At the end of the tunnel was a crowded refuge of several little chambers, roughly walled, floored and ceilinged by insulation panels, set right against cavities in the ice. Every room radiated from a larger central chamber that served as kitchen and dining hall. Jackie hugged everyone in there but Maya, ending with Nirgal. They held each other hard, and Nirgal felt her trembling, and realized he was trembling as well, in a kind of synchronic vibration. The silent, desperate, fearful drive would strengthen the bond as much as their lovemaking by the volcano, or more— it was hard to tell— he was too tired to be able to read the powerful vague emotions sloshing through him. He disengaged from Jackie and sat, feeling suddenly exhausted to tears. Hiroko sat beside him, and he listened to her as she told him what had happened in more detail. The attack had started with the sudden appearance of several space planes, dropping onto the flat outside the hangar in a group. So they had had very little warning inside, and the people at the hangar had reacted in confusion, telephoning in to warn the others, but failing to activate Coyote’s defense system, which apparently they had simply forgotten. Coyote was disgusted about this, Hiroko said, and Nirgal could well believe it. “You have to stop paratrooper attacks at the very moment of landing,” he said. Instead the people at the hangar had retreated into the dome. After some confusion they had gotten everyone up into the escape tunnel, and once they were past the blast point Hiroko had ordered them to use the Swiss defense and bring down the dome, and Kasei and Dao had obeyed her, and so the whole dome had been blown down, killing whatever part of the attack force was inside, burying them in million of tons of dry ice. Radiation readings seemed to indicate that the Rick-over had not suffered a meltdown, although it certainly had been crushed along with everything else. Coyote had disappeared down a side tunnel with Peter, out a bolt-hole of his own, and Hiroko didn’t know exactly where they had gone. “But I think those space planes may be in trouble.”

So Gamete was gone, and the shell of Zygote too. In some future age the polar cap would sublime away and reveal their flattened remnants, Nirgal thought absently; but for now it was buried, utterly unreachable.

And here they were. They had gotten out with only some AIs, and the walkers on their backs. And now they were at war with the Transitional Authority (presumably), with some part of the force that had assaulted them still out there.

“Who were they?” Nirgal asked.