Scardown

by Elizabeth Bear

  “I am.” Dr. Simon Mobarak was a pudgy, balding thirty-something—Razorface's own age—who held his HCD as if it were an extension of his hand. No other similarities existed between the two. “Where the hell are you? You look like shit.”

  “Toronto.” Deltoids strained leather as Razorface scrubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, the armor-weave on the inside of the lip catching on his teeth. His jaw ached, and so did his chest. “I nearly got blowed up a minute ago.” Razor drew in a long, rattling breath. The air here was a little better than in Hartford, at least.

  “What are you doing in Toronto?”

  “Came looking for Maker. And you. Found out you'd left. Mitch and Bobbi're dead, Doc. And Maker's whore of a sister. That's something.”

  Simon swore. “Jenny's gone, Razorface. She left Earth a few days ago. She's on Clarke by now.”

  “Maker in orbit? Fuck.” Razorface turned farther into the corner, covering the shapes his lips made. He subvocalized into a collar mike to talk to his hip. Simon's words came tinny through an ear clip. He keyed encryption on. “Doc. Somebody was holding that Barb Casey's leash. Somebody here in Toronto, right? Mitch thought it was a company called Canadian Consolidated Pharmacom.”

  “Right.” The doctor's image flickered as Simon encrypted, too. “You still think you have a grudge to settle, Razorface?”

  “They used my boys like goddamned white lab rats, Doc. Testing their space drugs on my kids. I got hell to pay. I bet you know a name.”

  Simon Mobarak closed his eyes and covered his mouth with his hand. Razorface frowned at the conflict creasing the other man's brow. He shifted his weight to his left side, taking the strain off his half-knitted ankle. “Doc. These people killing kids. They got some kinda hold on Maker. I see that. Now they got you, too?”

  Simon didn't open his eyes. He spoke through his fingers. “Alberta Holmes,” he said. “And Colonel Frederick Valens, Canadian Army. Unitek. They own CCP. I think Jenny has some hard evidence.”

  “Thank you,” Razor said, starting to grin.

  But Simon opened his eyes and held up his hand. “Holmes's a vice president of a multinational with a bigger annual income than the G.A.P. of PanMalaysia. You already know what Valens is—and he's with Jenny on Clarke. You'll never touch them.”

  “Watch me,” Razorface said. “You keep in touch—and let me know if you get any news from Maker.” He closed the connection before Simon could answer and turned to catch his train.

  Later that night, Razorface sat in his rented room under the flickering light of the holo, stroking a rag-eared ginger tomcat that lay purring softly in his lap. “Dammit, Boris,” he muttered. “I don't suppose you got a bright idea how to get a message to Maker? Seeing as how you're her cat and all.”

  He picked kneading claws out of his leg. “No, I didn't think so. How come she couldn't of had a dog?” With a gesture of the remote, Razorface muted the sound on the holo. Boris didn't seem to notice. The big scarred cat stared into the fluttering light, squinting as if after prey. Razorface grunted. He brushed the cat off his lap more gen-tly than his brusque words would have indicated and retrieved his hip, keying the feed into the holoscreen. Speaking, because he couldn't write, Razorface began a Net search for Unitek, for Colonel Fred Valens. For information on a drug known on the street as the Hammer. And for a lady named Alberta Holmes. As an afterthought, he looked up Guy Fawkes, too, and then rubbed a big hand over his scalp in surmise.

  Boris leaped onto the arm of Razor's chair, bumping a furry head determinedly against his shoulder. Absently, the hulking gangster scratched the cat under his chin. “You and me, big guy. We gonna get Maker back. And we gonna pay these corporate assholes for everything they done. Don't you worry.”

  Evening

  Sunday 5 November, 2062

  HMCSS Leonard Cohen

  Patricia Valens twisted her hands in her lap as the vast silver outline of the Montreal loomed outside the porthole. A few strands of dark hair floated around her face, escaped from her braid, but the five-point restraints kept her firmly in her seat as the shuttle Leonard Cohen matched velocities with the starship and drifted into position along her central axis. A shiver went through the shuttle's hide as it latched onto the starship like a remora to a shark. Patty laid her hand against the glass, a similar shiver rippling her skin.

