Scardown jc-2

by Elizabeth Bear

  I cross to my chair, curl my legs up on it, and watch the white-suited figures crawl over the Montreal's vast golden solar sail. But is her computer core big enough?

  “Yes,” he says reluctantly. “It is. I think Min-xue's determined to try it anyway. If we can get her down close to the impact zone, we can make a difference. Mitigate. Which is the best we could do under ideal circumstances. This is not the sort of damage that can ever be — healed. The scars will always be there.”

  I press my steel hand to my cheek, taking comfort in the coolness of the metal. I know what you mean.

  “Meanwhile,” he continues, “we're still trying to hack into the controls. But it's only a matter of time until security finds him. The Huang Di's not infinite.”

  I can't pick out which spacesuit is Wainwright. I wonder if one of the others is one of the saboteurs. Richard, am I safe to go on-line with the Montreal?

  “Your nanosurgeons seem to be becoming rather adept at fixing up the neural damage the interface does, but it's awfully soon. And you ripped yourself up pretty good with that last trick. I wouldn't recommend trying that again. You should eat something and take your supplements. And — wait. Jenny. I have news from Riel.”

  A reflexive glance at Gabe. He catches it, starts toward me. I wonder if Richard's giving me a second to brace, or if Riel is slow relaying what she has to say. What?

  “Genie and Elspeth are alive.”

  “Yes!” I'm out of the chair as if catapulted — easier in the light gravity of the habitation wheel than it would be on Earth, and I hit Gabe chest-high and wrap my arms around him, squeaking like a girl a third my age.

  Undignified.

  Who gives a shit?

  “They're okay, they're okay, they're okay—”

  Breathless, wordless, he squeezes me tight.

  “Jenny.” Richard, still serious.

  Ah, shit. Qu'est-ce que le fuck ici maintenant?

  “She's sending this via me so you'll know it's legit. She has a job for you and Captain Wainwright.”

  Richard—

  “Yes.”

  Beijing? He doesn't have to answer. He's already answered it all. Revenge. Tell her we'll take out the Huang Di—that's not a lie. Remove the threat. We can — shit. Richard, what if you release the physics behind the stardrive worldwide? That should shake some things up. Maybe a few more people will make it off world before the end.

  “I'd be the first AI to win a second Nobel Prize. I can do it. It will — you're right, if everybody has the stardrive tech, it removes some of the excuse for China and Canada to batter each other back into the stone age. Complicates the equation.” His dry tone hides worry. I can see it in the gull-wing arch of his brow, the way his long fingers move like a bird's feathers grasping the wind. For no reason at all, I remember the eagle at the rehab center and the chrome steel binding her wing together. Gone, too, now, where all good things go.

  Is this extortion, Richard? Riel is holding Genie and Ellie hostage so I'll kill a few million Chinese civilians for her?

  A long silence, while Gabe holds me tight enough to cramp my breath in my lungs, his chin resting on the top of my head. I draw strength and warmth out of him as if they come up through a straw.

  I think that flutter of color in my head is Alan's equivalent of a sigh. You never quite get to talk to just Richard anymore. “She's looking out for the future in her own way. You convinced her we need to get where they're going. And I think the last twenty-four hours nicely demonstrate why.”

  Why do we need to go take somebody else's planet if we can fix our own?

  “They'll take it anyway, Jenny. And we don't know there's anybody out there.”

  This removes the moral high ground. Remember when you asked me how much I trusted you, Dick?

  “Yes.”

  The Benefactors don't have AIs, you said. You've been keeping an eye on them. Do you think you have better control over this tech on a program level than they do?

  “Yes again.” He's almost gone — visually, I mean. Just a voice in my head that might almost be the voice of my conscience, or the voice of my will.

  I trust you a hell of a lot, I say. Richard's smart enough to keep his mouth shut — if you can call it that — while I disentangle myself from Gabe, give him an extra squeeze, and walk across the bridge to sit down in my chair. Let me know when Wainwright and the others are inside.

  There's no right choice, is there? There never was. Not with Peacock. Not with Nell. Not now. Sometimes there's no choice at all.

