“I had other obligations.” Namely, standing before a hastily convened Board of Inquiry, livelinked with Maguire and Canfield on the Moon and Kymri in the Hal Embassy in New York, who grilled her about every aspect of the rescue flight, taking her further back to the attempted assassination of President Russell. It wasn’t a punitive investigation, that was made clear at the start, they just wanted to know everything that had happened. And she told them. What she saw, what she did, what she knew, what she surmised.
“You did your best for Alex, I know.”
Do you? She stayed silhouetted against the sky, eyes behind shades, letting him squint to get a closer look. He wasn’t used to stillness, it threatened his control and made him edgy.
“Quite frankly, I am amazed you went back.”
“Why?”
“He tried to kill you.”
“He was hurt, I wasn’t about to abandon him.” And if you don’t comprehend that, Old Man, she thought, you don’t know anything.
“D’you think he’d care so much for you?”
Actually, yes.
“He’s your son.”
“Who tried to kill me.”
“So what d’you figure, let him go, that balances the scales, ties up the loose ends? Simply write him off the way you would a flawed investment?”
“He was a grown man, Lieutenant. Am I responsible for the decisions of his life?”
“You made the ones that mattered.”
“What does that mean?”
“You gimmicked the boy in the womb, same as you’re doing with these cars, to maximize performance.”
“Such an accusation is, at best, in the poorest of taste. Some might consider it slanderous.”
“Just two people making conversation, where’s the harm in that?”
“Perhaps you’d be better served then, talking to yourself. I have better things to do.”
He tried to walk past but she didn’t give way, and he realized that to leave he’d have to push her aside. For a moment, he contemplated it and saw the slight, anticipatory smile that told him she was waiting for him to try.
“ ‘Too much of his mother,’ that was what you told me,” Nicole continued conversationally. “What, the package wasn’t as advertised. Not quite perfection. Ain’t Ma Nature a bitch, shame on her.
“How soon after he was born did you twig that he didn’t measure up to specs?”
“Leave my house, Ms. Shea.”
“When I’m ready. When I’m done. The boy was brilliant, and gifted. His only crime was that he wasn’t you. Since when is that a capital offense?”
“How dare you!”
“Amazing. That’s more raw emotion on his behalf than I’ll bet you ever showed when he was alive—except maybe to his mom when the truth came out. All that work and you get a son with a bum heart, an arrhythmia condition that couldn’t cope with extreme physical stress. He could live a normal life, he just wasn’t perfect. And you never told him, did you? Amy knew, you knew, not him.
“But what the hell, you were already back at the drawing board, yes? ‘If at first you don’t succeed,’ you said. ‘That’s why we have more than one.’ But this time, no mistakes. A carbon copy, a little modified on the facade so no one would guess, but inside where it counts, you.”
“Is there some purpose to this?” He’d turned back to his tools and she wondered if he’d throw something at her. “Other than perhaps the acquisition of your pound of flesh?”
“Call me Cassandra, here to deliver warnings that most likely won’t be heeded. She isn’t you, Manuel. Or rather, she’s the untempered you. Raw, elemental, messy. Ungoverned and I suspect ungovernable.”
He said nothing, and she had an image of some hulking cave bear cornered in its den.
“The Wolfpack I destroyed goes back five years, can you imagine? Amy’s barely a teenager, yet while she was a kid she masterminded one of the deadliest criminal operations ever fronted in Mid-System.”
“Prove it,” he snapped.
“Ah, there’s the rub. If evidence there was, it went up with the Wolfpack’s asteroid base, or down with Patriot.” Perhaps she shouldn’t have brought Alex back to the Hybrids—he was dead, what did he care—and instead should have dived straight back inside to pull the core datapacks, assuming she could find them, assuming they weren’t booby-trapped, assuming she could have gotten in and out safely.
But the missiles from Sutherland were already on their way, curving back along the station’s orbital track, so that in effect they and Patriot were racing headlong towards each other, and the Hybrid had all of five minutes, tops, to pull clear.
“To be honest, I don’t think anybody really wants to. To prove it, I mean.” That had been made abundantly clear by the White House rep, in terms even Canfield wasn’t prepared to buck. “Especially when Alex provides such a perfect patsy. But that won’t change the truth.”
“As if you know what such a thing even is!”
“Better I suspect than you. What, was this supposed to be some sort of rite of passage, a way of determining whether or not Amy could function in the big leagues? See, I don’t buy the argument she could have handled this all by her lonesome. That you’re the grand old entrepreneur who’s gotten to the age and stage where he’s content to leave the actual running of his company to others. If you didn’t know, it’s because you didn’t want to. It still amounts to tacit, implicit approval.”
