“That sounds right,” Berto says. “Did they bring in reinforcements, though?”
I shrug. “Who knows?”
“I guess it really doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s as many as we’re gonna get. Time?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Time.”
I close my eyes. Even through my tight-shut lids the flash half-blinds me. The heat comes an instant later, far more intense than I’d been prepared for, burning the exposed skin on my hands and forehead. After that comes the pressure wave, throwing me onto my back like a blow from a giant’s fist, and last the sound, crashing over me, roaring, deafening, loud as the end of the world.
017
IT TAKES A minute or so for me to crawl over and make sure Nasha’s okay, and then for the ringing in my ears to drop off enough to hear voices again. When it does, the first one I hear is Cat’s.
“Sweet mother,” she says. “What the shit was that?”
Lucas gets to his hands and knees, then rocks back onto his heels and shakes his head. “No idea. What the hell, Mickey? Think you could have warned us that was coming?”
I grin behind my rebreather. “I told you to get down.”
“Get down? You think that’s enough?”
“He couldn’t say anything,” Cat says.
Lucas turns to look at her. “Couldn’t?”
Her eyes flick to Speaker, then back to Lucas. “Couldn’t. Obviously. Drop it, Lucas.”
He looks like he has more to say, but after a moment of consideration he thinks better of it.
“Anyway,” Cat says, “what was that? That couldn’t have just been those things cutting into the plasma chamber, could it? I mean, if the rover had that kind of power I would have expected it to move a little faster, right? Did somebody forget to tell me we were packing a pocket nuke?”
I shake my head. “You’re right about the size of the blast, but no. I don’t think so, anyway. Berto? Any idea what just happened?”
“Not sure,” he says. “I wasn’t carrying fusion devices, and I wasn’t carrying antimatter, so that blast probably wasn’t me. I mean, my warheads were definitely the catalyst, but you saw what I was packing last night. That explosion was a hell of a lot bigger than anything I was carrying could account for. If I had to guess, I’d say that the initial blast I set off breached the drive unit’s plasma containment, and the interior of the cabin acted as a resonance chamber to amplify the burst.” He touches one hand to the back of his head, checks his fingers for blood, and then scowls and wipes them on his shirt. “Now that I think of it, though, if that’s what happened, then there might actually have been a bit of a fusion reaction going on in there, at least briefly. Anyway, we should probably all go through radiation protocols when we get home.”
“Great,” Jamie says. “This trip just gets better and better.”
I climb unsteadily to my feet. “It does, actually. Speaker, you should be happy, anyway. Unless the spiders can build new ancillaries out of titanium vapor, your nest should be secure—even more so than before, really, because in addition to vaporizing the rover, we just vaporized another fifty or sixty spiders. We can get on with our mission together now, yes?”
Speaker rises slowly to look down into the valley. The mushroom cloud that rose over the explosion is beginning to dissipate, revealing a blackened crater at least a hundred meters across.
“This…” he says. “This is what your bomb can do?”
“Oh no,” Berto says. “Not remotely. The bomb we’re searching for makes that one look like a firecracker. If we were fifteen hundred meters away when that thing went off, we’d be just as dead as the spiders.”
Speaker turns to look at him. “Why would you make such a thing?”
Berto shrugs. “Why? That’s a good question. Because we can, I guess. You see why we need to recover it, anyway.”
“What will you do with it?”
“Excuse me?”
“This bomb,” Speaker says. “If we recover it from our friends to the south, what will you do with it?”
“Dismantle it,” I say. “If we are able to recover the bomb and return it to the dome, we will render it harmless. We don’t want this sort of destructive power loose in the world any more than you do.”
“This is a promise?” Speaker says.
“Yes,” I say. “A promise.”
“Very well,” he says, and settles back to the ground. “Our friends are not far now. We should go.”
I get to my feet, then turn to help Nasha up. She wavers a little when I let go of her hand, then steadies.
“You okay?” I say.
She drops her chin to her chest, then rocks her head back with her eyes shut tight and her hands cradling the back of her neck.
“Close enough,” she says. “I think I can walk, anyway.”
I look around. They’re all watching me.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s go. Speaker? Lead the way.”
Speaker rises and twists around to look at me for a long moment, then drops back to his feet and scuttles off along the ridge to the south. One by one, the rest of us turn to follow.
BACK ON MIDGARD, back when I was just Mickey Barnes and the worst thing I had to worry about was running out of credits in between subsidy payments, I loved backpacking. There was a trail that ran almost eight hundred kilometers along the crest of the Ullr Mountains just south of Kiruna, and over the course of five years I solo-hiked the length of it four times. I loved the solitude. I loved the feeling that my life was entirely self-contained. I loved the ache in my muscles after a thirty-klick day. I loved planting myself on an overlook somewhere and knowing that if I slipped and fell there was a fair chance that nobody would ever find my body.
I do not love what we’re doing now.
Start with the rebreather. By any objective standard, it’s fantastic tech. It allows us to survive more or less forever in an atmosphere that would kill us in under five minutes if we were unprotected. The way it does that, though, is by filtering out the components of the atmosphere that we don’t want and concentrating the ones that we do. The upshot of that is that our lungs need to constantly pull twice as much gas through the mask as we’re actually getting to breathe, which means that hiking with this thing on is like hiking underwater while breathing through a straw that smells like halitosis. Add in the fact that I’ve been awake for twenty hours and counting. Top it off with the understanding that we’re probably being hunted, and that if we wind up getting run down it most likely means the death of every human on the planet.
Yeah, not loving it.
I haven’t checked my chronometer in a while, partially because I’m too tired to bother but mostly because it makes me sad, but it must be close to dawn now. Over the past several hours we’ve made our way down off the last ridge and well out into the flatlands, all the while listening to Speaker tell us over and over again that it’s just a little bit farther, a little bit farther. We’re hiking toward the mountains in the distance through what seems like an endless field of knee-high ferns when Jamie falls in next to me.
“We have to rest,” he says. “I know you guys caught some sleep on the ride yesterday, but I’ve been awake for almost a full day now.” He glances back. When he speaks again, his voice is lower. “More to the point, Nasha is about to drop. She won’t admit it, so just blame it on me, right? Call a halt.”
I turn to look back at Nasha. She’s at the rear of the line, ten meters or more back from Cat. Her eyes are half-closed, and as I watch she stumbles over nothing and nearly goes down before catching herself.
Jamie shouldn’t have been the one to notice that.
“Speaker,” I say. “How much farther?”
“Not far,” he says without slowing. “Half the next day. Maybe more. Not far at all.”