by M. R. Carey
No hungries in that infinite light-show. No junkers. No lies or bullshit. The world ended more than a decade ago, but the news hasn’t made it out there yet and it won’t make any difference when it does. Perfect truth is black and white and it doesn’t know our names.
McQueen is wrestling with his pride and with his definition of himself. He isn’t enjoying it, but he doesn’t shrink from it either. It’s absolutely necessary to know who you are, as the basis for knowing anything else.
Cutting loose with the flamethrower felt necessary and obvious at the time, as though it was just the part of the equation that comes after the equals sign. He didn’t think about wind speed or their own displacement as they moved. He just thought about the response that needed to be made to that dead man on the ground, hacked to the bone like meat on a slab.
In other words, he lost control. Carlisle called the play, and he called it right. You don’t do a broad sweep with a flamethrower from a moving vehicle unless you want to fry yourself and everyone who’s riding with you.
There are only two ways you can go from that realisation. You can make up stupid stories about how you were actually right all along because X and Y and Z and all the rest of it. Or you can admit you screwed up and try to be better.
McQueen climbs down from the turret. His limbs are heavy and he feels tired to death. It seems appropriate that emotions should have recoil in the same way guns do, because after all they’re just as dangerous. But that doesn’t make it any more pleasant to endure.
To get to the cockpit, he has to walk through the crew quarters. There is a mixed bag of soldiers and whitecoats in there and they all look up when he comes.
Foss is the first to react. She stands up quickly and rips off a salute. As a signal it’s pretty unambiguous. Phillips is right behind her, Sixsmith a little slower but inside of a couple of seconds the three of them are standing there, defying regulations and telling him he’s still ranking officer here.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me!” Dr. Khan exclaims, appalled.
McQueen enjoys that part, at least. But he needs to nip this little revolution in the bud.
He returns Foss’s salute, crisply and punctiliously. “A little confused, aren’t we, Lieutenant?” he says. “Never mind. It will sink in eventually.”
He walks on, leaving silence in his wake.
The cockpit door is open. He goes in and closes it behind him. Carlisle sets his book aside and nods towards the shotgun seat. McQueen stays on his feet, even though he has to stoop a little because of the low ceiling.
“Permission to speak, sir,” he says.
The colonel shrugs mildly. “Of course,” he says.
McQueen doesn’t beat about the bush. There is no point. “You were right about the flamethrower,” he says. “I used it without authorisation and without due care, as you pointed out. In doing so, I risked the safety of the crew and the vehicle. I deserve a reprimand for that, and I accept it. But I’d like you to restore my access to the turret guns. We’re in a bad place and with junkers in the mix it could easily get worse. You may need me, and I can’t do much if I’m not allowed to touch the silverware.”
Carlisle is silent for a moment or two. McQueen waits for the verdict, wanting this to be over.
“Will you sit down, Private McQueen?” the colonel asks him.
“No offence, sir,” McQueen says, “but I didn’t come here to kick back and talk about old times. I just need a yes or a no.”
“Then it’s no.”
The colonel’s tone is flat, emotionless. McQueen feels that recoil again, this time in the form of a cold fizz of static through his nerves. He thinks he must have misheard. Considering the magnitude of the climb-down he has just made, the Fireman’s answer makes no sense.
“Sir, I don’t think one error of judgement—”
“Mr. McQueen.” The colonel drops the words like a baulk of timber, cuts him off dead. “If the flamethrower were the only issue, I would agree with you. But it’s not.”
The colonel stands, wincing as he momentarily shifts some of his weight onto his injured leg. Clearly it’s important to him that they be on the same level for this, one way or the other. “Your whole attitude,” he says heavily, carefully, like a doctor delivering a terminal diagnosis, “is at odds with military discipline and the outlook required of a soldier. To serve in an army, in a militia of any kind, is to subordinate your own wishes and instincts to the orders of your commander. A soldier may have his doubts, but he does what he is ordered to do. Whereas you, Mr. McQueen, seem to regard orders of any kind as an insult to your professionalism.”
