Except light is the wrong word here, isn’t it? My left eye—prosthetic too—catches the red glimmer of sensor as I pass through. “Seems a little primitive,” I call after Wainwright.
She propels herself down the corridor—a much larger one—keeping one hand on the grab-rail for the inevitable moment when she starts to drift to the floor. She gets her feet under her neatly, but even Charlie follows with better grace than me. All my enhanced reflexes are good for is smacking me into the wall a little faster. I stumble and catch myself on the rail. Gabe muffs it too, God bless him, although Valens manages his touchdown agile as a silver tabby tomcat.
“The ship?” She turns, surprised.
I amuse myself with the hopping-off-a-slidewalk sensation of each step heavier than the last as I close the distance between us. This corridor must spiral through the ring, to take you from inside to outside feet-down. I speculate there’s a ladderway, too. One I wouldn’t want to lose my grip in. “The hatchways.”
“Less to break.” She shrugs her shoulders, settling her uniform jacket over her blouse. I make a mental note to requisition some jumpsuits, if they’re not already provided. Valens always seems to think about these things.
Wainwright continues. “And if it does, we can fix it with a wrench and a can of WD-40. That might be important a few thousand light-years out. Saves power, too. They’re just like submarine doors, but less massive.”
Gabe lays a hand on my elbow as he comes up beside me, still soft on his feet for all he’s got three years on me and I celebrated my fiftieth last month. “Let me guess,” Richard says in my implant. “Ask about the decompression doors, Jenny?”
“Captain.” I brush against Gabe as I move past him. Valens’s gaze prickles my spine as he dogs the hatch behind us. I swallow a grin. “What do you do if there’s a hull breach?”
“Try not to be in a doorway. The habitation wheel is designed like a honeycomb, for strength. There are automatic doors for emergencies, and if the air pressure drops suddenly—they come down.”
“They don’t wait for pedestrians to clear the corridor?”
“No.” She turns her back on me and walks away, leading us further out of the floating heart of her ship, now my ship, too. “For Christmas, I guess we’ll hang the mistletoe in the wardroom.” She glances back over her shoulder with a grin that stills my shiver.
“Hostile environment,” Gabe mutters in my ear.
“Enemy territory,” Valens adds from my other side. “What’s outside this tin can is trying to kill you, Casey. Never forget that for a second.”
I square my shoulders and don’t look up. He needs me enough that I can get away with it. “I’ll bear that in mind, Fred.”
He chuckles as I walk away.
The bridge lies near the center of the habitation ring. It’s long enough I can see the curve of the floor, but not particularly wide. Remote screens line the walls with floor to ceiling images of blue and holy Madonna Earth on one side, Clarke Orbital Platform spinning like a fat rubber donut at an angle. “I’ve never felt claustro-and agoraphobic at the same time before,” Gabe says. He brushes past me and rests one bearlike paw on a console, bending down to examine the interface. “Sweet.”
I’m the only one to hear Richard chuckle.
I find myself staring at the padded black leather pilot’s chair. Leather on a starship? Well, why not; at least it breathes. But it’s not the look of soft tanned hide that pulls me forward, has me bending to trail my fingers down the armrest.
Most pilot’s chairs aren’t equipped with straps and clamps intended to keep the operator’s head and arms immobilized. They don’t have a glossy interface plate with a pin-port mounted on a cable-linked collar at neck level, either, and another one right where the small of your back would rest.
It looks like an electric chair. I sink my teeth into my lower lip and turn. “There aren’t any physical controls?”
“That panel over there,” Richard tells me, even as Captain Wainwright moves toward it and lays her dainty right hand possessively on padded high-impact plastic. It’s a good three meters from my chair. The chair that’s going to be mine.
“Somebody else flies her sublight,” Wainwright says. “We save you and Lieutenant Koske for the dirty work. When she’s moving too fast for anybody else to handle.”
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 Bo 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, on my other side. As for trying her out—how does this afternoon sound?”
4:30 P.M., Thursday 2 November, 2062
Government Center
Toronto, Ontario
Constance Riel leaned over the shoulder of her science advisor, 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 ref
ugee scientist from the slowly freezing British Islands.
Fallout from the Pakistani/Indian wars and the United States’ 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 the 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 eat 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 genemod 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 dieoffs.”
Still 2-D, but no harder to follow than the 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 minutes 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 change 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 Doctor 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 like 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 re-terraform Earth.”
HAMMERED
A Bantam Spectra Book / January 2005
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2005 by Elizabeth Bear
Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90183-2
v3.0
Hammered Page 31
