“Mindestens drei Männer. Sind auf rotes Schneemobilen.”

Burkhart clicked his teeth. At least three men had been sighted. On red snowmobiles.

As he’d suspected, the enemy had broken up into harrier teams.

“Schätzen?” he asked.

“Ungefähr fünfzig meter östlich.”

Burkhart tasted adrenaline at the back of his tongue. The machines Koenig had reported were approaching from fifty meters to the east.

His alertness notched to its utmost level, Burkhart looked over his right shoulder, glimpsed the noses of two more snowmobiles through the snow—these speeding toward him from a westerly direction.

It further confirmed his assessment of the enemy’s diversionary tactics. But he had no doubt their main thrust still would be reserved for the dome’s entrance.

“Lass keinen näher kommen,” he ordered, thinking that they had gotten close enough.

Much about Antarctica was alien to Nimec, but he would have recognized the sound of automatic gunfire anyplace on earth.

The initial burst came from approximately where Waylon had seen the snow bikes, its distinctive crackle carrying across the distance even in the high, wild wind.

His opponents were throwing themselves into an outright confrontation, forfeiting stealth to delay his Sword ops from reaching the dome.

The nasty little cold war they’d initiated had just gotten very hot.

Nimec mentally bold-faced a decision that he’d known had to be. Sword was a civilian security outfit whose international presence was licensed through a clutter of separate arrangements with UpLink’s host governments, most of them skittish about having armed foreigners on their real estate. Nonlethal threat response was Sword’s option of first choice, and its techies had developed a collection of ingenious suppressive tools toward that end. Nimec’s operatives were not cowboys on horses riding the range in search of desperados. But he had never allowed them to be victims-in-waiting either. Their rules of engagement were right in line with those followed almost universally by police and military forces. Deadly fire was to be returned in kind.

It made things stickier in theory that Antarctica was a piece of real estate unlike any other, demilitarized by global pact, everybody here supposedly living a harmonious coexistence, one big happy human family, their baser impulses and ambitions renounced. But in practice it didn’t change a thing.

Nimec’s people were under attack, taking fire, and getting killed by a bullet was the same the world over.

Gordian’s words surfaced from recent memory: They can’t always be protected from violence. But we have to keep our watch.

“Guns on max settings,” Nimec told his men over their comlink.