It’s funny how expectations work. Four hours ago, I left the cell expecting to go to the cycler. I wasn’t afraid, really. I knew what was going to happen, and I knew there was nothing I could do about it. There’s a certain peace that comes with that.
This time, I leave the cell assuming that we’re headed back to Marshall’s office to talk about creepers. We’re not, though. We pass that corridor and keep walking. My heart lurches, and my stomach twists itself into an aching knot.
This time, we really are going to the cycler.
Marshall is there waiting for us when we arrive, along with Nasha and Cat and two other goons. These ones are carrying burners.
The corpse hole is open. Tiny flashes of light dance across its surface.
“So,” Marshall says. “Before we get started, I have a few questions.”
“Oh, for shit’s sake,” Eight mutters.
Marshall’s eyes narrow. “Excuse me?”
“Look,” Eight says. “I know you, Marshall. I’ve been getting myself killed for you for nine years now. Despite that, for the most part you’re a decent guy. You’ve got a stick up your ass most of the time, but you’re not some kind of villain from a vid drama, and I don’t know why you’re trying to act like one now. You don’t want a multiple hanging around your colony. Fine. Kill one of us, and shove him down the hole. Problem solved. Or kill both of us and pop a new one out of the tank, if that’s the way you want to go. Just do it, and quit dicking around.”
“Well,” Marshall says. “Just to be clear—if the two of you wind up going down the hole today, there will never be another of you. Your personality will be wiped from the server, as will your body template. You’re not looking at a trip to the tank right now, Barnes. You’re looking at a death sentence.”
Eight shakes his head. “Bullshit. There are only a hundred and seventy-six of us left, and we’re moving to a war footing. You need every body you can get right now. You sure as shit can’t throw away your only Expendable.”
“This is true,” Marshall says, and his face breaks into a tight-lipped smile. “What is not true is that you are the only person in this colony who is willing and able to fill the role of Expendable. In fact, Corporal Chen has graciously volunteered to take your berth, if and when that becomes necessary.”
Eight opens his mouth, closes it, then opens it again, all without speaking. I turn to look at Cat and her Security pals. The other two are eyeing me, fingers tickling the triggers of their burners, but Cat’s staring down at the floor in front of her.
“Cat?”
“I’m sorry,” she says without looking up. “It’s nothing personal, Mickey. It’s for the good of the colony.”
I bark out a short, sharp laugh. “The good of the colony. Right. This is what you were on about the other night, isn’t it? Do I think I’m immortal? I guess you’ve got your answer to that now, huh?”
She meets my eyes. The anguish in her face drains the anger out of me.
“Please, Mickey. I didn’t mean for all of this to happen.”
“You made all of this happen, Cat.”
A tear leaks from the corner of her eye and trails down her cheek. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I just…”
“Shut up,” Nasha says. “Seriously, Chen. Just shut the fuck up.”
“Enough!” Marshall says. “There’s no point in acting as if this is some kind of betrayal, Barnes. As I understand it, Chen became aware of your situation through your actions, not hers. Once that happened, she was bound by duty to report to Command. If she hadn’t done so, she’d be standing beside you right now, waiting to go down the hole. Moreover, her decision to volunteer to replace you has no bearing whatsoever on what eventually becomes of you. If I decide to wipe you, we’ll either find a volunteer to replace you, or we’ll draft one.” He pauses to wait for that to sink in before continuing. “The salient point right now, however, is that you still have an opportunity to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
The room falls silent. Behind us, one of the goons resets the safety on his burner with an audible click.
Eight is the first one to speak. “What do we have to do?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Marshall says. “All you need to do to avoid going down that hole is to fulfill your duty. I have a mission for you.”
I roll my eyes. “A mission which will result in both of us being killed, I assume?”
Marshall turns to me, and his smile turns into a smirk. “Do I need to refer you back to your job description, Mr. Barnes?”
I sigh. “Tell me.”
And so, he does.
022
ANTIMATTER, IN CASE you were wondering, is a hell of a thing.
When it’s kept to itself, it basically behaves like regular matter. If there had been a hair more antimatter created during the Big Bang and a hair less normal matter, we could have a perfectly functional antimatter universe right now. There wasn’t, though. Because of that, we have a normal matter universe, and when antimatter is brought into it, bad things happen. It’s not quite true that you get a pure conversion of mass to energy when normal matter and antimatter interact, but depending on exactly what kind of particles are interacting, what their energy states were before they met one another, and what sort of environment they’re in, you can get anything from a barrage of gamma rays to a massive spew of subatomic particles ricocheting around at a significant fraction of the speed of light.
As either One or Two would have been happy to tell you, as a living organism, you really don’t want to be anywhere near any of those things.
Antimatter was discovered back on old Earth, pre-Diaspora, well before the Ching Shih was even a gleam in someone’s autoCAD. For a long time, though, it was mostly just a curiosity. They didn’t figure out how to synthesize and contain it in any significant quantity until just before the breakout. In fact, most people would argue that the Chugunkin Process was the singular advancement that led most directly to the Diaspora.
Partially that’s because antimatter is absolutely critical for interstellar travel. Nothing else that our physics has yet discovered contains enough energy in a compact-enough form to get us anywhere near the speeds that we need to cross the gulfs between stars. Still, even if that weren’t true—if, for example, some of the reactionless thrust concepts they were playing with before Chugunkin did his thing had actually paid out—it seems pretty likely that the Diaspora wouldn’t have happened without the ability to create antimatter in bulk.
It should be pretty clear by now that launching a colony mission is in most ways a desperate act. It’s expensive, it has a high probability of failure, and even if it succeeds, the place you’re going to will probably be significantly worse than the place you came from for at least a few lifetimes. In order to make a leap like that, you have to either be running toward something great, or running away from something truly terrifying. For the ancient Micronesians, the thing they were running from was resource depletion and starvation.