"Gotcha," Mike said. "Well get the stuff. You relax."
Relax while a giant named Thor cuts me out of my suit. Sure.
They wrapped them in blankets. Sherrine and Thor had to carry him to the sled. He couldn't walk, and could barely stand. Gordon was still out. They carried him over as well. Sherrine settled him onto the sled and put on more blankets, then a white sheet. "Should I?" she asked.
"Should you what?"
"Like the way the 'danes run things."
Alex tried to shrug under the blankets. "It's not my world; but they did try to shoot me down."
Mike Glider--he called himself "Mycroft"--loomed over him. "They did more than try, Gabe-boy," he said. "They did it."
"That they did." If I'd turned back, after the first missile-- But damn all, we needed the nitrogen. "My name's Alex, not 'Gabe.' " Talking wasn't easy. The air was cold, horribly cold.
The fat man spread his arms out. "Code names. You're Gabriel; the kid is Raphael. Two angels. Get it?" He took his place on the sledge runners.
Alex wondered how any human being could become as fat as Mike. Perhaps it was an adaptation to the ice age. Heat loss was proportional to surface area; and the sphere had the lowest surface area to volume ratio of any solid.
"Saint Michael was an angel, too," he pointed out.
Mike brightened. "Hey, that's right. Do you think I could go up with you guys when they come to get you?"
Alex didn't say anything. MacLeod's First Rule of Wilderness Survivaclass="underline" Don't piss off your rescuers. But Lonny would never take someone like Mike aboard. Whatever Mike's intellect and training, he was just too damn big. It would take too many resources to fuel that much mass.
They're not corning down for us anyway. We are here for keeps, and Mike is a hell of a lot better adapted to local conditions than I am. "Where to now?" he asked.
"Back to my grandparents' place," Sherrine answered. "So we can return the equipment they loaned us. Bob's waiting for us there with the van." She shook out a bedsheet and hauled it over her head. A slit cut in the middle let her wear it like a poncho. Alex saw that the others were doing the same. But the sheets were too thin to give much warmth, so why--
"To hide yourselves," he said. "Right?"
She paused and grinned at him. "It was my idea," she said. "Camouflage. Not even Bruce thought of it. This way, if a search plane flies over, we'll be hard to spot. Gran said it would be worth the work sewing the sheets back up if it meant getting you two safely off the Ice."
"Your grandparents sound like good folks."
"They are. Gran was a plant geneticist before they outlawed it. Pop-pop was a farmer. They still do a little bootleg bioengineering in their basement. Developed a cold-resistant strain of wheat that let them bring in a crop for three years after their neighbors went under. They had to stop last year, though. Gran seeded a rust virus that killed off their crop."
"What? Why? If they'd continued--Sherrine, it's going to get a lot colder before it ever gets warmer."
She looked away; beat her mittens together. "Hungrier, too." Her voice was hard and angry. "But their neighbors--their good, kindly, salt-of-the-earth neighbors were starting to talk about witchcraft. They couldn't imagine any other reason why my grandparents' wheat thrived while theirs died. Peasants always believe in witchcraft." She seated herself on the snowmobile attached to his sledge. Her back was turned and he could not see her face.
Bruce Hyde, code-named "Robert," planted himself behind the other sledge. "Everybody ready?" he asked. Doc Waxman took the second snowmobile. Thor and Steve Mews, the black man, were on cross-country skis. They adjusted their sunglasses and waved. Bruce checked his Navstar transponder and circled his arm above his head. "Warp factor five, Mr. Sulu!"
The snowmobiles started with a roar. Searchers might find us hard to see, Alex thought, but we sure as hell would be easy to hear.
And, dammit, they would stick out for sure on an IR screen. Eight warm-bodied needles in a very cold haystack. And the two snowmobile engines would glow like spotlights.
Alex tried to scan the skies for search planes, but found himself oddly disoriented. The sky was white and the ground was white, and it was hard to tell which was which. "White-out," Mike had called it. "Sky" was "forward," the direction along the acceleration vector. Yet, the visual cues--the ice sliding past the sledge--were at right angles to his sense of acceleration. He began to feel dizzy. He closed his eyes. Give it time, he thought. Let the reflexes catch up to his intellectual awareness. The old-time astronauts had always readjusted quickly to gravity.
Except they hadn't been in free fall as many years as he had. The stations had drugs to compensate for calcium losses, and two tethered ships that spun to make a quarter gee, but it wasn't the real thing. Besides, everyone hated it.
Alex looked at his watch. "Aim this thing south." He indicated the antenna. "South and up. It's not too directional, just get it aimed in the right general direction. We have a relay in geosynch."
Sherrine nodded. None of them wanted to talk. It was too cold.
He tongued his uplink. "Big Momma, this is Piranha." More hiss and crackle. "Big Momma, this is Piranha." Sherrine looked the question at him. He shook his head. "Big Momma, this is Piranha."
"Piranha, da. Eto Mir. We relay you. Please to be standink by."
He waited. Freedom would be below the horizon. Fortunately, there was always something in the sky. The RCA communications satellites, capable of relaying half the long-distance calls of the world, only the world didn't want them anymore. Now this splendid system, capable of thousands of simultaneous calls, served the space stations and the few people on Earth who wanted to talk to them.
"Alex, this is Mary. What is it?" Alex thought she sounded tired, and who could blame her? She had been standing by in Mission Control ever since the launch. She must have been catnapping right at the console. Quickly and concisely, he told her of their IR visibility.
"I don't know what we can do about that, Alex, except to keep you posted on troop movements so you can avoid them. Their search planes have been quartering steadily southeast toward your position."
"Give them decoys."
"Say again?"
"Give them bogeys. I've got it scoped out. Have SUNSAT beam down a few hotspots here and there around the glacier. If they're, looking for IR targets, let's give 'em their heart's desire."
Mary fell silent and Alex could sense her working through the calculations. Power was the one thing besides people that the habitats could spare. Space was full of power, supplied by a friendly, all-natural nuclear fusion generator. All you had to do was catch it…
SUNSAT did that. The U.S. government had nearly completed a demonstration power satellite before the Congress changed their minds and proxmired it. They'd needed the money for dairy farm subsidies or corporate bailouts or something else real useful. The entire space budget, start to finish, was less than what HEW had spent in a decade, less than the cost overruns at the Defense Department; but space was "frills," so they always cut there first. The station had floated in orbit, nickels and dimes away from being operational, until the crunch came and the habitats decided to cut loose from Earth.