Scardown

by Elizabeth Bear

  “One, they liked Mars better. It was more like home.”

  Charlie nodded, forgetting Paul couldn't see him. “Or, as you said. Earth was more hospitable to life than Mars.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe they're good guys. Anticolonialists. Maybe they figured we had a chance on our own.”

  A long silence, and then Paul Perry laughed ironically, his rich voice made tinny by distance and empty space. “Our own colonial history as hairless monkeys is so rife with altruism, after all. Don't go buying into that twentieth-century cultist trope that the aliens are advanced and enlightened, Chuck. It worries me. Figure the odds.”

  Figure the odds, Charlie thought, wondering how naive he could possibly be. And then figure the odds on life. And then consider the difficulty you have talking to your pet dog, Paul, and figure the odds that life from another planet will want things that are even comprehensible to life from ours. He sneezed again and wiped his nose on the camphorated cloth.

  0500 Hours

  Monday 6 November, 2062

  HMCSS Montreal

  Earth orbit

  I wake early, ship's time, alone in my bunk and wearing the kind of bad attitude that makes you hate living in your own skin. I know what it's about, too. I haven't had a drink since we left Earth, and I've been a borderline alcoholic for twenty years. Self-medication is a wonderful thing.

  You don't need it anymore, Jenny. Yeah, right.

  So I can sleep nights, when two months ago I couldn't. Somebody loves me and isn't shy about showing it. My monsters are all dead now. Dead and buried. Lost and gone.

  So why am I waking up mornings wanting a drink? Or thinking about the vial of diminutive yellow pills in my blazer pocket?

  Oh, hell. Today is another test-drive day. I get to jack into the Montreal live and for real, take her up and out, and put her through her FTL paces. Not the virtual reality simulator, like the one Leah is probably flying right now, somewhere on Earth. Not a model. A real, live, deadly powerful ship with some three hundred souls on board.

  I roll over out of the bunk, hit the floor palms flat, and start my push-ups. Endorphins. Good thing. One, two, three, four, nose dipping down to almost touch the porthole in my floor, nothing out there now but the trackless dark—

  The trick is not using the prosthesis. It's too strong. Fortunately, in partial gravity, one-handed push-ups aren't as hard as they are planet-side. Get the blood moving. Good morning, Richard. Any progress?

  “Yes,” he says. “And it's complicated in here. I'm not certain there's any differentiation between the worm and the programming.”

  I stop with my right arm extended, left arm folded against my chest. Even the new prosthesis is heavy, although it's lighter and stronger than the twenty-five-year-old one it replaced. If I didn't keep up with my PT, I'd look like the Hunchback just from carrying the damned thing around. “No differentiation?” I say it out loud, and bite my lip. Richard, what does that mean?

  His image drums fingers on immaterial thighs, then the hands come up in an encompassing gesture. I imagine a sailor pulling ropes. “It means there's no worm, per se. Nothing I can deactivate without ripping the programming out entirely. And you need it where it is. It was skillfully done. But if I could decompile the code, Castaign and I might have a chance.”

  That software runs the wetware that keeps me walking. Nanoprocessors along my damaged spinal cord, improving its functionality; the reflex boost that makes me potentially able to steer this improbable starship. My left hand, gleaming steel under a polymer film that handles the sensory information. All souvenirs of a very, very bad accident half a lifetime ago, upgraded and enhanced with new, radical nanotechnology that cost me a few weeks on tubes and monitors in a hospital bed.

  There's a rub. The source of that medical miracle is the grounded alien spacecraft that Valens and Charlie discovered on Mars. The technology that also gave us the Montreal's quasi-understood stardrive and my ability to control it. Technology we've back-engineered, or at least copied . . . but that, in my layman's estimation, we don't understand worth a damn.

  It's beyond irresponsible and into criminal. So how did I come to sign on for this little charade?

  Thereby hangs the tale—

  “I'm working on it, Jenny,” Richard says in my ear, as I realize I've lost count of my push-ups and ease back onto my knees to stretch.

  The worm, or the tech?

