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.

Cold Corners Base

“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.

“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.”