Dark Winter

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

They sat in the galley in sick indecision, listening to the hum of the ventilation system and half expecting it to go off as the power died. If they hunted down and confronted Norse, they risked Abby. If they didn't go after him, they might risk themselves: How did they know the psychologist wasn't sabotaging the station? Yet they were emotionally depleted. After the near-disaster with Lewis, none had the stomach to sacrifice Abby for the group right now by confronting the psychopath. A showdown might prompt Norse to somehow not just shoot her, but damage the fragile machinery that kept them alive. Maybe it was safer to wait. Maybe he would simply keep his word and drive away.

It was a depressed silence, each of them profoundly alone, a cataloguing of misgivings and second guesses and confused doubts. Norse had robbed them of their own self-confidence. He'd drained them of purpose.

"I don't get it," Pulaski finally said. "How can a man hate all of us like that? Hate his own kind?"

Lewis was in no mood for philosophy. "Easy. By hating himself."

"And if he hates himself, why? What the hell did he do?"

"Who knows? I think he lost it completely when he strangled Gabriella. Before that maybe it's something he didn't do once. Something he's been trying to justify to himself."

"Justify by killing people."

"By getting us to act like the fools he thinks we are. Maybe we'll find out someday, if we get through this."

"It would have to be something pretty bad, wouldn't it? Something to really make you feel terrible about life?"

Lewis looked at the cook for a long time and then let his gaze drift around the room. Geller. Calhoun. Dana Andrews. Alexi Molotov. Accusers. Executioners. "Yes," he finally said. "Like tying an innocent man to a stake at the Pole." He couldn't hide the bitterness.

Everyone looked away.

He should have bit it back but Norse's taunting had hit home. Lewis was angry, sore, depleted. He'd lived, yes, but some vital part of him seemed to have gone: He felt that he'd died a little just by being strapped to that stake. He wondered if he'd ever get that part of himself back. Basic optimism. Trust.

He'd come looking for community and they'd been willing to dispose of him. The harder he'd tried, the worse things seemed to get. So here he was, the woman he was falling in love with in the hands of a madman, without a friend and without a future. Welcome to the Three Hundred Degree Club, buddy.

Sitting in a metal box, waiting like dumb poultry for their fate. That's what Norse would have predicted, wouldn't he?

Predicted that, at the end, none of them would be talking to each other.

He'd played with them.

What if he was still playing with them?

It was the first thought to jolt Lewis out of his depressed apathy. What was Norse's game now? They had nothing but the word of a killer that he'd ever let Abby go. That he wouldn't damage the station. There were, what? He counted. Seventeen of them. Abby, the eighteenth, and then Norse. Six dead, assuming Tyson had succumbed. And…

Where the hell was Pika?

The little man was so quiet he was easy to miss.

Lewis stood up, suddenly terribly concerned but not certain what he was concerned about. The lethargy! They had to shake it off! Norse was counting on it to give himself time to get away. Get away with Abby. Get away with… what?

Seventeen against one.

What the hell were they sitting there for?

The others were eyeing him uncertainly.

"Cueball, did you get a look at his gun?"

Pulaski shrugged. "Barely."

"Is it real?"

The cook looked at Lewis speculatively, his own energy pricked slightly by the geologist's. "It looked real to me. Won't know unless we jump him."

"How many shots does he have?"

"Well, a real gun would have been picked up in the detectors when he came down here, so his looked pretty crude, a bunch of homemade parts." Pulaski thought. "I saw two barrels, which suggests there's no chamber for extra bullets. Probably just two shots, like a double-barreled shotgun, until he has time to reload. Who knows how many bullets? What are you thinking?"

"That we've been letting him control events since the winter began. And that we're still letting him, by sitting here."

The cook looked doubtful. "You want to risk Abby, Jed?"

"You think she's not already at risk? After all that's happened? Norse says he's going to leave, but how?"

"The Spryte," Geller spoke up. "Like Tyson tried. Norse was curious about it from the beginning. Load a sled with food and fuel and take off across the plateau. It's risky, but he knows he's dead if he stays here. If we'd killed you, maybe he would have gotten away with the whole thing, but not now. His only chance is to go to the Russians and try to bribe his way off the continent with the meteorite."

"Norse is a good talker, but it doesn't make sense. It's him against eighteen or nineteen witnesses, and he knows we'll get the radios back up sometime, that we'll alert NSF and the Russians."

"He's crazy, Jed," Calhoun offered.

"Is he? If Norse takes that Spryte, he not only gets away with murder, but he takes away our only emergency exit in case something goes wrong. What if he's screwing up the base right now, sentencing us all?"

"He can't get to the fuel or generators," Pulaski said. "We sealed those up."

"So how is he getting to the garage to get the Spryte? When you sealed off the generator room you sealed off the garage, too, didn't you?"

That stopped them.

"Maybe he's breaking in or something," Geller said. "He'd have to. Pika is the only one who knows a way to get in. Who has a key."

Lewis let his eyes scan the room. "So where's Pika?"

Heads turned, their apathy becoming alarm. Had Norse kidnapped him, too?

