Nimec unexpectedly thought of the day that he and Meg had first talked to Tom Ricci about joining up with UpLink, on a spring afternoon a year or so back. They had met with him at his place in Maine, and were on his deck overlooking Penobscot Bay when a bald eagle had soared from a nearby tree, prompting every other bird in sight to flutter off into nowhere, all of them dispersing at the same time.

“It’ll generally stay quiet for five, ten minutes after she’s gone,” Ricci had remarked. “Then you’ll see the gulls, terns, and ducks come back, sometimes a few at a time, sometimes hundreds of them at once, like there’s been an all-clear.”

Nimec felt an odd twinge. He supposed this was his day for recalling other people’s words.

“They scattered,” he said. “Just like that.”

Waylon glanced out toward the dome, then faced Nimec.

“The men who hit us,” he said with understanding.

Nimec nodded.

“They did what they wanted. And now somebody’s given them the word to retreat.”

Waylon looked at him.

“We have to go after them—”

“No.”

“No?”

Nimec gave him a second nod.

“We don’t know how many of them are out there, where they came from, or where they might be planning to hole up. Probably don’t know a bunch of other things that I haven’t thought of, and that we ought to know before flinging ourselves into a manhunt. And our priority’s to safeguard the base,” he said. “Besides, the storm’s getting worse. It’d be craziness to have our people riding blind in it.”

Waylon kept looking at him.

“What are we supposed to do?”

Nimec hesitated a moment.

“Call off our troops and put out the fire,” he said, then juiced his engine and went racing off toward the dome.

The fire-suppression agents carried into the water-treatment dome by CC’s Sword ops shared the capacity to arrest intense flames without leaving a damaging residue on sensitive computer and telecommunications equipment—an almost certain collateral effect of foam or water. Both nonconductive formulations were certified environmentally green, and as such had gained approval for use on the Antarctic continent.

These important similarities apart, each possessed separate and unique properties.

FE-13 was the commercial name for trifluromethane, a cryogenic substitute for Halon, which had been banned from global production in 1989 for its ozone-depleting qualities. Stored as a liquid in an airtight steel container, FE-13’s minus-115° Fahrenheit boiling point meant it discharged as a colorless, odorless gas that would lower the temperature of exposed areas to levels that were too cold to sustain a burn.