<Command1>: There is only a single human on this planet older than fifty standard years. Can you guess who that is?
<Command1>: I have to go now, Barnes. Dr. Ling will assume command of this colony sometime in the next ten minutes, if what she tells me about the environment in the core is correct. You’re her problem now.
<Command1>: Good luck. I suspect you’ll need it.
I WAKE TO the sound of a lock disengaging. I’d been sleeping with my forehead resting on my knees, propped against the wall next to the door to the surgical recovery room. I look up to see Burke standing over me.
“Get up,” he says. “You can come in now.”
I get to my feet and follow him in. Nasha is there, laid out in a bed that fills ninety percent of the room. Her eyes are closed, but as I watch, her chest rises and then falls.
“Is she…”
“Don’t know,” Burke says. “Let’s find out.”
He pulls out a tablet, shows it his ocular, and then taps at the screen. Something green flows through the tube that runs into a vein on the back of Nasha’s hand.
Her eyelids flutter.
“Adjaya?” Burke says. “Can you hear me?”
Her eyes focus on him, then on me. The tip of her tongue runs across her upper lip. I edge around the corner of the bed and take her hand.
“Mickey?” she whispers. “What the actual fuck?”
“She’s good,” I say. “Right, Burke?”
He squints at his tablet, then up at Nasha. “Can you move your toes?”
She sits half-up, grabs the back of my head in one hand, and pulls me down into a kiss.
“Yeah,” Burke says. “I think she’s good.”
“SO,” BERTO SAYS. “Marshall, huh?”
“Yeah,” Cat says. “Who would have thought that jackass would wind up being the hero?”
I look up from my yams. We’re in between breakfast and lunch right now, and it’s just us and a table full of off-shift tomato tenders from Agriculture in the caf at the moment. “He’s not a hero,” I say. “He’s a martyr. A self-made martyr, which is the worst kind of martyr. It’s not the same thing.”
“Either way,” Berto says, “if we ever get around to building a high school on this planet, they’re definitely gonna name it after him.”
I sigh. He’s right about that.
We eat in silence for the next few minutes. I can’t shake the feeling that they’re judging me.
“I was gonna do it,” I say finally. “I was in the middle of uploading when he went into the core. If I hadn’t been, I would have told him not to do it. I would have gone instead.”
Cat looks up from her tray. “What? Why?”
Berto’s looking at me too now, his face a mix of confusion and annoyance. “Yeah, Mickey. What the hell are you talking about?”
I look back and forth between them. “I mean … I uploaded last night, for the first time in two years. I went to see Ling right after. I was ready to go.”
Berto shakes his head and goes back to eating. “Unbelievable.”
“What?” I say. “You don’t believe me?”
“Hieronymus Marshall has been the bane of your existence for the past eleven years,” Berto says around a mouthful of yams. “And now you’re trying to tell me that you were all ready to throw yourself into the core to save him?” He shakes his head again. “Get over yourself, buddy.”
I turn to Cat. She shakes her head. “Oh, no. Don’t look at me, Mickey. I’m with Berto on this one.”
“Ask Quinn,” I say. “Hell, ask Ling. I was on my way to the core when she told me what Marshall did. I was already a ghost.”
“You’re already an idiot,” Berto says. “You just missed taking a ten-gram slug in the face, and you’re jealous of the guy who shoved you out of the way.”
“Berto’s got a point,” Cat says. “You’re not dead. Nasha’s not dead. The guy who’s made your life hell is dead, and we’ve got enough fuel in storage to get us through the next winter. Everything’s coming up Mickey, you know? You might want to focus on practicing gratitude for the next little while.”
024
EXPENDABLES DON’T USUALLY get to retire.
They don’t ordinarily get kept around forever, mind you. At some point a colony either establishes itself or dies. Either way, the need for someone that you can kill on a whim tends to fade. Remember, though—the Expendable usually isn’t someone you necessarily want to keep around after he’s no longer needed. Bringing along a convicted extortionist murderer sex criminal may make your conscience feel a little better when you have to watch him get dissolved or incinerated or whatever, but when you don’t need someone to do those things anymore, you might start to think twice about whether you really want that guy hanging around with your freshly decanted kids in the park. The most common way that an Expendable ends his career is a fatality followed by a denied regeneration.
Marshall certainly threatened me with exactly that often enough.
Maggie Ling apparently has other ideas. She’s a technologist, and she really likes her drones. She seems pretty convinced that there’s nothing an Expendable can do at this point that a mech can’t do better. She’s never actually told me that I’m fired, and my patterns and my last upload are still on the server, but it’s been over a year now since Marshall died, and she hasn’t given any indication in all that time that she considers me to be anything other than a general-purpose grunt laborer now.
That’s more than okay with me, because Nasha is pregnant and I’d really like to get the chance to meet my kid.
I have to admit, though … I do sometimes catch myself thinking about that other me—the one who got uploaded to the server the night Marshall died. The fact that I’m retired means he’ll never get the chance to exist. I know it’s not rational. It’s not like he’s hanging around in there, pacing back and forth and wishing I’d go ahead and die already. He’s just an abstraction right now, a potential person stuck in server limbo.
As long as I stay retired, I guess that’s all he’ll ever be.
Unless …
The median time between landfall on a new planet and the resulting colony launching its own first expedition is around two hundred years. That’s not so long, really, in the greater scheme of things. Physics has already identified a potential target for us, assuming we manage to make a go of it here.
If we do, I guess they’ll probably need an Expendable, right?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Hmmm … Got another one of these, huh?
The process of writing Mickey7 pretty much flowed directly into the process of writing this one, so I’m going to crib heavily from the thanks I gave at the end of that book. I’m sure by the time my next book comes out I’ll have made a whole host of new friends and been summarily ditched by my old ones, but in the meantime:
The list of people who contributed to this book is a long one. I’m probably going to forget some of them. If you’re one of those, I hope you will forgive me. As you are probably well aware, I’m not nearly as smart as I look.
First, the obvious: my deepest gratitude to Paul Lucas and the good folks at Janklow & Nesbit, without whose guidance and encouragement I would almost certainly have given up on this business long ago, and also to Michael Rowley of Rebellion Publishing and Michael Homler of St. Martin’s Press, both of whom were willing to take a chance on the sequel to an odd little book written by an extremely obscure author. Fun fact: this is the first time I’ve ever gotten paid for a book before it was written. I appreciate both Michaels’ faith in me, and I am pleased to report that I did not in fact have to fake my own death and flee the country after failing to follow through on my contract.
My sincere thanks also go out to (in no particular order):