“Fireblast,” Ryan growled, looking out at the white expanse of broken terrain before him. “It’s one bastard big rock, but how lost can we get?”
RYAN KEPT THEM moving with the ocean always to the right. If nothing else, they would walk in a giant circle. The problem would be to effectively search the center of the ice mass.
Snow was a problem, too. Piles of it covered the surface, making it necessary to test footing before stepping down through it. Only Jak’s cat-quick reflexes saved him from dropping through a fissure in the iceberg that was thirty feet deep.
After an hour of moving through the cold and the snow, Ryan called a break. They huddled in a little group on the lee side of a massive upthrust of ice that shielded them from most of the wind. They ate double helpings of the self-heats they carried with them from the redoubt. All of them knew the dangers of exposure, and knew that they were burning extra calories simply by being out in the cold.
Even Ryan, as hardened as he was to the harsh life in Deathlands, couldn’t help feeling a little doubtful about their chances.
“You’re thinking too hard, lover,” Krysty said.
Apart in their conversation from the rest of the companions, Ryan nodded. “Can’t help thinking this is a fuck-all place to be.”
“There’s a way, lover.” Krysty touched his face with her gloved hand, and he hated it that the cold had robbed him of the sensation. But the gesture meant a lot. “Over, under or around. There’s always a way. You taught me that.”
“We’ll get it done,” Ryan said. “We haven’t ever been stopped before.”
Then, with a clear, unmistakable intensity, a gunshot rolled over the companions.
RYAN TOOK THE LEAD, matching himself with Jak. He stayed low to the terrain, feeling the added moisture of his breath starting to cake up the handkerchief around his lower face. He held the Steyr at the ready in both hands, but kept the sweatshirt he’d taken from the clothing bins in the redoubt wrapped around the rifle to keep the action from freezing.
Jak paced him, twenty yards away, a pale ghost running against the snow-covered backdrop.
More gunshots echoed over them, coming faster now. Somewhere up ahead, serious gunplay was being dealt out.
Ryan felt more hopeful about the situation. J.B.’s minisextant had revealed they were in the Arctic Circle, somewhere below Greenland, if that place still yet existed. But the population density of the area preskydark hadn’t been heavy. Doc had said that a few shipping lines used the routes during the warm seasons of the year.
But blasters meant men, and men usually meant some way of surviving. He was even further encouraged by the sounds of running engines. Images of boats filled his mind, and he figured he’d never really thought about how good a boat could look until he was thinking about them at that moment.
The land rose up before Ryan, but it was so white and so like the rest of the terrain that he couldn’t tell the difference until he noticed that his angle to the ground had changed. His calf muscles ached from the increased fatigue, the cold and running uphill.
Then he cleared the edge, scanning it tight against the orange skyline for just a moment. The iceberg dropped away below him, cutting inward in a bowl-shaped depression from the shoreline.
Nearly forty people scrambled for cover below, dodging bullets fired at them from eight men ringed around them. The engine noises came from two small airwags that glided over them like giant hornets.
The airwags weren’t true planes. Ryan had seen pics of those before. These were little more than seats with wings and a pusher-prop behind. The wings were nearly three times the length of a man, though the body of the plane might have been barely as long as a man was tall. Trapped in the bowl-shaped depression, the engines sounded loud, popping and snarling.
The forty people running for their lives didn’t have weapons except for bows, arrows and spears. They dressed in furs and homespun clothing. Children ran with the adults, crying out in loud voices.