Severance (40 page)

Kinsella shifted gears again. Gesturing down the well, he
asked “So, what’s your plan?”

Hogg was getting better at reading the mayor’s shifts. “Simple.
We stop sending our guys to get blown away.”

“But we’d gotten so good at that. Seems a shame to ignore
our only strength.”

“I don’t think we can ignore it completely,” Hogg said. He looked
down to the fortified semi–circle of security officers jutting out into the
garden well. From up here, Kinsella was still far enough away to avoid seeing
the human costs. No one had been killed yet, but that was coming. And it was
now Hogg’s job to make it happen.

“We just have to wait until we have
a lot
more
to
throw away,” he said.

§

Stein brought her fist down hard on the end of the spork,
propelling a lump of broccoli upwards. The overcooked green spun lazily through
the air, ricocheted off a light fixture, fell back down to the cafeteria table,
bounced twice, then rolled off the table to the floor. “Five for twenty–three,”
she said quietly, setting up another. One more night in the hospital so her
rattled skull could stay under observation. Her friends, evidently satisfied
she wasn’t imminently about to perish, had left her to her own devices. Devices
which had led her to the cafeteria, where she had found a new way to entertain
herself.

“You’re not very good at that, are you?” someone said behind
her. She turned to see a doctor, one she hadn’t met before, though he did look
familiar. And oily.

“Mr. Mayor,” she said, recognizing him through his disguise,
which on closer inspection, appeared to consist of little more than a lab coat
and costume stethoscope. “Why are you dressed as a stripper?” she asked.

Kinsella walked around to the far side of the table and sat
down without waiting for an invitation. “I can see why they wanted to lock you
up,” he said.

She looked down at the pile of broccoli sitting beside her spork
and fidgeted with a piece. “Is there anything I can help you with?” she asked,
not looking up from her work.

A tortured, raspy noise slipped from Kinsella’s mouth. She
wondered if he was getting used to his new, less–prestigious station in life. “Yes,”
he finally said. “Our captain called you a terrorist. Are you one?”

Stein fiddled with the spork some more before she shook her
head. “I wasn’t at the time, no.”

“But maybe since? Van girl?” Kinsella asked, a thin smile on
his face. “Okay. So, you’re not a terrorist. Or maybe just a casual one. So why’d
he call you one? What’d you do to piss him off so much?”

Everything about the man in front of her was disagreeable, which
she longed to tell him about, in great detail. But, she reluctantly had to
admit, they were on the same side. At least the side that Helot wasn’t on. Whatever
shenanigans she’d accomplished with Bruce, they paled beside what the mayor was
surely planning. She had noticed the battle yesterday, couldn’t help not to, when
the
fucking sun went off
. And as spectacularly poorly as that had gone
for the mayor’s idiot brigade, it was only the first battle. If anyone was
going to keep the ship in one piece, it was this oily, oily man. So, she told
her story, explaining how she had blundered into Helot’s plot, embellishing the
good bits and fudging the parts which badly incriminated her.

Kinsella listened attentively. “That’s incredible,” he said
when she finished. “And thank you for glossing over the parts where you clearly
broke the law. That could have been awkward.”

Stein smiled and shrugged, rewarding herself by setting up
another piece of broccoli on the spork. “Why do you care?” she asked, launching
the green into the air, this one landing neatly in the light fixture. “Six for
twenty–four.” She set up another piece. “It sounds like you knew all that
already.”

Kinsella’s eyebrows did a funny kind of waggling motion. She
realized he was trying to be coy. “Indeed, I did,” he said. “The captain told
me himself. Straight from the horse’s mouth.” He leaned back and grinned. Stein
wondered what orifice Kinsella was in this analogy.

“He told you he was going to split the ship in half? Why?
When?”

“Just before he tried. I think he was bragging. He seemed a
little desperate to tell someone how clever he’d been,” Kinsella said,
chuckling. She returned her attention to the spork and launched another piece
of broccoli into the air, watching it rise up, ricochet off the light, and come
back down on Kinsella’s head. He snatched the spork away from her. “Will you
listen to me?”

