"I just don't know," said Curtis. "The satellites we still get information from don't show any city-sized structures or new agriculture or anything that would suggest the adversaries have moved down here, but that means bupkus. We know they don't breathe the same air we do, and they might not be city-builders or farmers, either. What we do know is that there are atmosphere modifiers dotting the planet at roughly six-hundred mile distances and that we can reach one of them from here."

"Changing one isn't going to do any good," argued one of the scientists, a young man named Chavez. "We'll need to get to all of them..."

"If the first one works out all right, we'll get to all of them," said Curtis grimly. "I'm not saying that we're going to walk in there, plant the machine, and all of a sudden the pine trees will come back and everything's going to be Disney. This is the first step in a long war, and none of us will be alive to see the end of it. But, dammit folks, we've been playing defense for over thirty years. It's about time we took the fight to the bad guys."

"Damn straight," murmured the man next to Bess, her second in command. His name was Walter, but, for some unknowable reason, everyone called him Gomer. "It's our world."

Bess wanted to say something to him, but didn't. She stayed silent and thought about the two dead people she'd held yesterday, remembered the Demon as it mindlessly ate and drank her lover's blood, remembered the gills on her daughter's neck fluttering uselessly in the air of the hospital wing. She thought about the picture in Curtis's office, those green trees. blue skies and white tipped waters.

She thought they'd probably all die up there, but that was okay. There'd finally be a chance for a little payback, and that chance was worth dying for.

"Bess, you want to say something?" asked Curtis. All of the eyes in the room turned to her.

She nodded and moved to the front, climbing up onto the table next to him. She took the roll of paper she'd been holding, extended it in front of her, and shook it open. Everyone gathered closer to look at it.

"This is an old-style topographical map of the surrounding area," she said. "We've marked the location of the New America ramp and the alien atmosphere processing plant in red, our tentative route is in blue."

"Looks easy," said Zack.

"Doesn't it?" she said. "Just a curvy little blue line. Anyone could do it."

"What's that other blue line?" asked another security team member, a teenager named Ashley. "The one crossing ours?"

"That's the South Platte River," said Bess. "It used to come down off the mountains and go through Denver. There won't be any water, as you know, but the river bed will probably still be there in one form or another. And we've got to buck a thousand pound cart containing delicate equipment over it."

"A river," said Ashley quietly, her face absorbed in study. "A body of water."

"Not anymore, no oxygen, no water." said Bess. "But, the riverbed is probably a hundred yards wide in spots. The satellites say that there's still some trace of where the river had been. But we don't know what will be there. How the water had shaped it...it could be hairy."

They took in her information soberly, all of them wondering what on earth an actual river would look like, most of them realizing that it was tragic that they would never see one. They had seen pools, of course-their reservoir of potable water was on Five, and they'd all been down there-but the only moving water most of them had ever seen was in the community shower room.

"We don't know what we are going to find out there," said Bess. "It's springtime, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything in the Colorado mountains. We don't know how the new atmosphere will react to the temperatures. Everything's changed up there, and all we have to work with are the best guesses of the science cadre."

"Yeah, they've done a hell of a job so far," muttered one of the warriors. "You guys seen the latest gill babies?"

"That's fucking enough!" said Bess, her voice suddenly thunderous, a pounding beginning behind her eyes. Gill babies. "The scientists have kept thousands of people alive in caverns for thirty years, managed to create an impossible biosphere that produces oxygen without anything other than cave moss, managed to come up with edible food and clean water, managed to keep enough electricity going that we can communicate with satellites a thousand miles up! And they've finally come up with a weapon that's going to win this fucking war for us! So if you've got some problem with your teammates, Mike, you let me know right fucking now and I'll get you replaced."

"Sorry, Boss," said Mike. "I didn't mean no disrespect. I just..."

"Shut up," said Bess. "And see me after the meeting."

Mike, red-faced, nodded and shrunk back into the crowd. Bess glared at him for a moment longer, and returned to her map.

"Back to the atmosphere question," she said. "There is something that falls out there. The best comparison from the old days is snow, but this stuff is a dark gray color, and we don't know that it's not acidic, so our little expedition might be over real quick. A few holes in our suits means death in minutes. And even if it's harmless, it piles up like snow did and we'll have to trudge through it with all our equipment."

"Just like a Christmas carol, Boss!" said Zack, and most of them laughed, though there were still some with grim expressions on their faces as they imagined acid falling from the sky onto their delicate suits.