  “Goose bumps?”

  She jumped and glanced to her right. Her classmate Carver Mallory grinned at her, teeth very white in his teakwood face. Green flickers across his eyes told her he had a heads-up display running on his contacts. She wished she'd thought of that.

  She had to turn away from his eyes before she found her voice. He put a lump in her throat too big to talk around. “It's big,” she whispered.

  He snorted. “No kidding.” Left-handed, he unhooked his restraints and drifted free of his chair while she was still struggling with the quick-release on hers. “See you inside.”

  Did you have to go and prove yourself a dork, Patty? She managed to get herself free and oriented, waiting until Dr. Holmes and the other important adults at the front of the cabin had made it through the air lock before she collected her duffel and followed.

  Free fall was wonderful. She was almost disappointed when they left the shaft for the habitation wheel and her feet drifted back to the floor. One of the Unitek bigwigs—the one even Dr. Holmes deferred to—looked a little green around the edges, and Patty made sure to stay out of his way. She answered uncomfortably when Carver asked her a question, and he didn't try again.

  No one else spoke to her until they were inside, when a uniformed airman whose name she didn't quite catch showed her to her bunk, the showers and “head,” as he called it, and to the common room she was entitled to use. He kindly told her to get some sleep and promised to collect her in time to eat breakfast before the test flight the following morning.

  Patty stowed her duffel bag and brushed her teeth and realized she would never—never—fall asleep. Left to her own devices, she thought about exploring the ship with its narrow corridors (dimmed for night shift), and decided her mother would never forgive her if she wound up in trouble on this field trip. No wonder Carver thinks you're a nerd, she thought. You are. If it wasn't bad enough that just looking at him made her head spin, she was sure he thought that she'd only gotten to come on this trip because her grandfather was in charge of the program. Unlike Carver, who was first in their group.

  Patty was second, and she did it all herself. But of course nobody ever believed that.

  She collected her HCD and scuffed down to the common room in her ship slippers, which reminded her of rubber-soled socks. The lights were dimmed; Patty sighed in relief and didn't order them up when she entered. She curled in a bucketlike chair near one of the two observation posts and watched Clarke Orbital Platform and the nighttime globe beyond it sparkle in the darkness, seeming to roll in slow circles that were actually the result of the habitation wheel's spin.

  She had just switched on her HCD to start her homework when the door slid open again and a brisk footstep startled her. She expected Carver, and a raised eyebrow at the way she was sitting in the dark grinding away at her assignments. Carver was gifted, though. Everything came easily to him. He couldn't have understood how Patty had to work to live up to her parents' expectations.

  It wasn't Carver. “Lights,” Patty said.

  A burly blond man—a crew member in a heather-gray athletic shirt stenciled Property of HMCSS Montreal—paused inside the doorway. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn't realize anybody was in here.”

  “I was looking at the view,” she said, standing.

  The crewman crossed to the beverage dispenser and drew himself a cup of coffee. “Would you like anything, miss? . . .”

  “Patty,” she said, feeling foolish and about ten years old. “Patricia Valens. Seltzer water, if they have it?”

  He fussed with the panel, not turning toward her. “Are you related to Colonel Valens?”

  Becau
se a girl never would have made it here without knowing somebody, right? Patty's back tightened. “He's my grandfather. Who are you?” Almost brusque, her voice startled her.

  The blond crewman handed her a disposable cup full of clear fluid. “I'm Lieutenant Ramirez,” he said. “Chris. That's water with lemon juice flavor. Best she'll do.”

  “Thanks.” Patricia sank back into her chair and set the cup on a low molded table, which she noticed was bolted to the floor. “I'm sor—”

  “Think nothing of it,” he answered with a dismissive wave. “All you pilots are testy. I know. Will I be invading if I sit here and do some work?”

  “What are you working on?” Intrigued despite herself. He called me a pilot! “I'm not a pilot yet.”

  “I'm a specialist,” he said, producing a hip unit from somewhere and tapping it on. “I maintain the ship's operating system and the pilot interfaces. We'll probably get to know each other very well if you decide to stay in the program.”

