Hammered jc-1

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Yeah.” He tosses the shucked horse chestnut to the ground, and I bend down to pick it up. They’re supposed to be lucky for travelers.

  “Remember when you told your girlfriend Kate about me? What Valens had done, the wiring, and the experimentation? And she reported on you to Military Intelligence?”

  He nods. “Charges were dropped, eventually.”

  “Yes. You remember what you told me then, when I was thinking of going to the press about the whole sordid mess?”

  His forehead wrinkles. “I told you to think about your career.”

  “I did. I thought about it hard. And I decided to throw it the fuck down the tubes, too, and bend Valens as far over the desk as I could, and give my little terrorist boyfriend every bit of dirt I could rake up on the program.”

  He speaks with care, each word coming out as if laid on a counter for consideration. “What happened to change that, Jen?”

  And I realize how far down the wrong path I’ve come. “A lot of things.” It’s a lame answer and I know it, so I rush to cover before he can follow it down. “But that’s not the point. He’s doing the same thing again, Gabe. He’s recruiting young soldiers, young civilians. Desperate old warhorses like me. And it’s all just another web of lies.”

  It sounds irrational when I try to explain it, but it all has a terrible logic inside of my head. “And that wasn’t enough, Gabe… there’s a 30 percent chance that if I go through this surgery, I’ll be either comatose or flat on my back on a ventilator for the rest of my life. And I’ve been through it before. The surgery, the hospitals. It’s not worth it.”

  And Gabe shakes his sandy tousled head at me and frowns, hands fisting loosely as he churns the air. “Marde. There’s a 100 percent chance that if you don’t go through with it, you’ll be dead in five years. And dead or alive, that’s got nothing to do with it, and you know it.”

  “What the fuck do you know?” My voice is up an octave; we’re almost shouting on the street.

  “I know you,” he says, and the bitterness in his voice stops my retort like an order to halt. “Whatever bullshit logic you’ve worked up to deny it, Casey, the fact of the matter is that you don’t want it because if you have it, you might have to admit that you can have a fucking life, and the only thing that keeps you from that life is fucking fear, Genevieve, and it’s about time you took a good hard look at what it is that is really crippling you.” His voice, which has been rising, drops. “N’est-il pas vrai?”

  “Gabe, that’s not it—” But he’s turning away already, back toward the office. I don’t want the surgery because…

  Hell.

  Because if I have it, I won’t be a cripple anymore.

  Elspeth wanders past me as I come up the walk to the front door of the lab, squinting against the glimmer of sunlight on pink marble and steel. Her head is ducked down. She peels open the wrapper of a toxic-green sour-apple candy with her teeth and one hand. In the other one, she’s got that canvas bag with the Unitek logo on it that she lugs everywhere.

  She shoves the candy into her cheek and wads the wrapper into her pocket. “Jenny, wait up. Want to get some lunch?”

  “I just had coffee.” I didn’t make it to the coffee shop, actually, but I’m not in a company mood.

  “Whatever. Here, take a couple of these.” She sets the bag down and digs in her pocket, comes up with a fistful of candy spilling out of a handkerchief. “Genie sent them in with Gabe, and if I eat all these I will be both sick and enormous.” She holds the handkerchief out to me, dropping the overflow candies back into her lab coat. I reach out, right-handed, to take one off the top, more out of politeness than any desire for sweets, and she shoves the whole thing into my hand.

  “Better you than me,” she says with a sharp-edged grin, and picks up her bag, moving away before I can protest.

  The data slice Elspeth slipped me lies in my pocket, heavy as a loaded gun for the two hours I spend back in the lab after she abandons me there. That’s all I can stand, especially after the screaming match with Gabe. If I ran into Valens in the corridor, I’d probably break his neck. Twice.

  Discretion being the better part of valor, I take a lunch I don’t plan to come back from.

  I can’t think of a better place to access a public terminal than the university library. I suppose it’s possible that Valens could tag my activity there, but I’m hoping the sheer volume of information on the public Nets will make that kind of filtering impossible. Besides, I have Richard. I use the contact feed to access my prosthetic eye, instead of the provided monitor. I don’t need to get shoulder-surfed committing treason. And treason is what it is.

