In the meantime, they’ve got someone on their tail and McQueen knows in his gut that it’s the exact same bastards who killed Lutes. Said bastards have cars or—his best guess—bikes, and they know enough to stay out of the range of the infra-red scopes. Wouldn’t have been hard to slip down some back crack out here in the fucked-up wilderness and flank them. Find a good spot to dig in and wait for fireworks.
So leaving the road was pretty much the stupidest thing they could have done. It makes them a little bit harder to track, sure, but they’re the only thing moving out here so how hard can it be? And the slower they go, the more chance the Invercrae posse have to get ahead of them again.
Tonight, tomorrow or the next day—soon, anyway—they are going to find themselves in the middle of another surprise party, probably a lot wilder than the last one. When that happens, they’re going to need him. Need him on the big guns, up in the turret, laying down serious hurt. And he will do his duty, as per the oath he swore when he joined up. He’ll do whatever has to be done to keep them all alive.
Even if that means putting a bullet in the colonel’s head and assuming command himself.
While he is musing on these matters with the rifle completely disassembled, the Robot comes tripping through from the crew quarters, heading for the lab. McQueen snaps out a warning, but the kid steps nimbly between the components and the grease rags. Doesn’t touch a spring or a bolt. McQueen finds this irritating without being able to say why.
“This is delicate equipment,” he says sternly. “Each of these little bits and pieces has got a job to do, sunshine. Don’t mess them up.”
Greaves turns around and faces him. Well, that’s probably stretching it a little; the Robot keeps his eyes on the ground the way he always does. But he is looking at the ground in front of McQueen in a way that’s maybe a little sassier than usual.
He points to the dismounted pieces of ordnance laid out neatly on the floor, and as he points he names them. “Operating rod. Bolt. Firing mechanism and trigger guard. Magazine. Takedown pin. Pivot pin. Charging handle. Bolt carrier assembly. Buffer assembly. Spring.”
Considering how inflectionless his voice is, it’s amazing how much defiance and sarcasm it carries. McQueen is nonplussed, and even a little impressed.
“Well, hooray for you,” he says. “Ever use one?”
“Yes.”
Of course he has. Everyone in Beacon has to do their civil defence, even people who manifestly shouldn’t be allowed to use sharp pencils.
“Ever hit anything?”
“No.”
“Right. So you stick to your test tubes and I’ll look out for the guns, okay?”
“Okay,” Greaves agrees. He walks on into the lab, but he mumbles something as he goes.
“What was that?” McQueen calls. Because he’s not taking any cheek from this reality-challenged little snot.
The Robot stops and half-turns around, so he is talking to his own shoulder now. “You’re going to get a hammer follow,” he says, and he slides the lab door across between them.
“The fucking hell you say,” McQueen says to the closed door. Indignant. Like anyone could tell that without even bending down to inspect the gun parts up close. But of course he has to check now.
And of course (because what’s a joke without a punchline?) the Robot is right. There is wear on the hammer face and on the sear, so McQueen probably would have got a hammer follow and a bad misfire sometime in the next ten or twenty shots.
He changes out the sear spring and the disconnector. He is thinking dark thoughts when he starts, but by the time he’s done he finds it hard to keep from grinning. He set out to school the Robot and got schooled himself. That is pretty funny, any way you look at it.
Everything is a lesson. This one is about not judging by appearances. Just because the kid has a face as empty as a bucket with a hole in it doesn’t mean he’s stupid. And just because he creeps around like a whipped puppy doesn’t mean he’s got no spirit.
Everyone is special, right?
31
In the end, it’s McQueen and Phillips who climb Ben Macdhui and bring the specimen cache down. They’re professional about it, but they let their irritation show. If going cross-country was a bad idea, parking up to run errands makes it catastrophic.
But Sixsmith makes it easy for them, taking Rosie up the shallow slopes of the Cairngorm plateau almost to the summit. It’s such a bravura performance, they’re barely aware they’re climbing.
“Door to door,” she jokes, as she brings them to a halt at the mid-point of the Lairig Ghru, directly below the peak.
“Keep the engine running,” McQueen tells her. “We’re not sticking around.”
It’s cold as hell on the slope and the ice makes the going precarious, but fifteen minutes’ slog brings them out above the treeline. The world opens out, suddenly. They can see Braeriach to the west, and lonely Ben Nevis beyond like a sleeping god who has turned his face from them, pulling the mantle of the snow up around his shoulders. Right at their feet, the valley dips and bends all the way down to the loch in switchback curves like a roller coaster.
Phillips stops to gawk. Stubbornly resisting the beauty of the vista, McQueen urges him on and up. He has seen the splash of orange on the ridge above them and wants very much to get this over with.
Phillips is looking thoughtful as they climb the last hundred feet to the cache. It’s an unusual enough occurrence that McQueen feels it needs to be checked out.
“What?” he demands. He grudges the spent breath a little, and the gulp of frigid air he swallows to replenish it.
“I was just thinking,” Phillips admits. “I wonder what we look like from space.”
McQueen looks around at the rust-brown scrub and general desolation. “Like two ants on a turd,” he grunts.
“They reckon you used to be able to see the Wall of China from the moon,” Phillips pursues, refusing to be sidetracked. “But by the time it all went to bits, there would have been lots of human stuff you could see, wouldn’t there?”
They’ve reached the cache by this time. They lean against the rock to rest up for a few seconds before they get busy again. “Cities and towns would have been big grey areas,” Phillips says. “Going on for miles. Only now they’re not, are they? The forests have gone in and taken over again. From a hundred miles up or so, it would all look the same. London would just be more jungle.”
“So?”
“So here we are up on a mountain. And I bet this bright orange dot here is one of the last human things you could still see from all the way up there.”
McQueen gives a snort. The condensed breath hangs in front of his face, a visible index of his emotion. Most of the satellites fell out of the sky long ago so this is academic in any case, but he doesn’t see what’s so great about leaving your mark on things. You have a life and then it ends and you’re dead. Living it is the point, not proving to other people that you were there. The whole thing is really just water pouring down a plughole, but that’s absolutely fine. Standing water gets stagnant.