"If Bob is planning to bring down the temple like some kind of deranged Samson, we need him alive to tell us how to defuse whatever he's cooked up. Don't we? We can't afford to let him set off for Vostok because then he's free to pull the plug on this place. Booby-trap it, like the batteries in Comms."

"Set a fire," Pulaski said. "Cut a cable."

"We're sitting like hams in a can, waiting for him to do it."

They looked at the galley door. What if Norse had anticipated this very conversation? What if he was outside the door, waiting for one of them to test his threat? Or was he already firing up the Spryte, the station generators about to explode?

"Maybe we need to get out of here and into emergency shelter," Dana said quietly. "Run the bloody hell to Bedrock Village."

"If it comes to that. But I'm not sure I'm willing to write off the rest of the station for this guy. Willing to sit out there, hoping for the best."

"I hear you on that," Mendoza said.

"If he's got Pika's keys, or Pika himself," Lewis reminded them, "he can go anywhere, do anything. We're letting a lunatic roam the station."

"And if we go charging out there, we're not only going to get some of us killed, but Abby, too," Linda Brown warned. "If we just wait maybe it will be over."

"Or not. Maybe his experiment hasn't stopped. Why should we believe it has?"

Everyone was looking at Lewis uneasily, suddenly restless, suddenly uncertain again. Every choice seemed risky.

"I care for Abby more than any of you. But Norse is counting on us to react, not anticipate. That's been his expectation from the beginning. He's counting on us to be a step behind him."

"He said if we go out that door- " Linda began.

"That's my whole point. He said."

"But what do you want us to do?"

Lewis stopped. What should they do? He thought a moment. "If he sees us coming, he's got more chance to hurt Abby or hurt the station. We need to take him by surprise. If he's really fleeing, then he has to already be in the garage gassing up. Right? He's got to be getting ready. So he can't see us. There's only one of him. Let's go outside, circle around to the garage doors, and jump him when he comes out."

"What about the generators?" Mendoza said. "What if he's rigged them to blow when he leaves? Blow if we come at him?"

Lewis paused. "Is that possible?"

"Who knows? He seemed awfully sure we won't survive long enough to sic the authorities on him."

"Okay, how about this? A few of us should go that way- sneak into the garage the back way in case he tries to retreat. Check for any sabotage. Take him from behind with the rest in front. We'll surround the bastard."

"How do we get in?"

"The same way Norse did, I hope. I just remembered something. Pika's been going to BioMed like a horse to a feed bag but there's no sign he's sick. When I found Nancy in the storeroom there was a cabinet askew, a panel behind it, and I'm wondering now if there's some kind of utility access there to the arches. I'd like to take Longfellow through in case there's some electrical thing Norse has rigged to booby-trap our power. You, too, Carl. See if we can find Abby before he takes off in the Spryte, and get her safe. Then the rest of you can block him."

"He's got a gun!" Linda Brown reminded.

"Homemade, we think. With two shots."

The others looked queasy, apprehensive, but with a slowly hardening resolve. They'd lost all sense of control. Maybe, following Lewis, they could somehow get it back.

"If any one of us tries it alone we'll be killed," Lewis said. "Any two of us, maybe. But with all of us, everyone distracting him…" He shrugged. "We win."

"With casualties," Pulaski warned.

"But not as lame victims."

Geller was nodding, too. He stood up. "I agree. We're sitting here like sheep."

"So we give him a shot at us?" Linda asked.

"We ambush him."

Others were nodding now, too. The idea of doing something, acting together, was beginning to reenergize them.

"I just want him to go away," Linda moaned.

"No. Because if he gets away, he wins," Lewis said. "He leaves us like lab rats, pressing levers and chasing cheese. Don't you see? Norse wants to erase everything Mickey Moss built by making us give up on it ourselves."

It was disorienting listening now to Lewis, the man they'd almost killed.

So it was Clyde Skinner who ended the last hesitation. He unsteadily stood.

"I don't want him to get away with my eyes."

Lewis stepped out of the galley first, bracing for a shot despite the bland certainty about Norse's movements he'd conveyed to the others. What if he was wrong?

But no shot came. The shadowy dome seemed empty, a soft slough of wind audible through the hole at the top of the dome. He heard nothing else, saw nothing else. So he stepped down to the snow and waved the others out, watching them pour silently like a line of emerging bees, trotting across the snow to the junction of the archways where the ramp was. Still no Bob. To the left and right were the barrier walls they'd erected to seal off the fuel supply and generators. They hadn't been breached, and the door to the outside was still bolted and locked. If he was in the garage, Norse had followed Pika's way.

"Okay, there has to be some kind of tunnel or corridor," Lewis told the others. "Go outside and get in position, we'll push from behind. Stay low, but move fast once it starts. With luck, we'll surprise him."

Pulaski unlocked the dome's smaller side door and the winter-overs began filing out into the night, going up the ramp as they had before to stake out Lewis. This time, if Lewis was right, they'd stop the Spryte. If wrong, they'd retreat to the emergency camp at Bedrock and regroup. Pulaski had told them that the galley suddenly seemed like the worst kind of trap.

"Unless Bob wants us to abandon the galley," Hiro muttered.