"Just like that, Zack," she said, smiling herself. "And we're Santa Claus, with a present for the adversaries."

"A present right up their fucking asses," shouted one of the scientists, and everyone laughed at that.

Win or lose, Bess thought, at least we've still got the right kind of spirit. For the first time since learning about the project, she allowed herself to think that yes, maybe they could do this thing.

"Let's look at the map a little more," she said. "We're coming out of the ramp in the low hills, here, and that means the terrain will be rocky and difficult, though Curtis assures me that there were roads here and here, and if we can get to them things'll be a lot easier for us...unless the roads are wrecked..."

"You ever read the Bible?" asked Gomer.

"I don't read much," said Bess, strapping on her atmosphere boots, making sure the seals were tight. "You going evangelist on me, man?"

He snorted, checking his rifle again, fingering the little bubble over the firing chamber and peering at it with fascinated curiosity. "Yeah, I've found God and I want to make sure everyone else does too. I'm also looking for donations for the church I'm founding. Got any spare change?"

"I've got three bottles of Cookie's best grain whiskey in my backpack," she said, "and the way I wrapped them, they're better protected than the Oxygen Bomb. I'll let you have a sip or two if you don't share your new religious beliefs with me."

"Done," said her second in command. "But I've got a flask myself..."

She knew that her people would be smuggling booze, and she'd considered banning it from the expedition, but then she'd considered the rigmarole that would be necessary in order for them to actually take a drink-the setting up of the oxygen tent (meant for their night's rest, not for drinking), the careful removal of the breathing apparatuses, the digging through packs to find the cached liquor, and then the furtive sneaking of drinks, careful that she or Curtis wouldn't see the malefactors. She figured that anyone resourceful enough to manage a snort or two deserved them.

And, of course, they'd want to celebrate on the way back.

So she hadn't made an issue of it.

"What about the Bible?" she asked.

"Just thinking about all the end-of-the-world stuff in Revelation," said Gomer, finally putting down his rifle and picking up his own boots. They were on One, in an abandoned vehicle garage, suiting up for the journey. Around them, in clusters of nervous humanity, were the other members of the expedition, getting their gear together and donning the suits and equipment they'd need for survival. Bess and Gomer sat in a corner, near a dead U.S. Army tank that had been spray-painted repeatedly over the last thirty years by various artists in the Warren. The tank hulked impotently on its treads, sadly, covered in scrawls that said 'My other car is a Martian spaceship' and 'New America-love it or go outside and choke to death' and 'I fucked Tricia, 3/11/2010'. They barely noticed it and all the other vehicles that had ended up here, instead concentrating on their preparations and their talk. "You think there's a God, Bess?"

It was rather a rude question, but she didn't mind. She and Gomer went way back, had even slept with each other a dozen times or so over the years. She knew that he was just making conversation.

"No," she said. "You?"

"Haven't made up my mind yet," he said.

"Still waiting for a miracle, hm?" she asked, smiling, as she picked up her hood, checked the connections.

"Life is miracle enough," he said seriously, her smile died when she looked over at him. "But I'm not convinced that some supernatural being created it. 'Cause, if He did, then he also created the adversaries, and that's a little too fucked-up to believe."

"Don't let it worry you, man," she said, rubbing a finger along the fabric where the plastic mask met the hood. "There's nothing you can do about it but try your best. If there's a God, you'll get your reward in heaven. If there's not, then you've done what you could for humanity."

" 'When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour'," Gomer quoted thoughtfully, pulling on one of his boots. "Half an hour. Isn't that a strange thing to find in the Bible? Why 'half an hour'? Why not 'an hour' or 'a long time' or just 'silence in heaven'?"

"Who knows?" said Bess. "Are you all right, man?"

"I'm fine, Bess," he said, starting to buckle the straps around the polymerized boots. "Just confronting my mortality before we go out there. I'll be good to go once we get topside."

"Good," she said, another small smile forming on her face. "There's no one in New America I'd rather have watching my back, and I'd hate for you to be playing with your rosary while the Demons gut me."

"Never happen," said Gomer, returning her smile. "When you go, you're gonna go in a blaze of glory."

"Gee," she said. "I can hardly wait."

They opened the doors to the ramp at sunrise, hoping to maximize the natural light for travel so they wouldn't have to depend on their flashlights-the Demons and the Diggers were attracted to light and they wanted to be far away by the time they had to use artificial light.

