Eight tilts his head to one side. “Explain?”
I shrug. “For the moment, it seems like Marshall is more worried about having his colony eaten by creepers than he is about having a perverted multiple hanging around.”
“Huh,” he says. “That’s surprisingly sensible.”
“To be clear, I didn’t say he’s not going to kill us. He’s still pondering, I think. I told him what happened to me after Berto abandoned me. I think it spooked him.”
“What did happen to you? You never told me.”
“Let’s just say that I wasn’t surprised when Marshall told us that we’re dealing with sentients. Also, just FYI, the kind we’ve seen aren’t all there is. There are creepers out there that are big enough to eat a flitter and have room left over for dessert.”
“And they’ve got miltech.”
“Apparently.”
“And we’re moving to a war footing.”
“That’s what Marshall says.”
He leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees, and rubs his face with both hands.
“This isn’t good, Seven. We’re not equipped for a ground war with a technological species. There’s only a hundred and eighty of us.”
“One-seventy-six. We’re down five of everyone else, and up one of us.”
He looks up at me and scowls. “Whatever. We needed to know this before we dropped the colony.”
So that we could have bombarded the creepers from orbit, he means. So that we could have committed genocide before putting any of ourselves in harm’s way.
I have to remind myself at this point that Eight is me, six weeks or so removed. How can I be so horrified at what he’s saying? Have the creepers really gotten that far into my head?
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “We didn’t know, and it’s too late to do anything about it now.”
He leans back and folds his arms across his chest. “Is it?”
And that’s it, of course. It might not be. As I said before—Marshall has the full energy output of a starship engine at his disposal. We may not have the high ground anymore, but we still have an insane amount of power available.
“Anyway,” I say, “whatever winds up happening, I don’t think either of us is going to be around to worry about it.”
“I don’t know,” Eight says. “He hasn’t killed us yet, right?”
I lie back on the bed again, fold my hands behind my head, and close my eyes.
“Don’t get too excited, Eight. I’m pretty sure this is a temporary reprieve.”
* * *
FOR SOME REASON, while I’m lying there in the holding cell waiting for Marshall to make up his mind about what to do with me and hoping that if he does decide to cycle me he at least has the decency to kill me first, I find myself thinking about Six.
I don’t remember all of my deaths, obviously. Four refused to upload before he died, and I don’t remember being Two at all. I know exactly what happened to both of them, though. I saw surveillance video of each of their endings. I’m still not sure which is worse, honestly—remembering your own death, or watching it on video. Six, though … I thought I knew what happened to him. Berto told me he got torn apart by creepers.
Berto told me I got torn apart by creepers.
Berto has demonstrated pretty clearly that he can’t be trusted when it comes to me and dying.
I wonder now—did Six wind up abandoned in the tunnels too? Did he just never manage to find his way back out? If I ever get the chance to see Berto again, I’m gonna squeeze the truth out of him.
Even if it kills me.
I’m still contemplating that when my ocular pops open a chat window.
<Mickey8>:In**stan* cl**r?
I turn my head to look at Eight.
“Come on,” he says. “Again with this shit?”
<Mickey8>:C*e*r? S**nder?
I sit up. “What are you doing, Eight?”
“Me? What are you doing? What’s with the gibberish?”
I shake my head. “That’s not me. I thought you were sleep-chatting.”
His face shifts from annoyed to confused. “Sleep-chatting? Is that a thing?”
“Maybe?”
<Mickey8>:Un*r**nd? C***r?
I blink the window closed. “If that’s not you, and it’s not me, then who is it?”
Eight shrugs. “It’s a glitch, obviously. There’s not supposed to be two separate nodes in the system with identical handles. There must be some kind of feedback thing going on between us.”
“Oh please,” I say. “You’re making that up. You don’t know any more than I do about the network, and I don’t have any idea whether what you’re saying is even plausible.”
“Tell you what,” he says. “After Marshall shoves you down the corpse hole, I’ll see if he’ll hold off on me for a while so I can check to see if it’s still happening. Should be an interesting experiment.”
I sigh. “Thanks, Eight. You’re a pal.”
* * *
YOU MIGHT HAVE the impression at this point that every colony that’s ever been attempted has failed miserably. That’s not remotely true, obviously. I’ve been perseverating on the failures because that’s where my head has been pretty much ever since we entered orbit around Niflheim, but there have been tons of rousing successes. Take Bergen’s World, for example.
Bergen’s World was jungle from pole to pole when the first colony ship arrived. It had two continents, one huge and one smaller, both straddling the equator on opposite sides of the planet, with warm blue oceans, a whole mess of jungle islands, an atmosphere rich in oxygen and thick with CO2, and a biosphere that could best be described as maniacal. There weren’t any sentients and there wasn’t anything alarmingly large, but the animals were fast and strong and bad-tempered, the trees were semi-motile and carnivorous, and the microbiota was adaptive, infectious, and omnipresent. Command dropped a small exploratory party from orbit, just to get the lay of the land.
Even with armor and heavy weapons, they didn’t last a day.
The inhospitality of the place put the Bergen’s World Command in a bit of a pickle. As I’ve mentioned, colony ships don’t really have the option of packing up and heading to a new destination once they’ve settled down. So they made the best of it.
They sterilized the smaller continent. Burned it down damn near to the bedrock.
It’s a beautiful place now. Practically a paradise, from everything I’ve read.
So, yeah, it’s not true that every time we make landfall on a new planet we wind up dying.
I mean, somebody almost always does.
It’s just not necessarily us.
* * *
IT’S CLOSING IN on noon when the door opens again. It’s a different goon this time—a bigger guy, with dark skin and a clean-shaven head. His name is Tonio. I’m pretty sure he was the one who tased me in the cafeteria two days ago.
“On your feet,” he says. “Let’s go.”
“Which one of us?” Eight asks.
“Both.”
I look over at Eight. He shrugs. We get to our feet, and we go.