McQueen can’t believe he’s hearing this, or who he’s hearing it from. And maybe he should keep his mouth shut until the sermon is over, but there are serious arguments to be made and he already has permission to speak. “I know all about following orders, sir,” he says. “I also know where it can lead to.”
“Thank you,” Carlisle says gravely. “That is exactly the point I’m trying to make. It seems to me that you obey where it’s absolutely required, but that you do so in a spirit of reluctant compromise. Knowing that your own instincts are more reliable and that you could achieve more if you were left to your own devices.”
“That’s not true,” McQueen says.
“Really? Standing orders dictate—”
“Shit, I already admitted I got it wrong! Once! I got it wrong once!”
They’re matching point-blank stares, practically stepping on each other’s toes. The cockpit’s narrow confines are pushing them towards confrontation whether they want it or not. “Standing orders,” Carlisle repeats heavily, “dictate that if the situation on the ground materially changes, you notify your commanding officer.”
“I did that.”
“When you found Lutes’ body, yes. You should have done it the moment you saw the dead dogs.”
“I made a judgement call.”
“Of course.” The colonel nods. “You always do, Mr. McQueen. One judgement call after another. Most of them have been good, I have to admit. But it was only a matter of time.”
“Why?” McQueen demands, contempt thickening his voice. “Because your judgement is so much better than mine?”
“No,” the colonel says, with the same infuriating calm. “Because armies work by simple algorithms. Procedure, however pointless it seems, is there to lessen the chance of error. It filters all the decisions you make through a bed of cross-checks and failsafes. But only if you use it. You could be a fine soldier, Mr. McQueen, if only you weren’t in an army of one.”
McQueen shakes his head, bitter but also—now that the first rush of anger and surprise has passed—coldly amused. This has a symmetry to it. Carlisle is describing him exactly as he sees himself, but upside down so that all his virtues are vices, and presumably all the colonel’s own failings are strengths.
“I have to ask,” he says. “Were you following the algorithms when you bombed Cambridge and Stansted? When you did the burn runs, and fried all those people in their beds? Did that decision filter through okay?”
Carlisle’s mouth tugs down as though he’s got a hook in his lower lip. That one hurt. “Yes,” he says, “and no, respectively. I did what I could within the system to stop the burn runs from happening. But it didn’t work. The wrong decision was made. I offer no excuses for that.”
“No,” McQueen agrees, his face inches from the other man’s. “And you got no reprimands for it, either, did you? I put a dozen men and women in danger but they all lived. You killed thousands and walked away with a medal.”
“You’re mistaken. Nobody gave me a medal.”
“I’m sure they’ll get around to it, sir. Just a matter of time, if you don’t mind me saying.”
The colonel is silent for a moment or two. “Is there anything else?” he asks at last.
“Only what I already said. I’ve got more experience with the field pounder than anyone. The flamethrower, too. Let me do my job.”
<
br /> “If I thought you could do your job, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Words are bubbling up in McQueen’s throat. Saying them won’t do any good. He leaves the way he came, runs the same gauntlet of resentment and solidarity. He has no use for either, but in Rosie there’s only ever one route from A to B.
25
Sunrise finds the crew up and at it. Kat Foss, as ranking officer (and how crazy is that?), leads the charge.
Not that there’s much need for leadership, as far as she can see. Everyone does what has to be done without being told. The motion sensors and immobiliser traps were a sacred mystery once, but seven months have made their operation tediously familiar. So the whitecoats dismantle the perimeter while Foss leads a detail down to the loch with the ten-gallon water drums. Rosie has integral tanks that fill with rainwater run-off, but Colonel Carlisle is a belt-and-braces man.
