I glance over at her, open my mouth to say something rude, then think better of it and shake my head.
“If our friends in the Agriculture Section don’t get their shit together soon,” I say, “I think you’re likely to find out.”
She smirks. I pick up my mug of goo and take it to a table near the center of the room. Cat follows.
“You know,” I say as she sits down, “you’re kind of shoving your fancy-ass rich-person food in my face right now.”
She laughs, but in a hesitant way that makes it clear that she’s not entirely sure I’m kidding.
I am not, in fact, kidding.
None of my problems are her fault, though. I smile, and she visibly relaxes.
“Anyway,” I say, “what’s up in Security today? Anything new since that fiasco with the perimeter patrols?”
She takes a fat bite of her yams, chews, and swallows. I grimace and sip at my mug of paste.
“Well,” she says around a second mouthful, “Amundsen is pretty worked up about this whole creeper issue. He’s got us on a twelve-on-twelve-off duty cycle, which is a gigantic pain in the ass, and everyone who’s on has to carry a linear accelerator at all times, which is also not great, because they’re awkward and heavy and they leave you with sore shoulders at the end of a shift. On the plus side, after what happened over the past two days, we’re confined to the dome, so no more wandering around outside getting frostbite.” She pauses to swallow. “I’m not even sure what he thinks we’re supposed to do with an accelerator on the inside. Do you have any idea what kind of damage a ten-gram slug could do ricocheting around in here?”
She looks at me expectantly. It takes me a solid five seconds to realize that this wasn’t a rhetorical question.
“Um,” I say. “No?”
“A lot,” she says. “That’s what kind.”
I’m most of the way through my paste by now. My belly still feels empty.
“Anyway,” she says, “that’s my jam. What about you? Have you had any more thoughts about how you’re going to spend your day off?”
“Oh,” I say, “you know. Hanging around. Sucking down cycler paste. Waiting to hear how Marshall’s gonna kill me next. Just another day in paradise, I guess.”
She laughs. Cat’s laugh is not delicate. It’s the sort of laugh you might expect to hear from someone who’s just watched you slip on an ice patch.
“So tell me,” she says as she scrapes up the last of her brunch, “what made you decide to get into the Expendable business?”
I think about making up some nonsense about service and duty, but for some reason I don’t feel like I should be feeding self-serving lies to Cat. In the end I just shrug and tell her the truth.
“I wanted off of Midgard. This was the only way to make it happen.”
“Ah,” she says. “Got it.”
I nod, turn up my mug, and let the last gritty dregs drain into my mouth.
“Wait,” I say. “Got what? What do you got?”
“Why you signed on,” Cat says. “You were a criminal, right? Killed somebody or something?”
This again.
“No,” I say. “I didn’t kill anyone.”
“Huh. So what, then? Extortion? Armed robbery? Sex crimes?”
“No, no, and no. I’m not a criminal. If I were, do you really think they would have brought me onto Midgard’s first colony mission?”
“As our Expendable? Yeah, maybe. During training I heard they were talking about conscripting someone.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I heard that too. Kinda raises questions about your judgment, doesn’t it? You just let a murdering extortionist sex criminal spend the night in your room.”
She grins. “I never said I was the brightest.”
I run my finger around the inside of my mug to scrape up the bits of goo stuck to the bottom.
“Wow,” Cat says. “You really like that stuff, huh?”
I scowl. “Oh yeah. It’s the best.”
She scrapes at her tray to get up the last burned bits of yam. “I never actually thought you were a murderer,” she says. “I didn’t believe they’d send someone like that on a colony mission, if only because they wouldn’t want to screw up the gene pool. Most of the people I talked to, though, thought it was a lie when we heard that we’d gotten a volunteer. It’s kind of hard to imagine someone just agreeing to … you know … do what you do. Gillian was sure you were a prisoner or something, and that they were feeding us a line about you volunteering so that we wouldn’t ostracize you or whatever.”
“Huh,” I say. “That worked out great.”
She rolls her eyes. “Oh come on. You’ve got friends. I’ve seen you around with Gomez, and Nasha seems to like you well enough. You still haven’t answered my question, though. What were you thinking when you signed on to be the official crash test dummy for a beachhead colony?”
I could go into what actually got me into Gwen’s office now.
I could, but I won’t. Maybe a few self-serving lies wouldn’t be so bad.
“Who knows?” I say. “Maybe I’m an idealist. Maybe I was just looking for a way to do my part for the Union.”
She laughs again, harder this time. “Wow,” she says. “How’s that working out for you?” She sobers then, looks down at her empty tray and then back up at me. “Actually,” she says, “it’s working out pretty well for you, isn’t it? Better than for Gillian or Rob or Dugan, anyway.”
I’m not sure where she’s going with this, but for some reason a chill runs down the back of my neck.
“What I mean,” she says, “is that there are some definite advantages to being unkillable in a place like this, aren’t there?”
“I’m not unkillable,” I say. “I get killed all the damn time. That’s the entire point of being an Expendable, isn’t it?”
“And yet,” she says, “here you are. Where’s Gillian today?”
I don’t have an answer for that. We sit in silence as Cat grimaces and downs a shot of cycler paste that she’s gotten to supplement her meal. Medical says we all ought to be drinking a few hundred milliliters of paste per day for the vitamins. Apparently yams and crickets aren’t actually a completely balanced diet. When she’s done, Cat leans back in her chair and her smile returns.
“Anyway,” she says, “totally unrelated, but I wanted to say … I guess … thanks, Mickey. I know last night was a little weird, but…”
“It wasn’t weird,” I say. “I get it.”
She looks away. “Yeah. I just … I needed that, you know?”
I’m not sure what to say to that, so I reach across the table and touch her hand. She puts her other hand over mine for just a second before pulling away.
“Hey,” she says, “what’s your duty cycle look like tonight?”
I hesitate, but I can’t come up with a good reason to lie about this. “I think I’m off tonight?”
She leans forward again, pushes back from the table, and picks up her tray. “Really? You’re off now, right? How does that work?”
“You know,” I say. “They make allowances when I’m fresh out of the tank.”
“Wow,” she says. “No kidding. The benefits just keep on coming, huh?”
I can’t tell if she’s smiling or not as she walks over to the refuse bin and drops her tray.