Scardown jc-2

by Elizabeth Bear

  “I'm not due for that for another six weeks,” Min-xue answered, and the master technician called up his chart.

  “I know.” Paiyun had thick wrists, still well muscled despite free fall, and arms long enough that bare strips of skin showed below the cuffs of his uniform. Those wrists — and the big, blunt hands attached to them — moved with assurance through the projections, motions as deft as Min-xue's when the young pilot was at the Huang Di's controls. “But we need a fourth for mah-jongg, you see. And there's no reason we can't combine two tasks into one.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. Min-xue smiled. “Thank you, Paiyun,” he said. “That would be — very nice.”

  The mah-jongg set was magnetic, the tiles softly burnished steel with a tendency to adhere to one another even when the player did not necessarily wish them to. Min-xue floated comfortably in a corner of Medical's crowded ready room, tethered to one padded wall by a length of soft webbing and a plastic clip. Liu Paiyun had carefully set things up so that Min-xue would have his back to the wall. Most gracious, but then Medical understood better than anybody except another pilot what, exactly, the pilots endured—

  “—out of patriotism, Min-xue?”

  “I beg your pardon, Paiyun?” It was nice to be on a casual basis with one person on the Huang Di, at least.

  “Oh.” Paiyun shuffled his tiles. His broad fingertips left faint oily dapples on the metal. “If I gave offense, I'm sorry. I had asked”—he glanced to the other two technicians, Chen and Gao — both only seniors — for confirmation. Chen smiled. Gao nodded. — “why it was that you agreed to enter pilot training. Given the risks. An exemplary young man such as yourself.”

  “They only take the best,” Min-xue said, without pride. He chewed his lip, feeling toward an answer that might make sense to Paiyun. “If my performance had not been acceptable—”

  “That was not my implication at all.” Paiyun looked down, ostensibly to lay a tile on the board with a soft, magnetized click. China. Min-xue smiled at the boxy red ideogram.

  “—no, Paiyun, I know it wasn't.” Min-xue let the smile widen. “It was the adventure, of course. And the idea that I might be good enough to be accepted. And—”

  They let the pause hang in the air long enough to be notable. “And?” Gao said. He looked down then, as if afraid he had been rude to the pilot, and turned away to fetch another round of drinks in plastic bubbles.

  “I'm a second child,” Min-xue said, enjoying the widening of his tablemates' eyes more than was probably fitting. He gripped the stem of the game board between his feet to keep himself from twisting as he accepted a bubble of cola from Gao. “There wasn't much place for me at home, and there was a girl, you see—”

  “Ah.” Paiyun smiled. “This girl, you'll marry her when we go home, then?”

  “I don't think so,” Min-xue answered, keeping his face impassive and strong. “I do not think she would like to be married to a pilot.”

  “No?”

  “No.” Firmly. He bit the valve on the cola and drank deeply. “No, not at all.”

  The little group fell silent. Chen shuffled his tiles, click and hiss of steel against other steel.

  Min-xue sighed and jerked his thumb toward the bulkhead behind him, and the cold deeps beyond it. “It's not so bad as all that, my noble PanChinese comrades and allies. This is more important. I'm doing this for her and for my sister, I think. So that their children have someplace to go.”

  Paiyun blinked, releasing the valve on his own beverage. “You believe the stories, Min-xue? They're… Well. There is gossip, of course. But people have been hungry as long as there has been a China, and — well, there is always gossip.”

  Min-xue shook his head. “My family is from Taiwan. It's not just rumors. I know.”

  2330 Hours

  Thursday 2 November, 2062

  HMCSS Montreal

  Earth orbit

  My cabin has a porthole in the floor.

  That may take some getting used to. But, of course, that's where the “outside” is. The gravity that isn't gravity pushes us away from the center of the wheel. It's probably a perk, although it's a little weird to walk across the optically perfect, quadruple-glazed bubble like standing on the glass floor of the CN Tower and looking all that endless long way down. Except this really is endless, and I balance on a thin sheen of February ice over the unsounded void and the bottomless well of the stars.

