Free Ice Station by Matthew Reilly Page A

before
     holstering his pistol.
    Then he quickly reached over his shoulder and pulled his Maghook from
     its holster on his back. The Armalite MH-12 looks a little like an
     old-fashioned Tommy gun. It has two pistol grips: one normal grip with
     a trigger and one forward, support grip below the muzzle. In effect
     the Maghook is a gun, a compact, two-handed launcher that
     fires a grappling hook from its muzzle at tremendous speed.
    At Schofield's feet, Gant began to groan.
    Schofield pointed his launcher at the ice wall and fired. A loud
     metallic whump rang out as the grappling hook shot out from
     the muzzle and slammed into the ice wall. The hook exploded right
     through the wall, into the dining room. Once on the other
     side, its “claws” snapped open.
    “Scarecrow! Get moving!”
    Schofield turned, just as Gant groggily got to her feet beside him.
    “Grab my shoulders,” he said to her.
    “Wha—huh?”
    “Never mind. Just hold on,” Schofield said as he threw her
     arms over his shoulders. The two of them stood close, nose to nose. In
     any other circumstance, it would have looked like an intimate clinch,
     two lovers about to kiss—but not now. Holding Gant tightly,
     Schofield spun and leaned his butt up against the railing.
    He looked back toward the main entrance tunnel and saw shadows moving
     quickly over the ice walls of the passageway. Gunfire began to spew
     out from within the passageway.
    “Hold tight,” he said to Gant.
    And then, with both hands holding the launcher behind Gant's
     back—and with her arms wrapped tightly around his
     neck—Schofield shifted his weight backward and the two of them
     tumbled over the railing and fell out into space.
    No sooner had Schofield and Gant fallen clear of the railing than it
     was assaulted by a torrent of bullets. A brilliant cascade of
     white-orange impact sparks exploded above their heads as they dropped
     clear of the catwalk.
    Schofield and Gant fell.
    The Maghook's cable splayed out above them. They whipped past
     B-deck, past Riley and Hollywood, who spun around at the unexpected
     sight of a pair of bodies dropping past them.
    Then Schofield hit a black button on the forward grip of the launcher
     and a clamping mechanism inside the muzzle bit into the unspooling
     cable.
    Schofield and Gant jolted to a sudden stop, just below B-deck, and the
     Maghook's cable began to swing them in toward the catwalk. They
     swung in fast, over the C-deck catwalk, and dropped down onto the
     metal gangway.
    As soon as his feet hit the catwalk, Schofield pressed down twice on
     the trigger of the launcher. When he did so, up on A-deck, the
     grappling hook's claws responded by immediately collapsing inward
     with a sharp snick, and the hook was sucked back through the
     hole it had created in the dining room wall. The grappling hook fell
     down into the central shaft of the ice station, reeled in by the
     launcher. In a couple of seconds it was back in Schofield's hands,
     and he and Gant hurried inside the nearest doorway.
    “Grenade!”
    Riley and Hollywood ran flat out down the northern tunnel of B-deck
     and dived around the corner.
    Just as they cleared the corner a booming explosion rocked the ice
     tunnel behind them. Hard on the heels of the explosion came the
     concussion wave and then—
    Riley and Hollywood ducked behind the corner as a swarm of dartlike
     objects shot past them at phenomenal speed and thudded into the
     opposite wall of the tunnel.
    The two Marines looked at each other in astonishment.
    A fragmentation charge.
    A fragmentation charge is basically a conventional grenade that has
     been filled with hundreds of tiny pieces of metal— tiny
     sharp-edged, skewed pieces of metal designed to be as
     difficult as possible to extract from the human body. When the charge
     detonates, it sends a wave of these lethal fragments rocketing out in
     every direction.
    “I've always said it,” Riley said wryly as he
     popped his clip and