  “Yes.” Expansive, expressive hands. Long knotty fingers, with no physical reality whatsoever. Richard is made in the image of a physicist dead since the previous century. He's not Richard Feynman—just an artificial persona, a program meant to mimic the original. A persona that somehow clicked into self-awareness; a feat my friend Elspeth hasn't been able to reproduce. “I've got a few ideas on how the stardrive works. It has to be duck-ing the Einsteinian speed limit somehow. Superstrings, probably—” he rattles on, sketching diagrams in space. They hang glowing between his fingers; the joys of VR.

  Man's got a gift. My eyes don't quite glaze over when he starts talking about eleven-dimensional reality. Dick, the worm.

  “It's not a worm.”

  Whatever. What does it do?

  His face rearranges itself around a tangled smile. “I'm going to have to block-redirect part of it before I get out of your head. It logs brain activity, for one thing.”

  Thought police? Damn.

  “Not exactly. But I was using up a hell of a lot of your processing capability when I was living in your head, and it will pick that up, so I need to fake some logs. Here's the coolest thing—the surgical nanites are still active in your system. Still laying networks to help you interface with the Montreal. And VR linkages. Have you noticed my voice and image getting stronger? There's more room in here every day.”

  I thought that was practice. Great. I'm full of bugs.

  “You're full of bugs that are still repairing all the old scar tissue and neural damage. Jenny. It's radical—”

  What?

  “You might get smarter. Even more interesting—”

  I catch myself holding my breath. I wonder how much of this Valens knew before he shot me full of these things. Koske is wearing them, too, though. As were the pilots killed in Le Québec, the Li Bo, the Lao Zi. Interesting, Dick? We're talking about my brain.

  “Sorry, Jen. Organic repair is continuing. You had some liver damage, some age-appropriate arthritis in addition to all the scardown and trauma around your implants, artificial joints, and prostheses. And did you happen to notice that half the Montreal is sick?”

  He's nattering. “I noticed Gabe and Valens both wiping their noses.” And I've never felt better. Who have always been able to catch a cold by looking at a sick person across an empty room. Richard, the scardown was supposed to reverse. Look. I can touch my toes. Haven't been able to do that since I was twenty-four. Damned ceramic hip was always too stiff.

  “Yes. Supposed to reverse. So was the neural damage, the demyelination, the flashbacks and the seizures, the symptoms of MS. How about the liver and kidney damage? Was that supposed to reverse, too?”

  Something chill settles between my shoulder blades. Liver damage . . . Richard? What are you telling me?

  “Not enough evidence yet to know, Jenny. But you're getting healthier. And I checked. Koske hasn't been on sick call since he went through the procedure, and he was a lot worse off than you were. He had the induced-Asperger syndrome symptoms you mostly ducked, in spades. In fact, he still does.”

  “Holy hell.” I think about Earth, the unforgettable blue-white sweep of her face seen from the panorama lounge on Clarke Station. Starving, fevered Earth—brutal winters and searing summers since the shutdown of the global thermohaline conveyor, the cold Atlantic rising along river valleys and pressing dikes. New Orleans floating on barges, Houston abandoned to the sea. I think of Gabe's daughter Genie and her thick, choking cough. And maybe I feel a little pity for Trevor Koske, after all.

  Dick. You're trying to tell
me I'm not getting any older. That the ship tree—Charlie Forster's word—nanites are actually healing more than just the scar tissue and the neural issues.

  “That's what the evidence suggests. Yes.”

  Is this going to affect Leah?

  “Not with the neural VR implant she has now, no. But if she goes through the full enhancement, and survives it—yes.”

  You're talking about an end to disease. You're talking about global overcrowding on an unimaginable scale.

  “That's the least radical possibility. But there's something I'm not sure any of the Unitek and armed forces types have considered. Other than Dr. Forster, who's a nice boy, but a bit—naive.”

  What's that, Richard?

  “If you were leaving presents like this for the backward natives of a backward world—wouldn't you want something from them when they finally came to say thank you?”

  “Troy,” I say automatically. I'm still thinking about my answer when a knock startles me. I grab yesterday's shirt and drag it on over my underwear, buttoning it more or less straight. “Coming.” A pair of warm-ups follows before I undog the hatch and jerk it open. “Valens. You're up early.”

