Scardown

by Elizabeth Bear

  She could have killed me.

  No doubt in her mind. Genevieve Casey—shit. Shit! Indigo crushed her eyes closed and tried to think past the burning exhaustion, the sensation like a bullet hole in the center of her chest. She saw, over and over, the woman's fucking arrogant white grin as she rolled steel fingers back precise as a time-lapse film of a flower unfurling, the squashed bullet, the wink.

  Who the hell would have imagined she could do that?

  Why on Earth would she want to let me live?

  Despite the blinds, it was much brighter in the cabin when she lifted her eyes and rubbed at the dent the rifle had left in her forehead. She wasn't sure if she had slept, but her neck ached and her mouth felt stuffed with scraps of paper. She leaned the rifle against the wall and stood. Food first—she dug in her backpack for energy bars and a pouch of pop—and then she flipped open the cheap Web link she'd bought in a department store in Ottawa. She signed in using trial guest software from an Internet conglomerate and checked Web mail accounts maintained under several false names.

  On the third one, she found the e-mail from Razorface. Time-stamped two days before.

  Shit. Her finger hovered a centimeter from the open icon at the edge of her interface, and finally stabbed through it. His recorded image stared at her out of cyberspace, a clever algorithm making the eyes seem to track. “Indy.” A deep breath, and the image covered its mouth to cough. “I got a message for you from Maker . . . from Jen Casey, probably the name you know her by. She says you need to ditch Farley, head for the border or someplace safe. You need to abort the hit on Riel—she said to tell you this: ‘Tell Indigo that Genevieve Casey says her Uncle Bernard would have had more sense, and she doesn't have to trust me but if she's smart she'll do what I say.' She said to tell you that Farley works for Alberta Holmes, and she—Maker—doesn't.”

  “Shit.” Indigo dropped the Web link on the battered maple table. She tried to warn me?

  She didn't just let me get away. Genevieve Casey went out of her way to protect me.

  What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

  0300 Hours

  Saturday 16 December, 2062

  HMCSS Montreal

  Trevor Koske was coming to dread opening his eyes. It could have been worse. This time, he flinched from the strobe-flicker of fluorescent lights and would have shaded his eyes with his hand, but it was tied to the bedframe. “Ow.”

  “Captain Wainwright.” A modulated voice he recognized as the tones of the ship's AI. “The overhead lights hurt Lieutenant Koske's eyes. Would you—”

  “Light down,” she said, and the flicker behind his eyelids dimmed to a bearable level. “It's okay, Lieutenant. You can talk now. The tubes are out.”

  He coughed and tried to peer at her through his eyelashes. “The fluorescents strobe,” he managed. “Ma'am, thank you. How long has it been?”

  “It's Saturday,” she said. “Barely.” She circled sick bay slowly, one wall to the other, measured steps carrying her between workstations. “You're going to be fine. Apparently you're tougher than we imagined, Lieutenant. Your warning allowed the ship's AI to avert a major threat to the Montreal. You have the crew's gratitude for that.”

  “Threat?”

  “A computer virus. A Trojan horse.” A lightning change of direction. “Can you describe your attacker?”

  “Can you untie my hands?”

  Captain Wainwright glanced toward the door. “I don't see why not, now.”

  The AI spoke. “It should be acceptable, Captain. The duty surgeon gives his permission.”

  She unwound the soft cloth straps on his wrists, careful not to touch his skin. Once she released him he stretched, then gingerly patted the bandages encircling his throat. “I remember leaving the gym,” he said. “Handball practice.”

  The captain's eyebrows arched at the irony in his voice. “Now you develop a sense of humor?”

  He shrugged. It tugged his bandages. He didn't do it again.

  Wainwright came back to the bedside, her rubber-soled ship shoes scuffing the deckpads. “That's all?”

  He pushed back until he found blackness, his gut unraveling when he realized he didn't even know how much time he'd lost. His voice came out level, to his pride. A wrinkle in the sheets chafed his skin. He smoothed it irritably. “Until I woke up in my quarters.”

  “Traumatic amnesia?”

