Hammered

by Elizabeth Bear

  In my ear: “Get them!”

  I’m on it, Richard.

  “I’d love it if you mailed me copies.”

  “Consider it done.”

  It’s all I can do not to glance at Valens to see if he’s overheard, but I can still hear him talking. “I heard a but in that sentence, Charles. If I may call you that?”

  “Charlie.”

  “Jenny, then.” A moment of eye contact, and we’re on the same team, just like that. Don’t trust too quickly, Jenny. You can’t afford to trust at all. But I’m stuck with it, aren’t I? “Anyway. Where were you going?”

  “But,” and he pauses, as if watching my reaction to see if what he is about to say will offend, or as if uncomfortable with the confidence he’s about to offer a total stranger. “Meeting you. Having you tell me that, about your pain. Seeing you striding down the corridor like you own it. Forgive me if this sounds mushy. But it makes my work feel worthwhile.”

  And damned if he doesn’t mean it, too. I blink and glance down at the floor. “It’s appreciated, Charlie.”

  He grins. “Remind me to tell you my scientific wild-ass guess about the salvage ships sometime.”

  “What’s wrong with now?” I can about feel Richard bouncing on his toes in the back of my wetware. His fingers would be drumming the furniture if he had either to work with.

  Charlie clears his throat. “Well, the way I see it, there’s no way they could have been left there accidentally—discarded, and not stripped or salvaged. So it stands to reason that they were a gift.”

  “A … what?”

  “Sure. Two damaged ships, set down carefully and preserved. They’re not built for atmosphere. Or gravity. You know what happens to a starship if you try to land it on a planet?”

  “I can imagine.” Vividly.

  “I theorize that they were left for us to find. The casualties removed, the bodies shown proper reverence—if the aliens, whatever they are, do that. They may be two races: we saw two totally different ship designs. Anyway, it stands to reason—as I said—that the salvage was left for us as a gift.”

  I roll that around on my tongue for a moment. “A gift of garbage.”

  Charlie grins, delighted that I’m following his logic chain. And hell if it doesn’t make sense. My own ancestors weren’t above salvaging from the middens of the white colonists. I take a breath before I continue. “Get as far as Mars, and we give you the stars. Don’t break stuff, kids.”

  “Exactly!”

  And then we arrive in front of a dogged hatchway, painted oxymoronic Air Force navy. I come up behind Valens, who offers me a smile a little too fond and possessive for my tastes. “Go ahead, Casey. Open it.”

  Cool pressure on my left hand as steel clicks on steel, and I have to lean on the heavy blue door to pop the seal against a slight pressure differential. Airtight, and what’s on the other side wafts through, a draft cold as a ghost.

  And conversation is suddenly useless.

  I imagine Gabe’s grip on my arm must tighten, but I can’t feel it. I pull away, footsteps slow as if through mud at the end of a march. Forster stops, and I can feel his eyes and Gabe’s upon me. They’re all looking at me—Valens and Wainwright, too. I don’t care. I have eyes for one thing exactly.

  Richard’s voice, though I’m already moving: “Dammit, Jenny, get me to the window.”

  This is a lounge, a viewing area. The air is cold. The details of furnishing, decking, everything vanishes in the reality of the scene outside the massive, floor-to-ceiling window. The spin of the docking ring is such that, from an outsider’s perspective, I am standing on the “wall” and looking through the “floor.”

  The sun is behind Clarke, as if hanging over my shoulder. The broad, tapering rail-edged strand of the beanstalk drops toward a cobalt-blue globe delineated by swirls of vapor-white. I lose sight of an ascending car as it brakes silently toward the center of Clarke, from where it will be switched to one of the half-dozen sets of rails leading to the various airlocks around the edge of the platform.

  It looks a hell of a lot better from up here, doesn’t it? The curve of the earth kills my breath dead in my chest. We’re spinning with her, and I can make out the edges of North and South America, the faint outline of the Atlantic coast. It’s holier than a stained-glass window, blues and silvers reminding me of the Madonnas of my childhood. And that’s not all:

  She hangs in front of the full Earth, above and to the left from my perspective, gossamer-winged as a dragonfly surfing the solar wind. Lights flicker along her length. Her habitation wheel rotates with a slow grandeur, her silver hide glittering as if faceted in the unfiltered light of the sun.

