“Yeah,” I say. “I think so, anyway.”
She waits for me to come to her, then closes the last half meter between us with a lunge that ends with her arms wrapped tight around me and her mouth pressed to my ear.
“Thank you,” she whispers. “Thank you for not dying.”
I hold her, eyes squeezed shut, until her grip loosens and she pulls away. Cat and Jamie are on their feet now.
“The bomb,” Cat says. “Did you get it?”
“Not yet,” I say. “Soon, though.”
I blink to a chat window.
<Mickey7>: Berto? You still alive up there?
<RedHawk>: Barely. But yeah. I’m functional.
<Mickey7>: Can you fly in the dark?
<RedHawk>: To get away from here? Hell, yes.
<Mickey7>: Get back to the dome. Come back here with a lifter. Tell Marshall we’ve got a deal for the bomb, but he has to get us home first.
<RedHawk>: You got it, boss. I’ll be in the air in five.
“Mickey?” Jamie says. “What did you give them?”
I turn to look at him. The look of alarm on his face makes me wonder how much he’s already guessed.
“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing yet, anyway.”
MARSHALL IS WAITING for us in the hangar when we land. “Well?” he says, while I’m still halfway through the lifter’s hatch. “Where is the device?”
“We don’t have it,” I say. “We’ve got a deal to get it back, but they’re still holding on to it for the moment.”
His jaw sets and his face darkens. “Gomez told me you had the device. I would not have authorized a lifter otherwise. Do you have any idea how much energy the gravitic grids in this machine draw?”
“Well,” I say, “if you hadn’t authorized the lifter we would probably have died out there, and you would never have gotten your bomb back. Count your blessings, I guess.”
“Barnes,” Marshall says, his voice low and even. “Where is the device?”
“It’s complicated,” I say as Nasha steps down from the lifter beside me. “There’s a lot going on, and we’re not going to talk about it now. No disrespect, sir, but Nasha needs medical attention, and we all need to eat and sleep. When that’s done, I’ll give you a complete rundown.”
He tries to grab my arm as I walk past him, but I shrug him off and keep moving.
“Do not walk away from me,” he says to my back. He starts to say something else as I step into the main corridor, but the door sliding shut behind me cuts him off mid-syllable.
“That was bold,” Nasha says. “Hieronymus Marshall doesn’t like being ignored.”
I shrug. “I don’t much care what Marshall thinks at this point. I don’t expect to be alive long enough to worry about the blowback.”
HERE’S A MORAL quandary for you: Which takes precedence—a promise to a living enemy, or a promise to a dead friend?
“SO?” CAT SAYS. “When are you gonna tell him?”
I look up from my rabbit haunch. I’m so deep into this meal that I’d almost forgotten she was there. We’re alone in the caf at the moment, so I guess it’s okay to talk.
“Tell him what?” I say, then take another bite. “That I’ve gotten us into the middle of a war?”
“Yeah,” Cat says. “That too, I guess. I was mostly thinking about the fact that the deal we have to get the bomb back involves us doing something that we’ve been telling him is impossible for the past two years. If he’d thought there was a military solution to the creepers, he would have taken it a long time ago.”
“There wasn’t,” I say. “There still isn’t, I don’t think—at least not for us acting alone. My impression from what both Speaker and not-Speaker told me is that the two nests have been in a rough balance, strength-wise, for a long time. The collective isn’t looking for us to clear the labyrinth on our own. They’re just expecting us to tip the balance in their direction.”
Cat pokes at her potatoes with the tip of her fork. “And you agreed, huh?”
I pick the last scraps of meat from the bone I’m holding, sigh, and drop it onto my tray. “Honestly, I don’t know what I agreed to. They said they wanted our help. They didn’t specify what, exactly, that meant. I guess they could be expecting us to go down into the labyrinth with guns blazing, but I don’t know … set aside that we don’t actually have the numbers to do that. I’m not sure I can go to war with Speaker’s people.”
Cat raises one eyebrow. “People? Really?”
I lean back, close my eyes, and rub my face with both hands. Now that my stomach is semi-full, my body is telling me that it needs to be unconscious as quickly as possible.
“Aren’t they? What else would you call them at this point?”
She shrugs. “Bugs? Monsters? Thinking of them as people is going to make what we have to do a lot harder, you know?”
I sigh again. “Yeah, Cat. I know.”
The door slides open behind Cat, and Berto walks in. He shows his ocular to the scanner at the counter, collects his food, and then comes over to drop onto the bench beside me.
“Hey,” he says. “What’s with the rabbit, Mickey? Did Marshall bump your rations when he made you king of the creepers?”
“Not quite,” Cat says. “He’s eating rich people food courtesy of your stunt on the rock wall yesterday.”
Berto looks from Cat to me, then back. “Huh?”
“We had a disagreement about whether you’d make it,” I say.
Cat nods. “I bet him dinner that you were gonna die.”
Berto grins. “Finally learned your lesson about betting against me, huh, Mickey?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Better late than never, right?”
Berto digs into a mound of yams and fried crickets. “You told Marshall what you signed us up for yet?”
“Not yet. Thought I’d get a last meal first, and maybe a nap.”
He nods without looking up from his food. “Good idea. Who knows? Maybe he’ll have a stroke and die before morning, right?” He shovels up a half dozen forkfuls in rapid succession, not even fully clearing his mouth in between. “How’s Nasha doing?”
“She’s down at Medical getting her brain scanned. They told me it would be a couple of hours.”
“Really?” Berto says. “Seems like overkill, doesn’t it? She seemed mostly okay in the lifter.”
“Maybe. Burke was pretty insistent, though. I guess you don’t screw around with head injuries.”
“Guess not.”
Berto stops talking now, and focuses single-mindedly on eating. There’s nothing left on my tray but bones at this point, and Cat is picking delicately at her last scraps of potato.
“So,” she says after a few minutes of watching Berto clear his tray. “Back to the point: What are you gonna tell Marshall tomorrow?”
I’m trying to come up with an answer when my ocular pings.
<Med1:Burke>: We’re done with Adjaya’s workup. You need to come down here.
My mouth runs suddenly dry, and my heart lurches into a panicked jackhammer rhythm.
<Mickey7>: What’s happening, Burke? Is something wrong?
<Med1:Burke>: She’s not dead, okay? But get down here, Mickey. Now.
“YOU SEE THAT?” Burke says. We’re looking at a semi-transparent rendering of Nasha’s head. He’s pointing to what looks like a tiny star in a dark cavity just behind her left ear. “Back during transit, we had to pull a benign mass out of her left temporal lobe. Remember that?”
I give him a flat, blank stare. No, Burke. I’d completely forgotten, you asshole.
“Anyway, that spot you’re looking at is a micro-bleed into what’s left of the surgical cavity. There are a bunch of vessels in the area that maybe never really healed properly. I’d guess the blow to the head that she took out there knocked a few of them loose.”
“Okay. So did you fix it?”
He gives me a look that tells me his estimate of my IQ just dropped by twenty points.
“No,” he says. “I did not fix it. That’s why I needed you down here. So I could ask what you want me to do.”