  “May I come in?” And scrubbed and shining, too—full uniform, insignia gleaming almost as brightly as his silver hair despite the peeling redness of his nose and the blurriness of eyes that are usually bright and sharp. I wipe sleep out of the corner of my prosthetic eye and remind myself of ship discipline. Much as I'd like to keep him standing in the hallway, I step back and let him into my cabin. He takes up most of the available floor space, all cleft chin and precision. “I thought you deserved a personal wake-up call. It's your big day.”

  He glances around the room, eye lighting momentarily on the eagle feather in its cubby. I wonder if he was trying to catch Gabe and me together. I grin. Gabe's a civilian now. No rules against it. Besides, I know damn well they've got every room on this ship wired for sound. “First of many, sir. I was just doing my PT before heading down to the scrubbers.”

  “I'll expect you in uniform today,” he says. I scratch the back of my neck, funny sensation where the skin ends and the edge of the socket sits. It itches a little. Not like the phantom pain I used to get on my left side. Which is when I realize I haven't had that in a day or two either. And that the morning stiffness is lessening, and the aches at bedtime.

  “Or what, Fred? You'll court-martial me? You need me a hell of a lot more than I need you.”

  He tilts his head to one side, studying me like a judge eyeing a show dog. The effect is ruined when he sneezes. “If the petty rebellion makes you feel better, Casey, by all means, indulge yourself. As long as I can count on you when it matters, I don't care if you mouth off. We're beyond those kind of games now, aren't we?”

  Damn him. “Yes.” I get a towel from my locker. “I guess we are. Bigger problems and all that.” Sure. A girl can walk away from her dreams of vengeance. I still want to see Valens court-martialed for what he did to me almost thirty years back. On the other hand, he's saved my life twice now. Sometimes things get a little hard to reconcile.

  “I guess you could call China a bigger problem.” His nod is slow, considering. He stares at the view out the porthole between his boots, but I don't think he's seeing it. “Earth is an egg, Casey. Eventually, the hatchling either puts its beak through the shell, or it suffocates in its own waste.”

  “And what about everybody who gets left behind? What about the damage we do on the way out?” I can all but hear my Haudenosaunee grandfather's wry comments as he stopped to pick up litter on the roadside.

  Valens scratches his earlobe. “We try to solve that problem when we're a little closer to realization.”

  I bite my lip on my answer. Use it up, throw it away, you can always get more. I guess it applies to planets, too.

  He continues. “In the meantime, you're scheduled for twelve hundred. Two Hyperex ninety minutes before, and one when you report. Do you have enough pills?”

  Damn. The bottle he handed me when I started the VR program had twenty Hyperex tablets in it. Yellow poison dots no bigger than the plastic head of a sewing pin. A drug used in combat missions, colloquially known as the Hammer. He should know exactly how many I have left, as he's supervised my trials.

  And Valens knows what I went through with the Hammers and the pain meds, years ago. The first time I left the army. Before it took me back, over my very vocal protests.

  He's setting you up, Jenny. Damn. Has set you up. “Plenty,” I answer, and drape the towel around my shoulders. “Now if you don't mind, sir. I'd like to get clean.” So why does Valens want you back on drugs?

  Because it's one more way he can control you. Beyond Gabe, beyond the girls. He smiles and gets out of my way. “Uniform, Casey,” he reminds me.

  “Why are you so damned determined to get me all dressed up and spit shined, Fred?”

  “One. This is not a civilian ship, and you represent Captain Wainwright, myself, and the entire crew of the Montreal when you step on that bridge. Two, we have some visiting dignitaries, which is why we're doing a second run under solar power to get well above the plane of the elliptic before we try the stardrive. Seeing as how said stardrive is a little tricky.”

  “Understatement.” Like her sister ships, the Montreal has a fatal attraction to gravity wells.

  Valens winks. “Also, one of my grandkids is onboard.”

  How the hell did he manage that? “Grandkids?”

  “Patty. She's sixteen. She'll be one of your students once we start the second phase of the program.” There's something in his voice. Pride, sure. But something else, and maybe a little frantic glimmer in clever hazel eyes. Worry.

  I don't want to think what might have Col. Frederick Valens running scared. “Valens. How many of these ships are you planning on building?”

  He ignores the question as I undog the hatch. “Your locker's 312. Everything you need is in there. There's a sidearm, too. I want it on you at all times.”

