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The wind whipping through the open interior was bitterly cold, cutting through Maddock’s scarf and face mask like they were made of cheesecloth., but he gritted his teeth against the frigid blast and gripped the handlebars like they were the only thing keeping him from flying off into oblivion. As the valley floor loomed closer, he could just make out the human figures crowding around the idle vehicles. He didn’t need to see the men clearly to know that they were probably packing some serious firepower.
Maddock figured they had one thing going for them: the commandos below didn’t know what had happened inside the ice-bound pyramid, and had no idea who was in the hovercraft racing down the slope toward them. That uncertainty would only last until the gunmen realized that the trio were wearing North Face parkas instead of white camouflage shells.
“Stay down,” he called back to the others. “We’re going to blow through.”
He would have preferred to veer off, skirt the valley floor and keep as much distance between them and the commandos as possible, but on the steep downslope, the idea that he was in control of the hovercraft was just wishful thinking.
The slope flattened out and he felt the craft decelerating. Now he could see the other hovercraft clearly, silhouetted against the horizon ahead, and right in front of him, the snowcat, with its heater and all their gear and food, seductively close, impossibly out of reach.
He pushed the throttle to its maximum and steered away from it. In the corner of his eye he saw movement, commandos jumping out of their motionless hovercraft... Pointing... Shouting....
Shooting.
With a loud crack, the fiberglass hull to Maddock’s left erupted in a spray of splinters. Almost simultaneously a second crack—the sharp report of an assault rifle—echoed across the valley.
Maddock cut right, or tried to. Steering a hovercraft was accomplished by turning the control vanes on the fan, redirecting the flow of air at an angle, but the machine had a lot of forward momentum to overcome. It behaved more like a hockey puck than an ice skate. Instead of changing direction, the craft started to spin on its axis, turning dizzying curlicues across the icefield as it continued more or less in the same direction. He quickly corrected his mistake, pointing the nose in the direction of travel.
A few more shots were fired but none of them found their mark, and after a few more seconds, they ceased altogether. A quick backward glance revealed why.
The commandos were in pursuit.
Maddock reckoned they had about a three-hundred-yard lead on the enemy hovercraft, easily within the effective range of their assault rifles. They had not started firing yet, but it was only a matter of time before the lead started flying again, and any attempt at evasive maneuvers would only shrink the distance between them. He kept the throttle maxed, but knew he would never be able to outrun a bullet.
“Rose!” he shouted without looking back. “If you know how to make that orb work for us, now would be a really good time.”
“I’m trying!” she replied.
Maddock wondered if that was the explanation for how they had made it through the gauntlet relatively unscathed.
Bones leaned over his shoulder, shouting in his ear. “Hope you’ve got a back-up plan, dude.”
“Working on it,” Maddock answered. He checked the fuel gauge. The tank was three-quarters full, but he had no idea how far they could get on that. Novo Base was at least a hundred-and-fifty miles. The coast was a lot closer, but neither option would necessarily mean safe harbor if the commandos decided to chase them all the way.
And if they couldn’t make it that far, it probably wouldn’t matter. They would freeze to death at the bottom of the world.
It felt like a replay of the showdown on the open ocean. Outnumbered and outgunned. Nowhere to hide and no chance of outrunning their enemies. That left only one option.
Déjà vu all over again, he thought.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said, and then added. “You’re not gonna like it.”
Bones clapped him on the shoulder. “As long as it’s not turning around and playing chicken with these guys, count me in.”
Maddock grimaced behind his scarf. “Umm....”
“Crap. You’re kidding. That’s your plan? What are we gonna do, throw snowballs at ‘em?”
Maddock looked over his shoulder to where Rose was kneeling in the bilge space, hugging the orb. “Rose! How’s that force field coming?”
She looked up and gave a helpless shrug.
Bones heaved a sigh. “Okay, let’s do this.”
Maddock nodded and gripped the handlebars. “Hang on!”
He cut hard to the right and, as before, the hovercraft pirouetted, turning around without immediately changing direction. Just as quickly, he straightened the control vanes, stopping the spin at the halfway point so that they were sliding backward. The machine shuddered as momentum fought a losing battle against the air being forced through the fans. The hovercraft slowed, stopped for just an instant, and then began moving forward, back into the valley.
The four enemy hovercraft seemed to be moving across the ice at warp speed, a hundred... seventy-five yards away, side-by-side in a picket line. Orange-yellow tongues of flame lanced out from the approaching vehicles. They were so close now that, even if he had wanted to, Maddock couldn’t have veered off to avoid a collision.
“Hang on!” he shouted, and then there was a lurch as the hovercraft rose up beneath him and went airborne. The sensation abruptly changed to a feeling of weightlessness as the craft fell away, but that too lasted only an instant. The hovercraft crashed down, bouncing and skipping across the ice.
Maddock struggled to get upright again. The hovercraft seemed intact. He could only surmise that it had somehow—impossibly—ridden up and over the other machines.
Had Rose succeeded in using the orb to create a protective force field around them?
