“Puny meatsacks,” Vanguard murmured, but he slowed down.
Hey, I like this guy! Jim commented cheerfully. You know, if you replaced your weak, fleshy bits with cybernetic parts, I could provide so much more information for you. We could be a real team.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I’d rather be inside the hardware than have the hardware inside me.
“Hey, Vagabond,” Deke said, “how the hell do you Skingangers live cheek-by-jowl with the Cultists? Don’t you guys hate each other?”
Vagabond stopped in his tracks and stared at Deke with one gleaming green eye and one dark biological one. His claw-like metal hands clenched, and I firmly believe that if Deke hadn’t already shown he was packing some kind of augmentation himself, the cyborg would have taken a swing at him.
“We do not allow the use of that word,” Vagabond declared. “We consider it a slur.”
“Sorry,” Deke said, raising a hand, palm-out as if in surrender. “Bad habit. I should have said Evolutionist.”
Huh. I didn’t even know enough about the cyborgs to be aware that Skinganger was offensive. Vagabond said nothing, just stood immobile as if considering whether or not he bought Deke’s apology. Abruptly, he turned on his heel and walked again, his pace still fast enough to be uncomfortable.
“We never hated the Predecessor Cultists any more than we despise all Normals,” he answered Deke’s question, his voice carrying back to us despite how far ahead he’d gotten. “They hated us for who and what we are, and we fought them for our survival. That kind of conflict takes a life of its own.”
I shut my mouth. It had been hanging open from the sheer length of the dissertation, more words put together at one go than Vagabond had said to us the entire time we’d been on the ship. Deke had struck a nerve.
“Marakit taught us,” he went on, a gentler note to his voice, “that the powerless hating each other is exactly what the powerful want. They want to keep us helpless, keep us preoccupied hating and killing each other because then we’ll be too weak to stand against them.”
“Who’s they?” I wondered. “Who exactly is powerful now?”
“Perhaps we are.” Vagabond sounded far too pleased with that idea for my comfort.
He stopped and I thought we’d made him mad again, but then I noticed we were at our compartment.
“You gonna lock us inside again?” Deke asked, pulling open the hatch and stopping halfway through it, looking back over his shoulder at Vagabond.
“You suggest I could trust you?” Vagabond’s head tilted to the side at an angle that no human spine could manage, as if trying to examine us from a different perspective. “You, who have likely killed friends of mine, have almost certainly killed friends of the Tahni among us?”
“Don’t forget the Cultists,” Deke reminded him, a hint of malice in his smile. “I took out a few of them back in the day too.”
“But that’s all in the past, isn’t it?” I pointed out. Not that I was particularly interested in enabling Deke Conner’s head games, but it would have been nice to get out of the compartment more often. “Isn’t that what your boss says? That we need to do things differently now? You might have the power now, but we sure don’t. If we did, we wouldn’t be coming to Marakit for help.”
“No.” Vagabond’s answer was decisive, without the slightest hint he’d even given consideration to the idea. “Marakit may decide to trust you, but that is her choice to make, not mine. I may have exceeded my authority in merely bringing you along.”
I shrugged and followed Deke into the room, kicking the door shut behind me, then closing my eyes and leaning back against it in time to hear the magnetic click of the lock sliding into place. I didn’t want to look at the compartment. I’d grown to hate it these last few days, not just because of the stale odor that seemed to come from every square centimeter along with the air ducts. And not just because of its uncanny resemblance to a jail cell or the cracked, puke-green plastic upholstery on the beds and chairs.
No, I didn’t want to look at Deke. After all this time, I knew what his routine would be. Less than a minute after the door locked, he’d start stripping down to his skivvies then plop down on his cot, legs spread and big, nasty feet hanging off the end of the bed.
Sighing, I cracked an eyelid and winced, seeing exactly what I expected to.
“You know,” I told him, “for a man with genetically engineered good looks, you have the most ratchet toenails I’ve seen on a human being. And that includes the zombie cannibal guy I found on Plateau.”
“Well, excuse the hell out of me, Colonel, sir,” he said, resting his head back against his interlaced fingers, the look on his face completely unconcerned with my opinion. “Maybe you had dedicated pedicurists on the Orion, but it’s been a kind of rough and ready few years back here in the Cluster.”
Yeah, and I wanted to ask him something about that, but I had to assume we were being monitored in here and I didn’t want to give away anything sensitive. Not that I had a clue what Deke might consider sensitive. I pulled one of the chairs as far away from Deke’s bed as it would go in the little compartment and sat down in it. I wanted to take off my boots, but there was a faint residue on every surface and I didn’t especially want to feel it against my bare feet.
“How long have you and Colonel McIntire been together?” I asked Deke, trying to find a question he wouldn’t object to for security reasons.
“Oh, hell, I think it’s been six years now,” he said, eyes closed, as if it would be too much trouble to give an exact number. “I mean, we kinda got involved while I was still a private citizen, and then things got interesting and I was… let’s say, recruited back into the military. That was even before the whole Transformation Virus came along. We had to deal with the Corporate Council trying to mount a coup, then the whole mess with the Northwest Passage and the Skrela waiting there for us, then the Tahni trying to revolt against military rule…”
“Yeah, I keep hearing how hard it was here,” I interrupted. “Out there, we lost more than half our company of Drop Troopers, three quarters of our officers. Lost our ship. Lost fifteen years of our lives. So, I can’t say honestly whether I would have liked to be here more than there.”
“I wish we had a bottle,” Deke said, eyes still closed. “So we could drink to each other’s troubles.” Finally, one of his eyes opened a slit. “What about you? How long have you and Vicky been married?”
“Since the war ended.” I shook my head. “We had it all figured out. We were going to settle on a nice, peaceful colony world, have our own farm and start a family. I should have known that was too much to ask.”
“From what I hear, you’ve seen more in those fifteen years you lost than most people will ever dream of in their lives.”
“Yeah, there is that,” I admitted. He wasn’t wrong.
“Then I suppose the question is, was it worth it? The people you lost… would they have traded it for staying here?”
By God, that was the question, wasn’t it? It hit me between the eyes in that scummy, cramped little compartment on a scummy, beat-up freighter in the middle of nowhere. I’d been thinking about my loss, how much I missed the ones who’d died. But would Top have wanted to go any other way? Shit, the only reason she’d have wanted to come back was so she wouldn’t miss out on the fight with the Unity. But Top would never have been the type to settle down, not even if they’d made her a general. And God knows she would never have accepted that.
“How’d you get to be so fucking smart, Conner?” I asked.
“The usual way,” he said with a shrug. “Pain. Lots of pain. It’s always the best teacher.”
I definitely couldn’t argue with that.
A blaring klaxon roused me from a sound sleep, a familiar sound and a welcome one.
“Transition,” Deke said somewhere in the darkness. I felt around for the light switch on the bulkhead beside my bunk, then winced as the overhead lamp glared at me.