Salvation полностью

“No, don’t flatter me; you wouldn’t do it.” Yuri’s forefinger tapped the picture. “Henry Orme’s partner is about to give birth, for God’s sake! Callum didn’t even let him go to the Gylgen plant; he sent him to supervise the Haumea end of the operation where he’d be safe. And the rest, they all care about one another. They’re friends, they face danger together on a weekly basis, they party together, they share the bike. But this…” He stared at the sunlit happy faces, trying to absorb the camaraderie. “To willingly go into an unknown exile together. To make that sacrifice, give up your whole life. Unanimously. I don’t believe it.”

“But…they did do it. They knew we’d send them after Callum, it’s the only way we could be sure this whole rendition thing didn’t leak to the media.”

Yuri moved his finger over to Callum’s head. “Yes. Why, though?”

“They owe him, maybe?”

“No, not owe. Trust. They trust him. Every time they face a disaster, they trust him with their life. He plans every operation. We think they take risks, but actually they don’t. Callum’s too clever for that. He’s got backups and fresh angles and cutoffs all worked out in his head long before they actually take that one step into a danger zone. And that’s what we’re dealing with here.”

“Sorry,” Kohei said. “I just don’t see it.”

Yuri smiled at the picture. “That’s it! We’re not seeing it.”

“Chief?”

His knuckles rapped the frame. “What’s missing? They’re all there. Callum, Moshi, Henry, Alana, Raina. The whole team.”

“Yes? So?”

“So who took the picture?”

—

It took half an hour, and a lot of shouted insults, but by then Donbul was simply going through the motions. Callum could see doubts troubling the man, that just because he’d come through wearing a guard’s uniform, that didn’t actually make him a guard. That and hope. A way out.

Callum strapped the guard uniform belt around his coat, checked the weapons, and cut the pair of them loose. He stood back, one hand very close to the pistol holster. “Just so we understand each other, I don’t trust you. So keep your distance and no fast moves. I’ve sacrificed everything to come here. Shooting you won’t even register.”

Foluwakemi stretched and rubbed her wrists. Donbul simply glared at him and went over to the drums to find himself new trousers and boots.

Now that the daylight had strengthened, Callum could see the lake was actually a rough circle a couple of hundred meters in diameter. Sitting on the rock shelf just out of the water was a raft made entirely of the yellow drums lashed together.

“It’s a volcanic caldera,” Foluwakemi said, watching him. “There’s a group of them in this section of the canyon. Without them, we’d be dead. They supply all our heat and water.”

Callum glanced up at the phenomenal walls of rock. “And the air? Do they vent that as well?”

“Only sulfur gas. We’re seven kilometers below the planet’s average ground level. That’s why we have air. It’s a tiny pocket, the last on Zagreus. It must have had a full terrestrial atmosphere at one time, maybe a million years ago. But now it’s as thin as Mars, that’s why no one bothered to try and terraform it. You’d have to import a whole new atmosphere. Too expensive, especially when exoworld astronomy has found so many worlds with a nitrogen-based atmosphere close by.”

“How long’s the canyon?”

“Three hundred kilometers, we think. A few of us remember the Orion survey images and news reports. But less than twenty percent is habitable, and this is the only cluster of geothermal vents.”

Callum squinted up into the sky. It had brightened to an astonishingly deep sapphire blue. “Where’s the portal?”

“It’s on some kind of drone blimp, we think,” Donbul said. “They lower it when they’re sending a batch of people through—which only happens at night, so we can’t ever see it. That way we can’t jump on board and go back through the portal. The rest of the time it stays up there somewhere, all nice and safe from us badboys.”

“Makes sense,” Callum muttered. “So it won’t come down again until tonight?”

“Never has,” Foluwakemi said. “But then we’ve never had anyone like you come through before, either.”

“It’ll take security a while to work out what’s happened. As soon as they do, they’ll round my crew up and send them through along with Dimon and Akkar.”

“Akkar?” she asked sharply, and crossed herself. “They caught Akkar? Well, shit.”

“They didn’t catch him. He went visible so I could position myself for this. Very visible, actually.”

“You are joking, detoxification man.”

“No joke.”

“Akkar’s coming?”

“Yes. And when he does, we’re all out of here. Everyone goes home.”

“I’ll take you to the longhouses,” Foluwakemi said. “You can see if your wife is there.”

“Thank you.”

“If she’s not…”

Callum grinned weakly. “Don’t worry, I’ll still get you all out.”

—