The air stank of fuel and coolant. A lurid light shone in through the window by Arkady’s head. In his dazed confusion he took it for the familiar white flash of the orbital sunsets he’d known all his childhood. Then he saw sparks and realized it was the rotors scraping fire off bare rock.
He looked forward, trying to see why the pilot hadn’t shut off the turbines…and one look was enough to tell him that the pilot was dead. Beside him Osnat had somehow gotten her hands free and was struggling out of her harness. But too late, too late.
Then, suddenly, miraculously, the copilot roused himself and reached out a hand and switched the power off. The machine heaved a final horrible shudder and died. In the stunned silence that followed, Arkady heard a cricket singing in a nearby tree and the soft hiss of a leaking feedline.
“My legs are broken,” the copilot said in a blurred voice.
“Looks like it.” Osnat was bending over him, not to help but to remove his sidearm from its holster and thrust it into her belt where the deep groove of her spine ran down between her back muscles. She reached across the gearbox to the butchered remains of the pilot’s body and took his weapon too. Then she began patting the copilot down, transferring the contents of his pockets into hers.
The copilot said something to Osnat in Hebrew too quick for Arkady to follow. He must have hit his head as well as breaking his legs; he was delirious.
She came aft without answering the man and stooped over Arkady.
“Can you walk?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“Good. See that stand of junipers? No, not that one. Farther back, up at the crest of that hill. You’re going to walk to it. Don’t try to run, but don’t turn around or stop either. And don’t come back down here, no matter what you hear or see or think you hear or see.” She undid Arkady’s bonds. His hands were trembling, he noticed distantly. Hers weren’t. “I don’t need to be worrying about where you are on top of everything else I have to worry about.”
Then he spent almost forty-five minutes sitting under the junipers with no view at all of what was happening below, feeling guilty and terrified. Finally he heard the crack of gunfire, and moments later the whoosh and suck of a fierce explosion.
Osnat walked out of the inferno alone, and holding something in her hands.
“You didn’t get the copilot out?” he asked. Then he saw what was in her hands.
She emptied the chamber and slapped the ammunition clip out with practiced hands. Then she stowed the gun in its holster and strapped the holster onto her body. She had to adjust the holster’s fittings several times; they’d been sized to a man’s broad shoulders. At the sight of her hands on the buckles, Arkady remembered the copilot’s last muttered words and felt his gorge rise.
When she’d adjusted the holster to her satisfaction, Osnat looked at Arkady. There was an odd blank look in her usually sharp eyes; the mechanism was clicking along as smoothly and efficiently as always, but there was nobody at the wheel.
Osnat had pulled other things out of the wreck besides the sidearm and holster—though not, as she pointed out, enough things to raise the suspicion of survivors as long as the flames did their work. Still, they had water, food, and—what seemed far more important now that the cold fall night was pressing down upon the desert—a first-aid kit with its two silvery sleep sacks. She parceled out the supplies between the two of them, giving herself the lion’s share and merely rolling her eyes at his weak protests.
“Okay,” she said in a horribly normal voice. “Time to take a hike.”
“What made the helicopter crash?” Arkady asked several hours later.
They were facing each other across a small fire that Osnat had lit only after a forced march that took them into the early hours of the morning, and only because Arkady had begun shivering uncontrollably with shock, cold, and exhaustion.
“To me,” Osnat said in the hairsplitting tone of a connoisseur discussing a wine’s bouquet, “it sounded like someone set a timed charge on the tail rotor.”
“What kind of someone?”
“Well, I would have said Ash up to this point. You have to assume she was going to do something to break us out. But that was an awfully risky way to do it.” Her good eye measured him briefly. “I wasn’t going to say anything about it, and I don’t want to freak you out, but it’s pretty fucking unbelievable that we both walked out of that. Whoever set that charge was trying to get us out of GolaniTech’s hands, but they weren’t going to be crying on their pillow if we bought it in the process. I doubt Ash would have made that kind of call without it going up to the eighth floor. Maybe higher.”
“But that would mean—”
“—that Didi has decided to cut his losses and pull the plug on the operation while the tape’s still on the box.”
Arkady squinted across the fire, trying to gauge Osnat’s expression. The air rippled above the flames like running water, and the face beyond the scrim of the sparks was as unreadable as a text written in a dead language.
“What was it like growing up in the Syndicates?” Osnat asked suddenly.
“It was…happy. Until the war. A lot of things changed then.” Suddenly Arkady found himself struggling to articulate something he’d felt often but never put words to. “Before the war we had a very idealistic society. Not perfect. But…honest, somehow. When the UN attacked us, everything went out the window except pure survival.” He laughed softly. “And somehow ‘survival’ always seems to translate into the honest idealists being pushed aside and replaced by dishonest manipulators.”
“It’s the same for us,” Osnat said, making the same connection Safik had made. “Human nature. And apparently not just human.”
The bottom stick on the fire flared bright red, popped loudly, and crumpled into charcoal, setting the rest of the fire sliding and slithering and realigning itself above it. Beyond the firelight Arkady could hear the muted and furtive night sounds of the living desert.
“That woman who got pregnant, Arkady. Was your friend sureit was because of the fever?”
“As sure as you can be about work done in the field and under time pressure.”
“What do you think it would do to humans? What…just as an example…what do you think it would do to me?”
Arkady stared across the fire at her, but the eyes looking back at him weren’t Osnat’s eyes; they were the eyes of a rabbit racing ahead of the fox’s jaws. Arkady felt a guilty dread grip his chest and bear down on him. If Osnat could begin to covet the Novalis virus and the fertility that came with it, then what would the rest of her species do? How deep would the insanity run? And how brutal a price would Earth’s people pay if their surging population pushed them into outright war with the Orbital Ring? For the first time, Arkady really understood the myriad effects that the virus would send rippling across Earth—as dramatic and irreversible as the effects of triggering a cascade reaction in a newly terraformed biosphere. How far would the ripples spread? Would they bring down the fragile spider’s web that linked Earth to the dependent populations of her far-flung colonies?
How many deaths were going to be on his hands before it was over?
“The human immune system is so different from ours,” he told her, skirting the question. “It might do nothing. Or it might kill you.”
“That’s assuming I can catch it from you.” A log slithered to the ground in a shower of sparks. Arkady heard the blood thrumming in his ears, felt the curve of the planet falling away into darkness beneath him. “Can I?”
“You might already have caught it.”
He spoke the words without having consciously decided to say them. Even as he watched comprehension spread across her face, he was far from certain that he’d done the right thing.
“Are you sure of this?” Osnat asked. The hunger was gone from her voice. She had gone back to being the hard-bitten and practical soldier. “What’s your evidence?”