The ship was dead. The only transceivers functional were the shipsuits and the tiny individual rescue units, and Sten was not about to use them. First of all, he assumed that whatever was left of the Imperial Forces would be somewhat busy at the moment, and he also would rather not have any Tahn units homing on any broadcast.
They would have to rescue themselves.
Sten told Kilgour to break out the emergency gear while he and Tapia, who was now semifunctional, attempted to figure out how much rescuing they would need.
It looked to be considerable. The main lock was crushed history. Sten managed to muscle the emergency lock open slightly, then swore as icy water jetted into the ship.
They weren't trapped, at least. They could put on space-suits, put the casualties in bubblepaks, and get out of the Gamble. Which would leave them in very cold water—not a problem in spacesuits—but the water must be refreezing rapidly.
"So we swim out," Sten said.
"Looks like it, sir."
"And we better full-drive it. I don't think any of us except for Kilgour can bash through an ice cube."
Sten and Tapia found Kilgour in a bashing mood. He had just finished going through the ship's emergency supplies. For some reason, sailors never believe they may actually have to abandon ship. And so their emergency kits tend to be maintained perfunctorily and sometimes raided for necessities. The sailors of the Gamble were no different.
"We'll worry about that when we get to the surface," Sten said, "Move them out."
With everyone in the shipsuits and the casualties bubble-pakked, the emergency port was opened fully. Water flooded the compartment. Sten and the others had death grips on anything sturdy. The current boiled around them, and then the water rose over the sailors' heads into the next level.
Kilgour was the first to exit the ship. He held one of the two cutting torches from the Gamble's tiny machine shop. He set it at full power, aimed it up, and cut in his suit's rockets. He started slowly upward through the solidifying sludge of the rapidly freezing lake around the Gamble. A line was snap-linked from his suit to the other crew members.
Sten was the last man out. He hung in the black water outside the port for a moment. This was the end of his first command. At least, he told himself, we went out fighting, didn't we, lady?
Then the line went taut, and Sten started upward. There was something wrong with his suit's cycler. His vision was a bit blurred. That was the explanation. No rational being becomes sentimental over inanimate metal, of course. Definitely something had gone wonky with the environmental controls.
Kilgour's suit rockets, intended for use offworld, gave him just enough power to overcome the spacesuit's neutral buoyancy and drift him toward the surface.
"Be a mo," his voice suddenly crackled in Sten's headphones. "The situation's clottin' strange. Ah seem't to've hit air. But... Skipper, Ah'd like a wee consultation."
Sten undipped from the line and put more power on his suit rockets. He broke through a few centimeters of ice, surfaced beside Alex, and shone his suit light around.
The scene was strange. They floated in a small, rapidly freezing lake created from the water melted by the Gamble's drive and skin heat. Next to them was the battered nose of the Gamble, protruding about half a meter above the ice scum.
That alone was not too strange—but just a couple of meters overhead arced a low, icy ceiling.
"This makes no sense at all," Sten thought out loud.
Tapia surfaced beside him. "Maybe it does," she said. "Do you know anything about snow, sir?"
That wasn't one of Sten's specialities—most of his experience with the stuff came from the snowscape mural that his mother had hocked six months of her life for, back on Vulcan. There had been a couple of Mantis assignments on frozen worlds, but the weather had been just another obstacle, not worth analyzing.
"Not a clottin' lot," he admitted. "As far as I'm concerned, it's just retarded rain."
"That rumble we heard? Maybe that was an avalanche."
"So now we're really buried?"
"Looks like it."
Tapia was exactly right. What had happened was that the Gamble had buried itself in the deep, perpetual snowfield. Its nose was within a few meters of the surface. But 500 meters above the valley, the ship's driveshock had weakened a snowy cornice. It broke free, and a thousand cubic meters of snow and rock avalanched down and across the valley.
The wreckage of the Gamble was buried more than forty meters below the snowfield. When they had opened the emergency port, the water pouring into the ship had lowered the level of the minilake around the Gamble. The ice that had formed at the base of the snow slide now formed the roof of the dome above them.
"Th' problem then," Alex said, "is how we melt on up. Th' suits dinnae hae power enow to gie us airborne. An' tha' snow up there dinnae be load-bearin't."
There was a solution—one that had all the neatness of a melee.
They paddled clumsily, towing the bubblepaks toward the edges of the under-snow lake. Paddling became crawling atop the ice, breaking through, crawling on again, until eventually the surface was solid enough to hold them.
From there, all they had to do was tunnel.
Being in spacesuits, they fortunately didn't have to worry about smothering. Kilgour half forced, half melted his way, curving upward. "Y' dinnae ken Ah wae a miner in m' youth," he said, burning a particularly artistic hairpin bend in the snow.
"Are you sure we're headed up?" Sten asked.
"It dinnae matter, lad. Ae we're goin't up, we'll hit air an' be safe. Ae we're goin't doon, we'll hit sheol an' be warm an' in our rightful place."
Sten scraped snow from where it was icing up on one of his suit's expansion sleeves and didn't answer. Then he noticed something. There was light. Not just light from their suit beams or Kilgour's cutting torch but a sourceless glow all around them.
Seconds later, they broke free onto the surface of Cavite.
Sten unsealed his faceplate. The air tasted strange. Then he realized that he had not breathed unfiltered, unrecycled air for... he realized he couldn't remember.
Helluva way to fight a war, he thought.
And speaking of war, the next step would be finding their way down out of the mountains. And the question was, Would their suit power last long enough for them to hit the warm flatlands? An unpowered suit was as useless as the Gamble, ruined in the ice below them.
One catastrophe at a time, he told himself. Probably his sailors, who had less than no experience at ground combat, would get jumped and massacred by a Tahn patrol first.
It would be warm, at least. Sten turned back to his people and started organizing them for the long march.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
On the third day after the Cavite landings began, Lady Atago transferred her flag from the Forez to a mobile command post on the planet itself. Her headquarters were in a monstrous armored combat command vehicle—dubbed Chilo class by Imperial Intelligence. The huge—almost fifty meters wide by 150 meters long—segmented ACCV traveled on forty triad-mounted three-meter-high rolligons, cleated, low-pressure pillow wheels that gave the vehicle amphibious capabilities as well. Any obstacle the rolligons couldn't pad their way over caused the triad mount to rotate, bringing another wheel into use atop that obstacle. Also, the ACCV was segmented and could twist both vertically and laterally.