“Not until a few weeks ago,” said the sergeant, and Vale could sense her pride. “General Trimble had several feeds she used to monitor the faction wars, but her control room was . . . irreversibly damaged in the civil war. This college had a new computer science department, upgraded right before the Break. Our techs have been working on it for a while, and last week we were finally able to tap into Trimble’s old feeds.”

“You didn’t think that was something you ought to report?” asked Vinci.

“We’ve reported it to Morgan three times,” said the sergeant. “She never got back to us. We’re lucky we had the satellites, though, since Delarosa was easy to spot against the snow. Here they are.”

She led them into a heavily guarded room. Marisol Delarosa, whom Vale recognized from the files he had found on her, lay on one side of it, bleeding heavily from her shoulder, with two soldiers leaning over her trying to clean and bandage the wound. In the center of the room sat a small nylon bike trailer, the kind people would use to pull their children behind their bicycles before the Break. Barely two feet across, painted a dull white, it carried a fat metal canister that had gotten an identical paint job. From some scratches on the side Vale could tell it had once been painted green, to better hide it in the forest, and he imagined she must have hurriedly repainted it when Ryssdal’s insane winter storms started up. It was smaller than he’d expected, and while he marveled that she’d gotten so far, he couldn’t deny that such a disguise would have made them phenomenally hard to spot. With as much trouble as the human resistance was making right now, a lone woman with a small package like this could hide in the wilderness almost indefinitely.

Until she came here, thought Vale, and tried to kill eighty percent of the people on the planet.

He felt himself sweating. She’d been trying to activate it when they found her. Another minute and we’d have all been dead.

“Is it really what we think it is?” asked Audra. “A nuclear warhead?”

Vale could hide his feelings from the link and lie if he wanted, but Vinci’s data would give it away. And they already know anyway. They’ve examined it, identified it, and neutralized the threat. They’ve done their jobs, and I can’t lie to them now. “It is.”

“Damn bloody humans,” said the sergeant. “Nothing’s ever enough for them, is it? First the bioweapon, and now this.” She gestured violently at Delarosa. “If this witch got this far without us seeing her, how do we know there’s not more of them out there? What are we supposed to do?”