Worldwired jc-3

by Elizabeth Bear

  Neither Casey nor Min-xue was suited yet, which worried Patty, but there was nothing she could do about it from inside the Montreal. And she wasn't going to think about that nothing she could do. Wasn't going to think about Carver or Mom…

  The pilots had another ten minutes before they reached the birdcage. Drill was to be suited and sealed in three.

  Drill was also to suit before you took a shuttlecraft out of dock, but this was an emergency.

  Patty was grateful that she couldn't feel her body. She couldn't feel her heart tighten in her chest when she refused to think about how Min-xue might get hurt either. That's what Leah would do. Leah would do the job and she would do it well and she'd protect everybody else while she was doing it. And if Leah could do it, Patty could do it, too. She imagined herself clothed in the armor of the ship, a golden robot-girl and not a flesh and blood girl at all, and didn't worry about whether her heart was racing. She picked up Mr. Castaign's voice through the bridge ears, and spared him a little attention. It was just keeping the Montreal pointed, now. “Dick, how are we doing?”

  Alan's avatar winked green-purple, and Richard's voice rang from the speakers. “Your window in five, Gabe — four, three—”

  Patty giggled inside her head, where nobody but she and Alan could hear it and it didn't matter if she sounded hysterical.

  There's nothing quite as much fun as squirming into a space suit while fighting gees from an erratic maneuvering burn, but I've got the damned thing up to my waist, and I'm struggling with the seals across the chest when Richard starts counting.

  “—two, one—” Richard counts in my ear, with that flatness of tone that tells me he's half-Alan, currently. Always weird to be reminded that a good friend isn't human.

  “We're not in position to catch yet, Dick.” I say it out loud, for Gabe's benefit. Patty and Min-xue don't need to be told; they're on the worldwire with me, tight as sharing a skin.

  “Don't worry. Plenty of time before anything breaks open.” I get my hat and my gauntlets on, double-checking the seals before I tug the controls away from Min-xue so he can get dressed. He does a better job than I did, fast and efficient despite what must be unfamiliar suits. I wonder how different the Chinese equipment is. He seems to be doing okay with the controls.

  “Richard coached me,” he says in his musical English, without turning his head inside the helmet to look at me. “When he reprogrammed my wiring to the Canadian standard.” He checks his restraints and rests his gloves on the arms of the chair rather than taking the controls back. I drive at the birdcage as hard as I dare. The gaps in the filigree aren't all the same size, and I need a pair of them opposite each other, or nearly, and big enough that I can line them up and coast through on inertia. I'm not risking a burn inside that thing if there's any way around it. And then, assuming we catch one of the missing the first time through, we get to come back and try it again.

  Dick, you rat.

  “I said nothing.”

  Sure. But I believe him; Min-xue isn't quite the spooky mindreader Elspeth is, but he's a smart kid and he's wired so tight that he shivers like a Mexican lap dog when he tries to stand still. Worse off than I am, and just as convinced that it's worth any price to fly. And it's perfectly possible that his hindbrain read my hindbrain, and he just sorta knew what to say.

  Freaks. Every last one of us.

  “Gabe's hacking, Jen. Can you get a little more vee?”

  “If I burn faster I have to brake harder once we get there, Dick. We need to be moving slow enough that Min-xue can bail out to handle the rescue, and we aren't going to be maneuverable while that's going on. This is crazy shit, sir.”

  Min-xue says something in Chinese that I take for agreement. I don't understand a word, but the tone is 50 percent if Momma could see me now and 50 percent I'm fucking nuts even to consider this. He slaps his release and vaults out of his chair. Acceleration kicks him toward the aft bulkhead; “down” is currently aimed toward the ass-end of the Ashley MacIsaac, and I wince, grateful for the armor of Min-xue's space suit and expecting him to wind up on his ass, sprawled against the wall like a terrified bug. But he twists in midfall, agile as if that space suit were a pair of stretch jeans, and lands with his boots against the bulkhead. The thump as he hits rattles my chair.

  Damn, he's fast. And so very, very young.

