Providence - Max Barry Page 0,56
could barely stand the bus, with people on all sides who might press close at any moment, with its thin, stale air. But in the video, the Providence had looked big. And it had big guns. So maybe. Maybe.
Of course, Service had tricked him. Service was lies from beginning to end, and one of the lies was that a Providence Weapons Officer got to do anything more intimate with a laser battery than observe its numbers from station. It was incredibly frustrating. Eventually he asked Gilly to open a small-arms locker. He’d been thinking about that for a while, and it would have been glorious, but Gilly wouldn’t play along. “I’m not doing that, Anders,” Gilly had said, like he was talking to a child. Gilly had been hanging out with Beanfield around then and so became serious and not fun. When Gilly and Beanfield spent time together, it was like Gilly’s testicles, small to begin with, climbed right up inside his body, so that anytime Anders wanted to do something interesting, Gilly coughed and got nervous. Anders’s idea was to get a gun, sneak up behind Gilly, and bam, plug him. Not badly. He just wanted Gilly to yell and fall to the deck and remember how to have fun.
It would be even better if Anders could figure out how to open a small-arms locker by himself, because they were alarmed. There would be a tone, and everyone would think, Who the fuck is opening an arms locker? and realize: Anders.
They were family out here, him and Gilly and Beanfield and Jackson. One thing Anders had figured out in life—maybe the only thing—was that family was what you could trust. Even if it was bad, you could trust it like that. The four of them were stuck with each other out here, and that meant none of the other shit mattered, like how Gilly was unlike anyone Anders had ever known, and if you asked him even something stupid and simple, like who had a better ass, Beanfield or Jackson, there would be a half-second pause, the gears in Gilly’s brain turning, and then he would produce a careful, inoffensive response, like: I haven’t thought about it. From how Gilly acted, everything they ever said was recorded by Service for permanent archive. Which he guessed was true, but that wasn’t the point; the point was that Gilly shouldn’t care. Anders couldn’t give two shits what Service thought, but Gilly did; Gilly gave shits about everything. Sometimes Gilly was the alien to Anders. Or the ship, thinking in ways he couldn’t understand. But that was fine. Anders didn’t need to understand Gilly to know they were in this together, and would be until the end, and that he would give his life for Gilly in a heartbeat.
Gilly had once asked him what he was planning to do when they got home. It wasn’t something Anders had thought about; he was out here to kill salamanders and didn’t want to consider what came after. “Because the way our numbers are tracking,” Gilly said, “I think we’re going to be received pretty well back home.”
This had made Anders laugh. “Gilly, no one will care about our numbers.”
Gilly looked puzzled. “Of course they will. That’s why we’re here.”
“What people think about the war has nothing to do with what happens. If Service wants us to be heroes, they’ll make us heroes. If they don’t, they won’t.”
Gilly was silent and Anders realized he’d strayed into forbidden territory. Beanfield would not be pleased. He wasn’t supposed to disillusion Gilly of his fairy tales. But it was amazing to Anders how naive Gilly could be. He was crazy smart in ways Anders could barely appreciate but swallowed everything Service told him like a child.
“I don’t think people can ignore our numbers,” Gilly said.
He could see Gilly getting aggravated, so he let it go. The thing was, Anders wasn’t even going near the other fairy tale Gilly was suggesting, which was that the ship was an impregnable fortress that could never fail. That was the biggest fairy tale of all, in his opinion. In Anders’s experience, everything failed. “If you say so.”
“I do say so,” Gilly said.
* * *
—
After watching Gilly almost get trapped in Eng-5, he turned