“Never stopped.”

Kinsella threw the spork over his shoulder. “Well, listen harder.”
He swallowed once and spread his hands flat on the table. “One thing our
captain also mentioned was that if the ship were to split in two, our half
could survive for hundreds of years. What do you think of that?”

One of the nice things about being wrongfully imprisoned was
that she had had plenty of time to consider exactly that question. “We do have
the auxiliary reactor,” she said. “And lots of fuel. So, you know, on paper it
could work.”

“Paper,” the mayor echoed.

“But I’m worried about the insulation,” she said. Seeing the
blank look on the mayor’s face, she continued. “All around the outer hull of
this thing is a whole bunch of something that looks like metallic diapers. That’s
what keeps us warm, more than anything else. Stops us from leaking energy.”
Kinsella nodded once, at least faking comprehension. “But if Helot pops the ass
end of the ship off, that exposes a whole different chunk to space. An
uninsulated chunk. Even if it is airtight, with no insulation along that
surface, we’d start bleeding energy like crazy.”

“How long would it take for us to run out?”

“One year? One hundred? Who knows?” Out of her pocket, she
produced another spork and set it up in front of her. “Ask a math guy.”

Kinsella glared at the new spork but let her keep it. “And
we couldn’t make more insulation?”

“Maybe. We can make most things. But we’ve never made that
before. And we’d need a few square kilometers of it.”

Kinsella rubbed his hands together. He reached out and
turned the spork over in his hands, then set it back down, placing a piece of
broccoli on it. Stein watched this all carefully, as he made the same mistakes
she made her first time. Tentatively he raised his hand up in the air, looked
at her for some sign of encouragement, saw none, frowned, then brought his hand
down hard on the end of the spork, sending the piece of broccoli smashing into
his face.

Kinsella rubbed his cheek, glaring at Stein, who, having
seen it coming, didn’t need to work too hard not to smile. His throat worked up
and down, swallowing. “How much time do we have, do you think? To stop him?”

“Before he tries again?” She shrugged. That depended on how
many fuse torches he had left and how long it would take to make another one. “No
idea. A month? Maybe two?”

“So, if we want to stop him, we have to do it soon.”
Kinsella flipped the spork aside and rubbed his face again. “Can you help? I’m
not going to demean you by asking you to do it for the sake of your fellow
shipmates; I will make this worth your while.”

“And if my while is incredibly expensive?” she said,
gesturing at the pile of broccoli.

He raised an eyebrow, then shook his head, chuckling. “Look.
I need someone with your knowledge.” Kinsella pointed at the light fixture. “Remember
how he turned off the fucking sun? Can you maybe stop him from doing that
again? And can he do that with anything else? Stop our food mills? Shut off the
life support?”

Stein bit her lip. “Yeah. He can.” Seeing Kinsella swallow,
she added, “I can probably stop that, though.”

“Good.” He pointed at her. “Do that, and you can have
anything you want. All the broccoli on the ship? It’s yours.” He sat back in
his chair, looking pleased with himself. “After that, well, we’ll see if we can’t
find some other way to make use of your remarkable resourcefulness.” Another
unsettling smile. “Maybe you can come up with some poison or sleeping gases we
could pump through their air. Knock them all out.” Seeing her completely
undisguised look of shock, he held up his hands defensively. “Just thinking
aloud.” He patted the table a couple of times, a gesture that looked like it
was meant to conclude conversation, then stood up and stepped away from his
chair.

As she watched him adjust the stethoscope around his neck,
mumbling something about looking more doctor–y, she realized there was still a
big piece of the puzzle missing, then wondered how much of that was deliberate.
“Did he say why he was doing it?” she asked.

Kinsella stopped, turned back to face her. “Helot?” he
asked. She nodded.
Who else?
Kinsella shrugged. “Nope. He didn’t say.
Because he’s an asshole, I suspect.”

Stein nodded, playing along. “He certainly acts the part.”

Kinsella laughed again. She realized she hadn’t see him
laugh before and could see why he avoided doing it in public. “He certainly
does,” he agreed. With a wave, he turned and left the cafeteria.

