I don’t have to wonder that much. Seems pretty clear that he’d kill me.
There’s not much to be done about it, of course—but still, I try. We head up into the hills north of the dome first, mostly toward the cliff Berto showed me rather than toward the bomb. The ferns are knee-high on the hillsides, and little eight-legged lizard things are everywhere, scuttling away from our feet and leaping up onto the rocky outcrops to watch us. Once we’re past the first crest and out of sight of the dome, I turn back across the slope and start working my way toward the bomb’s hiding place. I’m feeling pretty proud of my spycraft when Nasha says, “You know we’ve got drones, right?”
I turn to look at her. “What?”
“We’ve got drones,” she says. “If Marshall wants to know what you’re up to, he doesn’t have to stand on top of the dome with a pair of binoculars. He just needs to put a drone on you. He could be tracking us right now. Hell, he could be listening to this conversation if he wanted to.”
I look up and turn a full circle. There’s nothing overhead but a few wispy white clouds. Nasha sighs. “You’re looking for a drone.”
“Yeah. The sky is crystal clear. I’d be able to see it if one were up there, right?”
Nasha pulls the burner from her hip holster and sights off into the distance. “You see that hilltop?”
I squint in the direction she’s pointing. It’s a little hazy, but I’m pretty sure I can make out the one she means. “Yeah. So?”
“Push the mag on your ocular to maximum and then pick out a rock on that hillside—one maybe a meter across or less. Point it out to me.”
Oh. I see where she’s going here.
“That hillside,” she says, “is, according to the range finder on my weapon, about three klicks off.”
“Right. Which I assume is also roughly the altitude at which the drone that Marshall may or may not have following us would be flying.”
Nasha taps her temple with one finger. “A standard surveillance drone is less than a meter across, and their underside mimics what the sky would look like from below. There could be a dozen of them up there right now, and we’d never know it.”
“Oh.” We walk a little farther. “Do you think there are?”
Nasha shrugs. “Probably not. I honestly don’t think Marshall cares where you’re going, as long as you come back with the bomb.”
Yeah, she’s probably right about that. We keep walking.
The place where I hid the bomb hasn’t changed much. It’s an ice-carved gully near the base of a massive granite outcropping. We pick our way down the rocky slope. There’s the boulder I used as my landmark. Twenty meters upslope from there …
Twenty meters upslope from there is an empty hollow under a rock overhang.
Suddenly I’m very conscious of my heartbeat.
“Mickey?” Nasha says.
I don’t respond.
She nudges me.
“Mickey? Where is it?”
I shake my head. “Doesn’t matter.”
She pulls me around to face her. Her eyes widen when she sees my expression.
“Doesn’t matter where it is,” I say. “The important point here is where it’s not.”
007
WE HAVE A long, silent walk back to the dome, Nasha and I. We’re almost there, just a few hundred meters out from the perimeter, when she says, “I told you it was a stupid idea.”
I stop. She walks on for a few more paces, then turns to face me.
“What?” I say. “Going to find the bomb?”
She closes her eyes and sighs behind her rebreather. “No, Mickey. Not going to find the bomb. Hiding it the way you did in the first place. I told you two years ago, when you first showed it to me. For shit’s sake, that was a doomsday weapon! You buried it under some rocks like a goddamned pirate’s treasure. There was no way this was ever going to end well.”
“No,” I say. “No, no, no. I remember that day, Nasha. Yeah, you said it was a dumb idea. I said it was a dumb idea. I just didn’t have a better one, and neither did you.”
She starts to reply, then stops and shakes her head. “I don’t understand what happened. If a human had found that thing, they would have turned it over to Marshall. That, or accidentally set it off, I guess. Is it possible Marshall really has just been playing with you this whole time?”
I have to think about that for a minute.
“Maybe? Why, though? This seems like a lot of effort to go to just to make me squirm.”
“I don’t know,” Nasha says. “I don’t—”
“Does it help him to catch me in a lie?”
“Huh.” She digs a finger under the rebreather strap at the crown of her head, scratches, and then resets her seals. “Depends, I guess.”
“On what?”
“On what he’s planning on doing to you now. If the idea is to shove you down the corpse hole, it might be helpful from a PR standpoint to prove that you’ve been jerking us around about this thing for the last two years. Traitor to the Union and all that, right?”
I shrug. “I guess. If he’s got the bomb, though, doesn’t he know that already?”
“Right. Right.” A half dozen long, spiny legs poke up out of the soil between us. Before whatever it is has a chance to fully emerge, Nasha has drawn her burner and vaporized it. “Look, though. Marshall’s pulled two copies of you out of the tank in the last week, right? What did he do with them?”
I stare at her as she holsters her weapon. That might have been the fastest that I’ve ever seen someone move, and it’s not even clear to me that she noticed what her right hand was doing.
“That’s, uh … that’s what we were trying to find out with the download thing, right?”
“Yeah,” she says. “But that didn’t work, so we have to speculate. What’s the last thing he asked you to do before you resigned?”
Oh. Right.
“He asked me to return the fuel from my bomb to the reactor.”
Nasha taps one finger to her temple, then turns and starts walking again. After a moment’s hesitation, I follow.
BERTO DROPS INTO my desk chair and runs his hands back through his hair. “You’re kidding.”
Nasha shakes her head. “He is not.”
“You hid it.”
“Yeah,” I say. I’m pacing, which is pretty unsatisfying in a three-by-four space that’s ninety percent full of stuff. “I hid it.”
“Under a rock pile. You hid the most dangerous object on this planet under a rock pile.”
Nasha sighs, pulls her feet up onto the bed, and leans back against the wall. “Yes.”
“And you left it there. For two … goddamned … years.”
“Fine,” I say. “I get it. Not my finest moment, but I didn’t have a lot of good options.”
“And now it’s gone.”
Nasha sighs again, louder this time. “Get past it, Berto. We didn’t bring you in on this so that you could tell Mickey how stupid he is.”
He rounds on her now. “How stupid he is? What about you, Nasha? You were in on this from the start, right? If I’m understanding this correctly, he showed you where he buried that thing two years ago. What the absolute hell were you thinking?”
“I was thinking I wanted Mickey to stay alive,” she says, voice ice-cold now. “I guess that’s where you and I are not on the same page.”
Berto’s eyes narrow and he starts to reply, but I cut him off before he can start something that he’s not going to be able to finish. “Look, Berto, we can all agree that this hasn’t turned out the way I hoped it would. Mistakes were made, okay? But Nasha’s right. We need to decide what to do now, not what we should have done two years ago.”
He looks like he has something more to say on the topic, but after a moment’s hesitation he pulls in a deep breath, holds it, and then lets it back out. “Fine. Fine. You’re right. This isn’t the time to worry about how your dumbassery has doomed us all to freezing to death in the dark. Let’s try to figure out if there’s any possible way we can get un-doomed.”