  Not if you don't wash out.

  Patty felt another blush stain her cheeks as she drew her knees up and, burying her feet under her butt, hid herself in differential equations again.

  0430 Hours

  Monday 6 November, 2062

  Clarke Orbital Platform

  If there was any fate in the galaxy more miserable than suffering through a cold on a space station, Charlie Forster hoped he never had to encounter it.

  It could have been worse, of course. It could have been zero G, or he could have not caught on that he was getting sick until the Montreal was under way. Which was a good way to burst an eardrum, if the decongestants and antihistamines didn't quite keep up with the flow of snot.

  As it was, he'd managed to catch the Gordon Lightfoot returning to Clarke, and was able to weather his misery in conditions of relatively stable pressure, gravity, and acceleration. Which wasn't to say that he wouldn't cheerfully have died about three times an hour. But at least he wasn't in immediate danger of his head bursting open like an overripe plum, no matter how imminent it felt.

  And he had his work to distract him.

  Charlie leaned back in his desk chair and pressed a damp, freshly microwaved cloth to his face. The aroma of menthol, citrus, and camphor pierced the fresh-poured cement clogging his sinuses, and he coughed in the middle of a sentence “—considering for a moment my own research on Mars, Paul—”

  “You sound awful.”

  “I feel awful,” Charlie admitted. “One of the ground-siders must have brought something up from Toronto or Brazil. Half the station is sick.” There was a light-speed lag in communication, but it was barely noticeable compared to the eight minutes one way he'd been accustomed to when he was working on Mars.

  “What about the Montreal?”

  “Nobody sick over there yet,” Charlie said. “Give it a couple of hours. It looks like a three-day incubation period, which means if they go they'll start dropping any minute now. The earliest infected Clarke staff is already recovering. And Montreal's life support is more efficient. More modern. Augmented carbon dioxide cycle over there, rather than straight canned air.”

  They couldn't see each other, Paul Perry and Charlie. A waste of bandwidth on the scrambled channel when they were just talking. But Charlie knew Paul well enough to pick up the worry even from the tinny, digitally compressed tone. “There's no chance it's a bioagent?”

  “PanChinese sabotage?” Charlie shrugged. “Possible but unlikely. They're not above bioweapons, but if I were going to wipe out a space station's crew complement, I'd go with . . . dunno, what do you think? Legionnaire's?”

  “Influenza,” Paul answered, after a pause that was half lag and half thought. “Engineered influenza. An incapacitating one, high fever, nausea, death in say, thirty-six hours after a seven-day incubation?” He sighed audibly. “It would be doable, too. I'll see that screening protocols are instituted immediately. I wonder what else we haven't thought of.”

  “Whatever the one that gets us is,” Charlie answered bitterly. “If that's dealt with, I still want to talk to you about Mars—”

  Lag. “Listening.”

  “I had another thought.”

  “Most scientists are satisfied with three or four unprovable hypotheses in a career, Chuck.”

  “Instead of three or four a week?”

  Paul's laughter. Charlie got up to microwave his face cloth again. The steam did help. He pulled another cloth out of the plasti-foil pack while he was up, and heated that one to lay across his scalp and the back of his neck, where it could ease aching muscles. God, for a steaming-hot, old-fashioned dirt-side shower— “Do you want to hear this or not?”

  “Sure,” Paul said, easy and relaxed. Before he'd become Riel's science adviser, Paul Perry had been a number of things. One of which was a consultant on the government side of the joint Canadian/Unitek Mars mission that had discovered the two vessels buried under the red planet's wind- and water-scarred surface. “Tell me your crackpot theory, Mr. Bigshot Xenobiologist.”

  “There's an ejecta layer over the craft on Mars.”

  “There's an ejecta layer over most of Mars. And isn't it several ejecta layers? I know your dating of the ships relies heavily on the geology.”

  Charlie breathed in through steam, bending double to cough as the glop on the back of his throat peeled loose. “Good—God,” he gasped, tasting sour-sweet metal through even the camphor reek of the cloth. He sat down on the stool bolted in front of his secondary interface. “I think my dating was wrong.”

