collided with him with enough force to jerk it from his grip. She galloped across the floor and drove Anders into the end of the slab.
Gilly ran to the gun and snatched it up. He didn’t know how to fire it. But he’d seen Anders hold it and raised it in the same way.
Martin was slumped to the floor, moving slowly. Gilly advanced, keeping the gun trained on her. Her hind legs twitched. She began to rise. She took a few unsteady steps and that was when he saw that Anders was crushed against the rock.
“No,” he said. “Anders. No.”
“Gik. Kee,” Martin said.
He sank to his haunches. He couldn’t look at Anders but also couldn’t look away. There was a wild grief in his chest, pressing against his lungs.
Martin tottered toward the pool. She made no move to attack him. She lowered her head and nosed at the burned larvae.
Beside her, the converter lay in pieces. Martin had stepped on it during the attack. Even from here, he could see that it was destroyed.
He breathed. He looked at Anders. Then away.
According to his film, he had approximately an hour of life remaining.
Martin hunched over the larvae, her middle legs scooping at the pieces.
He stared at her. It was as if a veil had been ripped from his vision. Martin wasn’t his friend. She wasn’t like him. She wasn’t like anything he had created in his imagination.
His core battery reading flipped below sixty minutes.
He explored the gun. It didn’t seem complicated. There was a thumb latch, a trigger. He thought he could figure this one out.
He forced himself to his feet. “Martin,” he said.
She turned. What was in her features, he had no idea. He couldn’t intuit her thinking. Martin might have understood what he was doing, or not.
He squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked. The afterimage of lightning crawled across his eyeballs. He sat and cried for a while.
* * *
—
He spent some time inspecting the converter piece by piece, just in case. But there was no miracle: It had been destroyed.
He sat with Anders. He squeezed shut his eyes. He didn’t think he could do this without Anders. Anders was the one who made impossible things happen. “I’m sorry,” he croaked.
Anders’s core, too, was unusable.
So that was that. There was no chance of escape. This was not a carefully designed puzzle with a tricky solution he had to work hard to find. It was simpler than that. It was the logical result of forces beyond his control.
He enabled his suit’s ping sweep, and within a minute it flared Beanfield’s location. She was on the edge of his range, her little blip flitting in and out of existence. He tried to hail her but received no response. He was able to transmit asynchronous data at a low rate, though, so, for what it was worth, he sent the recordings he’d made, everything from the beginning. Then he recorded a clip, describing what had happened and what had become of Anders, and sent that, too.
When that was done, he shut down all comms and ping. It meant that Beanfield couldn’t reply, even if she moved closer. His core read forty-two minutes. For what he wanted to do next, he couldn’t spare the power.
“I’m going after the queen,” he said. He was still recording, but realistically, this was just for him. It had probably been like that for a while. “I might be able to make a difference.”
He moved to the edge of the pool. He wound the lightning gun’s strap around his body and waded in.
The sides quickly grew steep. When he reached the point where his next step would take him out of his depth, he gave the chamber a last glance, then let the liquid close over his faceplate.
Gravity tugged him downward. His helmet light illuminated thick brown muck to a distance of ten inches. He put out a hand and felt rock sliding by.
After a few minutes, his boots hit something solid. He jerked.