“Do you know what a criticality accident is?” Ms. Jones asked Ivar.
He nodded. “Of course. An uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction.”
Unnoticed by everyone, except Ms. Jones and Pitr, a frown crossed Doc’s face at this shift in questioning.
“How many have occurred?” Ms. Jones asked.
“Twenty-two outside of reactors,” Ivar said.
“And sixty, known, including reactors and assembly facilities,” Ms. Jones said. She lifted a hand toward her scar-covered head. “I experienced one directly at Chernobyl. It was the largest of the sixty. Known. Explain to the team what a criticality accident is exactly.”
“Well, uh, it’s the unintentional bringing together of a mass of fissionable material outside of a shielded environment. The critical mass releases radiation and neutron flux. The radiation can be very dangerous to any humans nearby.”
“The woman who opened the Gateway Rift,” Ms. Jones said, “had received what would have been a fatal dose of radiation — fatal, that is, if she’d lived long enough to have died from it.”
“Lucky her,” Mac muttered.
“That’s new,” Doc said. “Usually they’re sucked through the Rift.”
Ms. Jones ignored him, focusing on Ivar. “What if the critical mass is done intentionally?”
“Then it isn’t an accident,” Ivar said. “Did this woman have fissionable material?”
“No.”
Doc tried to keep his hand in. “Then it had to come from the other side.”
“Duh,” Mac said. “Even Roland could have figured that out.”
“Yes,” Ms. Jones said, ignoring the team interplay as she usually did. “I fear we are approaching our own form of criticality.”
“How so?” Moms asked.
Ms. Jones shook her head. “I don’t know. But for many years the Rifts and the Fireflies were relatively the same. But the last few have been different, evolving. That concerns me. Almost as if there were a plan being played out.”
“And Burns?” Moms asked. “How does he play into this?”
“That is a good question,” Ms. Jones said. “I fear we might not ever know the answer.”
“I’ll get the answer out of him,” Nada vowed.
Ms. Jones waved that comment off and focused back on Ivar. “Will you destroy Fireflies, and whatever they’re in, if ordered?”
Ivar didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
“Will you be a Nightstalker?”
“Yes.”
Ms. Jones gestured and Pitr picked up a thick folder from among the papers on her desk. He disappeared behind Ms. Jones’s high-backed chair. A shredder went to work.
“You no longer exist,” Ms. Jones said. “All tangible proof of your existence is gone. Teams in the field have also erased your existence in the outside world. You might be a memory for people you’ve met in your life, but that is all. And memories fade, faster than most people realize.”
Ivar swallowed hard, trying to search his own memory for those who might have a memory of him.
Apparently he wasn’t giving up much, he decided.
Ms. Jones finally shifted her gaze past him. “Names?”
“Fred,” Nada said right away, as Nada was wont to say. He felt every team needed a Fred and they hadn’t had one in a long time. This was met with a few eye rolls but was so expected it was pretty much ignored.
“Mini-Me,” Mac said. “We already got a Doc, so he can’t be called that, but he is a scientist. Kind of looks like a mad scientist to me.”
This nomination didn’t seem to light anyone’s fire.
“Roland?” Ms. Jones asked.
The big man didn’t like being singled out, especially by a woman. He had a thing about women in leadership roles — not a bad thing, but they made him kind of nervous. He’d rather be shot at.
“Buddy?” Roland suggested, at a loss for anything else and not having paid much attention to the candidate anyway.
“He ain’t a dog,” Mac drawled.
“A nice name,” Ms. Jones said, and Roland blushed, the barbed wire standing out in stark relief against the scar. “Eagle?”
“Chowder,” Eagle said.
“Clarify?” Ms. Jones said.
“The only Ivar I know of is a chain of seafood restaurants around Seattle,” Eagle said. “Ate at one while waiting for a ferry. Had chowder.” Eagle shrugged. “Best I could do. Under the circumstances.”
Ms. Jones moved on. “Mac?”
“Rat.”
Everyone in the room turned to look at Mac, including Ivar.
Mac clarified. “Not ’cause I think he’s a rat or nothing, just that when we rescued him in that lab, there were rats there, and he was kind of weird about them.” Mac shrugged also. “It’s all I know about the man.”
“Moms?” Ms. Jones asked the last member of the team.
“Ivar.”
Ms. Jones blinked.
“Heck, Moms,” Mac said, “we know that’s—” Then he trailed into silence.
Ms. Jones cracked a smile, which actually appeared like her face was crumbling. “Yes. I like it. He is an original. He is the only one to open a Rift and still be among us. Therefore he should still retain his name. Ivar it is.”
“Welcome to the team,” Mac said, taking a step forward and slapping him, a bit too hard, on the shoulder. “Usually we celebrate with beer, but this ain’t a beer day.”
The rest of the team shuffled by, uncomfortable under Ms. Jones’s gaze, and shook Ivar’s hand.
Then everyone regained their positions and waited for the bad news.
“I will not bore you with more ‘why we are here’ talk,” Ms. Jones said. “You all have heard it many times and Ivar will have time here at the Ranch for me to discuss it with him one on one.”
Moms and Nada exchanged a glance. They’d both expected to be gearing up and moving out to go after Burns ASAP after this. Perhaps they were leaving Ivar behind and—
“The issue of Burns has been appropriated by a higher authority,” Ms. Jones said.
“Frak,” Mac muttered.
“Fuck me to—” Nada couldn’t finish it.
“Excuse me, Ms. Jones.” Moms was the only one who would dare to stand up to the old woman. “Burns was one of us. We clean up our own messes. He killed the scientist at the Arch and he killed one of our Support in Utah along with an innocent girl. He’s ours.”
“He was ours,” Ms. Jones clarified. “But we lost him, didn’t we? We discarded him and then he turned on us. It is my fault,” she added, because she always took responsibility for everything that went wrong. “I chose him for the team. It was a mistake. One I hoped we could rectify in-house. I also made the mistake of letting him go. Believe me, Miss Moms. I want us to go after Burns very badly.”
Nada stepped up next to Moms. “Whose responsibility is it now?”
“The Cellar,” Ms. Jones said, and they all glanced over at Roland, because he’d spent some time with a Cellar operative after their joint mission during the previous holidays, saving the world from nuclear Armageddon.
Roland put both his big paws up, as if to ward off the stares. “I ain’t heard nothing from Neeley since we dropped those two CIA dickheads.” When Roland said dropped, he meant it literally, cutting the two men’s climbing rope and letting them fall to their deaths on a mountaineering expedition in South America. Such was the price of betrayal in the world of covert operations.
“It does fall under the province of the Cellar’s mandate to deal with rogue agents,” Ms. Jones said.
“Yes,” Moms agreed, “but whoever the Cellar sends, will they understand if a Firefly is involved?”
“There’s no indication a Firefly came through,” Ms. Jones said. “I told you: We have video from six different cameras of the gate. The only thing that came out was Burns.”
“What looked like Burns,” Nada corrected. “And who knows what’s in him. He took down the Snake pretty effectively. The Burns we knew couldn’t have done that.”