“Yeah, well,” I say. “Maybe you should have.”
“Maybe.” He looks up, and breaks into a grin. “Tell you what—next time I’ll see if I can get video of whatever takes you out. If I can, I’ll show it to Nine as soon as he comes out of the tank.”
I don’t want to let this go just yet—but, lying sack of shit or not, he is more or less my best friend.
“That’s really thoughtful, you asshole.”
He reaches out then and pulls me into a bear hug with those goddamned gangly monkey arms.
“Seriously,” he says. “I’m sorry I lied to you, Mickey. I won’t let it happen again.”
“Yeah,” I mutter into his chest. “I’ll just bet you won’t.”
* * *
IT OCCURS TO me at this point that I’m not painting Berto in a particularly positive light, and that you may be wondering why I was ever friends with this guy in the first place. The short answer is that I’ve always believed it’s important to accept the people in your life for what they are. There’s no such thing as a perfect friend, any more than there’s any such thing as a perfect anything, and if you slag everyone in your life for their many and varied failings, you’re going to miss appreciating the good stuff they bring to the table.
As an example, during my last couple of years in school, I had a friend named Ben Aslan. Ben was a good noodle. He was smart enough to get me through two semesters of astrophysics despite my complete lack of mathematical aptitude, funny enough to get me suspended for two days during twelfth form for cracking up during our late vice administrator’s funeral, and loyal enough to stick around and take a beating with me when I got on the wrong side of a bunch of extremely drunk older guys at a Copper Fist concert the summer after we graduated.
Ben was also unbelievably, almost pathologically, cheap.
The Aslans owned a controlling interest in the company that held the intercity shipping franchise for the entire planet. His dad dipped in and out of the list of the twenty-five wealthiest people on Midgard. Ben himself owned a flitter, a ground car, a beach house, and a guy who cleaned up his dormitory room for him. Despite that, in all the time I knew him, I don’t think Ben Aslan ever picked up a check. He didn’t have implants, because he said he was afraid that if he did, somebody might cut his eye out to get access to his trust fund, and he never seemed to remember to bring a phone along when we went out because why would he? If he needed to talk to someone, he had people to do it for him. The upshot was that when the check came around, he’d smile and shrug and promise to pick up the next one.
This went on for years.
Why did I put up with it? Why did I, a kid who never had more than twenty credits in his account at any given time, buy gallons of beer and mountains of food for the richest person I’d ever met? Simple, really. I knew who Ben was, and I accepted it. I added up the benefits of having him in my life, deducted the annoyance of having to pay for everything anytime we went anywhere, and decided that on the balance, he was a net positive. Once I’d made that decision, I quit worrying about the checks. It wasn’t worth it.
I guess it’s kind of the same with Berto, except instead of cheaping out on restaurant tabs, he occasionally leaves me to freeze to death in a hole and then lies about it later. That’s who he is. Everything’s easier if you can just accept that and move on.
* * *
WHEN I GET back to my rack, I find Eight curled up in my bed, sound asleep. I think about letting him be—tank funk is rough—but I’m tired too, and we’ve got things to discuss. I latch the door, then grab the top sheet and yank it off of him. He’s naked.
I make a mental note to change my sheets.
Eight lifts his head up and blinks at me, then grabs at the sheet and tries to pull it back over him. It’s then that I notice that he’s got a pressure wrap on his left wrist.
“Hey,” I say. “What happened to your hand?”
He shoots me a withering look. “Nothing, idiot. We need to look like the same person now, right? You can’t take the wrap off of your wrist, so I needed to put one on mine.”
“It’s not purple.”
He looks down at his hand, then up at me. “What?”
“Your hand,” I say. “It’s wrapped, but it’s not purple. Anyone who looks at it closely will be able to see that you’re not really hurt.”
“If anybody’s looking closely,” he says, “we’re probably already dead.”
He flops back onto the pillow and pulls the sheet back up to his chin. I sigh, and yank it off again.
“Sorry,” I say. “Time to wake up. We’ve got a few issues that we need to go over.”
He sits up, rubs his knuckles into his eyes, and pulls the sheet up to his waist.
“Seriously? You know I just came out of the tank, right? Don’t we usually get a day to recover?”
I sit down on the edge of the bed. “Yeah, we won’t get a work detail today—which is a good thing, because exactly how we’re going to handle our duty cycles is one of the things we’re going to need to figure out. Only one of us can be out and about at a time if we don’t want Marshall shoving us both down the corpse hole.”
Eight yawns, rubs his eyes again, and looks at me. A smile slowly spreads across his face. “Hey, that’s a good point. This could actually work out pretty well, couldn’t it? Only having to pull half duty isn’t so bad, right?”
“Yeah,” I say. “As long as our shifts are getting seconded out to Agriculture or Engineering, we can share. What happens the next time Marshall decides he needs someone to scrub out the antimatter reaction chamber, though?”
His smile fades. “That is definitely gonna happen at some point, isn’t it?”
“It is. We should probably figure out how we’re going to handle it ahead of time, no?”
He shrugs. “Seems pretty obvious to me. I shouldn’t have come out of the tank until you checked out. Ergo, if we want to set things right, you should be the one who takes on the next suicide mission.”
That doesn’t seem obvious to me. I’m about to explain to him exactly why his argument is utter bullshit, but …
I actually can’t come up with a good reason why he isn’t right.
“Fine,” I say. “If and when Marshall comes up with an actual suicide mission for us—I mean something like what he did to Three—I’ll fall on the sword. I’m not taking every hazardous job, though. If he sends us out on another recon mission, or posts us to the perimeter, or sends us up in the flitter with Berto again, we’re throwing hands for it.”
He squints at me, head tilted to one side, and for a second I think he’s going to try to argue the point. Finally, though, he just shrugs and says, “Yeah, fair enough.”
“Good,” I say. “I guess we can play it by ear the next time a summons comes through.”
“Anyway,” he says, “until and unless one of us goes down, living on half rations is definitely going to suck.”
“Yeah,” I say. “About that.”
“About what? Rations, or duty?”
“Rations,” I say. “That meeting with Marshall didn’t exactly go the way I was hoping.”