When they get back from the loch, the roles rotate. The whitecoats add purification tablets to the water drums and stow them in the galley; Foss puts the soldiers on to the maintenance allocation checks. The MAC routine is prescribed by Rosie’s operational manual, which Foss keeps in her hand the whole time and cribs from about ten times a minute. There’s a long and exhaustive list of checks covering the treads, the engine and the environmental controls. Some of them are just diagnostic; others involve getting down and dirty with oilcans, spanners and wrenches. Lutes knew the book by heart, and gave everyone else the reassurance of a safety net—a better pair of eyes verifying everything they did. Lutes being unavoidably dead, Foss does the best she can. She stands over Phillips and Sixsmith the whole time, watching them with a nervous, critical eye. Then when they’re done, she makes them go through the entire list again, out of a general sense that cock-ups are hovering over them and waiting to descend.
They’re going home. Not a one of them quite believes that yet, and not a one of them wants to jinx it.
But in spite of Foss’s slightly obsessive thoroughness, it’s still early when they leave. Colonel Carlisle surrenders the driving seat to Sixsmith, its rightful occupant, but remains in the cab so he can use its comms rig to talk to everyone in the main crew space. Foss takes the mid-section look-out and gives Phillips the turret. She is still hesitant about giving orders to McQueen.
Everyone apart from the look-outs straps in and waits for take-off. They won’t stay strapped in, of course. Rosie’s top speed is twenty miles per hour on a good road, but there are no good roads left. She picks her way slowly along Britain’s rutted, sclerotic arteries, and drops to an 8 mph average when she leaves the tarmac for the scenic route. Most day-to-day activities, whether work or leisure, aren’t inhibited by her easy trundling. But this is turn-around, a day they have been anticipating for a long time. Soldiers and whitecoats alike are showing a due respect.
In fact, the scientists seem downright sombre. Foss can see where they’re coming from, too. More than half a year on the road and nothing to show for it. For all the good they got out of those endless shoot-em-ups and cut-em-ups, they might just as well have been picking blackberries. Better off, in fact. Fresh fruit is hard currency in Beacon.
If Beacon is still there. But it must be. Nothing would have torn the whole camp down so completely that they couldn’t even squeeze a word out. So the lack of comms must be a technical hitch. That’s all it can be.
So personally she’s in a pretty buoyant mood. The image of Lutes’ body almost cut up into pieces is still vivid in her mind—much more vivid than any particular memories of him alive—but the fact that they’re heading home early is the best news she has had since they set out.
And going back with a field commission would be the icing on the cake if she didn’t feel so bad for (it’s just force of habit, but she can’t break it) the lieutenant. McQueen only did what the rest of them were thinking of doing, so where’s the sense in pretending he’s the one to blame? When he put his hands on the guns and the turret turned and the fire spewed out, Foss felt almost like it was happening because she was willing it to. If anything, she wishes she’d got there first. Now, vicariously, she feels herself slapped down by McQueen’s punishment. She doesn’t believe she’s alone in that.
Damn if she isn’t sliding into the same grim mood as the whitecoats. She drags herself out of it again by thinking about what she’ll do when she gets home. First, go to the Twenty-Seven Pavilion and get wasted. Then take a tumble or two with some guy blessed with a respectably sized dick and a sense of direction (there are exactly two men on board Rosie who she was ever sexually interested in, Phillips and Akimwe, and—story of her life—they only have eyes for each other). Finally, go home and wave her lieutenant pips in her father’s face—How do you like that sleeve-candy, quartermaster sergeant? That’s a recipe for a good day right there, and now that they’re heading south again it can’t be more than a few days away.
Rosie’s frame shudders as the engine comes awake. The throbbing climbs and peaks. Sixsmith is dropping down through the gears for a start that will lift them up out of the footprint made by their own massive weight: she knows Rosie better than anyone, now Lutes is dead. They rock back and forth a little as she makes herself some room to manoeuvre, then with a huge lurch and a basso fart of hydraulics they’re underway.
That counts as a smooth take-off, and it gets a fair bit smoother as soon as they’re moving. There’s a scatter of applause from the crew quarters.
“Too kind,” says Sixsmith on the intracom. “Your stewardesses will be passing down the aisles shortly serving drinks and recreational drugs.”
There’s a click and the colonel’s voice takes over. “Mid-section,” he says tersely, “report in.”
“We’re good here,” Foss answers.
