“Aren’t you going to ask me how it does that?”
I rolled my eyes. “By killing us all?”
“Yes,” she said. “But I was going to say it in a much funnier way.”
I sighed. “Why do I need to know about any of this? We’ll have engineers, right? If they’re all dead, I don’t think whatever you can cram into my head in the next two weeks is going to make much difference. I like history. I can tell you who Wernher von Braun was, but that’s about my limit when it comes to propulsion tech. I barely passed high-energy physics in school, and that was a long time ago.”
“I’m not trying to turn you into an engineer,” she said. “The Drakkar will carry a fully redundant complement of propulsion specialists. They’ll tell you exactly what needs to be done if the need arises—but time will likely be short if it comes to that, and things will go much faster if you already know the basics.”
“And if something does go wrong, they’ll need my help to fix it because…”
Her smile disappeared. “Because an hour after shutdown, the neutron flux in the combustion chamber is still high enough to provide a lethal dose even through full combat armor in less than sixty seconds—and if it comes to that, trust me, you will not be wearing full combat armor. That shit is expensive.”
“Right,” I said. “I didn’t mean they’d crawl into the engines themselves. Who does that? I meant they’d use a drone.”
She shook her head. “Drones are subject to damage from high-energy particles, just like you are. In fact, you’d be surprised how much longer a human will last in a stream of heavy particles than a mechanical. You may be dead for all practical purposes after sixty seconds in there, but it will take your body an hour or more to figure that out, and you can be doing useful work for that entire time. A drone in that environment will shut down in under a minute—and once you’re away from Midgard’s industrial base, a damaged drone will be a lot more difficult to replace than you will. Your official title is Mission Expendable, Mickey. Part of my job over the next twelve days or so is to make sure you really understand what that means.”
I think that’s probably the point where I started liking her slightly less.
* * *
WE DIDN’T ONLY talk about schematics and radiation poisoning, Jemma and I. When it was pretty clear that my head was full up with technical data for the moment, we switched over to philosophy, which was much more my speed.
Turns out that people have been poking around the periphery of what has become the central question of my life for a long time. That first day, after we were finished talking about the many different ways I could irradiate myself into oblivion, Jemma told me about the Ship of Theseus.
“Imagine,” she said, “that one day Theseus sets out to sail around the world.”
“Okay,” I said. “I know I should know this, but who’s Theseus?”
“An old Earth hero,” she said. “Seriously old school—from maybe three thousand years before the Diaspora.”
“Huh. And he’s sailing around the world?”
“Right,” she said. “He’s sailing around the world in a wooden ship. As he goes, parts of the ship get damaged or wear out, and he has to replace them. Years later, when he finally comes home, every single board and timber of the original ship has been replaced. So. Is this, or is this not, the same ship that he departed in?”
“That’s dumb,” I said. “Of course it is.”
“Okay,” she said. “What if the ship is destroyed in a storm, and he has to rebuild it all at once before sailing on? Is it the same ship then?”
“No,” I said. “That’s totally different. If he has to rebuild the entire ship, that’s Ship of Theseus II, the Sequel.”
She leaned forward then, elbows on the table. “Really? Why? What difference does it make if he replaces every component one by one, or if he replaces them all at once?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but then realized that I had no idea what to say.
“This is the key to accepting this job, Mickey. You are the Ship of Theseus. We all are. There is not a single living cell in my body that was alive and a part of me ten years ago, and the same is true for you. We’re constantly being rebuilt, one board at a time. If you actually take on this job, you’ll probably be rebuilt all at once at some point, but at the end of the day, it’s really no different, is it? When an Expendable takes a trip to the tank, he’s just doing in one go what his body would naturally do over the course of time anyway. As long as memory is preserved, he hasn’t really died. He’s just undergone an unusually rapid remodeling.”
* * *
I DON’T WANT to make it sound like my training was all engine schematics and Theseuses. Some of it was actually fun. Jemma taught me the basics of handling a linear accelerator, for example. I couldn’t actually fire a real one on the station, but she ran me through a pretty realistic simulation where I got to fight space zombies, and when I finally did get a chance to use the real thing years later, it wasn’t much different. She showed me how to get in and out of a vacuum suit. She showed me how to assemble a full set of combat armor. On Day Six she actually took me outside, and we clambered around the hull of the station for an hour and practiced using recoilless wrenches to tighten and loosen bolts. I will never forget standing with her on the underside of the station and looking up to see the night side of Midgard rolling by.
“I know,” Jemma said. “It’s something, right?”
“That bright patch,” I said. “That’s Kiruna, right?”
“Yeah,” she said. “You from there?”
I nodded. She couldn’t see that through my mirrored visor, but she seemed to understand.
“And now you’re leaving forever,” she said. We hung there in silence for a while and watched Midgard swing by until Kiruna disappeared over the horizon. “I admire you guys,” she said then. “The colonists, I mean. I don’t understand you, but I admire you. I get the romance of it. I get that spreading humanity as widely as we can, making us as disaster-proof as we can, is the whole point of the Diaspora—but I could never just go.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, well. Some of us are just born explorers, I guess.”
Jemma gave an incredulous snort. I turned to look at her, but I couldn’t see her face any more than she could see mine.
“I’ve trained Expendables before,” she said. “We need them here on the station from time to time. They’re usually pretty difficult to deal with. You’re a pain in the ass, but ordinarily when I take them outside like this I’m worried they’ll cut my tether and shove me into the void. Any idea why that would be?”
I sighed. “I know most Expendables are convicts,” I said. “It’s different, though, signing on to be an Expendable on Himmel Station. That’s just agreeing to get killed every once in a while for no good reason. I signed on for a colony mission. Like you said, it’s a romance thing, right?”