Worldwired jc-3

by Elizabeth Bear

  She was committed. She plunged at him, head-butt to his abdomen like a playground wrestling match, and there was more blood, everywhere, slippery-sticky and hot, on her face, in her mouth, sticking her hair across her eyes. She slammed him against the railing, felt something snap. They landed hard, and she brought her knee up, fighting dirty like Papa Fred had taught her, and she was fast, faster than she'd known she'd be, but he was faster somehow and he got his thigh in the way and he still had the gun in his hands and her arm wouldn't work and he clawed at her nose, her mouth, pushing her back. Her right hand locked around his wrist and yanked his hand off her face and—

  The white stars turned red-black as he struck her across the temple, once, with the barrel of the gun.

  Damn, this son of a bitch can move. Like a fencer, like a ballet dancer. He feints and I fall for it, but rather than cracking my forearm, his pistol rings off my metal arm like somebody whaled on a cold water pipe with a claw hammer. He grunts. I bet he felt that all the way up to his shoulder.

  Unfortunately, it doesn't distract him enough to slow him down when I go for a sharp right jab. Fluid sidestep, faster than I can think, and he grabs my wrist and tries to put me over his shoulder in some kind of martial-arts throw. He reckons without the weight of my prosthesis throwing my center of gravity off, though, and I clothesline his throat as he tosses me. It doesn't stop me going over his shoulder, but he loses his grip and I roll with it instead of landing cripplingly hard, flat on my back. When I come up into the crouch he's gone straight down, vertical drop from his feet to his knees, and the gun is on the floor in front of him because he's clutching his throat with both hands, his eyes bugged out so far I can see the whites all the way around. I bet I crushed his trachea when I hit him.

  I'm surprisingly okay with that.

  But I don't have time to think about it long. Gunfire, two shots, from up where Patty and Constance were headed when I lost sight of them. And then three more shots, flat and close, that could be the guys on the podium snapping off a couple at me, or at Min. It's an easy decision; I dive after the dying guy's gun, squirm between two rows of desks, kicking a huddled dignitary in the head—“Pardon”—and risk a peek around the end of the row, trying to get a look up the aisle toward the doors.

  I'm just in time to see Patty knock the gunman into the railing on the nearest section of seats and both of them go down. Riel hesitates, her fists pressed to her chest and clenched so tight I see her knuckles whiten from here.

  My right hand knows how hers must feel. Fingernails bite my palm, and I turn my back on Patty and Riel, transfer the pistol to my meat hand, and turn around to see if I can help Min.

  I'm just in time to hear a splintering crash and a surprised yelp that turns quickly into a moan. Min-xue's put his shoulder against the podium, and shoved, suddenly, hard, topping the whole damned thing over onto the gunman crouched behind it. Smart child: he keeps moving, too, diving off the stage with as much commitment as a swimmer kicking off. He tucks and rolls beautifully, and the gunman behind the long table pops up, handgun held in a police stance, tracking Min-xue like a pro. He snaps off his first shot, which misses, and waits the opportunity for a second, which I think won't.

  The palm lock on the stolen handgun I've stolen back is sticky against my flesh. I hope to hell it's cracked. It is a nine-mil, semi-auto, caseless ammo in a horizontal magazine. I expose myself, level the gun, brace with my left hand, wishing it were my gun and the interface weren't trashed so I could lock on the threat scope in my left eye, and I double-tap the gunman right over the heart. He doesn't even have the decency to look shocked as he folds across the table, his weapon discharging randomly.

  Min-xue's got a hell of a lot of trust. He never even looked back; he's vaulted the barrier and is crouched behind the PanChinese table. From the motion of his head and shoulders, he's shaking bodies, trying to find out if Premier Xiong is alive.

  Fred's still bleeding under a table over there somewhere. God knows how bad Patty is hurt — I turn around in the aisle, the gun still braced, and freeze right where I am.

  The last gunman has Riel, her arm twisted behind her back, his pistol pressed against her temple, using her body as a shield. Patty's sprawled at their feet, crosswise across the aisle, puddling blood staining the grass-green carpeting black.

