Waylon looked at Megan.
“You know how Doc Payton was,” he said. “I want to say the crew here got along with him. But the truth is there isn’t anybody at CC that didn’t have the urge to strangle him at least once.” Waylon shook his head. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s terrible what happened to him. I wish it hadn’t happened. But I’m thinking it’s possible he could have done something to provoke it.”
There was more silence.
“Okay,” Megan said. “We have to make some decisions—”
“Like how we get Scarborough and Bradley out, you mean?” Nimec said.
Megan exchanged glances with him.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “It isn’t that simple. I won’t allow any more of our own to find themselves in a situation where they’re easy targets. There’s a question of how we can accomplish it. Whether we should request help—”
“From who? And when’s it going to reach us? I thought we went through this together once before. The boss got us the authority to act.”
“No argument about that,” Megan said. “But we have a small force here… and a slice of it’s been allocated to recovering function at the desalinization plant.”
“You know the pump kicked in for a little while this morning,” Nimec said. It had been a good piece of news he’d gotten upon his return from Marble Point, where he and his rescue pilot had spent an overnight due to passing fog whiteout. “Don’t ask me how the crew did it. For all I can tell they used string, scotch tape, and chewing gum. But they got it to show signs of life. And they figure to have some of its capacity back soon.”
Megan looked at Waylon.
“How much?” she said. “And how soon?”
“I’m estimating we can get to almost a quarter of our regular freshwater output in a couple of days. That’s with four or five of us on it round the clock.” Waylon spread his hands. “I can’t guarantee the pump’ll stay up, but if we lose it again manpower won’t matter. We’ve done about all we can with the parts we’ve cannibalized.”
Megan shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said. “There are other considerations to weigh. Before she left yesterday, Annie Caulfield advised me about a range of problems we can expect because of the solar flares—”
“Just another reason we should move fast.”
“Pete, we’ve already felt some effects,” she said. “Though they haven’t even emerged from the far side of the sun, it appears we’ve already had some irregularities in our satellite and radio connections. Dead spots.” Megan gestured toward her timed-out desktop computer. “I’ve experienced them myself. Annie provided an access code for a turnkey NASA Web site. A half hour ago I tried to log on and access the latest models for when the activity’s going to peak. And couldn’t. The data link broke on me. It’s still fouled up. We might be looking at periods when our radio connections go partially or entirely down over the next couple of days… can you imagine what kind of tactical problems that would lead to in the field?”
Nimec nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “But it’d be an equal disadvantage. The other side would run into the same complications.”
She shook her head. “Still…”
“I’m no world-beater,” Nimec said. “I wouldn’t take anybody out there to the Valleys without a solid plan.”
“I’m not implying that. I trust you. But it’s my job to measure the risks. Make the final decision. Nobody else can do it. I can’t unload the responsibility. I own it… ”
She trailed off, her features tight with concentration.
Nimec watched her a moment. Then he stepped away from the map and softly rested a hand on her shoulder.
“Meg, listen,” he said. “One thing I learned from the boss… from Gord… is that part of owning it is knowing when to trust somebody enough to let go.”
Silence in the room.
Megan sat with her face turned up toward Nimec’s as that silence spooled out between them like an invisible thread. Then she took a deep breath, seemed to hold it a moment, and released a long, deep sigh.
Nimec could feel her muscles loosen under his palm.
“You said you’ve come up with a plan?” she said.
“No,” he said. “Not me.”
She looked at him.
“Who?” she said.
Waylon thumbed his chest, moved his shaved head up and down in a single nod.
“You,” she said.
He nodded again, his long-sword earrings gleaming softly under the fluorescent lights.
Megan half smiled.
“Tell it to me, Ron,” she said.
“Sure,” he said, “I was just waiting for you to ask.”
And then he told her.
Burkhart did not decide upon a conclusive plan of action until several hours after Granger failed to report — convincing him the pilot’s true failure was more critical than that.
The plan’s crucial elements, however, had germinated in his mind much earlier. In fact, its rough contours had emerged after his return to Bull Pass. He had known that even Granger’s success — his elimination of UpLink’s head of security — would only forestall the inevitable.
Looking backward, Burkhart could see the road to his fall so clearly. With all veils of conceit and ambition lifted from his eyes, now he could see. The destruction of UpLink’s robotic probe, his taking of its recovery team, his exposed sabotage attempt and the bloodletting that followed, and at last, his hastily necessitated reliance on Granger to do what Burkhart had recognized was far beyond the pilot’s competence… from the day he’d set foot on that road, and perhaps onto the many forking junctures he had walked along the way, it now seemed there had been something almost deterministic about where he was headed.
Gabriel Morgan was dead. The Albedo Consortium’s vast and elaborate underpinnings were on the verge of complete breakdown, a thunderous crash that would send legal and political ground quakes through scores of nations.
What options remained before him then? What roads on which to push toward success… or if not that, then some little measure of self-redemption? There was no way to erase — or substantially reduce — the evidence of the uranium digging and transshipping operation in whatever scant time was left to him. Not even if the mines were razed would that evidence be concealed for long. He could, perhaps, physically remove himself from it, arrange to be carried off in a small plane from one of the South American gateways… but that would mean abandoning all or most of his men.
They were men who had fought bravely beside him. Men who had been loyal and true to him in the darkest face of his own failure.
He would not do it.
Would not desert them.
Deep beneath the frozen earth, Burkhart had decided to make his stand in the pass above, and hold the high ground where he was certain the enemy would show his own resolute face.
“These ATVs were shipped from Kaliningrad a few months back, when they ordered and got themselves updated models,” Waylon was saying. “They’re two-passenger, fully automatic, and have noise-dampened engines. Our field researchers love zipping around in them.”
Megan stood beside Nimec and Waylon in the heated garage arch outside CC1, looking at the ten parked, neatly aligned vehicles, and remembering.
“They were used by Max Blackburn in Operation Politika,” she said. “I was… we were together in Russia at the time.” She paused and glanced at Nimec. “When you and I signed off on the upgrade request right before leaving San Jose, it came to me that the older vehicles might be perfect for the ice. Waste not, want not, you know?”
Nimec was quiet a moment. He had tried very hard to ignore the sadness in her voice as she’d spoken of Max.