  I hang my jacket and lie on the bunk, not yet ready to undress completely and pull the webbing over me in case the artificial gravity fails. “Lights down,” I mutter, and they drop by about two-thirds. I could dig out my holistic communications device — useless for communication here, outside the Net, but it's got a few dozen classic novels loaded. Instead I lie on my side and luxuriate in the wonderful sensation of not being in pain. If I edge my head just right, I can catch about a fifth of the moon sliding past. I'm faced the wrong way to see Clarke or Earth, so I close my eyes and pretend I'm home in my own bed. Except I haven't really had either of those things — home or a bed — for years now. Richard?

  “I'm always here, Jenny,” he says with the wryness that's his alone. I get up in the blue oval of moonlight and open my locker in the bulkhead. My suit jacket hangs there like a purple worsted scarecrow, headless and sad. There's something in the inside pocket; with my meat hand, I reach inside and draw it forth, bring it over to where the moon can shine through its interlocking barbs. Glass beads press cool and precious against my skin as I hold it up to the light, since I can't burn tobacco here the way I should. Gabe probably violated half a dozen international laws bringing this to me.

  Bald eagle feather, beaded to symbolize bloodshed and sorrow, wardenship and loyalty. A warrior's feather. A gift from my murdered sister. And a duty I need to start living up to again. There's something else in the jacket's side pocket — a small, smooth cylindrical bottle. I leave that where it is.

  I set about making a place for the feather, and when I'm done I start unbuttoning my shirt, feeling — at last — as if I could rest. I'm interrupted by a knock on the hatch, which I open, and Gabe comes in quickly. We'll both be overly conscious of the emergency bulkheads for a while. I dog the hatch behind him and he doesn't speak, just reaches down and finishes the unbuttoning I started.

  Richard is silent as he ever has been while Gabe bends down and brushes his cheek against mine. He smells like the peppermint he must have brushed his teeth with. His lips move on my skin. I lean my forehead against his chest, and for a long moment he just holds me. “Jenny.”

  And for some reason it's funny. “When did I become Jenny again, instead of Maker? It was when you married Geniveve, wasn't it?” His long-dead wife, who had almost the same name I do. Don't think I never wondered about that.

  “It was.” He shrugs, a big ripple of mountainous shoulders. “I must have been feeling grown up.” He kisses the tip of my nose. “Do you think Valens is on to us yet?”

  “I think he's probably reviewing the videotapes,” I say dismissively, pulling away. “Have you talked to the girls?” Gabe's daughters — my goddaughters — and our friend Elspeth are on Earth, hostage for our good behavior. Unstated but true.

  “Leah and Genie are fine.” He follows and wraps an arm around my shoulders, pulls me down to sit beside him on the hard narrow bunk. Moonlight, shifting as the Montreal spins, brings out the silver in his hair, washes the color from his cheeks. It's bright in here. “Elspeth is staying with them.” His hand squeezes mine. Morse code, as he passes a message to Richard from Elspeth Dunsany, his creator, through the intermediary of flesh on flesh. “She sends her love.” Gabe's fingers twined in mine tell another story. There is a worm.

  An intentional programming glitch in the software that runs my wetware. Makes my metal arm do what my brain — or my combat-wired reflexes — tell it to do. Will do the same for this massive, powerful hulk of a ship. Valens doesn't trust me.

  “No,” Richard says. “He knows you hate him. He kno
ws Elspeth would love to see him on the wrong end of a court-martial. And he knows my prototype was famous for not staying within bounds.”

  It's what makes you a good AI, Dick.

  “It's what makes me an AI at all,” he answered, passing on the fleeting impression of a smile.

  Richard. I meant to ask you. Do I need to worry about transmitting my nanite load to anybody else? Like… shit, like a blood-borne disease?

  “Can Gabe catch them? Little late to ask now. No — it shouldn't be a problem. They need a controller implant, a chip; they're not designed to act independently. Which reminds me: I'm going to go check your programming again.” He's been over it a few thousand times. “You kids have fun. I won't peek.”

  I bet. But he vanishes from my inner eye with a wink, and Gabe pulls me close, a casual touch I've waited a lifetime for.