  I don't look at that, at Patricia. It can happen later, when I have time to deal with it. Instead, I look at the gunman, and at Riel's calm expression and tight set jaw.

  Dammit, Connie. Why the hell didn't you run?

  Which is when, suddenly, sharply, Richard's presence explodes back into my brain.

  Min-xue tore kidskin and cloth in his haste to bare his own hands, and then to bare Xiong's throat. There was blood — a great deal of blood — and the ragged tear across the premier's scalp showed a glitter of white through the crimson. Min-xue tasted blood when he wiped the sweat from his face onto his sleeve. No breath stroked his fingers; the air was sickly and still.

  He worked his mouth and spat, leaning to the side as his fingers slid and stuck in the mess of stringy blood smeared over the premier's skin. He didn't expect a pulse. That wound looked like the bullet had plowed through hair and flesh and bone, and Min-xue half suspected that if he lifted Xiong's head off the floor, it would leave a blood-pudding of brains behind.

  Min-xue pricked a finger on the pins holding one of the decorative ribbons to Xiong's breast. More blood dripped and vanished into the silk, scarcely darkening the color. As a lucky color, red proved an irony under the circumstances. He pushed two fingers into the hollow softness of Xiong's throat.

  Min-xue jerked his hand back in shock; Xiong's pulse beat steadily under the angle of his jaw, strong and slow and not thready or fluttering. He shook his fingers, not quite believing what he'd felt, and pressed them back against cool skin.

  If anything, the premier's heartbeat was steadier than his own. Carefully, Min-xue tilted the man's head back, straightening his throat, and, gagging on the rankness of blood, began to breathe for both of them.

  A welcome presence bloomed in Min-xue's head, and he hissed relief. Richard. How very, very nice to have you back.

  His cheer was short-lived. “Min-xue,” Richard said, his moth-wing hands uncharacteristically knotted in front of his belt buckle. “Unfortunately, I must recommend that you surrender immediately. The PanChinese agent has Prime Minister Riel.”

  They'd only been linked for a matter of days, and still when Leslie kicked himself out of the air lock, knocked the condensation off his helmet, and saw Charlie floating before him, and could not feel him, the strangest seasick sensation of something broken — something severed—twisted his guts.

  “Charlie.” He said it quietly, but the suit radio turned it into an accusation. “What are you doing with your helmet off?”

  “Leslie,” Charlie said, raising both eyebrows. “What the hell are you doing wandering around loose like that?”

  It helped. Leslie chuckled, and reached up to undo the clasps on his own helmet. Air hissed in as soon as he cracked the seal, pressure equalizing. “I figured out how to ask real nice. I just… I showed them an image of my… shape, my gravitational signature, moving from the birdcage over here. And they showed me to the door and handed me my suitcase. You?”

  “Took a calculated risk,” Charlie answered. He hesitated, a bizarre figure in a pair of blue cotton trousers, barefoot, the back of his T-shirt floating out of his elastic waistband. Worry creased his forehead. “You know the worldwire's down.”

  “So's my suit radio. And some other stuff. The Benefactor network is still working beautifully, though. Had enough of hanging around with my finger up my arse while you did all the work, so I came here because…” He shrugged. “I wasn't all that sure Wainwright would let me in, frankly.”

  “You were worried about me.” Charlie slapped him on the shoulder, rebounding him lightly against the closed air lock. The air smelled impossibly sweet, earthy, rich. He picked up notes of ferme
ntation products, and other things, things he didn't have words for — the weight of the shiptree around him, the belly and roll of the curves of space. He closed his eyes.

  “Les, you—”

  “All right?” The air stung his senses like liquor. He laughed, giddy and half-hoarse. You can't go home. “I don't know. Tell me about the worldwire. Are we under attack? Is it Richard?”

  “No,” Charlie answered, quite crisply. “I spoke with Ellie via coded transmission. Gabe has managed to hack through to Dick. He hasn't gotten contact with the worldwire yet, but he's working on it. Dick thinks it's sabotage.”

  “I am getting really sick of hearing that word.”

