solar system and back, the shuttles would never have been visible at all, Rourke realized. “They will find us—or we’ll find them,” Natalia said from behind him. It would be a long night, Rourke knew—listening for radio signals, alternately transmitting, observing in the cold from the top of the mountain to attempt to get a fix on the crafts if they passed overhead again. Coincidence or providence, Rourke wondered. He dismissed the question. Rourke twisted in the saddle to better see Natalia’s face. He took her face in his hands, the wind catching at her hair, her cheeks cold to the touch, her lips drawing out into a smile. “Merry Christmas, John*” He smiled, wondering—but he drew her face toward him, kissing her lips, holding her there.
Chapter Sixty-Two
All was ready, his meager things prepared for the journey—an historic journey, he had told himself.
The old wounds bothered him not at all.
His speed with a gun was fast—very fast. Faster, he wondered? Faster than John Rourke?
The vial of the cryogenic serum he had paid so much to obtain when he had first learned of the Eden Project long before the Night of The War. The gunfight—he had lost.
But some few of his faithful—he would sing their names to the pages of history—they had taken him, found him the best of care in secret and when the inevitability of it had been known, helped him to survive. He closed his eyes tightly, a pressure behind them he could feel, then opening them, staring at the sky—it was already Christmas. And the present he so much wanted to bestow—the gift of death— he could not yet give. “Soon,” he whispered to the morning stars, to the horizon beyond the mountain top where he had forged his plans, begun it all. Footsteps crunched in the snow behind him and he turned around. “All is ready. But there are strange signals coming over the radio—it is perhaps the time. The words are garbled—but I think they are English. It is a signal like none I have ever heard.”
“The Eden Project. So much the better—so much the better.”
“There is no way to be certain.”
“I am certain. When the pain was all that consumed me, it seemed somehow to deepen my perception, to heighten my awareness—I could feel their presence before you spoke of it to me. We leave, then.”
The other man, swathed in arctic parka and ski toque, raised his right hand in salute, “Yes, Comrade Colonel.”
The snow through which he trod had been virgin until he had made his imprint on it, he thought as he walked, the subordinate following him. It would be that way with this new world as well.
