We move to the back of the cabin. The atmospheric trap closes behind us, and the hatch swings open.
“Is Speaker dead?” Berto asks as we climb up onto the roof. “He hasn’t moved a muscle since I got back.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t think so, anyway. I think he’s mad at us.”
Cat and Lucas are up by the turret, sitting back-to-back with their weapons across their knees.
“Hey,” Berto says. “You two want a break?”
Cat turns to see us, then rolls her neck in a long, slow circle, stretches, and stands.
“Thanks,” she says as Lucas gets to his feet. “I really needed to pee.”
“No problem,” Berto says. He takes her weapon as she passes. Lucas hands his to me.
“Keep an eye on Nasha,” I say. “Let me know if anything changes with her.”
“Will do,” Lucas says. He swings himself down and into the cabin, and the hatch closes behind him.
Berto settles down against the turret. I take my position on the other side. After five minutes or so, Berto says, “So. You think they’ll really come back?”
I shrug. “Speaker seems to be pretty sure of it.”
“Yeah,” Berto says. “Speaker seems to be pretty sure of a lot of stuff. You really trust him?”
That’s a good question. Do I?
“It’s not a matter of trust,” I say finally. “He’s a source of information. He’s the only source of information we have about what to expect from the spiders. He’s the only source of information we have about where we’re going, or what to expect when we get there. If we had some other source to compare him against, that would be one thing, but we don’t. So I guess my feeling is that we take what he says with a grain of salt, but we can’t totally discount it, because we don’t have anything else to fall back on.”
“We’ve got our own observations,” Berto says. “He said they wouldn’t run. They ran. Now he says they’ll come back. What’s to say he’s right this time?”
“I mean, he makes a fair point, doesn’t he? When he said they wouldn’t run, he wasn’t factoring in the idea of you swooping in and dive-bombing the shit out of them. If I’m understanding correctly, aerial assault is a completely new thing on this planet. It’s kind of understandable that they’d want to take a minute to think things over after that.”
Berto shrugs. “Maybe. On the other hand, it would also be understandable if they saw what I just did to them and came to the conclusion that they’re screwing with something that they’d be better off leaving alone. The folks on Eden really wanted to drop a colony in The System That Shall Not Be Named, didn’t they? When they found out that whoever’s living there now has a Magical Ship Eraser, though, they decided that it was in their best interests to leave them the hell alone.”
“Not exactly. Acadia tried too, you know, and when their ship vanished they wanted to send them a Bullet. We’re not nearly as smart as you’re giving us credit for.”
“Yeah, well,” Berto says. “Nasha seems pretty convinced that the creepers are smarter than we are, right? Maybe they’ll get the message quicker than we did.”
I laugh. “I guess it’s possible. If what Speaker says about their need for metals is true, though, I could imagine them being willing to take another run at us. He hasn’t given us any details, but I get the impression these guys and Speaker’s nest have been in a kind of cold war for a long time, and they both see us as something that might put their side over the top.”
Berto’s head tilts to one side. “Cold war?”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s an old Earth thing. A couple hundred years before the breakout, there were two nation-states that pretty much dominated the planet. They both had fusion bombs and ballistic delivery systems, so direct warfare would have been suicidal for both of them, but they had networks of proxies, smaller countries who could—” Berto lets his head loll back and rips off a long, loud snore. I sigh. “Fine, you ignoramus. Don’t worry about it. Point is, Speaker’s nest and their friends to the south clearly don’t like each other, and we’ve obviously got resources that could be game-changing here. You can see how that might motivate them to take risks that might seem crazy otherwise.”
“Maybe,” Berto says. “Or maybe Lucas is right, and Speaker is just trying to manipulate us.”
“Okay. So what would we do differently if we thought that was true?”
After a long silence, Berto says, “Yeah. That’s a good point.”
It’s a nice enough night, anyway. We’re picking our way up along what I’m pretty sure is the last ridgeline before we hit the open plains, moving through what I would have called an alpine meadow back on Midgard, meter-high ferns swishing against our tires. The air is cool and dry and crisp, and the stars are hard, bright pinpricks in a jet-black sky.
“You know,” Berto says, “nights like this, I could almost convince myself that we made a good call coming here.”
I’m about to reply when a ghost flickers in my peripheral vision. I turn toward it, and close my left eye so that I can focus on what my ocular is showing me. It flips rapidly from enhanced visible to infrared and back, then presents me a pseudo-colored image of the two superimposed.
I brace myself against the turret and bring the accelerator to bear.
“Good news,” I say. “Looks from here like Speaker was telling the truth after all.”
016
“STOP,” BERTO SAYS. “You’re wasting rounds.”
I lower my accelerator, take a deep breath in, hold it, and then let it out slowly. He’s right. The spiders—if that’s even what they are—are most of a thousand meters off, pacing along with us just like they did when they first found us, but outside of the effective range of our weapons now.
“I think Chen packed self-guided rounds,” he says. “We should be able to hit them with those, I think. Not sure they carry enough punch to take them out, though. I know they’re not rated to penetrate standard combat armor.”
“Not sure it matters,” I say. “Speaker was right. They’re tracking us. At some point, they’ll try to swarm us. I don’t know that picking off one or two of them now makes any real difference.”
Berto shrugs. “Maybe not. Can’t hurt, though.” His eyes unfocus as he blinks to a chat window. A minute or so later, the hatch swings open and Cat climbs onto the roof. She comes up to stand beside us, one hand on the turret for balance, closes one eye, and squints into the distance.
“Oh,” she says after a few seconds. “Yeah, I see them out there.”
Cat takes her weapon back from Berto, drops to one knee, and swaps out the magazine for a bulkier one that she pulls from a pouch at her waist. She braces herself and brings the accelerator to bear. “It would be nice if we could quit bouncing around for a goddamn minute,” she mutters, then growls and pulls the trigger.
“I think you hit it,” Berto says.
“I did,” Cat says. “It went down, but I’m pretty sure it got back up.”
“Maybe,” Berto says. “That might have been another one taking its place.”
I’ve got my ocular on infrared at maximum resolution at the moment. I saw the flare of the round’s drive, but I couldn’t see what happened when it hit. I flip over to enhanced visible spectrum, which gives me enough resolution to actually see individual spiders out there. Cat fires again, and an instant later one of them drops.
She’s right, though. After a moment, it gets back to its feet and keeps running.
“Waste of time and ammunition,” Cat says.
“Maybe,” Berto says. “Maybe not. Looks like they’re pulling back a bit farther, anyway. You may not be killing them, but those rounds can’t feel good.”
“I only packed two mags of self-guided,” Cat says. “Forty rounds all told. I’m not about to empty them both just to annoy those things.”