Our only hope for long-term survival was to spread.
It was also clear to them that the Diaspora would be futile if antimatter weapons came with it. We’ve ostracized old Earth from the start of the Union, and at this point we don’t even know if there’s anyone left alive there. We like to think that we’re different from them, that we’re more enlightened or evolved or some such bullshit.
It’s not true, though. The people of the Union are no different, at the end of the day, from the ones of old Earth. We still argue with one another. We still sometimes fight.
We don’t do it with antimatter, though. That’s the one hard and fast rule, even deeper-seated in our psyches than the ban on multiples, that every world in the Union abides by.
That’s the one rule that, if it’s broken and one of the neighboring worlds finds out about it, will buy you a Bullet.
023
“THIS IS THE place, right?” Berto asks from the cockpit.
The bay door slides open, and I look down. We’re hovering over a crevasse. It looks pretty much like every other crevasse in this godforsaken place. Is this where I fell?
“Maybe,” I say. “Who knows?”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Berto says.
The drop winch deploys two meters of cable. Eight shoulders his pack and clips in.
“See you down there,” he says, and steps into space.
I lift my own pack as the cable plays out. It’s not as heavy as I expected.
Hard to believe it carries enough destructive force to sterilize a city.
Soon enough, the winch reverses. When the end of the cable appears, though, I hesitate.
“Hey,” I say. “Berto? Before I do this, there’s one thing that I’d really appreciate you clearing up. What actually happened to Six?”
Berto sighs. “Creepers took him, Mickey. I told you that the first time you asked, right after you came out of the tank.”
“I don’t believe that,” I say. “You told me that creepers ate me, remember?”
“I didn’t say they ate him,” Berto says. “I said they took him. You inferred the eating thing. He was working another crevasse, not too far from here. They came up out of the snow, just like I said. They didn’t rip him up, though. They dragged him down a hole. It was fifteen minutes before I lost his signal. He was incoherent for the last ten. I got the impression…”
“What?” I say.
“I’m pretty sure they were doing what we did to that creeper you hauled in,” Berto says. “They were taking him apart to see how he worked.”
“They took his ocular,” I say. “They took my ocular.”
“Maybe,” Berto says. “Not like they could do anything with it.”
Until the last few days, I would have agreed. Now, though?
“You lied to me,” I say. “You lied to Command. You must have known the creepers were sentient before I did. You could have gotten cycled for that, Berto. What were you thinking?”
He doesn’t answer. I wait through a long ten seconds, then shake my head and reach for the cable.
“I was afraid,” Berto says.
I turn to look at him. He won’t meet my eyes.
“Afraid of what? Until you falsified your reports, you hadn’t done anything wrong. What happened to me wasn’t your fault.”
“No,” he says. “I wasn’t afraid of Command. I was afraid of those fucking creepers. I could have saved you, probably. I could have pulled you back out of that hole. I could maybe even have saved Six if I’d gotten to ground quick enough, and brought along an accelerator. I didn’t, though. I didn’t, because I was afraid.”
And now, suddenly, it all makes sense.
“You’re Berto Gomez,” I say. “You’re the guy who flies a flitter through a three-meter gap at two hundred meters per second. You’re not afraid of anything.”
He sighs, and nods.
“You risked actually getting cycled because you couldn’t admit to me, to Marshall … to yourself? You couldn’t let anyone know that there was something out there that frightened you.”
He turns back to the controls. “Eight is waiting for you, Mickey.”
“You know,” I say, “if any of me makes it through into Nine somehow, I’m gonna make a point first thing of kicking the crap out of you.”
He doesn’t have anything to say to that.
I clip in, and I go.
* * *
“SO,” EIGHT SAYS when I unclip at the bottom. “Is this the place?”
I look around. The floor of the crevasse is maybe a half dozen meters wide. Thirty meters of ice loom over us on both sides. Halfway up one wall, a boulder that looks a little like a monkey’s head juts out of the ice.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think so. Don’t think it really matters, though. I’m pretty sure this whole area is undermined. If this isn’t exactly where I went down before, we just need to find another entrance to the tunnels.”
The cable disappears, and a few moments later we hear the hum of gravitics as Berto’s shuttle accelerates away. We start walking. Just past the boulder, I see the edge of the hole. Apparently it hasn’t snowed enough in the past few days to cover it over.
“There,” I say. “That’s where I fell.”
We walk up to the edge and look down into a steep, slanting, rock-walled tunnel a bit more than a meter wide.
“Looks climbable,” Eight says.
“Eight,” I say. “We shouldn’t do this.”
He turns to look at me. “You think there’s a better way in?”
“No,” I say. “That’s not what I mean. I mean that we shouldn’t do this.”
“Yes,” he says. “We should.”
“The creepers,” I say. “They’re sentients.” I hook one thumb toward my pack. “And these things are war crimes. If Midgard finds out that we did this, they’ll make us the next Gault.”
Each of our packs, for all intents and purposes, contains a miniature bubble bomb: fifty thousand tiny nuggets of antimatter taken from what’s left of the Drakkar’s fuel stores, each one isolated in a magnetic monopole bubble. When we release them, they’ll disperse, drifting through the air like will-o’-the-wisps.
Eventually, the bubbles will pop.
The fact of what I’m carrying on my back right now is making my skin crawl.
“I know they’re sentients,” Eight says. “That’s why we have to do this—and it’s only a war crime if we use these weapons on humans. Anything goes on a beachhead. Our terraformers have sterilized entire continents to make space for us where they had to. You know this.” He sits down at the edge of the hole and leans forward. “Give me a hand, huh? It’s a bit of a drop to the first ledge.”
“One of them saved me,” I say.
He looks up at me. “What?”
“Four days ago,” I say. “When I got lost in these tunnels, and Berto gave me up for dead. One of the creepers saved me. It picked me up and carried me almost back to the dome. It let me go.”
“So what you’re saying,” Eight says, “is that all of this bullshit that’s happened to us is actually their fault.”