Okay. I guess that’s one way of looking at it.
“Anyway,” Eight says, “it doesn’t matter. You heard what Marshall said. If we don’t do this, we go into the cycler, and we don’t get to come back out. He wipes our personality off the server, and fucking Chen takes our place.” He inches a bit farther forward, and looks down again. “You know what? I think I’ve got this.” He braces one hand on either side of the opening, lifts himself up, and lets his legs dangle. “Meet me at the bottom, huh?”
He lowers himself down into the hole and disappears.
I stand there, staring down into the hole, for a long while. I could just walk away, I think—wander off into the snow, pop the seals on my rebreather, and be done with it.
Wouldn’t make a difference, though, would it? They’d send Berto or Nasha out to find my body, retrieve the pack, and send Nine down into the tunnels with it, assuming that Eight hadn’t already finished the job.
Eventually, my ocular pings.
<Mickey8>:Let’s go, Seven. We’ve got things to do.
I sigh, tighten the straps on my pack, and follow him down.
* * *
“WE SHOULD SPLIT up,” Eight says. “Get as far away from one another as we can, then pull our triggers simultaneously. That way we get maximum spread, and we shouldn’t have to worry about the blast from one of our weapons screwing with the dispersal pattern of the other.”
“Eight—” I begin, but he shakes his head.
“No,” he says. “I don’t want to hear it. Start walking. Keep a voice channel open. When you’re ready to do it, let me know. And if you run into your friend from the other day…” He turns away. “I don’t know. Tell him we’re sorry.”
I stand there watching his heat signature fade long after he’s disappeared down one of the side tunnels. Maybe I think he’ll come back? He doesn’t, though. Eventually, I pick a tunnel of my own, snug the straps of my pack down to my shoulders, and start walking.
* * *
“SEVEN. YOU THERE?”
“Yeah. I’m here.”
“You seeing anything? These tunnels seem pretty empty.”
“Nope. I’ve been hearing things off and on, though.”
“Yeah, me too. Scratching behind the walls, right?”
“Right. That’s our friends, I’d guess.”
“Think they know we’re here?”
I roll my eyes, though I know he can’t see it. “This is their house, Eight. How long would it take us to figure out that one of them had gotten into the dome?”
The silence stretches on, until I begin to wonder whether he’s cut the connection.
“Think they know what we’re here to do?”
* * *
IT’S TEN MINUTES later, and I’m standing at a crossroads trying to decide whether I should take the upward-slanting route or the one that spirals down when my comm flashes. A still frame pops up in the upper left corner of my FOV. It’s a broad, deep cavern seen from high above.
Every square meter of it is covered in creepers.
They’re the smaller ones, the kind that took down Dugan and ripped through the floor of the main lock.
There must be thousands of them.
Tens of thousands.
“Seven! Seven, are you seeing this?”
“I see it,” I say. “Eight, listen…”
I trail off then. Listen to what? I think back to that spider I set loose in my mother’s garden all those years ago. If it had come back into the house, would I have saved it again, or would I have just crushed it and been done with it?
And what if I’d found a nest of spiders out there, hundreds of them, and realized they’d come to colonize the garden?
“Eight?”
Eight doesn’t answer.
“Eight? You there?”
A final image drops into my cache. It’s almost too blurred to interpret. I’d guess most people seeing this would have no idea what they were looking at.
I recognize it, though. It’s the maw and feeding arms of a giant creeper, seen from no more than a couple of meters away.
That’s when I realize that Eight is dead.
What now? I have no idea where he was, no idea how far away the crèche might be.
No idea if he had time to pull the trigger before they took him.
These tunnels are a blind maze. I could be kilometers from where Eight died, or it could be around the next bend.
I could try to find him.
I could pull the trigger now, and be done.
I close my eyes, start to reach for the cord, then hesitate.
There before me is the campfire, burning backward, sucking in smoke and turning ash into wood.
There before me is the caterpillar. The grin is gone, though. Its eyes are narrowed, and its mouth is a thin, hard line.
A chat window opens in the corner of my FOV.
<Mickey8>:Understa*d?
I open my eyes.
Something moves in the darkness.
Something that nearly fills the tunnel.
<Mickey8>:You understand?
I blink, run my tongue across my teeth, and swallow. My hand rests lightly on the trigger cord.
<Mickey8>:Yes, I understand.
<Mickey8>:You are Prime?
Okay, that I don’t understand. The creeper moves closer. Both pairs of mandibles are spread wide. That has to be a threat posture, right? I take an involuntary step backward, and my hand tightens on the cord.
<Mickey8>:You are Prime?
I shake my head. Idiot. Even if it understood human body language, this thing probably doesn’t have eyes.
<Mickey8>:We have destroyed your Ancillary. You are Prime?
Prime? Ancillary?
It’s talking about Eight.
I could pull the trigger now.
I could, but I don’t.
Instead, I take a leap of faith.
<Mickey8>:Yes, I am Prime.
The creeper’s head settles to the tunnel floor, and the mandibles slowly close, inner first, then outer.
<Mickey8>:I am Prime also. We talk?
And so, we do.
024
IN ALL THE hundreds of worlds that make up the Union, there’s only one where humans and native sentients have managed to coexist. It’s a lonely little dwarf planet orbiting a gas giant, that is itself orbiting an M-class star at the far end of the spiral arm, almost twenty lights from the next-nearest colony. The mission that brought our people there was the single longest successful jump that we’ve managed. They named the planet Long Shot.
There’s a whole other story behind that.