  “How do you sabotage a quantum network?”

  Leslie shrugged. “I can guess. Jam its communications. Flood it with nonsense information, so the signal gets lost in noise.”

  “Primitive. Brute force.”

  “But effective. Where's Jeremy?”

  “Base camp. Follow me. We can radio back and let them know you're safe inside.” A long pause followed, which Leslie didn't mind; he was absorbed in the eerie beauty of the weightless garden they moved through, and the strangeness doubled and redoubled of everything glowing, shimmering faintly, leaving currents he could feel through the Benefactor sensorium. Synesthesia. Only not.

  “Hey, Charlie?” The suit speakers were much too loud. Birds — bird-analogues — darted away, shrieking. “What made you decide it was safe to take your helmet off?”

  Charlie stabilized himself with a grip on a branch and turned back to Leslie, bobbing in midair like a red-cheeked apple. “Because I'm a biologist, Les. And I was sick of the effing helmet, and playing the odds. Scientific wild-ass guess.”

  “And you risked your life on that?”

  “I've risked my life on crazier things.”

  “You've a point, mate,” Les answered.

  “What made you decide to take your helmet off, Les?”

  “You can't drown a man who was born to hang.” Leslie took another breath. It went to his head. “High-oxygen environment.”

  Leslie tossed Charlie his helmet — more a cup-handed shove than an actual throw — in free-fall, and pushed off to follow him. They brachiated in silence, Leslie feeling as if the fresh air had rejuvenated his thinking process. It was Richard. Something to do with Richard, and the worldwire, and—

  “Hey, Charlie. You know more about the nanotech than I do.”

  “Yeah?”

  He caught a branch as Charlie let it snap back, using the recoil to add a little push to his own forward momentum when it oscillated. “Is it weird that we're affected, too, when our nanosurgeons came courtesy of a direct transfer from the Benefactors, rather than through your lab? I mean, if the Chinese and their guy, um…”

  “Ramirez.”

  “Right. Cracked the operating system—”

  Charlie chuffed, using Leslie's helmet like a shield as he bulled through the undergrowth. Leslie envied Charlie the freedom of movement and obvious comfort of his shorts and T-shirt, and blinked another bead of sweat off his lashes. “Well, we know they cracked the OS. But we rewrote it, Gabe and Richard and me, and our network — Dick's network — and the PanChinese one and the Benefactor system don't really talk to each other. Beyond Richard being able to hack them enough to talk to people — oh.”

  “Yeah, you see what I mean?”

  “I think I do, Les. If the Benefactors can rewrite their system to communicate with ours, which they must have done… how the hell do we let them know it's okay for them to rewrite our system to communicate freely with theirs?”

  “Is it?” The smell of the air was addictive, a faint hint of ozone, the silken texture of the wind before a thunderstorm, and mild, shifting floral and herbaceous perfumes. Leslie's hands still tingled inside his gloves. He'd swear he could feel every individual cell zooming through his arteries, scalp to toes. He couldn't tell if there was something wrong with his body, or if he'd simply been deprived of it so long that he was hyperaware.

  “Is it what?”

  “Is it okay?”

  Charlie stopped so suddenly that Leslie almost drifted into his back. “You know…I think we'd better radio back and have Gabe ask Richard about that.”

  “You explain it to Dick,” Leslie said. “I'm going to try to explain it to the birdcage.”

  My fists are knotted as hard as my heart. The air I can get, past the pressure in my chest, comes in shallow little sips, painful. Connie's looking at me across all that space, her chin lifted up so I can see her throat bob when she swallows. I wish I knew what the hell she was trying to beam into my brain with that steady, too-calm eye contact.

  The only scrap of reassurance I can muster is Richard's presence, his ghost standing just off to the left and out of my line of fire, where I can see him without being distracted. Merci à Dieu, Dick. Tell me there's something you can do about this.

  He turns away, as if he were looking over his shoulder at Riel and Patty. He looks sterner in profile, old-man-of-the-mountain, cotton-wool hair brushed back from a high forehead, revealing a widow's peak. He stares at the hostages long enough for my attention to follow and turns a worried squint back at me.

