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"I know, 'twon't take a minute," Elgars said in a strangely deep voice. "Could you possibly rummage me up a spot of wire, baling wire will do well, and a few scraps of duct tape and . . . oh . . . a can of spray paint? There's a good lass."
"Hey!" Wendy said, catching Elgars' eye. "Hello! A
Elgars shook her head and looked down at her hands, which had started to strip out the wiring harness for the tank motor. She shook her head again and nodded. "I know," she said in a normal, if distant, voice. "But I think the Posties should have a something to remember us by, don't you?"
"So you're mixing up a really nice batch of nutrients?" Wendy asked sarcastically.
"Not exactly," Elgars said with a death's-head grin. "What's in nutrients, Wendy?"
Wendy thought about it then said: "Oh."
"Roight," Elgars said, her head going back down to her task. "Now go get me a spot of wire and some duct tape, there's a good lass."
* * *
"Wire and duct tape," Wendy muttered, shifting the MP-5 to a better grip. "Where in the hell am I going to find wire and duct tape?"
There would be some in a maintenance section, but the nearest one on the map was further away than the elevators and in an area the Posleen were bound to have overrun. She walked to the far end of the room and thought about it. Something one of the long-time "pro" firefighters had told her floated up to the surface of memory and she smiled. She looked at her map and figured out which door an administrative puke would come in. All things considered, either the one they came in or the one they were going out. So, where was the furthest away from that you could get?
She climbed down from the catwalk and began hunting along the walls of the room until she found what she was looking for. On the south wall, the furthest from the door they had come in, behind the last tank, carefully hidden from all but a determined search, was a chair.
And a toolbox.
And a pile of oily rags and roll of baling wire. And a can of gray spray paint, half full.
And a pin-up calendar.
"Well, at least he had some taste," she said sourly. "Although that chick has no idea how to carry a rifle. And I guarantee that's a dye job! If she's a natural blonde, I'm Pamela Anderson."
She opened up the toolbox and, after extracting a hard candy from the bag in the top, found the roll of duct tape in the lower compartment.
"Okay, all the comforts of home," she muttered, rolling the candy around in her mouth. She put the baling wire in the toolbox, closed it up and picked up the can of spray paint. "Now if I can just get it all up the ladder."
* * *
"What took you so long?" Elgars asked.
"Gee, sorry, Captain," Wendy snapped back. "I just found a toolbox I thought you could use and all the other shit you asked for. I guess I should have hurried carrying the heavy fucker up the ladder! And trying to breathe in here isn't helping!"
The atmosphere, slightly ammoniacal and earthy before, now reeked of ammonia: it stung the eyes and clawed at the nostrils.
Elgars tossed her a mask and do
Wendy's shirt had taken a beating with three of the buttons torn away.
"I caught it on the damned ladder," she snapped, looking down at herself. "I thought about duct taping it together, but that was just too redneck."
"Don't let Papa O'Neal hear you say that," Elgars said, chuckling.
"You're sounding normal again," Wendy noted, opening up the toolbox and tossing her a hard candy. "You had me creeped out for a second there." She adjusted the mask and refit it carefully. Without careful fitting, masks tended to leak and she could smell a trace of ammonia still.
"What did I sound like?" the captain asked. She had stripped out the primary power leads for one of the mixing tanks and brought it under the catwalk so that it reached the tank on the opposite side. Taking the spray paint can from Wendy she proceeded to tape the three-phase leads onto the can.
"Sort of . . . British I think. All this 'there's a good lass' stuff."
"I sort of remember it," Elgars admitted. "All this stuff is just sort of 'coming' to me as I go along. I think the shrinks were right; I think the Crabs implanted . . . more than just skills, but sort of 'memories' in me. When I dredge one up, the . . . personality associated with it comes up to the front too. Then when I use it for a while, when I get used to it, the personality fades. Sometimes I get real memories along with it. Sometimes I even seem to be the person for a while. I think they might have given me most of my day-to-day skills through a single entity and she's who comes to the fore most of the time."
"So who is the real you?" Wendy asked.
"I du
Wendy nodded for a moment then gri
Elgars laughed and went back to the main control board. "Trust you to see the humor of it."
"Nah, it's just a matter of looking on the bright side of any really fucked up situation," Wendy said with a muffled chuckle. "I didn't know how to do that at first; I really had a hard time understanding how Tommy could be so . . . comfortable in Fredericksburg. I mean, we were all getting ready to be either blown up or killed and eaten. It's because the rest of us had had our heads in the ground for years about the Posleen. But he had been thinking about what fighting them would be like, getting beaten by them would be like, for years. So when the time came, he just did it while I was ru
"That I have a hard time believing," Elgars said. She cut the power to the tank that the leads had been run to and walked back. She carefully leapt to the mixer arm and waved at the wires. "Hand those to me, would you?"
"Sure," Wendy answered, pushing the bundle across the gap. "But really, the difference now is that most of us have been thinking about what might happen down here for years. Oh, there were some that thought the Posleen would never come; just like there are some that pla
"Was this your plan from the begi
"No," Wendy said with a sigh that could barely be heard over the grinding of the other motors; the material in the bottom was mostly anhydrous ammonia and the mixture was harder than cookie dough. The motors were designed to drive against liquid and although they were about thirty percent overrated for that, they were quickly reaching the point where failsafes were going to pop out. "My plan had been to be in the emergency crews; they would have been at the front lines, trying to hold the Posleen back for as long as possible. But that presumed that we got some warning; I don't know why we didn't."
"So the longest that the defense points could hold out is . . . what?" Elgars asked, wiping her gloves off on a rag and jumping back to the catwalk. She walked back over to the central console and started shutting down the pumps.