“The rats are turning on each other, you mean.”
The man in the corduroy coat laughed softly. “Our government—and Dr. Allman—has the greatest faith in General Shijie's integrity.”
“And look where faith has gotten the USA so far.”
“That was uncalled for.”
She lifted her chin and angled a glance across the bridge of her nose. “I'm a politician,” she said. “I can recognize an unsubtle insult when I deliver one. What's on the data slices?”
“There's some documentation that will impeach MWO Casey's credibility as a witness fairly nicely. She has a juvenile record that was sealed when she turned eighteen.”
“And? How are we going to explain away the documentation they've entered into the record? Captain Wu is prepared to testify that those orders are exact copies of the orders he received and destroyed. And Minister Shijie's signature is on them. Their provenance has been validated; the electronic postmarks are supposed to be impossible to fake. We'll have to buck fifty years of precedent to say otherwise.”
“The signature was forged by elements in the PanChinese government who have no love for General Shijie,” the man said without looking at her. “Elements that are in favor of expansion at the price of peace. The same elements that urged the PanChinese invasion of Siberia last year—”
“Xiong.”
“You said it. I did not.” Silence for a moment, and then he cleared his throat. His fingertips rubbed absently at the stone of the wall in front of them, fingers arching and pulling inside his gloves as if he were trying to wear away a stain.
“So how do we explain away Dr. Holmes's possession of those documents, if she was not in collusion with the Chinese?”
“I would have thought Mr. Hardy would have explained this.” The man glanced over his shoulder. Janet followed the look: the observation deck was still not overly crowded, and she could see Toby's camel-hair coat fifteen or twenty yards down the wall. He was looking the other way.
“Perhaps he thought I should hear it from a neutral party.”
“Mmm. Perhaps.”
She almost reached out and grabbed his wrists to stop him rubbing his palms together. As subtle as Lady Macbeth. “Tell me.”
“She received the documentation, along with certain other communications, from General Shijie himself. The minister had opposed the plan, found it . . . dishonorable, and did not wish to be remembered as a genocide. Unable to contact Prime Minister Riel directly, he used Dr. Holmes as a go-between.”
The corners of Janet's mouth lifted. “And Connie, with her well-known opposition to the star travel program, dismissed Holmes's concerns as . . . as grandstanding, as a desperate attempt to generate support for the Montreal.”
“Precisely. At which point Dr. Holmes went to her superior, Mr. Hardy, who contacted yourself. Unfortunately—”
“The delay cost everything,” Janet said, nodding. She stepped back and leaned her hip on the gritty wall, unperturbed by the streak it left on her coat. “And Connie is trying to cover up her incompetence by pretending she was not warned in advance.”
“Exactly. Conspiracy theories are a cottage industry. There are always rumors that the powers-that-be knew in advance. Mumbai, Coventry, Pearl Harbor.” His left hand rose, swooped, hovered in midair.
She followed the line of his point, the lower Manhattan skyline, and nodded. She didn't look long, but lowered her head, pushed her scarf aside, and scratched her cheek with a gloved thumb. “I remember. I was five years old. There are always rumors, you're correct. What about what Wu has to offer, and Xie? What about Casey?”
“Once her credibility is impeached, your testimony—and Mr. Hardy's—will make the difference. Casey, of course, couldn't have known any of this skullduggery. Nothing you say will contradict anything she has to offer. And General Shijie's testimony will correspond with yours. The only people who will appear to have perjured themselves will be Valens and Riel.”
“That's dastardly.”
“Thank you.” Without taking his eyes from the New York skyline, lower Manhattan and the Dike spread out behind it like a long frozen line.
“It wasn't a compliment.”
He gave her a smile, then, a thin one. His lower lip cracked when he did it, but not enough to bleed. “I know.”
She turned and walked away without shaking his hand in farewell. Her shoes rasped on cement. Toby was watching the skyline of the lower West Side through one of the viewfinders. She put her hand on his elbow as she came up behind him. He didn't jump.
