No, he and Sixsmith will have to disagree on the matter of the Fireman. But she makes a good point about the game. Four of them is below critical mass. You don’t get proper poker without five or six around the table.
He considers. Sentry duty is some more of the Old Man’s play-it-by-the-book bullshit. They don’t need a sentry. The movement sensors will trip if the hungries come, and in any case the hungries don’t. Not while Rosie is on silent running. And how is it that only the grunts draw night duties? As if divisions of rank matter a flying toss when they’re sitting out in nowhere’s armpit with nothing coming in on the radio and no way of knowing if Beacon’s even there any more. It’s time to strike a blow for the common man, and maybe goad the colonel into finally facing him head on.
He goes through to the mid-section platform, where Phillips is standing by the airlock. Rifle at parade rest. Face at back in five minutes.
“Anything?” McQueen asks sympathetically.
Phillips nods towards the airlock. There’s a light on in there, at about knee height. It takes McQueen a moment to realise that it’s Stephen Greaves, writing by the light of a clip-on reading lamp with a 50-watt LED.
“Just the Robot,” Phillips says.
Privately McQueen has a few nicknames of his own for Greaves that are less family-friendly. He shakes his head as he stares, then taps his brow with the tip of his trigger finger. “Wonder what goes on in there,” he says, although he really doesn’t. He actually prefers to see Greaves as a kind of black box—like the hungries. There may or may not be a person in there, but either way it’s not his problem. He only has to deal with the output.
“Listen,” he says to Phillips, “I don’t see any point in you staying out here. The perimeter is up. Nothing can get close to us without tripping an alarm. And the kid will raise a squawk if it comes to that. You might as well join the game.”
Phillips considers. McQueen watches him doing it, knows more or less what’s going through his mind and politely gives the other man as long as he needs. McQueen isn’t his commanding officer; Colonel Carlisle is. And Carlisle’s authority has to punch it out with Dr. Fournier’s. But in Rosie’s narrow spaces, rank and influence aren’t the same thing. There is no question who looms largest in the private’s mental landscape, false modesty aside.
“Aye,” Phillips says at last. “All right, then.”
McQueen slaps him on the shoulder. “Good man. If the colonel comes your way, tell him you were obeying a direct order.”
They go back into the crew quarters.
Greaves watches them go, and gives them a minute or two to change their minds. When they don’t return, he stands and strips.
The top layer only. Underneath he is wearing something else entirely. A matt-black suit set with small glassy studs very much like the cats’ eyes you find on road surfaces. In fact the retro-reflectors in cats’ eyes were one of Greaves’ starting points when he designed the suit, but more because of their simplicity and durability than because of what happens at the business end of them. It’s not light he’s hoping to diffract, but his own body heat.
He has been working on the suit, off and on, for four months. The idea of it came to him even earlier than that, but it wasn’t until they left Beacon that he had time to implement his design. He brought most of the raw materials with him, trusted to serendipity to provide the rest. The journey north offered uninterrupted stretches of whole weeks with no official lab work to be done. Sometimes he worked through the night, appreciating the opportunity to progress on the suit without stopping every half-hour or so to answer questions.
Now it’s done, as far as possible given the constraints under which he has been working. He has confidence in the principle, and in the overall design. Some of the components are work-arounds and make-dos, and the tolerances are not what he would have liked, but now it’s way past time for a field test. And he believes, all things considered, that it will work. In an ideal world, of course, he wouldn’t risk his life on it.
But the world is the way it is and that’s just what he’s going to do.
12
Samrina Khan has retired to bed early. The curtains are drawn across her bunk, which signals that—awake or asleep—she is not to be disturbed. There are very few social niceties that have survived their seven-month voyage, but this one is accorded universal respect. Only a full-on emergency would cause any of the crew to pull those curtains aside. So it’s unlikely that anyone will find out she’s not alone in there.
Getting three tiers of bunks into a seven-foot space meant cutting everything back to basics. Each set of bunks is really just a single recess separated into three by two rows of wooden slats lying across steel supports. John Sealey, whose bunk is above Dr. Khan’s, has rolled back his mattress (which is easy enough as it’s barely an inch thick) and removed five of the slats, opening his own bunk space up to hers. He is leaning down through this gap at an oblique angle so their upper bodies can meet up in a tight embrace. Any other kind of embrace would be impossible, all things considered.
This is a risky enterprise and they don’t do it often. Tonight, Sealey has come to visit Rina in order to lift her mood after her official interrogation by Dr. Fournier. As the father of the child she’s carrying, he feels this is the least he can do.
But he finds Rina’s mood surprisingly resistant to lifting. Surprisingly, that is, until she tells him what it is that’s weighing on her mind. It’s not the mission commander and his flaccid third degree. It’s Greaves, her surrogate son.
“He’s going to get himself killed,” she whispers, sounding choked. “He’s out there, with no camouflage and no backup. Watching them. Not with binoculars. Watching them from a few feet away. John, all it would take would be for him to trip, or sneeze, and … They’ll eat him alive!”
“We’re all taking that chance, every day we’re out here,” Sealey offers. “Greaves isn’t stupid. Or reckless.”
Rina seems not to have heard him. “I think Fournier knows,” she says, raising her voice a little more than is safe. Only the infield chatter of the poker players a few feet astern gives them any cover at all. “He’s just decided it doesn’t matter. Stephen was forced on him at the last moment, and he’s never treated him as a full member of the crew.” Her churning mind hits on another explanation. “Or perhaps he sees it as an acceptable risk. He knows by now we’re not going to find any environmental inhibitors. If Stephen comes up with a new idea, we might have something to show for all this.”