"We Yanks had a general named Grant once whose officers were always spooked by a general named Lee," Pulaski told him. "Grant told them to stop worrying what Lee was going to do and start thinking what they were going to do."

"What happened?"

"They won the war."

Lewis turned with Longfellow and Mendoza to BioMed. The trio studied the sick bay module, which stood on stilts a foot above the snow. Crouching, Lewis could now see there was one point at the rear where a metal culvert led from the sick bay floor down into the snow. Stepping back to view its roof, he noted there was a tube of utility piping that reached to the arched ceiling above, conduits spreading like branches. Some kind of artery ran up the back of BioMed like a spine. It was here, he was certain, that Pika went in and out.

With everyone suspect, no one had been trusted to have access to their power supply. The necessary exception had been their generator mechanic. Norse must have coerced him into showing the way. Coerced him into getting the Spryte.

BioMed's door was half open; the snapped lock had made it impossible for the fugitive to secure it after himself. The three men went inside. It was much as before except that Skinner's bed was empty. Medical supplies remained scattered, drawers askew, the shelves where Lewis had been tackled were still toppled. The cold had invaded, and broken liquids had frozen into thin platters. Lewis went to the rear room. Poor Nancy Hodge lay in the wreckage of her life, her corpse stiff from cold. In the confusion that had followed the murder, her body had been shockingly forgotten. Now she'd have to wait even longer for commemoration. Lewis stepped over her to the cabinet he'd seen dragged askew.

He saw the panel in back of it was now removed. Cold air swirled into BioMed from the dark air beyond. Had Pika been forced to show this entryway to Norse?

Lewis poked his head in and looked downward. No light, but a faint glimmer from spaces beyond. He couldn't risk his own light. If he came upon Norse, he wanted it to be a surprise, which meant claustrophobic gloom again. "I hate tunnels," he murmured to Longfellow.

"Well, it can't be a very long one. I'll go first."

"No, I will, because it was my idea. Just in case he uses that gun."

Taking a breath, he climbed into the shaft and dropped down the short ladder inside it, finding himself in a utility culvert that led in both directions under the archways. Pipes ran here, more than he'd ever suspected existed. The station was as complex as a spaceship. He wondered if Tyson had hidden in here somewhere after Cameron was stabbed. There was enough light from the opening overhead to dimly see and he considered for a moment which way to go. In the direction of the fuel arch it was dark, with a sound like water running. Unlikely Norse would go that way: It was opposite of the garage. Back under the other archway, toward the generators and Spryte, there was a dim light of another opening. He began crawling in that direction, Longfellow and Mendoza following.

It was a tight, grubby, cold place, the thing Lewis hated most. But Pika must have come this way on his regular rounds to keep the plant running. Had Norse and Abby passed here, too? It occurred to Lewis that maybe the psychologist had known about this escape hatch all along. That maybe that's why he'd agreed to Pulaski's determination to seal up the archways, to lock them in the dome. But why would Pika tell him?

Lewis came to an opening overhead that light issued from and could hear the reassuring drum of the generators beyond. At least Norse hadn't cut their power. Cautiously he poked his head up and glanced around. As expected, he was in a corner of the generator room. No one. He pulled himself out of the tunnel and crouched near the reserve generator. The electrician and astronomer came up beside him.

"You see anything out of the ordinary?"

Longfellow crept from machine to machine. The middle one was drumming faithfully. No wires, no bombs, no monkey wrenches. "I think he's left them alone."

Lewis was surprised. Maybe Norse didn't care if he left witnesses. Maybe he was tired of killing. Maybe there was some booby trap they couldn't see.

"We have to make sure," Mendoza said.

"We do that by catching him," Lewis replied.

The three men began cautiously moving toward the gym and garage, giving the others time to circle around in the snow.

Suddenly there was the sharp pop of a gun. Lewis reflexively dropped at the bang, flinching from the expected whine of a bullet. Had Norse spotted them? The others fell with him. But there was no buzz, no thud of a projectile striking a hard surface, and he realized the bullet would have reached him before the bang anyway. The shot had been aimed at someone else. Had Norse gotten in a struggle with Abby? His stomach tightened at the thought of it. "Come on," he hissed. "Let's rush him." Determined to risk a confrontation, he moved forward. The others scuttled after him. Ahead there were footsteps and the slam of a door.

The gym was dark, the door to the garage beyond closed. Lewis trotted ahead and then tripped on something in the gloom, sprawling. Damn! Raggedy Ann, the CPR doll? He reached around. No, someone still warm and sticky. His heart hammering, he moved his hands along the head and body. Despite himself he felt a flood of relief. It wasn't Abby.

"Turn on a light," he whispered.

Longfellow felt along the wall until he found a switch, all of them blinking in the glare. The body was Pika's, they saw, sprawled as he tried to run back toward the generator room. His arm was outstretched, as if trying to score a goal, and his back was bloody. Norse had cut him down in midflight, the poor little bastard. His other arm was tucked under him and clutching something rough and heavy as tightly as a football. Lewis reached under and tugged it free.

It was the meteorite.

Then they heard the snort and roar of a revved-up Spryte.