Chapter Twenty-Four

 

J.B. laid the circuit boards on the table Jak and Dean had brought up from one of the storerooms they had successfully broken into. It was a long way from making the gateway room homey, but with the heat working a little better, the addition of the chairs gave the companions momentary respite that they weren't deep in a sinking iceberg. "These are the problem," the Armorer said. "Boards are shorted out."

 

"Can't you simply fix them, John Barrymore?"

 

Doc asked.

 

"Mebbe, but this is precise work we're talking about, Doc. And if I get it wrong, mebbe we all just go out like a puff of smoke instead of getting on to the next gateway."

 

"What do you need?" Ryan asked.

 

"Access to an electronics shop," J.B. answered. "Got to have the right kind of soldering metals, magnification lenses so I can get a good look at what I'm doing. Robot arm with a laser is what would work best."

 

"Don't they have an electronics room in the redoubt?" Albert asked. "Seems like they'd have one."

 

"They do," Ryan said. "From the blueprints J.B. ciphered out, the electronics lab is down there somewhere around the docking bay."

 

"Oh."

 

"Leaves us one choice," Ryan said.

 

J.B. nodded. "Go up top and take a look around."

 

"And if all you find is ice and snow?" the dwarf asked.

 

"Don't know that's true until we go look," Ryan said. "You start counting off possibilities before you go see what you can do, you might as well stay home and put a bullet in your brain. I'm not ready to do that yet."

 

 

 

IT WAS ONE HUNDRED feet to the top of the iceberg. Jak went up first, setting pitons they had found in one of the open storerooms.

 

The albino drove them deep and fast into the hard ice, having no problem at all to get them to seat. The white birdsDoc called them albatrosses and said they were birds with a lot of bad luck assigned to themscreamed at one another and took turns diving at Jak and Ryan. The cool green of the killer-cold ocean waited below for the slightest misstep.

 

Ryan wore the handkerchief around his lower face again, partly to keep out the water and partly to keep warm. The storerooms had also yielded new socks and underwear, all of them thermal lined. There hadn't been much in Albert's size, but the dwarf had made do.

 

Jak knew what he was doing when he set the pitons. The redoubt had also contained an enormous amount of rope. Between the pitons and the rope, Ryan knew he and the teenager were crafting a stairway that the others could follow safely.

 

"Ready," Jak called down.

 

"Go," Ryan said, and dug into his position.

 

The albino removed one of his safety harnesses and latched it to the new piton he had in place. He pulled himself up and tied on to the new one, then reached for another piton.

 

Ryan hung on, feeling the wind pull at him with icy claws.

 

 

 

IT TOOK MORE THAN two hours for all of them to reach the summit of the iceberg.

 

Ryan stared out over the uneven terrain at the top. During the long climb, he had imagined several different ways that it might have looked. Seeing it still seemed a little stunning.

 

The top of the glacier was made up of a number of plateaus. Several of them held jagged edges, showing how the frozen surface had shaped then been reshaped by the elements. It was a nightmare rendered in cold white edges, stretching out as far as his eye could see.

 

"Dark night," J.B. yelled to be heard above the crash of surf below and the howling wind above. "All I've seen in this life, Ryan, and I've never seen anything like this."

 

Ryan swiveled from their lofty perch, taking in the various icebergs surrounding them. He'd taken a compass reading again at the mouth of the access tunnel, and it had showed that their iceberg was facing eight degrees farther south than it had previously.

 

"Looks like herd of icebergs," Jak commented. With the cold making his pale face even more white, his ruby eyes stood out like blood spots.

 

"And all headed south for the winter," Mildred said.

 

As they watched, three of the icebergs went completely to pieces, breaking and shattering in small white storms that left hardly anything visible above the ocean's surface. Their own iceberg shook and shivered, as well.

 

"You have to wonder where all those pieces of ice come from," Krysty said. "Makes me curious about what it must have looked like during the fiercest part of the cold after the nuclear winter."

 

"Probably like nothing you'd ever want to see," Dean said quietly. "I got no curiosity about seeing it. Be glad when we get off this one."

 

"I've been small all my life," Albert said, "but seeing this, going through that gateway like you people call it, makes me feel real small."

 

"We're all small when you get right down to it," Ryan stated. "It's up to a person how big of a footprint they want to leave when they step out of this life. That's what Trader always said." He shook himself, then resettled his gear over his body. "Let's move out. Jak, you and me are going to run point. Dean, you're walking drag with J.B., and make sure you don't lose sight of him and he doesn't lose sight of you."

