Hammered

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Thanks. Today we’re just introducing you to the VR setup with your current equipment. We’re going to run some tests, see what the functionality is, see how comfortable we can get you with operating in a VR environment. We’re not even going to use a real vehicle today, or the drugs. You’ll be flying the HMCSS Indefatigable.”

  Since when do aircraft have names? “What’s that?”

  Amusement colors his voice. “A virtual spaceship. Supposed to be very challenging to fly. It’s got a tendency to smack into planets—or any sufficiently massive object nearby. As if attracted to them, actually.”

  “Whose lame-ass idea was that?”

  “I believe it’s intended to be a game.”

  “Teenagers. Got to make everything harder than it needs to be.”

  “I’ve got kids of my own, and yes, I think that probably covers it.” There’s a hesitance in his voice. I wonder what he isn’t telling me. “We’ll sedate you once you’re hooked in, paralyze the voluntary muscles. Like REM sleep.”

  “I’ve done some work in VR, actually.”

  “I know. That’s one of the ways we tracked you to Connecticut.”

  “What?” There’s a jolt, sharp and sudden, as the adrenaline of fury dumps into my body.

  In the jump into combat time, I hear my heartbeat slowing. To Valens, it accelerates—and he murmurs to the anesthesiologist, who makes a minor adjustment. Increasing the sedative drip, no doubt. It works. “Calm down, Jenny.”

  Simon, you son of a bitch … no, wait. If he’d been talking to Valens behind my back, Valens wouldn’t need me to release my medical records. If he were that unethical, Simon would just do it.

  “I’m calm,” and it’s grit between my teeth, but I get it spat out. “How do you know about that?”

  “Oh, the researcher you were working with published some papers on you. Name changed, of course, and some of the personal details. But I knew who it had to be. He wouldn’t talk to me when I tried to contact him about it.”

  “Ah.” I see. And the shit of it is, Simon probably thought he was protecting confidentiality. Not really unethical. Really. And it explained why he had been so rabbity during that last discussion.

  Just exactly not what I asked him to do. The temptation must have been unbearable. But we’re going to have a long, stern discussion after I get back to Hartford.

  If I get back to Hartford.

  My mind is alert, but my body feels numb, tingling. I cannot feel my right hand, now, either, or the pinch of the IV site. My lips prickle and panic sings at the bottom of my belly, but I force myself to stillness.

  Like outwaiting the enemy. The first to move is often the one to die.

  There’s a tug and a sting as Valens seats the lower cord. He’s not as good at it as Simon. Or maybe not as gentle. I couldn’t raise my head from the cradle if I tried, but I hear the others in the theater moving behind Valens. “With the patient’s voluntary muscles relaxed,” he says, and I know he’s talking to the observers, “her neural impulses will be translated by the computer, resulting in normal movement of her icon through a virtual space. The effect is much more realistic than the VR suits and goggles most of you will be familiar with. And that realism is the basis of the technology we are pioneering here. In a moment, you’ll be directed down the hall to a holotheater. The monitors will transmit images of everything Master Warrant Officer Casey experiences once the linkage is complete.”

  The observers are suits, not the doctors and students I once was used to seeing. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Valens finishes his lecture and turns his attention back to me. My body numbs as he finishes the connection and lifts his hands. “All right, Casey?”

  “Fine,” I mumble. He dismisses the observers. For a moment, I close my eyes, relishing a cheerful recollection of the sensation of Valens’s shoulder breaking under a poorly aimed punch. I really wish I’d gotten to hit him twice.

  “Comfortable?”

  “Couldn’t tell if I wasn’t, Fred.”

  He chuckles. “I want you to put some thought into your new arm, by the way. Since you won’t be taking it into combat, there’s no reason not to lay pseudoskin over it and match your complexion. More or less. It’ll still look a little off, of course.”

  I think about it for a minute. Imagine something that might pass for a normal hand. From a distance. From six feet. “No.”

  “No?”

  I tell myself I have no intention of going through with the surgery. That I am arguing to string him along, stretch things out. Once I’ve got proof that Valens and Barb are somehow linked to Mashaya Duclose’s death, I can count coup, show brave, pay my debts. Get myself killed in the process or go home and die in peace.

