Private Sixsmith turns Rosie through a tight arc and cuts her loose. With no buildings to worry about, she is quick and confident, almost showy. There is barely a jolt as they leave the asphalt for the wild green yonder.
Phillips is back up in the turret. The mid-section platform is empty now, since the bumps and shocks of their overland progress make standing up more of a challenge. Dr. Fournier is in the engine room, the colonel and Sixsmith in the cockpit. Everybody else is sitting in the crew quarters.
Everybody except for Dr. Khan, who has retired to her bunk. The excuse she gave was that she was still feeling woozy after her fall, but she flashed John Sealey a look as she retreated—if a sideways removal of less than two yards counts as a retreat. Now she’s waiting for him to take the hint.
Waiting with the curtains closed, and with a caldera of tears boiling inside her. She feels a surge of undirected anger. She never cries. The worst thing about all this is that she has lost control enough to feel she might cry.
Almost. Almost the worst thing.
Poor Stephen! He was so helpless when she fell. Earlier, when he saw her mixing up some emergency medication for herself, he was right there with a chemical solution to her chemical problem. But when he saw her hurt, he was paralysed.
No sign of John. All he has to do is say he’s crashing early with a good book (one of the three on board). He must have seen her give the high sign. But he doesn’t come. Does he know what she wants to say to him? Is he staying away in order to stop this box from being opened?
Not going to work, John. It’s coming, ready or not.
“Anyone feel like a game?” McQueen’s voice, faux-casual. He lives for his poker, and the worse his mood gets, the more he needs his fix. There are murmurs of assent from Foss, Akimwe and Penny. A flat no from Stephen. Then John’s voice, the weariness just as studied as McQueen’s nonchalance. “Count me out. I think I’ll read.”
She hears him cross to the bunks. The metallic rattle of his feet on the boost-step, then a creak as he settles. She’s waiting for one more sound, but it doesn’t come. He’s taking his time. Playing it cool.
“Dealer’s choice,” McQueen says. Akimwe declares that his choice is Oxford stud with a high-low split. As the bidding starts, there is (at last!) a muted swish of fabric. Sealey’s curtain being drawn across.
“Goodnight, John-boy,” Foss calls.
“Goodnight, Calamity Jane,” Sealey replies, which causes Akimwe to giggle like a schoolboy.
John waits a good five minutes before rolling his mattress back and removing the top slat. His face appears in the gap directly above Khan, peering down. He is instantly alarmed by the sight of her red-rimmed eyes. “Hey,” he says, his voice a murmur designed to stay within the bunks. “You okay?”
Khan shakes her head.
John finishes the excavation and leans down to join her, insofar as that’s possible. To close the gap, at any rate. In a crazy way, the risk is less because they’re doing this by day and on the move. The engine noise will help to cover any sounds they make, and nobody else is likely to head for the bunks any time soon.
Tentatively, with due regard to the narrow space, the crazy angle and her fragility, he puts his arms around her. He doesn’t ask any questions, just waits for her to talk.
Which she does. She has held it in long enough, and to hell with stiff upper lips.
“When we were running for cover in Invercrae, I got a contraction,” she says. She talks into his chest to mute the sound. Also so he doesn’t have to look at her flushed, out-of-control face. “When it didn’t come back, I thought it must just have been a stomach-ache, but this morning I got three in the space of an hour. I’ve been dosing myself up with home-made tocolytics. Magnesium sulphate at first, then Stephen told me there was nifedipine in the med kit. I’m fine now, but I’d lay ten to one odds I’m going to drop this payload before we get anywhere near Beacon.”
There’s a long silence. His arms tighten around her just a little, transmitting reassurance. “Okay,” he says at last. “So you have the baby in Rosie. It’s okay, Rina. We can make the lab sterile, and you’re surrounded by biologists. We know how it works. Plus Lucien’s got masses of first-aid training. Penny too, I think. You’ll be as safe here as anywhere else. Safer, even. You name me another maternity ward that’s got its own flamethrower.”
She smiles at the incongruous image. In her current mood, she finds it has a certain insane appeal. But the thought of what’s to come still weighs on her: the known unknowns of giving birth inside a tank in the middle of a war zone. She feels a sudden, dizzying sense of dislocation, a keen awareness of unfathomable distances: between here and Beacon; between the past and the present; between the world as it is and how she would wish it to be.
Paradoxically, though these thoughts give her pause, they don’t cow her into despair. There is the baby now, a new and unknowable factor. The baby could be the bridge over all these abysses.
“Hey,” she says, trying for a bantering tone. “Do you want to volunteer to pick up that last specimen cache?”
Stark horror makes John’s eyes open wide as saucers. “Rina, it’s halfway up a mountain!” he protests.
She shakes her head. “Near the top, I think. Eight hundred metres up.”
“Do you want to give birth on a rock ledge?” He hugs her close as if he could protect her from her own recklessness.
“I was kidding,” Khan whispers.
“Don’t.”
30
The land east of the A82 is rugged and broken, with a topography that changes from mile to mile. Rosie makes indifferent speed even with full daylight. As the sun drops and the shadows lengthen, she slows to a crawl.
The poker session is equally desultory. Brendan Lutes’ ghost hovers over it, making the usual raucous banter seem like a slap in his ectoplasmic face. Finally, the game dribbles to a halt.
McQueen strolls out to the mid-section to oil his gun. And to brood, something that he feels is best done alone. He is unused to giving way to his emotions, or at least—he corrects himself wryly—to being aware that he is doing it. It sits badly with him, like most things that have happened since Invercrae.
He admitted he was wrong to fire the flamethrower. The colonel had a chance to admit, in his turn, that—orders or no orders—McQueen pulled all their arses out of the fire. He didn’t do that. They could have met in the middle but they didn’t, so they have retired to their corners instead.
At some point, the bell is going to ring for round two.