Polestar Omega Read online

  ARMAGEDDON’S NOMADS

  Banded together to survive, Ryan Cawdor and his companions travel the barren wastelands of a post-nuclear world. There are no laws in Deathlands—only fear, destruction and annihilation. As each day brings a new struggle, this group journeys toward the shaky promise of sanctuary.

  COLD WAR

  Ryan and his friends become the subjects in a deadly experiment when they’re taken captive inside a redoubt at the South Pole. A team of scientists is convinced the earth must be purified of mutants, and now they have the perfect lab rats to test their powerful bioweapon. Within Antarctica’s harsh and unstable conditions, the companions must fight the odds and take down the whitecoats before millions are killed. But in this uncompromising landscape, defeating the enemy may be just another step toward a different kind of death…

  “Are you ready?” Ryan shouted

  There was no answer.

  Then he heard the deep, resonant hum of the mat-trans. He looked over his shoulder and his heart sank when he saw the door was sealed. The transfer was already in progress. The companions had left him behind.

  To die.

  He drew his panga and chopped down the first wave of stickies, lopping off heads, arms, hands indiscriminately. But he couldn’t keep up the pace for long; no one could. Before he could reach for his SIG SAUER, suckered hands gripped his arms and face, tearing at his flesh…

  The sensation brought him back to consciousness.

  His bed frame began trembling violently and the glass shimmied in the window frame. Was he dreaming this, too? Or was the redoubt coming apart?

  The door opened, and whitecoats and blacksuits rushed in.

  Ryan couldn’t move. Over the rattling bed and the pounding in his skull, he heard one of the women say, “His body temperature is 106. And climbing.”

  “We need to get him into the tank at once. Uncuff him.”

  Ryan was lifted under the arms and dumped feetfirst and fully clothed into the ice-filled water.

  Tears streaming from his good eye, Ryan threw back his head and screamed. It didn’t feel cold.

  It felt like molten metal.

  Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

  Demons of Eden

  The Mars Arena

  Watersleep

  Nightmare Passage

  Freedom Lost

  Way of the Wolf

  Dark Emblem

  Crucible of Time

  Starfall

  Encounter:

  Collector’s Edition

  Gemini Rising

  Gaia’s Demise

  Dark Reckoning

  Shadow World

  Pandora’s Redoubt

  Rat King

  Zero City

  Savage Armada

  Judas Strike

  Shadow Fortress

  Sunchild

  Breakthrough

  Salvation Road

  Amazon Gate

  Destiny’s Truth

  Skydark Spawn

  Damnation Road Show

  Devil Riders

  Bloodfire

  Hellbenders

  Separation

  Death Hunt

  Shaking Earth

  Black Harvest

  Vengeance Trail

  Ritual Chill

  Atlantis Reprise

  Labyrinth

  Strontium Swamp

  Shatter Zone

  Perdition Valley

  Cannibal Moon

  Sky Raider

  Remember Tomorrow

  Sunspot

  Desert Kings

  Apocalypse Unborn

  Thunder Road

  Plague Lords

  (Empire of Xibalba Book I)

  Dark Resurrection

  (Empire of Xibalba Book II)

  Eden’s Twilight

  Desolation Crossing

  Alpha Wave

  Time Castaways

  Prophecy

  Blood Harvest

  Arcadian’s Asylum

  Baptism of Rage

  Doom Helix

  Moonfeast

  Downrigger Drift

  Playfair’s Axiom

  Tainted Cascade

  Perception Fault

  Prodigal’s Return

  Lost Gates

  Haven’s Blight

  Hell Road Warriors

  Blood Red Tide

  Polestar Omega

  What a prodigious growth this English race, especially the American branch of it, is having! How soon will it subdue and occupy all...the wild parts of this continent and of the islands adjacent. No prophecy, however seemingly extravagant, as to future achievements in this way [is] likely to equal the reality.

  —Rutherford Birchar Hayes, 1822–1893

  THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

  This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

  There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

  But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

  Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

  Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

  J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

  Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

  Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

  Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

  Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

  In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope…

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Prologue

  A tremendous blast of wind swatted the nose of the hovertruck earthward, throwing Adam Charlie hard against his seat harness. For an awful second he hung suspended by the webbing, staring down at nothing but white, edge-to-edge across the aircraft’s windshield. With a roar of the front turboprops, the computer-assisted autogiro corrected, lifting the nose, leve
ling the flight path and leaving Adam’s stomach dangling somewhere down around his boot tops.

  Groans and complaints from the other crewmen poured through his earphones.