  Once snuggled into a netted terminal, the data slice autoreads its own information off to its mysterious destination and wipes itself clean. Twice. A moment later, a red telltale blinks in the corner of my vision. I concentrate on the blank beige surface of the study cube wall. “Hello, Richard.” I subvocalize into the mike, and a moment later, his image resolves before my eyes.

  “Jenny. Thank you.” He bounces like a basketball player stretching his calves and swinging his arms. “Exactly what I needed.”

  “Good. What was it?”

  He chuckles, and I expect some bullshit about need to know. I bargained without Richard. “It’s a glorious puzzle, Jenny. A riddle to be fretted and unraveled.”

  “Meaning you don’t know.”

  “Not yet, but I can show you.”

  “First I want to ask you something. I need to find somebody.”

  He rubs his jaw professorially, scrubs a hand across wavy gray hair. I wonder if the tics are programmed in, or if he does it on purpose, to seem more human. “Who?”

  The breath I take burns the back of my throat. “Chrétien Jean-Claude Hebert of Montreal. Born May first, I don’t know the year. Last decade of the twentieth century or the first few years of this one. He’d be about Valens’s age. Probably an extensive criminal record.” I close my eyes, concentrating. “There will be an arrest in 2027—October, I think — for pandering, and probably one late the next year for possession with intent.” Heh. I called in the tip on that second arrest. Gave me enough time to get my ass sworn into the army before he caught up with me.

  “I’ll look,” Richard said, his eyes narrowing. “There’s something else in the data you brought me.”

  I must be holding my breath, because he doesn’t make me wait for long. “The proof you were looking for. About Valens and your sister.”

  “The murder?”

  “No.” I know I wouldn’t be able to detect it if he truly hesitated, so it must be for my benefit that he stops and takes a “breath.” “The new-generation rigathalonin. Barbara Casey was given charge of a thousand units of it, 30 percent contaminated with trace agents, and instructions to street test it.”

  “Street test. Why contaminated?”

  Richard shrugs. “No data. Shall I speculate?”

  “S’il vous plaît.”

  “One, to make it believable that the drugs were a stolen, destroyed shipment. Less than 5 percent of the tablets actually contained enough contaminants to cause mortality in the subjects.”

  “Two?”

  “To provide sacrificed subjects for autopsy.”

  Sweet Mary, Mother of God. “Barbara knew?”

  “She knew. There is no indication here that Colonel Valens was aware of the intent to poison the recipients, however.”

  “Someone must have. Someone high up.”

  Richard lets me get there on my own.

  “Doctor Holmes.” I close my eyes. I wanted Valens dirty. Dirtier than he is.

  But I know the truth, and the fact of history is this: Fred Valens is the star of his own movie. And as far as he’s concerned, Fred Valens is one of the good guys. He might lie to a soldier for her own good, or test drugs or medical procedures on somebody without consent, but he wouldn’t poison someone.

  Barbara Casey would do it without a second thought.

  “Why Hartfo
rd? Why take the risk?”

  “You know your sister better than I.”

  Sucking on my lower lip, I lean my forehead down on my steel hand. “Sloppy,” I say quietly. “It’s just sloppy, for Barb. Lazy. Hell, that’s it, isn’t it? She was just too goddamned lazy to keep running back and forth between Hartford and Boston, or Albany, or wherever. Not when I was somewhere near Hartford, and there was a CCP warehouse on the edge of town, and she had to be there anyway. She wouldn’t have worried about getting caught because she never gets caught. She’s fifty-seven years old, and she’s smarter than anybody I’ve ever met except for maybe Fred Valens and Elspeth Dunsany, and she’s never gotten caught.”

  He inclines his head. “Logical.”

  My right hand shakes as I raise it, covering my eyes — which of course does nothing to block his image. I want to scream, How could she? But really, when could she not have done it? What ever would have stopped her?

  It’s like she was born with some essential part of her brain just missing. Once, I would have called it her soul.

  I get my breathing under control. I can talk again. “Thank you, Richard. If anything happens to me, can you see that those records make it to the proper authorities? American, Canadian, and wherever the hell Unitek is incorporated?”

