“Well?” Marshall says. “Here I am, Barnes. Do what you came here to do.”
I wonder what he expects now. For me to wave my arms, I suppose, and summon an army of creepers up out of the snow to eat him. For just a moment I actually consider shouting, Get him, just to see what he’d do, but the goons both have accelerators at the ready, and they’re probably nervous. This isn’t the time for fun.
“I didn’t do it,” I say. “I didn’t pull the trigger.”
“I can see that,” Marshall says. “What about your … friend?”
“You mean Eight?”
“Yes. Eight. Did he trigger his device?”
“No,” I say. “I already told you that he didn’t. He was killed before he could.”
“I see,” Marshall says. “What happened to his device?”
“The creepers have it.”
The silence following that one stretches on for what feels like an eternity.
“Do they know what they have?” Marshall finally asks. There’s a tremor in his voice that wasn’t there before.
“Yes,” I say. “They do.”
“How do you know that?” Marshall asks.
“Because I told them what it was, and how it operates.”
Marshall turns to the goon on his left. “Kill him.”
“Sir?”
It’s Cat. I should have recognized her armor. Marshall raises one trembling hand to point at me.
“This man has betrayed our colony, Corporal Chen. He has betrayed the Union. He has betrayed humanity. I have no doubt at this point that our time left on this planet will be measured in hours, if not minutes, but before that clock runs out I want to see him dead. Kill him.”
“That’s not a good idea,” the goon on Marshall’s other side says. It’s Lucas, I think, but his voice is hard to make out over the comm. “He’s carrying a bubble bomb, sir.”
“Listen,” I say. “I had to tell them what they had. Otherwise, they might have tried to take it apart, tried to see what makes it tick. If they’d done that—”
“If they’d done that,” Marshall says, “this problem would have taken care of itself.”
“Unless they decided to do it underneath the dome,” Cat says. “That’s what I would have done if I were them.”
“It doesn’t matter what you would have done,” Marshall says. “It doesn’t matter what justifications Barnes has dreamed up for what he’s already done. This man has conspired with the enemy in a time of war. There is no greater crime.”
“What about genocide?” I say. “That’s a pretty great crime. It wasn’t conspiring with the enemy that led us to abandon old Earth, you know. Also, not for nothing, we’re not at war.”
Marshall rounds back on me. “Those things out there have killed five of my people, you monster! Hell, they’ve killed you twice now. We’ve killed them as well. If we’re not at war, then what are we?”
I shake my head. “You’re thinking like a human. The creepers don’t see it that way. They don’t seem to have much of a concept of individual life. As far as I can tell, they’re a communal intelligence. They don’t care at all about the creepers we’ve killed, and they don’t have an inkling of why we’d care about the people they’ve taken. The idea that dissecting a few ancillaries would be considered an act of aggression is beyond them. As far as they’re concerned, all we’ve done so far is exchange a bit of information.”
“Ancillaries?” Cat says.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s my best translation for what they call the little ones that we’ve seen around the dome. They’re just parts of the whole, not intelligent things themselves. They’ve been assuming that individual humans are the same.”
“Great,” Cat says. “Did you at least correct them on that?”
“I tried. Their grasp of the language is surprisingly good considering that everything they know, they’ve learned from snooping on my comms, but where the concepts aren’t there, there’s not much you can do to translate. Anyway, they say they’re sorry.”
Cat starts to say something more, but Marshall cuts her off.
“Enough! Be silent, Chen, or by God you’ll go down the corpse hole with him.”
“I’m not going down the corpse hole,” I say.
“Oh, you are. Unless we’re all blown to hell first, you are definitely going down the hole, and I do not care in the least if you’re alive or dead when it happens. You have to take that pack off sometime, Barnes, and the minute you do, I’ll put a round in you myself.”
“Not to criticize,” Lucas says, “but you’re not giving him a lot of incentive not to kill us all right now, sir.”
Marshall turns to glare at him, then Chen, then back at me.
“You can’t kill me,” I say. “Much though you might want to, you can’t. I’m your only liaison to the creepers, and they’ve got an antimatter weapon now, just like we do.”
“Thanks to you,” he says. “Thanks to you, Barnes. You’ve killed us all, you bastard.”
I shake my head. “Sending a doomsday weapon down into their tunnels wasn’t my idea, and it wasn’t my fault that they took Eight before he could pull the trigger. That’s on you, Marshall.”
“But you could have ended it,” he says. “If you’d just done your goddamned job, this would all be over. You’re an Expendable, you coward, and you were afraid to die.”
I sigh, and let my eyes fall closed. When I open them again, Cat and Lucas have shouldered their weapons.
“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe I didn’t want to die … or maybe I just didn’t want to have a genocide on my conscience when I did. I get that you think I should have just pulled the cord, and killed the creepers, and died—but I didn’t, and now we’ve got to move on from there. There’s another intelligent species on this planet, and you’ve just handed them an antimatter weapon. You’re in desperate need of diplomacy, and I’m your only diplomat. Do you really think killing me is in anybody’s best interests at this point?”
Marshall stares me down for a solid thirty seconds. His hands are shaking and I can see his jaw working under his rebreather, but he doesn’t say a word. In the end, he turns on his heel and stalks back toward the lock. Cat and Lucas stand and watch him go.
“So?” I say when the outer door cycles shut behind him. “Are we good?”
Cat glances over at Lucas. He turns to look at the nearest pylon. As we watch, the burner goes dark and sinks back onto its bearings.
“Yeah,” Cat says. “I think so. For the moment, anyway.”
She closes the distance between us and offers me her hand. I stow the trigger cord, take it, and pull her into a hug.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and I can hear the tears in her voice.
“I know,” I say. “It’s okay, Cat. You did what you had to do.”
We stand there for another ten seconds, until she finally says, “Hugging in armor is weird.”
She’s not wrong.
I let her go, and the three of us walk back to the dome together.
* * *