“Spooks,” she said. “I really hate those guys.”
“Did you get what you needed?”
“I got what you were promised.” She moved toward the doors to the interior observation deck, the wind tugging the hem of her coat. “It's cold out here. Let's go the hell home.”
Thursday 11 October, 2063
Whole-Earth Benefactor nanonetwork (worldwire)
16:13:13:31–16:13:29:43
Richard was watching the baseball game.
It wasn't all he was doing—his usual subroutines and his responses to the developing climatic disaster consumed something in excess of 95 percent of his processing power, and he was having three other simultaneous conversations. All in all, the balancing act was considerably more challenging than higher math on strip-club cocktail napkins. On the other hand, he hadn't had this much fun since he was fooling overperfumed women into believing he could perceive via extrasensory perception which volume from a shelf of books they had leafed through.
It was starting to look like he might be able to get the North Atlantic conveyor restarted after all, through micromanipulations of ocean salinity levels and a certain amount of sheer brute force. The atmospheric issues might prove a bigger problem: ozone damage, global dimming, global carbon dioxide increase, and a thousand other variables he hadn't even begun to sort out accurately yet.
But that was chronic, not acute.
He had more immediate problems. Not including the fact that the Red Sox were losing seven to four.
Jen didn't need him just now; his eavesdropping was a matter of insatiable curiosity combined with the desire to be on hand if she did require assistance, or simply an obscure fact. “. . . a decision was made in the wake of the attack—” her chin lifted, her mismatched hands resting lightly on the sides of the podium. “—to exact no retribution upon the PanChinese . . .”
Nice use of the passive voice, Jen. She didn't answer in words, but he felt her amusement. He backgrounded the process and divided his focus between the laboratory—where Gabe was conducting a postmortem on yet another batch of nanite victims of sudden-biomechanical-autism-syndrome—and the captain's office. Richard and Leslie rode behind Charlie's eyes as he and Elspeth entered Wainwright's domain shoulder-to-shoulder, trying not to look like they came expecting—spoiling for—a fight.
Wainwright wasn't behind her desk; she stood close to the holomonitor that showed the gangling hull of the Montreal spilled out across space, the unholy miscegenation of Tinker Toys and an Erector set. Her hands were clasped behind her back, her dark hair freshly trimmed and bound into a club at the nape of her neck with a tidy but strictly nonregulation nacreous gray ribbon. She turned and caught Elspeth's eye, then very carefully looked from the contact team leader to Charlie. “Absolutely not,” she said, before Charlie could open his mouth. “You're not impressed enough with what the Benefactors—if I may use the term loosely—did to you and Leslie the last time we went out there?”
Richard smiled to himself. He liked Wainwright. And she had said we. That was ground to build on.
Meanwhile, in the hydroponics lab, Gabe swiveled his chair back. Richard watched as Gabe lifted his head from the eyepiece of the virtual magnifying device he was using to examine yet another noncommunicating nanite, and snorted exasperation. “Dick, if I didn't know better, I'd say these critters were suffering under a denial-of-service attack.”
Richard relayed the comment to Charlie. S
piked? Charlie asked, his eyes wide behind spectacles he no longer needed.
“No, just choking on static, I expect,” Richard said—out loud, for Gabriel's benefit. “Am I right?”
“It's a little more interesting than that, Dick—”
“We're not here about Leslie,” Charlie said to Wainwright. “We're here about the shiptree. And our mandate.”
Wainwright squared her interface plate on her desk.
“I will go to the prime minister if I have to.” Elspeth folded her hands over her biceps in a position Richard translated to trouble for somebody. “I hope I don't need to remind you that the Montreal is detailed primarily to the first contact project.”
If Richard were a real boy, he'd steal Ellie from Castaign in a minute, Gabe's charm notwithstanding.
“She's also my ship, and you are my crew.” Wainwright kept her voice level. “I won't risk either unnecessarily—”
“—specifically,” Gabe continued, “the circuits aren't just fused or fried, the way I'd expect if there were a malfunction or a power surge or what have you. Remember what we tried to do to the Benefactor vectors to get back Les and Charlie?”
