And that felt wrong. He sniffed. No toxic leaks, as far as he could tell. But what the hell else could it be?
He returned to his door, which he’d saved for last, and pushed it open to find the same mess—someone had gone through his belongings.
Shit. His sat-phone charger was nowhere to be found. No computer, no wires or backup batteries. Not a scrap of electronics remained in any of the dorm rooms.
Definitely not an evacuation.
He checked the other buildings, where he found more of the same. All comms mysteriously…gone.
He opened every door, checked every bed and space he could think of. The place was as big and echoing as that hotel inThe Shining, though not half as cozy. Frankly, he’d welcome just about any sign of life right now—“Here’s Johnny” with a butcher knife, creepy twins chanting “redrum,” Jack the freaking Ripper, hallways full of blood.
Anything would be better than this emptiness.
It took an hour to go through the galley and the other communal living areas. The gym was empty, as were the screening room, game room, labs, and offices. Pam’s medical clinic sat cold, her data uplink smashed to pieces, generator silent and broken.
It all reminded him of something that he couldn’t put his finger on, though his body showed recognition. He couldn’t get rid of the goosebumps climbing up and down his arms.
Tightening his jaw, he made his way through the remaining common areas to the communications room door, which was wide-open. The utter destruction inside tested his forced calm. They’d taken a sledgehammer to the place.
Pure sabotage, deliberate and devastating. Violent.
Unease growing in his gut, Coop headed over the ice to the power plant arch, which had hummed with life for as long as he’d been here. Nothing was left of it now but a misshapen pile of melted plastic and blown-out metal, crackling with invisible flames. He couldn’t get within a hundred feet of it without choking on the fumes.
Innards roiling with tension, he turned in a circle. What now?
He exhaled a puff of vapor and blinked, sorting through the pieces in his head. Stolen drills, destroyed power plant, no communications.
What was he missing?
What did they want with his drills? Why destroy years of work? Not just his work, but this entire place. And where thehellhad everyone gone?
That last question sent something dark and queasy through him, sour as bile and heavy as sludge.
Unless he’d grossly misread the situation, no help would be coming, and unless the airplane truly had evacuated the winter crew to safety, no one would even know there was a problem until they reached out to the station and couldn’t get through. That could be days or weeks away, given how spotty communications were here in the winter.
Desperation sharpened Coop in ways that might dull someone else. He’d been deployed in enough war zones to know how to use fear to get shit done instead of letting it drag him down. Heat and food. Those were the only things he’d need to survive. There was plenty of the latter, and the former would be impossible to find, unless…
Wait. There was one backup generator they might have missed.
Instead of checking out the supply arch as he’d planned, he hurried to the ancillary building, the base’s emergency locale, equipped with its own generator, in case of an outage. Camp beds, cooking supplies, MREs: it had everything needed to survive for a day or two. Maybe longer, if he could locate more fuel. Maybe, just maybe, the people who’d carried out this destruction hadn’t known about it.
Hopeful for the first time since he’d gotten back, he threw open the shed door to find the ancillary generator in one piece. Relief flooded him.Hallelujah.
If they’d forgotten this, he thought as he got it up and running, maybe they’d left other things behind. A charger for his sat phone, for example. That would be helpful. Thus far, though, he hadn’t found a single charger—solar or otherwise—which spoke of a highly organized, premeditated operation. A full-blown assault.
Burke-Ruhe felt like a war zone.
He looked up at the sky, picturing the plane he’d watched flying away earlier. Had it been full of refugees from some terrible accident, or hostages?
In a flash, his brain fed him an image of Angel Smith, dancing like a hot-blooded goddess in the coldest place on earth. Had that been just last night? Felt like ancient history.
Where was she headed right now? The safety of McMurdo Station? Christchurch? The fucking Bermuda Triangle?
Dammit!
He squeezed his temples, willing his brain to think. What were they up to? And who were they? What had they done with everyone? There was no blood. No signs of violence, and he’d checked everyth—
The supply arch. He’d been headed there when he’d remembered the ancillary building.
