11

“He killed himself, just like that,” the man on the vidscreen said. It was less a question than a statement. He had a square-cut jaw and white hair that was swept back and plastered down. Even on the small vidscreen, he was an imposing man. He was wearing a uniform, but his screen had been set to dither out his insignia, to make it impossible to say just what branch of the service he was part of.

“That’s what they tell me, sir,” said Tanner.

William Tanner was head of the newly established DredgerCorp Chicxulub, the semisecret branch of the organization that had been set up hurriedly as soon as they’d had some indication that something was going on in the center of the crater.

Tanner had a military background and specialized in running black ops through dummy corporations. He was running this one under the name Ecodyne. Enter the right command into the system at the right moment, and any sign of a connection to DredgerCorp would instantly vanish from the company files. Then Tanner would vanish and reappear under another name. So far, his operations had gone well, partly because of good luck, partly because he was very good at what he did, which was why he’d been with DredgerCorp for ten years.

He didn’t know the name of the man on the screen. All he knew was that, three days before, he’d had a vid conference with Lenny Small, the president of DredgerCorp, who’d explained that they were bringing someone in from the outside. When Tanner asked who it was, Small had just smiled.

“No need for names, Tanner,” he said. He flashed a vid still of the man onto Tanner’s screen. “Here’s your man,” he said. “You tell him anything he wants to know. And you do anything he says.”

Once Small disconnected, Tanner had shaken his head. Why bring someone in from the outside? Just one more possible way for something to go wrong. Just one more hole he’d have to plug after the operation was over. Small was getting soft in his old age, drinking too much maybe, getting sloppy. Which put everyone at risk. Which put him at risk. Tanner didn’t like that.

But when he saw the guy on the screen, first heard him talk, first heard the coldness of his voice, he realized that he’d misjudged his boss. This wasn’t just anyone. This was military, someone who’d clearly seen a lot and knew better than any of them what was going on. Privately, Tanner started thinking of him as the Colonel, though he had no idea what the man’s actual rank was, or if he even had the right branch of the service. It wasn’t even possible to guess at where he might be—the background had been deliberately pixilated out, which lent an odd shimmer to the edges of the Colonel’s body. It was the Colonel who had taken the data they’d intercepted from various scientists’ reports and generated a model that gave them an idea of what might be waiting for them at the heart of the crater. It was the Colonel who immediately had the security system replaced, who had seen the potential for the technician who had installed the first system to leave a back door for himself. And when that young geophysicist named Altman started asking around about anomalies in the crater, the Colonel immediately had his phone tapped.

A few minutes later, the Colonel was back on the vidscreen, telling Tanner that Altman had already had a call from the technician—Bacon was his name. Or no, not quite that, another kind of meat: Ham. Hammond.

“Too late to trace it,” the Colonel said, “but let’s bring this Hammond in and have a chat.”

Which brought Tanner back to where he was now, impressed by how impassive and stern the Colonel’s face remained as Tanner told him that Hammond was dead.

“Any chance they’re lying to you?” asked the Colonel.

“I’ve seen the body myself,” said Tanner. “He’s dead, all right. They were just trying to bring him in, just talking to him, and he flipped and slit his own throat.”

“He what?”

“Slit his own throat. Almost sawed his head off.”

“Just talking to him, you say,” said the Colonel. “What’s that supposed to mean? People don’t slit their throats when you’re just talking to them.”

Tanner swallowed. Talking to the Colonel made him nervous.

“Any chance they nudged him along a little too hard?” the Colonel asked.

Tanner shook his head. “I’ve worked with these men before,” he said. “They’re completely reliable. They had their orders straight. Trust me, they were as surprised as you and I.”

The Colonel gave a curt nod. “You think this Altman’s a threat?”

Tanner shrugged. “I was hoping to find that out from Hammond.”

“Best guess,” said the Colonel. “Threat or not?”

Tanner glanced down at the holofiles he’d spread before him, spun them through the holoscreen. Copies of them, he knew, were appearing on the other side of the link, where the Colonel could see them. “I don’t think there’s much to worry about with Altman,” he said. “There’s nothing special about him. Your run-of-the-mill scientist. No Einstein, not really the sort that stands out from the pack.”

“In my experience,” said the Colonel, “nobody stands out from the pack until they’re given a reason to. It’s not until then that you know whether they’ll bend or break.”

“I suppose so,” said Tanner. “In my experience, very few people ever get that far.”

The Colonel nodded, lips tight. “But if Altman does? . . .”

Tanner thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said. “He doesn’t seem to be the hero type. He’s not likely to be an industrial spy for another corp, I don’t think, and not likely to opt to become one. He seems to have taken his current job exclusively so as to follow his girlfriend down to Chicxulub.”

“Could be a good cover,” said the Colonel.

“Could be,” said Tanner. “But you’d probably know better than me if it was, and, if so, for what. I don’t think it’s a cover.”

The Colonel scanned quickly through the files. “No,” he said, once he’d finished. “I don’t think so either.” He stayed for a moment, staring straight into the screen. To Tanner it felt like the Colonel was staring through him, not even seeing him.

Finally the Colonel said, “Let’s move things forward quickly.” He turned to his own holobank, sent a rendering through his vidscreen to Tanner. A three-dimensional image. Some kind of vessel. At first Tanner thought it was a spacepod and experienced a brief wave of fear: he had been part of the shock troops for the moon skirmishes, part of the deadly fight over which nation had the right to the resources of the moon. He had spent harrowing hours with his oxygen running out, siphoning from the tanks of the dead and dying around him. Last thing he wanted was to be in space again. But then he noticed the screw engines and realized it wasn’t a spacecraft at all: it was some sort of submarine. Deepwater, from the looks of it.

“What is it, sir?” he asked.

“The F/7,” the Colonel said. “Prototype submersible, not released yet, even among our people. I’m sending it to you. Find two men to man it, people you can trust. And quickly. We need to get there first.”