  “The HMCSS Montreal,” Wainwright says in my right ear. “That’s my baby, Master Warrant. You take good care of her for me, you hear?”

  Somehow, Gabe’s come up on my left. He lays one hand on my shoulder where metal and flesh conjoin and tugs my sleeve, touches my fingers. I look down, and see he’s pressed something into my prosthetic hand. An eagle feather. Nell’s eagle feather. For a moment, I can almost feel the station spinning under my boots, before I realize he must have gotton it from Simon, and for the moment, I don’t even care that that means Simon was going through my stuff.

  I look up at the starship, the future, the stars. Mother Earth hangs like a sunlit crystal in a kitchen window. The Chinese are three months ahead of us, maybe, and if something isn’t done it’s not ever going to be any different up here than it is down there.

  Delicately, precisely, my steel fingers tighten on the beadwork my sister must have sweated over, fretted over. The familiar texture of trade beads—cornaline d’Aleppo, crimson glass—is strange on unreal skin. Not the traditional Kanien’keha:ka designs, but something Nell developed from them just for me.

  I haven’t a thing to say, watching the Earth turn, watching the ship turn, wheels within wheels within wheels as Clarke itself revolves under my boots. Richard is strangely silent in my head. They’re all waiting for me to speak, I realize. It’s my moment, somehow. My lips are numb around the words they shape, so silently. Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce. Le Seigneur est avec vous. They can break you of religion—

  Oh, hell.

  What’re you gonna do, Sergeant? What are you going to do?

  Bernie would have wanted me to change the world. Gabe has always been much more sensible. Still, the perspective might even make him wonder. It all seems so much more manageable from a little distance, doesn’t it?

  Well, Jenny? What are you going to do?

  “Marde,” I manage at last, in a voice sweet with awe. “So that’s what all the fuss has been about.”

  About the Author

  ELIZABETH BEAR shares a birthday with Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. This, coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary as a child, doomed her early to penury, intransigence, friendlessness, and the writing of speculative fiction. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in central Connecticut with the exception of two years (which she was too young to remember very well) spent in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, in the last house with electricity before the Canadian border. She currently lives in the Mojave Desert near Las Vegas, Nevada, but she’s trying to escape.

  She’s worked as a stable hand, a fluff-page reporter, a maintainer-of-microbiology-procedure-manuals for a major inner-city hospital, a typesetter and layout editor, a traffic manager for an import-export business, a test-pit digger for an archaeological survey company, a “media industry professional,” and a third-shift doughnut manufacturer.

  Her recent and forthcoming appearances include: SCI-FICTION, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, On Spec, H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, Chiaroscuro, Ideomancer, The Fortean Bureau, the Polish fantasy magazine Nowa Fantastyka, and the anthologies Shadows Over Baker Street (Del Rey, 2003) and All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories (Wheatland Press, 2004).

  Shes a second-generation Swede, a third-generation Ukrainian, and a third-generation Transylv
anian, with some Irish, English, Scots, Cherokee, and German thrown in for leavening. Elizabeth Bear is her real name, but not all of it.

  Her dogs outweigh her, and she is much beset by her cats.

  Be sure not to miss

  SCARDOWN

  the next thrilling novel from

  Elizabeth Bear

  continuing the story

  where HAMMERED left off.

  Coming from

  Bantam Spectra in July 2005.

  Here’s a special preview.

  Scardown

  On sale June 28, 2005

  1200 Hours

  Thursday 2 November, 2062

  HMCSS Montreal

  Under Way

  The Montreal has wings.

  They unfurl around her, gossamer solar sails bearing a kilometer-long dragonfly out of high Earth orbit and into the darkness where she will test herself, and me. She’s already moving like a cutter through night-black water when Colonel Valens straps me to the butter-soft leather of the pilot’s chair and seats the collars. I’m wearing the damned uniform he demanded; it’s made for this, with a cutout under my jacket for the interface.