  Which is not something I'm allowed to think about. Not here. Not now. Because it's always the kids, isn't it? And more of us survive than don't, so I might as well quit whining, really.

  The pulley spins as he yanks a safety line out of the aperture; it clicks solidly through a D ring on his suit.

  “Don't jump until Dick tells you jump,” I say, just to be saying something. From his snort, he knows it and forgives me. The hatch to the passenger cabin bangs open and he drops through the hole, rappelling down. Design flaw: there's no way he can dog the hatch behind him. The shuttles weren't built to have people running around inside them when they're under acceleration. I'll have to talk to an engineer about that if we make it back.

  At least the air lock is set up so you can get in and get sealed up no matter which way the ship is pointing. The inside hatch unseals and I hear more clanging as Min-xue unhooks one safety line and attaches the one from inside the lock, the sound attenuated through my helmet. Min-xue's voice in my head is as clear as if he were standing close enough to lay a hand on my shoulder. “I am in position, Master Warrant.”

  “Thank you, Min.” Knowing Dick will relay if Min-xue can't hear me. It would be far too easy to get used to that, to start relying on it. As if any of us could in fact be relying on Richard any more than we already are. “Dick, how's Gabe doing?”

  The inner air lock door shuts with a vacuuming shoosh.

  “He's in, but he says he's not sure he's accomplishing anything,” Richard says. “Patty's ceased braking the Montreal and has begun tacking and a burn to match vee with the birdcage and come into synchronous orbit ‘behind' it, to facilitate pickup.”

  “Tricky.”

  “She's up to it.”

  I know she is, but we're angling up on the birdcage now, and I'm suddenly too busy flying to agree, because the joined-together Benefactor entity starts to shred like a fistful of twisted Kleenex, spattering mercury droplets this way and that. I've got what's on the monitors, and Dick is giving me what he feels, too, through the nanobot infestation. Which is gold-plated bizarre, because while I'm hands-on-the-controls, the acceleration couch prodding my back and my suit turning into a sauna because I'm all for conserving its resources as long as I have a perfectly functional shuttlecraft providing me with life support, I'm also spinning apart, decohering, as if fingers and toes and eyes and kidneys and guts all suddenly decided that the arrangement that's suited them just fine for the last fifty-odd years simply will not do for another cotton-picking moment. “Dick! That wasn't the plan!”

  “You know what they say about plans, Jen—” The Alan has dropped out of his voice, which tells me the other AI thread is damned busy all of a sudden, and I've got just Richard now, and probably a persona all to myself.

  “Does that mean Gabe hacked in all right?”

  “No.” I'm not imagining the tired resignation in his voice. “It means we got nowhere. It would have been nice to get a damned Hollywood ending for a change.”

  I've got Min-xue's presence in my head and the weird doubled vision that comes when Richard connects us. I see his suit, see the battleship-gray interior of the air lock through his eyes. I feel the birdcage entity flying into splinters, and the Ashley MacIsaac no longer slamming me back against my couch as I end my burn, and Patty light and precise in control of the Montreal and Dick all tangled up in my head and it's really more than I can handle. “Dick, I'm not a multithreaded entity, man—”

  “Sorry, Jen.” He modulates it back, leaving me strong and in control, the other awarenesses like monitors I have to turn my head to see; there, but not driving me to distraction. It is useful. I've got to hand
him that. Because I can feel Min-xue and Patty, almost like my own metal hand, an extension of my body that my kinetic sense encompasses, and I know they can feel me back. And moreover, all of us can feel which droplets and splinters of the birdcage critter are Charlie and Leslie.

  The three of us are thinking like a flock of birds. And that, coupled with our enhanced reflexes, is the thing that may let us pull this mad exercise off, rather than wrapping the shuttlecraft around one of the struts on the birdcage.

  It's just math, Min-xue told himself, bracing both gauntleted hands on the grab rails bracketing the air lock as he felt — through his own inertia, through the shift of Casey's hands on the controls — the Ashley MacIsaac begin its braking burn. A puff of vapor blew into space past him as he triggered the air lock, making sure his safety cables were short enough to hold him inside the shuttle even if Jenny had to move abruptly—more abruptly, he corrected, hands tightening on the grab rails convulsively a split second before the shuttle bumped hard, coming around flat with its rear end pointed in the direction of travel. Casey kicked the thrusters on, and this time Min-xue's death grip kept him from being hurled against the interior air lock door, rather than out into orbit.