  4:00 PM

  Friday 3 November, 2062

  Bloor Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  Elspeth Dunsany blinked her contact clear of streaming data as the front door of Gabriel's Toronto apartment opened; she leaned away from Gabriel's desk, rolling stiff shoulders. She had let her hair down, trying to ease the ache across her temples, and now she massaged it, spring-coiled ringlets brushing the nape of her neck. She reached into an overwhelming stretch, fingers spread like a scratching cat's, then clapped her palms together and stood more fluidly than her comfortably padded frame would suggest. Absently, she fiddled with a slip-thin crucifix hanging over the hollow of her throat before shaking her head, picking her blazer off the back of the chair, and tapping a password on the crystal plate set into Gabriel's desk to lock the interface. “Leah?”

  “Genie,” Geniveve Castaign answered with a light little cough. She walked into the den, which doubled as her father's study, and sat on the white-legged stool beside the door. “Comment allez-vous, Elspeth?”

  “Bien,” Elspeth replied, smiling at her own accent. She couldn't understand the Castaign family's French half the time, nor they hers. “Qu'est-ce que tu faim?”

  “Oui!” Geniveve bounced onto the balls of her feet, arms swinging. She was small and thin for twelve, and always hungry. Enzyme therapies and the magic of modern medicine made her cystic fibrosis treatable, but her body still burned calories at an alarming rate, and she was hard-pressed to absorb everything she needed from her food. Elspeth led Gabriel's blond daughter into the stainless-steel, concrete, and linoleum kitchen, where they grilled cheese sandwiches out of the box. “Somebody needs to teach your dad to cook.”

  “He's the king of takeout.” Genie switched to English for Elspeth's sake. “Can you cook?”

  “Can I cook?” She slid a plate across the breakfast bar and dialed two more sandwiches from the freezer as the front door opened again. “I can make better than this, kid. My mother was an American. She taught me real Creole roux, jambalaya, and beignets. I do a pretty good bouillabaisse, too.”

  Genie turned to face her sister as Leah came into the room, checkered skirt flipping around her knees, transiently lovely as girls on the edge of adolescence can be. “Leah, what's jambalaya?”

  “Like rice and stuff?” Leah glanced at Elspeth for confirmation, tossing her carryall at the bench in the corner. She was already almost as tall as the older woman. “Can I have a—. Oh, thanks.” She giggled and dragged a stool beside Genie's as Elspeth slid the second plate across the bar. “Have you talked to Dad?”

  “Just an hour or so ago. He and Jenny are safe on the ship. He gave me coordinates. We can look up tonight with the telescope and see it.” Elspeth dialed coffee on the tap and fixed herself a cup before walking around the counter to sit beside the girls. I need to bring some tea over, she thought, and grinned privately. If Gabe's going to come home to my toothbrush and towels, I guess a few things in the kitchen cabinet won't hurt.

  Typical. Wait till the boy is seventy, eighty vertical miles away to move in. “What do you two want to do after homework?”

  “I've got flight simulation,” Leah said. “At six, at the lab.” She sighed, absently touching the shiny interface hidden under her streaked wheat-straw hair. “It's so weird being at the office with Dad gone.”

  Elspeth leaned her elbows on the sealed and brushed concrete breakfast bar. “Have you found out when you're supposed to go up to Clarke? Any of your group of trainee pilots?”

  Genie poked Leah. Leah caught her sister's hand and pressed it against her side, finishing her sandwich with the other hand. “Ellie, I don't know if they're even planning on taking us up. Training and simulations, and flying the mock starship here and there and mostly into planets. But they won't tell us if we're ever going up or not. Or even which of us are getting picked for the enhancements. There's like a hundred candidates, and I've only met the thirty or so in my class.”

  “You will be,” Elspeth said, turning her mug on her fingertips, hiding her worry. Leah had already had the much less invasive surgery to ready her body for a neural virtual reality hookup. The nanosurgeons that produced the augmented reflexes and senses of a starship pilot were much more dangerous — derived from the same alien tech as the Montreal's faster-than-light drive — and the process was very poorly understood. “They'll need all of you trained eventually. I expect they'll have Jenny teach you. She used to be a drill instructor.”

  “I know,” Leah said, and let Genie's hand fall. “I miss Richard, Ellie.”

  “I know,” Elspeth twisted her fingers together, feeling the uselessness of someone relegated to observerhood, someone whose work is done. “I miss him, too.”