  Cold metal presses above my hips, against the nape of my neck. There’s a subtle little prickle when the pins slide in, and my unauthorized AI passenger chuckles inside my ear.

  Gonna be okay out there, Dick?

  “With a whole starship to play in? Sure. Besides, I have my other self to wait for. Whenever Valens lets him into the system, pinions clipped.” He grins in the corner of my prosthetic eye. Virtual Richard. I’ll miss him. “I’ll go when you enter the ship. They’ll miss me in the fluctuation.”

  Godspeed, Richard.

  “Be careful, Jenny.”

  Spit-shined Colonel Valens raises three fingers into my line of sight. I draw one breath, deep and sweet, skin prickling with chill and cool sweat.

  Valens’s fingers come down. One. Two. Three.

  And dark.

  My body vanishes along with Valens, the observers, the bridge. Cold on my skin and the simulations were never like this. Richard winks and vanishes, and my head feels—empty, all of a sudden, and ringing hollow. It’s strange in there without him. And then I forget myself in Montreal, as the sun pushes my sails and the stars spread out before me like buttercream frosting on a birthday cake. Heat and pressure like a kiss gliding down my skin, and the Montreal’s sails are eagle’s wings cradling a thermal.

  Eagle wings. Eagle feathers. A warrior dream.

  I pull the ship around me like a feathered skin and fly.

  Valens’s voice in my ear as Richard leaves me. “All good, Master Warrant?”

  “Yes, sir.” I hate the distractions. Hate him talking when I’m trying to fly. The simulations were mostly hyperlight: I didn’t get to play much in space I could see. Only feel, like the rough curve of gravity dragging you down a water-slide, and then the darkness pulling you under.

  This is easy.

  This is fun. Richard? I don’t expect an answer. He’s gone into the ship, part of the Montreal now with her cavernous computer systems and the nanotech traced through her hull, her skin, wired into my brainstem so her heartbeat is my heartbeat, the angle of her sails is the angle of my wings.

  “Got you, Jenny,” he says, and if my heart were my heart it would skip a beat. I can’t feel myself grin.

  Dick!

  “Guess what?” His glee tastes like my own. “Jenny, the nanites can talk to each other.”

  What do you mean?

  “I mean I can sense the alien ships on Mars—the shiptree and the metal one—and I can sense you, and the other pilots. And the Chinese vessel following us.”

  The Huang Di?

  “On our tail. No lag, Jenny.”

  I don’t understand. No lag?

  “No lightspeed lag. Instantaneous communication. I think I was right about the superstrings. It’s not so much faster-than-light technology as … sneakier-than-light—”

  Implications tangle in my brain. Richard.

  “Yes?”

  Can you feel our benefactors? Somebody alien left the ships on Mars for us to find. Somebody alien meant for us to come find them, too.

  “And they can feel me,” he answers. “Jenny, I can’t talk to them. Can’t understand them. But I know one thing.

  “They’re coming.”

  I almost stall the habitation wheel as the Montreal and I continue our ascent.

  Three hours previous:

  0900 Hours

  Thursday 2 November, 2062

  HMCSS Montreal

  Earth Orbit

  Don’t all kids want to grow up to be astronauts? It’s not a strange thing to ask yourself when you are hauling yourself along a series of grab-rails on your way to the bridge of a starship, floating ends of hair brushing your ears like fingertips.

  Let me say that again in case you missed it.

  A starship.

  Her name is the Montreal, and she’s cold inside as a tin can on an ice floe. Her outline is gawky, fragile-seeming, counterintuitive to an eye that expects things that fly to look like things that fly. Instead, she’s a winged wheel stuck partway down a weathervane arrow, a design that keeps the hazardous things in the engines as far as possible from the habitation module without compromising angle of thrust. The wheel turns around the shaft of the arrow, generating there-is-no-such-thing-as-centrifugal-force, which will hold us to the nominal floor once we’re on it. There’s no gravity in this, the central shaft. You could float along it if you wanted, and never fear falling.

  I prefer the grab-rails, thank you.

