“Excellent,” he says. “You’re a bigger man than most.”
He leans forward, and reaches across the desk to offer me his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, I shake it.
“So,” I say when he releases me and leans back again. “Um … will that be all, sir?”
“Well,” he says, and the smile returns, slightly bigger this time. “Not quite. Now that things are hopefully on their way back to normal, we have a job for you.”
Right. Here we go. “A job, sir?”
“Yes,” he says. “Assuming that our friends will keep to their tunnels and away from our dome in the future—and I hope we can assume that—it’s time for us all to get back to the business of making sure this colony survives, don’t you think?”
I lean back in my own chair and fold my arms across my chest. “Yes, sir. I suppose it is.”
“Good. Good. Well, as I’m sure you can guess, producing those two devices yesterday put a dangerous dent in our remaining store of antimatter. We don’t have any prospect of being able to produce new fuel stores anytime in the foreseeable future, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what happens to all of us if our power plant shuts down.”
“No,” I say. “I’m sure you don’t.”
He leans forward now and plants both elbows on the desk, looking for all the world like a flitter salesman trying to close a deal.
“Half the fuel we pulled is lost, of course. No help for that. It is vital, however, that the antimatter contained in the device that you brought back with you goes back into the core.”
Oh, for shit’s sake.
“You pulled it out,” I say. “Just do whatever you did then, only backward.”
He tries for a sorrowful look now, but it’s not working. “Unfortunately, that’s not possible. We extracted that fuel by using the normal drive feed mechanism. As I’m sure you know, that only runs in one direction. There is no mechanism for feeding individual fuel elements back into the core. I’m afraid it’s going to have to be done manually, from the inside.”
I close my eyes, take a deep breath in, and let it out slowly.
What’s the neutron flux in an active antimatter core? I don’t think Jemma ever covered that one, but I’m guessing it’s a lot.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t ask you to upload before or after. You won’t need to remember any of this.”
“I won’t have to upload?”
He shakes his head. “Absolutely not.”
“I haven’t uploaded since I came out of the tank, you know. If I do this, it’ll be like this part of me never existed.”
“Nonsense,” he says. “This part of you, as you say, will have saved the colony. We’ll remember, even if you don’t.” He looks down at his hands, then back up with what might even be sincere emotion. “I know I don’t say this often enough, but the truth is, you’ve saved this colony more than once already, and I’m sure you will again in the future. That’s a debt that can’t be repaid. On behalf of all of us—thank you, Mickey. Your courage is an inspiration.”
Mickey. For the first time in nine fucking years, he called me Mickey.
My courage is an inspiration.
Fuck you, Marshall.
I slide my chair back and get to my feet.
“No.”
The sincerity drops from his face like a mask, replaced almost instantly by pure rage.
“What?”
“No,” I say. “I won’t do it. You obviously had plans for the colony to survive without that fuel when you sent me down into the tunnels. Use those. Or burn a drone getting your war-crime bomb back into the core. Or do it yourself. I’m not doing it.”
He surges to his feet now, his face darkening and his eyes narrowing to slits.
“You will do it,” he hisses. “You will, or as God is my witness I will wipe your pattern and your recordings from the servers, and I will shove the last instantiation of you down the corpse hole myself.”
Now that the decision is made, I can feel a weight that I didn’t realize was there lifting from my shoulders. It almost feels like flying.
“You can wipe the servers, Marshall. In fact, please do, because I am hereby resigning as this colony’s Expendable. Find a replacement. I honestly don’t care. You won’t kill me, though, because I’m your only liaison to the creepers, and you were stupid enough to hand them an antimatter bomb yesterday. Have your people lay a hand on me, and I’ll tell the creepers that the truce is off.”
His mouth opens, closes, then opens again.
I can’t help it. I burst out laughing.
“You wouldn’t fucking dare,” he finally manages when I’m halfway out the door.
“I’ve died seven goddamn times,” I say over my shoulder. “That’s six times more than anyone should. Don’t tell me what I wouldn’t dare.”
I don’t bother to close the door behind me.
* * *
“HEY, THERE, BUDDY. How’s it going?”
I look up from my cricket and yam scramble. Berto sets his tray down on the table across from mine and drops onto the bench.
“Oh,” I say. “It’s you.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I heard you resigned.”
I shrug. “Seems like it.”
“Wild,” he says. “I didn’t know you could do that.”
“You can’t,” I say. “Not unless you’re holding an antimatter bomb over Marshall’s head, anyway.”
He takes a bite, chews, and swallows. I’m just turning back to my own food when he says, “Back on a solid diet, huh?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m not sharing a ration anymore, am I?”
“Oh,” he says. “Right.”
“Yeah.”
We eat in silence for a solid minute, long enough to be uncomfortable if I cared about that kind of stuff right now.
“I’m glad you made it back,” he says finally.
I look up. “Thanks, I guess. Didn’t feel up to inventing some story about what happened to me for Nine, huh?”
That gets a wince out of him, anyway. “Ouch. I said I was sorry about that.”
“Yeah,” I say. “You did.”
We sit through another thirty seconds of silence. I’m almost done eating by now, but Berto’s barely touched his food.
“So,” he says. “Are we, uh … good?”
I close my eyes, take a deep breath in, and let it out. When I open them again, he’s watching me expectantly. I lean across the table toward him. He leans forward in response.
I pop him right in the eye, hard enough to split my knuckle and snap his head back.
“Yeah,” I say. “We’re good.”
I stand, pick up my tray, and go. When I glance back as the door to the corridor slides open, he’s staring at me, mouth slightly open, hands flat on the table in front of him. The eye is already purpling up nicely.
I know it’s a cliché, but I don’t care. This is the first day of the rest of my life.
027
SO APPARENTLY THERE’S such a thing as springtime on Niflheim. Who knew?