Berto looks like he has more to say, but with a visible struggle he swallows, fixes his eyes back on that spot behind Marshall’s head, and says, “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Excellent,” Marshall says. “Go.” As we rise and turn to leave, he says, “Oh, Barnes? I don’t know what your involvement in this incident was, but on the presumption that you probably had something to do with it, I’ll be reducing your rations by five percent as well.”
I turn back to him. “What? No!”
“Ten percent,” Marshall says. When I open my mouth again, he says, “Care to make it fifteen?”
My jaw snaps shut with an audible click.
“No, sir,” I say. “Thank you, sir.”
015
“ANOTHER TEN PERCENT? Come on, Seven! You can’t do that to me!”
“First,” I say, “I’m not doing it to you. I’m doing it to us. And second, I’m not doing it. If you want to bitch at somebody, bitch at Berto. He’s the one who decided to screw half the Security Section out of their rations and then clock one of them in the caf.”
Eight slumps down onto the bed and drops his face into his hands. “I can’t do this, Seven. I never got a chance to recover from the tank. You know this body still hasn’t eaten a single damned bite of solid food, right? Eating is all I think about from the time I wake up until the time I go to sleep. Now we’re down to, what, seven-twenty each? I can’t do it. I cannot fucking do it.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Seriously, I know you must be going through hell right now, but look—there’s nothing to be done. Unless we want to go back to the corpse hole, we’re just going to have to deal with this.”
He looks up. “I’m not gonna lie, Seven. The corpse hole is sounding better and better right now.”
I drop into the desk chair, pull my boots off, and prop my feet up on the bed beside him. “It might come to that, friend-o, but we’re not there yet. Tell you what—you can have whatever’s left on our account for today, and I guess … nine hundred tomorrow? Does that help?”
He groans.
“Look,” I say, “that’s only leaving me five-forty for the next thirty-six hours, and I didn’t even get to finish my dinner before Berto started his little riot. I know you’re dying right now, but this isn’t exactly a picnic for me either.”
He sighs, and flops over onto his back.
“I know,” he says to the ceiling, “I know you’re hurting too, and I do appreciate the offer. You’re a good guy, Seven. I’m gonna feel terrible when I finally wind up strangling you in your sleep and eating your corpse.”
I don’t have time to come up with a response to that before my ocular pings.
<Black Hornet>:Hey there. You off-shift?
I start to compose an answer, but Eight beats me to the punch.
<Mickey8>:Yeah. Thought you were flying tonight?
<Black Hornet>:I was, but now I’m not. Looks like they swapped Berto into my slots for the next few days for some reason, so I’m free until further notice. Want to hang?
<Mickey8>:Hells yes!
<Black Hornet>:Sweet. See you in ten.
“Sorry,” Eight says. “You gotta go.”
“Hey,” I begin, but he cuts me off.
“No, Seven. Don’t even. I need this. I need this. I was mostly joking about strangling you in your sleep, but if you try to fight me on this, I swear that I will end you.”
The rage that boils up in me now is completely out of proportion to anything that he said. I recognize that.
I recognize it, but I don’t care.
“Look,” I say. “I get that you’re having a rough go, you big fucking baby, but you’re really starting to push it, you know that? I’ve taken two days of hazard duty while you’ve been napping up here, and I just offered to give you three-quarters of our rations for the next two days out of the goodness of my dumbass heart. You just came out of the tank, fine, you’re hungry—but I’m hungry too, and I almost got killed today, and anyway there’s nothing I remember about tank funk that makes us extra-horny. So if you want to keep walking this road, we can head down to Marshall’s office together right now and settle this for good.”
He stares at me for a long five seconds, his jaw hanging slightly open.
“Wait,” he says finally. “What? You think this is a sex thing?”
That sets me back. “Uh … yes?”
He groans, sits up, and rubs his face with both hands. “Good God, Seven. Did I not just tell you that I’m starving to death? You think I’ve got the energy for sex right now? When Nasha gets here, I’m not gonna try to get her out of her jumpsuit, you idiot. I’m gonna try to talk her into feeding me. You got yours from Berto, even if you didn’t get all of it down your neck, for some reason. You’ve got to give me this.”
And just like that, the anger drains away.
“Oh,” I say. “Right.”
“Right. So?”
I stare at him. He stares back. After a few seconds of this, he rolls his eyes and points to the door.
“Right,” I say again.
I pull on my boots, and I go.
* * *
SO HERE’S A fun story about starvation. Everybody knows Eden was the first colony, right? The first place old Earth successfully infected with her children. Not everybody knows, though, that the mission that dropped the beachhead on Eden was actually our second attempt.
The first, on a ship called the Ching Shih, went off almost forty years prior, twenty years or so after the end of the Bubble War. That mission was our species’ first desperate attempt at flinging ourselves past our own heliopause—and like most of our first attempts at most things, it didn’t go particularly well. The ship didn’t have a cycler, and their engines weren’t anywhere near as efficient as ours, and Earth to Eden is a long jump even by modern standards. They were expecting to be twenty-one years in transit, and they were expecting to sustain themselves for that entire time with shipboard agriculture.