There is a middle ground, though, whatever the colonel thinks. Fournier can say whatever he needs to say to get out of this room, and then go back on it. Carlisle won’t dare to kill him in front of the crew.
Which means, of course, that he won’t dare to do it here in the engine room either. The closed door hides nothing. If he shoots Fournier, everyone will hear the shot. Everyone will know it was murder.
“I’m sorry, Colonel,” the doctor says. “I won’t be threatened or dictated to. I have the right to express my own opinions, and the right to enforce them as civilian commander.”
“Very well then,” Carlisle says. He runs his left hand across the side of the handgun. There is a single click, soft and discreet but full of sinister import. He stands, without a word.
“Wait!” Fournier blurts.
Carlisle presses the barrel of the handgun against the side of the doctor’s head. Fournier’s eyes close involuntarily against the flash and ruin that’s about to come. His knees give and he sinks to the floor. He raises his hands to wrest the gun from the colonel’s hands, but then leaves them up in a gesture of abject submission.
“Don’t,” he pleads.
“I don’t want to,” the colonel says again. But the gun doesn’t move from Fournier’s temple. “I want us to come out of this intact, with no further loss of life. Work with me, Doctor. Until we get home, at least. After that, you can do as you like.”
Fournier can taste bile in his mouth. He thinks he might be about to vomit, which would make his humiliation complete. “I’ll work with you,” he says, the words thick and oily in his mouth. “I promise.”
The cold pressure at his forehead goes away. “Thank you,” Carlisle says. “You are sure, Dr. Fournier, that you don’t have that missing radio component? If you did, we could contact Beacon right now. Make a full report and get our orders direct. The report would of course include the conversation we’ve just had. I won’t try to stop you from laying a formal complaint against me.”
Fournier climbs weakly to his feet. He feels strange and distant from himself, tingling and prickling with dread and nausea, but that makes it easier to lie. Nobody could read his body language now, when it’s slack and sick and strange even to him.
“I don’t know what happened to the radio,” he says.
“Very well. But we’re agreed about the mission?”
“Yes, Colonel. We’re agreed.” And I’ll make my report in my own way. In my own time.
“Then that’s all that matters for the present. Thank you. I’ll give you some time to compose yourself, Doctor. Ten minutes. Then I’ll convene the crew.”
42
There is a meeting in the crew quarters, to which everyone except Stephen Greaves is summoned. He is the spectre at the feast, Khan thinks, only a few feet away but invisible, sitting on his bunk with the curtains drawn. Present and absent at the same time. He has changed into his blue cotton pyjamas, as though this is his bedtime, and withdrawn into himself in the way he often does. The rest of the crew have pulled up their drawbridges too, in ways that are only marginally less obvious. Greaves might as well be in another country.
Foss has been patched in from the turret via the short-range walkie-talkies, since the ship’s intracom is still shot. Khan is present too, for some value of that word. Mostly she is aware of the tides of her own blood and her own emotions, while the conversation rolls around and over her.
She is still human. The moment when she was bitten plays on a continuous loop in her brain, vivid and terrifying, but it must be an illusion. A trauma artefact. She must have been stabbed or scratched or sliced, or else something scraped against her open wound and caused that sharp spike of pain. She has managed to evade the (literally) once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study the hungry pathogen very briefly from the inside.
All the same, something is very wrong. Under the bandage her skin is alive, crawling, as though it wants to migrate to some other part of her. Her head is heavy and hot. Her stomach too, an oven baking her dry. When she cried for John, which she did long and hard, no tears came from her eyes.
Everybody, by this time, has made the pilgrimage to the lab’s freezers and inspected the tiny corpse in cabinet ten. Everybody has accepted that it is what Greaves says it is: one of the hungry children they just encountered. The children who all but slaughtered them from a standing start despite the adults’ massive superiority in weapons and training.
If they had only known, John might be alive. And Penny. And Phillips. Khan has always been able up to now to make allowances for how Stephen thinks. How he behaves. And she knows he tried his best to tell them his secret. But for now, and for the first time ever, she finds it hard to look at him or to think kindly of him.
Words wash around her. Meanings follow at their own pace, or some of them do. She is not always at home to take delivery.
Akimwe argues for going back. His lover, Private First Class Gary Phillips, is among the dead. He asserts, over and over again, that they can’t just leave him there. Leave them all there, like rubbish dumped along the road.
John is there too, Khan thinks. I should feel the same way Akimwe feels. But she doesn’t. When she thinks of John Sealey, she thinks of their bodies pressed together between the upper and middle bunks—the narrow space that they defended against the world. That’s important. The scientist in her insists on it. Her memories are John’s mortal remains, and that roadside carrion is nothing.
But the living owe a duty to the dead. Even the feral children know that. That’s why they ran and ran in Rosie’s wake, all the way from Invercrae. They want their brother, their friend, their own to be returned to them. Which is exactly what Akimwe wants.
She sees it all in that moment. Everything that’s happening, and has to happen. But it slips away again. Her mind won’t make a fist to hold it in.
So it is left to Dr. Fournier to explain how important the specimen in freezer ten is. How unique it is. McQueen scoffs at that word. How can it be unique, when they’re surrounded by the evil little fuckers? And it’s true that Fournier’s words ring a little hollow right now. In fact, everything about him is hollow. He looks like a cardboard cut-out of himself stood up as a point-of-sale display in the days when smiling faces sold things. Not that he’s smiling.