“Of course. Flash them. That's what I did to Min-xue, more or less, to get him on our network.”
“The programming hasn't been changed. Which is reassuring, since we couldn't manage that with the birdcage nanites.”
Richard considered, relaying. Charlie got there amazingly fast, for a carbon-based intelligence, and Dick decided to let him have it. It did make them happy to beat the machine. Could we do it to a Chinese-programmed network? Charlie asked.
“If we knew their security codes, we could.”
“Change all the codes,” Richard said.
Gabe stood. “I'm on it, Dick, but it will take awhile—”
“—and what if I said it was a necessary risk, Captain?” Elspeth met Wainwright's irritated gaze and did not look down.
“Over my protest,” Wainwright started, but Charlie cleared his throat, and she stopped, and looked at him.
Silently, he held out his hand. “Captain, it did work.”
The captain's mouth compressed. She stared at Charlie, putting her back to the bulkhead, braced as if the deck were pitching under her feet. “At what cost? You tell me—”
“No cost,” he said, “if you'd let us go get Leslie back.”
Richard knew what Leslie wanted, as surely as if Richard were Leslie's hand, his finger, his thumb. It took no effort at all for Dick to reach out and flip the image on the screen behind Elspeth and Charlie to a panoramic shot of the Montreal, the Huang Di, and the birdcage ship hanging in fixed geometry above a cloud-swirled crescent Earth. The picture was from Piper Orbital Platform; another view from Forward showed the shiptree, in higher orbit, sliding past. Richard plastered that one on the second largest monitor. On the one that normally held Wainwright's refrigerator-drawing view of the Montreal, he offered the present view from Clarke; a very nearly full and sunlit Earth.
“Captain,” Elspeth said calmly, unfolding her arms. “Have you thought about the potential costs if we fail?”
And Wainwright swallowed and looked down. “I'm not authorizing anything unless the prime minister says so,” she said. And then she looked up, fixed Elspeth with a cool, crinkled stare, and smiled coldly. “And don't presume you understand my personal leanings in this matter, Dr. Dunsany. Or in the matter of Dr. Tjakamarra. Some of us do draw a line around our personal feelings when we pull our pants on in the morning.”
“Ma'am,” Elspeth said, after a few moments. “I'll message the prime minister at once.”
By the fourth day of testimony, there's a small child in the back of my head whining over and over again I wish I wish I wish I wish Gabe and Ellie were here I wanna go home I don't want to answer any more questions waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. Goddamn.
Can't you shut that kid up, Jenny?
I mean, I'm good at this. I know I'm good at this. It's not even exactly testimony, although everybody calls it that. And it's not speechifying either; mostly, I stand up there behind the podium and field questions for hour after hour after hour. They seem to have some sort of a protocol worked out, too, where it's the big dogs—the permanent security council members—who get to ask things when they want, and the representatives of other nations pass notes or tap shoulders or send e-mail and get whoever they're tributary to or sending aid to or receiving aid from to ask their questions. It's an elegant demonstration of patronage, if you squint at it right. My Grandpa Zeke would have approved.
But sweet Mary Mother of God I am so goddamned tired. Would it kill them, you think, to give me a chair?
Besides, this is the day when I'm going to have to talk about the things I'd rather pretend never happened. So standing up there, facing that enormous seashell room packed with delegates from 213 nations and five supranations, is something more than just an exercise in stage fright. It's like exhuming Leah's grave.
It's the only grave she's going to get, because her body never made it down. She's part of the planet now. Part of the atmosphere. I push her in and out with every breath, since I came home. Her, and Trevor Koske, too.
At least Koske had the decency to do what I couldn't, and die with her. I wouldn't have thought he had it in him.
It's a little disconcerting to think about, nonetheless.