Bess stood next to Curtis, her breathing almost heavy. In her airproof suit the sound of her own breath was loud and intrusive, but she'd get used to it. She clenched her gloved hands around the rifle and tried to ignore the feeling of the strange protrusion around the stock. The weight of the pack on her back reminded her that she was carrying all the oxygen she'd get for the next few days. It wasn't a comforting thought.

The ten men on Bomb duty waited as the blast doors creaked open, their hands tightly gripping the handles of the huge cart, they were waiting for enough space to shove the load outside. Directly in front of them was the vanguard, the five security personnel who would serve as early warning...or cannon fodder. In seconds, the gigantic metal doors began to widen, spilling a sickly yellow light onto the dusty floor of the access ramp. Ashley broke from the pack and slipped out into the world.

Congratulations, girl, thought Bess. You're the first human to walk up there in three decades.

"Hurry up!" shouted Gomer from the van, urging everyone forward. "Day's a-wasting, and that shit's getting into the Warren!" At his words, the other soldiers jammed their way through the crack, disappearing into the billows of dirty yellow air that had begun to pour through the aperture.

"Bomb squad, go!" shouted Bess when she judged enough time had passed for the door to open sufficiently to let the cart through. Instantly, the remaining soldiers lifted the handles of the cart sending the contraption into the air, the "Atmospheric Regulating Mechanism" (they called it the ARM, or, simply, the Bomb) resting on its cradle like a broody hen. They marched forward in cadence, Zack calling out the steps as they did.

"Left...left...left, right, left.

"Left...left...left, right, left.

"Goin' outside, boys and girls!"

The others echoed him in defiant chant. "Goin' outside, boys and girls!"

"Gonna see a brand-new world!" ("Gonna see a brand-new world!") "Gonna bring back trees and grass!

"Shove this pill up Charlie's ass!"

"Jesus," giggled Bess. "It does look kind of like a suppository, doesn't it?"

"It looks like a new beginning to me, Bess," said Curtis as they began to walk, following the Bomb group and flanked by the scientists. "That machine represents humanity's best hope for a future."

"Not running for re-election, Curtis," she reminded him. "We've had all the fancy speeches we need."

He was silent for a moment as the march continued, and Zack's voice roared out in the echoing space of the ramp chamber. "Work our ass off, duty calls! Kick ol' Charlie in the balls!"

Kick ol' Charlie in the balls!

"Why 'Charlie'?" she asked.

"It's from a war a long time ago," Curtis said.

"The Second Gulf War?" she asked. They walked through a yellow lake of poison air. The alien atmosphere was spilling into the chamber and down the ramp like water. Bess could almost feel a tingle on her legs as she marched through it, watching it swirl around the humans as if flooding them.

"Not that one," he said. "An older one. They're out."

It was true-the ARM had made it through the doors, and the rearguard and the science team were all that remained inside the Warren.

"Goddamn," she whispered as they neared the doors. The techs back at the airlock leading to the Warren, each in his own environment suit, had stopped the Brobdingnagian gates from opening further. When the expedition cleared the doors, they would shut them again, restoring equilibrium to New America. Bess took a quick glance backward, looking at the nervous knot of engineers at the inner door, one of them raised his hand to her in a good-luck salute. She half-raised her rifle in response, and turned back to the doors and her future.

It was light outside, but nothing like the light in the Warren, so it took her a couple of seconds to adjust. The sky was a dirty shade of yellow tinged with green, and the sun crested the horizon before her. The group stood on a rise, looking nervously at the ground falling away below them in a long, slow swell down to a black, ashy plain. She didn't have time to contemplate this new world, because as the doors started to close behind her, there was a scream from the vanguard.

The Bomb squad instantly halted at an upraised hand from Zack. Bess she marveled at the feel of real dirt beneath her boots as she sprinted toward the cry, but the vast majority of her mind was wondering what could have gone wrong so early in the proceedings.

"It's okay, Boss," shouted Gomer, seeing her moving toward them, raising a hand in a 'slow-down' gesture. He knelt, with a few of the others, around a body on the ground. Bess kept coming, seeing that things were definitely not "okay", the body was writhing and screaming.

"What happened?" she asked, breathless, her rifle swinging around, looking for targets. "Who is it?"

"It's Frances," said Gomer, bending back over the woman on the ground, holding her down in the gravelly dirt, trying to soothe her. Bess could see that the woman was beyond soothing. Her eyes rolled wildly and her hands clutched the ground as though she were trying to burrow into it. She was making horrible sounds, no longer screams, but wheezing, panicked yelps of sheer terror. "I don't know, Boss-she seemed fine, and then she just went nuts."

