Dark Winter (38 page)

"Now I'm really getting pissed," Pulaski muttered, glowering for a culprit and finding none. Lewis was already locked up. "Really, really pissed."

"You can't blame Jed for this one," Abby told him.

"Really? Let's figure out what happened first."

"We found Doctor Bob!" someone shouted.

Norse was sitting on the floor of Cameron's old office next to Comms, dazed and coughing in the lingering smoke. He appeared to have been knocked unconscious in the blast. Furniture was awry, papers on the floor like snow. "I was getting ready to make the call!" he choked. "What the hell happened?"

"The worst, near as I can tell," Pulaski told him.

"Clyde said he had to crank up the radios!"

"He cranked them up, all right."

They lifted the psychologist to his feet, Norse blinking from the concussion of the blast. Losing him would cut them from their last anchor. They led him back into the radio room, where everything stank of burnt plastic and rubber. At a glance it was apparent their normal connection to the outside world had been wiped out. "I don't understand what happened," Norse muttered.

"The batteries blew up," said Charles Longfellow, their electrician.

"Yes, but why?"

"They were probably charging. You told us to pull the plug on this place during the communications blackout and the batteries ran down. Clyde had to bring them up again with the generator. Charging always creates hydrogen and oxygen gases, which is the stuff that blew up the Hindenburg. Normally it vents off okay but a spark or a match…"

"Clyde didn't smoke."

"No, something else…" Longfellow was leaning over the wrecked radios and computers, looking for a clue. "There, maybe."

They looked. Two crossing wires, now blackened and bubbled, had frayed down to metal. "When Clyde flipped the radios on, the current could have caused a short," the electrician pointed out. "If the gases weren't venting, then… bang. But I thought the battery compartment had a vent."

They went outside. A sheet of plywood had been shot outward by the explosion. Longfellow kicked it. "This could have been leaning up against the hole," he said, "blocking it."

"Deliberately?" Norse asked.

The electrician just looked at him.

"And the wires. Don't you check them?"

"Twice a year," Longfellow said. "At the beginning and end of summer season. They were fine. There's no reason for them to be abraded like that."

"So what happened?"

He looked at the ruptured building. "Someone wanted this to happen. The bastard didn't just destroy our radios, he shorted out the linkages to the machines and radios on the rest of the station. This place was a hub. Now we're deaf and dumb."

"But why?"

"Someone planned this before Clyde ever threw a switch to recharge the batteries. Someone wanted to destroy our communications. Someone doesn't want us talking about Jed Lewis."

They were panicked now, their vulnerability to accident or sabotage made clear. No one slept for the next twenty-two hours as they fortified their enclosure from a threat they didn't understand. There was no sun anyway, no natural clock, and no place to escape to. Only a suffocating paranoia that seemed to settle on the dome with the weight of the polar night. Pulaski had become transformed by the explosion, a metamorphosis that shed the cook and returned the old soldier. He was Crockett at the Alamo, girding for battle. The garage was ransacked for metal, wood, welding torches, and tools. Brackets were welded in a shower of sparks and beams were placed against the bay doors. Latches were fastened for the smallest doors and fastened with wire, cutters issued to sentries. Their greatest points of vulnerability were the fuel tanks and the generators, and so the fuel arch behind BioMed and the opposite arch leading to Pika Taylor's machines were walled up completely. A frame was built across both half sections of tunnel, and sheets of plywood and metal were nailed across it to prevent any kind of access at all.

"I still know how to get in," Pika said quietly. "No one else has to know. No one else has to get to my machines." He looked from face to face, a slight grin as he regarded them. "You kill me, you die."

The work went in shifts, one group hammering and welding while another warmed up in the galley and gulped down coffee to stay awake. No one was sleeping until they were certain Antarctica was walled off: that Buck Tyson or some malevolent ghost wasn't somehow sneaking into the dome to wreak murder and sabotage, revenge and psychic terror. That some traitor in their midst was not plotting a final catastrophe. The rest of the station was to be abandoned for the time being, the Dark Sector and Clean Air left to slumber in the snow. "We're a turtle," Pulaski explained. "We're drawing into our shell."