  “Sorry,” Casey said in his head, and he didn't answer, because he'd known she was going to do it before she did it, of course, and in any case his attention was fixed gape-mouthed on the ungainly dragonfly body of the Montreal, solar sails at full extension, passing over the Ashley MacIsaac like a hawk over a huddled gosling. The shiptree glimmered behind her, silent and aloof, keeping its own remote counsel.

  He could feel Casey and Richard computing trajectories and angles of thrust, aiming the shuttle after the two bits of flotsam that Richard's infiltration of the Benefactor nanonetwork revealed to be Dr. Tjakamarra and Dr. Forster. He relaxed, and let them do it. This part of the process was not Min-xue's job.

  His duty was simply to go out there and catch them and haul them back inside. He wasn't worried about that. He'd act, and fail or succeed, and there would be no time for fear once he started. It was the waiting that was going to drive him mad.

  “Piece of cake,” Jenny said, and he realized that he had been thinking loud enough for her to sense. Min-xue didn't answer. Instead he glanced down and visually inspected his safety lines one last time, as the shuttle glided in absolute silence through the bars of the birdcage, and Min-xue groped with Richard's senses toward Dr. Forster, who would be the subject of their first rescue attempt.

  Min-xue braced himself in the doorway, watching the crystal bars of the birdcage slide past, and much to his own surprise managed to clear his mind. Casey's touch on the controls was feather-light; the shuttle turned within the length of its own hull, drifting, and suddenly all he could see was silver scattering, water shaken from a half-drowned dog, droplets smaller than his thumbnail with perspective that might in reality be close enough to reach out and grab in a gauntleted fist, or which might be as big as shipping containers, and a kilometer away. A quarter Earth glimmered behind them, flanked by an attendant moon. City lights shone far below, dulled by the pall in Earth's atmosphere, the birdcage picking up blue reflections from the moonlight and the earthlight.

  Oddly enough, Min-xue thought of the shiptree and its presumed inhabitants, line of sight now blocked by the shuttle's bulk, and wondered at their aloof observation of the scurrying about between the birdcage and the Montreal. Maybe they're up there hoping as hard as we are that we learn this. Maybe they want to talk to us as badly as we want to talk to them.

  Charlie's closer, and I've got him lined up pretty as a picture when I call down to Min-xue in the air lock. I'm surprised; this is nothing on flying medevac in jungle under fire. There's all the room in the world up here, and all I'm trying to do is not hit anything. Nobody's shooting at me, or at the people I'm trying to evac. Also, the psychic link with my ship, my target, and the retrieval team doesn't hurt in the slightest. Nothing like being able to mindread your buddies. This would have saved a lot of lives, back in Brazil. In fact, I bet if Charlie wasn't a bit fragile for that kind of treatment, I could scoop him up with the Ashley MacIsaac easy as a jai alai player scooping the ball into his basket.

  I'm not quite cocky enough to call it a cakewalk just yet, however. The shuttle glides up on our target. Min-xue tenses as he makes visual contact. I see the white of Charlie's space suit through Min-xue's eyes seconds before I make it out with my own. He's got the better angle. Should, of course; I planned that.

  “Is he breathing, Dick?”

  “I don't know,” the AI admits, a moment's wringing frustration. “I don't see any vapor off his suit, but he didn't have this much oxygen either.”

  “Can't you tell from the nanites?”

  “No. I can't tell a damned thing from the nanites right now. They're all wonky.”

  “That's a technical term?”

  “Jen,” he says, weary and a little bit irritated, which is a tone I don't hear from him often. “Quit yanking my chain and fly the shuttlecraft, please.”

  Sorry. And I am. It's reflex, the banter.

