Sixty hours? More?
“Jess, you wanna catch a few zees? I’ll stay up, make sure the beacon doesn’t conk out . . .”
Jess started as if from a trance. He looked over at
her, his face expressionless. “No, that’s okay. I’m good.”
Lara studied him, his deep brown features set into grim lines, the exhaustion and hurt and shame in his gaze. Tired and sad she could live with, but she’d left him alone about what had happened for long enough; too long, maybe.
“Martin, it wasn’t you,” she said softly, and saw him wince ever so slightly, a tightening around his mouth and eyes. “And you know it. Why are you doing this?”
Jess looked away, staring down at the backs of his hands. “I don’t want to talk about this—”
Lara shook her head, feeling a sudden rush of anger at him, at his stupid male need to keep it all for himself. “Well, that’s too bad, Jess. What if it was all my fault? If I’d told you about how weird Pop was acting, maybe we could have stopped him. Or Ellis, why don’t you put it on him? If he’d gotten into Max a few minutes earlier, they might still be alive. Why you, why do you want to take responsibility for this?”
For a moment he didn’t answer, his jaw clenched, his mouth a thin line. The low hum of the ‘cyclers was all there was to hear, pushing barely warmed air through the dying filters. Lara wondered if she’d gone too far; she’d been contracted, ex-Marine, while Jess and his two men had been righting XTs in lieu of prison time. There was always a distance between the “volunteers” and the Company staff—
—and to hell with it. We ‘re going to die together, to hell with going too far. It doesn’t matter anymore. If it ever did.
Jess finally looked up at her, and because she expected him to be defensive and angry, she was a little surprised by the open sorrow she saw across his weary features.
“Because no one else will,” he said, “Pop’s dead, and Weyland/Yutani had us sacrificed before we even got the call. There’s—there’s no one else to feel shitty about what happened. To be responsible.”
He sighed again, looking away. “They deserve that,” he said, so quietly that she didn’t think he’d meant it for her.
His reasoning was terrible, but she could see the rough logic in it; for a man who hadn’t slept in three days it probably made perfect sense. Ellis wasn’t the only one damaged by what had happened.
“Tell you what,” she said gently. “You sleep, and I’ll think about Teape and Pulaski for a while.”
Jess blinked. “Don’t patronize me, Lara—”
She shook her head. “No, really. You’re right, everyone thought they were expendable. The Company wanted us dead for rinding out that the infestation came in on one of their ships; no witnesses, Pop said. And whatever data they wanted off that log, it meant more to them than any of us. Teape and the Candyman were good guys, and they deserved better than what they got. It’s still not your fault, but I understand what you’re saying.”
Lara took a deep breath and met his gaze evenly. “Go rest. I’ll stay up and watch things . . . and I’ll carry it for a while. Okay?”
It was Jess’s turn to study her, and he must have seen that she meant it because after a moment he nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Just a few minutes.”
He unstrapped himself and floated past her chair, headed to one of the wall slings at the rear, next to where Ellis slept and the Max sat, cold and empty and dead. Lara leaned back, closing her eyes, feeling useless. Jess would get some sleep anyway, that was good.
Wouldn’t want to meet oblivion with bags under your eyes. Lord knows you want to be well rested, sharp, and alert so that you can panic fully when you start to lose consciousness . . .
She told herself to shut up and thought about Teape and Candyman Pulaski, about how they’d died. It wasn’t much of a favor to Jess; she’d thought of little else since they’d left the terminal. She’d thought of Ellis, climbing into the suit to save Jess in spite of the in-
terface that had fucked him up so thoroughly. Of the poor bastard who’d been inside the Max first, who’d died alone and insane in the metal shell because the Company had put him there. Of Eric “Pop” Izzard, her lover who had made a deal and screwed all of them, and of the four hundred people of DS 949 who were no more because somebody had fucked up on quarantine.
All of that, and how they were going to die soon.
Lara opened her eyes and started looking through the scant computer files on quadrant layout for the hundredth time; she had nothing better to do.
Ellis woke up with the same headache he’d had for years, or what seemed like years. For just a moment, he didn’t know where he was or why he was surrounded by clingy web, by lines of dusty thread that lay across his skin like a cold whisper—and then he saw the dented orange metal of Max’s massive right arm some three meters away, the blackened metal of its flamethrower “hand” reflecting the bare light beneath the securing straps, and closed his eyes again.
Safe, I’m safe. My name is Brian Ellis. Brian Ellis, I’m twenty-four, A-level in synth repair and contracted to Wey-land/Yutani and I’m in the shuttle from, from—
For a second, he could only see images. A plain bunk. A cramped room with thick plexi windows and the giant steel table where Max slept. A stats/med console, blue lines pulsing across. He saw Pop’s angry face and then a dead and rotting body, its face grinning, a decaying, stinking man on the floor of 949, just after he’d brought Max over from—
“Nemesis,” he whispered, and felt a rush of relief. Compared to before, the name had come easily. As he’d done each time he’d awakened on the shuttle, he brought himself up-to-date, checking for lapses. The first time he’d opened his eyes after the station, all he’d known was Lara’s name and his own age.
He, they, were on the shuttle from the Nemesis. He’d been part of a Max team, assigned to monitor the
machine’s human occupant and run its program in order to clear XT infestations—
—33, first 011.2 away—
—and they’d gone to deep-space terminal 949, and he’d gone into Max himself when everything had gone wrong. When Pop had deserted the team and the man in Max had died, his wasted body pushed too far by the synth adrenaline. Max’s interface had been designed to fit into a surgical implant, which Ellis didn’t have; the prongs had pierced his skull, and he and Max had become one, one perfect machine that dealt death from both hands, wiping the bugs—
—space 17.25 object dot nine the animals cooking in their shells acid boiling my name is Brian—
Ellis blinked, forcing himself to think clearly. The station had been fail-safed and Lara had picked them up in the shuttle. In this shuttle, he and Jess, and the interface had not been perfect. It had done damage, possibly long-term—but then, he’d probably never know.
He heard a soft grunt from the mesh bunk below and looked down to see that Jess was asleep. Even in rest, his features were strained, his hands in fists; he was sad and angry, grieving over the Candyman and . . . and the man with the thin, twitchy face and haunted eyes. The bait. The volunteer who found the egg chamber by letting himself be caught . . .
Teape. Teape, the Candyman had called him “Teepee.”
Getting better, and how much time? How long now? He knew the air filters were going, he’d at least gotten that much in one of his earlier bouts of consciousness. Once they wound down, the air would turn to poison in a few hours. Strangely, the thought wasn’t as terrible as it should have been.
Ellis sat up slowly, pulling the tab on the bunk and letting himself roll out into the frigid air, careful not to bump into Jess. The scabbed wound on the back of his head itched beneath the Plastical patch, but it wasn’t
throbbing anymore and he didn’t feel like throwing up; a definite improvement. He pulled his glasses out of his front pocket and slipped them on, the tight interior of the shuttle instantly becoming sharper and even smaller than when it was a blur.
Lara was at the ops console in the front, slouched in front of the nav screen. Ellis shifted himself to one side and pulled himself along using the handholds on the wall, waiting until he was well away from Jess before speaking.