Genesis Echo (Deathlands 25) by James Axler

“That lady could be banged,” Trader said, as he returned. “If we had more time, I’d have her falling into my hand like a fine ripe peach.”

“We getting up?”

The older man stamped his feet, kicking up splinters of powdery ice. “Might as well. Snow’s stopped. Cold as a baron’s charity, but we could get moving. Soon warm up.”

Ryan nodded. “Agreed.” He nudged the woman next to him. “Wake up, Thea.”

“Turn on the enzyme coolant,” she muttered fuzzily. Ryan pushed her harder. “What’s the” She seemed alarmed. “Has the grizzly returned?”

“No. Just time to get up and moving. Nearly dawn. Sooner we start the better.”

“Snow stopped?”

“Yeah.”

She sat up. “I can’t believe that we’re all still alive after the bear and the cold.”

“Not all alive,” Trader said, breathing on the Armalite to get ice off the side of the butt. “There’s five of your men back up there won’t be eating breakfast today.”

“Yes, you’re right.” The scientist managed to get to her feet, nearly slipping on the packed snow. “I owe you both my life for butchering the grizzly and for preventing me from freezing to death last night.”

Trader shuffled his feet. “Shucks, ma’am, it weren’t nothin’ at all.”

“You may turn it into a joke, but I mean it. I would most certainly be back there with Brunner, Cooke and the others if it weren’t for you. I owe you everything.”

Ryan was also on his feet, doing a few exercises to try to restore circulation. “Well, we always try and help each other out when we can.”

Her cold blue eyes turned to him. The left eye did; the right one was looking out across the snow-masked valley. “I am placed in an impossible situation. One that you can’t possibly understand, a dreadful dilemma that woke me several times in the night and which I can’t solve.”

“What is it?”

She shook her head. The tight knot of iron gray hair had come unpinned during the night and now it tumbled down over her shoulders, reaching almost to her waist.

Trader whistled. “Hey, lovely bunch of hair you got there, lady.”

She ignored him, concentrating on Ryan. “There are things happening at the institute research of nearly a hundred years coming toward fruition. And the culmination happens to involve you and your party. Particularly” She shook her head. “No. I’m not ready to betray everything that I have been raised to hold dear. But there is danger.”

Ryan held her arm, considering whether it would be a good idea to spend some time on persuading her to speak, but rejecting the idea for the time being. “What is it?”

“No. May the institute forgive me, but I can’t tell you. Not yet. I need to think more. The debt is so heavy and I can’t bear to carry it.”

“IS THERE ANOTHER WAY to the institute,” Ryan asked, “save going past the sec barrier?”

They had been slogging through the deep snow for three quarters of an hour, stopping every ten minutes or so to recover, their breaths pluming out into the air around them.

Thea leaned her hand against the slick trunk of a silver birch. “Why do you ask that, Ryan? Why do you want to go around the barrier?”

“Just curiosity, I guess.”

The truth was, all his instincts were on red alert after her strange, muddled speech. It was clear as crystal that something was wrong at the institute, and it involved them, possibly involved Krysty. So he thought it might be worth a try to get back in without being seen.

“There is a narrow hunting trail,” she admitted. “We’re more or less on course for it here. But the Professor doesn’t like anyone to do that.”

“We won’t tell him. There’s no reason for him to check us past the sec barrier, is there?”

“Perhaps not.” She thought about it for several seconds. “I have said how much I owe you. This can be a small part of that debt between us. We can always say, if questioned, that the main track back over the highway was blocked by snow. It’s a very small untruth.”