Mickey7 (Mickey7 #1)
Edward Ashton
For Jen. If you hadn’t ended civilization, none of this would have happened.
001
THIS IS GONNA be my stupidest death ever.
It’s just past 26:00, and I’m sprawled on my back on a rough stone floor, in a darkness so black that I may as well be blind. My ocular wastes a long five seconds hunting for stray visible-spectrum photons before finally giving up and flipping over to infrared. There’s still not much to see, but at least I can make out the roof of the chamber above me, glowing now in a pale, spectral gray, and the black ring of the ice-crusted opening that must have brought me here.
Question: What the hell happened?
The last few minutes of my memory are fragmentary—mostly unconnected images and snippets of sound. I remember Berto dropping me off at the head of the crevasse. I remember climbing down along a broken jumble of ice blocks. I remember walking. I remember looking up, seeing a boulder jutting out of the ice about thirty meters up the south wall. It looked a little like a monkey’s head. I remember smiling, and then …
… and then there was nothing under my left foot, and I was falling.
Son of a bitch. I wasn’t looking where I was going. I was staring up at that stupid monkey-head rock, thinking about how I’d describe it to Nasha when I got back to the dome, and I stepped into a hole.
Stupidest. Death. Ever.
A shiver runs the length of my body. The cold was bad enough up top, when I was moving. Down here, though, pressed against the bedrock, it’s soaking into me, eating through the skin suit and the two layers of thermals, seeping down through hair and skin and muscle and all the way into my bones. I shiver again, and a sudden jolt of pain runs from my left wrist up to my shoulder. I look down. There’s a bulge where there shouldn’t be one, pressing against the fabric just at the point where my glove meets the sleeve of my outer thermal. I start to pull off the glove, thinking that maybe the cold will help keep the swelling down, but another jolt of pain stops that experiment almost before it’s started. Even just trying to make a fist, the pain ramps up from bad to blinding as soon as my fingers start to curl.
Must have banged it on something during the fall. Broken? Maybe. Sprained? Definitely.
Pain means I’m still alive, right?
I sit up slowly, shake my head clear, and blink to a comm window. I’m too far out to pick up any of the colony repeaters, but Berto must still be close, because I’m getting just a hint of a signal. Not enough for voice or video, but I can probably manage text. My eye flickers to the keyboard icon, and it expands to fill a quarter of my field of view.
<Mickey7>:Berto. You getting this?
<RedHawk>:Affirmative. Still alive, huh?
<Mickey7>:So far. I’m stuck, though.
<RedHawk>:No kidding. I saw what happened. You walked right into a hole.
<Mickey7>:Yeah, I figured that out.
<RedHawk>:Not a little hole, Mickey. A big one. What the hell, buddy?
<Mickey7>:I was looking at a rock.
<RedHawk>:…
<Mickey7>:It looked like a monkey.
<RedHawk>:Stupidest death ever.
<Mickey7>:Yeah, well, only if I die, right? Speaking of which, any chance you’re coming for me?
<RedHawk>:Uh …
<RedHawk>:No.
<Mickey7>:Seriously?
<RedHawk>:Seriously.
<Mickey7>:…
<Mickey7>:Why not?
<RedHawk>:Well, mostly because I’m hovering two hundred meters over the spot where you went down right now, and I’m still barely reading you. You’re deep underground, my friend, and we are definitely in creeper territory. It would take a hell of an effort and a great deal of personal risk to get you back out—and I can’t justify that kind of risk for an Expendable, you know?
<Mickey7>:Oh. Right.
<Mickey7>:Not for a friend either, huh?
<RedHawk>:Come on, Mickey. That’s a cheap shot. It’s not like you’re really dying or anything. I’ll file a loss report on you when I get back to the dome. This is line of duty. There’s no way Marshall won’t approve your regen. You’ll be out of the tank and back in your bed tomorrow.
<Mickey7>:Oh, that’s great. I mean, I’m sure that’ll be convenient for you. But in the meantime, I have to die in a hole.
<RedHawk>:Yeah, that sucks.
<Mickey7>:That sucks? Really? That’s all you’ve got?
<RedHawk>:I’m sorry, Mickey, but what do you want? I feel bad that you’re about to die down there, but seriously, this is your job, right?
<Mickey7>:I’m not even current, you know. I haven’t uploaded in over a month.
<RedHawk>:That … is not my fault. Don’t worry, though. I’ll fill you in on what you’ve been up to. Got any private stuff you’ve done since your last upload that you think you might need to know?
<Mickey7>:Um …
<Mickey7>:No, I guess not.
<RedHawk>:Perfect. Then we’re all set.
<Mickey7>:…
<RedHawk>:All good, Mickey?
<Mickey7>:Yeah. All good. Thanks a lot, Berto.
I blink away from the window, lean back against the rock wall, and close my eyes. I can’t believe that chickenshit bastard’s not coming for me.
Oh, who am I kidding? I can totally believe it.
So, what next? Sit here and wait to die? I have no idea how far I tumbled down that bore hole or drop shaft or whatever it was before I hit ground in this … whatever this is. It might have been twenty meters. From the way Berto was talking, it might have been more like a hundred. The opening I dropped through is right there, no more than three meters up. Even if I could reach it, though, there’s no way I’m climbing with this wrist.
In my line of work, you spend a lot of time pondering different ways to die—when you’re not actually experiencing them, that is. I’ve never frozen to death before. I’ve definitely thought about it, though. It’s been hard not to since we made landfall on this godforsaken ball of ice. It should be pretty easy, relatively speaking. You get chilly, fall asleep, and then don’t wake up, right? I’m starting to drift, thinking that at least maybe this won’t be such a bad way to go, when my ocular pings. I blink to answer.
<Black Hornet>:Hey babe.
<Mickey7>:Hey Nasha. What can I do for you?
<Black Hornet>:Just sit tight. I’m in the air, ETA two minutes.
<Mickey7>:Berto pinged you?
<Black Hornet>:Yeah. He doesn’t think you’re retrievable.
<Mickey7>:But?
<Black Hornet>:He’s just not properly motivated.
You know, hope is a funny thing. Thirty seconds ago I was one hundred percent sure I was about to die, and I wasn’t really afraid. Now, though, my heart is pounding in my ears and I find myself running down a checklist of everything that could go wrong if Nasha actually manages to get her lifter on the ground up there and makes a rescue attempt. Is the floor of the crevasse even wide enough for her to set down? If it is, will she be able to locate me? If she does, will she have enough cable to reach me?
If she does, what are the chances that all that activity brings the creepers down on her?
Shit.
Shit shit shit.
I can’t let her do it.