The cook insisted that everyone, without exception, be armed. Tyson's old locker was broken into and the knives he'd made were distributed to whoever didn't have one. The recipients regarded them a little dubiously.

"Amundsen-Scott Base," the blade of one read, the legend bracketed by penguins. There wasn't a penguin within eight hundred miles.

"What if we start going after each other with these things?" Gina protested. Like everyone else, she was so cold and sore she could hardly move. The frenzy of getting the dome sealed was holding off their terror but they were also close to a breaking point. Losing Comms had wrung them out. The damage to their communications would take days to repair, especially with Skinner blinded and Abby morose.

"I am a little concerned about arming people to the teeth," Norse admitted. He'd deferred to Pulaski's military expertise in locking up the dome but seemed uneasy with the cook's new martial authority. It had eclipsed his own. "Tempers are short. People are jumpy."

"And so far no more of us are dead," Pulaski answered grimly. "We tried it one way, with all of us wandering around like blind sheep and getting picked off one by one. Now let's try it another way. Strategic deterrence, people. Mutual assured destruction. You take a predator like a mountain lion and they'll back off if you fight back. They don't want to risk injury. They can't risk injury, because if they get hurt they starve. If our murderer is someone other than Lewis, then he or she can't risk injury, either, because they'll be found out. You get jumped, make sure you draw blood. Die if you have to, but scream bloody hell first."

"Jeez, Cueball," Geller said. "Enough drill instructor dramatics, okay?"

"You people are almost asleep on your feet. You need some dramatics."

"I just don't know that we're up to stabbing people," Dana said tiredly.

"Well, someone might be up to stabbing you. That make a difference?"

The New Zealander looked at him gloomily.

"Come here, Dana," Pulaski suddenly said.

"What bloody for?"

"Come here." It was an order and she complied against her own wishes, walking over to the cook. He turned her around to face the others. "You're my Raggedy Ann for a little knife lesson."

"Oh please," she groaned. "I just want to go to my bloody bed."

"Now, listen," he said to the others in the galley. "The whole point of this is that you don't get attacked. That any killer knows that open season is over. But if you are attacked, you don't want to pussy around, right? You want to stop an assailant so they can't stop you, cut them so they can't cut you, make them go down and stay down so you can run for help. Right? Otherwise all you do is piss them off."

They looked at him with exhaustion.

"Stay here a moment," he told Dana. He went to the kitchen and came back with a jar of spaghetti sauce and a basting brush.

"Wade, Jesus Christ, come on- "

"Stand still. This might save your life. Our lives." He dipped in the brush.

"Please…"

He dabbed a splotch of red under her nose and she started. "Hit them here, under the nose. Try to break it. Try to push it upward. It will hurt like hell. If you're lucky, the cartilage will be shoved into the brain and the frontal lobes will bleed and they'll go down permanently." He dipped again and painted her throat. "Hit here. Under the Adam's apple for men is a good pain point. It can chop off air for either sex. With a weapon you can cut an artery, with a blow you can collapse the windpipe. Don't screw around! Don't give your opponent time to do it to you! Not unless you want to get laid out in the snow with Gabriella Reid."

Dana looked at him with distaste.

He dipped again and aimed toward the hollow behind her clavicle. "Next pain point- "

"No." She stepped away, raising her own knife. "Enough. Stay away from me, Cueball. I'm not some damned American killer mercenary."

"Excellent reaction, Dana. Get that knife up. This is exactly my point. I want to make you a damned killer mercenary."

"So I declare my graduation. Enough with the sauce." She walked away and slumped in a chair, throwing her knife with a clatter on the table.

He turned to the others, pointing with the brush. "The solar plexus, right under the rib cage. The abdomen. Breasts if it's a woman, balls if it's a man. The eyes. The ears. Anywhere you can inflict pain. Any way you can get the other guy to hesitate, back off, go down. Listen, I know it's grim, but I'm tired of people dying like rabbits. You gotta look after yourself. I've climbed, I've rafted, I've jumped, I've shot. Look for yourself. Check your own chute. Sharpen your own bayonet. Lock and load, people."

"You're scaring me with all this army stuff," Gina said. "You're going to make us fear every man and woman on this base."

