by M. R. Carey
All the same, something is very wrong. Under the bandage her skin is alive, crawling, as though it wants to migrate to some other part of her. Her head is heavy and hot. Her stomach too, an oven baking her dry. When she cried for John, which she did long and hard, no tears came from her eyes.
Everybody, by this time, has made the pilgrimage to the lab’s freezers and inspected the tiny corpse in cabinet ten. Everybody has accepted that it is what Greaves says it is: one of the hungry children they just encountered. The children who all but slaughtered them from a standing start despite the adults’ massive superiority in weapons and training.
If they had only known, John might be alive. And Penny. And Phillips. Khan has always been able up to now to make allowances for how Stephen thinks. How he behaves. And she knows he tried his best to tell them his secret. But for now, and for the first time ever, she finds it hard to look at him or to think kindly of him.
Words wash around her. Meanings follow at their own pace, or some of them do. She is not always at home to take delivery.
Akimwe argues for going back. His lover, Private First Class Gary Phillips, is among the dead. He asserts, over and over again, that they can’t just leave him there. Leave them all there, like rubbish dumped along the road.
John is there too, Khan thinks. I should feel the same way Akimwe feels. But she doesn’t. When she thinks of John Sealey, she thinks of their bodies pressed together between the upper and middle bunks—the narrow space that they defended against the world. That’s important. The scientist in her insists on it. Her memories are John’s mortal remains, and that roadside carrion is nothing.
But the living owe a duty to the dead. Even the feral children know that. That’s why they ran and ran in Rosie’s wake, all the way from Invercrae. They want their brother, their friend, their own to be returned to them. Which is exactly what Akimwe wants.
She sees it all in that moment. Everything that’s happening, and has to happen. But it slips away again. Her mind won’t make a fist to hold it in.
So it is left to Dr. Fournier to explain how important the specimen in freezer ten is. How unique it is. McQueen scoffs at that word. How can it be unique, when they’re surrounded by the evil little fuckers? And it’s true that Fournier’s words ring a little hollow right now. In fact, everything about him is hollow. He looks like a cardboard cut-out of himself stood up as a point-of-sale display in the days when smiling faces sold things. Not that he’s smiling.
The children are—or seem to be—something completely new, he tells the silent room. They are infected but they can still think. Properly focused research might be able to pinpoint the mechanism involved and then duplicate it. To find a cure, or a vaccine. This is the single most important discovery anyone has made since the Breakdown began.
Fournier speculates, briefly, on what the children might be. The offspring of women who were already pregnant when they were infected, or else the children of atypical hungries who retained some human drives apart from feeding. Second generation, almost certainly. The Cordyceps pathogen has to have been mediated through something in order to explain these functional and structural changes, and the most likely candidate is a placenta.
Khan feels a vibration, as Fournier says that word, from the depths of her own abdomen. It feels for a moment as though Rosie is still moving, but it’s just her: a freight train with a single carriage, a single passenger, destination still unknown.
Fournier seems to have realised at last how little anyone cares about his speculations. He pulls himself together and sums up quickly. They have to get the sample—the child from Invercrae—back to Beacon, along with their report. The scientific effort that is needed now will involve dozens or hundreds of researchers and years of time. And that work can’t start until they get their specimen home. With the radio out, they can’t even let the Main Table know what they’ve found. They have to bring the sample back, or everything they have done will be wasted.
It’s quite a long speech. Dr. Fournier makes it, for the most part, with his eyes down, staring at the steel-latticed floor. But when he has finished he looks at Colonel Carlisle, just once, as if he is searching for approval or agreement in the colonel’s eyes.
Foss, over the walkie-talkie, says thank you. She says she likes to know what she’s shooting, especially when it’s cuter than kittens. She adds that if they are ever going to get started on those fucking treads they’ve got maybe an hour or so of daylight left.
McQueen says he doesn’t think daylight is going to make much difference. They’ve got the spotlights, and all the kit. The trouble is that as soon as they step outside the doors all hell is probably going to break loose again. They’re stuck here for the duration, which might mean until they’re all dead. Right now he is more concerned with the question of what they’re going to do with Greaves—only he doesn’t say Greaves, he says “the Robot.” He offers some suggestions. The mildest is that they shove Greaves out of the airlock and leave him to die. Another, not the most extreme, involves a bayonet.
The colonel states, without inflection, that he has written up Stephen’s actions and will refer them for adjudication and punishment as soon as they’re back in Beacon.
McQueen says that’s not good enough. Akimwe agrees, and the whole room tenses for a confrontation that seems to have been a very long time in coming. It’s awful, all of this is awful, but Khan feels as though she is watching it through the wrong end of a telescope. At the same time, everything is too close, too confined. Rosie is full of the rank sourness of human bodies pressed and rolled against each other like cheese in a vat. Every time she inhales, the smell hits the back of her nose, tickles and scorches there.
John is dead and there is nothing left that isn’t burning to the ground. Except her baby. Except that little sliver of life that caught in her and quickened.
“He saved me,” she whispers. She clears her throat and says it again, louder.
