Orphan's Triumph

FIFTY-THREE

I TUGGED UP THE MASK that shielded my face and pointed a mittened hand. “There!”

The moments between thumps lengthened as Aud and I stood together squinting out through the side slits at endless white beneath a hard blue sky. Aud and I took longer turns standing at the frigid, windward wall of our sledge because, forewarned, we had come equipped with more effective cold-weather clothing than most of the others.

In fact, the Spooks had forewarned us about much that we would see. Tressel’s North Polar region actually more closely resembled Earth’s South Pole, a wind-scoured continental plain bisected by razor-peaked mountains, its moisture so frozen in its ice and snow that its air was as dry as a desert.

Bits of black appeared in the distance, peeking from snowy ridges.

I said, “That must be the wire. Makes a lousy snow fence.”

Parallel to and a mile from the trackway that knifed toward Tressel’s pole ran the barbed-wire boundaries of the first “resettlement camps.” Hidden beneath the wind-blown snows between us and the wire slept Iridian children, Tressen professors, homosexuals of all nationalities, and anyone else unfortunate enough to differ from or with Republican Socialism. The simple brutality of the scheme was more breathtakingly bleak than the Tressen Arctic.

Aud spoke through his scarf as he shook his head. “I should have seen this. I should have seen this.”

“Aud, Zeit wasn’t exactly advertising the truth. Good soldiers doing their duty have been fooled before. I sent you that biography, about the field marshall whom the Nazis poisoned for plotting against them.”

Aud shook his head. “A soldier can hide behind his duty. I abandoned that excuse when I swore on the chancellor’s book. And at the last, your Rommel tried to do the right thing.”

“Which is what you’re doing now.”

The ice train wasn’t slowing because we were almost there, it was slowing because it was going uphill. According to the Spooks’ mapping, the early mass graves continued for ten miles, then the single track climbed through a mountain pass and descended to another plain. On that next plain the newer barbed-wire enclosures resumed, the drifted snow low against them, and at that spot were garrisoned the troops who kept the survivors penned until exposure and starvation finished them.

The presence of that military garrison had been the problem that had scuttled Howard Hibble’s plan to burgle Tressel’s Cavorite. Because beneath the snows of that new plain, amid the corpses, lay the fallen stars of Cavorite that controlled the fate of mankind. Spooks and the politicians they serve love covert ops. But politicians fall out of love quickly when covert ops go wrong.

Within twenty minutes, the ice train crept slower than a walking man. It rolled through a dynamite-widened pass that was still so narrow that from the sledge I could have reached out and touched the vertical granite walls, and so deep that its shadows darkened the box like sundown.

My ’Puter’s altimeter pegged the pass crest elevation at nine thousand feet, and the Spooks’ mapping said the canyon rim topped out fully one thousand feet higher. Growing up in Colorado, the rule of thumb had been climb a thousand feet and lose three degrees Fahrenheit. But it felt like we couldn’t get colder.

Forty minutes later, the thumps of the runners over the ice road had increased in frequency again, as gravity accelerated the ice train down the pass backside, toward our destination.

I turned to the man next to me, dozing standing up with his arms crossed, and nudged him until he opened eyes that the last five days had sunken in their sockets.

I said, “Showtime!”