Scardown jc-2

by Elizabeth Bear

  I nod, barely hearing her. Remembering the simulations, the caress of sunlight on solar sails. A little sad that I won't be feeling that for real.

  “Jenny.” Richard again. “Don't get greedy. You'll be driving faster than anybody else ever has.”

  Except for the pilots of the three ships that didn't make it. China's already broken two, the Li Bu and the Lao Zi. Montreal is Canada's second attempt. The first one—Le Québec—had an unexpected appointment with Charon. Pluto's moon, that is. These babies are very hard to steer.

  I look from Wainwright to Valens and grin. “When do I get to try her, then? And who is Lieutenant Koske?”

  “Your relief,” Valens says. He moves to stand beside and behind me, just enough taller to loom.

  I touch the interface collar, metal fingers clicking softly on plastic. “Do I get to meet him?”

  “He's probably eating,” Wainwright says, on my other side. “As for trying her out — how does this afternoon sound?”

  Tall, dark, good-looking, without the faint mottling of repaired burn scars that mars my face — Trevor Koske is an asshole. I can tell from the set of his shoulders under his spotless uniform jacket as I follow Valens to his table. Koske sets his fork down, light glittering off slight scratches in his cervical interface, and turns to face us. Somehow, he and I managed to miss each other, despite getting the trillion-dollar-soldier treatment from Valens within the same few years. Admittedly, we guinea pigs weren't encouraged to fraternize. Some shrink probably thought being around normal people would encourage us to believe we still were. Normal, that is. How normal you can be when you can catch a bullet in your left hand, I'm not telling.

  “Lieutenant Trevor Koske,” Valens says. “This is Master Warrant Officer Genevieve Casey.” Wainwright purses her lips at him as he usurps her role—making friends already, Fred?

  I set my tray down and put out my hand. “Jenny,” I say, determined to act like the civilian they won't allow me to remain. “Pleased to meet you.”

  Gabe, at my shoulder, grins and sticks his hand out, too. Koske regards our hands like a pair of dead eels, his fingers resting inches from the handle of his fork. “Charming fellow,” Richard says. “I hate him already. Did I tell you about the time—”

  Richard. I withdraw my hand, still smiling. I took his job.

  “You merited his job.”

  Because I'm a freak. Nobody says another word as I hook a chair back with my foot — a chair set on a swivel arm in the floor — and sit down directly across from Koske. I pull my tray closer and pick up the fork. Soba and a green salad with ginger dressing; they'll turn me healthy if I'm not careful. “So, Trevor,” I say around a mouthful of lettuce, “tell me about yourself.”

  He grunts and picks up his tea. After ten minutes of bloody-minded silence, Captain Wainwright starts flirting with Gabe. It's almost a relief. I'm tired enough that my neural implants are making the overhead fluorescent lights strobe. I lay my fork down and cast around the room for something less annoying to look at; my eye lights on a crop-haired, twentyish blond with bulging shoulders. He stares at me. His eyebrows are so light they're paler streaks against the ruddiness of his face. He glances down quickly when he sees me looking.

  Nothing new there.

  4:30 PM

  Thursday 2 November, 2062

  Government Center

  Toronto, Ontario

  Constance Riel leaned over the shoulder of her science adviser, Paul Perry. He sat in Riel's own chair, at her exceedingly well-interfaced desk, busy hands moving over the plate. Riel frowned, ignoring the ache in feet rapidly growing numb. “You're telling me these images”—she poked a finger into the center of one of the displays, and it obligingly expanded—“show — what?”

  Paul had pulled his jacket sleeves up and rolled his shirt cuffs. He blinked bloodshot eyes and continued in an Oxford-educated drawl. “This is from the Martian orbital telescope, Prime Minister. It shows an explosion or an impact near the south pole of Charon, the sister planet of Pluto. This shows the debris track. Ma'am, should I call down for sandwiches?”

  She hadn't realized the rumble in her belly would be audible. “Yes. Bless you. That looks like a special effect from a science fiction holo. What does it mean?”

  He keyed some information quickly — a request for food and coffee — and moved back to the telescopic images. “It means something struck Charon. Hard. Hard enough to essentially fracture the planet. Planetoid.”

