Wake up.
“Mickey?” Nasha whispers, her lips brushing my ear. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I roll over in the darkness until our foreheads are touching. “Was I talking?”
“No. Just breathing hard and twitching. Bad dream?”
“Sort of.” I reach up to touch her cheek. She puts her hand over mine and squirms closer. “I was Eight, down in the labyrinth.”
“Oh,” she says. “Oh gods. Did you…”
“What? Die? No, I woke up right before.”
She kisses me. “Good. You’ve got enough of your own deaths to dream about without having to worry about his too.”
I roll over onto my back and sigh. “It was weird. It wasn’t really like a dream. It was…”
She slides her arm across my belly and rests her head on my chest. “It was what?”
“Real,” I say. “It was real. Like I was remembering it. Like it happened to me.”
“Well,” she says. “It kind of did, right?”
I pull her closer. “We’ve been over this. I wasn’t Eight. Eight wasn’t me. He was just a guy who looked like me and talked like me and put his hands all over my stuff.”
“Maybe,” she says, and I can hear in her voice that she’s already sliding back into sleep. “It kind of seems like your brain disagrees, though.”
I GET A ping from Berto the next morning. He’s bored, and he wants to know if I’m up for some hiking. I blink to my duty roster.
It’s empty.
That’s weird. I thought I was on tomato duty today.
I check tomorrow.
Empty.
Next day?
Empty.
Now I’m spooked. The only time you get three straight days duty-free on Niflheim is when you’re dead. I send a query to the AI that runs human resources. A half second later it bounces back a note letting me know that my schedule has been cleared for the indefinite future, by order of Commander Marshall.
Oh well. After a quick check to make sure he hasn’t canceled my rations as well, I bounce back to Berto and let him know I’m game.
“INDEFINITE LEAVE FROM duty? That sounds fantastic.”
I glance over at Berto. I can’t read his expression behind his rebreather, but there’s no mockery in his voice.
“Does it, though? Because, to me, it kind of sounds like a threat.”
Berto clambers up onto a block of broken stone jutting out from the fern-covered slope we’ve been climbing, then turns and offers me a hand up. He’s carrying a pack bigger than the one I took down into the labyrinth, but for some reason I’m the one who can’t seem to get enough air into his lungs.
“I don’t follow,” he says as he pulls me up beside him. “I’m basically on indefinite leave. I don’t feel threatened at all.”
We sit down on the edge of the block with our legs dangling, facing back toward the dome. I don’t know how Berto is doing this, but even though I’m carrying nothing but a water bottle, I need a few minutes to breathe. For me, at least, climbing even a shallow grade while wearing a rebreather in an atmosphere that’s less than ten percent oxygen is a workout.
That said, this is a beautiful day. It’s hard to believe this is the same planet where we made landfall thirty months ago. The sun is a yellow ball in a pinkish-blue sky dotted with white puffs of clouds, and the terrain between here and the dome is a rolling blanket of green and purple vegetation, studded with the occasional granite outcrop or scrubby tree. The dome itself looks like a toy from this distance, an inverted cereal bowl surrounded by a ring of gossamer fairy towers. Days like this, I could almost start to like it here.
Unfortunately, days like this aren’t going to last.
“I’m sure you’re loving this,” I say, and I’m not sure if I mean the time off or the climb or just the fact that we’re stuck on this planet for the rest of our lives, however long that turns out to be. “But you and I are in very different situations, Berto. There’s a reason you’re on indefinite leave, and when that reason is over, you’ll be back on regular duty. Not so for me.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I guess that’s true. Also, so far as I know, Marshall doesn’t actively want to kill me.”
I sigh. “Also true. Even if he didn’t want to kill me, though, there’s no such thing as a permanent basic subsidy on a beachhead colony. Everybody knows that. If you don’t work, you don’t eat.”
“So has he cut your rations?”
“Not yet. I think the implication is that my only duty right now is to retrieve that bomb.”
“Okay,” he says. “That sounds about right. So when are you going to do that?”
“Better question,” I say. “Am I going to do that?”
He turns to look at me, shakes his head, then looks back toward the dome. “I had dinner with Dani last night. According to her, there’s nothing wrong with the reactor itself. They ran a full diagnostic yesterday, and everything came back green. They’re only running at eight percent of full capacity, though. I tried to get her to tell me why, but I honestly don’t think she knows. All she said was that they’d been ordered to reduce fuel usage to the minimum necessary to sustain current operations.”
“That’s not really helpful, is it?”
“No,” Berto says. “I guess not. Could mean we’re actually running out of fuel, but yeah, could also mean Marshall is trying to manipulate you, if you’re really feeling paranoid.”
“Right—and I’m not going after the bomb until I know which one of those is true.”
Berto pulls a protein bar from his vest pocket, peels off the wrapping, then lifts his rebreather and takes half of it in one bite. He offers the rest to me, but those things are nothing but compressed cycler paste, and I’ve had more of that in its original form than I want to remember. I shake my head. He shrugs, swallows, and then shoves the rest into his mouth.
“Well,” he says with his mouth still full, then gags and has to pause to crack open a water bottle and wash the remains of the bar down his throat. “Wow. Those things are … not great.”
I roll my eyes. “No shit.”
“Anyway, as I was trying to say, you said yourself that Marshall’s reaction seemed genuine when you talked to him about the reactor. Between that, what you saw in the corridor the other day, and what I’ve gotten from Dani, it seems pretty likely that something really is wrong, doesn’t it? Is it exactly what Marshall says it is? Who knows? Hard to figure what else it could be, though, isn’t it?” He pauses then, and stares off toward the dome. I can see his jaw working under the rebreather, muscles bunching and relaxing. Finally, he turns to me again. “Look, Mickey. I get why you don’t want to do this, and I get why you want to know exactly what’s going on—but really, you’re just delaying at this point. You can keep doing that for a while, I guess. I mean, if you wanted to push it, you could just wait until the weather turns and things actually start going to pieces. Marshall’s not about to let people start dying just to screw with you. If the reactor miraculously ramps back up to full capacity then, you’ll have your answer.”
“Uh-huh. And if it doesn’t?”
He shrugs. “If it doesn’t, you hustle over to your creeper pals and get that bomb back before anybody you actually like goes down, I guess.”
We’re only a klick or so from the bomb’s hiding place right now. Fifteen minutes, and we could be there. Another hour, and we could be back to the dome. I could hand the damn thing over to Marshall and be done with it. And then …
Would he really kill me? At this point, I honestly don’t know.
I’m about to say we should probably get going when Berto says, “What’s Nasha think?”