“Sounds like a solid plan,” he says. “Think you’ll be able to pull it off?”
I sigh. “I don’t know. I’m not used to being on this end of things, you know? I’m supposed to be the one bleeding out, not her. Do you think … is this how it was for her? Do you think she felt like this every time I went down?”
“I don’t have to think,” Berto says. “I saw it.”
I don’t have any answer to that. We stand in silence for a moment, until finally Berto shoulders his pack and starts toward the rover. He stops, though, just as he reaches the ramp, and turns back to look at me.
“Hey,” he says. “I’m sorry, Mickey. I didn’t mean to drop that first round quite so close to you, and I should have given you more warning. It’s just…” He runs his hand along a three-centimeter-deep gouge in the armor next to the hatch. “Things looked pretty desperate down there, you know? I wanted to…”
“Yeah, I know,” I say. “You’re a hero, Berto. You wanted to save the day.”
The words are already out of my mouth before I realize how bitter they sound. Berto’s face looks like he’s just been punched.
“And you did,” I quickly add. “You got there in the nick of time, and you totally saved our asses. If you’d gotten there five minutes later—hell, probably thirty seconds later—we’d all be dead by now. You didn’t have time to do anything more than what you did. I don’t blame you for what happened to Nasha.”
He looks down, one hand braced on the top of the hatch. “Thanks, Mickey.” He ducks through and into the cabin. As he does, he mutters something else that I can’t quite catch. It’s not until I’m back in the cabin and the hatch is swinging down behind me that I realize it was “I do.”
“SO,” I SAY. “What happened out there, Berto? I expected you to come back with a heavy lifter, or not at all.”
“Yeah, well,” he says. “I tried.”
Cat and Lucas are both riding shotgun on the roof, so it’s just the two of us in the cabin now, other than Speaker and Nasha. She’s under a blanket, laid out on the bench next to me, strapped down to keep her from rolling. Speaker fills half the center aisle, stretched out flat. He hasn’t spoken or moved since we started rolling again. Berto sits across from me, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.
“How did you do it?” I ask. “I mean, you said those drive units had limited charge, right?”
“Well,” he says, “first thing I did when I got within range of the dome was to get Marshall on the comm and try to convince him to give me a lifter. He pointed out to me that all of our lifters’ gravitic grids have been removed and drained, and that even if he wanted to authorize me to take one, which he did not, it would take at least six hours to get them recharged and reinstalled. So that was a no-go. It would have taken almost as long to recharge the drive units on my glider, though, so I had to bust up a couple more drones and swap them out. That took me about forty-five minutes. Once that was done, all I had to do was secure some ordnance and get back in the air.”
“Right. Speaking of which, what, exactly, did you drop on us? I didn’t think that glider had enough lift to let you carry a missile launcher.”
He laughs. “No, it doesn’t, but you’re closer than you think.” He reaches into a side pocket of his pack and pulls out a shiny silver ovoid, about the size of two fists.
“Okay,” I say. “What is that?”
“This,” he says with a grin, “is the part of an air-to-ground missile that makes it go boom. I liberated a few of them from the armory.” He pulls out another from a different pocket. “I’ve still got two of them left, just in case.”
“Huh.” I reach out, and he hands me one of the warheads. It’s warm to the touch, and heavier than it looks. “How does it work?”
“You mean what makes it go boom?”
I roll my eyes. “Yes, Berto. What makes it go boom?”
“Well,” he says, “currently, these are set to detonate on impact. Any deceleration greater than forty meters per second squared and they’ll trigger. It’s configurable, though. They’re keyed to my ocular. I can put them on a timer, or make it an altitude trigger, or just set them off if I want to. It’s a pretty slick system when they’re in a missile and you’re in a combat situation, being able to reconfigure your weapons on the fly. It didn’t take much thinking to realize that I could take advantage of the system to turn them into grenades.”
“So, what, you just dropped them on us?”
He shrugs. “Yeah, pretty much. I mean, threw more than dropped, but the effect was the same. It was a tricky optimization problem, actually, figuring out how to make sure I hit what I was aiming for. I had to get low enough to be accurate, but not so low that I got caught in the blast and killed myself.”
“Huh. Well, I’m glad you worked it out.”
“Yeah, me too. Incinerated in my own fireball was not the way I was planning on checking out.” He leans back against the bulkhead and yawns. “So what’s the plan going forward?”
“Same as it was, I guess. Find Speaker’s friends. Get the bomb back somehow. Get it back to the dome without getting killed. Save the colony.”
“Those are goals, Mickey. We kinda need an actual plan.”
“I know,” I say, then close my eyes and rub my face with both hands. “I’m working on it.”
FUN FACT: IN addition to not being a terrific decision maker, I am also not exactly a wiz at forming effective plans. Case in point—why am I here on Niflheim, where I have been half-starved, deliberately infected by multiple fatal diseases, and dissected by creepers at least once and probably twice, rather than well-fed and safe in my crappy but totally nonfatal apartment back in Kiruna? There are a number of answers to that question, but they really all boil down to this: I had an extremely bad plan. I placed a number of wagers without really understanding either the odds or the stakes, and when, one after another, they all turned out poorly for me, I didn’t have the slightest hint of a fallback position. Darius Blank and his torture machine might have been my motivation for signing on to this gig, but my own stupid brain was the root cause.
All that said, the dregs of an idea for how to get us out of this situation are beginning to seep into my head. Is it better than my plan to get rich by fleecing an extremely dangerous criminal? Unclear. One thing is clear, though.
Everything depends on Nasha waking up.
“WE NEED TO hole up somewhere,” Jamie says from the cockpit. “I can’t drive all night.”
He makes a fair point. In a straight line we’re only about eighty klicks south of the dome, but it’s taken us fourteen hours to get here—and what time he hasn’t spent in the cockpit, Jamie’s spent waiting to get dissected by creepers, which I can say from experience is also pretty stressful. Cat and Lucas have been up on the roof for the past few hours, taking the occasional potshot at shadows in the distance, but mostly just hunkering down and staring at the horizon. They’re probably pretty much done too.
“You’re right,” I say. “See if you can find a spot that’s defensible, okay? High ground. Good sight lines. No tunnel openings nearby.”
“Sure,” he says. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“We should spell Cat and Lucas,” Berto says. His eyes shift to Nasha. “You sitting here isn’t gonna help her. They can watch her sleeping just as well as you can.”
He’s not wrong. I sigh, and stand, and pull on my rebreather.
“Pop the hatch,” Berto says. “We’re going up top.”