THREE

Sonia loomed over me. She was covered in mud and bleeding from a wound in her forehead, and she held her right arm clamped against her belly. She yelled, “Can you hear me, Michael? Can you move?”

I pushed myself upright. For a second the world grayed, as if reality were draining out of me again, but the feeling dissipated. Sonia reached down with her good arm to help me up, but she winced. I stood, unsteady. I don’t think I had ever felt so old, so drained of strength.

I leaned on Morag. She had always been strong, but now she felt very solid, like a stone pillar. She was wearing a simple white coverall, the kind of practical gear she had always preferred. But her coverall was mud-streaked and splashed by a spray of blood, somebody else’s blood, and her strawberry blond hair was mussed by the breeze. She was even more embedded in the world than before, when the wind hadn’t seemed able to touch her.

Somehow she had come back: not a ghost this time, not an elusive vision glimpsed from the corner of my eye, but here.

“You’re real,” I said.

She looked down at herself. “Real?”

“You’re back in the world.” I touched a mud splash on her sleeve. “You weren’t before. You are now.”

“It looks that way, doesn’t it? How strange.”

Suddenly I had a head full of questions, and things I had waited seven-teen years to say to her. But even at that moment, behind it all was a single sharp memory, of what John had said to me about their affair, a grain of pain.

I glanced around. The crowd was actually thicker than it had been before the blast, I thought. Engineers and VIPs, covered in mud and blood, wandered around or sat in the dirt. The VR guests had been untouched by the blast, of course. They walked like glittering ghosts through the battlefield that our event had become; some of them even had drinks in their hands. I wondered if we had a few visitors who hadn’t been here before the blast. It was a common phenomenon: Bottleneckers, they were called, disaster-tourists.

I became aware of the others, Shelley, John, Tom. They all looked battered and muddy, but had no obvious serious injuries — none save Sonia herself, who was shepherding us, despite her damaged arm. She seemed to be the only one of us thinking clearly. I guessed her military training had kicked in, and I was grateful for it.

Everybody was staring at Morag. Maybe the shock of having just come through the explosion helped us; if we hadn’t been dulled by that I don’t know how we’d have coped.

Tom’s mud-streaked face was a mask of hurt and bewilderment. “Dad—”

I felt a stab of regret that I hadn’t been able to save him from this profound shock. “Later. We’ll deal with this.”

Something of his dry cynicism returned. “Well, we’ll have a lot to talk about, won’t we?”

Sonia tapped her ear; maybe she was getting information through her service-issue implants. “OK, EI security are getting ahold of things. Makaay and Barnette are dead. Many casualties on the rig. The EI people are doing a good job, but they are concerned about follow-up attacks. And they hope to get the VR facilities shut down so we can lose these Bottleneckers.”

“What about the police, the authorities?”

“See for yourself.” She pointed.

Outside the footprint of the wrecked marquee, cops and military types swarmed, and as my hearing recovered I heard the roar of vehicle engines, the flap of chopper blades. They must have been on hand to provide cover for this VIP-heavy event anyhow, but they had been unobtrusive, and now they seemed to just melt out of the tundra.

Sonia began to herd us away from the marquee. “The Alaska State Troopers are taking charge of the incident for now. They want to get us out of here, the five of us—”

“Six,” I said. I got hold of Morag’s arm. Whatever happened, I wasn’t going to be separated from her.

“Six, then. The marquee area and the rig will be closed down as a crime scene. We’ll be flown out to a hospital. But we’ll be in military custody.”

Shelley said, “So we’re all suspects?”

We had all grown up with terrorism, and we knew the mantra: everyone is on the front line, everyone is a suspect. But it was depressing to be caught up in its dreary processing.

John said, “We’ll be held as witnesses at the minimum. I’ll make sure we get proper legal representation. I have contacts…” He trailed off. He had struck his usual blustering competent-man-taking-charge pose, and it was briefly impressive despite the mud streaked across his face, his torn shirt, the way his fringe of hair stood on end, caked in dust. But Morag stood here, large as life, impossibly alive, watching him without expression. He crumbled, his words drying up, his personality imploding.

Sonia led us toward a site that was being marked out by troopers as a landing area. A chopper descended toward us, a big old Chinook in camouflage colors.

I asked, “Where are they taking us?”

“Fairbanks.”

“Fairbanks?” That was in the interior of Alaska, six, seven hundred kilometers from Prudhoe Bay.

Sonia shrugged. “Not my decision. It has a good hospital, I’m told. And we can be made secure there. You need to remember that the military’s response to situations like this is always to establish control. Dispersing key components isn’t a bad way to do it.”

Shelley forced a grin. “I’m a key component. Gets you right there, doesn’t it?”

Tom, freaked out, said, “Shut up, shut up. ”

The chopper landed heavily, and a trooper waved at us. Sonia ran toward the chopper, holding Tom’s hand. They ducked to avoid the still-turning blades. Shelley and John followed, and then me and Morag.

I clung to Morag’s hand firmly. “I always did want a ride in a Chinook, ever since I was a kid.”

“I know,” she said. “On any other day this would be a thrill, wouldn’t it?”

I glanced at her. Was she joking? But that was how Morag would have reacted, with dry humor. “Come on, that trooper is starting to look pissed at us.”

We sat strapped into canvas slingback seats bolted crudely to the floor. Battered, bruised, bloodied, we looked like refugees from a war zone — as we were, I guess. Six troopers rode with us. Their faces hidden by faceplates like space suit visors, they watched us, calm and alert, cradling massive weapons.

We took off with an unceremonious lurch. It was true that I had always wanted to fly in a Chinook. It was a design so good it had been flying since before I was born, and was still in operation now, all over the world. But the interior of that old bird was hideously uncomfortable, a roar of noise.

From the air the sight of the rig was spectacular. We saw it through the open door of the Chinook’s cargo bay. The rig’s heart had been torn out by the Higgs-field suicide bomb, leaving a hollow tangle of rusted metal that stood precariously on bent stilts. Whatever there was left to burn was doing so, fitfully. Choppers, planes, and drones buzzed around the rig like flies, and launches skirted it nervously. Away from the rig the sea seemed to be boiling, with immense slow-moving bubbles of gas breaking the surface. The gas was methane, of course, escaping from the hydrate deposits we had meant to stabilize, but had only succeeded in breaking apart. But at least the flares that had ignited in the first moments after the detonation seemed to have burned themselves out.

The chopper slid away from the coast and swept south, heading inland toward Fairbanks, and I could see no more.

Sonia seemed to have run out of the adrenaline that had brought her so far. She was bent over her damaged arm now, grimacing with pain. I wondered if one of the troopers could give her a morphine shot or somesuch, but Sonia was capable of asking for that herself if she wanted it.