“But you did it to this one. So now this.”
“Nok.”
“Shit!” he said. “Yek! Yek!”
“Nok Gikky.”
He was silent awhile. “Why am I still alive?”
“Gikky.”
“Yes. Gikky. Why is Gikky alive?”
“Gikky.”
“I want to know why you brought me here.”
But even as he spoke, he realized the answer. He had been absorbed by his own curiosity, thinking only of what he could learn, and forgotten that this was what they did, all the time, and had done from the beginning. From every encounter they’d ever had, the salamanders had learned something, and become more dangerous.
“Gik-ky ak-live,” it said.
* * *
—
He shut his mouth and closed his eyes and eventually the salamander left. He hung in the orange cave. His film read that fifty-nine hours had elapsed. His core could support him another twenty-two. After that, he would die. There was no question about that anymore. All that remained to be seen was how much damage he would do to his own species first.
Service hadn’t advised him on what to do if he were captured by salamanders. He couldn’t find it within himself to blame them: He was the first human being to be captured. No one had thought the salamanders did that. There was a lot that the salamanders did that no one had realized, Gilly was figuring out. Service had underestimated their complexity. Even the schema of distinct classes—soldier, worker—was wrong, or at least incomplete, since there were clearly subclasses as well, including an undiscovered one for this blue-hued creature.
He heard dragging salamander movement in the tunnel. These sounds came and went. They barked at each other, sometimes from close by, more often far away. Maybe he would be left alone until he died. He might have been flattering himself, thinking he was a vital military asset. He could be a memento: a curiosity collected from the battlefield and shoved into a drawer. Years from now, young salamanders would sniff his corpse. This was one of the creatures we fought. It used to move.
He checked his recorder. “I’ve realized the salamander may be trying to learn from me. I won’t talk to it anymore.”
He fell silent.
“I’m going to die here,” he said.
* * *
—
He couldn’t sleep: The gravity would seize his head and yank it toward the floor. He grew angry. He had nothing to think about except how he’d wound up here, and the more he did, the stupider it seemed. There were twenty-eight billion human beings and none of them had managed to get themselves bound to a wall in a salamander burrow. He mentally traced and retraced the path that had led him here, the precise steps, to establish where he went wrong. One misstep, of course, was his own dumb idea to put himself forward when Surplex asked for interested candidates in a special, secret Service project, but he was starting to think that people had taken advantage of him. People who had implied that crewing a Providence-class battleship was essentially risk-free. He specifically remembered a meeting in which a Surplex engineering lead—or maybe it had been Service—addressed a question about mission risk by saying, “Well, you might be hit by a car crossing the road tonight,” and all of them in the room admitted to the underlying point, which was that there was risk in anything and all you could do was minimize it. But Gilly was now thinking that there was an entire dimension to risk that had been seriously fucking understated, because he would happily run into traffic if it meant getting out of this dark place full of salamanders. Also, it was a double bluff: they worked it both ways, because they told the public, These brave crews risk their lives, but in private, the implication was: Not really.
“Even if it doesn’t work out, the exposure you’ll get is priceless,” a Surplex manager had told him, when Gilly discovered just how intensive the candidate process was, how it required him to live in the arctic wastes for a year, embedded with the military. “The access you’ll get working that closely with Service, the managers you’ll meet, Surplex