  I tell myself all that. Except. Gabe kissed me, damn him. “Steel. I want it the same as the old one. Armored.”

  “Yes. We put the ‘skin’ over the armor. That’s what gives you the fingertip sensitivity. Fingertip, flat palm, back of the hand. Process developed by a Dr. Evans in the U.S. The arm itself stays numb, unfortunately. We’d overload your nervous system if we tried full-surface tactile. We can’t match the delicacy of the electrical impulses the human nervous system uses. Yet.” He turns and steps toward the door. “See you in cyberspace, Casey.”

  I raise my voice with an effort. “I want steel, Valens. Make the skin transparent if you have to.” Why are you arguing? Why do you care?

  I can see his booties, the bottom of his scrubs. And Valens strolls two more steps, stops, turns back to me, and draws a slow breath. “If that’s what it takes, then. That’s what we’ll do.”

  I close my eyes as he walks through the door. The normal noises of the operating room resume, and someone—nurse, assisting physician, technician—asks me, “All set, Ms. Casey?”

  “Locked and loaded,” I answer, numb on the padded table, and then even that falls away.

  Nowhere and neverwhen

  Stars.

  Stars, and cold stillness like frost crystallizing on motionless skin. Heat like an iron stroked down my body on the opposite side. Light that should be blinding-bright, eye searing, casts white-sharp edges over a tumbling stone hanging either below or above; I’m not sure which.

  Farther, a rust-red curve, and I know where I am. Mother fucker. That’s Mars.

  Which is when I realize:

  I’m not flying the spaceship.

  I am the spaceship.

  “Valens, you cocksucker, you could have warned me.” I yelp out loud, and I’m surprised when I hear my own voice, clear and strangely external, as if recorded and played back.

  And then I hear him laughing in my ear, self-satisfied as a cat. “I thought it would be more fun as a surprise. Pretty good, isn’t it?”

  And it is. It is. I stretch and wriggle into the skin of the ship, the Indefatigable, Valens called it. Her. I can’t think of her as an object. Not when I’m living inside her, sailing serenely along in areosynchronous orbit. I spend a long moment realizing that there’s facility built into this beast for all the functions you would expect of a real space cruiser—some back-brain fraction of my awareness is tracking life support, hull integrity, the tickle of the solar wind on the edges of my furled solar sails. Diagnostics read full capability, and it reaches my conscious mind as an intoxicating euphoria, a spring-day desire to leap over fences.

  “Valens, I’m going to kick this thing into gear.”

  “Gently, Casey,” he offers. “Use the sails at first. And the attitude rockets. You want to nudge yourself higher before you hit the stardrive. Oh, and you don’t want to be pointing at the sun when you do it.”

  Stardrive? “Wilco.” It’s incredible. Peaceful. There’s no pain, and not a scrap of fear. The solar sails unfurl like the wings of a swan, and I boost and turn myself, back to the solar wind that feels more like a gale. It’s hours—days—but they go by like time spent lying in bed on Sunday with a lover.

  “Valens, aren’t your suits getting bored out there?”

 
; “Actually, we’re altering your time sense a bit. We’ve been watching for fifteen minutes.”

  “Oh.” That freaks me out; my course wobbles. I correct. It’s easier than learning to walk. Again.

  I reach for cynicism, for the armor of biting wit and savage dismissal. It’s not there, not hanging in the closet where it should be, next to my raincoat. There’s nothing but the stars, and an old slow dull ache inside me like coming home.

  “Status, Casey?”

  “I can’t feel Mars tugging on my boots anymore.”

  “Stow the sails.”

  “Check.” Like furling wings, they slither into the embrace of my body. I—the Indefatigable—am shaped rather like a doughnut stuck halfway down a carving fork. The tines would point backward. The doughnut spins. Silly-looking thing.

  “Sails stowed, Colonel.”

  “Widen the focus on your navigation charts?”

  “Got ’em.”

  “You’re going perpendicular to the plane of the elliptic. Do you know what that means?”