  “My pleasure, Jenny.” He gives me a moment before he continues. “Ready for download?”

  “Yes.” But I am totally unprepared for what he gives me next.

  Dust, red as rusted iron — red with rusted iron — rising about my boots. I taste it through my rebreather, gritting my teeth like a night without sleep. Virtual reality, more intense than I’ve ever known — real as a damned flashback. But not me, this time. Not me. He’s spliced into my motor cortex through the wetware that operates my prosthesis, and he’s forcing vivid, sensual kinetic memories into my brain.

  The gravity feels wrong. Too subtle. And then I realize I’m on Mars, and the dust is Mars dust—fines, he corrects me, and I realize I’ve vocalized the word — Martian fines, then. And I’m in a tunnel, some sort of a dark passageway.

  “Starships,” Richard says in my ear. “Two of them. Alien starships, stranded on a barely hospitable world. That’s where the Indefatigable comes from. And the Chinese ships, and the one they plan to have you fly.”

  “Aliens.” There’s no such thing. “Purple elephants, too, no doubt.”

  “Hah.” In my virtual vision, Richard Feynman lifts his shoulders in a powerfully suggestive shrug. He’s wearing an old-fashioned cotton oxford shirt, rolled up to show wire-strung forearms. “Least hypothesis. Where else does technology come from with no physics and no engineering to back it up?”

  And I haven’t got an answer for that at all. I’m trying to find the argument, in fact, when the tips of my fingers go blank white numb. My left hand clenches on the data slice as I withdraw it from the reader.

  The holographic crystal crushes to powder in my hand.

  I try to open my mouth to say, Richard. No words come out at all.

  9:15 A.M., Friday 15 September, 2062

  High Street

  Rockville, Connecticut

  Bobbi insisted on calling it a suburban assault vehicle, but in reality it was a reasonably standard heavy-duty high-clearance four-wheel-drive. Razorface hadn’t wanted to abandon his limousine and switch to Bobbi’s vehicle, but she did have the first-aid kits and a cache of additional weapons. And chances were that Casey wouldn’t be looking for a dark green Bradford, newer than Maker’s, with roll bars and armor plate.

  Whatever, Mitch thought, parking it beside the sidewalk, guardrail and chain-link fence that separated the edge of the narrow street from a twelve-foot drop into brambles. He turned off the radio in the middle of the weather report—eighteenth named storm of the Atlantic season menaces the Outer Banks—and unlocked the doors. “This hill must be a pig to get up in the wintertime, killer.” Razorface just grunted from the passenger seat.

  “That’s why I have the four-wheel,” Bobbi answered from where she reclined in the backseat with her hastily bandaged leg propped up. “And I wish to hell that doctor friend of yours had let you know he was running out of town so soon.”

  “Yeah,” Mitch answered. “Me, too.”

  Razor opened his door and walked around the car to help Bobbi. Pale lines were etched across her forehead, but she didn’t so much as whimper when he picked her up as easily as lifting a bag of groceries.

  “Please get the first-aid kit, Michael.”

  Mitch did it and locked the Bradford up. Thin-lipped, Bobbi directed them up a narrow flight of cement stairs to a woodframe house built into the side of the hill. Classic New England milltown architecture, he thought with a bitter grin. Awkward, inaccessible, and picturesque.

  “Is this where you live? It’s a little out of the way.” She handed him the pass card and he opened the lock. Razorface held her up so she could disable the security system.

  “Just a safehouse,” she answered. “There are MREs in the cabinet. You’re going to have to do my leg, Michael.”

  “Yeah. I know. Will that table hold your weight?” It looked sturdy enough.

  “It is oak. I don’t think it will be a problem.”

  There was nothing on it. “Are there sheets?”

  “Linen closet in the bathroom. Set me down please, Razorface.”

  Mitch marveled at the calmness of her tone.

  Bobbi leaned back on her elbows while Mitch cleaned the wound in her calf. The bullet had creased muscle and gone through. If it had struck bone there would have been nothing Mitch could have done for her. She stared at the ceiling, talking through the pain; he barely heard the strain in her voice.

