He stays up for a half hour or so, taking the glider through a series of increasingly terrifying maneuvers, ending with a wide loop before dropping down to skim by maybe twenty meters over my head and past the outcrop behind me. A few seconds later I hear another whoop, and then he’s calling to me.
“Mickey! Did you see that? I pulled a full inside loop! Aaaaaahh! I can’t believe I waited so long to do this!”
I round the outcrop to see him on the ground, thirty or forty meters away. He unclips his harness, turns to pump both fists in my direction, then crouches down to begin disassembling the glider as I make my way over to stand beside him.
“That was incredible,” he says without looking up. “In-freaking-credible. I think what I just did was the closest that a human can come to being a bird without a whooooole lot of surgery.”
“You could have died,” I say. “You know that, right?”
He waves me off. “Nah. I knew this thing would work. Wasn’t sure the airframe would stand up to that loop, but—”
“What if it hadn’t?”
He stops working long enough to glance up at me. “Hadn’t what?”
“What if the airframe hadn’t stood up to the loop?”
“Oh.” He shrugs. “Then I would have died.” He folds the fabric carefully, then sets it aside and starts pulling the spars apart. “I didn’t, though. You saw that, right? This is my new recon platform, my friend. These Casimir drives draw practically zero power, so there’s really no way Marshall can object. Now that I know it works, I can launch under power from the roof of the dome. This is gonna be awesome.”
I could object. I should object. This is a homemade, practically untested aircraft. Yeah, he made it through one thirty-minute shakedown flight, but if he actually starts taking this thing up on the regular, I can’t believe that there’s any possible way that it ends well for him.
On the other hand, this is the happiest I’ve seen Berto since …
Well, since forever, I guess.
“Come on,” he says. “Help me get this stowed away.”
His grin is infectious. I smile, and sigh, and fetch him his pack.
WE’RE JUST PAST the crest of the hill, almost back within sight of the dome, when we see the creeper.
Berto spots it first. He’s walking ahead of me, practically bouncing with every step and saying something about seeing if he can knock another glider together for Nasha, and I’m just about to tell him to fuck right off with that idea when he freezes so abruptly that I almost walk into his pack.
“What?” I begin, but he holds up one hand and points with the other, and there it is, maybe eighty meters off. It’s perched on top of a boulder, rear segments curled under it, front segments lifted up. This isn’t one of the giants, but it’s not an ancillary either. It looks to be maybe three meters long, with a half dozen or so brown-and-gold-mottled segments and two perpendicular sets of mandibles. It’s facing away from us at the moment, looking down toward the dome.
“Mickey,” Berto whispers. “You see that?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I see it.”
“Can you talk to it?”
I look up at him. I’m about to say something sarcastic when I remember that he thinks I’ve been in regular contact with the creepers for the past two years. He thinks I’ve been negotiating with them. Nasha’s the only one who knows I’m completely full of shit.
Well. This is likely to be disappointing.
“Dunno,” I say. “Let me give it a shot.”
I step in front of Berto. The creeper is moving now, its head weaving slowly back and forth. What would it look like if I were actually communicating with this thing? I clench my jaw, squint my eyes, and lean forward slightly.
“Are you okay?” Berto asks. “You look like you’ve got the runs.”
I shoot him a quick glare, then relax my face and turn back to the creeper. Just for yucks and grins, I blink to a chat window.
<Mickey7>: Hello?
<Mickey7>: Are you seeing this?
<Mickey7>: If you are, we’re not here to fight. Just passing through, okay?
It stops moving.
Its head swivels around to face us.
“Is it talking to you?” Berto whispers. “What’s it saying?”
I wave him off. The creeper and I stare each other down, and I have time to wonder what I’ll do if it comes for us. Run, I guess? I’m pretty sure I could outrun one of the little ones. Not so sure about this guy, though.
Fortunately, I don’t have to find out. After a long ten seconds, the creeper ducks behind the boulder and disappears.
When it’s been gone long enough that we’re sure it’s not coming back, Berto lets his breath out in a rush, claps one hand to my shoulder, and says, “Nice work, Mick. What did you say to it?”
I look back at him and grin behind my rebreather.
“Honestly, Berto? You probably don’t want to know.”
005
THERE ARE LOTS of things to like about Union technology. It’s allowed us to spread across our spiral arm like seeds on the wind. It keeps us warm and safe (mostly) in the cold vacuum of interstellar space. It takes in our garbage and spits out barely edible food. It allows us to live on planets like Niflheim, places where we honestly probably have no business living. There is one factor above all, though, that defines nearly every gadget and whatzit that the Union produces.
It’s idiot-proof.
Nearly every device we brought with us to Niflheim is imbued with enough AI to allow it to be operated by almost anyone. If you think about it, this is an absolute necessity, given the way we travel. The typical crew complement on a colony mission is under two hundred adults, who are responsible for shepherding and protecting several thousand frozen embryos. That group has to include the seeds of everything that you’ll need to form a fully functional technological society: administrators, doctors, lawyers, engineers, farmers, etc., etc., etc.
There’s not a lot of room there for a guy who has an intimate knowledge of how to work the espresso machine. That thing needs to pretty much run itself.
That principle extends to just about every piece of tech on Niflheim. The agricultural specialists, the engineers, the medicos—they know what their equipment is for, and they hopefully know what to do with it and when, but when it comes down to it, making the machines work is mostly just a matter of telling them to go. The main limiting factor isn’t expertise, in other words. It’s having the appropriate permissions to turn things on.
All of which is just to say: technically, I don’t really need Quinn to help me do a download. I know how to strap the helmet on. When I’ve done uploads, the only thing Quinn has actually done once I’m strapped in is to press his thumb to the authentication pad and tell it to do its thing.
That means, of course, that I do in fact need Quinn’s thumb.
“NO,” NASHA SAYS. “No way, Mickey. I am not stealing a man’s thumb for you.”
“Oh, come on.” I lean my head against her shoulder and look up at her. “It’s just one thumb. It’s not like I need you to steal his whole hand.”
We’re back at the overlook that Berto launched himself from yesterday afternoon. I wanted Nasha to see this place. Unlike Berto, I thought she’d appreciate it as something more than a convenient place to kill yourself. I used to do a lot of backpacking back on Midgard, wandering around in the wilderness and looking for places like this to sit and think. I wanted to give Nasha a glimpse of that part of me.
Also, of course, I wanted to bring her someplace where we could talk without being overheard.
“Seriously,” she says. “How do you expect this to work, Mickey? I sneak up behind him with a pair of pinking shears? Snip, grab, and run?”
“Look, I haven’t thought through all the details.”
She laughs behind her rebreather, shakes her head, and leans back on her elbows. “Babe, the fact that you’re here on this planet tells me everything I ever needed to know about your ability to think through all the details.”