The exoskeletons did however afford excellent protection from the elements. As they raced along, faster than an automobile could travel on open road, they felt no breeze on their faces. The air inside the force field was cold, but the warm clothes they had purchased in South Africa were more than enough to ward off the chill. Hurley and Hobbs had no difficulty mastering the intuitive control system, and within a few minutes they were all confidently gliding through the seemingly endless polar night.
They soon began to see large icebergs, pale blue against the inky ocean, and at the first opportunity, Hurricane dropped down and deactivated his exoskeleton while the other men hovered nearby. When he rejoined them, a dusting of ice crystals had formed in his eyebrows.
“Cold,” he said through chattering teeth. “It’s only going to get worse the further we go.”
“Are we on course?”
The big man scowled. “No. According to the compass, we’re twenty degrees from where we ought to be. Evidently we’re not keeping as true a course as I thought.”
“How is that possible?” Dodge’s question was understandably rhetorical; none of them possessed enough knowledge about the exoskeletons to even attempt an answer.
“I can make an educated guess to get us back on course, but if we can’t keep to a straight line, we could very well miss it completely.”
The dire prediction was underscored half an hour later when they reached what appeared to be the main icepack and Hurley risked another blast of bitter cold to check their progress. Despite their best efforts, they had deviated from their southerly heading. Taken with their first error, they now faced the very real possibility that they might never find the enemy’s headquarters.
“What now?” asked Hobbs in his usual dispassionate monotone.
Dodge glanced at both men and realized the clergyman had been asking him. “We keep going,” he declared. “We can always double back, or run some kind of search pattern once we reach the turnaround point. It’s not like we really have a choice.”
The Padre’s lips curled in a faint grin, and Dodge knew he had once again said something that reminded the men of their former leader. Big shoes to fill, he thought.
The weather grew steadily worse as they progressed. Although they could not feel the frigid wind blasting against their energy shields, the force of the air mass was nevertheless pushing against them, nudging them further off course. By the time they reached their turnaround point — an arbitrary position determined by the estimate of how far their enemy could have traveled in three hours — they were engulfed in blizzard-like conditions. Not only was it completely out of the question for Hurricane to drop his force field, even for a few seconds, to check their position, but it was quite likely that they had passed right by their objective and not seen it.
Dodge was beside himself. He had failed his duty to the President and worse, he had failed his friends. Unable to get their bearings, they faced the very real possibility that, if the weather didn’t change, they might wander the icy wilderness until they perished. He turned to offer a futile apology to the other men, but they weren’t there. Though they had diligently maintained visual contact throughout the night, a curtain of ice had fallen between them for the briefest instant. When he tried to push through, he found only more swirling ice.
He called their names, shouting into the maelstrom, but heard only the rush of wind against his force field. Seconds of panic grew into minutes of desperation, and ultimately a final, horrible revelation: He was lost and alone in the most desolate place on earth.
Molly pulled the blanket tighter in a vain effort to shut out the pervasive chill. She knew part of it was in her head; the absence of her friends and the inky blackness outside the windows made it seem much colder than it really was, and the constant pitching of the hull as it rolled over the swells didn’t help.
She drew some comfort from the old shotgun resting on her lap. It had belonged to her father — the sire of her blood, if not also her heart — once upon a time, and while it hadn’t been enough to save his life, she liked to think of it as his way of looking out for her.
After a while, the rolling deck and the rumble of the engines lulled her to sleep. It was a deep but peaceful repose; her body succumbed to a depth of exhaustion that her pride had denied. Yet, despite the depth of her dreamless state, she came instantly awake when she heard the noise.
It was soft sound and ought to have been inaudible given the constant chugging of the idling engines, but it was just different enough that she was immediately alert and on her guard. The blanket fell away as she leaped to her feet, brandishing the shotgun.
But she was already too late.
She fired off a blast of buckshot at the nearest figure, point blank range, but the pellets never reached their target. Before she could load another shell, the weapon was torn from her hands, and then a blast of brilliant white light returned her to the dark void of unconsciousness.
CHAPTER 17
THE OUTPOST
After a while, Dodge recalled his mother’s advice about getting lost — stay in one place and let someone find you. It was sage advice in most conceivable crises since it assumed that there would be a rescue party, but Dodge had to wonder if it would work in this remote wilderness, where the only possible searchers were also lost. Still, in the absence of any better strategy, it was something to do.
When he realized it was impossible to actually remain in one place, he blindly lowered down until he felt something solid beneath his feet, but even in this he was confounded. The near constant winds pushed him across the icy landscape as easily as when he was aloft. Worse, the blizzard-like blasts came at him from all angles, shoving him back and forth like the ball in a bagatelle game. Even when it seemed that the wind had died, he could hear the ice scraping by underfoot. After a few minutes, he discovered that it was not the wind at, but something else entirely.
I’m being pulled.
It was like magnetic force; a steady irresistible pull that wasn’t as strong as the wind, but was nonetheless constant. A blast of air might knock him back a few yards, or spin him off at an angle, but immediately thereafter, he would resume moving in the original direction.
It’s the exoskeleton, he thought. It’s being attracted to… what?
He impulsively unbuckled the exoskeleton to test this hypothesis…
…and almost died.
His extremities instantly seized in place. The cold was so absolute that his breath was snatched away, and he could do nothing except lay in a fetal ball as his skin started to freeze.
The dark god watched as his minions carried the unconscious girl onto the flying disc. He did not know who she was, but her presence here was testimony enough that his enemies had gone on ahead to find his last redoubt, and find it they would. The original engineers of the place had implemented the simplest of devices to guide fellow travelers to what was otherwise an impossible to find location.
He barely remembered his own first encounter with the ice cave and nothing at all of what had gone before. His emergence from the frozen stronghold, equipped with the mysterious technology of a long-forgotten society, had been a rebirth. He could only surmise that, in the same figurative sense, he had died upon entering that place which was both tomb and womb.