“Done running?” she asked.

CHAPTER THIRTY THREE:

The Lieutenant

(again)

“Oh, hi,” I said. “I was just thinking about you.”

“I’m sure you were. I hope you’re done trying to get yourself killed, because you’re coming with me.”

I had a good four inches height and seventy pounds weight on Lantern-Eyes, but the way she gripped my flashlight suggested those pitiful advantages wouldn’t count for much. I’d left her armed, but I’d run out of ammunition; I’d found a source of water, but food, not so much.

I said, “Got any crackers?”

The shell of Republican Military Might cracked a little. The lieutenant said, “What?”

“I’ll come with you if you give me food,” I said. “Like a stray cat.”

She regarded me a moment longer, her hand still gripping my flashlight over her head, suspicion a fading light in her eyes.

“Easily bought,” she said, “aren’t you?”

Lantern-Eyes moved with confidence through the darkened halls, flashlight off and club swinging in one hand. She led me to a space that echoed, and I trained my flashlight beam over the walls and ceiling. It was the bottom flight of a stairwell.

For the first time since she’d found me, Lantern-Eyes flicked her flashlight on. The steps past her were half-collapsed; a gap of three feet separated the lower stairs from the upper, and metal poles thrust into the empty space, bent and rusted. Not an easy climb.

“So you do use a flashlight,” I said.

She flicked the penlight off. “I’m not exactly flush with power sources. Besides, a light makes it easier for things to see me.”

I glanced down at my own stolen flashlight, blazing white. “Should I turn mine off?”

“And trip over your own feet? Sound travels further than light on this ship. Come up here.”

I had a horrible image of climbing up these broken stairs, up and straight out to the choking emptiness of vacuum. “Won’t those stairs go into the hull?”

“No, they go deeper into the ship. The ship is a wheel, these steps lead closer to the inner circumference. Let’s go, Wren. Species 019 is probably on your trail again.”

“Oh-one-nine?”

She sighed. “The ‘manikin’.”

The stairs creaked beneath my weight, bending ominously, but they held. I had to stretch out to bridge the gap where stairs had collapsed, but I made it, stepping where Lantern-Eyes stepped. There was no difference between the upper level and the lower that I could see, but Lantern-Eyes seemed a little more at ease. Thirty feet or so down the hall she stopped, and opened up a door. “There are some places in this ship where species 019 and the other monsters don’t go,” she told me lowly. “This room will be safe, as long as we’re quiet.”

Other monsters. “Like that rock thing?”

“I’m more worried about the Dreamer,” she muttered, then added, with a glance at my expression, “The AI. Sit down.”

The door led to some office-sized space. It had received the same treatment as some of the rooms I had seen downstairs: every item of furniture in the room had been systematically reduced to dust. The difference here was that Lantern-Eyes had swept that dust aside and placed caches of food and water stacked neatly against the wall, just as she had done downstairs.