He won’t commit murder for her.
When he told her that, and when she realised that her life as a human being was measurable in days or perhaps in hours, she felt herself fall. She fell away from him and Rosie and her stolid, helpless self, from everything that demanded an answer out of her.
Such a luxury. Such a mountain of self-pity. She hates herself for having that traitor inside her, that coward. She is back now. In the driving seat, whatever that might mean. She will see this through for the baby’s sake, given that as of now she has no sake of her own.
It helps to think of herself as a vessel. Like Rosie. Carrying a precious cargo over rough terrain, heading for a harbour where most likely—having served her purpose—she will be mothballed and dismantled. There is no shame in that. No stigma in being dead once you’ve done everything you needed to do. She has this payload to deliver. She needs to keep her armour up until the job is finished.
A sudden clenching of her stomach promises that the job will be finished soon.
What if she outed him? Shouted out Stephen’s secret to the rest of the crew? McQueen would get the recipe out of him at the point of a bayonet, squeeze him like a sponge. The world would be saved.
But no. It wouldn’t. The treatment seems to require regular top-ups, like the Td toxoid vaccine for tetanus. Khan glimpses a future in which the feral children are caught, brought to maturity, bred in pens the way pigs and sheep used to be before the Breakdown. Farmed for their nerve tissue.
How many lives is my life worth? she wonders, dazed and sickened. She can’t do the maths. While the baby is still inside her, she won’t even try.
But she’ll keep her mouth shut, as they rush towards separation. What happens after that will depend on who she is when they get there.
48
Night falls and they keep on moving. Slowly, with circumspection, but always pushing forward. It’s a calculated risk. The road is wide and flat and they can see a long way out in front of them. This far north the obstacles are few, and since Sixsmith has charted them on their way up she is unlikely to be surprised.
With the first hint of dawn, she accelerates again. Rosie attains her ponderous top speed and eats up the miles. Hungries see them and give chase—not the children, just the regular kind—but mostly they don’t get close. When they do, Rosie ploughs them under with a barely perceptible bump.
They are still two days out of Beacon by anybody’s reckoning, but they’re not heading for Beacon now. If they keep to this speed, they’ve got one more day, one more night. They’ll make it to the rendezvous sometime around sun-up tomorrow. There has been talk of helicopter gunships. They will ride home in style, leaving Rosie behind them like a steel rind, a shed skin.
That thought causes Lieutenant Foss a twinge of melancholy, but in every other respect the news is good. She has had more than enough of the field. She wants a hot bath, a sweaty fuck (these thoughts are not coming in any kind of logical sequence) and above all the feeling that if she lets her guard down nothing will take a bite out of her. This is what she’s living for now, and it’s close enough that the pleasant fantasies she is indulging feel like promises to herself that she can actually keep.
Looking around her, though, she’s not seeing the same enthusiasm. Okay, the whitecoats are in mourning. She gets that, and she respects it. But the colonel isn’t saying a word to anyone, Sixsmith is sullen and even McQueen has closed up tighter than a nun’s hope chest.
She finds him in the mid-section, making ammunition. It’s something she does herself, but she has never seen him take an interest. The RIH cartridges and vintage Lapua Magnums that Beacon uses as standard issue seem to suit him well enough, and he hasn’t seemed impressed by her highly technical arguments about long-range stopping power versus short-range accuracy. Now he’s sitting there on the floor with a non-electric press and a Lee Challenger reloader (she is pretty sure it’s hers), cleaning out spent primers with the quiet intensity of a monk flicking through the best bits of his rosary.
“You pick your times,” Foss says, nudging his shoulder with her knee. “What do you think you’re going to be shooting?”
“You never know,” McQueen says. He doesn’t look up from his work.
Foss leans back against the turret rail and watches the landscape roll on by. She feels a strong determination to squeeze a companionable moment out of this. “Remember that time on the way up when we got stuck in the mud and had to hammer the front winch into the fucking asphalt because there was nothing else to tie it to?”
McQueen tamps another primer down, decants powder into the Challenger’s narrow hopper. “What about it?”
“Nothing. I’m just looking forward to never doing it again, that’s all.”
No response.
“What are you looking forward to?” Foss prompts.
He looks up at her now, his eyes cold. “Some peace and quiet,” he says.
Foss can take a hint. “Fine,” she says. “Enjoy.” She leaves him to his home-mades, which frankly are not up to the standard of hers. He is sloppy with the calipers and uneven with the powder.
The crew quarters feel uncomfortably empty, like a jawline with some fresh, raw gaps between the teeth. Khan is lying down, her pale face shiny with sweat. The Robot is soaking a towel at the sink, which he carries across to her. She is clutching her big belly and muttering to herself under her breath. Counting, it sounds like. Foss puts two and two together and gets a total of holy shit!
“You’re kidding me,” she says. “It’s coming? It’s coming now?”
“Soon,” Greaves says, giving Foss a quick, anguished glance. “The contractions are fifteen minutes apart.” Khan says nothing. Her eyes are open and she’s staring at the ceiling. She is deep inside herself somewhere, barely aware of her surroundings.
“Okay,” Foss says. But what the hell does that mean? Should she do something, or just let this run its course? What’s the significance of fifteen minutes apart? How long does that give them?
The last question is the pertinent one. “Khan,” she says, “are you about to drop? Give me an ETA, for the love of Christ.”