“You got it,” I say. “Even if I don’t believe it’s permanent, I’m really not interested in dying any more often than I have to. Dying hurts.” I shoulder the accelerator and pull on my gloves. “That said, I’ve got a theory about the creepers. I don’t think they’re going after us. I think they’re after our metal, just like the natives on Roanoke were after their water. If I’m right, wearing combat armor out there is like walking into a wolf’s den wrapped in bacon.”
“Metal?” Cat says. “They’re animals, Mickey. What would they want with metal?”
I shrug. “Who knows? Maybe they’re not animals.”
Cat pulls down a weapon for herself. “I don’t like that. Let’s get back to immortality. Do you?”
I look over at her. “Do I what?”
She rolls her eyes. “Believe that you’re immortal, Mickey.”
I sigh. “Ever heard of the Ship of Theseus?”
She pauses to think. “Maybe? Was that the one that they used to settle Eden?”
“No,” I say. “It was not. The Ship of Theseus was a wooden sailing vessel from old Earth days. It got wrecked and had to be rebuilt … or else it didn’t, I guess, but it still needed to get fixed—”
“Wait,” Cat says. “A sailing vessel? Like on the water?”
“Yeah. Theseus sailed around the world in this boat, and it either got wrecked or it didn’t, but either way he had to fix it.”
“I’m confused. Is this a Schr?dinger’s cat kind of thing?”
“A what?”
“Schr?dinger’s cat,” she says. “You know, with the box and the poison gas? Quantum superposition and all that?”
“What? No. I told you, it’s a boat, not a cat.”
“I heard you,” she says. “I didn’t think your boat was a cat. I’m just saying, it’s the same kind of thing, right?”
I have to stop and think about that. For a second it seems like she’s actually making sense.
Only for a second, though.
“No,” I say. “Not at all. Why would you think that?”
Cat opens her mouth to answer, but before she can, the inner door to the air lock cycles open, and the bored-looking goon sitting beside it waves us over.
“Chen. Barnes. You’re up.”
“We’ll finish this later,” Cat says.
We pull down our rebreathers. Cat checks my seals, and I check hers.
“This thing cycles in ten seconds whether you’re in it or not,” the goon says.
Cat shoulders her weapon, and we go.
* * *
“THIS IS BULLSHIT,” Cat says.
I look back at her. She’s not using the comm, and the combination of the rebreather and Niflheim’s atmosphere makes her voice higher than it should be, harsh and tinny. We’re walking the perimeter now, shuffling along in our snowshoes, moving from pylon to pylon looking for signs of incursion. There are two other teams out here, spaced equidistant around the kilometer-wide ring that defines the human presence on this planet. We’re supposed to keep moving at a steady pace, each team circling the perimeter twice in a six-hour shift. Every time we pass a pylon, it notes our presence and updates our oculars on the positions of the other teams.
“Which part?” I say. “The part where we spend our entire day freezing our asses off walking circles around the dome? Or the part where we maybe get shredded by creepers for no particular good reason?”
“Neither,” Cat says. “Walking is good for you, and I guess getting shredded is part of the job when you sign on as Security. What’s bullshit is this.” She swings her arm in a gesture that takes in everything around us—from the dome, to the snow, to the mountains off in the distance. “This place was supposed to be habitable, remember? Goldilocks zone, oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, yada yada.” She kicks a clump of snow into the air, then watches as it breaks apart into a powdery cloud, glittering in the low yellow sun as it falls back to the ground. “This is not freaking habitable, Mickey. This is, in fact, bullshit.”
I open my mouth to start in about the place Asher’s World sent her people to. At least this planet didn’t kill us dead right away. She turns away and starts walking, though, and I think better of it. I’m not the most sensitive person, but I’ve been alive long enough to figure out that telling a miserable person about how much worse things could be is usually a bad idea.
The pylons are spaced out at hundred-meter intervals around the perimeter. When we shuffle up to the next one, my ocular pings to let me know that we’re moving more quickly than the other two teams, and that we need to slow down by ten percent.
“Ugh,” Cat says. “How much slower can we go?”
“They’re probably in full armor,” I say. “No snowshoes. Remember how much fun that was yesterday?”
“Right. Still, though.”
My ocular pings again. Command wants us to wait here for twelve minutes before proceeding. Cat sighs, leans back against the pylon, and sights down along the length of her accelerator, aiming toward a knob of bare rock jutting up out of the snow fifty or so meters away.
“I haven’t fired one of these things since basic, back on Midgard,” she says. “Hope I still remember how it works.”
“Point and click,” I say. “The targeting software does most of the work, and the size of the exit wound does the rest.”
Her weapon whirs and slams back against her shoulder, and an instant later the top of the rock explodes into a cloud of powdered granite.
“Yeah,” she says. “I guess it works.”
I’m about to say something about maybe saving her rounds for when we need them when the debris around the rock settles out.
There’s a creeper crouched there, head poking up just where Cat’s round struck, rear segments trailing back into the snow. Its mandibles are spread wide, and its feeding arms are beckoning.
“Cat?” I say.
“Hush,” she says. “I see it.”
She aims carefully, and again the accelerator whirs and kicks. The creeper’s front segments vanish in a hail of shrapnel, and the body drops back into the snow.
“Yeah,” she says. “It definitely works.”
The snow around the rock begins to churn.
The disturbance spreads like a wave, snow heaving up and settling back, then heaving again.
It sweeps toward us.
“Mickey?” Cat says.
A creeper breaks through the snow maybe thirty meters off. Cat aims and fires, but it’s a panicky shot that raises a gout of steam and snow, but leaves the creeper untouched. The burner on the pylon we’re standing under comes to life. Its beam plays across the snow around the rock, and an instant later those from the pylons to our left and right join in. Steam rises in boiling clouds, obscuring my view of the oncoming wave. I’ve brought my weapon to bear by now, but before I can fire, my field of view splits. My right eye is sighting down the length of my accelerator at where I’m guessing the leading creepers are swarming forward. My left eye, though, is looking back at the dome from a distance. I see the rock Cat destroyed, and the billows of steam where the burners are vaporizing the snow. The images are distorted, colors washed out and features flattened.