watched, the gap they had opened with explosives and blasterfire sealed itself shut. Screaming in outrage, pengies continued to wheel past. Then the edge of the churning mob suddenly split away, this time of its own accord, the flock shifting as one to try to flank and surround them.
“Back up!” Adam cried as he lobbed flash-bangs. “Back up!”
Rocking blasts of concussion, light and sound knocked the initial wave of pengies onto their butts, chest feathers blackened and smoking from the burning cordite. As Adam pulled grenades from his harness, unharmed birds rushed past, lunging and stabbing down at him with their beaks.
A second later a shrill scream erupted in his earphones. When he looked over his shoulder, he saw that Brad had been caught from behind. A pengie loomed over him, its head buried to the eyeballs in his back. Its beak had been driven all the way through and come out his chest—the tip making a tent in the orange fabric of his coldsuit. Brad’s legs churned wildly, his boots slipping on the ice as he tried to get a foothold, arms waving as he grasped for his assault rifle.
Before Adam could drop the grenades and swing up his own weapon, two more pengies attacked the skewered man. Rearing back their heads, they slammed their curved beaks into his chest. Brad’s legs stiffened; his faceplate fogged over as he unleashed a terrible cry of agony. Like nightmare woodpeckers, heads bobbing, the pengies punctured him over and over. They weren’t trying to hit his heart. They were trying to spear him as many times as they could without killing him. To drag out his ordeal.
Adam looked down his rifle sights and fired as the nearest pengie reared back for another strike. The slug plowed through the creature’s neck. As it toppled to the ice, its head lolled at an impossible angle, connected to the torso by a thin layer of skin and muscle. When the bloody-beaked second pengie turned to attack him, he put five quick single shots into its center chest. Each impact sent it sliding backward, little wings flapping madly for balance, back, back, back, then it dropped.
The third pengie shook off Brad’s body, letting it collapse to the ice. Before it could take a step toward Adam, he shot it once through the left eye. A gush of brains exploded out of the back of its skull. Against the white of the ice sheet, the feathers floating down looked like wisps of black ash.
Adam rushed over to Brad and gently turned him over. The inside of his face mask was opaque, tinted red from sprayed blood. His wounds were too many to count, and he was already gone. He had bled out.
The rocking boom of flash-bangs jerked him back to the present danger. The others were beating back the flock, holding ground while the hovertruck circled overhead. Adam shouldered his rifle and took aim at the birds. As much as he wanted to kill them all, he raised his sights and fired a sustained burst over their heads.
The high-visibility red, stubby winged aircraft landed on the ice behind them. William remained at the controls, ready for a quick takeoff, while Adam and the others loaded the cargo bay. Dragging the bodies to the rear ramp, they daisy-chained them to the winch and hauled them inside, five at a time. The unbroken, thirty-pound eggs were deposited in specially built cradles spaced along the interior walls.
During the loading, the pengies made another attempt at counterattack, but it was halfhearted. A few well-placed grenades turned them back.
Brad’s mutilated body was loaded last. They carefully put him in a hammock of cargo netting, then climbed one by one into the cockpit.
“Where the fuck’s Brad?” William asked, his eyes going wide behind his faceplate.
“He didn’t make it,” Adam said. “Take us home.”
“Son of a bitch!” The pilot pounded the armrest of his flight chair with a balled fist. “Son of a frozen bitch!” Revving the aft turbines to redline, he lifted off the ice with a tremendous jolt, banked a steep, gut-wrenching turn and put the polar wind behind them.
They flew in silence back across the ice sheet, then north along the edge of a whitecapped, indigo blue McMurdo Sound, past the sprawling, rocky debris field of the McMurdo station ruins. There was no talk about Mama’s favorite pengie recipes. Or the joy of the hunt. None of the usual friendly ribbing.
One of their own lay dead in the back.
Ryan struggled in mat-trans-induced unconsciousness, muscles twitching, jaws clenching and unclenching. In the dream he was buried alive deep underground, trapped in a narrow grave and dying by inches, starting at the tips of his extremities. The burning pain in his fingers and toes was so intense it made his legs and arms tremble. When the blowtorch flame spread to his ears, nose and lips, he jolted wide-awake, only to discover he was blinded.
Try as he might, he could not open his good right eye. Years ago he’d lost the left to a knife slash from his brother Harvey; the emptied socket was covered by a black patch. Shivering violently from the cold, he couldn’t force his numbed fingers to move. He brushed his eyelid back and forth with the bare heel of his hand. The lashes had frozen together; he kept rubbing until he managed to separate them.
Groaning, he pushed up to a sitting position, breath gusting out in thick clouds of steam. The walls of the mat-trans chamber spun around him and he thought he was going to be sick, then the moment passed. The only light spilled through the porthole window in the door. He could see frozen rivulets of ice on the glass. The porthole was something new.
Frost coated the clothing and hair of the six bodies curled up beside him. They had been sleeping in the cold for a long time.
Maybe too long.
The risk of mat-trans jumping to their deaths was a given because the destination was always random—they never knew what they were jumping into. That his companions would all die while he lived on was a possibility he hadn’t considered.
“Wake up, wake up,” he said, with an effort nudging each of them with the toe of his boot.
Groggily, his companions began to stir. He was relieved to see that no one had died of exposure.
J.B. raised his head from the floor plates and brushed milky icicles of jump puke from his chin. The Armorer’s fedora was tilted way back on his head. He reached a shaky hand into his shirt pocket, retrieved his spectacles and put them on. From between chattering teeth he said, “N-n-n-nukin’ h-h-h-hell.”
As Krysty, Mildred, Doc, Jak and Ricky struggled to sit upright, Ryan caught a shadow of movement on the far side of the porthole.
“Triple red, quick!” Ryan said. He reached for his Scout longblaster, which lay beside him, but the stock had frozen to the floor plates and it wouldn’t budge.
With a clank and a whoosh the door swung open.
Ryan grabbed for the SIG Sauer handblaster holstered at his waist, but couldn’t make his fingers close on the grip.
Human-looking figures in tightly hooded orange jumpsuits poured into the chamber with raised longblasters. Their faces were hidden behind glass masks and black respirators. He couldn’t tell if they were norm or mutie.
“Do not touch your weapons,” the one in front said, the voice distorted, muffled by the breathing filter. “Do not resist. We will help you out of here.”
Resistance was not only futile, it was impossible. Ryan’s body would not obey his commands.
He
