He worked quickly: it came in almost unrecognisable parts that clipped together around a first-order antigravity sphere. The remote would hover at knee height, and move around with little electric fans. On the bottom was a hook, and on that hook he hung one of the gravity bombs.

He talked to the remote, and it hummed into life, rising from his lap and spinning around once. Then it headed off back towards the land, dipping and lifting as it crossed the ground. It would have probably been better if he’d got hold of some white paint from somewhere, but at the very least it’d be a distraction they’d waste bullets on.

He was set. He zipped up the bag and threw it on to the ice behind him, then got into position for sniping. The noise of motorised vehicles grew loud, and the first dark shapes appeared out of the fog. Three of them, thirty metres apart: not the end of the line, but not the middle of it either. Somewhere on the right flank.

Petrovitch pasted the three targets with crosshairs, and let his onboard computer take over. One, two, three. Explosive rounds, meant for protecting a young woman from predatory polar bears, hit the widely separated men within a second. Each projectile bored into a chest, then detonated. One of the skidoos caught fire as stray chemicals ignited leaking fuel. All three drove on, riderless. The snow-rimed shore was marked with stark red blood and ruined, steaming corpses.

The echo of the explosions and the sudden run-on of the snowmobiles before they crashed into the ice wall ahead of them was not as loud as the silence that followed.

Convention dictated that he change position. But he wasn’t trying to avoid detection. He was actively courting it.

“How long now?”

[Unknown. I am… blind. The Freezone collective are my eyes and ears. To be cut off from any of them is unnatural and wrong.]

“I never thought I’d die this way,” said Petrovitch. “Chyort, I never thought I’d die. The dreams I had. Kept having. I was old and I still didn’t die.”

The engine noises cut off, one by one. “There should be two more to my left, the rest of them over there. They’re not talking to each other.”

[Because they would rightly surmise I could listen in.]

The flames from the burning snowmobile flickered prettily and started to die down.

“They’ll have to overcome me quickly. They have to realise that Lucy is out on the ice, and I’ve stayed behind. So no subtlety.”

He sent the remote rightwards, and picked up the first pop-up. He threw it hard, hard enough that it skittered to the ground only just within his vision, then slid away. That was it; that was all he had to do. Automatics would do the rest.

He launched the other two the other way, towards where he assumed the main force would be attacking from, then took control of the remote.

The image from the fish-eye camera was confusing until he deployed some software to deconvolute it, turning it from a distorted circle into a virtual bubble with him at the centre. He orientated it, and flew it north towards the ice barrier. Cracked ground, heavy with snow, passed underneath, and eventually he found a group of lines – made by two outer runners and a broad, teethed track – that meant someone had passed by.

He turned the remote again, and chased it up the tracks. He’d probably only get one shot at this, so he pushed the fans to their limit. The whine they’d make would be audible, but only if there wasn’t other noise around.

The outline of a snowmobile appeared. And another. And a whole bunch more. They’d parked them together, decided on their tactics, and carried on on foot. They were on their way, and there was nothing Petrovitch could do about that.

He could do something about their transport, though. He flew the remote into the middle of the impromptu car park and activated the bomb.

The camera died instantly. He blinked, taking in the wide expanse of snow and ice, and heard the distinctive sharp crack of plastic and shriek of tortured metal. He was too far away to feel the abrupt change in the direction of down, but imagined it all the same: frozen ground breaking free and rushing up, loose snow and anything resting on it drawn in towards a momentary, vast mass.

The fog bank flickered with more burning fuel.

One of the pop-ups went off. Bright green laser light pulsed and died.

“This is it, then.”

He stood up and snapped off three more rounds, aiming for the ground just beyond what he could see. The explosions turned the fog bright, and there were the shapes of men lit up inside it.

He tagged them, shot two figures on the shore side, and swung around to go for another on the sea side of the ridge.

The second pop-up blew, driving a chemically powered beam of light through the quickly calculated centre of mass of another man. The third burnt another, behind him.

Petrovitch’s muzzle flashes had given him away, and suddenly the air was full of soft lead and hard ice. Things zipped into his face and punched the surface of his parka. He was bleeding. His leg burned and the finger-sized hole in his trousers spread a dark, wicking stain all around it.

A lull. Maybe they thought they’d killed him. Again. He came up firing, but this time it was his thigh that refused to take his weight. Another two, three, four dead, and the effect of seeing another human being simply torn apart by the force of the burning gases inside them made the others falter, fall back.

Petrovitch crouched down in what little cover he could find, wedged between two blocks of sea ice. His face was pressed against one slab. He could see the tiny bubbles of air caught within it, frozen at the moment the water changed.

He looked up, to the north. Three diffuse stars were fading, sinking to the ocean’s surface. He’d almost missed the signal. Almost, but not quite.

“She’s been picked up.”

[There is a problem…] Michael hesitated. [Sasha?]

They started shooting again. His torso was sort-of-hidden. His legs took another two hits, foot and calf. Different legs. The second struck bone and broke it before leaving his flesh. He clamped down on the pain, all his pains, and it left him cloud-high and floating.

“Yeah. Kind of busy.”

He was lying on the last gravity bomb. He picked it up in his left hand, flicked the switch, and threw it in the direction of the North Pole.

It drew their fire as it rolled along, bouncing over the almost flat ice that covered the ocean. Why they shot at it was anyone’s guess, but before they could destroy it, it destroyed itself.

The ice buckled and heaved. A fountain of glassy green water burst out and rose like a fountain, before losing shape and splashing back down, pushing shards of thick ice away from the hole. The sea continued to slop up and over for a moment, then retreated, quiet once more.

The sky darkened.

Petrovitch took his chance. He’d run out of ideas, time and hope. He was bleeding out. He was dying. Yet directly above him was a descending plane, and he knew his wife was on board, and that she was coming to save him.

First, he had to save himself.

The axe.

He dropped the carbine, wrapped his fingers around the wooden shaft, and threw himself off the ridge of broken ice.

Now they were shooting at the plane, and the people – his people – were at the doors of the plane shooting back. Not just guns: missiles. No one seemed to be looking in his direction as he crashed on to the solid surface of the sea.

No one except a lone, slight figure walking in off the sea, pulling the mist along behind her, her right arm clamped tight by complex alien machinery, her left hand supporting her elbow as she raised the device.

Petrovitch looked up at Lucy just as lightning started to play around her. “Ah, chyort.” Stupidity did run in the family after all.