“Now let us go,” he said. Cynara couldn’t detect so much as a shiver, though the temperature must have been well below minus ten degrees. He seemed as composed and unaffected as if he stood in the ship’s galley with a warm mug of kaffé in his hand.
“Damn,” Gunter swore. “You a soldier, man? Too young for the Second War.” He moved cautiously toward Ronan and hooked his foot around the suit. “All right. You go now.”
Ronan knelt to pick up Cynara’s helmet and offered it to her. “You’re crazy,” she whispered.
“It must be done.” He placed the helmet over Cynara’s head and fastened it, working efficiently though his fingers must be numb. He grasped her arm and tugged her toward the cave entrance.
It was impossible to reason with him. She considered rushing Gunter and taking his weapon, but Ronan’s grip was so hard that she would have to fight him off first. She could hardly see him through the clouds of condensed breath wreathing his unprotected face.
He had asked to disarm Gunter at the beginning, and she had refused. You still don’t trust Ronan. If he dies—
She cursed Ronan and herself, wondering who was the greater fool.
Gunter didn’t follow them outside the cave. Ronan released Cynara when they were a hundred meters away. She found her bearings and pointed back toward the Thalassa, hoping they could make it quickly enough.
Ronan shook his head and gestured the way they had been heading before Gunter’s assault.
She flipped on the speaker. “I order you back to the Thalassa.”
He smiled with what she could only assume was wry humor and plunged his bare hands in a snowbank. He raised his ice-covered hands. There was no shivering, no unsteadiness in his fingers. He grasped her wrist and placed her gloved hand flat on his chest.
His heart beat at a normal rhythm, and his breaths were measured and regular. It was impossible, but it was happening. He lifted her hand, folded it into a fist, and rested his lips on her padded knuckles.
Where had he learned such a gallant human gesture? “You’re insane… you know that, don’t you?” She snatched her hand free and shrugged out of her pack, riffling the outer pocket for the thermal blankets meant for Kord. But Ronan had already set off, marching unerringly toward the Pontos’s landing site.
Short of a pitched battle, stopping him was out of the question. “Lizbet, did you copy all that?”
It was Zheng who answered. “Affirmative. You have a madman out there with you—two, if you count Ronan. Get back here immediately.”
“Negative. Ronan’s already out of sight. I’ll get us back as quickly as possible. You two remain with the shuttle, is that clear?”
A long, rebellious pause. “Affirmative, Captain.”
Cynara cut the ‘com and peered through the storm in the direction Ronan had gone. He covered ground at an amazing pace, and she had to scramble to keep up. He disappeared over a rise just as she reached its base.
By the time she had climbed to the top, she was ready to knock Ronan over the head with the nearest convenient rock and drag him back to the Thalassa by his hair. The view from the hill instantly halted such unproductive speculation.
On level ground twenty meters ahead, its nose driven deep into the snow, lay the Pontos. The hull had blackened and buckled in several places, and the aft section of the shuttle was nearly severed. Cynara picked up her pace and ran after Ronan as fast as the bulky suit would allow.
Once at the ship, she brushed away a thick coating of snow from the cockpit canopy. With her chisel she hammered at the layers of ice. Kord was a dim, unmoving shape within.
She set her scanner against the hull. It blinked green; Kord had survived. Emergency life support had remained operational, but it was near the end of its capacity.
Ronan had already found the hatch release and entered the shuttle. Cynara dumped her pack, unfastened the folded litter, and snapped it open.
Kord’s head was first to emerge from the hatch, followed by his body draped over Ronan’s shoulder. Ronan laid him out on the litter and crouched in the snow.