  “An attack of some sort? What, more space aliens?” War-of-the-worlds scenarios unfolded in her head. She pressed her fingers to her eyes, imagining she could already smell coffee.

  “No, ma'am.” Paul shrugged. “I've been chasing some rumors, and I've had my staff after it. I wanted good information before I came to you.”

  “You're stalling, Paul.”

  “Yes, ma'am. Unitek.”

  “Unitek?”

  “You've been briefed — have you been briefed?”

  “Is there a new development with the pair of derelict alien spacecraft on Mars?”

  “No. Unitek and a detached group from the joint forces have been working on developing a ship based on those design principles. You know that.”

  “I'm opposed to it, Paul. That's money better spent at home. But it's Unitek's money—” She shrugged. Canada needed to get free of Unitek. The problem was, with Unitek went access to the Brazil and PanMalaysian beanstalks, their international trade partners, and a good part of the funding for Canada's military. Times were more peaceful than they had been, on the surface. But a world in which the People's PanChinese Army was massing on the Russian border and eyeing the grain fields of Ukraine, a world where PanMalaysia and Japan relied on promises of military aid from Canada, Australia, and to a lesser extent the reconstructed but still limping United States to keep the same starving wolf from their door — it wasn't a world in which one dared appear weak. Paul himself was a refugee from the slowly freezing British Isles.

  Fallout from the Pakistani/Indian wars and the United States's actions in the Far and Middle East had moved Earth's supranational governments to rare, unified action. Global effort had managed what unilateral action could not: a functional missile defense shield, based on the same technology that provided meteorite and space-junk defense for the orbital platforms. Not, unfortunately, before the damage compounded China's inability to feed her swarming population.

  Canada had already fought one unpopular war on behalf of China's smaller neighbors. Riel started to wonder if the pain in her gut wasn't hunger, but an ulcer. “Was this a Chinese ship?”

  “No,” he said. “It was ours. And we have larger problems.”

  Riel sighed, glancing up as the door of her office opened. A liveried steward brought a tray into the room; she could tell at a glance that lunch must have been ready and waiting for their call. Or perhaps someone else's sandwiches and coffee had been diverted for the prime minister's use, and a replacement tray was already being made up. “Is this going to ruin my appetite, Paul?”

  “Most likely.”

  Riel shooed the reluctant steward away and poured the coffee herself, balancing two self-regulating mugs — she despised china cups — and a plate of sandwiches as she made her way back. “Then we'd better eat while we talk,” she said, and juggled dinnerware onto the desk. “I shouldn't eat these. I promised my husband we'd have dinner together for once,” she said. “And I have a meeting that starts in half an hour and runs until eight. Will this take longer than that?”

  Paul glanced up from the simulation and shook his head. “It'll be four hours until you eat, then,” he said. “Have a sandwich.”

  Her eyebrows rose. She knew it was an effective expression, under the heavy dark wing of her bangs, accentuating her thin nose and the long lines across her brow.

  “Ma'am,” he amended and she acquiesced, selecting a triangle without looking at the contents. Chewy black bread and vegetables, and something that was more or less tuna fish. Farmed gene-m
od tuna fish. Riel was just about old enough to remember the real thing.

  “All right,” she said, once Paul had had a moment to cram a third of a sandwich into his mouth. “Show me what you're worried about, Dr. Perry.”

  He didn't miss the formality — she could tell by the angle of his head — but he didn't acknowledge it either. “Here,” he said, tapping up an image of a different, and more familiar, globe. “These shots are courtesy of Clarke and Forward,” he said, and then waved a hand irritably over the panel, clearing the display. “Wait—”

  Long spare fingers tapped crystal, and Riel smiled privately at his thoughtless efficiency of movement. She squinted as new images resolved. “There's something wrong with the depth.”

  “They're 2-D animations,” Paul explained. “Late twentieth century — here. Do you see these color patterns, ma'am?”

  Riel nodded, watching as a computer-animated blush spread across the surface of the oceans, waxing and waning with fluctuations that could only be seasons. “Temperature patterns?”

  “Yes. And more. This is a record of coral reef die-offs.”