  “That gust was over one hundred miles an hour,” their pilot, William Yankee, said. “Sorry, but there was no way to compensate for that kind of headwind.”

  The lesser gusts made the hovertruck buffet, veer and dip, which in turn made their progress along the landward edge of the Ross Ice Sheet seem halting and fitful, but that was an illusion. Below a bright blue, cloudless sky, an unbroken expanse of frozen sea steadily unrolled before Adam’s eyes. Without his coldsuit’s polarized faceplate, the glare off the ice would have been blinding. Even so, he had to squint to pick out the shadow cast by the glacier cliffs four miles to his right. Distance made them look much smaller than they were. They stretched on and on, all the way to the curve of the horizon.

  Adam thumbed the button at the jawline of the coldsuit, activating his throat mike. “How far to target, George?” he said.

  “Getting a strong bounce back from the tracker,” the man seated behind him replied. “Target is stationary and coming up fast. We should have visual contact at one o’clock any second now.”

  The hovertruck’s cab, a clear blister perched on the top of the fuselage, provided an unobstructed three-hundred-sixty-degree field of view. The craft’s shape reminded Adam of a bottom-dwelling fish, with bulging eyes set too high and too close together on its skull. The cab quarters were cramped, as if passengers were an afterthought. Six crew including the pilot sat two abreast, knees brushing seat backs, elbows touching. In their flame-orange coldsuits with tight, head-conforming hoods and faceplates that sported black, molded noses and mouths, they looked like a clutch of gaudy insects ready to hatch out. Horizontal ribbing protected the suits’ heating elements and sensors; insulated boots and gauntlets were built-in.

  “Give us some altitude,” Adam told his pilot. “Overfly the target. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  The hovertruck climbed jerkily to a thousand feet and then angled sharply eastward. William held course against the blasts of side wind and tipped the nose down slightly, giving everyone a look at what lay below.

  The erratic bounce of the hovertruck made the recon challenging. Their target was tucked in the lee of a broad, sweeping curve of white cliff. At first it looked like a section of dirty glacier had calved off onto the plain of sea ice. As they drew closer, Adam caught the telltale clockwise movement—like a whirlpool, or a hurricane seen from space—and then he saw the mass of rhythmically bobbing reddish-gray heads and bodies.

  “Would you look at all that pengie pie,” George said.

  “Whoa, that’s one big-ass flock,” William said. “Gee, maybe we should radio for some backup?”

  It was the pilot’s feeble attempt at a joke. There was no backup. This job was on them, and them alone.

  On the ice below, hundreds of animals tramped around and around in an ever-shifting circle, flowing steadily in and out of the calm eye of the storm, taking turns in the warmest spot until they were pushed out.

  Adam remembered the last time he’d seen so many pengies in one place. That fiasco—not just a resounding defeat, but a clusterfuck of blood and death—was burned into his memory. In the five years since, escalating culls of both breeders and eggs had caused the animals’ stocks to plummet. The problem was complex: a growing human population at Polestar Omega, the collapse of other Antarctic food stocks and an accompanying, dramatic reduction in pengies’ birth and survival rates. Key elements of the polar ecosystem were in flux, and the changes seemed to be accelerating.

  “Let’s not get them stirred up,” Adam told the pilot. “Land a hundred yards downwind. We can move the aircraft closer after we harvest.”

  The hovertruck landed with a crunch, its skid feet crushing into the uneven surface of the ice sheet.

  “We can’t just barge in with guns blazing,” Adam said as they unbuckled their seat harnesses. “They won’t be cowed by a frontal assault when they see how few we are. And they won’t scatter, either. When they realize what’s happening, they will counterattack. We have to separate the animals we want from the edge of the flock, slaughter them and keep the rest at bay while we move the truck into position and load it. That means no solo action this time. We stay together, ready to defend and, if necessary, to retreat to the truck with covering fire. If we let ourselves get swallowed up by that mob, we’re done for, and you know what that means—it won’t be quick and it won’t be pretty.”

  No one said anything. They knew he was speaking the truth.

  “Let’s saddle up,” Adam said.

  Brad Lee rose from the cab’s rear left seat, opened the floor hatch and lowered the gangway to the cargo deck. One by one the others got up and followed him down. Adam was the last to step off the ladder. A coat of thick frost twinkled on the deck plates, the winch and the cargo netting strung along the empty hold’s walls. As they strapped crampons to their boot soles and shrugged into their combat harnesses, screaming wind slammed the flank of the aircraft again and again, making it shudder.

