Megan sat in silence for perhaps thirty seconds, her gaze suddenly sharp.
“Alan wouldn’t want anyone doing something as unwise as what you’ve suggested,” she said in a tight voice.
There was another long interval of silence. Nimec straightened, lifted his hands off her desk, and stepped back from it.
“So we’re done, that it?” he said at last. “This place makes the call.”
Megan shook her head slowly.
“No, Pete,” she said. “I do.”
Their eyes momentarily clashed.
“Appreciate you telling me,” Nimec said, and abruptly turned away from her, leaving the office without another word.
Burkhart stood in an ice-sheathed elbow of rock and gazed through his binoculars as the rising, snarling gusts blew around him.
There, he thought. There it is.
He could see UpLink’s ice station in the basin below, perhaps a half mile to the north, its modular core elevated above the snowdrifts on mechanical stilts. Much closer to his position was the geodesic dome housing the critical life-support facility that had been marked for destruction.
Unseen beneath the neoprene face mask he’d donned in the worsening cold, a touch of a smile. He had emerged from the senses-numbing vacancy of the whiteout, reached his destination with the gale well at his rear.
He turned to the man who’d accompanied him onto the bluff.
“Go back to the others,” he said. “You’re to make camp in the lee slope, wherever its best shelter can be found. Shovel plenty of snow over the ground flaps of our tents. Be sure the flies are also secure.”
The man’s eyes widened behind his goggles, but he remained quiet.
“What’s on your mind?” Burkhart said.
The man hesitated.
“Tell me,” Burkhart said. “I’ll reserve my bite.”
The man shook his head.
“I don’t understand why we’d wait,” he said. “We’ve driven ourselves without halt to outpace the storm.”
Burkhart looked at him, wind clapping the sides of his hood.
“Langern, you’re mistaken,” he said. “We’re meeting the storm. Joining its attack. There’s actually much it can help us take care of, can you see?”
Langern stood a moment.
“Yes, I think,” he said. “But there’s danger in it—”
“No worse than in immobility.” Burkhart made a dismissive gesture. “Is anything else bothering you?”
Langern just shook his head.
“Then get moving,” Burhkart said. “I’ll be along shortly.”
Langern started across the snow, walking downhill to where the rest of the men had waited with the snowmobiles and equipment.
Alone on the escarpment, Burkhart lifted the binoculars back to his eyes and resumed studying the base.
There was much yet that he wished to observe.
“I really feel responsible for you being stranded,” Megan said. “Sorry, Russ.”
Granger was careful not to show his uneasiness.
“You didn’t call in the storm,” he said.
“No, but I did call you, even knowing it was on the way.” She shook her head, her shoulders moving up and down. “Guess I’d been anxious for Pete to make it to the pass and take a look-see.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Granger coerced an accepting smile out of himself. “There isn’t much difference whether I’m wheels-down at Cold Corners or MacTown. And from what they told me over the radio, our field camps are in fair enough shape for the duration. So it’s not as if my detour caused any harm.”
Megan looked at him a moment, then nodded.
“Let’s just keep our fingers crossed that the weather blows over fast,” she said. “Meanwhile, you should be okay using this bunk. There weren’t any others available with our delegation from the States needing accommodations.” She paused, glanced down at the neatly made bed to her right, and settled herself. “It’s Alan Scarborough’s, you know. Sam Cruz here is his roommate.”
Granger turned to the man beside them in the little dorm and shook his hand. In fact, he wouldn’t feel remotely okay sleeping in that bed. Knowing what happened to the rover’s S&R team, the idea of it gave him the horrors.
“This must be a tough spell for you,” he said to Cruz. “Hope I’m not being too much of an imposition.”
“No, no, please,” Cruz replied. He was dark-complected, wavy-haired, with a strong grip. “It’ll be good for me to have some company.”
Granger had noticed the humorous marker-inked rendering on the closet door across the room. He glanced at the words above it.
“Prisoners of Fashion,” he read aloud.
“Blame me for that one,” Cruz said. “Megan lets us juvies amuse ourselves by making a mess of our quarters. It’s sort of an in-joke I’ll explain to you later.”
Granger manufactured another smile and plucked at his synthetic thermal vest.
“Think I already get it,” he said.
A half hour after stalking out of Megan’s office, Nimec beckoned the manager of base security over to the same paneled workstation he’d seized for his ultimately wasted planning session with Granger.
“I want to conduct a site security check while there’s an opportunity,” he told him. “Tour the installation so I can get a close-up sense of things.”
And feel like I’m doing something marginally constructive with my time, he thought but did not say.
The Sword base chief nodded. He was a burly guy named Ron Waylon, with a thick walrus mustache and a head that was shaved smooth except for a gladiatorial nape lock reaching to the middle of his back. The lock of hair was bound with a leather cord down its full length. Some sort of body tattoo peeked above his shirt collar on the right side of his neck. The silver earrings he wore on both sides were shaped like long swords, an interesting but questionably appropriate variation on the organizational badge. Or maybe they were supposed to be daggers and Nimec was reading too much symbolism into them.
Whether or not that was the case, he’d found dress and appearance codes to be pretty damn lacking at Cold Corners. Hadn’t the base chief been clean-cut when he was hired? Or was his recollection about that also off the mark?
“Yes, sir,” Waylon replied now. His road-warrior appearance belied a disarming mild-manneredness. “I’m thinking I should mention CC’s probably different from other locations, where the emphasis would be to harden it against corporate spies, armed intruders… human threats to property and employees. Here we try to prepare for emergencies shaping out of natural events. Like, say, the storm that’s headed toward us. If any of our personnel become sick or injured when we’re snowbound, it could be a long spell before relief arrives. So we push real heavy on self-sufficiency, and drill a crisis-and-escalation checklist into everybody’s minds. We try not to ignore perimeter defense. But rescue transport, triage, stopgap equipment repair… I guess they’d be stressed over it.”
Nimec nodded, itching to make himself useful.
“Understood,” he said. “How soon can we do this?”
“Be ready in a jiff, sir. We just need to suit up.”
Nimec rose from his chair. He gave the big man an after-you gesture.
“Lead the way and I shall follow,” he said.
Megan Breen stared at her computer screen feeling strangely under assault from the e-mail messages in her queue. Turn on the machine, and there they were demanding attention, zipped through electronic space from scattered points of origin around the world. Amsterdam, Johore, Tokyo, New Delhi, San Jose, Washington, D.C…
There were two, no, three, waiting to be answered from Bob Lang in Washington, D.C.