  12:34 AM

  Saturday 4 November, 2062

  Bloor Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  I should go home, Elspeth thought, shutting Genie's bedroom door. It beats sleeping on the sofa. She crossed the living room, past the small telescope they'd just brought back down from the roof, and ran a hand over tan tweed. Leah was almost fourteen, after all. And responsible for her age. And Elspeth was only a message away.

  Half absently, Elspeth walked around the end table. Back down the hall past the girls' rooms, to the door standing ajar at the end. She laid a finger against it and let it drift open, creaking softly. “Lights up,” she said under her breath.

  The bed was unmade, Gabe's robe thrown across the blue down comforter. Clothes draped pegs and chairbacks, and Elspeth smiled around a sting. “Screw it,” she whispered. “Lights down.” The head of the bed was below the window. She climbed up on it and leaned against the headboard, breasts on her arms, forehead warm against the glass. Outside, for once, no rain was falling, and the Toronto night glistened. She imagined she heard the creak of autumn branch on branch in a fickle wind. There would be frost by morning. Her apartment seemed very empty, and very far away.

  She looked up, picking out a few bright stars through the city glow, closing her eyes to imagine the single gleaming fleck that was the Montreal, arcing out and away from Earth with Gabe and Jenny and Richard within its aggressively engineered hull. A hull that seemed fragile as a soap bubble blown into the void.

  Without bothering to pull her jeans off, Elspeth lay down in Gabe Castaign's empty bed and pulled the comforter up to her chin, burying her face in his pillow.

  Afternoon

  Sunday 5 November, 2062

  McCaul Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  It was cold in the city, colder than Razorface thought of November as being. A wind picked at his collar as he walked aimlessly along the sidewalk, watching traffic and pedestrians with half his attention. He was in Toronto to deliver a little justice: the sort of justice you only got if you made it happen yourself, because nobody was likely to care if a few street kids got ground up in the corporate machine.

  The problem was that he had the feeling he'd bitten off something much bigger than his head, and he didn't exactly know where to start chewing on it.

  His boots scraped heavily on the sidewalk. The inflated cast on his broken ankle put an uncomfortable hitch in his
stride, and he paused in front of a Canadian Army recruiting office to glower at the green-uniformed soldiers in the projections flickering between the layers of window glass. Maker would know what to do.

  But Maker had other things to worry about. And Razorface was too old to baby-sit.

  He was turning away again when the storefront of the recruiting office blew out.

  The explosion was too loud to hear, over before Razorface could react. He felt himself hit the street and the stones and shatterproofed holo-glass thump onto his back like angry fists and boots. He didn't quite manage to get his arms over his head, and his right temple felt the way the inside of a blood orange looks: pulpy and purple-black.

  He opened his eyes. It was almost as dark outside his head as in and he tasted brick dust along with blood and the usual tang of steel. His fingers came away sticky when he pressed them against his shaved-slick scalp. He blinked grit from his eyes, smelling cold garbage and smoke. Nothing seemed broken.

  “Fuck me,” Razorface grunted, and put a massive hand down flat on the pavement. Broken glass scored his palm. He pushed himself to his knees, scraps of broken brick and mortar sliding from black leather as — hobbled by the inflatable cast — he struggled to get his right leg under him. A small hand appeared in front of his face. He looked up into a pair of black-brown eyes. “Rough town,” he said to a young Oriental woman who didn't flinch from the glitter of his teeth. He grabbed her outreached hand; she dragged him up with surprising strength.

  “You wanna stay away from government offices today,” she said. “Guy Fawkes Day.”

  “What's that?”

  A siren kicked up, somewhere close. She gave him a sidelong grin and walked away without a backward glance, dusting her hands on her trousers. Reminding him of his friend Bobbi Yee: pretty, maybe twenty-five. Razorface spat through the rows of prosthetic steel teeth that gave him his name, and turned away from the smoking facade of the recruiting office. The pigs would be along any second, and he didn't want to be identified as a witness any more than he wanted to think about what had happened to Bobbi. Questions would lead to more questions, and inevitably to the unanswerable one: what he was doing in Canada without having passed an official border post.