  Still 2-D, but no harder to follow than an old-fashioned movie once you got the hang of it. Riel licked mayonnaise off her fingers and frowned, rubbing them together to remove the last traces of grease. “Old news—”

  “This isn't.” His fingers moved. He leaned back in the chair, his shoulder brushing Riel's arm. She hunched forward, too intent to take a half-step to the side and preserve her space. It was the image that he'd brushed aside so quickly, a few moments before. A modern three-dimensional animation, and—

  “Those don't look dissimilar. But that's a much bigger scale, isn't it? And the currents look different than in the earlier one.”

  Paul shrugged. “They've changed a lot.”

  Yes. Including the failure of the Gulf Stream. Which is why you're in Canada now, isn't it, Paul? Riel found herself nodding slowly, almost rocking. As if the motion would help her think. She put a stop to it firmly. “What am I looking at, Paul?”

  “The end of the world,” he said, with turgid drama and a news announcer's baritone. He coughed and cleared his throat, reaching for his coffee. “Well, perhaps not quite. But a serious problem, in any case. This is data from two of the orbital platforms regarding algae populations—”

  “The algae is dying.”

  “Like the coral reefs.”

  “Not exactly. But for layman's values of like, sure.”

  “What does this have to do with the price of tea in China, Paul?”

  He chuckled. “Funny you should phrase it that way, ma'am. Everything, it turns out. I've been corresponding with a Unitek biologist on Clarke, a Dr. Forster—”

  “Charles Forster. He was involved in the mission that discovered the Martian ships.”

  “That's the one. He and I think that the increased Chinese interest in space travel — their outbound fire-and-forget colony ships, for example, and their expansion efforts within our system — date from about the time the first signs of this became apparent. It's a serious problem, Prime Minister. The sort of thing that could radically diminish the planet's ability to sustain life.”

  “You don't think the Chinese are behind—”

  “No.” Quiet, but definite. Riel liked the way he stated his opinions, when he could be convinced to have them. “But I think they caught on a hell of a lot faster than we did. Of course, we've been distracted by the Freeze of Britain—”

  “Excuses, excuses. What do we do?”

  He glanced at her sideways and ruffled his hair with one hand. “Beat the Chinese out of the solar system, for one thing. And start thinking about what we're going to do in a hundred, hundred fifty years if we have to reterraform Earth.”

  2100 Hours

  Thursday 2 November, 2062

  HMCSS Montreal

  Earth orbit

  Fucking bitch. Trevor Koske kicked the bulkhead once, hard, and turned back to the heavy bag. He slammed fist after fist into it, growling, squinting against the strobe of the overhead lights. Bitch! Let her come up here, flaunting her superior adaptation and her fucking ability to hold a normal conversation, to stand it when a man laid a hand on her arm. Fucking Master Warrant Officer Genevieve Casey. War hero.

  The only survivor of Valens's Frankensteinian augmentation program to recover enough to return to combat duty. Koske slugged the bag again, caught it on the backswing, putting power behind each blow until his shoulders burned. Bitch. Cunt. Whore.

  Koske didn't carry the kind of visible damage Casey did. Wearing her steel hand like a banner saying this is who I am. She might as well have pinned her medals to her chest. Bad enough she'd gone back out, an unqualified success. Gotten to do the things that Koske had lost forever thirty years back — to the bad eject, the broken neck, the creeping numbness.

  Casey had gotten to fly, dammit. Rescue and recovery — ferrying parachute paramedics into live-fire zones. Bitch! He kicked the bag for variety. Bad enough.

  He'd watched her career from the sidelines, knowing what she was. Knowing by her steel hand, her infrequent visits to Valens's clinic, her reputation as the best chopper pilot in the army what she had to be. Known it from the way she rode the edge, and the way she brought boys and girls back alive out of the jungle when anybody would have said it was suicide to go. Known. And hated. Because Casey was still everything Koske would never be again.

  And now she'd taken away his last chance to really fly again. Just by being who she was. By being so — slam! Bitch! — fucking good.

