I stare at him. He’s grinning.
“Too soon,” I say finally. “Much too soon. Seriously, Eight, what are we doing here? We’ve still only got one berth, and one ration card. More importantly, we’ve only got one registered identity. If anybody finds out we’re a multiple…”
He shrugs. “These are unusual circumstances, right?”
“Yeah, maybe—but given the resource constraints we’re under, I don’t think Command is likely to be sympathetic. If we go to Marshall now, one of us is definitely going down that hole.”
“Most likely,” he says. “And if we try to be sneaky about it, there’s a fair chance both of us wind up as slurry.”
I squeeze my eyes closed and wait for my pulse to slow from jackhammer to frightened baby bird, then finally to something close to normal. When I open them, Eight is looking at me with concern that’s clearly bordering on alarm.
“You okay, Seven?”
“Yeah,” I say. I shake my head and breathe in, breathe out. “I’m good. They talk about staring death in the face, but…”
“A bit too literal, huh?”
“Right,” I say. “If Marshall does wind up feeding me to the cycler, I really, really hope he has the decency to kill me first.”
Eight puts one hand to my shoulder. “You and me both, brother. In the meantime, though, we need some kind of plan.”
“Agreed. Do you have one?”
He runs both hands back through his hair. “I don’t know … I don’t know … they didn’t cover this situation in training.”
That’s the truth, anyway. Training was one hundred percent about dying. I don’t remember them dedicating much time at all to staying alive.
“Look,” he says. “We’ve got a heavy ration card. Unless you’ve done something stupid since our last upload, we should still be getting two thousand kcal a day.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I think that’s right.”
“So if we split that down the middle, we’ve got enough to keep us alive for a while. Not happy, maybe, but alive.”
I can feel my face twisting into a grimace. “A thousand kcal a day each? That’s brutal, Eight. We have to be able to do better than that. What about Berto? This is mostly his fault. If we told him what’s going on, think he might feel guilty enough to kick in a little cycler paste?”
Eight looks doubtful. “Maybe. I’d rather save that for desperation time, though. Berto’s not the most altruistic guy on Niflheim, and I don’t know how much of a fundamentalist he is about the multiple thing.”
“Yeah,” I say. “You make some good points. Also, he abandoned me to die in a cavern last night, so you can put that on the maybe-don’t-trust-him side of the scales.”
“Right,” he says. “That. Okay. What about petitioning Marshall for a bump in our ration?”
I roll my eyes. “Sure. I’ll get right on that.”
“Look,” Eight says. “When I stopped by the caf on my way down here, paste was selling at a twenty-five percent discount. If we stick to nothing but, that’s twelve hundred and fifty kcal of actual nutrition each. It’s not great, but…”
“Okay,” I say. “Fine. I guess we won’t starve to death right away, anyway. That still doesn’t address our main problem, though. There’s two of us. Marshall looks like he just stepped in something rotten every time he has to deal with the fact that there’s one Mickey Barnes in his colony. If he gets a sniff of this, the cycler is a best-case scenario for us.”
I should point out here that Commander Marshall found out about my run-in with Darius Blank about a week after we boosted out of orbit around Midgard, and interpreted that as evidence that a criminal element had infiltrated his colony. Add that to the fact that he comes from a religious tradition that considers the whole concept of pulling people out of the tank even one at a time to be an abomination, and you wound up with me about thirty seconds from being chucked out of an air lock before the captain of the Drakkar, a very nice woman named Mara Singh who is now head of our Engineering Section, reminded him that he wasn’t actually in command of the mission until we made landfall on Niflheim.
Somehow, I don’t think this situation is likely to improve his opinion of me.
“I know,” Eight says. “I know … but unless you want to change your mind about going down the hole today, there’s nothing we can do about that point, is there?”
“No,” I say. “I guess not.”
“Of course, if you did change your mind?”
“Don’t worry, Eight. You’ll be the first to know.”
He’s grinning. I’m definitely not.
“Thanks,” he says. “Hey—what about Nasha? Do you think we can talk to her about this?”
I have to think about that one. Nasha and I have been together since I was Mickey3, and unlike Berto, she was ready to risk her one and only life to pull me out of that hole last night. If there was one person we could trust around here, she’d be it.
On the other hand, if we eventually do wind up in front of Marshall over this, I’d really, really rather she didn’t have to go down with us.
“You know what?” I say. “Let’s just keep this between us for now, huh?”
“Sure,” Eight says. “I mean, the way things have gone since landfall, one of us will be dead pretty soon anyway, right? Problem solved.”
Ugh. He’s probably right about that.
* * *
ON THE TOPIC of being dead soon, here’s a story for you: a few months after landfall, when I was still Mickey6, Berto took me out for a ride-along. We took up a fixed-wing, single-engine reconnaissance flitter that day instead of one of the heavy lifters that he usually flies. We were already up and circling over the dome when I asked him how they managed to fit a gravitic generator into such a tiny plane. He turned to look at me, a subtle smile on his face.
“Gravitics? You’re kidding, right?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
He shook his head, then throttled up and put us into a steep, banking climb.
“This is an aircraft, Mickey. The only thing keeping us up here is Bernoulli’s principle.”
I didn’t have any idea who Bernoulli was or what principles he might have had, but I really didn’t like the sound of that. I’d never been off the ground before without the sure knowledge that I was surrounded by a gravitic field that would not, under any circumstances, allow me to plunge into the ground at a hundred and fifty meters per second and burst open like an overripe melon.
“Berto?” I said. “Do you think you might want to level out or something? Or better yet, maybe head back in and switch this thing out for something a little more stable?”
He laughed. “Are you serious? Do you have any idea how much wheedling I had to do to get them to let me sign out the flitter? The whole point of taking this thing out today is that it can do things that a heavy lifter can’t.”