“We may have misunderstood this word allies. You speak as if you are Prime, and we are ancillaries. Is this what allies is?”
Nasha takes a step toward him. Her jaw is set in a way that I recognize from a hundred arguments over the past eight years. “Look,” she says. “We need that device back. We don’t necessarily want to resort to force, but if you won’t cooperate with us, I promise you that we’ll do whatever we need to do to make that happen.”
Speaker rears up until only its last two segments grip the floor and its head looms over us. Nasha’s eyes narrow and for an instant I’m certain she’s about to fire on him, and that shortly after that we’re both going to die. She doesn’t, though, and Speaker doesn’t attack her either. Instead, it settles back until its head is only a meter or so off the floor, and its mandibles click together in a staccato rhythm.
“Wait,” it says. “Before we fight, consider this, please. Our friends are far away, much farther than we are now from your nest. If they accidentally trigger your bomb, neither you nor we will be hurt. Also, our friends will be killed, which would not bother us in the least. Perhaps … perhaps we should leave things as they are?”
I look over at Nasha. She seems to consider, then shakes her head.
“That’s an interesting thought, but let me be a bit more clear. We need that bomb. We need you to get it back from your friends, and we need for this to happen before the cold comes back.”
Speaker rises up again.
“Twice now, you demand that we follow your instructions. You should not do this. Allies do not demand. Assholes demand.”
“Look,” I say before Nasha can respond. “This may be a language issue. Nasha does not mean to make demands, only to express how important this is to us. We don’t mean to threaten and we don’t mean to demand, but we do mean to get that bomb back, one way or another. We would like to work together with you to do that. If that’s not possible, we will not hold it against you. We will not attack you, but we will be forced to seek your friends out ourselves, and we can’t guarantee that what happens then won’t spill over onto you.”
“Oh,” Speaker says. “No. No, I would not advise that. Our friends to the south are not as friendly as we are. When you first arrived, and for long thereafter, they advised us very strongly to kill you all. If you go to find them now, they will not welcome you. They will very likely disassemble you. Before we gave them your bomb, they requested that we provide them one of your ancillaries. They were very eager to learn of your inner workings. Again, let me suggest leaving the bomb with them. Their accidentally triggering it seems to us to be the best possible outcome.”
“No,” I say. “Unfortunately, that’s not an option. Nasha is right. That device is our responsibility. We need to get it back.”
Speaker’s head bobs back and forth between Nasha and me, mandibles clicking. Nasha’s hands rest on her burners.
“Wait here,” Speaker says finally. “We must consider.”
Once again, he drops to the floor, turns, and scuttles away.
“Okay,” Nasha says when he’s gone. “I’m starting to get really sick of this.”
I lift my rebreather long enough to rub my face with both hands. “He’s negotiating with an invading alien species with unknown advanced technological capabilities—one which has already proved itself to be at least genocide-curious, if not actually genocidal. You can’t blame him for being cautious.”
I put my back to the wall, then slide down until I’m sitting again. Nasha lowers herself down to the floor beside me, settles back against the wall, and then leans the side of her head against mine. “Yeah, maybe not. Still, we’ve been down here for a long-ass time, and we’re not any closer to having our hands on the bomb than we were when we left the dome.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe not. Let’s see what he comes back with.”
“Yeah. By the way, are we calling that thing a ‘he’ now?”
“I guess so? Seems to fit with the voice, anyway. Unrelated: that was some solid good-cop-bad-cop you pulled there, with the hands constantly stroking the burners and all.”
She nudges me with her elbow, and I can hear the grin in her voice. “Glad you liked it. I wasn’t doing a bit, though. I was seriously considering opening up on his ass at one point there.”
“You know burners just annoy those things, right?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’d bet two military-grade burners focused on one spot on his underside at point-blank range would do some real damage. If not, there’s always the accelerator.”
She may be right, I guess, but I kind of doubt it. Nasha didn’t see what happened when Rob and Gillian turned their burners on the creepers that were dissecting Dugan two years ago, and those ones were tiny next to Speaker. Hopefully we don’t have to find out, because I’m pretty sure the cannons on the pylons surrounding the dome wouldn’t make a dent in the giant’s carapace, let alone the popguns Nasha is carrying, and having killed Speaker would be cold comfort while that thing was tearing us into tiny, bloody bits.
“When he comes back,” Nasha says, “what do we do if he says they won’t help? All we know right now is that the bomb is somewhere to the south, right? Ninety percent of the planet is south of here. If they live in holes like these guys, it might not be super-easy to find them.”
“That’s an understatement. Also, unless they’ve shared a lot more with these guys than Speaker is letting on, we won’t be able to talk to them.”
“Ooooh, right. So we go in shooting?”
I lift my head away from hers and turn to look at her. “Is there any situation where your first solution isn’t ‘we go in shooting’?”
She laughs. “Is there any situation where that’s not the absolute best approach?”
I sigh, slide my arm around her shoulder, and pull her against me.
“This is why I love you,” I say. “You’ve got a real talent for boiling things down to their essence.”
She slides her hand across my belly and rests it on my hip.
“You’re goddamned right I do.”
IT’S AN HOUR later, and we’ve gone through two more tubes of slurry, another pack of protein bars, and most of the rest of our water when Speaker returns. We didn’t pack for a days-long expedition. If this doesn’t end soon, things are going to start getting even more uncomfortable down here than they already are.
“We have come to a decision,” he says when he reaches us.
I wait a beat for him to go on, then shoot Nasha a quick look and say, “And?”
“And,” Speaker says, “we do not accept responsibility for your bomb falling into our friends’ possession. You left it in a hole. This was a very stupid thing to do. The fact that we were the ones to find it was only chance. Our friends could conceivably have found it themselves. Anyone could have. So, your current situation is entirely your own fault.”
Nasha’s eyes narrow and her shoulders tense under my arm. I put my hand over hers, mostly to keep her from reaching for a weapon, as he continues.
“We do not accept responsibility for the loss of your bomb. However, we do accept blood-debt for the killing of your not-ancillaries. We gave this great consideration, as we had no reasonable way of knowing that your kind are structured so strangely, but in the final analysis, we acknowledge that we did kill several of you. Because of this, we have determined that we are obligated to provide you what help we can in recovering your bomb from our friends, despite our feeling that this is not a wise course.”
Nasha had already taken a breath to say something awful. She lets it out now, and I can feel her relax.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay. Thank you. That’s what we wanted to hear. You go talk to your friends, let them know we need that thing back immediately, and bring it to the dome. We’ll take it from there, right?”