"There's a minute leeway," I said. "We'll have to go on the dick. You stay long enough to get her skinsuit and -- "
"Shut your freaking mouth! I know my job. Now get out of my aircraft."
Nobody talks to me like that. Nobody. I looked into her eyes. If looks could freeze I'd have been a one-legged pop side.
"Right," I said. "See you in fifty thousand years."
I hurried to the front, where everyone was hanging back, away from the Gate. Nobody wanted to go. Neither did I. It would have been a lot easier to ride it in.
I looked back and saw Pinky hand something floppy to Lilly. I knew it was Pinky, though it didn't look like her, because there was no one else it could be. The floppy thing was her skinsuit. She was no longer a sexy stewardess; without her disguise she was a terrified, naked little girl.
Lilly gave her a salute which Pinky did not have the will to return, and sprinted toward me.
"Start walking through, or I start kicking ass," I said.
They did. I turned to Lilly.
"How old was she?" I asked.
"Pinky? She was twelve."
I didn't make the rule. I'm not trying to absolve myself by saying that. I think it's a good rule. If we didn't have it, I'd write it myself.
No hardware gets left behind. The penalty for carelessness is death. You bring it back, or you stay with it.
We couldn't always work it the way we did with Pinky. That was the best way. It could be done because this flight would hit so hard and burn so fiercely that no one would expect to recover more than fifty percent of the body in any form at all. If they got ten identifiable corpses it would be miraculous, so one girl who shouldn't be there would never be noticed.
Even so, Lilly's last act before leaving the plane was to grab a wimp of about Pinky's body mass and toss it back into the future. The balance is critical.
The worst way? If we'd had to bring Pinky back with us for temporal reasons, Lilly would have stood her up against the wall and shot her. And then, possibly, have shot herself. I had a team leader do that once. "
Nobody ever said it was easy duty.
I came through the right way this time. I still didn't have my squealer, but Operations knew that now, and knew nobody but snatchers would come through the Gate until they closed it for good. Which they were preparing to do.
We all fetched up at the padded Team Recovery Area. Medics were waiting all around us, like crash trucks at an airport. We all made hand signals that we were okay except one girl who wanted a stretcher.
It's traditional just to lie there for five or ten minutes. Our portapaks had automatically returned to normal operation when we passed through the Gate, so our hysterical strength was fading fast. Behind it was the exhaustion the drugs had masked, both physical and mental.
But I had to get up.
"Reward time," I said, as I grabbed Lilly's weapon and headed for the door to Operations.
"One hour at full power. Set 'em up, girls."
"See you in intensive care, Louise," one of them called out, twisting the dial on the portapak strapped to her wrist.
"Tell my dear mom I died grinning, " yelled another.
I ran into Operations and confronted Lawrence. He was going through his checklist preparatory to shutting power to the Gate.
"One of my people is still on that plane," I told him. "I want you to keep the Gate focused on it until it actually touches the desert."
"Out of the question, Louise."
"One of my people is still on that plane, Larry. If she manages to find her weapon she can still come back."
"Do you realize the problems we have keeping the Gate tuned in on a plane that's flying straight and level? Do you have any inkling of how that problem squares and cubes in complexity when it starts to twist and turn on the way down? It can't be done."
There are three settings on a stunner. The first puts you to sleep. The second delivers pain. I let him see me set Lilly's gun on the third notch. I put the muzzle to his temple.
"One of my people is still on that plane, Larry. I have now said that three times."
He managed to bring the Gate to the falling plane twice, once for two seconds, then again for almost five. Pinky didn't come through.
What the hell. I had to try.
I sat on the floor beside Larry's console and watched him supervise the powerdown operation. I asked him if he had any smokes, and he tossed me a packet of Lucky Strike Green. I lit three of them.
When he was through, I reversed the stunner and handed it to him.
"For me?" he said. He took it, hefted it in his hand.
"Do whatever you want with it," I said.
He aimed it at my forehead. I took another drag, and waited. He used the barrel to brush hair away from my eyes, then tossed the weapon to me.
"You don't really care right now," he said.
"No. I really don't."
"That would take all the fun out of it." He folded his arms and leaned back. Well, not really. He didn't exactly have a chair; he was more or less built into it.
His eyes lit up.
"I'll wait till things are going great for you. The next time -I see you smile, you've had it."
Tricky bastard. I did smile, but he didn't ask for the gun.
"Larry, I'm sorry."
He looked at me. We'd been lovers for a while, before he fell apart too much to get around under his own power. He knew my feelings on apologies.
"Okay. My fault, too. Tempers run a bit high during a snatch."
"Don't they, though."
"Forgotten?"
"Until the next time," I said.
"Naturally."
I looked at him and felt a deep regret for what had once been. No, let's get brutally honest here. For what I would one day become. One day real soon now.
Larry had elected to acknowledge his gnomehood all the way. Most of the gnomes at the other consoles looked like anyone else except they had thick bunches of cables running from their backs. Those cables ran into their chairs and down into hundreds of bulky machines in the basement.
Larry hadn't seen any use in living on a leash. If he couldn't leave the building, what was the point of phoney legs? So Larry's chair was part of Larry. It had no back. He sort of grew from it, planted there on the floor in front of his console. He looked like a bizarre chess piece.
From the waist up he looked like a normal human being. I knew most of that was a lie, too. Even when I'd known him he had only one real arm. His face had been hit-and-miss the one time I'd seen it without the skinsuit: nose gone, lips eaten away, only one ear. I didn't know which diseases he had. One doesn't ask I didn't know which parts of him were actually organic; probably not much more than the brain. One doesn't ask that, either.
Nobody but me and my doctor and Sherman know which of my organs and limbs are my own, and I'm happy to keep it that way. I must care, or I wouldn't live in this lying skinsuit pre, tending to be a film star from the year 2034. That's right: the me everybody knows is patterned, down to the last birthmark, on a glamor queen we snatched from a terrorist explosion.
It struck me, sitting there with him in a rare moment of quiet, that when I could no longer carry all my prostheses I would do well to emulate Larry. Then the time for attractive lies would be over. Then it would be time to face, finally, what I am, what all of us here in the glorious future really are.
The Last Age.
I got up and wandered from the Operations room. I found some clothes and got dressed, had breakfast from machines in the Snatch Team Ready-Room, and just sat for a while. I realized the day was still young.