  And if that wasn't bad enough, there was the way the big blond civilian had hovered over her, the way she'd leaned into his touch on her arm when she thought no one was looking. The way she'd heedlessly extended her hand to him, Trevor, as if he could ever fucking reach out and take a human hand again.

  He backed away from the bag, panting. As if the neural implants running through his body didn't turn his skin into a finely honed alarm system that could make him curl away and shake, crying, from an unsubtle touch. Bad enough to be a fucking autistic, he thought. Worse if you didn't start out that way, hypersensitive and hyperaware. Worse if you grew up a normal kid, with a normal kid's need to be held, and you woke up one day and you were different. Faster. Stranger. Feeling the air on your skin like sandpaper.

  Lieutenant Koske could remember precisely every detail of the last time he had made love to somebody. Remember the taste of his wife's mouth, and imagine the flavor of his tears when she left him three years later, unable to live with a man who couldn't bear an arm around his shoulders, a kiss on the cheek.

  It could be worse. I could still be crippled. Or dead.

  Would that be worse?

  The hatchway opened as he slammed the bag again. He heard the footsteps and then the hesitation. “Lieutenant. I beg your pardon. I'll come back later.”

  A young man's voice. He turned. The stocky, close-cropped blond lieutenant who stood just inside the hatchway tossed his towel around his neck and nodded. Koske took in powerful muscles under a crisp white T-shirt, shorts in air force blue, rubber-soled ship shoes.

  “No,” Koske said, lowering trembling fists. Exhaustion rolled over him, the familiar dizzying drop out of adrenaline-fueled combat time. “I'll hold the bag for you if you like—”

  “Ramirez. Chris.”

  “I'm done.”

  2200 Hours

  Thursday 2 November, 2062

  PPCASS Huang Di

  Earth orbit

  It wasn't as bad as it had been.

  Of late, growing habituated to his body's precarious artificial equilibrium, Second Pilot Xie Min-xue found that his tendency to flinch and panic when confronted with casual contact was lessening. Rather than overreacting, he was learning to anticipate and avoid the contact before it could happen.

  Also, the crew was learning techniques to make life easier for the pathologically high-strung pilots: incandescent lighting rather than fluorescent in most public areas of the Huang Di
, for example. Soundproofed bunks for the pilots, and a private ready room where the lights were dim and the only sound the hum of the Huang Di's systems. There had been some talk of removing the colored panels and ideographed plaques—long life, good harvest, fair sailing—that bid the Huang Di prosperity and success, but the first pilot had convinced the captain that such measures would not be necessary.

  Just privacy, he said. And so Min-xue and the other four fragile, essential, half-mad pilots were granted the luxury of bunks and a ready room of their own.

  A luxury that Min-xue had now abandoned to pass carefully through the weightless corridors of the drifting ship. Midwatch, the passageways were almost deserted. The ideal time for a young man suffering from an induced form of acute hypersensitivity to travel through them.

  Min-xue paused by the hatchway to Pilot's Medical and closed his eyes for a moment. His uniform bound at waist and ankles; he jerked it irritably straight, which of course disarrayed the cloth across his shoulders and at his collar. There was no true comfort, but it could have been worse.

  Min-xue opened his eyes, clutched a grab rail beside the door so reactive pressure wouldn't send him drifting into the corridor, and depressed the call plate beside the hatch. The doorway irised open. He swung himself through. “Master Technician?”

  There was a deep sort of irony in the fact that the title of the man who cared for Min-xue's own tightly engineered systems was technician. Or perhaps Min-xue's superiors only meant to acknowledge the truth: he, and every other soldier in the People's PanChinese Liberation Army, was perfectly machined for a role, and perfectly replaceable.

  “Second Pilot.” Master Technician Liu Paiyun released his webbing and drifted from his station, turning gracefully to face Min-xue. “Have you any problems today, or are you just here for your checkup?”

  “None,” Min-xue answered. “Well, no more than the usual, but nothing to complain of.”

  “Excellent.” The master technician rubbed the palm of a broad hand across his tight-cropped black hair and smiled in a way that made the corners of his eyes wrinkle tight. “Then come with me, Min-xue; after we finish with your physical, I'll conduct your quarterly psychological examination. As long as you're already here—”