  “Wrong how?”

  “I said the ships had been there about two, three million years. Which would put it very close to the development of sentience on Earth.”

  “Close, geologically speaking.”

  “But now I think it's closer to sixteen million years.”

  Dead silence through the link. Charlie smiled. “You see why I called you?”

  “Why do sixteen million years and Mars sound familiar—” Paul's fingers were moving rapidly enough over his interface that Charlie could pick out the sound of the enter contact being depressed. “You're talking about ALH84001.”

  “I'm talking about life on Mars. Above the microbial level.”

  “That doesn't make any sense, Charlie. Why ground a ship on Mars—wait. Presumably you're assuming that the—that they were using their derelict ships in somewhat the same way the Americans used Viking or the old Soviet Union did Venera—”

  “Space probes. Sure, why not? If they needed an FTL drive to get here anyway, and they were junking the ships—”

  “Spoken like a Yankee, Chuck. Do you have a box in your garage labeled ‘pieces of string too small to save'?”

  “If I had a garage, I probably would. As it is, I travel light.” The cloths had cooled; Charlie didn't have the energy to get up and microwave them again. Memo to me, he thought. Invent a cold cloth with an integral heating circuit. Why hasn't anybody thought of that?

  Maybe the microwave manufacturers get kickbacks—

  “But why Mars? We've got evidence of microbial life sixteen million years ago, but—”

  “How long did the Venera probes last?”

  Tapping. It was always reassuring when Paul didn't just know something, Charlie thought. “None of them over an hour.”

  “Earth's a much more corrosive environment than Mars,” Charlie hazarded. “Maybe they did send us ships, and they didn't survive. Or maybe they were keeping an eye on Mars because the life there was so much more fragile. Earth's ecosystem has survived some pretty astounding blows—”

  “You're thinking of the Yucatán meteor impact, aren't you?”

  Charlie laughed, which turned into a gagging cough. “God damn this cold. That was a sissy hit, Paul. We got one about 251 million years back that made that look like—nothing. And the ALH84001 meteorite is the remnant of a relatively minor knock that still managed to kick chunks clean off Mars. Mars doesn't have the gravity or the atmosphere Earth does. The atmospheric blowout, water an
d oxygen and carbon loss from a few of those would have put paid to whatever chance multicellular life might have had there.”

  “So what do you think the ships were for?”

  Plaintively. Charlie managed not to laugh this time. “You're the sober, responsible ecologist. I'm just a wild-eyed xeno guy. I come up with the crazy theories, you figure out why they don't work. I'm reasonably certain, though, that after all my work with the nanotech we're using on the pilots, it was intended for organic interfacing. And the freaky thing: it self-adapts. You show it a cat and it knows it's a cat. You show it a beet and it knows it's a beet. I haven't gotten any beet-cats yet.”

  “Why do you always get the fun jobs?” Paul sighed. “What if the ships were part of a, a—terraforming—no, a xenoforming attempt that failed?”

  “Hey, you do okay with the crazy theories on your own.” Charlie grinned, the cold cloth dangling forgotten from his fingers. “Huh. Possible. Or possibly they're interstellar altruists who dropped their nanotech off on an ecologically damaged Mars—figure the atmosphere leakage had already started, say, or a little axis wobble, or what have you—to see if the ecology could be reconstructed. To see if those Martian microbes would evolve into something more impressive, given a fighting chance. And then the system got nailed with another couple of catastrophic failures—like the meteor impacts—and folded. It makes as much sense as them leaving a couple of ships there so the hairless monkeys would be able to call next door for a cup of sugar if we ever got off our own little blue rock.”

  “Miocene, Charlie. Not that there were hairless monkeys—”

  “Fussy. Carcharocles megalodon, then. Space sharks.” Charlie braced his palms together, fingers meshing and biting air, and laughed at his own childishness.

  “Carcharocles translunaria. Ew. What an image.”

  Charlie could picture Paul's elaborate shudder, and dropped his hands, scrubbing them against his trousers. “If they didn't take a crack at Earth, there could be two reasons, I guess.”