“You’re deranged.”
“Then what are you worried about? I’m a young woman spouting nonsense.”
“A young and foolish woman who’d best start treading very carefully, if she knows what’s good for her.”
“Interesting. I was thinking pretty much the same about an old and foolish man.”
That struck a nerve and she knew they were at the line that, with Cobri, was never crossed.
“How do you tell a person no,” she demanded, “when the very concept has no meaning? At least Alex played out his fantasies—good and bad—in the sanctity of his Virtual theater. They were shameful, but they were private. For Amy, that theater is whatever she can see. Alex—on a dare, I’ll bet, your classic brother-sister thing; hell, I’ll lay odds he even thought this was some sort of bonding between them—established the scenario for the Wolfpacks. The feds found the cassette—awfully conveniently—I’ve seen it, the thing’s a masterpiece. But Amy made it reality. Phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny. Jean-Claude Baumier came up with the theoretical basis for an FTL drive, you made it work. What she takes from you, most completely, Cobri-Sire, is not the brilliance of creation—which is what Alex had, rest his poor, damned soul—but of manipulation. The difference is, your dream, your all-consuming passion, was to create this empire. Hers, like any kid, is to play.”
He stood with his back close to the side wall, and its shelves of tools, and she wondered if he heard a word she said, or if he’d made himself as deaf as Alex had at the end. One hand was laid across his chest, while the other traced its middle finger along the outline of his mouth, from the philtrum outward, one way and then the other.
“You may be right,” he said at last.
“Anything is possible.”
“Are you determined, Lieutenant, to give not a centimeter?”
“Forgive me, Cobri-Sire, I should have mentioned earlier. That is not an appropriate term of address.”
“I’m sorry. But I can’t say I blame you. The bureaucracy has treated you shabbily.” Quite the opposite, she thought, without a bit of it showing on her face, and isn’t it nice to discover there’s something I know that you don’t. But “bureaucracy”—NASA, Air Force, or otherwise—has nothing to do with what I said.
“Have you considered a career in the private sector?” he asked her.
“Working for you?”
“I admire your directness. No false modesty, no fencing, no preliminaries, just cut straight to the heart of the matter. Yes, for me.”
“I quit being a baby-sitter before high school.”
&nbs
p; His head came up and the bear image in her head bared its teeth.
“I wasn’t aware... ”
“Please,” she cut him off in a tone of brusque dismissal, amazed that she could talk so to him, marveling that this was just like taking a new bird up for its first evaluation flight, full of the heady delight of breaking virgin territory tempered by the awareness that any mistake could well be fatal. Caring totally and yet not at all. “Whatever the job is called, we both—we all three of us,” she added pointedly, “would know why I was here. Look in the mirror, Cobri-Sire, tell me how you’d react if Amy hired me to stand on your tail just when you were really starting to fly? See yourself, you know her.”
“People do not talk this way to me.”
“Or to her. The difference being, you mostly let it ride. She gets even.”
“Do you want me to perhaps follow her example?”
Hers was a genuine smile, and all the more unnerving because of it.
“I was wondering,” she said, reaching up at last to remove her glasses, “how quickly we’d get to this point.”
“And what point is that?”
“The declaration of war.”
“You flatter yourself, my girl. Assuming you’re right, that ‘war’ as you put it would be over before it’s begun.”
“Some victories have a price, Cobri-Sire.”
“You keep calling me that.”
“It’s the closest human approximation of the appropriate honorific.”
“In Hal, you mean. I fail to see the need for such an affectation. Unless you’re going native?” He tried a laugh to go with his joke, the one sounding as hollow as the other.
“I am Hal, as much as human,” She said, her ignorance of the true implications of those words going hand in hand with her acceptance of them. “This marks me, Cobri-Sire”—and she touched the necklace—“as one of Shavrin’s Prime. In essence, as much her child as any she physically bore. The Hal are a familial species, communities to them are an expanding network of extended families. An attack on me is an attack on her. An attack on mine is an attack on me.” She had his full attention and the look on his face was one she’d give almost anything never to have had to see.
“Maybe you’re right it’s all coincidence. Maybe it’s all paranoid theory carried to its wildest extreme. Set up Cobri, Associates as the modern equivalent of Britain’s East India Company, a mercantile government parallel to the real thing, eventually superseding it. The assassination of a President championing rapprochement with our first extra terrestrial contact, by one of those very extra terrestrials—not a hope for any treaty, then. And probably not for the concept of a united world. Balkanized countries, with less and less access to and influence over a local space increasingly defined and dominated by Cobri or some shadow front holding. A potential competitor for Cobri StarSystems suddenly wiped from the board, because who’d risk dealing with these Aliens who had shot down their best friend on Earth? On the other hand, who better to deal with them than the man who’s able to meet them on their own ground, our ships matched against theirs, our tech against theirs. Power implicit becomes power explicit becomes power absolute.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Alex had it all worked out. He loved role-playing games, remember; this was one where he wanted to see if he could beat you at yours. The original scenario didn’t include the Hal, this was something he crafted to prove to you that he was worthy of being your son.”