He glanced back, saw both Rose and Bones, hanging on for dear life, apparently unhurt.
The valley floor ahead looked clear, but unfortunately, the only way out of it was up the steep slope of a mountain. He knew the hovercraft could make the climb—the commandos had done it when they had followed them into the ice tunnel—but it would be slow going and burn a lot of fuel.
Then something happened that sent a chill down Maddock’s already freezing spine.
Appearing as if from nowhere, rising above the black pyramid, was an enormous airplane. It had the same profile as the Il-76 that had borne them across the Southern Ocean—wide fuselage, shoulder wing configuration with four engine nacelles and rear stabilizer wings mounted atop the elevated rudder, but unlike that jet, this aircraft was a dull battleship gray. The plane swooped down, filling the valley with its bulk, and then just like that, it was above them, passing so close that Maddock ducked reflexively. He glanced up quickly, saw that the plane’s landing gear was fully deployed, its rear-cargo ramp already lowered.
The plane was going to land. The bad guys had called for reinforcements.
Crap. Maddock thought. As if things weren’t already bad enough.
Bones was shouting something, but the roar of the jet’s engines drowned him out.
He glanced back, ready with a shout of his own. “Rose! If you’ve figured out how to control that thing, now would be—”
The rest of his sentence was lost in a new eruption of noise—not the distinctive report of assault rifles but something much louder, a rapid staccato burst, like a string of firecrackers amplified ten thousand times.
Directly behind them, a second sun—a white-hot supernova—blossomed into existence.
Maddock instantly knew what had happened, and when he spun the hovercraft into another 180˚ to get a look, his suspicions were confirmed.
A giant plume of ice marked the spot where the giant jet aircraft had just touched down, but the space between them and it had been transformed into a battlefield of fire and ice.
Bones let out a whoop of triumph. “Holy crap, dude. Did you see that?”
Maddock nodded dumbly.
Amidst the geyser-like steam plumes rising from flash melted ice were a dozen smaller fires sending up columns of black smoke—the burning wreckage of at least one of the hovercraft, and the smoldering bodies of the gunmen who had been riding in it, scattered haphazardly across the ice.
As the jet had passed over them, its anti-missile countermeasures had been activated. The magnesium flares, which deployed in a shotgun burst, were a defensive measure, designed to fool a heat-seeking missile by providing it with a thermal target even hotter than the plane’s engines, but someone onboard the aircraft had used them as a weapon against the commandos.
“That was a C-17,” Bones continued. “An Air Force bird. I never thought I’d say it, but hooray for the cavalry.”
Maddock scanned the terrain ahead. The plane—a C-17 Globemaster, if Bones’ identification was correct—had stirred up a blizzard of swirling ice and smoke, but at the periphery of the storm, he saw something moving away at a right angle.
At least one of the commando hovercraft had survived.
“Save the celebration until we’re clear,” Maddock said. He opened the throttle wide and the hovercraft charged forward.
As they neared the artificial ice storm, Maddock saw the commando hovercraft turning, coming around to pursue them. In the corner of his eye, he spotted another machine on the opposite side, likewise maneuvering for another attack, and then the world dissolved into a haze of blowing ice.
The hovercraft crunched and shimmied through the flaming debris, but after a few seconds, the cloud thinned enough for him to see the C-17, its engines still blasting out roiling convection waves of heat exhaust. The ramp to the open cargo hold beckoned invitingly, as did the two figures standing on it, arms waving in a “hurry up” gesture.
Over the roar of the jet engines, he could just make out the sharp crack of rifle fire. The figures on the ramp reacted. One of them ducked back inside the plane, the other produced a handgun and began firing back.
Maddock kept the throttle maxed, closing the remaining distance in seconds to race up the ramp, past the man who was still firing his pistol at the pursuing commandos, and into the cavernous cargo bay.
It was like being swallowed by some monstrous leviathan.
He reversed the throttle, but the craft had too much momentum to simply stop. Thankfully, the cargo space was empty. He caught a glimpse of some moving in front of him, scrambling to get out of the way, but then the forward bulkhead filled his vision and he barely had time to brace for the imminent collision.
The crash wasn’t as bad as he expected. The hovercraft had already given up most of its forward velocity, but the sudden stop nevertheless ejected him from the machine, hurling him into the bulkhead. His winter clothing afforded him some protection, but the impact knocked the wind out of him.
For several seconds, all he could do was lie stunned and motionless on the deck. He could hear shouting voices, and then felt a shudder rising through the deck plates as the aircraft began moving... accelerating.
The plane was taking off.
All he could do was hang on as the aircraft surged forward, the deck tilting upward as the plane climbed back into the sky. When it finally leveled off, he sat up.
Bones and Rose were gingerly climbing out of the hovercraft, the latter still holding the mysterious orb. Behind them, at the far end of the long tunnel-like cargo bay, the ramp was rising. Maddock caught a final glimpse of the ice-covered valley and the distinctive black pyramid before the door closed, sealing them inside the belly of the beast.
They had made it. They were safe.