Thirteen with the dead boy’s cerebrospinal fluid
Twelve and the T-cells of unnamed patient 13631
Eleven whose resistance to Cordyceps was promising
Ten but who knows? Who knows, really?
Nine Draw it back up again
Eight all of it
Seven Rina’s hands force his head back
Six so he’s blind and in his panic the metronome breaks. The ticking stops. His fingers grope and slide and don’t find a purchase. He needs a dispersal point in the muscle of her upper shoulder close—very close—to her neck. Intra-muscular injection will take advantage of the massive blood flow through that part of the body. Take-up should be instantaneous, and it will have to be.
Because he’s out of time.
He stabs down, hits the plunger, drops the untested medicine into a part of Rina’s body that he can’t even see.
Then gives up the fight, loses his balance and falls.
Rina falling off the table along with him, landing right beside him, face up.
She’s not moving.
Until she opens her eyes, opens her mouth, and screams.
Greaves holds her as she shakes. It’s not easy for him to be so close to another human body, to feel its alien movement against his own skin, but in her convulsions she might injure herself or kill the baby she’s carrying.
Eventually she quiets.
“Please,” he whispers into her ear, in case she can hear him. “Please. Please. Please. Don’t tell them, Rina.”
They can’t know—nobody can, not anybody, not ever—what he has just done.
39
Sixsmith is nobody’s idea of an engineer but she is far from stupid. With the mid-section door out of action, the cockpit will have to stand in. The main problem is that it opens like the door of a truck’s cab, occulting about half the visual field as it swings out.
Weighing against that, there are doors on both sides.
She fires up the engine and brings Rosie around in a half-circle, driving a steel wedge between the beleaguered crew and the little fuckers who appear to be trying (with some success) to kill them all.
She throws the nearside door open and yells out something that more or less boils down to “come and get it.” And one by one they come. Akimwe, limping and sobbing, as pale as a whitewashed wall. Then Foss and McQueen, still firing up into the blazing canopy even though there is no response from up there now. And finally the colonel, who doesn’t even make a move until everyone else is inside.
They don’t stay in the cab—it’s barely big enough for a driver and a shotgun. One by one they clamber through the gloryhole into the crew quarters. Slamming the door shut, Sixsmith guns the engine and relocates at maximum warp. The fire is catching. The whole damn forest is burning down, and the flames will go where the wind carries them. The only sane place to be is way out in front of that.
She gets about two miles—not even that far, not two—when she blows a track.
40
By the time Foss makes her way through to the mid-section, Greaves has unlocked both the bulkhead door and the engine room. Dr. Fournier is screaming into Greaves’ face, his own forehead bearing a bright-dark smear of blood, while Dr. Khan, on the floor, lies sobbing and wheezing for breath. Her long dark hair trails into the pool of vomit she has just deposited there. Her wounded arm has been newly but not neatly dressed.
They only just got out of that with their lives and maybe they should be counting their blessings, but Foss has a sense that things are still coming apart. McQueen strides past her, past the colonel, pushes Fournier out of the way one-handed and grabs Greaves’ lapels to lift him off the ground and slam him hard against the wall.
Then he hauls him back and slams him again, even harder.
“Mr. McQueen,” Carlisle says. “That’s enough.”
McQueen evidently doesn’t agree because he goes for the hattrick. The Robot hits the wall so hard that Foss can feel the vibrations through the steel plates under her feet.
Which seems to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. The colonel’s handgun is suddenly up against McQueen’s ear. McQueen lets go and Greaves slumps, sliding down the wall until he is sitting on the floor.
“Discipline is a habit of mind,” Carlisle says, with deadly calm. “Acquire it. Right now.”
McQueen stares down at the Robot. His teeth are bared and his eyes show very wide. “I want this bastard off the bus,” he says hoarsely. “He almost killed us all!”
Carlisle doesn’t look too impressed with this argument. His brow furrows a little and his face flushes red with the effort of self-control. “Actually I believe that honour belongs to you,” he says. “Dr. Khan was talking to the children. Negotiating with them. They didn’t attack until you shot at them.”
McQueen turns. He makes a big show of being under the gun, of only holding back because the gun is there, so Carlisle holsters it and holds him with a glare.
“There will be a full inquiry,” the colonel says, “when we get back to Beacon. Until that time, we are all members of the same crew and we will behave as though that means something.”
“Try telling that to this little shit,” McQueen says, prodding Greaves with the toe of his boot.
“He trapped me in the engine room,” Fournier pipes up plaintively. “He assaulted me and locked me inside. Now I can’t get any sense out of him. I demand to know what happened out there and where the rest of my crew is.”
“They’re dead,” Foss says shortly. She’s had about enough of the civilian commander. They’ve just lost three people, for Christ’s sake, and on top of that Greaves panicked and almost killed them all, and here’s Fournier bleating on about his own little bit of lost dignity like that’s the salient point.
Dr. Khan is trying to climb to her feet. Foss offers her a hand but she shrugs it off even though she has to grab hold of a grip-rail to stay upright. “Where’s John?” she whispers. “Did he make it?”
“Sealey’s dead,” McQueen says. “Penny and Phillips, too. And the rest of us were this close.” He holds forefinger and thumb an inch apart, an inch from Greaves’ face. “That was when boy genius locked the door on us.”
“I demand to know—” Fournier says again.
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Foss interrupts. “If you want to know something, stick your head around the door once in a while and take a look.”
Fournier swells like a bullfrog but he doesn’t answer, so that’s a plus.