  And then we're on Charlie, and Min-xue spins out of the air lock like a flyer in a trapeze act, except he's the catcher, really, if the metaphor is going to work, and I just bloody well keep my hands still on the controls and try not to screw him up.

  I don't think we're going to get a second crack at this, not if we're going to come back and get Leslie, too.

  Min-xue's flying, all right. Rush of inertia and sharp twinge of fear, metallic taste of adrenaline crimping his mouth as he lets the shuttle's momentum fling him forward and down, somersaulting, all his trust in the fragile safety lines and his mind on my mind like hand in hand, like dancing, except neither one is leading and I can almost feel Richard holding his breath.

  Breath that's knocked out of all three of us when Min-xue hits Charlie's drifting shape amidships, misses the grab with his arms, locks both legs around Charlie's suit like a kid on a carousel pony, and kicks his attitude jets on a split second later, buying acceleration, equalizing velocity so he's moving the same way the shuttle is when he and Charlie fetch up against the end of the safety line like some idiot bungee jumping over Niagara Falls.

  The shock when the lines snap taut brings tears to my eyes, and I'm feeling it attenuated, courtesy of Richard. Min-xue bounces hard enough that I think for a second his suit's ruptured—and how the hell would I explain that piece of brilliance to Riel? — but I feel him recover, and he keeps his grip on Charlie and starts hauling them both up the safety lines hand over hand, because the pulleys aren't quite doing it fast enough to suit any of us.

  “Goddamn. Would you believe he pulled it off?”

  “Very pretty flying, ma'am,” Min-xue says. Unsurprisingly, the next voice I hear is Wainwright, demanding our immediate return to the Montreal.

  “In a minute,” I say. The cocky gets away from me, raw unholy glee big enough to fill a room. “We've got another man overboard, Cap'n. We'll be back once we've fished him out, too.”

  Except it doesn't work that way at all. Min-xue tucks Charlie's unmoving space suit inside the air lock and clips him onto three safety clasps before we clear the birdcage. I swap ends on the shuttle, a gliding turn — front end slides left, back end slides right — not all that different from how you'd do it in a chopper, and get us lined back up with the birdcage as Dick says, “Jenny, are you seeing this?”

  Yeah. We've got a problem, sir. “I think they just rolled up the welcome mat, Dick.” Because suddenly, unexpectedly, the birdcage has a hull. The baroque, open-to-space filigree is still visible like the raised outline of leaf veins, or like ribs revealed under skin, but the gaps between are covered by a taut, stretched membrane that bellies and ripples a little, like an opaque film of soap bubbles.

  I can't fly through that. I don't even know what it is.

  Shit. “What do we do now, Dick?”

  “Casey—” Wainwright, and I don't want to hear it, but I know what she's going to
say. She surprises me, though. Her voice hitches and goes softer. “Master Warrant, why don't you just come on home?”

  The strips Wainwright tears off me are thin and she doesn't stop at half a dozen. She'd like to confine me to quarters, I'm sure, but it isn't quite practical when Patty and Min-xue were in on the mutiny, too.

  And, after all, we almost got away with it.

  Got away getting Charlie back, at least, and breathing, even if we haven't managed to prove that he'll ever regain higher functions. He shouldn't be breathing. The oxygen in his suit should have been exhausted long since, but something the Benefactors did seems to have put his in a state of hibernation, which kept him alive.

  One of these days, the captain's gonna severely kick my ass. Right now, however, she's contenting herself with a catalogue of my sins beginning at “reckless” and ending with “mutinous,” with side trips through insubordinate, overconfident, obstreperous, and just plain too stupid to live along the way before she pauses for breath. I love the way Richard plays soothing music in my ear while I'm being dressed down by my boss.

  I suspect I fail to look contrite. She stops cold, in the middle of drawing breath to continue upbraiding me, and shuts her mouth with a click. “What is it, Casey?”

  “Permission to go back out after Leslie, ma'am?”

  “Denied.”

  “Ma'am—”

  Her eyelids tighten. “Casey, get the fuck out of my ready room before I have you spaced.”

  But— I want to say. But Leslie's alive out there, but we got Charlie back, didn't we? But you don't leave your buddy behind, but—