  Supercilious son of a bitch. “Up.” Brief silence. I picture the scene in the holotheater as he pauses and mutes what I can hear. I envision him punctuating his lecture with a jabbing finger, as he informs his audience that I’ve never been exposed to the software before today, that this is a dry run to show what a trained pilot can do even with unfamiliar tech—tech that can save lives, when applied to the birds and beasts of mechanized war. He’ll say just that. Save lives.

  His voice comes back, then. “Roger that, Casey. We’ve put you back on real time. What’s going to happen now is that you’re going to take that baby up, out of the solar system. There’s a course plotted. It’ll take you to Alpha Centauri, which is a nearby star. There will be unexpected obstacles along the way … Dark matter, planetesimals. Virtually speaking, your craft is going to be moving faster than the speed of light, which means you’ll have no reliable visual input. Copy?”

  “Copy. So how am I supposed to steer this thing, sir?” And I want to bite my tongue as soon as I’ve said it, imagining the satisfied expression on his face. Sir. You can take the girl out of the army, but you can’t take the army out of the girl.

  “You should be able to feel what’s coming at you. It’s a function of the field the drive produces. We’ve got no justification for how it works, so don’t trouble yourself with that. It’s magictech, make-believe. Just run with it.”

  Whatever. “Roger. How large an object do I worry about?”

  “The drive field atomizes anything under about half a meter that it brushes up against. I would say, be on the safe side. Dodge anything bigger than a basketball. There’s not much out there.”

  “Roger. Any last words?”

  “Godspeed, Casey.”

  And what a damned funny thing to say. “On my way, Fred.”

  I point my nose up, and floor it.

  And hell if he isn’t right. I’m flying blind, and it’s like water-skiing in the dark. I can feel the shape of space like a pressure against my skin. No—more like a pressure a few feet away from my skin. I get a taste of it at first, as the flickering aura of the drives brushes and consumes little things, barely noticeable things. Like running in a dust storm.

  And then there’s a bigger piece, and I take evasive action, surprised by how fast I have to be on it and how slippery the bits of space garbage prove. The big ship flails a bit, more nimble than it has any right to be, and it’s all riding invisible swells like making love in a pitch-black room, all guesswork and intuition and trying not to poke anybody in the eye and damn, it’s hard.

  I’m holding it together pretty good until a dark body more massive than Mercury pops up a parsec or two to starboard, and the HMCSS Indefatigable is careening in a direction I didn’t send her and I’m under her, out of control as wrestling a goddamned pig on ice, slick-sliding sideways, fragile frame of the ship shredding like twisted straw as I fight her. Going into the ditch, and dammit, it’s just a little bitty lump of rock and the damned thing is sucking me in like a fucking black hole and then it’s not a starship and a starless night, it’s a rolling A.P.C., treads blown off, metal crushing under its own weight and nothing to do but hang on to the yoke like I could do any good at all and

  Boom.

  The rest is silence. For ten seconds, maybe fifteen. And then I’m back in my aching old body, shaking hard with reaction, and a tech I can’t see is pulling the wires out of my processors and another one is holding my right hand, squeezing hard as sensation returns.

  “Damn,” she says, whoever she is. “That was some nice flying, Master Warrant. You’re the first one I’ve seen get that far on the first try.”

  Which makes me wonder how many dry runs there have been. And why they have us flying a starship when we’re supposed to be testing out tanks, for crying out loud.

  I sit up, too proud to scrub the tears off my cheeks, feeling the loss of that ship—just a toy, Jenny, dammit—like my damned arm has been blown off all over again.

  3:45 P.M., Wednesday 13 September, 2062

  Hartford, Connecticut

  Downtown

  Mitch leaned back in the passenger seat of Razorface’s jet-black, silver-detailed Cadillac and unclipped his HCD from his belt. He accepted the call flashing at the edge of his contact. “Afternoon, Doc.”

  “Detective Kozlowski?”

  “Please, Doctor Mobarak. Just call me Mitch.” Because, for one thing, I’m suspended without pay as of this morning.