  “Bullets?” On a pressurized tin can in interplanetary space? I step into the corridor. Holy fuck. What do I need a sidearm for?

  “Plastic,” he says. “Fatal at short range. Won't pierce a bulkhead.”

  “You promise?” His face gives nothing away; Valens plays his games on a dozen levels. It's why I fear him. Fred, is this your underhanded way of telling me there might be somebody on the Montreal who means her harm? Oh, hell. And this ship has kids onboard. Kids not much older than Leah. Kids the same age I was when I signed on to this man's army. “All right. Combination? Key?”

  He comes out of my cabin, passing me as I hold the hatch open. “Thumb lock,” he says, and continues down the curve of the hallway, leaving me behind.

  1200 Hours

  Monday 6 November, 2062

  PPCASS Huang Di

  Earth orbit

  “The Montreal is accelerating again, sir.”

  At the astrogator's words, Min-xue smoothed his hands on the arms of his couch of honor and tried to ignore the black webbing creasing his thighs. Only the captain's chair was more prominent on the softly lit bridge of the People's PanChinese Alliance StarShip Huang Di, although Min-xue's role was strictly ceremonial until the Huang Di was under way. He was not wired in to his ship, but the command might come at any moment, and regulations demanded a pilot—one of the starship's five—be always on duty. Which was also why the lights were dimmed and surfaces padded in acoustically absorbent material.

  Min-xue glanced up at the gleaming panels around the rim of the bridge, struggling not to shiver in the inadequate warmth. He watched Captain Wu's reflected expression without daring to turn his head, lest the commander think his attention less than perfect. The ship's commander watched view screens impassively, one eyebrow rising slightly in calculation. Min-xue stilled fingers that wanted to fret the prickly slick curved surface of his interface shield, press down the soft gelatin protecting the contacts, and reveal the slender pins that would seal themselves into h
is neural port with a single swift gesture. The coolness was soothing, the sharpness of the pins concrete and focused enough that they left no room for the blurring of contact that could throw Min-xue into a panic of sensory hyperarousal.

  “Do we follow?” asked the junior officer at the controls. “It is probably another demonstration run. There have been shuttles recently—the Leonard Cohen and the Buffy Sainte-Marie.”

  Unlike the corporate ships of the Westerners, the Huang Di used chemical rockets for in-system propulsion. They made a visible flare—but the Huang Di's smaller silhouette was easier to conceal than the Montreal's sweeping solar sails and massive habitation ring. And the chemical rockets were not reliant on the solar wind for impulse, leaving the Huang Di more nimble under almost any circumstances.

  But they have gravity. The captain nodded, still impassive, and the junior officer's hands played over his control panels. Xie Min-xue folded his own hands in his lap and recalled lines of T'ang dynasty poetry to pass the time. Have you not seen, lord, near the Kokonor, the ungathered bones of the long dead soldiers? New ghosts whisper while the old ghosts weep: you can hear them in the empty passage of the rain.

  He couldn't wait until his stultifying duty shift ended, and he could put in his practice hours on the simulators and then read himself to sleep in what passed for the privacy of his coffin-bed. Or find Paiyun and the medics or the other off-duty pilots for a game of mah-jongg, go, or chess.

  The Huang Di rose in soundless pursuit of her rival, slipping ghostlike away from the embrace of Earth's gravity and into the caress of the stellar wind. The screens and holograms showed the character indicating Earth “below” and “behind” Min-xue's ship. Somewhere on that whirling globe was Min-xue's mother, his sister, the girl he had intended to marry. Before he'd been subjected to the pilot's modifications that made him flinch away from the simplest touch.

  What the Westerners did to their pilots was worse. The clinicians and technicians said the Canadians were afraid to trust their pilots with a full nanite load, or to make enough of them to allow adequate rest between shifts. The clinicians said that the Canadians severed limbs and replaced them with cybernetic appliances, implanted destruct codes in the pilots' software, addicted them to performance-enhancing drugs so that they could bear the endless workload, and so they could be more easily controlled. The Canadians and their corporate masters did not have the moral certainties of post-Communist and neo-Confucian patriotism to guide them; they were ideologically flawed, and their rapacious ways, so similar to those of the Americans, were a large part of the reason behind the poverty and privation that Min-xue had known so well as a child.