  “Surrender, Jen,” he says, and folds his hands over his arms. “There's nothing else we can do to save them.”

  For half a second my stomach drops, like the Wicked Witch just scrawled those words across the sky. Surrender isn't a word I thought Dick knew; less did I think I'd hear him counsel it.

  The arms stay folded. Paternal. Stern. He rocks back, head to one side, a discouraging frown chiseling the lines around his mouth deep enough to shadow. “Live to fight again.”

  I lock my thoughts down before I think it loud enough for Dick to hear. But they won't live if we surrender. Marde. I wish I could feel Min-xue now, the way I did when we went after Les and Charlie. I wish I could—

  Oh. If Dick is here, why, oh, why can't I feel Min-xue?

  It wasn't working, and Richard couldn't see any way that it could suddenly start to work, unless he could manage to crack the PanChinese network right back and take their system off-line. He wasted long nanoseconds trying, crippled by the lack of cycles. Even at limited capacity, he had an ear for Gabe, however.

  Especially knowing that Gabe was working as hard as he was, and as fruitlessly. And despite the fact that what Charlie was suggesting — and Gabe was backing up — was sheer insanity.

  Wainwright had left her XO in charge on the bridge and fled to the ready room to take Richard's call. It didn't look like a rout, of course. She'd made sure it wasn't even identifiable as a tactical withdrawal, and he wondered if she was sure herself if her hands were shaking with fear, or with adrenaline.

  “I don't mean to put any extra pressure on you, Dick,” she said, “but I am… extremely concerned about the ecosystem—”

  Richard was busy enough that he wasn't bothering with the niceties of human interaction. Alan's clipped tones crept into his own diction when keeping his voice warm was too much of an effort. “You're right,” he said. “It's not self-sustaining. None of it is self-sustaining, yet. Charlie's proposing we open the worldwire to the Benefactors—”

  “What?” With a fraction of his attention, he saw her come out of her chair, her hands white on her desk. “That's insane.”

  “It may be a moot point, as we don't currently know how to manage it. We can't even contact them, and we don't know how the heck to signal our intentions to the Benefactors even if we did.”

  “We already have the program we wrote to flash the Benefactor nanites,” Gabe reminded, pressing the headphones to his ear to hear Wainwright better.

  “The program that didn't work.”

  Charlie's voice, encoded and tightcast and unscrambled and reconstituted, curiously flat with most of the harmonics lost to efficiency. “We also have samples of the nanosurgeons they infected us with, and Gabe's been able to crack fairly large chunks of their operating system.”

 
; Wainwright's voice was as flat, with tension. “You're asking me to risk more than the Montreal this time.”

  If Richard had been a human being, he would have stopped short and closed his eyes in frustration at his own stupidity. “The ones that they left open to the worldwire.”

  “Yes.” Gabe and Charlie, two voices at once.

  Wainwright again. “Just to be absolutely certain I understand this, you're proposing we flash our own network, reprogram it, and leave it wide open — so the Benefactors can wander in and do whatever they want? To the entire planet? And hope they end the PanChinese attack?”

  “Yes,” Gabe said, without even the decency to sound chagrined at the ridiculousness of it.

  “How do you propose we do that when we can't even talk to the worldwire currently?”

  “Therein lies the problem,” Gabe said, gritting his teeth. Richard felt his heart rate kick up; it was pattering along tightly. “I was hoping Dick might have a clever idea.”

  “All we need is an access point,” Richard said. “A patch of the worldwire we can tap into. Then we can hack our way through it. Island to island, so to speak. World War II, in the Pacific.”

  “You need something you can run a hardline to. What if Elspeth went after one of Charlie's ecospheres?”

  “Not safe,” Richard said. “The pressure doors could come down any second. Or the captain could trigger them as a precaution. Or, worse, the Chinese could remotely open an air lock, and they could fail to deploy.”

  “Blake made it to the processor core,” Wainwright said.

  “Yes, and I've recommended he hole up somewhere and not try to travel further. In any case, we can't delay — if the pressure doors do come down, you'll lose me as well.”