  Adam opened the weapons locker and started passing out the 7.62 mm H&K autorifles, 40-round magazines loaded with Hydra-Shok ammo, and handfuls of the flash-bang grenades critical to the successful completion of the harvest. Once pengie blood began to flow, retaliation by the rest of the flock was a given. The hovertruck could carry only six tons of cargo, and fresh meat was too valuable to waste. They couldn’t afford to kill animals in self-defense that then had to be abandoned to the elements. Flash-bangs would leave the pengies unconscious, disoriented, but alive—breeders and meat on webbed feet for future harvests.

  Adam Charlie slid open the cargo deck’s side door and hopped out. The sensor on his wrist cuff said the air temp was -28°C, not counting wind chill. He took the lead and they set off single file across the ice sheet, weapons shoulder slung, barrels pointing downward to keep out the blowing ice. The footing was treacherous, both slick and jagged, and advancing against the wind gusts and accompanying blasts of ice pellets was a constant effort, like wading through a powerful, swirling river current.

  Despite the sustained exertion, he experienced no buildup of body heat. He and the others could thermoregulate just like the pengies. Not due to natural adaptation acquired over many millions of years—the density of feathers and blubber, blood chemistry and hormonal secretions—but because of their coldsuits’ embedded microsensors, onboard microcomputer and breathable, superinsulating polymer fabric.

  Step by trudging step, they closed to within fifty yards of the target. Over the shrieking wind, Adam’s suit mike picked up sounds echoing off the face of the towering white cliff—a rising, falling chorus of sharp metal scraping against sharp metal. The pengies were vocalizing as they wheeled around and around. The tramp of their feet was a steady vibration he could feel through the points of his crampons and into his boot soles. As he slogged toward the cliff, the sound and the sensation increased.

  Adam got no real impression of the pengies’ individual size until the distance was cut by half and he faced row upon countless row of rusty gray backs. These were massive creatures: the males six-foot-five and 350 pounds; the females only slightly smaller at six-foot-two and 300 pounds. Compact and powerfully muscled, both sexes sported ten-inch-long black beaks with slightly downcurved tips. In close quarters one female could outfight a dozen unarmed men.

  As harvesters of fat and protein, and efficient depositories of the same, they were remarkable biomechanisms, which is why their species had been resurrected from thirty-four million years of extinction, DNA salvaged from frozen, fossilized bones, cloned and genetically tweaked. The effort to recreate them had begun more than a hundred years ago, well before skydark. Supremely designed for the polar environment, the reintroduced pengies were a new top predator, able to displace the previous to
p dogs: leopard seals, killer whales and great white sharks. In the sea they were agile and quick; by attacking in coordinated packs they could disembowel a much larger enemy in seconds. They were much slower and more awkward on land and genetically programmed to congregate there for breeding and egg laying, which was the idea behind bringing the species back in the first place—let the pengies harvest the frigid, deadly sea, then easily and safely harvest them whenever needed.

  Hunting parties from Polestar Omega used to be able to land right next to the flocks, but that hadn’t been the case for over fifty years. What two generations ago was routine protein gathering had become dangerous duty. Pengies weren’t stupid. Their brains were almost human-sized. They had learned from experience to scatter for the escape tunnels beneath the ice field that led to the sea, or if they had sufficient numbers, to do exactly what they did in the sea: to envelop and destroy the threat.

  Adam stopped his squad thirty feet from the edge of the circling mass of bodies, autorifles shouldered and ready to fire. Hundreds of pairs of huge, taloned feet shuffled and slapped the ice, friction heat in combination with free-flowing urine and excrement turning it into vile gray slush. As they danced past, thick layers of blubber rippling over dense muscle and bone, the pengies craned heads over steeply sloping shoulders to glare down at the party crashers. The look in their red eyes said they were not afraid of anything that swam, ran or flew, that they would kill and die to protect eggs the size of small boulders tenderly balanced on the tops of their wide feet.

  As he opened his mouth to give the command to attack, Adam hesitated, his heart pounding under his chin. They were dwarfed, overmatched and outnumbered. The pengies didn’t have arms that could punch or legs that could kick, they had no hands to hold weapons, but their bulk could absorb many bullets before they went down, and with 350 pounds driving their beaks, they could punch through sheet metal as if it were cardboard. He had seen firsthand and in close quarters what the wrath of these animals looked like, and he knew he was about to initiate an uncontrollable, conceivably disastrous chain of events.

  But it had to be done. The people of Polestar Omega had to eat.