“I wasn’t interested.”
“I know. You rarely initiate events, you exploit the living hell out of them. Very Japanese. It was Amy who put it into motion. And Alex never realized, until I blew it wide open a year ago. I submit, Cobri-Sire, the scenario’s still active. The kid’s still growing.”
“Help me stop her, then.”
“She’s you, do you still not understand? She is as you made her, in every sense of the word. Could you stop yourself?” Nicole shook her head. “I’m not here for you, Cobri-Sire. To be honest, I couldn’t care less. Alex was the best thing you had going for you, and he, poor boy, was a joke.
“I tell you, any act against my people—anything—and we come for you.”
“ ‘We’?”
“We! The Hal don’t play by human rules and have no respect for some human niceties. Their beliefs are encompassed by the concept of alach’n’yn, blood price. They take it very seriously.”
“I have no interest in you, Ms. Shea. Or your ‘people.’ ”
“This isn’t meant for you.”
“I see. I understand. Is there anything else?”
“We’re done.”
“Then you will excuse me if I do not show you out. I believe you have your own transport.”
She shook her head as she turned her back on him, donning her shades once more as she strode up the path to the house. Whatever she’d expected from this confrontation, she wasn’t sure she’d gotten it. Certainly not any sense of satisfaction. She felt like she’d just bulled her way through the heart of a brute thunderstorm, or into the eye of a killer hurricane, as though she’d been pummelled across the back and shoulders, all the way down to the base of her spine. And she was thankful for the hotel suite waiting for her across the harbor in Manhattan, craving nothing more than to turn herself into a shriveled prune in its bathtub.
Frankenstein isn’t the right image, though, she considered, thinking back to her conversation on Nantucket with Alex. Better to think of God on his throne, staring in bemused despair at the handiwork of Lucifer, crafted oh so gloriously in His image only to betray Him. She started to chuckle at the image of the Lord lamenting, I made him what he is, how could I get things so wrong? And then the chuckle died as she made the logical extension of the analogy. “Always assuming,” she muttered aloud, “he got it wrong and this really is a mistake.”
She was inside the house, taking her camel coat from the butler, slinging it over her shoulders and scooping up bag and gloves, when a voice rang out from high above.
“You,” Amy cried, trying to match Nicole’s roar only to have her voice splinter in her throat.
The staircase towered four stories overhead and Amy was right up at the top, almost indistinguishable from the skylight just above her head.
“You killed my brother,” she cried. And Nicole had nothing to say to that. So she stood her ground and waited for what would come next.
“You killed my brother,” the girl shrieked again from on highest, in that falsetto tone kids slip into when losing any semblance of control.
Nicole shook her head again, once, twice, a short and definite denial, turning across the broad foyer with the girl’s voice ripping after her, spiraling ever higher into a hysterical rant. If she’d been in range, Nicole would have slapped her hard enough to leave a mark, but she wasn’t about to chase Amy around her own house. The noise was climbing into impossible registers, the words slurring-blurring with every repetition. “You killed my brother. You killed my brother.” The kind of rant that no empirical counter could deny. And Nicole wondered if the girl was really sorry, or if this public show of grief was some form of rationalized expiation. See how upset I am, see how much he meant to me, I couldn’t possibly have been responsible.
“But you were,” Nicole said softly, striking a military cadence down the steps to her waiting car, at the last moment catching sight of Manuel Cobri trudging up the drive, the Man of the People, the Blue-Collar Billionaire, old clothes marked with the grit of honest physical labor. To each, Nicole thought, their favorite illusion.
* * *
United States of America
National Aeronautics & Space Administration
Department of Manned Spaceflight
Office of the Chief Astronaut
After reviewing the opinion of the Medical Evaluations Board, together with all other pertinent data, it is the judgment of this office that Second Lieutenant Nicole Shea, United States Air Force, is fit to hold an astronaut’s rating and is therefo
re restored to Flight Status, effective immediately.
(Signed)
Michael Sallinger
Commanding Officer
Edwards Flight Test Center
David Elias
Chief Astronaut
Judith Canfield
Commanding General
U.S.A.F. Space Command
Director of Manned Spaceflight
Grounded! Page 38