“We doubt this. Moreover, we do not care. You have killed us. It makes no difference now whether the final blow comes from your device, or from the others.”
“You seem alive enough to me.”
It shudders again, and shuffles a meter or so forward. I step back to maintain the distance between us.
“We have fewer than a brace of ancillaries remaining. The others will come now, and take this place from us. They will destroy those of us that remain. They will destroy the collective. We cannot prevent this, but we can ensure that you do not profit from it.”
“What if we could prevent the others from coming? What if we could protect you from them?”
It falls still for what feels like a long while. Finally it raises its first three segments from the floor and wags them back and forth. “You cannot protect us. You lack the power.”
“We can. We can talk to them, tell them that you’re no longer a threat. If they won’t listen, we can do to them what we did to you.”
It falls silent again, this time for so long that I begin to wonder if it’s shut itself down. I’m just starting to consider what I should do next when it says, “We made an agreement. You betrayed us. Now you seek to make another agreement with us, and to betray whatever agreement you have made with the others. This is not done. This has never been done.”
“Really? Our people do it all the damn time.”
It shudders. “Your people are monsters.”
“Maybe so. You wouldn’t be the first ones to come to that conclusion, anyway. That said, though, this is the best offer you’ll get. Give me the device, and I tell you truly that we will protect you. This is your only opportunity to survive.”
The creeper’s front legs tap out a rhythm against the floor of the chamber.
“We cannot believe you,” it says. “How can we believe you?”
“I can’t give you an answer to that. The fact is, we’re lying bastards when we need to be, and I wouldn’t blame you for not accepting my word. Unfortunately, though, that’s all I have to give you, and from where I stand it doesn’t look like you have any other options.”
The creeper falls still, then shudders, curls back on itself, and disappears back into the chamber.
When it returns, it’s cradling the bomb in its feeding arms.
It shuffles up to me, lays the pack gently at my feet, and then backs away.
“Take it and go,” it says. “Your people should never have come here.”
“You won’t get an argument from me,” I say, and shoulder the pack.
“Remember your promise,” it says as I’m walking away.
“I will,” I say without turning. “This time, anyway. I will.”
022
I DON’T EXPECT a hero’s welcome when we get back to the dome. I don’t expect what we get either, though, which is Marshall standing in the hangar with Amundsen, both of them looking like they’ve been fighting over who gets to murder me first.
“Barnes,” Marshall growls before I’ve even gotten the bay door open. “I don’t know what the hell you thought you were doing out there, but—”
He stops abruptly when he sees that I’m holding the bomb.
“You … you got it?”
“I did,” I say, and step down onto the hangar floor. Amundsen steps forward and takes the pack from me.
“Is it intact?”
“I didn’t open it to check,” I say, “and I know the creepers removed and lost at least one fuel element. The bulk is about the same as I remember, though, so I’m guessing more or less everything is still there.”
“Get the device to Ling,” Marshall says. “She’ll determine whether we have what we need or not.”
Amundsen nods, then turns and starts toward the door. Just before he reaches it, though, he turns back to me. “Look, Barnes … I don’t know if what you did out there today was tactical brilliance, or if it was just dumb luck. If that scene out there this morning was prearranged I could goddamn well kill you for not telling me ahead of time, but … well, the bottom line is that you saved our asses without sacrificing my people. So, I’m grateful.”
He waits for some reply, but I honestly have no idea what to say to that. After an awkward five seconds, he nods again and goes. When the door has closed behind him, Marshall puts a hand on my shoulder.
“Come to my office,” he says. “We need to talk.”
I step back and let his hand fall. “Would love to, sir—but unfortunately I have urgent business to attend to.” He stares at me, jaw hanging slightly open, as I climb back into the lifter and latch the door behind me. He’s still standing there when the hangar door slides open again. Berto engages the gravitics, and we ascend.
WE START WITH a swing out over the ridge where the battle was fought. The craters from Berto’s bombing runs are still there, but if it weren’t for that you wouldn’t be able to tell that anything had happened here. There’s no sign of creepers anywhere—living, wounded, or dead. After that, we head south in a sinuous search pattern that covers fifteen klicks on either side of the straight-line path to the collective. We’re through the hills and out onto the plains when Berto says, “It’s only been a few hours, Mickey. There’s no way a counterattack could have made it this far by now.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess you’re right. Think they’re moving underground?”
He turns to look at me. “You think they’ve got tunnels running through a hundred-plus klicks of bedrock from there to here?”
Sure, it sounds stupid when you put it that way.
Berto swings us around, and we retrace our path back to the battlefield. He sets us down on the ridge, two hundred meters above the entrance to the labyrinth. I pull on a rebreather and climb into the back.
“No accelerator?” Berto says.
I shake my head. “If these guys want to kill me at this point, I guess they can do it. I’m not gonna argue with them.”
The atmospheric trap closes. Thirty seconds later, the bay door slides open and I go.
Hard to believe, but it’s still barely midafternoon. The sun is halfway down in a pale pink sky, and a soft, warm breeze is blowing up from the south. For the thousandth time, I find myself wondering how much longer this weather is going to last, and when it’s over, how long we’ll have to endure the winter that follows.
Doesn’t matter, I guess. It won’t be my problem.
I pick my way down the slope through a field of broken and mangled ferns. The stems are oozing a pale yellow fluid, and the smell is strong enough that I’m catching hints of it even through the rebreather. It’s sickly sweet and cloying, with an overtone of rotting meat, and for the first time in a long while I’m actually grateful that I’m not breathing unfiltered air right now.
When I reach the tunnel entrance, I find Speaker there waiting for me.
“Greetings,” he says in a perfect imitation of Berto. “It is good to see you.”
“You too,” I say. “We thought you were dead.”
“I was … captured.” Speaker says. “Present and aware, but unable to act. It was extremely unpleasant.”
“You got through, though. Back at the dome this morning. That was you, right?”
“I tried. That far from their Prime, the collective’s hold on me was badly weakened. It was clear to me that my Prime’s only hope was to remind you of your promise. I did not think that I succeeded.”
“You did,” I say. “You did well.”
“Yes,” he says. “As did you.”
I let that hang between us for a full minute or more before deciding that there’s no point in putting off the unpleasantness.
“I got the bomb back from the collective,” I say.
“This is good,” Speaker says. “I am pleased for you. I hope you remember your promise to dismantle it.”
“I do. I will. I have to tell you, though—in order to recover it, I had to make a promise to them.”
“Yes,” Speaker says. “This does not surprise me.”