One of the rabbits is nosing at my boot. I crouch down to give his ears a scratch. “So if, just hypothetically speaking, we did have some kind of issue with power generation, grounding you and Nasha might be a good place to cut back, huh?”
He shrugs. “I guess so. Gravitic grids are power hogs. Those lifters use an ungodly amount of juice.” He hesitates, and his grin fades. “Do you know something, Mickey?”
The rabbit nips at my finger. I guess he wasn’t looking for affection after all. I nudge him away with one hand, then stand again and glance back at Jamie. He’s head and shoulders deep in the hutch, scrubbing at something with a disinfectant sponge.
“Look,” I say, “have you seen me around recently?”
His mouth opens, then closes again. He shakes his head. “What?”
“Have you seen me?” I say. “Maybe with someone from Engineering? Maybe looking kind of confused?”
His eyes narrow. “What are you saying, Mickey?”
I sigh. “I’m saying I think I saw another me this morning. I think Marshall is pulling Mickeys out of the tank again.”
He tilts his head to one side and folds his arms across his chest. “You’re saying that you think Hieronymus Marshall, Niflheim’s high priest of Natalism, is deliberately creating multiples?”
I hesitate, then shake my head. “It sounds stupid when you say it like that.”
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s because it is stupid. Did you actually see another Mickey somewhere? Did you talk to him?”
“I didn’t talk to him, but I saw him. For a second. From about twenty meters away.”
Berto rolls his eyes. “So you got a glance of someone from twenty meters off that kind of looked like you, and from that you’ve concluded that our commander, who has a visceral, religiously motivated hatred of multiples in general, and of you in particular, is secretly making more of you because…”
“Look,” I say, “I know what I saw.”
“You don’t,” he says, and gestures toward the hutch. “It was probably just Jamie. You two are like twins.”
Et tu, Berto?
I open my mouth to argue, or maybe to tell him to go fuck himself, but before I can decide which one he smacks me on the shoulder and says, “Anyway, it doesn’t matter, does it? What do you care if Marshall is pulling copies of you out of the tank and … I don’t know … making them fight to the death while he and Amundsen take bets on the winner? You’re retired, remember? How is this any skin off of your nose?”
That’s a good question, actually. I’ve given it some thought since Nasha asked me the same basic question. If there’s one thing I’m sure of after what happened with Eight two years ago, it’s that I’m the only me there’s ever going to be, no matter what Nine or Ten or whatever number they’ve gotten to by now might think about it. By that logic, if Marshall is pulling bodies out of the tank and throwing them into the reactor or making them play gladiator or whatever, it doesn’t actually have anything to do with me, but …
But still.
It kind of does.
“Look,” I say. “Forget about the whole morality thing. The person I thought was me was with Maggie Ling, and they were headed toward the reactor.”
Berto starts to reply, but then his smile fades and I can see the wheels turning.
“Oh,” he says finally.
“Yeah. And you just got grounded.”
“Right,” he says. “That might be a problem.”
“You think? How long would we last here without power?”
“Depends,” he says. “Are we without power because the reactor shut down gracefully and got decommissioned like it’s eventually supposed to, or are we without power because the reactor overloaded and vaporized everything in a fifty-klick radius?”
“Let’s assume option one.”
He scratches the back of his head. “We’d probably be okay for the moment. We’re still getting a fair amount of our calories from the cycler, I think, but that’s something we can work on if we start throwing bodies at Agriculture. There’s not much else going on around here that requires a ton of power and is also absolutely essential for our survival.”
“That’s for now. What about when the cold comes back?”
“Oh,” Berto says. “When that happens we’re totally fucked.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s pretty much where I wound up.”
He grimaces. “Okay. So what do we do?”
“I’m not sure we do anything. We’ve still got power at the moment and we haven’t been vaporized, so obviously the reactor is still functioning. I guess default is to hope that Maggie knows what she’s doing and that whatever’s going on is just a temporary glitch.”
Berto grimaces. “I’ve got plenty of confidence in Maggie, but if somebody’s screwing around with the insides of the reactor, it’s not her, is it?”
“Now, wait a minute,” I say. “I hope you’re not questioning my competence. If there’s one thing I’ve proved I’m good at around here, it’s fixing crap while picking up fatal doses of radiation.”
“Yeah,” Berto says. “That’s a fair point. Still, I’ve got to say—just the thought of something glitching in the reactor is enough to spook me. Any thoughts on how we can figure out what the hell’s going on?”
“Don’t mean to interrupt,” Jamie says from behind me, “but I’m finished here. If you hens are done clucking, would you mind getting these guys back into One so we can get started on Two?”
I look back at him. He scowls and points to the hutch.
“Sorry,” I say to Berto. “Duty calls.”
“Yeah,” he says. “You do your bunny thing. I think I’m gonna do a little poking around. Ping me when you’re off-shift, huh?”
“Sometime today,” Jamie says.
Berto shoots him a glare, then steps back over the fence and goes.
WE’RE JUST GETTING the last of the rabbits back into Hutch Three when Jamie says, “You know, I heard what you and Gomez were saying earlier.”
I turn to look at him. “Really? So what do you think?”
He shrugs. “I think Gomez can go screw. You don’t look anything like me.”
I open my mouth to reply, then shut it again as my brain processes what he just said.
“I’m not saying I’m better-looking than you,” he says. “We’re just different.”
“So,” I finally manage. “Out of all the stuff Berto and I were talking about, that’s what you fixated on?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Pretty much. Why? Was there something else that I ought to give a shit about?”
I know the screening process to get involved with this mission back on Midgard was incredibly rigorous. I know they only selected the best and the brightest. Jamie, though …
Maybe he was somebody’s nephew?
I’m about to say something along the lines of, Yes, I agree that we look nothing alike, when my ocular pings.
<Command1>: You are required to report to the Commander’s office immediately.
<Command1>: Failure to do so by 17:30 will be construed as insubordination.
Okay, then. Here we go.
002
IT’S PROBABLY BEST at this point if I explain the current state of my relationship with Hieronymus Marshall.
To summarize: it’s not great.
On the plus side, he hasn’t actually tried to kill me since I resigned my position as Mission Expendable. That’s been refreshing. He hasn’t been particularly friendly, though. The first thing he did when I told him I wasn’t going to die for him anymore, pretty much before his office door had closed behind me, was to cut my rations to base minimum, which at the time was twelve hundred kcal per day. His argument for doing so was that I no longer deserved any service bonuses, since I technically no longer had a job. My counterargument was that if I attempted to live on twelve hundred kcal per day long-term, I would die. His counter-counterargument was that he didn’t remotely give a shit. My counter-counter-counterargument was that I was still in close contact with the creepers, and that if I died, they would be sorely put out, and might be tempted to express their displeasure using the antimatter bomb he’d so helpfully provided to them.