He looks me up and down. I’m bundled up pretty well, but strictly in cold-weather gear. He’s got two burners in hip holsters. I’m carrying a linear accelerator. It’s heavier than what he’s bringing and a lot less versatile, and I’m pretty sure my sprained wrist is going to complain bitterly if I have to actually bring it to bear, but it’s the only weapon I have any real training on—and anyway, ever since that last night on Himmel Station, I’ve had kind of an aversion to burners.
“I appreciate the advice,” he says, “but I saw what those things in the lock did to Gallaher’s leg. I’d like to have something a little more substantial than a snowsuit between them and me.”
“You saw what they did to Gallaher. Did you see what they did to the decking?”
He’s glaring now, looking back and forth between me and his right gauntlet, which he doesn’t seem to be able to get to slip into the fitting on his sleeve.
“Let me see that,” I say. He holds up his arm. I give the gauntlet a twist, and the connector latches.
“Thanks,” he says. He flexes his hand, makes sure everything’s hooked up, then reaches for his chest plate. “I get it,” he says as he snaps that into place. “This is no big deal for you. But you’ve got to understand, Barnes—the rest of us don’t get to just hit the reset button if we go down. Dead is dead for me. So, yeah, I’m wearing armor.”
I smile. “Reset button, huh? That what you think a trip to the tank is?”
“Look,” he says. “I’m not trying to start something here, but the fact is that you’re an Expendable, and I’m not. Our incentives are different. I just want to go out there, collect our sample, and get back in here intact.”
I lift the accelerator’s strap over my head. I want it loose enough that I can bring the weapon to bear quickly, but tight enough that it’s not banging against my back while I’m walking.
“I’m definitely not about to argue that point,” I say. “The whole reset-button thing isn’t as much fun as you apparently think it is.”
My ocular pings.
<Command1>:Adjaya and Gomez are starting their sweep. Time to go.
I look around. The goons are clanking toward the lock. I seal up my rebreather. Dugan dogs his helmet, and we go.
* * *
THE LAST TIME anything native seriously opposed one of our landfalls was a bit under two hundred years ago, and maybe fifty lights spinward from here. The beachhead Command there probably gave the place a name, but if they did, they never let the rest of us know. These days, the planet is called Roanoke.
Roanoke is not what you’d call an ideal habitat. Its star is a red dwarf, and the planet itself is a tidally locked rock with almost no axial tilt, very little water, and a thirty-one-day orbital period. It’s got a hot pole on one side, where the ambient temperature rarely drops below eighty C, a cold pole on the other side where it snows CO2, and a more or less habitable strip of perpetual twilight circumscribing the planet in between that’s maybe a thousand kilometers wide. Roanoke is an old world. Speculation is that it’s harbored life for maybe seven billion years. And all that time, everything that’s evolved there has been fighting for a toehold in that dry, wind-scoured, thousand-kilometer strip.
Apparently, bringing a few million liters of liquid water to a place like that is like bringing a giant sack of scrip to a shantytown, because the colony wasn’t a week past landfall before things started coming after them. There were tiny biting things that came on the wind, burrowed into any exposed skin, and brought itching rashes, then pus-filled blisters, then sepsis, then death. There were things like sand-burrowing starfish with armor-piercing fangs. They injected a necrotizing venom that killed in minutes. There were insectile things half the size of a man that shot jets of concentrated sulfuric acid from glands in their heads. Most of the creatures on the planet seemed purpose-built to defeat the colony’s defenses, and though it seems obvious to us now what was going on, as near as we can tell from the records their Command transmitted before they went down, they never did figure it out.
Almost from day one, Command on Roanoke couldn’t keep their people alive outside the main dome for more than an hour. They lost them in ones and twos, week after week, until finally, taboos be damned, they had to start making extra copies of their Expendable just to keep their berths filled.
They eventually did button the place up and try to hunker down and do some research into what was happening to them. By that time, though, something was reproducing inside the dome. Command tried a half dozen sterilization protocols, but whatever it was, it kept coming back. By the end, the entire colony was made up of copies. The central processor kept cranking them out until it ran out of amino acids.
One of the last of the Expendables to die got at least a glimmer of the truth, just before the end. Bio had released a phage tuned to take out one of the microorganisms that was tearing them up. A resistant strain showed up six hours later. The last words in his personal log, dictated as his innards were liquefying and pouring out of every orifice, were these: I am not paranoid. Someone here really is out to get me.
* * *
I’M THINKING ABOUT that guy, Jerrol-two-hundred-and-something, as we step out into the snow. The locals on Roanoke didn’t ring any alarm bells with the colonists there because they weren’t tool-users in the classic sense. They didn’t produce any electromagnetic emissions, didn’t have power plants or roads or cars or cities. Didn’t even have agriculture, as far as we could tell. They were, as it turned out, crazy-good genetic engineers, though. Combine that with their extreme territoriality and xenophobia—pretty predictable, considering that they’d spent their entire evolutionary history fighting with each other and everything else on their crappy planet over a thin band of marginally habitable territory—and you got a bad outcome for the Roanoke beachhead.
I’m thinking about Jerrol, and I’m thinking about my gigantic tunnel-digging friend from last night. Everybody died on Roanoke because there were sentients there, and the colonists failed to notice them until it was too late. I’m wondering if somebody like me maybe had a run-in with one of the locals on Roanoke, identified it as a sentient, and then failed to report it in to Command.
A fair number of beachhead colonies fail for one reason or another. I’d really hate to have this one fail because of me.
* * *
THE LAST GLOW of sunset is fading on the horizon, and the first stars are already visible in the eastern sky. We’re ten minutes out from the lock, maybe a half kilometer past the perimeter, and Dugan is conferring with Berto and Nasha over the comm about where best to find one creeper but not a hundred, when Cat clomps over to me. Back in the armory we were about the same height, but I’m standing on top of almost a meter of snow now, and she has to crane her neck to look up at me.
“Hey,” she says. “What’s with the LA? I thought we were all packing burners.”
It takes me a second to realize that she’s talking about my weapon. I don’t really want to go into my Jemma-inspired aversion to burners at the moment. I don’t know this person at all, and even after nine years, that story still feels a little raw.