  “I—It's not a tip-of-the-tongue thing, like trying to remember where you left the car keys. It's like the memories just don't exist.” He remembered in time not to shake his head. “What am I doing awake, Captain?”

  “Your nanite load appears to have saved your life.” Her face stayed impassive, a mask of intellectual interest. “You were very lucky. There was an attempt on Master Warrant Officer Casey yesterday as well, along with the prime minister.”

  “Casey? Is she—”

  “She'll be fine.”

  He chewed the inside of his cheek, not even bothering to sort through the tangle of emotions that raised. “Linked?”

  “Seems a bit likely, doesn't it? But no one has provided me with an official opinion on that. Yet.” A touch of irritation? Maybe. “You should be on your feet before you know it,” Wainwright continued. “Meantime, rest. We'll try hypnosis and, if we have to, study drugs to try to recover your memories, when you're feeling better.” She stared down at him for a long moment, as if expecting a response.

  “Ma'am?” He struggled with his frown, lost, wrestled his mouth back to a neutral line with some effort.

  A shrug, narrow shoulders lifting and falling under the crisp navy of her jumpsuit. She stepped away from the bed. “And, Koske—there's a guard on the door. I'm afraid you're in protective custody until we figure out what's what and which side who is on.”

  0400 Hours

  Saturday 16 December, 2062

  National Defence Medical Center

  Toronto, Ontario

  At oh-four-hundred I get out of bed to go to the bathroom and realize three steps away—when the IV tugs and I turn back absently to give the motorized smart stand time to catch up—that I am walking. With a certain amount of stiffness and pain, yes. With a spasm in my thigh like my quadriceps has been tied in a knot and spot-welded back into place, and my right arm feeling like Dr. Frankenstein ran a few stitches across the top of the shoulder to hold it on until he could get back to me.

  But walking.

  I stagger to the head, the IV stand humming happily along behind me, and then crawl back into bed and try to close my eyes. Sleep comes easier than I thought it would, but it only lasts an hour or two.

  By sunrise, I'm up and dressed in the clothes Elspeth dropped off yesterday, the IV—much to the discomfiture of the staff—unhooked and pushed back beside the nightstand. I can't stay in bed another minute. Even chatting with Richard about his conversations with Wainwright and company fails to distract me, but my leg still hurts too much to pace. I ask Richard to tell Leah to have Gabe hurry up. He laughs at me.

  Dick, how's Koske? I stretch back in the chair and stare at the ceiling, unwilling to endure the mindless drek on the holo.

  “Talking to Wainwright. I'll fill you in later. He'll live.” Richard sounds oddly satisfied at that. “He's better once you get to know him. Not personable by any means, but better.”

  You've been talking to Koske? Did he identify his attacker?

  “He can't remember anything between opening the door to his quarters and winding up on the floor. Somebody disabled the recording devices, and somebody must have been able to hack past the thumb lock on the door.”

  The way you did Gabe's—but my question is cut off by the appearance of a tall figure, framed in the yellow-painted steel doorway. Valens hesitates a moment, meeting my eyes as if waiting for permission to enter the room.

  “Forgive me if I don't get up, Fred.”

  “At ease,” he answers wryly. A dark bruise mottles his left cheek. It looks an awful lot like the sort of handprint you leave on somebody
when you're making damn sure they're watching you talk. I've seen those in the mirror, though not lately.

  Huh.

  That would be a pretty big hand.

  He saunters in like a silver tomcat casing an unfamiliar living room: a look to the left, a look to the right. “Just so you know, Casey. If that slug had gone where it was headed, we wouldn't be having this little conversation. Don't start thinking you're immortal now.”

  “Perish the thought. That was one hell of a spanking.”

  “Yeah.” Valens rubs the palm of his right hand across his blue-shadowed cheek. He takes a little box out of his pocket and plugs it into a wall socket next to the light switch. He presses buttons, and then he closes the door and wedges a plastic chair in front of it.

  Tension drags my shoulders back and I wince as that graze on my shoulder tugs hard.

