Then nothing but the steady crunch of tires on rocks.
“You’re clear,” Berto says over the comm. “Looks like the survivors have gone to ground.”
Nasha.
I stow my accelerator and scramble inside.
015
THE FIRST THING I see when I swing through the hatch is Speaker. He’s crouched over Nasha, mandibles working, feeding arms stroking her slack face.
“Hey!” I bark. “Get away from her!”
He lifts and twists to face me. “Mickey. The Nasha is injured.”
“Back away,” I say, and gesture with the barrel of Nasha’s accelerator. “Back the fuck away.”
He shuffles a meter or so back toward me, and I see the blood.
So, so much blood.
It’s puddled around her head and running in little rivulets across the deck.
I drop my weapon and scramble past Speaker to fall to my knees beside her. She’s sprawled in the middle of the aisle between the benches, head turned to one side, one arm flung out to the side and the other thrown across her chest. I put two fingers to her throat. Her pulse is rapid and weak, but it’s there. I’m trying to remember my medical training, but all I can see is the blood, and my brain is a roaring void.
“Mickey?” Cat says behind me. “Is she okay?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know. She’s bleeding so much…”
“Let me see,” she says, and gently pushes me aside. She puts her hands on either side of Nasha’s neck and carefully runs her fingers up along her spine, bringing her head back to a neutral position. Her fingers continue up into Nasha’s hairline for another few centimeters before she pauses. “Here’s where the blood’s coming from,” she says. “It’s not actually that bad. Feels like the wound is mostly superficial. Head wounds bleed a lot, but they tend to clot up pretty quickly.”
“We’re about to run out of ridgeline,” Jamie says from the cockpit. “Any idea where I should be going?”
“South,” Speaker says.
“Right,” Jamie says. “Thanks. Super-fucking-helpful.”
Lucas brushes past me, an already open first-aid kit in hand. He crouches beside Cat and hands her gauze, scissors, and a tube of disinfectant gel. Cat dresses the wound quickly, then pries each of Nasha’s eyes open and peers into them.
“So?” I say. “Is she okay?”
“No,” Cat says without looking up. “She’s not dead, though, and I’m pretty sure her neck isn’t broken. That’s something.”
“She’s concussed,” Lucas says. “Maybe a subdural hematoma. Maybe a brain bleed. Nothing we can do about any of that here. She’ll either come out of it, or she won’t.”
<Mickey7>: Berto—can you carry someone with that glider?
<RedHawk>: What? No. This thing barely has enough lift to keep me up here. Why?
I blink away from the chat window. “Is that kit seriously the only medical gear we’ve got here? Don’t we have any actual equipment?”
Lucas shakes his head. “We don’t have a surgical suite, if that’s what you’re asking. If Nasha’s got a brain bleed, that’s the only thing that’d save her, and it would have to be quick. If she doesn’t, then we just need to wait for her to come around. That’s pretty much all they’d be doing back at the dome anyway.”
My vision blurs, and it occurs to me that I’m hyperventilating. Lucas gets to his feet, takes me by the arm, and guides me down onto one of the benches.
“Get it together,” he says. “You losing your shit isn’t gonna help Nasha one way or the other.”
I’d like to argue.
But the fact is, he’s right.
I drop my head into my hands and slow my breathing. After a minute or so, the fuzz fades away from the edges of my vision and my brain starts to function again. I look up. Cat has Nasha laid out on her back with cushions strapped around her head to stabilize her neck. The cabin is nose-down now by probably twenty degrees as we pick our way down off the ridge.
“Speaker,” I say, then take a deep breath and gather myself when I hear the quaver in my voice. “Speaker. You said that the spiders wouldn’t give up, no matter how many of them we destroyed. They did give up. You misled us. Explain.”
“I did not mislead you,” Speaker says. “You are mistaken.”
“I told you,” Lucas says. “You’re wasting your time talking to him about this, Mickey. He’s not on our side.”
“I am on your side,” Speaker says, “although I must say that you are making it increasingly difficult for me to justify this position. I gave you the best counsel that I could provide. Nothing that I told you about our situation was untrue.”
Lucas looks as if he’d like to spit. “Bullshit. You said they wouldn’t break, remember? That was why we had to surrender. That was why we had to hand over this rover, which you admitted you were planning to keep a chunk of. We didn’t do it, though, did we? We fought instead, and they did break, just like Nasha said they would. You lied, Wormy. You lied to try to get us to give up. You lied to try to get us to turn Jamie over to the spiders. That’s not good counsel, friend.”
Speaker twists to face Lucas. “I say again, friend. I did not lie.”
Lucas starts to reply, but I hold up one hand to stop him. “This is semantics, Lucas. You’re saying he lied. He’s saying he misjudged the spiders. Neither of you can prove your point, so there’s no use in arguing over it.”
“No,” Speaker says. “You are not listening to me. I did not lie, and I did not misjudge. I said that the spiders, as you call them, would not give up the chance to capture this rover. I said that they would not be deterred from this by casualties. These are both true statements.”
“Speaker,” I say. “They are not. They were deterred by casualties, and they did give up.”
“No,” Speaker says. “This is untrue. You brought some new weapon to bear against them. I did not know that this was a possibility. If you had shared this information with me, I may have given you better advice. The spiders were likewise not prepared for this, and they seem to have retreated to consider. I promise you, however, that they have not given up.”
“So you’re saying they’ll be back?”
“Yes,” Speaker says. “They will most certainly be back, and there will be no more negotiating. When they return, they will do what they can to breach the walls of the rover. If they succeed, they will kill all of us, and my nest will get none of the spoils. Our friends to the south will very likely then have the strength to displace us. When that has been accomplished, they will turn to dismantling your dome and removing what metal is to be had there. Is this the outcome you hoped for?”
The silence that follows stretches on for a long, long while.
WE CATCH UP to Berto just after sunset on a flat, open stretch of rocky ground in the hollow between two ridges. He’s already got the glider broken down and packed when we roll to a stop beside him. Jamie pops the hatch, and I walk out to meet him.
“Hey,” he says. “How’s Nasha?”
I shake my head. “Not great. She’s alive, but she’s not responsive. She needs a real medical suite.”
He grimaces. “Sorry, Mick. You want to turn back?”
I close my eyes and breathe in, breathe out. When I open them again, Berto’s face is an even mix of pity and concern. “Yeah,” I say. “I want to turn back. Of course I want to turn back. But we can’t turn back, because if we don’t recover that bomb we’re all screwed anyway, including Nasha. So instead my plan is to do my best to keep it together until we do what we need to do here, and then to completely lose my shit unless and until she wakes up.”