  “What are you going to do?”

  What I have to. Richard, see that that data gets out?

  “I will.”

  Hey, Richard—The chair molds to me like an old friend. I don't call Gabe over to help with the interfaces yet. I want to just sit here quietly and watch him work for as long as I can. There's an eagle feather in my pocket and resolution like a fist clenching in my chest, and on some soul-deep level I'm dead happy I don't know what comes next. Does Wainwright know our orders yet?

  “She does.”

  When they first met with the Europeans, my ancestors wove a treaty with them, written in the symbols on a wampum belt. Two rows of violet beads side by side on a river of white: two canoes moving parallel down a stream, canoes whose courses were not to affect each other. Whose paths were not to intersect.

  It never works out that way.

  How soon will the Benefactors arrive?

  A dry suggestion of a shrug. “It's hard to tell when you can't read their star charts.”

  A picture is a picture, isn't it?

  “You would think so. But it doesn't appear to work that way.”

  We should probably have the war over with when they get here, don't you think?

  Watching Gabe work, watching the wounded Earth spin on the view screen over his shoulder, I settle back in my chair to wait. A warrior kind of finality fills me with an emotion I almost don't recognize. Take care of Genie for me, Elspeth.

  Peace.

  I am at peace.

  “Jenny,” Richard whispers. “We're in. Min-xue is in control, Pilot. The Huang Di is under way.”

  0615 Hours

  Friday 22 December, 2062

  HMCSS Calgary

  Earth orbit

  “Leah.” Richard's voice roused her from something half-like sleep, but mostly like staring out the Calgary's bridge view ports. “Elspeth and Genie are okay.”

  “What?” She said it out loud, jerking forward in her chair. The skeleton bridge crew glanced at her — three scared-looking junior grade officers and airmen, the oldest probably only four years older than she was. “Sorry,” she said, and waved them away. “Just thinking out loud.” They're all right? They're alive?

  “And kicking,” he answered. “Genie has two broken ribs. How are you?”

  Scared. Genie's really okay? Leah picked at the edge of her chair. She wondered where Koske was, and casually reached out to Richard for the information. He showed her a map, Koske in his new, Spartan quarters. Down the hall from Leah's room. Where Leah couldn't stand to be.

  “She'll live, but things are bad down there, Leah. And going to get worse.”

  I know. She stood and paced to the direct-view window, laying both hands flat on ice-cold glass. There were layers and layers of crystal between herself and the outside. Beyond it, she saw Clarke, the occasional flashes of light as its meteor defenses picked off a bit of space junk or debris. It's the end of the world.

  “Not quite.” Something colored his voice. He resolved fully in her imaginary vision, a rangy man whose shoulders lifted and fell in a shrug she would have called exhaustion in a human. “The Huang Di will be moving soon. I need you to get jacked in to the ship and let it go by, even if you hear something different from ground control or the captain. Can you do that for me?”

  Leah nodded. What's it going to do?

  “One of its pilots feels very bad about what happened, and he's going to try to make it better.”


  Richard. She sighed, exasperated. I'm not a kid. What's he going to do?

  “He's going to land the Huang Di in the ocean, and use it to start a global Benefactor tech infection and hopefully help fix some of the damage.”

  What you wouldn't let me do with Genie.

  “This is different—”

  Grown-ups always say that.

  “He's going to use the ship's brain as a control chip, so that Alan and I can regulate — Leah, you're still mad at me.”

  She let her hands fall to her sides and shuffled back from the window. She wore ship shoes that weren't much more than rubberized slippers; her footsteps fell silent on the textured gray matting of the deck. I could have helped her. Look how much better Aunt Jenny is—

  “We'll help her now. Just keep them from using the Calgary to stop the Huang Di, all right?”

  Leah looked over her shoulder, her hair whispering against her neck, a few strands pulling at her interface as she turned her head to regard the curved black couch. Isn't this dangerous? What about what happened to Carver? And then she bit down on her thumbnail, remembering that Carver was dead, and Bryan, too.

