The Ice Ravine

The escape from the Citadel was a brutal, bloody gauntlet.

Kaelen fought with the ferocity of a demon protecting its own. He laid down suppressing fire, throwing crude pipe bombs into crowded corridors, clearing a path through the subterranean hub with ruthless efficiency. Silas stayed close behind him, firing at anyone trying to flank them.

They burst out of the heavy blast doors into the freezing, blinding daylight of the vehicle bay.

Kaelen sprinted toward a heavy, armored snow-crawler—a massive, tracked vehicle designed for deep-waste traversal. He shot the guard by the door, vaulted into the driver's seat, and hotwired the ignition. The massive diesel engine roared to life.

Silas scrambled into the passenger seat just as a squad of Malacor's elites burst into the bay, opening fire. Bullets pinged off the armored glass of the crawler.

Kaelen threw the vehicle into gear and slammed the throttle forward. The crawler smashed through the bay doors, tearing up the icy ramp and out into the desolate expanse of the White Wastes.

"Hold on!" Kaelen shouted.

Behind them, three heavily armed, fast-attack pursuit sleds roared out of the Citadel, giving chase.

The chase across the ice was a terrifying, high-speed nightmare. The crawler was heavily armored but slow, while the pursuit sleds were nimble, flanking them like a pack of wolves. Heavy machine-gun fire rained down on them, shattering the side mirrors and tearing through the rear plating.

"They're going to tear our treads apart!" Silas yelled over the deafening noise.

Kaelen looked at the GPS monitor ripped from his old sled. He looked at the horizon. "We're close to the coordinates. The Glacial Rift is two miles ahead. It's a massive fault line in the ice. If we can make it to the narrow pass, they won't be able to flank us."

He gunned the engine, pushing the crawler past its redline. The massive treads chewed through the snow, hurtling toward a towering wall of jagged blue ice in the distance.

A pursuit sled pulled up alongside them, a gunner raising a rocket launcher.

Kaelen didn't flinch. He jerked the steering yoke hard to the left, ramming the massive armored flank of the crawler directly into the smaller sled. The impact sent the sled spinning wildly out of control, crashing into a buried concrete pillar in a massive explosion of fire and pulverized ice.

They hit the Glacial Rift.

It was a terrifyingly narrow canyon carved deep into the ancient glacier, the walls towering hundreds of feet above them, glowing with a deep, ethereal blue light. The path was barely wide enough for the crawler.

The two remaining pursuit sleds funneled into the canyon behind them, their heavy guns echoing deafeningly off the ice walls.

"We can't outrun them in here!" Silas shouted, looking back through the shattered rear window.

"I don't intend to," Kaelen said grimly.

He reached into his tactical vest and pulled out a heavy block of scavenged C4 explosive, wired with a crude remote detonator. He rolled down the armored window, the freezing wind whipping into the cabin.

"Silas, take the yoke!" Kaelen yelled.

Silas grabbed the steering controls, fighting to keep the heavy machine centered in the narrow pass.

Kaelen leaned entirely out of the window, the wind tearing at his clothes. He waited until the crawler hit a sharp bend in the canyon, exposing a massive, unstable overhang of jagged blue ice directly above the path.

He hurled the explosive block upward. It sailed through the air, wedging perfectly into a deep fissure in the ice overhang.

Kaelen threw himself back into the cabin. "Brace!"

He hit the detonator.

The explosion was catastrophic. The concussion wave rattled Silas’s teeth in his skull. Above them, thousands of tons of ancient glacial ice fractured, groaned, and collapsed.

A massive avalanche of blue ice and snow cascaded down into the narrow canyon, entirely burying the path behind them. The pursuing sleds didn't stand a chance. They were crushed instantly, swallowed by the collapsing glacier.

Silence descended on the crawler, save for the roaring engine.

Kaelen slowed the vehicle to a halt. He slumped back in the driver's seat, his chest heaving, his hands shaking violently on his lap. He looked at Silas.

Silas let out a breathless, disbelieving laugh. "You're a maniac."

A genuine, exhausted smile broke across Kaelen’s face. It was the first real smile Silas had seen in five years. "I had a good reason."