“All right, turn around,” Paula snapped. Halfway into the turn another gust slammed into them, and she thought they really would flip over this time. Rosamund spun the wheel violently, countering the tilt. Outside, gray light was seeping into the sky to reveal a thick low cloud base that was moving at a daunting speed toward Mount Herculaneum. The jeep steadied. Rosamund was taking them straight toward the base of the canyon wall.
“Anna, respond please,” Paula said.
“Wilson,” Oscar said. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry.”
“She can’t be!” Wilson said. “She can’t. Damnit, she’s perfectly human.”
“I worked with Tarlo for years,” Paula said. “I had no idea.”
“Work?” Wilson spat contemptuously. “I married her. I loved her.”
“Wilson, Oscar, you have to decide what you’re going to do now. I know this is hard, Wilson, but I expect she will try to crash into one of you.”
“We’ll leave a gap between unhooking from the tether,” Oscar said. “That way she can only go after one of us.”
“That sounds viable.” Paula desperately wanted to offer some practical advice, but she couldn’t even think on how to improve Oscar’s suggestion. She saw the edge of the canyon approaching fast. There was sand under the tires again. Big worn outcrops of rock were cluttered along the base of the canyon wall. Rosamund steered them around a dark jag of abraded lava and braked in its lee; she raised the suspension so the rim settled on the ground. “I hope this is deep enough,” she said as she switched on the jeep’s emergency anchors. The screws on the chassis started to wind down into the hard-packed sand with a strident metallic whine.
“Good luck, both of you,” Paula said.
Rosamund cut the mike and faced Paula. “You didn’t tell him you know about Abadan.”
“Oscar has enough to worry about right now. I didn’t want to impede his effectiveness. He’ll find out if he survives.”
“I don’t know about the Starflyer, but you frighten the living crap out of me.”
“She didn’t know.” Oscar repeated the phrase like a mantra; he’d lost count of how many times he’d said it now. The emptiness of human silence was oppressive and demoralizing as the furious wind rose in counterpoint around the hyperglider. A sense of isolation was folding around him like the caress of interstellar space. Anna: lost beyond redemption goodness knows how many years or decades before. While Wilson had withdrawn into a private hell of anguish and grief. “The human part of her was drawn to you. That’s still alive.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Wilson answered curtly. “I’ve had wives before.”
“Not like this, man; we saw flashes of the real Anna. She’s still there. Lost. She can be re-lifed and her memories edited.”
“After we kill her now. Is that it?”
Oscar winced. The whole conversation was made even more disquieting by the little emerald symbol shining in the corner of his virtual vision showing that Anna was still on the air, receiving everything they said. Maybe silence is best. “What do you want to do?” he asked warily. Wisps of fine sand were drifting past the cockpit, whipped up from the wet desert out beyond the gaping canyon mouth.
“Get to Aphrodite’s Seat. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what we do.”
Oscar resisted letting out a long breath of relief. At least his friend was starting to focus. That was the thing about Wilson, an ability to put the human element aside while he made choices. It was probably what made him so good at command. The parallel between that and Starflyer agents was one Oscar didn’t like to think of.
“We’ll get there,” Oscar said. “After all, there’s not that much she can do.”
“You think?”
Oscar was very close to turning his radio off and just keeping the hyperglider on the ground while the storm raged. The universe can survive without me, surely? Just this once. If he could just do what Wilson did and turn off his emotions.
The hyperglider shook as the wind strengthened around it. Overhead, the gray clouds had merged into an unbroken rumpled ceiling above the stark canyon. “Whatever you want to do, I’m with you,” he told Wilson. It was a cop-out and he knew it, transfer responsibility to someone else. But then that’s what he’d been doing ever since Abadan.
He checked the weather radar with its false-color mating jellyfish patterns. The whole cockpit was juddering now, wobbling the images on the little screen. It showed him a salmon-pink tide of wind channeled by the overbearing walls of Stakeout Canyon and reaching close to a hundred miles an hour. Somewhere in the invisible distance ahead of the hyperglider’s nose, the stormfront had reached the base of Mount Herculaneum.
“Confirmed go status,” Wilson responded with toneless dispassion.
Oscar smiled tenderly at the absolute professionalism; in his own fashion Wilson was showing him the way. Okay, if that’s what it takes to do this, I’m game. “Roger that. I’m beginning ascent phase.”