  “Then call me Simon. I’ve spoken with Mr. Castaign, Jenny’s friend. Can we meet?”

  Mitch looked over at Razorface. They were stopped in traffic on the Founder’s Bridge over the Connecticut River. Razor was leaning out the driver’s window, watching the girls walk by on the footbridge that ran from East Hartford to downtown. They turned around, giggling at the shining black car with the chromed cattle-catcher embracing the grille. Mitch decided not to ask how often Razorface felt the need to ram things. “Razor.”

  “Yah?”

  “Wanna swing by the hospital?”

  The big gangster nodded, rubbing his jaw.

  “Simon. We’ll be there in less than twenty minutes, assuming we ever get off this bridge. Want to meet in the caf?”

  Twenty-three minutes later by his heads-up, Mitch strolled into the Hartford Hospital cafeteria alongside Razorface; they met Simon Mobarak standing next to a potted ficus near the long bank of windows. “Traffic?”

  “The usual,” Mitch answered. “Simon, this is Razorface. Razor, Doctor Simon Mobarak.”

  It was a measure, Mitch thought, of how subdued Razorface was that he didn’t bother trying to intimidate the smaller man with his namesake grin. Instead, he shook Mobarak’s hand and followed as the doctor led them to an out of the way table in the corner by the conference rooms. Mitch recognized Mobarak’s placid face and reserved manner as the professional stillness associated with bad news, and silently braced himself.

  When they were sitting, Mobarak leaned forward and spoke without preamble. “I’ve gotten in touch with Gabe Castaign, Jenny’s friend in Montreal. Except he’s in Toronto now, and he’s seen her.”

  “How she doing?” Razor leaned forward, elbows on the table. Mobarak met the gangster’s gaze, in his element, refusing to be pressured.

  “Poorly. Castaign says she’s agreed to some surgery that may correct problems with her implants. In handling her follow-up care, I only recently became aware that there might be a problem, and I planned to complete some research and get my ducks in a row before I sat down to hash out a course of treatment with her. She seems to have jumped the gun a bit.”

  “A bit,” Mitch cut in. “This surgery you’re talking about. It’s—what, replacing some worn-out hardware?”

  “According to Castaign, it’s a total refit. Ground up, with new technology, and it could kill her. Apparently she’s back under the care of the surgeon who did the original work. A guy called Valens”—Razor sucked in a ragged breath—�
��you’ve heard of him?”

  “Heard Maker say the name once or twice. Not real kindly.”

  “I know. He apparently sent her sister down here to collect her—well, this is pretty irrelevant stuff. Anyway, Castaign sounds worried sick. I’m actually going to message Jenny and see if I can twist her arm into letting me be present for her surgery and recovery.”

  “Lot of time away from your practice, Doc.” Mitch cast a longing glance the length of the cafeteria, toward the gleaming silver coffee machines. He didn’t miss the complexity of emotions that crossed Mobarak’s face, though. Aha. Someone has an unprofessional attachment to a certain patient, or I miss my guess entirely.

  “My copractitioners can cover for me. God knows I have the time coming, and it’s a brand-new technique I may not get an opportunity to see again anytime soon.”

  “Sure thing, Doc. Look—” but Razorface stopped him with a big hand on his wrist.

  “You gonna see Maker?” the gangster interrupted.

  “I’m going to try.”

  “Give her this.” Razorface slid a long olive green plastic box across the table. Mobarak took it from his hand, lifted it up. “What’s in it?”

  “Hide it when you cross the border, man,” Razorface said. “Something from her shop. I expect she gonna want it.” He avoided Mitch’s eyes.

  Mitch had a pretty good guess what was in that box. Damn. Right out from under my nose. And if I ever wondered how this man rules half a fucking city by the strength of his word, I know the answer now.

  Later, on the sidewalk outside the unmistakable white brick towers of the hospital, Razorface turned as if to walk away from Mitch without speaking. The cop dogged his heels. “Razor.”

  “What?”

  “That was a nice gesture back there.”

  “Figured you’d be pretty pissed off about it, is all. Since you said don’t touch it.”

  “Nah.”