They’re the first words she has spoken. Everybody looks at her and she holds up her bandaged arm. “Stephen saved me, after I was hurt.”
“That’s beside the point,” McQueen says.
“Not to me.”
“He almost killed the rest of us.”
“Well, you did that first,” Khan points out. “You shot one of them without even looking at what was happening, and everything went to hell. We were fine up until then. And by the way, you should know that unless we leave that body here for them to find, they’ll keep coming after us. That’s what this is about. That’s what it’s been about all along.”
“And who brought the damn thing on board in the first place?” McQueen demands. “Thanks. You’ve made my point. It’s way past time we stopped talking about this and just fucking dealt with it.”
The ex-lieutenant seems to be all done with words. He stands up, slowly, making a big deal out of it.
“We need a little leadership here,” he says. “That little tosser hung us out to dry, and he probably spiked the radio, too. Now, are you going to show him the door or do I have to do it myself?”
With a heavy sense of inevitability, Khan finds a fork—the only sharp implement on the table—and grabs a hold of it with her good left hand. She is so tired and so sick, she would much rather just sit here, but if McQueen is going to square off against the colonel to decide Stephen’s fate then he’s going to do it with three tines lodged in his kidney.
But Stephen breaks the tableau. He pulls the curtains of his bunk aside and peers out at them, as though all this time he has only been waiting for his cue. His face is pale and his eyes are wide, but his tone when he speaks is calm and precise.
He says, “I’m happy to go outside. I was actually going to suggest it.” And then, although Khan thinks she must have misheard this part: “I’ll need to put my suit on.”
43
Private Sixsmith is not a good teacher, Greaves thinks. She locates and assembles the hydraulic track puller and drills him in its use, but she omits severa
l pieces of information that he considers crucial.
One: she doesn’t tell him that the Rosalind Franklin has “live” rather than “dead” track, held under tension by the rubber brushings in each track block so there is less risk of a throw as it passes over the return rollers. If he didn’t know this already he would expect the treads on the upper span to be under lower tension than those on the ground span.
Two: she tells him to set the puller to deliver 1,800 mechanical horsepower, the maximum it will output. This is only appropriate if the break is in the middle of a span, and must be adjusted depending on the distance from the return rollers.
Three: she omits to mention that Greaves will need to replace the existing connectors on the intact blocks adjacent to the damaged ones. Even if they look sound, they may be stressed in the plane of the existing break. Fitting new blocks to mounts that have been stressed in this way will practically guarantee another track throw.
As it happens, none of these omissions causes Greaves any practical difficulties. He read the track puller’s manual from cover to cover on the second week out from Beacon. He read the manuals for all the onboard equipment, even the ones that were already familiar to him from Rina’s lab. Still, it’s useful to see a live demonstration, and in this respect he has no complaints to make about Sixsmith’s instructions. She shows him how to position the pump, and the safest angle from which to fire the tapping-bit. These are useful things to know and the manual did not explicitly address them.
“A few wars ago, this was a four-man job,” Sixsmith tells him. “Tanker bar, cheater pipe, the whole frigging wardrobe. Even now, I don’t envy you doing it alone. The puller makes it possible but it doesn’t make it easy.”
“Thank you, Private Sixsmith,” Greaves says meekly. “I’ll do the best I can.”
“And you’re sure you don’t want to take a gun?”
“We are not,” McQueen says, “giving this fucking retard a gun.”
Greaves doesn’t answer, since McQueen’s response has made his own unnecessary. He absolutely does not want a gun. He won’t have either of his hands free to carry a weapon, and he wouldn’t be able to use one in any case. He read all the manuals for the guns and rifles too, of course, but only in order to understand their functioning. Not because he ever seriously thought about firing one.
They all watch as he puts on the suit. Its existence seems to make Dr. Fournier very angry, though he says nothing. Perhaps he feels that he is the only one on board who should be allowed to keep secrets from the others. Perhaps secrets are meant to be a privilege of rank.
“That is grotesque,” McQueen says, shaking his head.
Greaves tries to explain that form follows function. “The principle is heat diffusion via the placement of—”
“I don’t want to know the principle, fuckwit. I just want you to get out there and do the job. Or get yourself eaten, so we know where we stand.”
Dr. Khan is not present. She has pronounced herself unwell and taken to her bunk. Greaves had thought she might try to dissuade him from going outside, but she seems to be having difficulty at the moment focusing her mind on her surroundings. When he saw her last, as she withdrew, her face was flushed and she had a visible tremor in her hands.
Greaves frets. What are these things a symptom of? Just shock, or something worse? Has his cure—or rather his desperate, ad hoc work-around—been effective or has it failed? If the latter, the infection could become active again at any moment.
But he can’t help her unless he goes outside and acquires what he needs. That’s the whole point of volunteering to repair the broken tread.
Lie.
Liar.
Not the whole point. There’s something else he needs to do. Will risk his life to do, although he has no idea why it matters so much. It ought not to matter at all.
He pulls on the facemask and hood with a sense of relief. If they can’t see his face, they can’t see his thoughts.
