Matthew Reilly: Ice Station

From the surface, it hardly looked like a "station" at all? more like a motley collection of squat, domelike structures, half-buried in the snow.

In the middle of the complex stood the main building. It was little more than an enormous round dome mounted on a wide square base. Above the surface, the whole structure was about a hundred feet across, but it couldn't have been more than ten feet high.

On top of one of the smaller buildings gathered around the main dome stood the remains of a radio antenna. The upper half of the antenna was folded downward, a couple of taut cables the only things holding it to the upright lower half. Ice crusts hung off everything. The only light, a soft white glow burning from within the main dome.

Schofield ordered the hovercraft to a halt half a mile from the station. No sooner had it stopped than the port-side door slid open, and the six Marines leaped down from the hover-craft's inflated skirt and landed with muffled whumps on the hard-packed snow.

As they ran across the snow-covered ground, they could hear, above the roar of the wind, the crashing of the waves against the cliffs on the far side of the station.

"Gentlemen, you know what to do," was all Schofield said into his helmet mike as he ran.

Wrapped in the blanket of the blizzard, the white-clad squad fanned out, making its way toward the station complex.

Buck Riley saw the hole in the ice before he saw the battered hovercraft in it.

The crevasse looked like a scar on the icescape?a deep crescent-shaped gash about forty meters wide.

Riley's hovercraft came to rest a hundred yards from the rim of the enormous chasm. The six Marines climbed out, lowered themselves gently to the ground, and cautiously made their way across the snow, toward the edge of the crevasse.

PFC Robert "Rebound" Simmons was their climber, so they harnessed him up first. A small man, Rebound was as nimble as a cat and weighed about the same. He was young, too, just twenty-three, and like most men his age, he responded to praise. He had beamed with pride when he'd overheard his lieutenant once say to another platoon commander that his climber was so good, he could scale the inside of the Capitol Building without a rope. His nickname was another story, a good-natured jibe bestowed upon him by his unit in reference to his less than impressive success rate with women.

Once the rope was secured to his harness, Simmons lay down on his stomach and began to shimmy his way forward, through the snow, toward the edge of the scar.

He reached the edge and peered out over the rim, down into the crevasse.

"Oh, shit...."

Ten meters behind him, Buck Riley spoke into his helmet mike. "What's the story, Rebound?"

" They're here, sir ." Simmons's voice was almost resigned. " Conventional craft. Got somethin' in French written on the side. Thin ice scattered all about underneath it. Looks like they tried to cross a snow bridge that didn't hold ."

He turned to face Riley, his face grim, his voice tinny over the short-range radio frequency. " And, sir, they's pretty fucked up ."

The hovercraft lay forty feet below the surface, its rounded nose crumpled inward by the downward impact, every one of its windows either shattered or cracked into distorted spider-webs. A thin layer of snow had already embarked upon the task of erasing the battered vehicle from history.

Two of the hovercraft's occupants had been catapulted by the impact right through the forward windshield. Both lay against the forward wall of the crevasse, their necks bent backward at obscene angles, their bodies resting in pools of their own frozen blood.

Rebound Simmons stared at the grisly scene.

There were other bodies inside the hovercraft. He could see their shadows inside it and could see star-shaped splatters of blood on the cracked windows of the hovercraft.

" Rebound ?" Riley's voice came in over his helmet intercom. " Anybody alive down there ?"

"Don't look like it, sir," Rebound said.

" Do an infrared ," Riley instructed. " We got twenty minutes before we gotta hit the road, and 1 wouldn 't want to leave and find out later that there were some survivors down there ."

Rebound snapped his infrared visor into place. It hung down from the brow of his helmet, covering both of his eyes like a fighter pilot's visor.

Now he saw the crashed hovercraft through a wash of electronic blue imagery. The cold had taken effect quickly. The whole crash site was depicted as a blue-on-black outline. Not even the engine glowed yellow, the color of objects with minimal heat intensity.

More important, however, there were no blobs of orange or yellow within the image of the vehicle. Any bodies that were still inside the hovercraft were ice cold. Everyone on board was most certainly dead.

Rebound said, "Sir, infrared reading is nega?"

The ground gave way beneath him.

There was no warning. No preemptive cracking of the ice. No sense of it weakening.

Rebound Simmons dropped like a stone into the crevasse.

It happened so fast that Buck Riley almost missed it. One second, he was watching Rebound as he peered out over the edge of the crevasse. The next second, Rebound simply dropped out of sight.

The black rope slithered out over the edge after the young private, uncoiling at a rapid rate, shooting out over the rim.

"Hold fast!" Riley yelled to the two Marines anchoring the rope. They held the rope tightly, taking the strain, waiting for the jolt.

The rope continued to splay out over the edge until whack !, it went instantly taut.

Riley stepped cautiously over to the right, away from the edge of the crevasse, but close enough so that he could peer down into it.

He saw the wrecked hovercraft down at the bottom of the hole and the two bloodied and broken bodies pressed up against the ice wall in front of it. And he saw Rebound, hanging from his rope, two feet above the hovercraft's banged-open starboard door.

"You OK?" Riley said into his helmet mike.

"Never doubted you for a second, sir."

"Just hold on. We'll have you up in a minute."

"Sure."

Down in the crevasse, Rebound swung stupidly above the destroyed hovercraft, From where he hung he could see in through the open starboard door of the hovercraft. "Oh, Jesus ...," he breathed.

Schofield knocked loudly on the big wooden door.

The door was set into the square-shaped base structure that supported the main dome of Wilkes Ice Station. It lay at the bottom of a narrow ramp that descended about eight feet into the ice.

Schofield banged his fist on the door again.

He was lying flat on the parapet of the base structure, reaching down from above the door to knock on it.

Ten yards away, lying on his belly in the snow at the top of the ramp with his legs splayed wide, was Gunnery Sergeant Scott "Snake" Kaplan. His M-16E assault rifle was trained on the unopened door.

There came a sudden creak , and Schofield held his breath as a sliver of light stretched out onto the snow beneath him and the door to the station slowly began to open.

A figure stepped out onto the snow ramp beneath him. It was a man. Wrapped in about seven layers of clothing. Unarmed.

Suddenly the man tensed, presumably as he saw Snake lying in the snow in front of him, with his M-16 pointed right at the bridge of the man's nose.

"Hold it right there" Schofield said from above and behind the man. "United States Marines."

The man remained frozen.

" Unit Two is in. Secure ," a woman's voice whispered over Schofield's earpiece.

"Unit Three. In and secure."

"All right. We're coming in through the front door."