The UpLink man was badly hurt. Dumped onto his right side, his leg bent where it shouldn’t have been—broken in at least two places below the knee, Burkhart saw—he struggled to pull himself out of the snow, rolled off his hip, and somehow got into a twisted semblance of a sitting position, his VVRS still in his grip.

Burkhart rushed toward him, kicked the weapon from his hand before he could fully bring it up, retrieved it, and pointed his own gun at the rider.

The men looked at one another in silence, their eyes meeting through their dark goggles for the briefest of moments.

Then Burkhart pivoted away from him, scoured the back of the overturned snowmobile with sustained gunfire, riddling the gas tank with bullets, puncturing the spare fuel container on its rear rack. Mixed gasoline and oil blurted greasily into the snow.

Burkhart flicked a glance back over at the injured rider.

“Man kann nie wissen,” he said.

You never know.

A moment later he shouldered his weapon, turned to remount his snowmobile, and radioed out the order to withdraw.

As he approached the dome, Nimec heard the chatter of a baby VVRS to his left, and snapped a look through the flowing whiteness. He saw blood erupt from a storm rider’s chest, then saw both bike and rider capsize into the snow. An instant later, the Sword op who’d done the shooting sped over to where one of his teammates had been downed by the storm rider, got off his snowmobile, and crouched beside him, shaking his head in horrified denial.

Nimec braked and sat absolutely motionless, pods of snow bursting in the air around him. He heard a choked-back cry from the kneeling op, and was grateful when the wind pulled it away.

Even from a distance of some yards, he knew it was too late for the guy’s partner. His goggles were shattered and most of his forehead was gone.

“I can’t believe this.” Waylon had slid up beside Nimec and was staring out at the bloody scene. “It’s just so hard to believe this. . . .”

Nimec said nothing. It was hard, yes. And the decision he needed to make was harder still.

He turned and peered straight ahead at the dome. The smoke lacing from its entrance hadn’t abated, but the fire-suppression squad was almost there now, riding toward it unopposed. And although he could hear sporadic bursts of gunfire at their fringes, CC’s mounted attackers had vanished from sight.