Ryan had moved to walk with his old chief, keeping his voice quiet enough so the woman at their head didn’t hear him. “I don’t feel this track starting to go back down toward any lake, do you?”
“No. Climbing up and up. I reckon that we’re starting to move in a half circle, away to the east. Unless the wind’s veered, of course.”
“Think we should tell the whitecoat lady that we want to go home?”
Trader grinned at him, ice hanging from his eyebrows, frosting the stubble on his chin. He blew his nose into the thick white carpet around his boots. “Why don’t you go tell her, good buddy. You’re the one got a soft spot in her heart. If beaten brass had a soft spot at all.”
“AGREED.” Buford had gathered his hunting party around him. They were near the ruins of some kind of shelter, with three walls standing, offering a little protection against the rising wind and driving, blinding snow.
J.B. had insisted that they call an immediate halt, realizing that the way the weather had clamped down meant they were in far more danger from a rogue grizzly than a rogue grizzly was from them.
“It can come at us and be less than fifty feet away and we wouldn’t know. We have the blaster power, but not if it charges. Give us less than two seconds to open fire and stop it. Big mutie bear, like they say it is, won’t just check and turn tail with a couple of charges of buckshot peppering it. More than likely it’ll warm it up some.”
After the speech from the Armorer, Buford stamped his walking stick in the snow. “Right,” he said. “Turn back right now and head for hot showers and warm food. Rest of them’ll probably have already done the same.”
ELLISON GRIMACED as some snow slipped down the gap at the back of his collar. “Reckon we’ve gone far enough here. Haven’t heard any shots, so I figure the other two groups have likely turned back to the institute already. Professors aren’t known for liking any hardship.”
Jak smiled thinly. “Woman whitecoat looks like swallows razor blades for breakfast. Hardship falls off her like water off duck’s ass.”
The sec boss nodded at the albino teenager. “Reckon that there’s something in that, kid.”
“Don’t call me that, Ellison.”
The man weighed him up, finger loose, close to the trigger of the Mossberg. He saw that the slightly built youth was standing, relaxed, the right hand out of sight, somewhere close to the small of his back.
Knife , was what hopped into Ellison’s mind. “Sorry about calling you ‘kid,’ outlander Lauren. You agree about the idea of us turning back now? Or do you want a fine mutie grizzly’s head as a trophy for your wall?”
“Go back,” Abe said quickly.
Jak moved his hand very slowly away from the taped hilt of one of his hidden leaf-bladed throwing knives. “Yeah,” he said. “Go back.”
“ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT!” The woman scientist banged the butt of the Anschutz Kadett bolt-action rifle on the icy rock beneath her feet.
“Not a question of laying blame,” Ryan said urgently. “Fact is we’re lost, right?”
“Yes. But only until the snow clears away. Then I shall be able to locate our position.”
Trader laughed. “Sure you will, lady. Sure you will. But by then we might all be blank-eyed corpses, frozen stiffer than a coon dog’s pecker.”
“Shelter,” Brunner said. “We got way up high on this trail. Freezing so hard now with dark on the way that it’s solid ice behind us. I nearly went over the cliff. Would’ve if not for the outlander. We got food. Find a cave or something like that.”
Thea Gibson glared around, the exposed part of her face as white as bone. “But the snow’s so thick, we can’t see a cave even if we were nearly inside it.”
“We move ahead. Keep close to the cliff on our right. Luck’s with us and we find a shelter.”
“If we don’t?” Trader asked.
“Have to use drifted snow and try to build us a kind of igloo. Snow house. Need to be big for all of us. Wait here, huddled together, until this blows itself out.”