She was looking at him with the intensity of a cobra looking at a mouse. “Spit it out of that mush mouth, Bug Man.”
“Okay, say you have some general, or whatever. You fire up his biots, right? He knows now what’s coming. He knows he’s screwed. But biots can see, right? They could see, you know, if you showed them a sign. Held up a sign in front of them.”
She stared at him for a full minute, during which Bug Man wondered if he would have the strength even to resist if she decided to kill him. Did he even want to live?
Then she reached out one hand, pinched his swollen cheek, and said, “Buggy, you are a genius.”
THIRTY-ONE
Plath was in the second seat of the sleigh. Tanner was driving. O’Dell was in the other sleigh, being driven by Babbington, who had been convinced to help when O’Dell shot two of his toes off and promised to keep going if he didn’t.
Three more men plus Vincent and Wilkes were crammed into the Sno-Cat, trailing many miles behind.
“I still don’t see a damned thing, and we’re supposedly right on top of it,” Tanner said. Then, “Ahhh! Shit! O’Dell, stop, stop, stop!” he yelled through his radio.
He killed the engine and fumbled for the brakes that slammed steel claws down into the ice. The sleigh went from a moderate seventy miles an hour—neither Tanner nor Babbington felt confident going any faster—to zero in five seconds. Even so, the front two feet of the sleigh were over the lip of a sharp drop-off.
“This thing have a reverse gear?” Tanner wondered. If there was, he never found it. “Okay, we get out and push it sideways.”
Tanner and Plath climbed out onto the ice. Only then did they see the brightly lit compound nestled in the dry valley below.
“Under my nose,” Tanner muttered. “They built this right under my nose.”
“Antarctica is a big place,” Plath soothed. “And Lear has a lot of money.”
“Is that another swimming pool?”
O’Dell and Babbington joined them and helped manhandle the sleigh back from the lip of the cliff. Under low power, just enough to raise the weight of the sleigh from the ice, it wasn’t too hard.
“There’s ramp over there,” O’Dell said. “But we could just sit up here and fire down into the base. Twelve missiles, fair amount of thirty-mil cannon …” He shrugged.
“No,” Plath said. “We need to know whether this base is the place she’s using to control events, or just a place to hide while the work is done elsewhere.”
Tanner nodded. “Look at that slag heap over there. That’s way more than you’d get from just leveling. They’ve dug some holes.”
“Yeah, well, that base looks like it will sustain a hundred men,” O’Dell argued. “I’m not seeing the gun emplacements we saw back at Forward Green. Still, we could get a very hot greeting. These sleighs aren’t armored worth a damn.”
Babbington took offense at that. “We needed to keep weight down, obviously. The engine is armored.”
“Yeah? How about the cockpit?” O’Dell asked. “Yeah, I thought so.”
“The house,” Plath said.
“Yep,” Tanner said. “That’s the big-boss house right there. If we catch them by surprise, decapitate them—
“That chopper down there has missile launchers and a cannon,” O’Dell pointed out.
Plath said, “Look, for whatever reason, Lear hasn’t killed me yet. She could have. She wanted me back in the game. She insisted I play an active role. I think … I think she doesn’t want me dead.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“I think I walk down there, knock on the door, and hope she shakes hands.”
“I’m going to try to get through to some rational person, either in D.C. or Langley or any random naval vessel that might be within range. But don’t count on the cavalry. You understand?”
“I do,” Plath said.
He gave her an appraising look. “What are you, sixteen?”
“Yes,” Plath said. “But I’ve packed a lot into the last few months.”
He nodded. “I have a son about your age. Back in the world. Minneapolis, with my parents. I’m trying to tell myself he’s okay.”
Plath started to answer, stopped herself, shook her head, and finally said, “I was about to say I’m doing the same. But everyone I care about is either dead, or here with me.” Noah, lying in his own blood, gasping final breaths.
She squeezed her eyes shut. There were no tears—which, she thought, was a good thing as they would have frozen.
Her father, her brother. Ophelia, Nijinsky, Anya. Billy. She saw his head fall to the side, his neck cut almost through.
At least her mother had died of natural causes. She hadn’t been murdered. So much sadness, and now, the whole world was joining Plath in that sadness. That did not help. The old saying was that misery loves company. But Plath knew that misery needed hope. Misery needed to believe in a better future.
What was happening back in the world where Tanner’s son lived? Had Lear’s madness killed millions, or just hundreds of thousands? Had Burnofsky’s vile machines escaped to obliterate all of life?
How much could the human race stand? The dinosaurs had thrived for tens of millions of years before dying out. How many species had evolved, survived, and then at last succumbed?
Homo sapiens were, what, a million years old? And all of human civilization just a tenth of that. Had the clock run out?