  She seemed to be striving for dryness as she said, “You didn’t get a chance to look around the garage bay, did you?”

  “No.” The vinyl gloves he was wearing bunched and slid and stuck in clotted blood. He didn’t look up.

  “There was a white van parked there. Newer Ford, no windows. Looked like a delivery van.” She grunted as Mitch’s hand slipped.

  “Did you get a look inside?”

  “No.” No further noises of protest, even as he slathered the wound in antiseptics. “But I took cover under it. The undercarriage is stuck full of mud and grass, Michael.”

  “Oh.” He wound the bandage tight before he leaned back and closed his eyes. “I know a cop I can call in West Hartford. Last night might be covered up, but he might be able to make things hot for the corporate offices. Maybe he can even get a warrant and look inside.”

  “Do it,” Razorface said. “And tomorrow we’re going to Bridgeport.”

  2:30 P.M., Friday 15 September, 2062

  Toronto General Hospital

  Emergency Department

  Toronto, Ontario

  Gabe surged down the white-tiled corridor, his strides only shortening when a plump, shirtsleeved Middle Eastern man stepped in front of him. “Gabriel Castaign?”

  Gabe recognized him from the phone conversation. “Doctor Mobarak. What are you doing in Toronto?”

  “I had planned to come up to observe Jenny’s surgery. Come with me.”

  “How is she?”

  The doctor sighed, struggling to keep up with Gabe’s longer strides. “Refusing treatment.”

  “Quoi? You can’t have the hospital do something?”

  “You’ll see. She is as stubborn as a cow moose. And I’m not affiliated with Toronto General; the fact that they’re letting me play doctor at all is nothing but a courtesy. Valens went to bat for me once he figured out that Jenny wasn’t speaking to him.”

  “Valens is here?”

  “She threw him out of the room. He was recommending immediate nanosurgery. Apparently, she collapsed in seizures at the public library.”

  Que faisait elle à la bibliothèque? Gabe didn’t think now was the time to ask stupid questions. “What did she say?”

  “No surgery. She needs it, Gabe. She won’t make her birthday without it.”
<
br />   “She told me five years. Maybe ten.”

  Mobarak paused, his hand on the steel doorknob. Gabe, heart in the pit of his stomach, read the younger man’s eyes with a helpless sensation he knew all too well.

  “That was then,” the doctor said. “This is now. The myelin breakdown in her motor cortex is becoming acute. I don’t know what triggered it. It could be exposure to the drugs Valens was providing for her.” Mobarak’s voice dripped disgust. “It could also be the stimulation from the VR exercises.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Mobarak’s shoulders rose on an indrawn breath, and he slowly shook his head. Then he opened the door.

  Gabe, braced for the worst, swore out loud when he saw Jenny sitting upright in a chair beside the examining table, buttoning the cuff of her right sleeve with frowning care. Pain burst so bright in his chest that for a moment he thought his heart had stopped, and he looked up at the wall, calling fury back up over the relief that threatened to smother it. Oh, no.

  He didn’t dare think about what that relief meant.

  14:30 hours, Friday 15 September, 2062

  Toronto General Hospital

  Emergency Department

  Toronto, Ontario

  I’m about to put my boots on and stand up when Simon comes back into the room. This time, Gabe is at his heels. Valens has already delivered his prognosis and I imagine, knowing Valens, is trying to arrange for me to be moved to NDMC and for an operating theater to have been set up five minutes ago. Even after I told him no. It’s enough. It’s enough to put Valens in jail, and Barb with him. And maybe Mitch will manage to prove she shot his girlfriend. That’s still a death penalty in Connecticut. I’ll take the court-martial for refusing orders and go to jail. Maybe they’ll give me Peacock’s old cell.

  And then all three of Jeanne-Marie Casey’s little girls will be dead.

  Maman.

  “Oh, hell.” I don’t realize I’ve said it out loud until Gabe stops in front of me, Simon flanking him right. I stand up. Not many people are all that much taller than I am, but I find myself staring at the dimple in Gabe’s chin. “What bullshit story did Doctor Frankenstein here feed you, Gabe?”