”
Nimec gave him a second nod.
“We don’t know how many of them are out there, where they came from, or where they might be planning to hole up. Probably don’t know a bunch of other things that I haven’t thought of, and that we ought to know before flinging ourselves into a manhunt. And our priority’s to safeguard the base,” he said. “Besides, the storm’s getting worse. It’d be craziness to have our people riding blind in it.”
Waylon kept looking at him.
“What are we supposed to do?”
Nimec hesitated a moment.
“Call off our troops and put out the fire,” he said, then juiced his engine and went racing off toward the dome.
The fire-suppression agents carried into the water-treatment dome by CC’s Sword ops shared the capacity to arrest intense flames without leaving a damaging residue on sensitive computer and telecommunications equipment — an almost certain collateral effect of foam or water. Both nonconductive formulations were certified environmentally green, and as such had gained approval for use on the Antarctic continent.
These important similarities apart, each possessed separate and unique properties.
FE-13 was the commercial name for trifluromethane, a cryogenic substitute for Halon, which had been
