Ryan wore the handkerchief around his lower face again, partly to keep out the water and partly to keep warm. The storerooms had also yielded new socks and underwear, all of them thermal lined. There hadn’t been much in Albert’s size, but the dwarf had made do.
Jak knew what he was doing when he set the pitons. The redoubt had also contained an enormous amount of rope. Between the pitons and the rope, Ryan knew he and the teenager were crafting a stairway that the others could follow safely.
“Ready,” Jak called down.
“Go,” Ryan said, and dug into his position.
The albino removed one of his safety harnesses and latched it to the new piton he had in place. He pulled himself up and tied on to the new one, then reached for another piton.
Ryan hung on, feeling the wind pull at him with icy claws.
IT TOOK MORE THAN two hours for all of them to reach the summit of the iceberg.
Ryan stared out over the uneven terrain at the top. During the long climb, he had imagined several different ways that it might have looked. Seeing it still seemed a little stunning.
The top of the glacier was made up of a number of plateaus. Several of them held jagged edges, showing how the frozen surface had shaped then been reshaped by the elements. It was a nightmare rendered in cold white edges, stretching out as far as his eye could see.
“Dark night,” J.B. yelled to be heard above the crash of surf below and the howling wind above. “All I’ve seen in this life, Ryan, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Ryan swiveled from their lofty perch, taking in the various icebergs surrounding them. He’d taken a compass reading again at the mouth of the access tunnel, and it had showed that their iceberg was facing eight degrees farther south than it had previously.
“Looks like herd of icebergs,” Jak commented. With the cold making his pale face even more white, his ruby eyes stood out like blood spots.
“And all headed south for the winter,” Mildred said.
As they watched, three of the icebergs went completely to pieces, breaking and shattering in small white storms that left hardly anything visible above the ocean’s surface. Their own iceberg shook and shivered, as well.
“You have to wonder where all those pieces of ice come from,” Krysty said. “Makes me curious about what it must have looked like during the fiercest part of the cold after the nuclear winter.”
“Probably like nothing you’d ever want to see,” Dean said quietly. “I got no curiosity about seeing it. Be glad when we get off this one.”
“I’ve been small all my life,” Albert said, “but seeing this, going through that gateway like you people call it, makes me feel real small.”
“We’re all small when you get right down to it,” Ryan stated. “It’s up to a person how big of a footprint they want to leave when they step out of this life. That’s what Trader always said.” He shook himself, then resettled his gear over his body. “Let’s move out. Jak, you and me are going to run point. Dean, you’re walking drag with J.B., and make sure you don’t lose sight of him and he doesn’t lose sight of you.”
“Right, Dad.”
“Mildred, Krysty, you two are walking the middle, kind of loose wing positions. Not going to need to get spread out too far because we’re going to keep this narrow. Doc, you and Albert are next.”
“I have only one small question, my dear Ryan,” the old man said. The wind blew his silvered lock over his shoulders where they were free of the muffler around his lower face.
“What?” Ryan asked irritably. He didn’t have time for Doc’s usual addle-brainedness with the iceberg sinking beneath them.
“How do you propose we find our way back to this place?” Doc asked.
“Got the compass,” Ryan said.
“And with the shifting this deep-sea diamond in the rough is doing,” Doc said, “I do not think you can count on the readings you are going to get from that compass.”
“Doc’s right,” J.B. agreed. “If we get enough of a drift, even the minisextant isn’t going to be much use. Especially if we get in a hurry.”