“Here you go, you little lunatic.” Sixsmith says this without heat, almost with respect. She hands him, one by one, the track puller, the slender cylinder of compressed air in its shoulder sling, and the toolbox.
“I’d like my sampling kit too,” Greaves mumbles. “Please.”
McQueen rolls his eyes, but they humour him. They think he is sticking to a routine, just for the comfort it brings. They think, as always, that they understand him. Acting Lieutenant Foss brings the kit, and Greaves clips it to his belt, which he has deliberately worn on top of the heat-dispersal suit.
Then Foss opens up the inside door of the airlock for him, and he steps in. Greaves is used to missing the signals other people send with their faces and making up the lost information in other ways, but he sees the moment when Dr. Akimwe looks away. Dr. Akimwe blames him for the death of Private Phillips, whom he loved. He knows, of course, that Private Phillips died before Greaves sealed the mid-section door. But the logic that is operating here is not a simple, linear one. Guilt and innocence are tangled up in each other, elided.
Foss drops back as Carlisle steps up, taking her place at the airlock controls. “Are you sure you want to do this, Stephen?” the colonel asks.
Stephen nods. He’s very sure—and very grateful for the vagueness of the word “this.” He is sure of what he wants to do, and has no wish at all to explain it.
“Be careful,” the colonel says. “And come back inside at the first sign of movement.” He knows Greaves well enough not to try to touch him, but he gives him a nod of reassurance and perhaps acknowledgement. Then he closes the inner door.
Greaves is committed now.
Inside the mask he smiles, because of the certainty. Because being committed means a reduction of randomness, a paring down of possibilities. It will be hard, and he might die, but it’s good to have a clear through-line and to depend on nothing but his own abilities.
The outer door opens. He steps through it.
It is very dark at first. The moon has filled out a little since his last night-walk but rags of cloud are racing across the sky so it comes and goes.
He is alone in the night, as far as he can tell. All the rest of the crew are inside the hull. They can’t see him or interact with him. Sixsmith had tried to fit him with a radio microphone but had given up when she saw how tightly the mask and hood fitted him. A mike that broke one of the suit’s seals would be worse than useless.
Because from another point of view, he is far from alone. The children are out here somewhere, possibly very close. Greaves has stepped out of his own world into theirs. At night, he knows, they can only see heat. Their sight in the visible spectrum is no better than his, so the suit will disguise him. But it won’t muffle the noise he makes as he works, which will be considerable. His best hope, or perhaps his only hope, is that the fire started by Rosie’s flamethrower has forced them to relocate.
He addresses himself to the repairs. This is the first time he has ever used any of these tools, but their operation is simple and the task has an algorithmic structure that appeals to him.
Locate the damaged tread blocks. There are only two, which is good.
Break the track by knocking out the end connectors on their inside and outside edges. The puller has a tapping-bit attachment like a blunt-ended road drill specifically for this. The bit is powered by the gas cylinder and delivers a colossal amount of power to an area perhaps two square inches in cross-section. It feels to Greaves as though he is swinging a sledgehammer without having to raise it. The recoil frightens him a little, but the connectors pop away with almost no resistance.
Replace the damaged blocks with whole ones. He has brought ten and uses four—swapping out both the damaged blocks and their nearest neighbour on either side.
Attach the puller’s clamps to the two loose ends of the track, then set the main gauge to 1,500 horsepower, which he has judged by eye to be sufficient. The hydraulics go to work as he operates the pump, dragging the broken ends together under higher and higher tensio
n until at last they are where they need to be. The puller is now holding the tread together like a fingertip on a knot.
Fit new end connectors, again using the tapping-bit.
And release the puller. This is far and away the most dangerous part: if he has miscalculated the tension, the tread will snap and he will be standing right in front of it—perfectly positioned to be slapped across the face with a gauntlet of modular steel plates moving at eighty to one hundred metres per second.
He has not misjudged. The puller slides free and the tread holds.
Greaves’ inner clock tells him he has been out here for forty minutes. Lacking any visual confirmation of the extent of the damage, Sixsmith had estimated that repairs would most likely take around three hours. Greaves resets the notional timer with a half-painful prickling of tension. He has told nobody what he intends to do now. He has allowed them to believe that he will finish repairing the tread and then return immediately to the airlock.
But he hasn’t actually told a lie. That Rubicon glistens in the dark in front of his eyes, still and deep and treacherous.
Greaves puts down the puller, the cylinder, the toolbox. He walks away from Rosie into the dark and the silence, following one of the two flattened paths left by the vehicle’s treads. This is wilderness, uneven and unpredictable, but the going is relatively easy as long as he sticks to the path. He makes good progress.
After half an hour, he is back among the trees. He can feel the residual heat from that afternoon’s fire but the smell doesn’t reach him. He wonders whether it would include scorched flesh as well as charred wood and vegetable matter. He wonders whether he has come here on a fool’s errand.
But the bodies are intact. The flamethrower was pointed at the canopy and the east wind spread the blaze away to the west, leaving them untouched. And the living children, as far as he can see, have not yet returned to claim their dead. Greaves sits and waits until the moon comes out from the scudding clouds, letting him see to work.