“Pete, it isn’t like I’ve been living in a paper bag for thirty-five years,” she said. “I lost a husband. Lost my best friend aboard Orion. I understand those things. But that doesn’t excuse—”
“I’m not asking to be excused,” Nimec said hoarsely. He swallowed again, realized his throat was no longer dry. In fact, it had almost clogged with moisture. “I’m asking you for a second chance.”
Annie was quiet. Nimec waited, trying in vain to read her expression.
“A second chance,” she said.
He nodded.
Silence from Annie again. This time it seemed infinitely, torturously long.
Nimec’s heart kept tripping away in his chest.
Then she met his eyes with her own,
“Okay,” she said. “You’ve got it. I’m giving it to you. But I’m telling you very honestly there won’t be a third.”
Nimec pulled some air into his lungs. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought it had been an hour since he’d last caught a breath.
“I won’t need a third,” he said. “Won’t let ancient history carry over into my life anymore… make
“Pete, enough.” Annie moved closer to him, reached out a hand, lightly touched his wrist. “We both have important things to do.”
“
“It is, yes,” she said, still touching him with her hand. All at once smiling gently. “And we’ll pick up on it when we’re back home. Over a quiet dinner. Maybe in front of a warm fireplace.”
He stood there. Very conscious of her hand on his wrist.
“That’d be perfect,” he said. “Soon as I get back, I promise—”
Nimec looked at her. She looked at him.
Both of them were silent now.
“Annie?” Nimec said after a while.
She nodded.
“I kind of know you and Megan have gotten tight… ”
She nodded again.
He took another deep breath.
“That part about me being afraid…?”
“Will be our secret,” she said.
The Bell made a jarring launch from the USARP expedition camp where it had dropped its load of survival bags, having been forced to touch down at an angle in the steep-walled trench where the dome tents were clustered.
Nimec felt its sudden acceleration in his stomach as Granger throttled up. He held onto the sides of his tagalong seat though he was buckled and strapped in tight.
He glanced out his window. The scientific team that had called out for extra supplies — they had introduced themselves as micropaleontologists, mentioning something to Nimec about collecting flake-sized remnants of fossilized mollusks — stood waving at the bird in appreciation, arms high against a white background.
It struck him that Scarborough and his team must have looked much the same when Granger had become the last known person in the world to set eyes on them.
Then tents and expeditioners alike dwindled to vibrant orange specks under the chopper’s skids, and blanked out of sight as Granger flared off above two spiring crystal-cathedral seracs.
“I’ll have to see if we get any more urgent hails, but so far we’re in good shape,” he said. “One more scheduled inspection, a fill-up at the Marble Point fuel dump, and I think we’ll be all right to head into the valleys.”
Nimec turned his head from the window to look at him.
“I’ll be here,” he said.
“The reason they use bamboo for wands is that it can bend a hell of a lot before it breaks, and is almost climate-proof… I think it has something to do with the fibre density,” Granger said above the flap of his chopper’s rotors. “You can spot them up ahead, straight out to starboard.”
Nimec gazed down at the rows of marker wands with their orange and green flags. Granger had explained that they were planted to guide traversers and field parties across crevasse fields, steering them safely around the dangerous fissures. The purpose of his aerial survey, he’d said, was to make sure the bamboo staves hadn’t toppled, gotten their flags shorn away, or been drifted over in the storm’s gale-force winds.
“What’s your verdict?” Nimec said. “They look in decent shape to me.”
“Mostly, yeah,” Granger said. “But I know this area, and pretty well know the exact location of the wands. I think a few of them at the margins of the zone might have gotten covered.” He worked his cyclic and collective. “It wouldn’t hurt to be safe. There’s an outcrop a couple hundred yards outside the field that’s flattened on top and makes for a good natural LZ. We can land on it, take a walk, check that the banners are exposed to sight. One bad step and somebody could fall right into one of those cracks.”
“Not the sort of surprise a person would appreciate,” Nimec said.
Granger’s eyes flicked to his face.
“It sure isn’t,” Granger said. “You okay with us going down?”
“I don’t see how we’ve got any other choice,” Nimec said.
Getting from the platform where Granger lowered his skids to the first of the marker wands took them about twenty minutes. It was a tough walk for Nimec, his mountain-booted feet alternately sinking into deep snow and scuffling for traction on the slippery sheet ice.
Ahead of him, Granger was making easier progress in the snowshoes strapped over his own boots, moving with the balanced stride of someone practiced at their use.
“I know this must be tricky for you,” he’d said when Nimec stumbled minutes before. “But if you aren’t fitted for paddles that are the right weight and size, wearing them can make things worse.”
Nimec had not commented. That was a discovery he’d made for himself after trying on a second set of aluminum snowshoes Granger kept in the chopper — spares that almost sent him sprawling, and soon wound up hanging over his shoulder by their strap.
The two men stopped now, the helicopter left well out of sight to their rear. Nimec looked at the gaudy red marker poking up out of the snow to his left. Then he wiped the fog of exhaled moisture off his goggles and browsed over the lines of bamboo staves stringing a long way past it into the distance. Their distribution in the groups that he could see appeared fairly even. Wind-rippled colored banners accented all of them, red ones indicating the boundaries of danger areas, green flags indicating the safer paths around them.
He looked over at Granger. The chopper pilot had his back to him and was staring across the crevasse field.
“You ought to have a peek through your binocs,” Nimec said. “So far I’m not finding any problems.”
Granger nodded, still looking out over the range, his probe chocked upright in the snow. Nimec saw him move his arm, reaching for what he assumed was the binocular case around his neck.
Then he turned toward Nimec, a Beretta pistol in his gloved hand, proving that assumption very wrong.
Nimec’s eyes grew large.
“You want a problem,” Granger said, “you’ve got it.”
“What is this?” Nimec said. His gaze was fixed on Granger’s drawn Beretta. “What the hell are you doing?”
Granger stood there pointing it at Nimec, his expression masked by his goggles and balaclava. “It’s like I said. You came here looking for a problem. But sometimes you find ones you don’t expect.”
