I turn to look at him. “About what?”
He rolls his eyes. “About my new haircut, Mickey. About romantic poetry. About the price of tomatoes in the caf. What were we just talking about?”
“Right. The bomb.”
“Yeah, Mickey. The bomb.”
I shrug. “It’s complicated. I mean, she doesn’t want Marshall to get the opportunity to shove me down the corpse hole any more than I do.”
“But?”
“But, yeah. She doesn’t want to starve to death in the dark either.”
“Well,” Berto says, “it kinda seems like those are our two choices. Which way is she leaning?”
“I think she’s pretty much where I am. If it’s really me or the colony, I’ll do what I have to do, but…”
“She wants to be sure.”
“Yeah,” I say. “She wants to be sure.”
SITTING THERE ON that rock, sucking stale air through a rebreather and waiting for my blood oxygenation to get back up to something close to a normal range, I’ve got some time to actually contemplate the question of what Nasha might want. She loves me. I know that. She doesn’t want bad things to happen to me.
But …
She’s seen me die before. She’s held my hand through it three times. Every time, I was back in a few hours, good as new. She can’t help thinking about that, can she? Whatever she says about it being up to me and her not wanting me to lose the shield that’s kept me alive for the past two years, there’s no way it’s not ticking over in the back of her head that I could just do it, could just go and get the bomb and hand it over and then whatever Marshall did to me there’s at least a chance that I’d be right back there with her the next day. There’s no way she’s not at least contemplating the idea that me weighing my personal survival against the entire colony’s is just a monumental act of selfishness, is there?
WHEN WE FINALLY get moving again, Berto drags me to the top of the hill, over the crest, and then partway down the back side. We’re well out of sight of the dome now, farther out than I’ve gone on foot since my days doing crevasse recon just after landfall. I’m just working up to asking Berto if he actually has a plan for the day or if we’re just doing a random walk when we round a rocky outcrop and I find myself looking at a vista that stretches out so far that it fades out into atmospheric haze in the distance. Ten meters in front of us, the ground drops away. I walk up to the edge. It’s an almost sheer drop-off for the first fifty meters or so. Below that is a long, steep slope of jagged rocks that goes on for another three or four hundred meters before it flattens out into grasslands again. If I had to guess, I’d say this is a place where the freeze-thaw cycle split a pretty sizable chunk of rock away from the hillside and dumped it into the valley not too long ago.
I wish I’d been there to see it. It must have been apocalyptic.
“Wow,” I say. “Nice view. How did I not know this was here?”
Berto shoots me a grin. “I don’t think we ever came this way on our bug hunts. I’ve been overflying this spot almost since landfall, though. Sweet, right?”
I sit down on the edge and lean forward to look down past my feet. There were plenty of bigger, better views back on Midgard, but this is one of the best things I’ve seen on this rock.
“Seriously, Berto. This is beautiful. I wouldn’t have thought you were the type to spend a day walking to get to one good overlook, but I’ve got to tell you, I’m glad to be wrong.”
Berto snorts, and I hear a thump as his pack hits the ground. When I turn, he’s got it open and is starting to pull things out. “You’re kidding, right? We didn’t come here to sightsee, Mickey.”
He’s got a bundle of thin metal rods in his hands now. As I watch, he pulls them out and begins snapping them together. Eventually he’s built a broad skeletal frame spanning seven or eight meters from tip to tip, propped up by a wide triangular grip attached to the underside.
“Berto? What are you doing?”
He looks up at me, grins, and hefts the thing he’s built by the grip. “Come on, Mickey. Don’t you recognize what this is?”
I give it one more once-over, then shake my head. “Honestly? I do not.”
He sighs, sets the frame down, and pulls a bundle of fabric from the pack. It takes me until he’s almost finished stretching it across the frame to realize what he’s making.
“Is that a hang glider?”
He finishes making some final attachments before looking up again. “Brilliant! For that, you get to be the first to try it out.”
I’m opening my mouth to say something along the lines of, You’ve got to be freaking kidding me, when he laughs and shakes his head. “I’m just yanking your chain, Mickey. There’s no way I’m letting you pilot this thing. You’re strictly here to record this moment for posterity.”
There’s a sling hanging from the frame now, just behind the grip. Berto steps through it, pulls a harness up between his legs and cinches it at his waist, then clips into the sling with a pair of carabiners and lifts the glider onto his shoulders.
“Technically,” he says, “this isn’t actually a hang glider. It’s a powered ultralight.” He gestures toward two metallic disks fixed to the frame on either side of him. “I managed to get hold of a couple of miniature Casimir drive units. They’re only good for a few hours per charge, but if they die mid-flight, I figure I can always fly it the old-fashioned way, right?”
“How…” I begin, then hesitate, shake my head, and try again. “Where did you find a hang glider, Berto? Marshall wouldn’t let me bring a tablet onto the Drakkar because of cargo restrictions. Did you really pack that thing all the way from Midgard?”
Berto laughs. “Find it? No, Mickey. I built it. The spars and fabric are from emergency bivouac kits. The drive units are from a mini-drone I scavenged from my lifter. Nice, right?”
“You built it. When? When did you have time to do this?”
His grin widens. “Yesterday afternoon.”
I have a lot more questions, starting with, What makes you think that thing will actually fly? and ending with, Are you insane? Before I can get any of them out, though, Berto whoops, takes a running start, and flings himself off the cliff.
Years ago, back on Midgard, I watched a documentary about a guy named Jan Larsen. He’d managed to turn himself into a minor celebrity when I was in school by doing a series of increasingly stupid things. He started with BASE jumping off of buildings in downtown Kiruna. From there he moved on to stunts with a wing suit—flying through narrow gaps, waiting to pull his rescue chute until he was practically plowing into the ground, etc., etc. He finally killed himself while trying to do a solo jump out of a suborbital transport right at the apex of its hop, a hundred and eighty kilometers over the Northern Sea. His homemade heat shield failed, and he wound up turning himself into a shooting star.
Anyway, at one point they did a functional brain scan on him while subjecting him to different kinds of fear stimuli. They showed a side-by-side of his brain next to a normal person’s. The normie’s fear center was going crazy, flaring orange and red, but Jan’s just sat there, flat, cold, and blue. Something wasn’t hooked up right in there, and that part of his brain just wasn’t functioning.
I’ve sometimes wondered if he and Berto might have been separated at birth.
For a solid second, maybe two, I’m convinced that I’m about to watch my best friend die. Berto turns nose-down and drops like a stone, and I have time to picture him broken on the rocks below before the glider catches air. He’s still dropping, but increasingly slowly as he levels out and soars away from the cliff and over the grassland. Finally, when he’s far enough away that I can barely separate his body from the glider, he banks to the left and begins to climb.