open.
He'd been behaving like a monk for a long time. He'd put all of himself into his work or his car, he'd run or biked thousands of miles to wear himself out, and it wasn't like it was a sin to take pleasure in the company of an attractive woman.
It didn't have to go any farther than that. He didn't have to risk losing Toni as a friend and coworker by pushing it into romance. He could keep his hands to himself, his pants zipped, and keep it platonic.
His inner voice laughed at him all the way back to his office.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
When Toni Fiorella walked past her, Joanna Winthrop looked at the woman and was sure her suspicions were dead on target:
Miss Toni had the hots for their boss.
It wasn't that hard to see, given how Fiorella blossomed like a hothouse orchid time-lapse vid every time she was around Alex Michaels. He didn't seem to notice, no surprise. Men were usually stupid that way — among all the other ways. Still, he was a nice enough guy, and the truth was Winthrop had entertained a couple of fantasies in that direction herself. Well, at least before she'd started finding reasons to drop by and see Julio Fernandez. Michaels was okay, but Julio? Julio was a jewel.
In fact, she could probably break some time away from work tomorrow to get together with him and do a little computer stuff. He still wanted to learn, and she was getting more and more comfortable hanging around with him. The guy didn't seem to have any ego, at least as far as women were concerned, and he just kept surprising her with what he said and how he said it.
She grinned to herself. Yeah, let Toni pine after the boss. They were probably better suited for each other. Winthrop was finding that lately she had developed a real hankering for… Hispanic food.
It was still dark outside the one-man funnel tent, dark and cold too, but at least the snow had started falling again.
John Howard wasn't exactly toasty in his mummy sleeping bag, but he was warm enough, and the face shield had kept his nose from freezing off. He didn't want to peel himself out of the bag and get up, but he had to go pee and there was no getting around that. It wouldn't be light for a while yet, but he didn't have to go looking for a place — he was all by himself. Like his grandfather used to say, he was so far out, the sun came up between here and town…
He'd planned to do a winter survival weekend in Washington state after the scheduled joint Net Force/military exercises in the Pacific Northwest, but there was some kind of problem with the biochemical depot at Umatilla. Apparently one of the destabilized nerve-gas rockets had sprung a leak. It wasn't much of a leak, on the order of a microscopic spray, and it was contained and not dangerous, but the Army had been running around trying to put a media lid on it, and of course, had failed utterly to do so. As a result, the civilians nearest the depot were terrified that a cloud of poison was about to roll into town and kill every man, woman, child, and dog, and folks were being sent to visit relatives way out of town, so Net Force and the Army had canceled their exercise. The Army figured that it wouldn't look good to have a bunch of guys in combat gear running around and going
Howard slid out of the sleeping bag, already dressed in long underwear, pants, socks, and a heavy wool shirt. He removed the spare socks he'd stuffed into his boots to keep the scorpions and spiders out — even though it was winter, this was a good habit to get into. He pulled the boots on after he looked for hitchhikers anyway — damn, they were chilly! — grabbed a jacket and hat, and scooted out of the tent.
The early morning sky was perfectly clear, with stars glittering in hard, sharp, fiery points. You could see the Milky Way out here, and all kinds of constellations that you'd never spot in the city. And the colors of the stars, reds, blues, yellows. Truly a beautiful sky.
He stood, ambled a few yards off along the path he'd packed down before he'd turned in the night before, and wrote his name in a snowbank piled up against what looked like a frozen and pretty-sad-about-it creosote bush.
Back inside, he lit his hurricane candle, and set up his single-burner propane stove. The mouth of the funnel tent was just tall enough to sit upright in. The tent was made of double-walled rip-stop Gortex, which kept the snow out, but still allowed most of the moisture inside to escape, so you didn't wake up with your own condensed water vapor raining on you. In the old days, he'd have gathered firewood and started a small outdoor fire to boil water for coffee and rehydration of his food, but the current land-use philosophy was for 'no impact' campsites. No cutting down trees or clearing brush, no trenching your tent for runoff, no open fires, and only a minimal latrine — and even that had to be covered and tamped before you broke camp.
He grinned as he started a snowmelt pot of water heating. He'd been on a couple of outings where the 'no impact' rule had been so strictly adhered to they'd had to bag and seal their own solid waste and pack it out.
It was amazing what soldiers would joke about.
It was about twelve degrees outside right now, and the ground was hard as a rock and frozen to boot, so digging wasn't going any deeper than the snow, but he had biodegradable toilet paper pads that would disappear the first time they got wet, and by spring any signs of scat would be long gone. It wasn't likely anybody was going to be out here playing in the snow before springtime…
He had a little hike ahead of him today, just ten miles. But on snowshoes and with a backpack it would work him some. He had a GPS if he got lost, though he'd try to locate his next campsite the old-fashioned way, with a compass and landmarks. It wasn't as easy as the GPS, of course, where all you had to do was punch a couple of buttons and it would tell you exactly where you were and how to get to where you wanted to go. But batteries could go dead, satellites could fall, and a compass was reliable if you knew how to allow for magnetic north and all. If you lost your compass, there were the stars, including the sun. And if it was cloudy, there was dead reckoning, though that was a little more iffy.
Truth was, he hadn't been lost in a long time. He had a good sense of direction.
At six a.m., he pulled his virgil and keyed his morning check-in code. He could also find his way out using the virgil, and could go to vox to call for help if he needed it. If something happened and he couldn't call out, Net Force or other rescuers could also find him via the little device, which had a homer with a dedicated battery in it. It wasn't as if he were Lewis and Clark, a million miles away from civilization. Still, it was cold and he was all by himself out here in the middle of the high desert, with fresh snow piled a foot and a half deep. If anything happened to him, help wouldn't get to him right away.
There was a real risk to being here. Which was, of course, the point. The way a man found out what he was made of was when he tested himself against real danger. VR only went so far, no matter how real it felt. You always knew you weren't gonna die in VR. But in real life, sometimes things went to hell, and you had to survive on your wits and your skills. This little three-day trip was not that big a deal. He'd lived off the land on his own for a couple of weeks, in terrain ranging from desert to jungle. There was a great sense of accomplishment in knowing that if you survived a plane crash in the middle of nowhere, you could probably survive long enough for help to arrive. Assuming anybody wanted to find you…