Especially when I'm in the middle of explaining to a room full of politicians why she had to die, and how her death—her sacrifice—resulted in the worldwide contamination of the oceans with Benefactor nanotech. And how it's spreading to people and plants and topsoil and little terrier dogs all over the world.
And how, no, really, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I was smart enough to bring a handkerchief.
A thin Asian man in a narrow mahogany-colored suit leans forward on his elbows as I reach for a drink, waiting for the next question. I've lost track, but he's somebody in the PanChinese delegation. A shark, I think. Not an interpreter, because the UN handles that itself; there are a few dozen people in the glass-walled booths over our heads providing simultaneous translation on multiple-language channels, and I can access any one of them on my ear clip with a glance at a menu. I'm listening in French, because the interpreter has a sexy dark-chocolate voice and I like his Parisian accent better than the harsh midwestern drawl of the Chinese-to-English translator—who is getting a workout today.
Anyway. The shark says, in Chinese—whatever dialect they're using—and the interpreter says in French: “And you expect us to believe that the government of Canada has no intentions of using this tech as a weapon, when it's already responsible for the infection of millions, and the death or injury of thousands?”
He catches me with my water glass in my metal hand, just tilted to my lips. I couldn't have planned the snarf better; titters and at least one guffaw from my stodgy audience of diplomats attest to the perfection of my comedic timing.
At least it goes in the glass, and not all over my uniform. “The infection of, and the death or injury of, Canadians, sir. Canadians who were in desperate need of medical assistance in the wake of the attack upon Toronto.” Valens spent hours drilling me not to say Chinese attack. Or terrorist attack, for that matter. Apparently the official explanation of who kicked whom in the balls is still a matter for high-level negotiation.
Which is why I'm surprised. I'd thought these particular questions would be reserved for Fred. Or Riel. But what the hell.
“American citizens were affected as well.”
“Because American cities were affected by the attack. No one who was not ill or injured has been subjected to the treatment, sir, to the best of my knowledge.” I switch to English to answer this question, because it's the American shark talking, or maybe the American shark's diplomat boss. There's too damned many of them to keep track of. Or did I say that already?
The American is a round-faced Latina in her fifties, in a suit just the right bluish shade of power red to remind
me uncomfortably of Alberta Holmes. She shields her mouth with her hand as she confers with her boss, or her lawyer. She leans back in her chair and steeples her hands in front of her, her knuckles furled tight as her brow. “Of course, the USA would have been less significantly affected, by your own testimony, if you and the Montreal had not diverted the projectile from its course.”
Valens is seated in a chair off to my left, which means I can see him moving in the periphery of my prosthetic eye's vision much more clearly than I could on the right-hand side. Better than the real thing. I don't know why everybody doesn't run right out and buy a set, frankly.
Fred leans forward, his eyes on me rather than the American. Fortunately, I have the podium to hold on to. And I really do have better control of my temper than Fred thinks I do. I mean, okay, I broke his shoulder back in the thirties. But he deserved it then, and I'm sure as hell not going to feel bad about it now.
Dick? What do I say to that steaming pile of horseshit?
“You could just stand there with your mouth open and blink at her as if she's out of her mind.”
Got that covered already, thanks.
“Just be yourself. You're under oath, after all.”
Gee. Thanks. I make sure my mouth is closed, and turn away for a moment to collect myself. A functionary brings me a fresh glass of water. Perfect timing, and a perfect excuse. “Ma'am—” I try to steal a discreet peek at her nameplate, but she's pushed her HCD against the back of it and angled it away. I bet she did that on purpose, too. She's got a mean glitter in her eye. I take a breath and get the outrage out of my voice and a dry kind of mockery that served me well as a drill instructor in. “Ma'am, are you suggesting that it would have been a more prudent course of action not to attempt to prevent a ten-hundred-ton nickel-iron asteroid from slamming into Lake Ontario?”
It's not just titters this time. Somebody in the African section is roaring with laughter, and I see the Mexican delegates eye each other and grin. Yeah, nobody likes the Americans: not even their next-door neighbors.
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