William Dietrich - Dark Winter

He vaulted over the rail into stomach-deep fuel and waded toward the woman. She was limp as if dead, fuel having stained her to her chin, her body looking small and wilted. The flood had stopped an inch from her mouth.

"Abby?"

No response. He slapped her.

She jerked into crude consciousness and began coughing. He unstrapped one arm, then another, and she fell into his arms. Lewis had never seen anything so implacably heartless as this insane execution. He dragged her to the catwalk, pushing her up onto it and leaning her against the railing. She doubled over and vomited. When she came up gasping, he put an extra oxygen mask over her face. Abby sucked in air, reeling, tears streaming down her face.

"Where did he turn the valve? Where's the valve? We need to save what fuel we can!"

She shook her head.

"Where? Which pipe?"

She pulled away the oxygen mask, gasping to speak. "The wire! The flare!"

"I know! We got the fuel level to go down! We beat his clock!"

She shook her head vigorously. "No! Two wires! One if too high. A board if too low! It drops, pulls wire…"

Lewis saw what she was pointing at. Norse had anticipated them again. A second wire on the trigger was tightening as the fuel level fell and its board sank with it.

Good God. He'd brought nothing to cut it with.

"Run!"

She put on her mask and he pushed her frantically down the catwalk. The grating was slippery but the fuel had drained below it now. Gripping the slick rail, they ran as best they could, banging into the sides of the arch, looking back at the poised and hanging flare through a stinking fog of petroleum fumes, the slack wire growing tauter as the board pulled down.

Then they descended the catwalk stairs and went through the breach, wading across the petroleum pond to the ramp leading outside. It was molasses, clinging to them, beseeching them to stay. Behind them fuel was running across the hard-packed snow toward the modules, its fumes curling upward to the roof of the dome. It was a gray haze in the dome lights, the generator still chugging obediently behind the other wall.

The pair crawled up the slippery ramp, both slick with stinking fuel, the wetness beginning to freeze on their clothes.

"Go, go, go!" Lewis shouted to the others. "Get as far away as you can!"

Someone screamed. They were running.

Then a reflected flash as the flare gun went off, releasing red light like a glimpse of hell. With a gassy roar, the fuel arch blew up.

The shock wave of the blast kicked Abby and Lewis the last few feet up the ramp and knocked the scattering group as flat as a strike of bowling pins. The violence hit an instant before the sound did, and then for another instant everything at the Pole was noise. The pulse of superheated air that was now beyond the flattened winter-overs kicked up a wall of loose snow that expanded outward across the station like the penumbra of a star, an expanding blizzard, rushing a half mile in all directions before puffing out.

The snow over the fuel arch erupted like napalm, its wall of flame shooting skyward in an upside down curtain. BioMed disintegrated instantly, its fragments spewing into the entryway. The opposite wall guarding the generators blew inward into kindling and a gout of flame and plasma gases seared into the generator room like the exhaust of a rocket, melting the electrical connections and setting the gym ablaze. In an instant, power to the dome was snuffed out.

Fire leaped over the crude dike and flashed through the dome itself, the gases igniting and the resulting energy punching vents in the dome as if it were made of foil. Smoke and heat shot up through the ventilation hole at the top of the structure in a volcanic plume, spattering the complex with a rain of debris. Thousands of icicles broke off and rained down on the arena below like breaking glass, a maniacal tinkle against the thunder.

The fireball knocked the habitation modules askew from their foundations. Pipes were torn off, electrical cables snipped, and each metal box was seared with flame, roasting from orange to black in seconds. Crates flared into torches, banked ice cream flashed into steam. For a minute, the entire dome was an inferno.

Yet the explosion was a mere spark in a universe of implacable cold. Antarctica, for a brief moment punched aside, imploded back inward once the shock wave passed. The ice was determined to reclaim its dominance. Snow turned to steam and slush. The most volatile gases had vaporized and what was left began to burn more sluggishly as the heat consumed itself by turning a tinder-dry environment into a melting one. The blast had created a stinking lake. Fuel leaked down into the ice cap and spread into the surrounding snow. Flames roared, smoked, melted, and sputtered out. The ruptured tanks burned fiercely, sending a column of smoke boiling a mile high into the sky, but the blaze retreated to its heart almost as swiftly as it had expanded. With it went the stored energy that was to have kept them alive for the rest of the winter. There'd been a flash of oily violence, and now a grim guttering.

Their lifeblood had been consumed.

Shakily, the survivors stood. Miraculously, none had been seriously hurt and none had caught on fire. The searing heat was already a dim memory, replaced once more by relentless cold. They shivered.

Their spaceship had been destroyed.

Wordlessly, Geller handed over to Lewis some papers he'd snatched from Norse's dying hand.

There was some kind of scribbled account of a mountain climb, Lewis saw as he leafed through them. And a cover sheet with a scrawled message:

Thus Samson killed many more when he died than when he lived.

The dying fire lit their way as the tiny tribe trudged wearily back toward the Spryte. They were silent in their weariness, Skinner using the shoulder of an exhausted Hiro to guide him back across the snow. So many had been lost! More than a third of them. The rest alive, staggering like blackened zombies, exhausted, shivering. Left to what kind of fate?

When they got to the snow tractor Geller climbed up on it and caught the corpse of Norse by the boot, dragging him off the cab roof without ceremony. His blood was frozen so there was no trail. His limbs were already stiff. He toppled like Raggedy Ann into the snow, and man and mannequin lay together.

"I'd leave the sonofabitch for the buzzards but there ain't buzzards down here," the maintenance man said bitterly.

"It's just his shell," Lena whispered. "The demon is gone."

Lewis stooped to look at the tractor treads. Gears were bent, a sprocket broken. The track had snapped. Still, the basics were there. "Can we fix it?"

The support personnel clustered around. "Maybe," Calhoun said. He glanced back toward the burning dome. "Maybe the garage escaped the worst of it. With some tools, if we can get the generator at Bedrock running- "

"What the hell for?" Geller interrupted. "Why the hell try?"

Calhoun shrugged.

"I mean, can you fix the Spryte to run a thousand miles?" clarified Lewis. "Towing that sled, and maybe another, with a shelter and some food and tents. Drive to Vostok, like Bob was going to do. Or better yet, drive to the Americans at McMurdo."

Calhoun looked at the rest of them, emptied by the struggle. "It's winter, Jed."

"I know it would be hard."

"More than hard," Mendoza spoke up wearily. "Some of us are banged up pretty good. Clyde's blind. Abby's half dead. We'd have to melt drinking water, ride out storms. Winds can hit two hundred miles per hour on the Beardmore glacier. Windchill is, what, two hundred and fifty below? We'd be dependent on a single engine."

"I know it would be risky."

"But six or eight of us in the cab, in shifts," Dana said, coming to life at the thought of escape. "The rest towed in a covered sled. Better than Scott had."