Nasha shakes her head. “Nope. Nothing. I was running visible, infrared, and ground-penetrating radar, and I swear you guys were one hundred percent clear the last time I passed over.”
“Yeah,” Cat says. “That’s the same thing Gomez said. Between the two of you, we couldn’t have been exposed for more than thirty seconds at a time. It doesn’t make sense, does it?”
“I don’t know,” Nasha says. “They came at the main lock from underneath, right? GPR can’t see through granite. Maybe they’re miners. Hell, maybe they’ve got tunnels running straight up under us right now.”
Cat glances down at her feet. “Thanks, Nasha. I hate that.”
Nasha grins. “Lucky thing we’ve all got top-level racks, right?”
“Yeah,” Cat says. “Lucky.” She pokes halfheartedly at the last scraps of tomato skin on her tray, then looks over at me. “So you two have been together forever, right? Since Midgard?”
I look at Nasha. She shrugs.
“Almost. When he’s not getting eaten or set on fire or crushed by falling storage bins, anyway. Why? You want a crack at him?”
“Doubtful,” Cat says. “Why? Would it be worth the trouble?”
Nasha glances over at me. “Maybe. Depends on what you’re into, I guess.”
I can feel my face redden as they both burst out laughing.
“Just kidding,” Nasha says, and wraps one arm around my shoulder. “This one’s mine. You touch him, and I’ll gut you like a fish.”
Cat raises both hands in surrender. “Oh, no worries,” she says. “His tomato-stealing ass is all yours. I was just leaving, actually.”
She pushes back from the table and gathers her things. When she’s gone, Nasha leans her forehead against mine and cups my cheek in one hand.
“Just so you know,” she says, “she’s not the only one I’d be gutting.”
She kisses me quickly, gets to her feet, and goes.
* * *
I GET BACK to my rack to find Eight sitting in my chair, at my desk, reading something on my tablet. He shuts it down when he hears me enter. He’s taken the pressure wrap off of his un-sprained wrist.
“Hey,” he says without looking up. “How’d it go?”
“Great,” I say. “We’re five corpses closer to getting you a berth of your own.”
“Huh.” He puts the tablet into the desk drawer, stands, and stretches. “Were we always a sociopath, or is this another one of your post-upload innovations?”
“Really? Were we always a sociopath?”
He grins. “Sorry. Pronouns weren’t really designed for this situation, were they?”
“No,” I say. “I guess not. And in answer to your question, no, we are not a sociopath. What we are is really, really hungry.”
Eight barks out a humorless laugh. “Oh no,” he says. “I don’t want to hear anything from you about hungry. I just came out of the tank, remember? Try doing that on nothing but cycler paste.”
“About that,” I say, “I just used a hundred kcal. You’ve only got two hundred left now. Sorry.”
His face hardens. “So much for being a good guy, huh?”
I shake my head. “Don’t, Eight. I just almost got killed while you were napping. That’s got to count for something.”
“I may not have mentioned this,” he says, “but I am literally starving to death, Seven.”
He’s right, of course. Six and I both bitched incessantly about the rations when we came out, and we were eating like kings compared to what Eight is getting. I peel out of my shirt and drop it on the floor, sit down on the bed and start unlacing my boots. Eight sits down next to me.
“Anyway,” he says, “what’s going on out there? The feed just says four accidental deaths and one gone missing, all outside the dome. How does that happen?”
I finish with the boots, pull them off, and lie back on the bed. “Well,” I say. “First, they weren’t all outside, strictly speaking. One was in the main lock, which by the way is no longer in service, since they just used the murder hole.”
That hangs in the air for a long, awkward moment.
“The murder hole,” Eight says finally. “They used it on what?”
I fold my hands behind my head and close my eyes. “Creepers.”
Eight laughs, with a little more warmth this time. “Okay. Got it. You’re shitting me. Really, what happened?”
“Really, they vented plasma into the lock to kill creepers that had breached the decking, and roasted a mostly dead Security goon named Gallaher in the process.”
“Creepers are animals, Seven. You don’t use live plasma to kill an animal.”
“I don’t think you’re hearing me,” I say. “They breached the deck.”
“By ‘breached’ you mean…”
“I mean they cut directly through the decking and started peeling it away.”
“Peeling it away? You mean they … took it?”
I shrug. “Seems like it. This planet is metal-poor, you know. Maybe they need it for something.”
“Huh.” He scratches the top of his head. “Scoot over.”
I slide over to make room for him, and he lies down next to me. This still feels weird, but there’s been so much weirdness in my life in the past twenty-four hours that it barely registers.
“It’s not like anybody thought they were harmless,” Eight says, “but it’s a little hard to swallow an animal being able to rip through the ship’s decking, isn’t it?”
“You’re not wrong.” I’m about to go on, but I have to stop to yawn. I haven’t slept except in two-hour stretches since the night before last. “I didn’t see the bit with the decking, to be honest, but I saw the hole in the floor of the main lock. I also saw a bunch of creepers take down two fully armored goons and one very frightened biologist. It was not pretty.”
“You’re saying you saw creepers bite through ten-mil fiber armor?”
“Well,” I say, “not that specifically. I saw them crawling around on ten-mil fiber armor, and I saw the guys wearing the armor go down. The actual biting-through-armor part was pretty strongly implied, though.”
Eight rises up on one elbow and leans over me. “That doesn’t make sense. Species don’t evolve abilities that don’t have uses in their environment. Why would an ice worm evolve the ability to bite through armor designed to stop a ten-gram LA slug?”
“That’s an excellent question,” I say, and yawn again. “I will definitely give you a good answer for it when I wake up.”
Eight keeps talking, but his words slur into a dull background hum. The last conscious thing I remember is the bed shifting slightly as he stands.
* * *
ALMOST EVERY NIGHT for the past few weeks, I’ve had the same recurring … dream? No, more like a vision, I guess. It always comes just when I’m drifting off, or just when I’m waking. This is one reason why I haven’t been uploading. I’m a little concerned that I might have suffered some kind of glitch during the regen process. If I did, I don’t want to inject any of it into my personality record.