Ruins

“Sergeant Audra, sir.” She saluted. “We found the human insurgent approximately twenty minutes ago. She attempted to activate her cargo when she saw us, and we were forced to incapacitate her.”

“You shot her?” asked Vinci.

“She’s wounded but alive,” said Audra. “Our medic expired last year, but we’ve done our best to stabilize her.”

Vale nodded; the medics had been among the first to be produced, due to their more advanced training requirements, and thus had been some of the first to die. He looked pointedly at the swarm of soldiers, feeling their nervous energy crackle across the link; they were scared. “Why the crowd?”

“Don’t worry, sir, they all have clearance. We’re all teams Commander Vinci organized.” She hesitated, and Vale felt another burst of nervous fear. “When we realized what her cargo was, sir, we thought it was wise to bring in extra security.”

Vale ground his teeth in frustration; the other recon teams did, technically, have clearance, but he’d have preferred if the team that found her were the only team to know what she’d been carrying. “Take me to see it.”

The sergeant led Vale and Vinci into the main college building, where several soldiers in tech uniforms were milling around just as nervously as the scouts outside. “We’ve been using this facility for weeks,” said Audra, “trying to get the satellite feeds up and working again. That’s how we found her—she was farther north, trying to sneak in through a residential neighborhood, but her movement showed up on a scan from the satellites, and we brought her here, like I said, for security. We think she probably came up the river and managed to bypass our patrols.”

“I used to lead a security checkpoint in Tarrytown,” said Vinci. “Was nobody there?”

“I understand that checkpoint’s been vacant since you abandoned it and joined the humans,” said the sergeant, adding a strictly formal “Sir.”

Vinci’s irritation steamed across the link, but Vale steered the conversation in another direction before it could escalate. “What do you mean that you found her by satellite?” he asked. “We haven’t had satellite uplinks working since the Break.”

“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.”