"Great," said Bess. "Maybe that'll happen to all of us..."

"It's vertigo," came a voice behind her, she spun and saw Sandford standing there, watching the soldiers holding Frances down. "I didn't think of it until right this second, but that's what it's got to be."

"What the fuck is vertigo?" growled Gomer. "And how do we fix it?"

"It's the wide open spaces out here, isn't it, doc?" asked Bess, remembering some of her lessons, back when New America had tried to run schools. "She's not used to it..."

"And her brain can't handle it," nodded Sandford, his hood and visor bobbing up and down. "Fascinating. We've only been underground for parts of two generations, and already she's adapted to an enclosed world."

"Doc!" shouted Gomer. "How do we calm her down?"

Instead of answering, Sandford reached to the pouch at his side and started rummaging through it. Finding what he sought, he knelt, his knee sliding a bit on the cinder-like ground, and extended a syringe. "It's a derivative of scopolamine," he said. "It'll knock her out for a bit, we can call the Warren and get her back inside."

"She's the best we've got with the bow and arrows, doc," protested Bess as she watched the man trying to find the catheter in her suit.

"Shh," he said, shrugging, and leaning forward. "Hold that arm steady, Gomer," he told the big soldier.

"You got it, doc," said the man, who tightened his grip on the woman's arm. The doctor guided the tip of the needle into the catheter and expertly slid it into her vein. He paused a moment and depressed the plunger.

She jerked upwards at the sudden pain of the injection, but Bess could tell that she couldn't differentiate between it and the all-encompassing insanity she found in the wide world. Frances didn't fight against the drug, she simply kept writhing in the dirt and making that unearthly gasping, yelping sound...in seconds, her motions slowed.

Sandford pulled the needle out, reached back into his pouch and pulled out a bottle of liquiplast, poured some over the catheter and smoothed it around, protecting Frances against the chance that it didn't seal itself when the needle was removed. The woman was calming down, her spasms becoming slow twitches, her frantic gasps and wheezes quieting into a thick panting as she sucked at the oxygen in her suit. After what seemed an eternity, she closed her eyes and her body relaxed, settling into the dirt.

"Jesus," said Bess, finally taking a moment to look around, to get a better look at their surroundings.

They stood on an old road that still bore ruts from thirty-year old military traffic, and to either side of them stood a forest. Not the kind of forest in the painting hanging in Curtis's office-no, this forest had been changed, by decades of alien air, into something never before seen on this planet.

Twisted boles of wood corkscrewed up through the ground and bent into the sky, trunks of dark gray without bark or leaves, wide branches spread into paddles of gnarled wood. Thin, hair-like filaments dripped from the branches and lay tangled on the ground. The trees grew together, tight and thick. They were entangled as though the plants sought to become one gigantic organism. The highest rose forty, fifty feet into the yellow sky, with trunks at least ten feet across at their bases-the shorter grew in the space between their elder brethren, and latched onto them with those hairy, broad appendages.

Beyond the trees a slope led down toward what had once been Denver. Through the few spaces between the opportunistic tumors of foliage, Bess could see the hills stretching down into valleys that were covered with more of the virulent growths. A few open patches which may once have been lakes or stretches of concrete broke the gray mass. In the yellow light the scene looked monochromatic and harsh. Yet all of the sharp edges seemed blunted by the thickness of the atmosphere.

"Looks like a Bosch painting," said Curtis quietly, moving up to join Bess. "How's Frances?"

"She's sleeping," said Sandford, looking around like the rest of them. "We need to get her back inside."

"Why?" asked Curtis, turning to look at the doctor. "We can carry her in a travois, and when she wakes up..."

"There's no guarantee that she'll be better when she wakes up," said Sandford. "If someone develops a phobia-in this case, agoraphobia-it takes years of therapy and effort before they learn to live with it. She's practically certain to freak out again when she comes to, and we don't have the time to deal with a psycho on the trip we're taking. Assuming, of course, that it is actually a phobia and not some other problem. Either way, she can't be appropriately diagnosed or treated in the field. She needs to get back."

"Jesus," said Curtis, blowing air through his lips in frustration. "All right. Let me radio..."

"Look out!" yelled a voice from the Bomb contingent. Bess was instantly in firing stance, rifle swinging around... she locked on a target and was the first to fire.