"That's right, Gina. Fear is the one thing that might just keep you alive." He looked at the others. "At the end of the winter, that's all that counts."

"Is that all?" Geller asked wearily.

"No. When we finish boarding things up, I think it would be smart to search each other again as well."

Lewis was dreaming of Arabia. He was on a flat plain, stony and hot, looking for oil. The sky was white, the horizon watery, and he was uneasy because if he didn't find his prize soon he'd lose his job. The oil was under one of the rocks, he knew, but every stone looked alike. Each was the shape of a potato, burnt and glassy, and he was having to turn them over one by one to find what he was looking for. Finally he turned one over and was startled to see a face looking up at him. It was a woman, buried in the sand, her long hair made of strands of quartz and mica. He stepped back in surprise and she rose up out of the desert, robed, her gown made of silicon. It was a gray, shimmering, translucent thing, her body perfect beneath it. The woman was looking at him boldly and he heard himself think, I don't know you, and then the gown turned to sand and slid away, leaving the woman naked except for specks of quartz on her shoulders and thighs and breasts like a scattering of glitter. The merciless glare from the sun turned a cool blue directly above her, a small dark circle giving her a column of shade. Except the woman was now Abby, her hair shorter and her expression shy, and the glitter wasn't sand, it was specks of ice.

Lewis awoke groggily, his dream penetrated by a tapping. The sauna was pitch-black and stuffy, the bench where he lay hard and uncomfortable. He sat up. Someone was knocking at his door. It was the latest in a series of noises that had bewildered him- an explosion, alarms, hammerings, drills, saws. Despite his shouts, no one ever came to explain what was going on. It was like he'd been locked in the sauna and abandoned. It was like being buried in the old base. It was like freezing to death in the pit where they'd found Mickey Moss. His claustrophobia had come back to him.

"Who's there?" His voice was thick, doped from sleep.

"It's Abby. Can I talk to you?"

He was frustrated and embarrassed at his plight. In the end she'd stopped trying to defend him. In the end she hadn't known who to believe. "Go away."

"Jed, please, we're in danger. You've got to let me in."

He didn't answer.

"I'm sorry that I didn't say more in the galley. I was quiet because I had to think things through. I had to trust, first."

"Trust what?"

"Trust who to believe."

He sat there brooding tiredly, feeling angry and frustrated. There was no chance to prove anything to anyone now, locked up in here.

"I decided to believe you," she said.

"Well, hell." He flicked on the sauna light. Pulaski had barred the door from the outside as he'd promised, preventing Lewis from escaping his makeshift prison. But he'd also left the latch working on the inside, preventing anyone from getting in that Lewis didn't want to see.

"We can't afford a guard to protect us from you, and we can't afford a guard to protect you from us," the cook had growled. "I don't want some vigilante coming in here and beating the crap out of you until we know what's going on. So lock the damn door from the inside and don't open it up for anyone but me. Okay?"

Lewis had nodded. He wasn't even going to open it to Pulaski until he was so damn hungry and thirsty that he had to face the cook. Until then he wanted to be alone in his depression, willing himself mentally ten thousand miles from the Pole.

Yet did he? He felt so isolated. And Abby…

He cautiously opened the door, fearing a mob behind her, but it was only the woman. She quickly slipped inside, latching it behind her.

"Jed, I need help," she whispered.

"You need help? What the hell is going on out there, anyway?"

"We're completely cut off from the outside world and we're making prisoners of ourselves. Comms blew up and- "

"What?"

"The batteries exploded. They think it was sabotage. It knocked out the power grid to the outside buildings and everyone's gone nuts. They've barricaded all the entrances with beams and bolts and they're building walls to block off the fuel arch and the generators because that's where we're most vulnerable. We can't get to the fuel and we can't get to the gym and garage anymore. Only Pika knows how to get around them; he's the only one mild enough that everyone trusts him. And he's become some kind of hypochondriac, running off to BioMed all the time like he has a case of the runs. The rest of us are in prison, just like you. They're walling us in against a boogeyman nobody is really sure is out there, until they rebuild the communications hub. It's like a kettle coming to a boil and they've screwed down the lid. I'm worried the whole place is going to explode. I'm worried we're building a firetrap."