  The “wings”—furled against the rigging like the legs of some eerie spider—are solar sails. The main engines are not to be used until we’re cruising well clear of a planet. Any planet. From the simulations I’ve been flying back in Toronto, the consequences might be as detrimental to the planet as to the Montreal.

  Don’t ask me how the engines work. I’m not sure the guys who built them know. But I do know that the reactor and drive assemblies are designed so they can be jettisoned in the case of an emergency. If worst, so to speak, come to worst. And that they’re shielded to hell and gone.

  Don’t all little kids want to grow up to be astronauts?

  Not me. Little Jenny Casey, she wanted to be a pirate or a ballerina. Not a firefighter or a cop. Definitely not a soldier. She never even thought about going to the stars.

  I catch myself, over and over, breaking the enormity of what I’m seeing down into component pieces. Grey rubber matting, grey metal walls. The whining strain of heaters and refrigerators against the chewing cold and searing heat of space. The click of my prosthetic left hand against the railing, the butt of a chubby xenobiologist bobbing along the ladder ahead of me.

  Did I mention that this is a starship?

  And I’m expected to fly her. If I can figure out how.

  Big, blond Gabe Castaign is a few rungs behind me. I hear him mumbling under his breath in French, a litany of disbelief louder than my own but no less elaborate, and far more profane. “Jenny,” he calls past my boots, “do you know if they plan to put elevators in this thing before they call it flightworthy?”

  I’ve studied her specs. Elevators isn’t the right word, implying as it does a change of height, which is a dimension the Montreal will never know. “Yeah.” Grab, pull, grab. “But do me a favor and call them tubecars, all right?” He grunts. I grin.

  I know Gabe well enough to know a yes when I hear one. Know him even better in the past few hours than I did for the twenty-five years before that, come to think of it. “Captain Wainwright,” I call past Charlie Forster, that xenobiologist. “How much further to the bridge?”

  “Six levels,” he calls back.

  “At least her rear view is better than Charlie’s,” Richard Feynman says inside my head. If I closed my eyes—which I don’t—I’d see my AI passenger hanging like a holo in front of the left one, grinning a contour-map grin and scrubbing his hands together. />
  Richard, look all you want. I marvel at the rubberized steel under my mismatched hands and grin harder, still surprised not to feel the expression tugging scar tissue along the side of my face. It’s almost enough to belay the worry I’m feeling over a few friends left home on Earth in a sticky situation. Almost.

  A starship. That’s one hell of a ride you got there, Jenny Casey.

  Yeah. Which of course is when my stomach, unfed for twenty hours, chooses to rumble.

  “Master Warrant Casey, are you feeling any better?” Colonel Frederick Valens, last in line.

  “Just fine, sir.” Not bad for your first time in zero G, Jenny. It could have been a lot worse, anyway. Gabe had me a little too distracted to puke when the acceleration cut in the beanstalk on the way up. “I suppose I don’t want to know what sort of chow we get on a spaceship.”

  “Starship,” Wainwright corrects. “It’s better than you might expect. No dead animals, but we get good produce.”

  “Whatever happened to Tang?”

  Charlie laughs, still moving hand over hand along the ladder. “The elevator makes it cheap to bring things up, and life support both here and on the Clarke Orbital Platform relies on greenery for carbon exchange. No point in making it inedible greenery, so as long as you like pasta primavera and tempeh, you’re golden. I’ll show you the galley after we look at the bridge. Which should be—”

  “Right through this hatch,” Wainwright finishes. She undogs the hatchcover and pushes it open, hooking one calf through the ladder for purchase, her toe curled around a bar for a moment before she pulls herself forward and slithers through the opening like a nightcrawler into leafy loam. Charlie follows and I’m right after him, feeling a strange chill in the metal when my right hand closes on it. The left one picks it up too, but it’s a different, alien sensation. After twenty-five years with an armored steel field-ready prosthesis, I’m still not used to having a hand that can feel on that arm. I rap on the hatch as I go through it, examining a ceramic and metal pressure door that boasts a heavy wheel in place of a handle. I pick up the scent of machine oil lubricating hydraulics; when I brush the hatch it moves smoothly, light on its hinges.