 

"Right, Dad."

 

"Mildred, Krysty, you two are walking the middle, kind of loose wing positions. Not going to need to get spread out too far because we're going to keep this narrow. Doc, you and Albert are next."

 

"I have only one small question, my dear Ryan," the old man said. The wind blew his silvered lock over his shoulders where they were free of the muffler around his lower face.

 

"What?" Ryan asked irritably. He didn't have time for Doc's usual addle-brainedness with the iceberg sinking beneath them.

 

"How do you propose we find our way back to this place?" Doc asked.

 

"Got the compass," Ryan said.

 

"And with the shifting this deep-sea diamond in the rough is doing," Doc said, "I do not think you can count on the readings you are going to get from that compass."

 

"Doc's right," J.B. agreed. "If we get enough of a drift, even the minisextant isn't going to be much use. Especially if we get in a hurry."

 

"Fireblast," Ryan growled, looking out at the white expanse of broken terrain before him. "It's one bastard big rock, but how lost can we get?"

 

 

 

RYAN KEPT THEM moving with the ocean always to the right. If nothing else, they would walk in a giant circle. The problem would be to effectively search the center of the ice mass.

 

Snow was a problem, too. Piles of it covered the surface, making it necessary to test footing before stepping down through it. Only Jak's cat-quick reflexes saved him from dropping through a fissure in the iceberg that was thirty feet deep.

 

After an hour of moving through the cold and the snow, Ryan called a break. They huddled in a little group on the lee side of a massive upthrust of ice that shielded them from most of the wind. They ate double helpings of the self-heats they carried with them from the redoubt. All of them knew the dangers of exposure, and knew that they were burning extra calories simply by being out in the cold.

 

Even Ryan, as hardened as he was to the harsh life in Deathlands, couldn't help feeling a little doubtful about their chances.

 

"You're thinking too hard, lover," Krysty said.

 

Apart in their conversation from the rest of the companions, Ryan nodded. "Can't help thinking this is a fuck-all place to be."

 

"There's a way, lover." Krysty touched his face with her gloved hand, and he hated it that the cold had robbed him of the sensation. But the gesture meant a lot. "Over, under or around. There's always a way. You taught me that."

 

"We'll get it done," Ryan said. "We haven't ever been stopped before."

 

Then, with a clear, unmistakable intensity, a gunshot rolled over the companions.

 

 

 

RYAN TOOK THE LEAD, matching himself with Jak. He stayed low to the terrain, feeling the added moisture of his breath starting to cake up the handkerchief around his lower face. He held the Steyr at the ready in both hands, but kept the sweatshirt he'd taken from the clothing bins in the redoubt wrapped around the rifle to keep the action from freezing.

 

Jak paced him, twenty yards away, a pale ghost running against the snow-covered backdrop.

 

More gunshots echoed over them, coming faster now. Somewhere up ahead, serious gunplay was being dealt out.

 

Ryan felt more hopeful about the situation. J.B.'s minisextant had revealed they were in the Arctic Circle, somewhere below Greenland, if that place still yet existed. But the population density of the area preskydark hadn't been heavy. Doc had said that a few shipping lines used the routes during the warm seasons of the year.

 

But blasters meant men, and men usually meant some way of surviving. He was even further encouraged by the sounds of running engines. Images of boats filled his mind, and he figured he'd never really thought about how good a boat could look until he was thinking about them at that moment.

 

The land rose up before Ryan, but it was so white and so like the rest of the terrain that he couldn't tell the difference until he noticed that his angle to the ground had changed. His calf muscles ached from the increased fatigue, the cold and running uphill.

 

Then he cleared the edge, scanning it tight against the orange skyline for just a moment. The iceberg dropped away below him, cutting inward in a bowl-shaped depression from the shoreline.

 

Nearly forty people scrambled for cover below, dodging bullets fired at them from eight men ringed around them. The engine noises came from two small airwags that glided over them like giant hornets.

 

The airwags weren't true planes. Ryan had seen pics of those before. These were little more than seats with wings and a pusher-prop behind. The wings were nearly three times the length of a man, though the body of the plane might have been barely as long as a man was tall. Trapped in the bowl-shaped depression, the engines sounded loud, popping and snarling.

