Val said sharply, “I don’t want my group taken into a fight.”
“No no. It’ll all be over by the time we get there. Mai-lis just wants you to see the results, so you can be her witnesses if it comes to that in McMurdo. She’s a very practical lady that way.”
“She seems to be an authority,” Wade ventured.
“Yeah, she’s the local chief, no matter what she says about democracy. Lars is pretty much right about that.”
“How did she reach that status?”
“Well, she’s been down here the longest, and she knows how to do more things than anyone else. She knows how to survive down here. The Sami know about snow and weather. And she’s very up-to-date technically. She’s good with the photovoltaics and the batteries and the hydroponics. All of it. Better than most of us, anyway. We all have our specialties, but you know, it’s a work-in-progress sort of thing. An experiment, like she said. So nobody’s all that good at everything. It can be a little dangerous, actually.”
Wade said, “Like flying these blimps in a storm?”
“Oh no. No danger there at all.” She grinned. “Actually it’s not bad. These things float really well, it’s hard to drive them down. So it’s almost the opposite of a helo in that respect.”
“What about getting blown into mountainsides?”
“Well, you have to look out for that, but if you stay above them you’re fine. These are great machines. Top speed of three hundred k an hour, so even if you have to go straight into a full-force gale you can make progress, usually. Turbulent, as you saw, but not impossible. No, blimps are the only way to go down here. Getting around on foot is just too hard, as you must know. The air is the way. But planes and helos are too much of a hassle. Much more dangerous than these.”
“Who makes them?” X asked.
“A Japanese company.”
“How do you pay for them?” Wade asked.
“Money.”
“But how do you make the money? You’re not selling mawsoni cutlets and seal fur coats.”
“No. Some of us winter in the world and make money there. Some of us do northern jobs from here, just like any other telecommuter.”
“Is that what you do?” Wade asked.
“Me? No, no way. I’m no telecommuter. I’m all right here. Real time real space, twenty-four hours a day.”
Then she tilted the blimp down. Wade saw out the windows that there were other blimps ahead and behind, dropping just as fast as they were. He sat back in his seat and extricated his wrist phone from his headset.
“Did you catch any of that, Phil?”
“Some of it—I couldn’t hear you, but I heard some of the others. But it’s pretty windy there, hey? There’s quite a background noise.”
“Yes. Hey Phil, we’re back in the cloud, on our way down. Do you want to stay on the air or not?”
“Oh on, on! Just keep the line open, this is great! What I want to know is why these folks have factionalized, I mean that’s really the problem, isn’t it, you have people of like mind and they still end up at each other’s throats, I can never understand that—”
“Hey Phil, sorry, we’re, it’s getting kind of busy here, I can’t really focus—”
“Oh hey you do what you need to, I’m just thinking out loud here!”
The blimp was being driven down by its big fan, and it jounced up and down on gusts. Addie began arguing with the wind again. Wade was starting to feel a bit airsick when suddenly the blimp was rushing down at a blue glacial slope, firing its harpoon anchors into it and then reeling itself down in a final convulsion. As soon as they were secured Addie took off her headset and opened her door and leaped down. “Wait here a minute,” she shouted at them, and was off running toward a big clear-roofed gap, cut into a giant lobe of glacial ice—no doubt a refuge like the one they had left earlier. Several other blimps were already anchored, and their crews were out standing in front of this refuge, pointing some kind of instrument at it. “What are they doing to them!” Val exclaimed, and she was opening her door when X grabbed her arm.
“Look,” he said, pointing to the side. “Whatever they’re doing they haven’t got all of them in there, see?”
“Wade, you watch out,” Phil’s tinny voice said from his wrist, “you keep your eye peeled, I don’t like the sound of this, watch out all directions, that’s what I always say….”
White slips of movement; tiny black dots against a field of blue seracs; those were darkened sunglasses, Wade saw, and realized that their ferals were being ambushed, perhaps by people from the refuge who had slipped outside.
“Come on,” Val said, and opened her door and jumped down. X followed, and after a split second’s scared hesitation, Wade too jumped out of the blimp.
Val ran to one of the blimp’s anchors and picked up two big chunks of ice lying beside it. She tossed one of them at the ferals outside the refuge entrance, to get their attention; the other she fired at the white figures coming up on them. This drew the attention of the white figures, and one of them pointed their way—aiming guns at them, Wade saw with a jolt. In a panic he ran forward and dove into Val and X at the ankles, knocking their feet out so that they fell on him. Little snapping sounds in the wind caused his stomach to shrink to the size of a walnut; gunshots! He hugged the ice, looked up in time to see the ferals at the refuge entrance turn their odd-looking weapon on their ambushers. The figures in white staggered spastically, fell like marionettes whose strings have been cut.
For a moment nothing moved but the wind. Phil’s voice chirped from Wade’s wrist like a cricket. Only a few moments had passed but to Wade time had distended, ballooned by his panic; he could have given a long and detailed account for every second that had just passed. His heart was pounding like the fastest tympani roll in the Maestro basic sounds set.
Val and X were getting off him. They were both big people.
Finally there was movement at the front of the refuge’s clear tent. Mai-lis and Addie emerged and walked over to the latecomers. Wade put his wrist to his mouth. “Listen to this, Phil.”
By the time Mai-lis and Addie got to them everyone was standing again. Angrily Val exclaimed, “You said this wouldn’t be dangerous! What the fuck were you doing?”
“Sorry,” Mai-lis said shortly, with a glance at Addie that Addie ignored. “You weren’t supposed to get here until the operation was over. Thanks for helping us.”
Others from her group were collecting the fallen figures, hauling them unceremoniously across the ice to the largest blimp. More people, unconscious or paralyzed, were dragged out of the refuge itself. Perhaps a dozen or fifteen all told. The blimp they were being loaded into was considerably bigger than the others, but still, it would be stuffed.
Addie’s face was flushed bright pink. “That’s a lock-able gondola,” she explained to Wade and Val and X. “There’s nothing they can do in there. It’s a remotely operated vehicle, and this one’s programmed to fly to a base in the Peninsula, refuel, then fly across the Drake Strait to Chile.”
“What did you do to them?” Val said.
“We shot ’em with a thing made for Japanese banks that get robbed or whatever. It messes up muscle control, with ultrasound or taser, I don’t know. A stun gun.”
“That’s not what they were using,” X pointed out.
“No, those were real guns they were shooting! Glad they didn’t get you! Nice move there on the senator’s part. Here, come on over, Mai-lis is going to pronounce the verdict and send them on their way.”
Around the big blimp the whole group had gathered. Carlos was shouting abuse at the people locked behind the gondola’s windows, shaking a finger at them. As they walked over Wade said into his wrist, “Getting this, Phil?”