Chapter 94: Rich, wasn’t it?
*/Nikki’s First Person POV/*
For a while I just stood there in the quiet.
The pump kept going in the floor, patient as ever, and the panel over Brandt’s body kept glowing, and the woman who’d offered me a whole fort lay a few feet away with the last thing she ever said still hanging in the air.
I didn’t move, because a notification I’d been ignoring for the last twenty minutes became too hard to ignore.
-Ding!
{
Combatants Neutralized: Human ×20
Reward: 500 Credits per confirmed kill.
Subtotal: 10,000 Credits.
}
Ten thousand.
Eighteen people, plus the pilots on the pad, including the man dragged screaming into the dark, and the old engineer four minutes from a miracle, and the woman with a damn good offer.
All of them amounting to ten thousand Credits, out of a hundred and fifty million.
I stood in the middle of that and did the only thing my head knows how to do with a number, which is run it, and it ran itself before I could stop it.
The answer it handed back was that I would need to do what I had just done in this room fifteen thousand more times, floor to ceiling, to buy Nia one month.
[...Fifteen thousand rooms like this...]
That wasn’t even the part that got me.
The part that got me was that it didn’t matter because the truth of this economy is that a person is worth about two and a half sprinters and not one Credit more.
I could have walked out of here having spared every single one of them, and it would have changed my math by exactly nothing.
They didn’t have to die for the plan.
They died because they were standing on the plan, and the plan needed the room empty, and that’s a different and stupider reason.
I made myself hold it the way you hold a hot pan, because looking away from it felt like cheating them out of the one thing I may have owed them.
"Okay," I said, to nobody, and my voice came out rough.
"Mea," Tikki answered against my neck, without any judgment in it, because he doesn’t carry any.
He’s got exactly one rule, and it’s the same as mine.
I put my hand up over his small warm head and left it there a second while I made myself start moving again.
I went through the room like a survivor, because that’s what I am under everything else, and a survivor loots.
The 7.62 came first, mags stripped off chest rigs that had stopped rising and falling, out of dump pouches, out of stiff hands, because everybody on this op had been carrying the right calibers, the ones that actually punch the armor those things grow, and those could be used for trade. I didn’t even spare the helmets and chest rigs, throwing everything into the misc. chest.
The shotguns next, then the medical, and the medical is where I slowed down. The best kit in the room was a fat aid bag sitting between a dead man’s boots, packed by somebody who’d counted it twice and then counted it again, and I remembered exactly nothing about this man except that he’d had the bag between his feet the whole time like he was guarding it, and I took it anyway, and I hated a little that I was glad to have it.
Then I got to Del, out in the corridor, where I’d dragged him, in the dark, and as I walked to him, something stuck out of the liner of his helmet.
Paper, folded, jammed up under the shell against where the top of his skull would be, and my whole brain lit up wrong for a second, because you do not carry paper taped inside your helmet unless it’s something along the lines of coordinates, a frequency, a name, the kind of thing a man hides on his own body because it can’t be found on his radio.
[Intel...]
I crouched, and I worked it out from under the loose shell, careful, expecting a grid or a list or a codeword.
And as I unfolded it, all I found was crayon.
A stick family under a yellow sun, a man and a smaller shape holding his stick hand, a dog off to one side drawn about four times too big, the whole thing pressed down so hard by such a small hand that the paper had torn in one corner.
I looked at it for a long while, before eventually just crouching under the red light of a nuclear power plant I would send into a meltdown to poison the whole south of the country with, holding a six-year-old’s drawing of her dad and a dog that I carefully tucked back into place.
Folding it back along its own creases, along the lines her hand had made, I worked it back up into the liner where it rode, snug against where the top of his head used to be.
And I left it with him.
"Come on, booger," I said, my voice more tired than it had ever been.
On the way back through the control room I passed her rifle.
It had come out of her hands when I lifted her, and now it lay on the floor near where she’d landed, and I couldn’t help but stop over it.
It was an M110.
Not an M110A2 like the one on my chest, the one with that carving above the magwell done by a drunk woman who’s never once admitted to doing it.
This was an older and plainer one. The one Nia’s is a grandchild of.
Same barrel length, same lean shape, same job in the same hands, a person put somewhere high and far and safe and told to make the shots that mattered while everybody else made noise.
She’d wanted the same thing Nia wants.
To be the one who covers the people she loves from a long way off and never once lets a bad thing reach them.
She’d argued the same case Nia argued at me on a highway with a bite in her shoulder, the river and the counties and the kids, almost word for word, and she’d made it just as well, and she’d lost for the exact same reason.
[... wonder if the two of them would’ve become friends.]
And I found that I actually did wonder it, standing there, that under a different sky, in a world where Nia was never bitten, a designated marksman from a fort called Harlan and a designated marksman with my name carved into her rifle might have ended up cleaning weapons at the same table, telling the same dark jokes, hating the same brass.
I didn’t take her rifle.
I crouched, and I set it down properly instead, across her chest, positioning her hands to cradle it. I didn’t have a good reason for doing it, but I did it anyway, simply because it felt the right thing to do.
Rich, wasn’t it?
With a final sigh, I straightened up and made all of it go cold, because I had to, because I couldn’t do the next part with any of that still in me.
"Alright," I said, and turned back to the panel, to the pump in the floor and the glowing board and the whole reason twenty people were on this ground. "Let’s finish it... System?"
-Ding!
{
Consultation Mode: Resuming.
Objective: Catastrophic reactor failure.
Personnel obstruction: Cleared.
Beginning sequential guidance.
}
"Walk me through," I breathed.
-Ding!
{Final Sequence: Step one.
.
.
.