  Valens straightens from adjusting the settings on his antiespionage device. “I didn't know Alberta would be so willing to sacrifice you. I thought the hit would come after you left.”

  “I suspect she may have underestimated Indigo's dislike for me. Holmes isn't real good with people, is she? In any case—Riel would be dead.”

  “Maybe. But this solution is better overall.” He rakes that hand through his hair, the silver thatch falling back into place like a bird's preened feathers. “Koske's going to make it, too.”

  “I heard.” I catch myself rubbing the gouges in my metal hand with my right thumb, and make myself stop. It's half strange not to feel the touch, and half like a homecoming. “Fred, does it seem odd to you that somebody could get close enough to Trevor to put a knife into him? You know what that would take.”

  “In a dark room? If you came home tired?”

  “I'd leave anybody who tried smeared all over the wallboards.” I stand up, leaning on the back of a molded plastic chair, hesitantly stretching my leg. It feels tender, fragile. I don't push my luck. “Just out of curiosity. Why didn't you issue Koske a weapon, too?”

  His brow wrinkles over carefully groomed eyebrows. “Would you hand Trevor Koske a gun?”

  “Point.”

  He offers me his arm as I hobble around the bed. I ignore it, watching my feet move. Richard, these bugs are just freaky. I feel him chuckle, but he doesn't answer. Valens steps out of my way.

  “It's still weird, Fred. Weird . . . weird Koske can't remember what happened, too.”

  “Who told you that?”

  I grin at him and wink, enjoying the minor advantage. It's nice to see Valens at a loss for once. “You have sources and so do I. What are you going to do about Alberta and Riel?”

  “Blackmail one, cultivate the other. And you?”

  “I—” I stop, swallow. Examine the gray-and-blue speckled off-white tiles and twist my toe against them. “Calisse de crisse. I'm going to do what I gotta do. You know that.”

  When I look up, he's staring at me with a bemused expression. He meets my eyes levelly and then nods once, slowly. “Yeah.” He turns away, unplugs his little device from the wall. He looks back over his shoulder, hand on the knob, shoulders set under his uniform. “Be careful, Jenny.”

  He's out the door before I can frame a comeback; the latch click echoes in my open mouth.

  Tuesday 19 December, 2062

  Sol-system wide area nanonetwork

  08:27:10:01–08:27:17:09

  Carver Mallory was a good kid, Richard decided absently, with the 5 percent of his processing capability he was using to maintain communication with Constance Riel, Leah, Jenny, Min-xue, and the crippled boy.

  “There's no reason Carver can't still be an effective pilot,” Richard said to Riel, using the Montreal's tight-beam microwave communications. Simultaneously, he linked the flight simulation Jenny had provided to Carver, projecting it directly into the boy's brain. Richard bet he could learn another new trick very soon: relaying conversation directly between the nanite-infected organic intelligences. This is going to change the world, he thought, not for the first time. This is going to change the species.

  He managed all that with 5 percent of his intellect.

  The other 95 percent was bent on cracking the nanite core programming and delobotomizing his progenitor. Ramirez and Forster had managed to get the Benefactor tech to reproduce itself, managed to modify the descendants and adapt them to various purposes such as the neural and VR enhancements. The nanotech remained self-programming in that it evolved to maintain and repair whatever object or creature its control chips were implanted in.

  Richard had long ago figured out how to tap into their carrier signal and ride their bandwidth. His new insight into their core programming let him disperse his awareness through the Canadian side of the nanonetwork, making him essentially decentralized. He'd already been able to spawn subprocesses. The new development made him a literal multithreaded, multifocal intelligence, able to merge and part with disparate selves at a whim.

  The data from the Chinese ships were invaluable; he was surprised to discover that the Chinese were farther along in the programming process than the Canadians. And that they had discovered how to isolate clumps—families—of nanites from the “network” so that those particular bugs communicated only with each other. To cut them off from the nanonetwork, in other words. To cut them off from Richard, too.

