“This is their only other facility, so far as we know,” Tanner said.
The plane circled, coming around into a strengthening wind. The sun was low on the horizon, as much like night as Antarctica got this time of year.
“I don’t like that layout,” one of the ex-soldiers said. “Those towers sure as hell look like gun emplacements.”
The pilot called back over the intercom. “They are refusing to let us land.” Then, a moment later, “Sir, they are warning us that they will open fire if we attempt a landing.”
Tanner looked at Plath. “Well, I guess that tends to confirm your story.”
He unhooked himself from his webbing seat and went forward to speak to the pilot.
Plath looked at Vincent—arms folded, eyes in shadow. At Wilkes, snoring beside her, somehow curled into a fetal ball in the webbing. And Anya, who seemed never to need sleep.
Plath had removed her biot from Anya. With apologies. They were all three now in her own head, as safe as they could be. To kill her biots you’d have to kill Plath herself. Three windows were open, as they always were, now showing slithering macrophages and twitching neurons and what were hopefully spiky balls of pollen in her eye and not bacteria.
She—
BOOOOM!
Something had smacked the C-130 a staggering blow. Tanner came tearing back from the cockpit, the back of his jacket on fire. Plath unbuckled and threw her parka over him, smothering the flames.
The plane jerked again, not as hard, but then nosed down. They were low, no more than four thousand feet up; there was little room to recover.
The nose came slowly, slowly up, but as it did the plane went into a steep turn that threw Plath into Vincent.
“Sons of bitches!” Tanner yelled.
Plath worked her hand into the webbing and held on as the plane rolled, rolled, and she hung suspended in midair while baggage and vomit flew everywhere and grown men screamed.
Wilkes was yelling something that Plath couldn’t hear. “What?” she yelled.
“I said: I can’t say it’s been fun, Plath, but it was good knowing you!” Wilkes made a little mock-salute.
Plath reached her free arm across and took Wilkes’s hand. Plath was not afraid to die, in some ways it spelled relief. But she was furious at the idea that Lear would win. “I’m not dying until I’ve killed that bitch!” she yelled to Wilkes, who smiled wryly and squeezed her hand.
Then, with a series of bone-shaking jerks, the plane slowly, slowly leveled off, but all the while it drifted lower.
The pilot, voice wracked with pain and fear, yelled, “Hard landing! Hard landing! Brace! Brace!”
The impact rattled Plath’s spine and chipped one of her teeth as her mouth slammed shut. The webbing seat held her, but Anya was knocked from her seat and fell to the metal floor of the plane. A metallic shriek went on and on and on.
And that’s when a spinning propeller—almost twenty feet from tip to tip—exploded through the flimsy fuselage, tearing Anya Violet and two of Tanner’s men apart.
The plane skidded to a stop.
A giant gash made by the prop had nearly split the plane in two. Jagged metal edges were everywhere, blood and pale viscera was sprayed around the fuselage like some demented Jackson Pollock painting. A man with his leg gone at midthigh bellowed like a dying bull and tried futilely to cover the pulsing wound with his hands.
Smoke rolled back through the cargo bay, whipped away by a brutally cold wind coming through the gash.
Vincent stared at the place where Anya had been. He picked up something white and red, some unrecognizable part of her, and held it cradled on his lap.
Tanner was among the first to recover. “Get ready! They may send someone to finish us off!” He drew his pistol. It looked small and irrelevant in his hand. Dazed men responded, drawing their few weapons. One was trying to draw a gun with a hand that was no longer there. Another man gently eased him into the webbing and took the gun from him.
“You okay?” Plath asked Wilkes, and got a shaky nod in return. “Vincent?”
Vincent stared at her as if he’d never seen her before, maybe wasn’t seeing her now. His shallow breathing formed a small cloud of steam.
“Anyone who can, follow me!” Tanner said. He wound his way through tangled metal to leap from the gash. Half a dozen men followed. Plath and Wilkes went to Vincent. “Come on, Vincent. Stay alive now, grieve later.”
He flashed a look of pure, unadulterated fury that Plath at first thought was directed at her.
“Come on, Vincent. We have to get off this pl—”
A machine gun, sounding like a chainsaw, opened up. A line of holes appeared at the tail end of the cargo bay and walked its way forward. Metal was flying everywhere. The air stank of cordite, steel, blood, and human waste.
Plath grabbed Vincent by the jacket and yanked him to his feet as Wilkes undid his safety harness. Vincent let the gruesome body part drop, hesitated as if he might go back for it, and then Plath shoved him out onto the ice and jumped after him.
Wilkes landed on Plath, rolled off, and slithered on her belly. Plath glanced back and saw a Sno-Cat with a machine gun mounted on its roof, still firing from the far side of the wreck.
Then, with a woosh of searing heat, the starboard-side fuel tanks exploded, billowing out over the Sno-Cat. The man firing the machine gun was aflame, twisting, writhing, trapped somehow, and the machine gun stopped.
They were three hundred feet from the nearest building, which was one of the four gun emplacements.