“This was a bad idea, Mickey. We shouldn’t have come down here.”
I wrap my arms around her and pull her back against me. “Maybe. We’re here, though. Nothing to do now but wait and see what happens.”
We’ve spent a surprising amount of time like this, Nasha and I—hanging around some shitty place, wrapped around one another, waiting for something awful to happen. Usually the thing we were waiting for was for me to die in some horrible way, but there have been a few times when it’s been Nasha anticipating the call.
When that rock hit our forward shield during transit, while the original Mickey Barnes was getting absolutely fried while repairing the damage, Nasha was stuck in the carousel. It wasn’t the worst place she could have been. A quarter of the internal volume of the Drakkar was exposed to dangerous-to-lethal radiation levels, and a half dozen people unlucky enough to be in the right parts of the forward compartments wound up dying in more or less the same way I did, only slower and more painfully. The carousel girdled the waist of the ship about midway between the nose cone and the engines, and roughly a quarter of its volume was exposed as well. Which quarter of its volume was exposed was constantly changing with the carousel’s rotation, though, and Nasha was swept through the unshielded zone twice in the forty-five seconds that it took her to evacuate. Best guess is that she wound up absorbing about a hundred and fifty millisieverts all told—enough to throw off your digestion and thin out your hair a bit, but not enough to kill you.
Not right away, anyway.
Four years later, give or take, she started getting headaches.
I may not have mentioned this before, but Nasha is fierce. She wouldn’t even take an NSAID until the pain was blinding, let alone report to medical. By the time I finally dragged her down to talk to someone, she was having balance problems and could barely tolerate normal shipboard lighting. The tech on duty took a look at her, asked a few questions, and stuck her head in a scanner. Ten minutes later, he was using a tablet and stylus to show us the extent of the mass in her left temporal lobe.
Union medical science is pretty amazing in a lot of ways. We can bio-print new, genetically matched organs at will. Nobody dies from liver failure or atherosclerosis or pulmonary disease or any of a hundred other things that used to mow humans down back in the pre-Diaspora dark ages. It’s not magic, though—and the one organ we can’t just replace is the brain.
They took her away then, and stuck her into another, bigger scanner for what they called a digital biopsy. The question, apparently, was whether the mass was a benign glioma, which they could cure with nanosurgery, or a malignant glioblastoma, which despite well over a thousand years of head-banging-against-the-wall frustration in medical research facilities from Earth to Eden to Midgard, they could not.
I hung in a harness with her for two hours in the medical bay while we waited to find out if Nasha was going to live or die. We didn’t talk. We just drifted there with my arms around her waist and her head on my shoulder. When the tech came back out, tablet in hand, she lifted her mouth to my ear and whispered, “If it’s bad news, you don’t have to stay with me.”
She couldn’t see the tech’s face. I could. He was smiling.
“It’s not bad news,” I said, and kissed her. “But it wouldn’t have mattered if it was.”
I said it. Was it true?
Nasha’s stayed with me through far worse.
I guess I’m glad that I never got the chance to find out.
NASHA IS SLEEPING when I hear the giant creeper moving. I flip my shoulder light on to see it lift its lowest coil and allow Speaker to come scuttling out. I blink to my chronometer. It’s 02:00. I try to shift a bit under Nasha, and have to stifle a groan as new blood flows into my legs. My lower back is killing me, the frame of my pack feels like it’s dug permanent divots into my shoulder blades, and my ass has soaked up every bit of the chill from the damp stone floor. Nasha stirs, mutters something unintelligible, and nuzzles her head deeper into the soft spot where my neck meets my shoulder. I sigh, and pull her a little closer.
<Mickey7>: Can we communicate this way, please? Nasha is sleeping.
<Speaker1>: You do not wish to speak?
<Mickey7>: If you don’t mind.
<Speaker1>: But …
<Speaker1>: My name is Speaker.
<Speaker1>: Also, did I mention how complicated your vocal apparatus is?
<Speaker1>: And how much work we put into replicating it?
<Mickey7>: I know. It’s just—
Nasha stirs again, shifts her weight against me, and lifts her head.
“Mickey?” she says. “What time is it?”
“Ah,” Speaker says. “The Nasha is no longer sleeping now. We can speak, yes?”
Nasha sits up and focuses on Speaker.
“Oh,” she says. “You again.”
“Yes,” Speaker says. “Who did you expect?”
Nasha stretches and yawns, then leans back against me.
“Did it tell you where the bomb is yet?”
Oh shit.
“Bomb?” Speaker says.
“Pack,” I say. “We’re looking for a pack.”
“No,” Speaker says. “Bomb and pack are not the same. We know bomb. This word appears in your communications frequently. It is a kind of weapon, no?”
“Oh,” Nasha says, and presses her fists against her forehead. “Sorry.”
Speaker’s first three segments rise up from the floor, mandibles gnashing. I’m thinking about getting out from under Nasha and getting to my feet, thinking maybe it’s fight-or-flight time, when it says, “Mickey? Please tell me—are we allies?”
That was not what I was expecting.
“We, uh,” I begin, then have to pause to consider. “We could be allies. We would like to be.”
“Your people were vulnerable when you arrived here, before you had finished constructing your nest. We did not attack you, despite the danger you clearly posed. You were vulnerable when you came down into our tunnels. We did not kill you. We set you free. We have proved our goodwill, have we not?”
“Yes,” I say. “I suppose you have.”
“Then we should be allies, should we not?”
“Yes,” I say. “We can be allies.”
“And allies are honest with one another, yes?” Speaker says.
“They should be,” I say, with a small mental sigh.
“Agreed,” Speaker says. “So, please be honest with us.”
“It’s a bomb,” Nasha says. “The thing we’re looking for is a bomb. It is an incredibly powerful bomb, in fact—powerful enough at a minimum to kill everything for a dozen klicks in every direction, even if you set it off underground. We need to have it back because we’re afraid that you’ll accidentally trigger it, and maybe kill us in the process of killing yourselves. Apologies for everything, but that’s the truth.”
Speaker’s head weaves back and forth, and its mandibles clatter against one another for a long five seconds.
“Thank you,” it says finally. “We appreciate the honesty.” It drops back to the floor, turns, and scuttles back toward the giant creeper. “Please wait here. We need to consider.”
The creeper’s coil lifts, and Speaker disappears.
“Huh,” Nasha says. “That could have gone worse.”
“It could have gone better. What the hell, Nasha?”
She shrugs. “I said I was sorry. I was still half asleep and my brain wasn’t turning over yet, you know? I’m actually not sure I am, though. We needed to get to the point. They’re not stupid, Mickey. They weren’t going to believe we came down here looking for a bag full of snacks. Everybody’s cards are on the table now.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess so. Our cards are that we came down here two years ago with a giant bomb. I’m guessing that’s what they’re considering right now. How do you expect that to work out?”
“Don’t know,” Nasha says. “If it works out badly, though, my current plan is to put two explosive rounds into Speaker and then empty the magazine into the big one. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that, right?”