  Which crystallized his suspicions on the source of the logic bomb that could have killed the Montreal's crew and opened her hull to space. “Jenny,” he said when that individual had finished the trial runs for Carver (the same runs the rest of the students were undergoing, through direct hardware interface), “have you and Ellie finished the control chips I asked you to make?”

  “They're as ready as I can make them,” Jenny answered. Richard felt her motions as she stood, no longer favoring her injured leg, and paced around her desk. Plush carpet compressed under her boots; he sensed the absoluteness of her balance as she went to the window and stood, looking out. “Library computer, right?”

  “No,” he said with a smile. “I want to meet Alan.”

  She stopped, and Richard smiled to feel her mild surprise, to sense the nanite response to a brief elevation of heart rate and skin conductivity. “Alan? Lonely?”

  “It's not wise, I think,” Richard answered, “to let him grow up in isolation.” A half-truth. “Wire one of the chips into the intranet Elspeth has him isolated in, please.” (elsewhere, primary processes would have leapt and shouted aloud had they legs and voices as suddenly, precisely, the code structure of the nanite's quantum operating system came clear in Richard's not-quite-a-mind and he simultaneously saw how to force his other half to access the autonomous functions Gabe had so cleverly walled away / subprocesses noted that the Calgary's reactor came on-line for the very first time / Riel asked Richard if there was no hope that Carver would regain use of his body / Leah let a dark-haired boy kiss her in a corner stairwell and then pulled away, confused / Min-xue's heart rate spiked and—)

  “Dick?”

  Oh.

  Shit.

  (—his new access to the nanotech core programming triggered the logic bomb that Richard hadn't uncovered. And the Montreal started, picoseconds later, to take herself apart.)

  “Just a moment, Jenny,” Richard said into her brain. “Get me Alan. Now!” And while she kicked herself toward the door, he sent his own freshly cracked “family” of nanites to war and coded an emergency message to Prime Minister Riel.

  0827 Hours

  Tuesday 19 December, 2062

  PPCASS Huang Di

  Earth orbit

  Captain Wu stared, unmoving, out the window in his ready room as Min-xue drifted in. The captain didn't turn, so as the door irised shut Min-xue cleared his throat and waited. When there was still no response, he hesitantly drifted closer to the captain and cleared his throat again. Beyond the window, a crescent Earth and a crescent moon drifted side by side. Min-xue couldn't quite make out the silvery threads of the three orbital elevators from this distance, but he could catch the glitteri
ng flash from Clarke or one of its sister platforms.

  “I am not a war criminal,” Captain Wu whispered.

  Min-xue's heart rate spiked. “Captain?”

  The captain turned just far enough to fix him on a darkly glittering gaze. Min-xue realized the man had been drinking, and that the wetness that shone in the corners of his eyes was not from the drink. “I am not a war criminal,” he said again, more strongly. “And neither are you, Min-xue. There are times—”

  Min-xue almost fancied that Earth grew larger over the captain's shoulder in the moments before he spoke again. “—you must decide, yourself, what to do with the orders you are given. I have family,” he continued, rushing now, as if the words might clot and dry up if he didn't press them out fast enough. “Family that could suffer if I am disobedient. A child. Do you understand?”

  “No, Captain.”

  “A man must judge his own conscience.”

  Min-xue saw the trap and nodded. “My conscience is in the keeping of the service,” he said. “And of yourself, Captain.”

  Captain Wu would not look at him. “I suppose you have family, too.”

  “A sister. A mother.”

  “Then remember this conversation, Second Pilot. And ask yourself if one who gives his conscience into untenable keeping is not a war criminal, after all.”

  0828 Hours

  Tuesday 19 December, 2062

  Allen-Shipman Research Facility

  Toronto, Ontario

  I run.

  Valens is coming in the other direction. He hits the wall as I go by and falls into step behind me. “Riel just hit the panic button,” he gasps as I grab a corner and ricochet toward Elspeth's office. I should have left the damn chips with her.

  Richard, what the hell does “just a minute” mean, coming from you?

  “Just a moment. It's all right. We just suffered another attack, and—how fast can you have Alan on-line?”

  Fast, if you can tell me where to get the nanites to go with the chip.