I WAKE INTO coal-black darkness. Everything hurts. I blink to my chronometer: 07:30. Hard to believe I slept that long, but I guess when you’re tired enough your body quits caring about things like circulation. Nasha sits up, and a few seconds later her shoulder light snaps on and I see her rummaging around in her pack.
“What do you think?” she says. “Slurry, protein bars, or both?”
My stomach gives a warning rumble. It’s been over twenty hours since I’ve had real food.
“Let’s start with the slurry. If that works out, I’ll give the protein bars a shot.”
“Suit yourself,” she says, and tosses me a tube. I catch it, twist open the seal, and squeeze a bolus of goo into my mouth. I do my best to swallow, then pull a water bottle from my pack to get the grit out of my mouth and wash it down.
“It’s been over five hours,” I say around another mouthful of slurry. “You’d think they would have decided whether to kill us or not by now, wouldn’t you?”
“Maybe,” Nasha says. “Do they sleep?”
I shrug. “Toss me a bar, huh?”
These things are almost as bad as the slurry, but I feel like I should probably get something solid into my stomach before I get ripped to shreds and/or have to walk all the hell way back to the dome. Nasha drains a water bottle, stuffs the empty back into her pack, and then gets to her feet.
“Be back in a minute,” she says. “I gotta pee.”
I watch as her light bobs away along the chamber wall, then look away when it stops moving. She’s still gone when the big creeper stirs, and Speaker emerges. It rises up, swings its head back and forth between me and Nasha, and then starts toward the spot where she’s still crouched against the wall. It’s halfway to her when she barks, “Hey! I’m busy here, pervert! Go talk to Mickey.” It hesitates, then scuttles over to me.
“Greetings,” it says when it reaches me. “What is pervert? We do not have this word.”
That surprises me a little, considering that they’ve been monitoring my conversations with Berto for two years, but okay.
“It’s a term of affection,” I say. “Have you reached a decision about our request?”
“A difficult question. If we understand correctly now, you and your ancillary brought extremely dangerous weapons into our home.”
“Eight was not an ancillary,” Nasha says from across the chamber, “and pervert is not a term of affection.”
“Regardless,” Speaker says. “You and your…”
“Friend,” Nasha says.
“Yes,” Speaker says. “You and your friend brought death into our home.”
“This is true,” I say. “However, when we did that, you had already killed six of us. You killed my friend as well. Despite that, I did not trigger my bomb. I could have killed you, but I chose not to. That should count for something, shouldn’t it?”
“We recognize this,” Speaker says. “We must ask, however, why after so long you want this bomb back now. Have you changed your mind? Do you now intend to kill us? We reluctantly acknowledge a blood debt, but we did not understand what we did then. We will not submit to be killed.”
Nasha comes back now to stand beside me.
“We don’t want to kill you,” she says. “If we did, we could do it. That wasn’t our only weapon, you know. We want the bomb back to make sure that it doesn’t get used.”
“Ah,” Speaker says. “This is good. Thank you. Very reassuring.”
We wait for it to go on. Nasha looks at me. I shrug. She turns back to Speaker. “And?”
Its head bobs back and forth between us. “And what?”
I can hear the eye roll in Nasha’s voice.
“And will you give us the bomb?”
“Oh,” Speaker says. “Yes. We certainly would.”
“Would?” I say. “Don’t you mean will?”
“Apologies,” Speaker says. “My usage may be incorrect. Your grammar is surprisingly complex. I was proposing a hypothetical. We would return the bomb to you if we had it—but we do not have it, so we cannot. Is that more clear?”
010
HAVE YOU EVER had one of those days when it becomes painfully apparent that the universe is deliberately screwing with you?
I get to my feet. Nasha’s eyes cut to me. It’s impossible to read her expression behind her rebreather, but I’d put a week’s worth of rations on “murderous.”
“You don’t have it,” she says, her voice low and even. I notice her hands have drifted to the grips of her burners.
“We do not,” Speaker says. “But if we did, we would give it to you. This has been decided.”
“You don’t have it,” Nasha says. “We don’t have it. So tell me, Speaker … who does have it?”
“Our friends to the south have it,” Speaker says.
“Your…” Nasha begins, then shakes her head and says, “How do you know that?”
“We know that because we gave it to them.”
Nasha’s hands tighten around the burners.
“You gave our bomb to your friends?”
Speaker’s head wavers. “Friends is not the right word, exactly. We have a name for them, but I do not know how to translate it.”
Nasha turns to look at me. I sigh, and dig my knuckles into my eyes.
“You gave them our bomb,” I say. “You … why would you do that?”
“They demanded something of yours,” Speaker says, “as a tribute of sorts. As I told you, friends is probably not the correct word for them. Assholes might be more accurate, if I understand that term correctly. Our relationship with them has always been uneasy, and has often been hostile. Since your arrival they have become increasingly agitated about our access to you. They fear that you may provide us some advantage that we can use against them. Ancillaries have been taken. Threats have been made. When we examined your bomb, we found it to be filled with something we could not understand. It seemed interestingly mysterious, but the contents did not appear to interact with normal matter, so we judged it to be harmless. It seemed that it might make a useful offering.”
“A useful offering?” Nasha says. “Fine, you didn’t know exactly what it was, but you said yourself that it had something inside it that you didn’t understand. Did it really not occur to you that it might be dangerous?”
Speaker lifts another segment off the floor and spreads its mandibles in what I now recognize as a threat posture.
“Why should this have occurred to us? We had no way to know what this thing was. You did. You knew exactly what it was. You knew this thing was a deadly dangerous weapon, and you left it sitting in a hole. Not a deep hole, not a safe hole where it would never hurt anyone. You left it on our doorstep under a pile of rocks where anyone could find it. Only a stupid, stupid person would do this with a deadly dangerous weapon, no? We know you have technology that we do not understand, we know you can do things that we cannot do, so we foolishly assume you are not stupid, stupid creatures. So yes, we assume it must be harmless. Is this our fault?”
“Okay,” Nasha says. “Well. Now you know that it’s not harmless. So. Get it back.”
“We, get it back? Why would we do this? We do not want it. Now that we know what this thing is, we are glad to have it gone, glad that it is as far away from us as it can be. We do not understand why you would want such a thing back—but if you do, you should get it for yourselves.”
Nasha folds her arms across her chest and tilts her head to one side. “So much for allies, huh?”