Phillips begs to differ. “Sir,” he says, from up in the turret, “I’m seeing movement.”
Shit! What has she missed? Foss puts her fantasies of home sweet home aside for later and takes a look through the tell-tale in the mid-section door, which she should have done before she opened her mouth. She sees nothing but tall trees and weed-choked fields, blurred into green soup by their motion.
“Port or starboard?” she demands.
“Your side. Five o’clock.”
“I’m not getting anything, Colonel.”
“Ten o’clock, too,” Phillips says, tense as hell. “We’ve definitely got company.”
Foss looks again. Still just landscape in her field of vision. Nothing moving that shouldn’t be.
“Phillips, tell me what you’re seeing,” the colonel orders.
“I can’t, sir. Sorry. It’s just glimpses here and there, among the trees. I’m not getting a clear line on it.”
“Rabbits?” Foss guesses. “Foxes?” Not great suggestions, either of them. There just isn’t a whole lot of wildlife about these days. Anything with a pulse is fair game for the hungries. They prefer warm blood but they’ll take what they can get.
There’s a long, strained silence, then Phillips swears.
“Gone?” the colonel asks.
“I don’t know, sir. I keep thinking I’m seeing something, but they’re way low down.”
Which implies animal rather than human. Junkers might crawl to stay under the cover of the weeds, but they couldn’t do that and keep pace with a moving tank.
“Still nothing here,” Foss says. She’s looking a lot harder now. She trusts her own eyes, but from upstairs Phillips has two metres of height on her position and he doesn’t panic easily.
Neither does the colonel, but as previously noted he likes to go belt and braces. “Sixsmith, give us some legs. Phillips, see if there are any blips in the infra-red.”
“Nothing, sir,” Phillips reports in due course. Foss can hear the relief in his voice, and she shares it. Junkers would show as hot spots in the infra-red, as would live animals of any kind. So it’s just hungries, most likely, drawn by the sound of the engines as they started off. There are only so many layers of baffle you can add to an en
gine cowling and still move.
Hungries can outrun Rosie, but only in the short term. It shouldn’t be long before they’ve got the road to themselves again.
“All good?” the colonel demands.
This time Foss and Phillips agree that it is. The phantom blips are forgiven and forgotten.
Rosie’s going home.
26
As soon as they’re underway, Greaves springs his seat strap and retreats from the crew quarters into the lab. He hopes he might get a little time to himself there, since working when they’re on the move isn’t a popular option. It’s too hard to compensate for the rocking of Rosie’s chassis. A few shattered test tubes and ruined samples were enough to wean most of the science team off the habit.
But not today. He is followed almost immediately by Rina. He’s afraid for a moment that she will offer to help him, but it seems she’s got a project of her own to pursue. She flashes him a smile as she moves past him towards the further workbench. It’s a weak smile. Greaves assigns it meaning c (you are my friend) on a list that goes all the way to n (I’m thinking of something that you wouldn’t understand).
“Getting harder and harder to work around me, isn’t it?” Rina asks, patting her protuberant belly. “Don’t let me get in your way, Stephen.”
He considers telling her that there is still more than a foot of clearance on either side of the central walkway if she stands in its centre. But he is almost certain (from her smile, which has now transitioned into a d) that she intends the comment as a joke. He offers a smile in return, usually the safest option, and goes back to his work.
From the crew quarters come the voices of Sealey and Akimwe. They are discussing Cordyceps, the great adversary—its cultural and historical significance, with special reference to Chinese folk legends about its life cycle. Greaves is well aware that the Chinese, almost three thousand years ago, saw the fungus sprouting from the exploded bodies of caterpillars and thought they had chanced upon a magical metamorphosis. A creature that was an animal in summer and a mushroom in winter! They prized Cordyceps as a treatment for heart disease and impotence, the distilled essence of life itself. Later generations found that the fungus could grow through damaged nerve tissue and partially repair it. There’s a prevailing theory that these medicinal uses of the fungus were the precursors to the hungry plague—the doorway through which Cordyceps infected human populations.