“Their VVRS pintle guns,” he said. “They were transported with the ATVs?”
Megan nodded.
“And stored away, yes. It’s ironic, I suppose, that we stripped down the weapons. It was the one feature we never thought we’d need here.”
Nimec nodded thoughtfully.
“Waylon, you grab some men, take care of getting the guns remounted,” he said. Then he turned to Megan. “In the meantime we better see about getting those extra choppers from MacTown.”
The cage door grated open, then shut with a dull clang.
Shevaun Bradley was startled. A while ago the echoing of the machines had stopped and left her in almost total silence. The sounds of the door seemed very loud against it.
Sitting on the cot that doubled as her chair and bed, her back against the wall of the enclosure, she lifted her eyes as the marked man came inside.
He was alone, unaccompanied by guards.
It was the first she had seen him since the time of the screaming in the black. The first instance in which he’d appeared without his guards.
He stepped over to the cot and stood watching her in silence.
She could see him easily now. The cage was no longer in darkness. Her conditions had improved after she’d talked to him, answered his questions. His men had returned to screw a bare lightbulb into an overhead socket and wheel in the cot. And the food had gotten better.
They hadn’t brought Scarborough back, though. She hadn’t heard anything from him.
Not since the time of those screams…
“You deceived me,” the marked man said at once.
She stared at him in tense silence, trying to pretend she didn’t know what he meant. Except she did, of course.
“It was an artful deception,” he said. “The dome’s outer cameras were precisely where you revealed they would be. But you neglected to mention the internal cameras.”
She felt her heart pound in her chest, but said nothing.
“It was what you call a lie of omission, nicht wahr?” he said. “Is that not true?”
Bradley said nothing.
The marked man came closer to her. His hand slowly lowering toward the pistol holstered at his waist, hovering inches above its grip.
“You were loyal to your own. You showed courage. But your guile killed four of my comrades,” he said. “Does the knowledge please you?”
She looked at him, but continued to say nothing.
“Does it please you?” he repeated with a vehemence that made her flinch.
“No,” she said, her voice trembling as she gave her answer. “I’m not happy that men died.”
The marked man scrutinized her features a moment, and then suddenly crouched in front of her.
His right hand still near his gun.
His face level with her face.
“I could kill you out of vengeance,” he said. “Without pity or moral constriction. Do you believe me?”
“I believe you.”
A pause.
He reached out his left hand, clamped her wrist in it, and forced her palm against the crescent birthmark on his cheek.
“Describe what you feel,” he said.
Her heart was knocking. “I don’t know—”
“Describe it to me,” he said.
Bradley commanded herself not to cry, and the tears began streaming from her eyes.
“I don’t know what to say,” she told him. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I only feel your face.”
He pressed her hand against his cheek for several more seconds, his eyes radiant with that terrible intensity.
Then he relaxed his grip on her, let her pull back.
“All right,” he said. “Listen well, scientist. I’m going to tell you something you’ll surely wish to remember… ”
Nimec entered the water-treatment dome, strode to its central platform, asked the group working on the pump where he could find the man he was seeking, and was pointed in his direction.
“You Mark Rice?” Nimec said, approaching him from behind.
The man glanced up over his shoulder and nodded. He was crouched at a warped metal pipe-coupling near the platform, a small plasma cutter in his hand, a welding helmet and mask covering his head.
“I’d like to talk,” Nimec said. “When you’ve got a minute.”
“Got one right now.”
Rice switched off the torch, rose, carefully set it down on the wheeled tool cart beside him, turned off the oxygen supply to his face mask, and raised its glass hatch.
“What can I do for you?” he said.
Nimec looked at him. A few spikes of hair showed over Rice’s brow, sweaty despite the penetrating cold inside the dome. They were blond with dyed cobalt-blue streaks.
“I’ve seen your folder,” Nimec said. “You were with the Sword detail in Ankara, my old friend Ghazi’s section.”
Rice nodded silently.
“Ghazi sent your team to flush those terrorists out of the mountains a couple, three years ago. On horseback.”
Rice nodded again.
“Before UpLink, you were Army Ranger,” Nimec said. “The 3/75th, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Saw your share of action in the service… Task Force Somalia, an anti-narc unit in Colombia…”
“Right.”
“And earned some impressive commendations,” Nimec said. “The Distinguished Service Cross, a couple of sharp-shooter’s medals…”
Rice flicked a Nomex-gloved hand into the air between them.
“With all due respect,” he said. “It’s been a long while since I wore a black beret. Or rode a horse—”
“Or fired a rifle,” Nimec said.
Rice looked steadily at him.
“True,” Rice said. “Before the attack on this plant the other night.”
Nimec met his gaze. “You were going to resign from Sword until Rollie Thibodeau talked you out of it, and even then only agreed to stay if you could ship out to Cold Corners,” he said. “Feel comfortable telling me the reason?”
Rice regarded him another moment, then shrugged.
“I didn’t want to shoot anything anymore except with a camera,” he said. “What I do here is mostly work for the beakers. Photographic ecosystem profiles. It suits me fine.”
“And still puts that trained eye of yours to good use.”
Rice made no comment.
“I need a sniper,” Nimec said. “Someone who’s dependable. Who won’t make mistakes. A bunch of lives are going to be on the line. Mine’s incidentally one of them.”
Rice looked at him.
“The talk’s been that you’re going out to bring back the missing search team,” Rice said.
Nimec gave him a nod. Their eyes were still in contact.
“I’m not a quitter,” Rice said.
“Nobody thinks that.”
Rice nodded.
“Go ahead and count me in,” he said.
Burkhart led his men from the ascending passage’s mouth onto a black rock uplift, whipped by freezing wind, his boots stepping across striations that memorialized the labored seaward slide of ancient ice.
A hundred feet below him Bull Pass was congested with shadows. Faded orange, the sun floated on an almost even plane with his line of sight, giving the illusion that he could have squeezed it in his hand if only his reach were longer. It had been like that for days as wintry gloom made its onset.
His attention now, however, was captured by the writhing purple-red blot of light in the sky beside the sun. He had never before seen anything like it. Nor most certainly had any of the others.
Here was the first outward sign of the sun’s advancing fever.
“Mein Gott,” Langern said behind him, staring with awe at the bruisy radiance. “Was ist das?”