Alone again, Stein fidgeted with the spork, spinning it
around in front of her, not really looking as it danced between her fingers.
How
do you tell when the mayor is lying?
It sounded like a trick question, the
set up to a creaky old joke. The punch line — “When his mouth is open” — didn’t
feel helpful here. Not when so much of what he had said was obviously true.

“Helot? Nope, he didn’t say.”
That was certainly
plausible — she had a hard time understanding why Helot told anything to the
mayor at all. But what if he had said? Why was Helot splitting the ship
anyways? This was something else she had had time to think about alone in her
jail cell, and “
Because he’s an asshole,”
was about the best she could
come up with herself.

But only after her surprise mayoral visit did she realize
how dangerously lazy that reasoning was. Asshole though he might be, Helot
clearly wasn’t a dummy; he had a reason for splitting the ship. And Kinsella,
oily though he might be, was also no dummy. He would have come to the same
conclusion she had. Whatever reason Helot had for splitting the ship, it would
almost certainly be good enough for Kinsella to do the same.

Helping Kinsella wasn’t the answer. It was just trading one
monster for another.

She took the final step in this line of reasoning and
smashed the spork down in frustration, flinging a chunk of broccoli against the
ceiling.
We might actually need a monster.
If they really did have to
split the ship and leave thousands to die, it would certainly take a monster to
do that. And if that was the case, it might be a useful thing to get on the
good side of at least one of the monsters.

She just wished it didn’t have to be the oily one.

§

Koller chewed methodically on his meal bar. Bite, chew,
chew, chew, chew, chew. Swallow. On occasion, he breathed. He had heard
somewhere that it was a bad sign being conscious of your own breathing. It
meant you were dying, he thought. Or very, very bored. He breathed again, and
wondered if it could be both.

He had been camped in the tiny duct for a day, sleeping and
taking all his meals there. Thorias had been insistent on that; now that he had
advertised his existence, no more setting up in a place where he could be shot
first.

But no going home yet either; Thorias wanted the Othersider
sniper taken out. The sensors he was picking off were becoming increasingly
valuable. There were only a half–dozen left, and they had proved useful coordinating
the defenses during the previous day’s battle. And if the Othersider sniper
wanted to get nastier, there were an awful lot of security officers in the well
to get nasty on. Which meant that until he was stopped, Koller was doomed to be
conscious of his own breathing.

He breathed and craned his neck over to look at the display
on the smart rifle. Still on. He breathed. He wasn’t doing any manual searching
this time — he would stay still and rely on the counter–sniper software to
react when the Othersider finally came out of hiding and took a shot. Which had
been a long, long wait. He breathed.

The gun chirped. He spit a chunk of meal bar out and rolled behind
the gun, spotting the bright red arrow on the edge of the screen and rapidly
panning the gun to the right, chasing the arrow. No overshooting it this time,
the arrow changing to a red reticule in the center of his screen. It was the
roof of a building in the garden well, covered in rooftop shrubs, swaying in a
slight breeze.
There.
The motion of the foliage highlighted the stillness
of the long rectangular object concealed within.

He tagged the gun, then began tracking to the left, already
anticipating the smart rifle’s response. Only the second time around, but
already much, much faster. “I got you this time,” he hissed and breathed once
more. He settled the crosshairs on the blue reticule.

§

Griese laid on the ground, covered in an IR cloak, itself
covered in a piece of gray felt roughly matching the shade of the roof surface
he was lying on, part of a rather attractive rooftop garden. He breathed in,
slowly, held it, then began to exhale, stopping half way through. Everything
was still. He pulled the trigger, hearing the crack, feeling the gun smack his
shoulder in response.

He immediately rolled out of the way, abandoning the gun, ducking
behind the edge of the planter. Three seconds passed before he felt the planter
shake beside him, accompanied by another sharp cracking sound and a cloud of
dirt and gun parts raining down on him.
They were way quicker this time!
Three more seconds passed, the longest three seconds Griese had ever felt. Another
sharp crack, much closer, coming from the other side of the roof.