“Right,” she said. “A little hungover, maybe, but yeah.”
She smiled. I sighed, looked away, and put the burner to my head.
“Like this?”
“Sure,” she said. “Close enough.”
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath in, and let it out.
I pressed the trigger.
Nothing happened.
I stood there, frozen and shaking, until Jemma reached over and gently pried the burner from my hand.
“Congratulations,” she said quietly. “As of today, you’re officially Mickey1.”
009
THERE’S QUITE A crowd waiting for me by the main lock. Marshall is there, along with Dugan from Biology and a gaggle of Security goons. Berto and Nasha are standing off to one side. Berto’s hunched over, his face just inches from hers. He says something, short and sharp. She looks away and shakes her head.
“Hey,” I say. “What’s going on?”
Marshall waves me over. “Take a look,” he says, and gestures to the monitor over the lock. I look up. The outer door is sealed. There’s a blackened, mostly man-shaped blob slumped in one corner.
“Shit.” I look closer. What I’d taken for blackened metal is actually a hole almost two meters across in the floor of the lock. “Where’s the decking?”
“Gone,” says Dugan. “Something punched through while Gallaher there was waiting for the lock to cycle and started peeling it away.”
“Gallaher? You mean that lump in the corner?”
“Yes,” says Marshall. “That’s him. We had to use the murder hole.”
I can feel my jaw sag. “You vented plasma into the main lock? While one of our people was in it?”
“We did,” Marshall says. “Gallaher was seriously wounded, in the process of bleeding out. The thing that ripped out the first section of decking sheared off most of his left leg in the process. The AI controlling perimeter security made the call, and I’m not inclined to second-guess it. We couldn’t risk penetration into the dome.”
I’m not sure what to say to that.
“It was creepers,” says Berto. “At least two or three of them.”
I shake my head. “How…”
“Apparently those mandibles are sharper than they look,” he says. “I mean, I’ve seen them go through stuff before—”
“Stuff?” I say. “You mean like my skull?”
That gets me five seconds of awkward silence.
“Anyway,” Dugan says, “I was surprised to find that we don’t have any hard data on these things. I was able to call up a couple of descriptions in picket reports from Gomez and Adjaya, but that’s pretty much it. That’s why we called you down.”
I look to Berto, then back to Dugan.
“Gomez says you’ve got some personal experience with these things,” he says. “Says you’ve developed a bit of an obsession with them, in fact, and Commander Marshall tells me he’s had you out observing them for the past few weeks. We need more than that. We need to figure out exactly what we’re dealing with. If they start knocking holes in the dome, we’re finished.”
I glance over at Berto again. He won’t meet my eyes.
“Personal experience?”
“Right,” Marshall says. “Because they’ve eaten you.”
“True enough,” says Berto. “Mickey’s an expert at getting eaten by creepers.”
Berto and Nasha are both looking at me now. I roll my eyes.
“We just went over this. I don’t remember anything about what happened to Six or Seven. I wouldn’t even know it’d happened if Berto hadn’t told me about it.”
“You sure, Mickey?” Berto says. “This is important. You don’t remember anything from last night?”
Berto stares me down. Nasha looks away.
“I just came out of the tank this morning. You know this, Berto.”
Marshall’s eyes narrow. “Is there something going on here that I need to be made aware of?”
Berto gives me one more dubious look, then shakes his head.
“No, sir. We’re good. Mickey’s right. As we discussed this morning, he hadn’t uploaded in some time when he went down last night.”
Marshall’s not an idiot, but I guess he decides he’s got bigger fish to fry. After giving Berto another long, hard stare, he says, “Whatever. Get geared up, all of you. Gomez and Adjaya, you’ll be providing air cover. I want a complete sweep with ground-penetrating radar from the dome out to two thousand meters beyond the perimeter. I want to know exactly how many of these things are out there, and where they’re located. I also want you loaded for bear. Make sure your missile tubes are full before you lift. Once we’ve accomplished what we need to accomplish and extracted our people, I want the entire field cleared of those things out to a kilometer at least.” He pauses to look around. “The rest of you, be ready to step out of the auxiliary lock on foot in fifteen minutes. Dugan—if you’re going to develop an understanding of what these things are and what they can do, you need to have a specimen in your lab.” He grins, but the expression is more ghoulish than happy. “You gentlemen are going on a snipe hunt.”
* * *
“YOU KNOW,” I say, “I’ve done this before.”
“Huh?”
Dugan looks up at me. He and I haven’t interacted much since that first day on Himmel Station. I don’t get seconded out to Biology often, and when I do it’s mostly for things like cleaning the labs. He’s strapping himself into combat armor at the moment, which under other circumstances would be kind of hilarious. For the right kind of guy, being half in and half out of a battle suit makes you look like a war god from one of the old stories. Dugan is not that kind of guy. He looks like a plucked chicken getting ready for a costume party.
“I said, I’ve done this before. You don’t want that armor.”
He looks around. The Security goons are already geared up. I’ve been trying to remember their names for the last ten minutes. The scowly bald guy is Robert something—whatever you do, don’t call him Bob—and the shorter woman is Cat Chen. The third one I’m pretty sure is named Gillian, but I wouldn’t swear to that one. They’re clanking around the armory at the moment, making sure all their servos are working. This will be the first armored sortie we’ve attempted since landfall.
“Seems like that’s a minority opinion,” he says.
I shrug. “They’re Security. They’d wear armor to bed at night if they could. Armor may make you feel like you’re invincible, but those suits add almost a hundred kilos. That makes you too heavy for snowshoes, and you really want to be on top of the snow when we go out there. Slogging through a meter or more of loose powder is really, really unpleasant.”