 

The forty people running for their lives didn't have weapons except for bows, arrows and spears. They dressed in furs and homespun clothing. Children ran with the adults, crying out in loud voices.

 

The gunners used full-scale assault weapons and moved in a definite military pattern. Luckily they seemed to be selective in their targets. Otherwise, every person down there would have been dead.

 

At another time, in another place, Ryan might not have been so quick to get involved. He'd seen massacres before, had taken part in some of them. A man wanting to keep his head on his shoulders where it belonged also kept his nose where it belonged. That had been one of the Trader's earliest remembered sayings.

 

But the companions were trapped on the iceberg, which was definitely not long for the world. The gunners had assault weapons and obviously a purpose for being there, but Ryan had to ask himself who would willingly stay on a sinking iceberg.

 

The other people, dressed in their furs and their homespun clothing, gave him the impression of being native to the area. And there was no better source of information than a local.

 

One of the fur-clad men rose from behind a boulder, an arrow fitted to his string. He loosed it, and it crossed the distance to their attackers, catching the target in the chest. Before the bowman could get back to cover, a short burst blasted through his head.

 

Ryan settled in behind the Steyr, bracing it on the ground and easing the barrel past the ledge. He knew he would have only a few seconds' surprise working on his side before the gunners knew he was among them. He sighted on the middle of his targets, not going for a head shot because the chances were so slim. Then he let out half a breath, squeezed the trigger, then squeezed off a second round.

 

The heavy 7.62 mm bullets skated through the air, not affected by the wind at all. Two of the gunners were going down when Ryan dropped the crosshairs on the third. He squeezed again, moving his head automatically from the telescopic lens. If he had possessed two eyes, moving onto his next target would have been simply a matter of shifting the emphasis of his vision to his other eye. With one, he had to force the shift.

 

He caught the third target low in the back, ripping out a wash of blood from the man's midsection as his stomach shredded. Ryan moved to a fourth target, catching the man shifting behind cover, trying to get out of the line of fire. Ryan's round caught him flat-footed and knocked him down.

 

With an ululating wail, three of the fur-clad warriors pushed themselves free and rushed the three surviving men on the ground. One of them went down, his face shot away.

 

The small airwags fought to gain altitude and come around. Both of them had light machine guns mounted on the front of their craft. One of them got a line on Ryan and cut loose with a roar of autofire.

 

The ice ledge in front of Ryan seemed to go to pieces, hammered by the machine-gun rounds. Giving up his position, Ryan rolled on his side to escape the barrage. He scrambled on hands and knees to get back to cover, then brought up the Steyr again.

 

By that time one of the airwags was almost on top of him, the machine gun mounted on the front of it chattering away.

 

The Steyr banged against Ryan's shoulder as he put around through the pilot's head.

 

Out of control, the airwag slammed into the side of the ice cliff just below Ryan. It erupted into a huge ball of flame that twisted up over Ryan's head and scudded black smoke clouds into the air.

 

Ryan felt the heat wash over him as he chambered a round and sighted the Steyr back on the killing site. Two of the fur-clad men had overrun one of the two surviving men on the ground. The last ground gunner was making tracks, heading over the ridge.

 

Leading the man slightly, Ryan picked him off in midstride, sending him tumbling back down the grade. He searched grimly for the last airwag, seeing it fleeing the battle area and streaking away straight out to sea. Before it went far, one of the albatrosses swooped down at it, maybe merely coming in for a better look, and maybe to defend its chosen territory.

 

The pilot couldn't avoid the big bird. He tried to bank his craft, but the albatross pursued, running straight over his head into the pusher-prop. Feathers flew in all directions, and the sound of the engine popping died instantly, its last echoes gasping across the icy beach. The airwag dropped into the ocean and disappeared in a heartbeat.

 

"Gone," Jak said.

 

Ryan nodded, confirming the albino's statement. Still, he waited for a while in case they had both been wrong. It wasn't likely, and it didn't happen. He turned, knowing J.B. could see him. The Armorer had held his position with the others in case Jak and Ryan had been forced to abandon theirs. Ryan waved them up.

 

Then he stood and started down the steep side of the bowl-shaped depression, wondering whose fight he'd interrupted and which side he'd joined. More than anything, he hoped the fur-clad people had a way off the iceberg. He didn't relish the thought of being adrift somewhere in the Arctic Circle, but it beat the hell out of drowning.