The children are—or seem to be—something completely new, he tells the silent room. They are infected but they can still think. Properly focused research might be able to pinpoint the mechanism involved and then duplicate it. To find a cure, or a vaccine. This is the single most important discovery anyone has made since the Breakdown began.
Fournier speculates, briefly, on what the children might be. The offspring of women who were already pregnant when they were infected, or else the children of atypical hungries who retained some human drives apart from feeding. Second generation, almost certainly. The Cordyceps pathogen has to have been mediated through something in order to explain these functional and structural changes, and the most likely candidate is a placenta.
Khan feels a vibration, as Fournier says that word, from the depths of her own abdomen. It feels for a moment as though Rosie is still moving, but it’s just her: a freight train with a single carriage, a single passenger, destination still unknown.
Fournier seems to have realised at last how little anyone cares about his speculations. He pulls himself together and sums up quickly. They have to get the sample—the child from Invercrae—back to Beacon, along with their report. The scientific effort that is needed now will involve dozens or hundreds of researchers and years of time. And that work can’t start until they get their specimen home. With the radio out, they can’t even let the Main Table know what they’ve found. They have to bring the sample back, or everything they have done will be wasted.
It’s quite a long speech. Dr. Fournier makes it, for the most part, with his eyes down, staring at the steel-latticed floor. But when he has finished he looks at Colonel Carlisle, just once, as if he is searching for approval or agreement in the colonel’s eyes.
Foss, over the walkie-talkie, says thank you. She says she likes to know what she’s shooting, especially when it’s cuter than kittens. She adds that if they are ever going to get started on those fucking treads they’ve got maybe an hour or so of daylight left.
McQueen says he doesn’t think daylight is going to make much difference. They’ve got the spotlights, and all the kit. The trouble is that as soon as they step outside the doors all hell is probably going to break loose again. They’re stuck here for the duration, which might mean until they’re all dead. Right now he is more concerned with the question of what they’re going to do with Greaves—only he doesn’t say Greaves, he says “the Robot.” He offers some suggestions. The mildest is that they shove Greaves out of the airlock and leave him to die. Another, not the most extreme, involves a bayonet.
The colonel states, without inflection, that he has written up Stephen’s actions and will refer them for adjudication and punishment as soon as they’re back in Beacon.
McQueen says that’s not good enough. Akimwe agrees, and the whole room tenses for a confrontation that seems to have been a very long time in coming. It’s awful, all of this is awful, but Khan feels as though she is watching it through the wrong end of a telescope. At the same time, everything is too close, too confined. Rosie is full of the rank sourness of human bodies pressed and rolled against each other like cheese in a vat. Every time she inhales, the smell hits the back of her nose, tickles and scorches there.
John is dead and there is nothing left that isn’t burning to the ground. Except her baby. Except that little sliver of life that caught in her and quickened.
“He saved me,” she whispers. She clears her throat and says it again, louder.
They’re the first words she has spoken. Everybody looks at her and she holds up her bandaged arm. “Stephen saved me, after I was hurt.”
“That’s beside the point,” McQueen says.
“Not to me.”
“He almost killed the rest of us.”
“Well, you did that first,” Khan points out. “You shot one of them without even looking at what was happening, and everything went to hell. We were fine up until then. And by the way, you should know that unless we leave that body here for them to find, they’ll keep coming after us. That’s what this is about. That’s what it’s been about all along.”
“And who brought the damn thing on board in the first place?” McQueen demands. “Thanks. You’ve made my point. It’s way past time we stopped talking about this and just fucking dealt with it.”
The ex-lieutenant seems to be all done with words. He stands up, slowly, making a big deal out of it.
“We need a little leadership here,” he says. “That little tosser hung us out to dry, and he probably spiked the radio, too. Now, are you going to show him the door or do I have to do it myself?”
With a heavy sense of inevitability, Khan finds a fork—the only sharp implement on the table—and grabs a hold of it with her good left hand. She is so tired and so sick, she would much rather just sit here, but if McQueen is going to square off against the colonel to decide Stephen’s fate then he’s going to do it with three tines lodged in his kidney.
But Stephen breaks the tableau. He pulls the curtains of his bunk aside and peers out at them, as though all this time he has only been waiting for his cue. His face is pale and his eyes are wide, but his tone when he speaks is calm and precise.
He says, “I’m happy to go outside. I was actually going to suggest it.” And then, although Khan thinks she must have misheard this part: “I’ll need to put my suit on.”
43
Private Sixsmith is not a good teacher, Greaves thinks. She locates and assembles the hydraulic track puller and drills him in its use, but she omits several pieces of information that he considers crucial.
One: she doesn’t tell him that the Rosalind Franklin has “live” rather than “dead” track, held under tension by the rubber brushings in each track block so there is less risk of a throw as it passes over the return rollers. If he didn’t know this already he would expect the treads on the upper span to be under lower tension than those on the ground span.
Two: she tells him to set the puller to deliver 1,800 mechanical horsepower, the maximum it will output. This is only appropriate if the break is in the middle of a span, and must be adjusted depending on the distance from the return rollers.
Three: she omits to mention that Greaves will need to replace the existing connectors on the intact blocks adjacent to the damaged ones. Even if they look sound, they may be stressed in the plane of the existing break. Fitting new blocks to mounts that have been stressed in this way will practically guarantee another track throw.