“What are we on by now? Nine? Ten? More?”
Quinn sighs. “Marshall would probably kill me if he knew I was telling you this, but I guess you’ve got the right to know. We’ve pulled two copies out of the tank since you quit—five days ago, both within a couple hours of each other.”
“Right,” I say. “I want one of their memories. The second one, I guess—Mickey10, right?”
Quinn shrugs apologetically. “Sorry, Mickey. Can’t do that.”
“They’re his memories,” Nasha says. “You’ve been using his body to do whatever you’ve been doing. You owe him this, Quinn.”
Quinn turns to her. “First of all, I haven’t been doing anything with Mickey’s body. Marshall and Ling come in here and say they need a copy pulled, and I do what they tell me to do. That’s my job. Once they walk out that door, it’s out of my hands. Second, I don’t disagree with you, okay? I didn’t say I won’t give you their memories back. I said I can’t. The fact is, neither of them made it back here for an upload. Whatever Marshall needed them for, I can only assume that it killed them in a hurry.” He turns back to me. “I’m sorry, man. I’ve got no memories to give you.”
I meet Nasha’s eyes. She pulls the thumb out of her pocket and holds it out to Quinn. “Prove it.”
Quinn’s eyebrows meet at the bridge of his nose. “What the hell?”
“He doesn’t need that,” I say. “He’s got his own thumb, remember?”
“Oh,” Nasha says. “Right.”
Quinn sidles past Nasha to the control panel and puts his thumb to the reader. The display panel lights up. “You know how to read this, right, Mickey?”
I move over to stand beside him. He’s pulled up a menu of available downloads. The most recent time stamp is from over two years ago—the last time I uploaded, six weeks before Berto abandoned me in the creepers’ labyrinth and Eight came out of the tank.
“I don’t understand. They always made me upload before I died. Even after I took a beam of ions moving at point-nine-c to the back of the skull they managed to get me into the helmet before they let me go.”
Quinn shrugs. “Like I said, these guys must have died quick.”
“Maybe,” Nasha says. “Or maybe Marshall doesn’t want a record of what they were doing.”
I shake my head. “Doesn’t matter. They’re not here. Sorry to get you out of bed for nothing, Quinn.”
He looks back and forth between us. He really does look sorry, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe I should have given him a bit more of a chance over the years.
“No problem,” he says. “I can’t honestly say I’m sorry that there’s nothing here to download, because I’d hate to be responsible for turning you into a raving psychotic, but I’m sorry I can’t give you what you need. You’re right. You ought to be able to find out what they’re doing with your body.”
“Thanks,” I say. “Seriously, Quinn. I appreciate it.”
I pat him on the shoulder and turn to go. Nasha and I are halfway out the door when he says, “Hey, that thumb—it’s got my print on it, right? You thought you could use it to run the download without me.”
Nasha stops and half-turns. “Maybe?”
“You can’t. I mean, obviously. What kind of idiot would secure something this sensitive with a thumbprint? Still, though—can I have it back, please?”
Nasha looks at me. I shrug.
“Fine,” she says. She pulls the thumb out of her pocket and tosses it to him.
“Thanks,” he says. “I’m not sure what you could have done with it, honestly, but it seemed weird to have you running around with this thing.”
Fair enough. I take Nasha’s hand, and we go.
“SO WHAT NOW?”
We’re back in our rack, curled up naked together in the sweaty half-dark.
“I don’t know,” Nasha says. “Seems like a dead end, doesn’t it?”
“Berto said I should just wait until the weather turns. If they ramp the power back up then, I’ll know it was all bullshit. If not…”
“If not,” Nasha says, “people start dying.”
Right. That.
“I know where the fuel is. It would take me a couple of hours, tops, to get it back. I don’t have to do it now. I really could wait until the weather turns.”
“And what if bringing the fuel back doesn’t solve the problem?”
I shrug. “If that doesn’t solve the problem, then I’d say we’re boned.”
“Maybe,” she says. “Find that out now, though, and we might have time to come up with a plan B. Find out when the snow has started flying, and this colony dies.”
That hangs in the air between us for a solid ten seconds.
“You want me to go,” I say finally.
She props herself up on one elbow to look down at me.
“No, babe, I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you throwing yourself on Marshall’s mercy any more than you do. But Mickey, we’ve sacrificed so much for this colony. You’ve sacrificed so much for this colony. What Four went through, and Five, and Six, and Eight … if this place goes down, if everybody dies, that was all for nothing. That’s what I don’t want. I don’t want to have watched you lay your head on the block so many times, and then find out that it didn’t mean anything at all.” She leans down to kiss me. “Also, I don’t want to starve to death in the dark.”
Yeah, that’s a fair point.
“Look,” she says, rolls away, and folds her hands behind her head. “If you bring back that bomb, I will make sure it’s known that you did it, and that you doing it saved our asses. If Marshall takes you out after that, he’ll have a rebellion on his hands. You’ve said it before, babe—he’s an asshole, but he’s not an idiot. However much he may want to kill you, if you do this, I don’t think he’ll have the juice to do it.”
I sigh. “You’re willing to bet my life on that, huh?”
She turns her head to look at me. “I’m willing to bet our lives on it. If Security comes for you, they’ll have to go through me first.”
And that’s the sort of thing that people say, of course. Most of the time, it’s just empty words when the shit comes down. Somehow, though, with Nasha I don’t think that’s the case, and I feel a sudden stab of shame for thinking that she might be just as happy to watch me go down the corpse hole and then start over with Mickey11. I mean, I’m not under any illusion that she could actually protect me. Despite all appearances and attitude, she’s not actually some kind of warrior goddess.
I’m not sure she knows that, though. She might not be able to stop Marshall’s people from taking me, but I have a deep suspicion that she’d be willing to die trying. I snake one arm under her shoulders and pull her closer.
“Okay,” I whisper. “I’ll do it.”
She strokes my cheek with one hand. “You’re a good guy, Mickey. That bastard won’t lay a hand on you.”
I close my eyes and breathe in, breathe out. I guess we’re about to see.
WE WAKE TO a beautiful morning. Looks like it rained while we were sleeping, but by the time Nasha and I step out of the main lock the sun is halfway up in a pastel-pink sky. I look over at her. Hard to read her expression behind the rebreather, but from the way she keeps touching me I’m starting to feel like she’s afraid I’m going to just disappear.
“You don’t have to come,” I say.
Her eyes narrow. “Don’t be an ass.”
Okay, then.
I haven’t been to visit the bomb since that day two years ago when I showed Nasha its hiding place. I wanted to. More than once I’ve woken up from dreams where one of our people stumbled across it and triggered it somehow, and the last thing I see is a flash of white light as the colony disappears. I didn’t, though, because I was afraid Marshall might be tracking my movements.
Which leads me to wonder: What if he’s tracking me right now? What would he do if he found out that the creepers never had the bomb, that it’s been hidden under a rock pile all this time?