The Great Escape

And so howls that terrible wind, on that terrible air, in this terrible cold.

The masses huddle, filing one-by-one into each of their three arks. 01, 04, 05. Sno-Cat 02 sits in the garage, its windshield broken and bloody, unusable. Sno-Cat 03 lies out in the wastes, derelict and forgotten. Discarded belongings pepper the ice. There is a grim understanding: a person takes up less space than you'd think, and fripperies take up more. The corpses are tallied. Arthur. Myrddin. Bohdana. Vittoria is searched for, and never found. There is a silent sigh of relief. That is one less body to be desecrated in the luggage-hold.

This is not a place of honour.

But it will not be a place of anything, soon.

Nassim. Guy. Sage. Eddie. Four drivers for three vehicles. They do not sleep enough, but there is not enough time to rest properly. They shift positions, weary-eyed and cramp-handed. As the vehicles claw their way through the gathering snow, weaving through the forest-spires and the crag-falls, seeing five meters ahead at any given time, and not an inch more; a sharp-toothed psychologist impatiently twists their half of their ziptie-restraint; the other half bound around the wrist of an orange-eyed driver. In a separate vehicle entirely, those very same restraints slip free, and there is blood, and blood, and blood.

A man with a blade holds, breathes, calms himself. One with a gun lies unconscious on the ground. One woman laughs her last life-breath away, whilst another lies alongside her, cooling, in a pool of her own gore. In the third vehicle, a quiet man, unseen by his peers, launches into a frenzy. When he dies, the one holding the weapon that kills him regrets that he has had to take a second life. In the third vehicle, a woman covered in burns mistakes the face of her employer for the woman who laughs, and, blinded by fury, opens a bullet-cavity in his head.

A singer-songwriter is lured away into the cold, and swallowed by the storm. Heads are counted, and a parageologist is found to have never even stepped foot upon her designated Sno-Cat. The lumbering trucks suffer hail and spikes, stuck tracks and chronological displacement; hallucinations and bouts of mania. But at long, long last; after the final five hours of agonising uphill crawl, each driver's hand grasping their wheel with reverent hope to not provoke an avalanche, Sky Blu's signal tower crests out of the storm.

The dead are counted. The thirty souls that left APERIS are reduced by a fifth. Fourteen corpses lie on the runway in front of Sky Blu. Five are old, three are cold, and five more are, almost, still warm.

Nobody smiles.

The work is not over yet.

Mateo has trained his proxies well, but he does not get to see the fruits of his labour. He slips away soon after arriving at the base. Relying on schematics and a few hours of explanation each, his students savage the Sno-Cats, tearing away anything extraneous to get at the engines within. The others prepare as they work, and as soon as the first is set up to generate power they begin repairing the plane, the air filled with the buzz of power tools.

The propeller is straightened out and reattached, and salvaged plates of metal welded on to patch holes in the hull. Controls are rewired, a delicate job that is beyond the expertise of anyone present, but must be done nonetheless. Those who cannot contribute rest or help in other ways. Food is prepared from rations brought from APERIS, a warm and hearty soup to keep the mechanics going.

Hours later, as the blizzard rages on and the wrecks of the Sno-Cats roar, the plane is declared ready for flight. Sky Blu's vast stores of fuel are drained. There must be no chance of running out during the journey. Corpses are loaded into the cargo hold and the back of the passenger deck, and then the escapees file on, finding their seats. Not one of them dares to hope. Yet.

The plane begins to slowly pick up speed, rattling down the makeshift runway. The engine splutters. The cabin shakes. Plastic zipties hiss against steel bars.

200 yards.

300 yards.

500 yards.

There is a soft, upward tilt of the controls.

Two dozen pairs of lungs inhale, holding a collective breath.

And then—from one moment to the next—the great metal machine is suddenly airborn.

Twenty-four suvivors go soaring through the tempest.

The turbulence rolls the cabin, but they remain steadfast. No one tempts fate with so much as a smile. No one dares make a sound. A failure now would send them crashing into the Earth with wings aflame, like the fall of Icarus. Every victory would be undone—every life saved lost.

But that doesn’t happen. Instead, the aircraft breaches the clouds. The desolate white of the ground below dissolves into the bright radiance now reflecting off of the cracked windshield. Those aboard let the subtle warmth of it linger on their face.

It’s the first time they’ve seen the sunrise in months.

The aircraft touches down in the Falklands on the 20th of June. The exigency radio call—cryptic and suspiciously reticent with the details–rings throughout the RAF Mount Pleasant airbase, demanding space for an emergency landing and urgent medical attention once on the ground. Faceless engineers help with the bodies. Medics tend to the injured. Mechanics marvel at how the plane landed in one piece—the turbine was dangerously overworked, they inform the survivors—by the time the plane touched the runway, it was mere minutes away from catastrophic failure.

Tempting fate indeed.

Embassies and consulates are contacted, and contacted again. Arrangements are made. Contracts signed. Planes and helicopters arrive to reclaim those who have survived—and those who haven't—and return them to their empty homes and absent families.

They are safe, though they are scarred.

In time, they will forget.

For now, humanity has left Antarctica.

But they will be back.