“You have the authority to make this commitment?”
No, not remotely.
“Yes, I do. If I tell our people that we’ve made this agreement, I promise you that they will honor it.”
“To say this is not a trivial matter, Mickey. I have told you how we view agreements.”
“You have, and I understand that. We also take our agreements seriously. Now, do we have a bargain?”
After a long, strained silence, Speaker drops fully back to the deck and says, “Yes. Yes, under these conditions, we have a bargain. I will admit that I am relieved to not have to face the spiders alone. Understand, though, that if your people do not do as you say they will, there will be serious consequences. If we are attacked and you do not come to our aid, all prior understandings will be void. If we manage to defend ourselves, your dome will provide us the metals we need to recoup our losses, voluntarily or not—and if our nest falls, I promise you that yours will not be far behind.”
Berto shoots me a hard look, but I’m not in a place to worry about what might happen six hours from now, let alone six months. For the moment, this is good enough.
“Thank you, Speaker.” I look around the cabin. Cat and Lucas are back by the hatch. Neither of them will make eye contact. Nasha is sitting again, cradling her head in her hands. Berto raises one eyebrow. I nod. “Everybody else, pack up, but pack light. We’re bailing soon, and I think we’ve probably got a long walk ahead of us.”
ONE BY ONE, we jump down from the back of the moving rover. Nasha goes last. She hesitates, wavers a bit, then hops down, stumbles, and drops to her hands and knees. The rest of us are already on the ground, trying not to silhouette ourselves against the deep black sky within view of the spiders. The hatch swings closed as the rover bounces off along the narrow peak of the ridge, then turns to the west and begins to descend. Jamie has set it to roll to a stop after a klick or so, more or less at the bottom of the slope.
“So?” Berto says. “Are they coming for us?”
Lucas rises up to his knees and closes one eye.
“I don’t think so,” he says after a few seconds. “Looks like they’re still tracking the rover. Should we get moving?”
“No,” I say. “We’ll stay here until they’re clear. I don’t want them to notice that we’ve bailed if they haven’t already.” I crawl over to Nasha. She’s still on all fours, head hanging down, long braids just brushing the ground. “Hey,” I say, more quietly now. “You okay?”
She looks up, her eyes narrowed with pain. “I’m alive. That’s something, right?” She settles back into a sit, wraps her arms around her legs, and rests her forehead against her knees. “I’m sorry,” she says after a moment. “I’m not sure I can do this, Mickey. I can barely stand. How many kilometers do we have ahead of us?”
I touch her shoulder. She flinches, and I pull away.
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “However far it is, you’ll get there. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met. You could walk back to Midgard if you had to.”
“I don’t know, Mickey,” she says without looking up. “I don’t think I’ve ever hurt like this before. I’m not bailing on you. Whatever we have to do, I’ll try to do it. If it turns out that I can’t, though, you’re going to have to leave me. You know that, right?”
I open my mouth, hesitate, then close it again.
“I’m serious,” Nasha says. “I know you don’t want to think about this. I know more than most what it’s like to watch someone you love die, you know? But every human being on the planet is depending on this mission. You can’t let me slow you down.”
I put my hands over hers and lean closer. “No. I don’t want to hear this shit, Nasha. Every human being on the planet can rot, as far as I’m concerned. I’d trade every one of them for you.”
She raises her head from her knees. The expression on her face isn’t suffering now. It’s anger. “Don’t be stupid, Mickey. If I can’t get where we’re going, and then somehow get back to the dome, I’m already dead. Say you told these guys to fuck off and stayed with me. How long do you think the two of us would last out here, even if those things didn’t come back for us?”
I shake my head. “Doesn’t matter. Wherever you go, I go. If you’re so concerned about saving the colony, I guess you’re gonna have to pull your shit together and start walking.”
She stares at me.
I stare at her.
“Lie down,” I say.
Her eyes narrow. “What?”
“Lie down,” I say again, almost whispering now. “Please. Lie down, and don’t get up until I tell you to.”
“Look—”
“Please,” I say. “Please, just trust me.”
“Hey,” Lucas says. “The rover’s stopping.”
I turn away from Nasha and crawl twenty meters or so over to a spot where the land begins to drop away. At max magnification through my ocular I can see the rover as it rolls to a halt down in the valley.
“We should go,” Lucas says. “We don’t know how long it’ll take those things to get through the demolition. We need to be long gone when they’re done.”
I glance back at Nasha. She’s flat on her back, one arm half covering her face, the other resting on her stomach.
“No,” I say. “Not yet. I need to see what they do now.”
“Uh-huh,” Lucas says. “And the fact that you’re stalling has nothing to do with the fact that Adjaya’s down again, right?”
I turn to look at him. He stares back, then shakes his head.
“I’m sorry, Mickey, but we need to move,” he says. “We need to put distance between us and them, and we need to do it fast. If she can’t move now, maybe Nasha can catch up with us once she’s on her feet again.”
Lucas stands and looks around. Nobody else moves.
“Get down,” Berto says after a long, awkward moment. “You’re making an ass of yourself, Lucas.”
Lucas turns to Cat.
“Gomez is right,” she says. “Shut up and get down.”
He hesitates, starts to speak, then growls and drops to one knee.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “We’ll be moving soon enough.”
Down in the valley, the spiders are gathering. Over the course of ten minutes or so, they press in around the rover, forming a cordon maybe two hundred meters across. After another few minutes, one of them approaches. It circles the rover twice, then clambers up onto the hull. It moves slowly, stopping every step or two to tap at the metal with a foot. Eventually, it reaches the burner turret.
It bites through the barrel of the burner cleanly, shears it completely away.
“Well,” Berto says, just at my shoulder, “I guess that answers our question about whether they can penetrate our armor or not.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Guess so.”
“Okay,” Lucas says. “We see what they’re doing, right? Can we go now?”
“Relax, Lucas,” Berto says without looking back. “We’ll be moving in a minute.”
“Relax?” Lucas says. “We need to—”
“You need to shut up,” Berto says. “Seriously, Lucas. Things are happening here.”
“Not to interfere,” Speaker says, “but Lucas is correct. They are ignoring us now, but they have not forgotten about us. Once they have completed the dissection of the rover, they will come looking, and they are able to move much more quickly than we are on foot.”
“I understand,” I say. “We’ll get moving very soon, I promise.”
Below us, the ring of spiders has closed around the rover, and pieces are starting to come off. Twenty or so of them are climbing over and around it, gouging out hunks of armor and tossing them aside. Another thirty or more are in a tight cluster around the slowly disintegrating chassis, gathering the pieces the others are removing and sorting them into piles.
“What do you think?” Berto says. “Is that all of them?”
“Not sure,” I say. “It has to be most of them, though. I thought there were a hundred or so originally. Between your bombardment and Cat and Lucas’s sniping we must have killed half of those at least.”