  “That's a risk,” Richard answered. “But this is just to heal. Not enhance. So it's safer. We're starting in five minutes. Are you ready?”

  Leah checked the chrono in her contact lens's heads-up display. I'll be ready, she said. “Airman?”

  He looked up from his monitors: thermal readings, she saw, showing the entry streak of the asteroid scraped the breadth of North America like a slash through the belly of a gutted fish. “Cadet?”

  “I want to check the hull and vane integrity, just in case some of that debris made it up this far. Would you please help wire me in?”

  The pinch of the wires was nothing. The young man's hands shook when he touched her, and then Leah floated in space, the Calgary her wings and eyes and breath. Richard, do you think Bryan felt anything?

  “Nothing, Leah.” He spoke as if from far away.

  How do you know?

  “I was with him.”

  Oh.

  “I told him you were thinking of him.”

  Thank you. Richard fed her data, showed her the leisurely, orange streak that was the Huang Di, the limping arc of the Montreal coming around. “Are we ready to go up?”

  Testing the vanes now. A thought brought her up short. Richard. Those ships on Mars.

  “Yes?”

  Could they have been grounded for a similar purpose? Long ago?

  His hesitation might have been framed in nanoseconds. An unaugmented human, one not becoming accustomed to conversation at the speed of thought, would never have noticed. “It's a possibility, yes. Mars had significant surface water once, and the project xenobiologist thought that was what they were for.”

  But they failed. There's no life on Mars.

  “Mars was a more fragile system,” Richard said.

  Is this going to work, Richard?

  She almost sensed when he thought about lying to her, almost knew the instant when he decided there was no point. “Probably,” he said. “A little, at least. We have to try, in any case. There's nothing else left to do.”

  Min-xue would have liked the poetry of it if the Huang Di moved, when she moved, with the silk-on-water purity of his grandfather's fishing boat. She didn't, though; it was the Montreal that was graceful, elegant. The Huang Di lurched like a drunk when he triggered her main engines and attitude jets, no time for a gentle burn, no poetry in her motion but a stagger.

  I wanted to be a poet, Richard. Did I tell you that, my friend? I wanted to live to write poetry.

  The Huang Di curved in space, dropping, one brief nudge enough to push her into the gravity well, a longer burn to turn her topple into a glide.

  “Min-xue,” Richard answered. “You've done so. This is a poem that will be remembered for a thousand years, my friend.”

  Min-xue smiled, feeling the warmth of his friend's benediction. And then feeling nothing at all, as his connection with the Huang Di suddenly, unbelievably, went dead.

  Damn it. Richard, I think they've—

  After so long in the darkness, the light that struck his eyes was as bright as staring into the sun.

  — found me.

  The Huang Di is pulling up, Richard. That's not right. That can't be right—

  “It's not right, Leah. Not right at all.”

  Oh. In timeless space, the body of her ship like her own bright body laid out under the stars, Leah considered. Richard, do we need a new plan?

  “Huang Di's security has found Min-xue. I don't have a fallback plan.”

  She knew. Leah always knew when somebody was lying to her. He had a plan, all right. It just wasn't a plan he was willing to use. What's the crew complement of the Calgary, Richard?

  “Sixty-four,” he answered reluctantly. “Counting Trevor and you. A skeleton crew.”

  The Montreal's is 347, and her stardrive works. The Calgary's isn't on-line yet. She's crippled. It's logical, Richard. Leah felt the cold in her belly like the cold of space against her hands when she had leaned against the view port, and her right thumb fretted the chip implanted in the back of her left hand. The Huang Di's chances to heal the damage are finished. She extended the solar sails and looped the feed from visual, thermal, and magnetic-body sensors that would have told the bridge crew that the Huang Di was moving. Sunlight filled her sails and she — the Calgary—skittered forward with the same sort of hitching glide she got if she opened her coat while on ice-skates and let the wind carry her along.

  “Leah—” No. She felt his denial and his impotent fury.

  The only choice, Richard. The logical choice. Or are you my father, now?

  “No,” he answered, a little while later. “I think you're rather grown-up, actually.”

  “Trevor, I need you.” Richard's voice, overlays of Alan's, and Koske was on his feet with one hand on the hatchway's wheel, not even bothering with shoes. It was dim in his cabin, recessed lights shaded with translucent polymer he'd tack stripped to the wall, and he could tell from the Calgary's luxurious shiver that she was under way.

  What's wrong, Richard?

  Richard didn't so much explain as thrust the knowledge into his head wholesale, a bubble of trajectories and leaps of intuition and Leah and Min-xue's wildly desperate plan. Koske stopped momentarily, the hatchway wheel still heavy in his hand, using the other to shield his eyes as the information flared into headache as if someone had boxed his ears. He stepped back from the door and started to pull his ship shoes on, one foot at a time. “Time is limited,” the AI said. “Leah's going to get herself killed—”

  Koske nodded, swallowed, and turned his head to look through the porthole in the floor at the spinning stars, so far away. I wanted to go there, he thought. And then said to Richard, What do you propose I do about it?

  “—ah—”

  Carefully, calmly, Koske opened the door. Long strides carried him toward the bridge. She's right, Richard. Are you afraid of dying?

  “It's not a major concern these days. I would be somewhat hard to kill. Aren't you?”

  No, Koske answered. He checked his stride and stopped dead, weight all forward, one hand on the bulkhead. The bridge wasn't far. His head still thumped with the equations and diagrams Richard streamed through it — trajectories, velocities, calculations of mass — and he dropped his chin to his chest and heaved a single long, expressive sigh.

  Trevor Koske turned, a crisp reversal of stride, and palmed himself into a deserted side corridor, increasing his pace. I don't mind dying. But there's sixty-two people in this hunk of tin who probably do.

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  Get everybody aft. Tell them it's a drill. Lie. Fake hull damage forward. There's enough debris flying around to make it ring true. I don't care what you do.

  I'll uncouple the drive units. They'll have a couple of hours before the radiation gets too bad. Start shuttling them back to Clarke, or to the
Montreal. We'll save whatever we can.

  Richard tracks the crew for me, feeds me the data. How did I ever live before I had an AI in my brain? He beats the stuffing out of my hip unit, that's for sure.

  He shows me the vermilion eye that is the icon for the Huang Di, as red a star as Mars, and shows her start to slide downward, backward, directions that have no meaning in space at all. I fumble for the interface pins, have to look down at my hands to make them work right. Oh, too tired for this, Jenny. Too tired.

  Even dimmed, the bridge lights beat at the backs of my eyeballs. I'm slapped with a sudden incongruous picture of Nell, all her black hair come out of her braid and tangled with snowflakes, stooping to pack slush into a ball that's going to sting like hell when it wallops me in the side of the head.

  Bad time for a flashback, too. It tells me I pushed it real hard with my raw interface earlier, and maybe did a little more neural damage than the nanosurgeons have been able to repair just yet. I need more downtime. Sleep. Supplements and plenty to eat. All of which I'm not going to get.

  There's an answer, of course. Miniature yellow pills rattle in my thigh pocket, and it would only take just one.

  Maybe two.

  Except if I push it too hard, I could wind up like Carver. Like Face's boy Mercedes, who got his brain melted when Unitek was illegally testing the Hammers in Hartford — was it just a few months back? “Gabe?” I say his name as much to remind myself that he's there as to get his attention. “How's it coming?”

  “Not as well as I had hoped,” he says. He looks up at me, tired line between his eyes, which are still made bluer than they should be by the reddened whites. “I dunno how Ramirez made this big of a mess. Marde, tu sais — Je ne pense pas qu'il avait un partenaire.”

  “He did it all himself?”

  Gabe shrugs. “Programming's like handwriting. It all looks like one guy. And he wrote probably 30 percent of the O/S for this thing. He could have been mining it for months. I found two Trojan horses that haven't triggered yet, and God knows what else is in here. I don't think you or Patty should be jacking into this ship until Richard and I have it clean.”

  “Je comprends—” I want to take his face between my hands and kiss him until the beaten look leaves the back of his eyes, and I'm afraid it never will. I sigh and look down.