Scardown

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Her decision, Jenny. Her plan. It might even work.”

  Might. Why aren't I there? In her place? Falling like that? Dammit, Leah, it was supposed to be my job to die for you, you silly girl. As Gabe goes about his work, not looking up. Not looking at the blazing image lighting the wall as the Calgary contacts atmosphere and starts to burn.

  The bridge and the crew quarters aren't shielded for reentry. But there's lead and armor plate around the processor core array, because there are fusion power cells in there. It's all self-contained. And Richard's right.

  It could work.

  At least it will be over fast. She won't burn. She won't feel a thing.

  Like flying it into a mountainside.

  I stand there like an idiot, scatter of pills around my feet and crushed underfoot, dazzle of my senses and, at last, that maddening flutter of the light starting to fade to a bearable flicker as the Hammers kick in.

  “Jenny!” Gabe's voice rough and torn. It's not the first time he's shouted.

  It's the first time I heard.

  I walk away from him, up the curve of the Montreal's hull, and lay my hand on the holographic monitor screen. The fluid under its membrane distorts and ripples at my touch, making the broken shape of the Calgary look as if she were smeared across the starry sky. Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce—

  No.

  You know what?

  I don't want to talk to God right now.

  Richard?

  “I'm here.”

  Tell her we love her, if you have enough time. Tell her—

  —tell her she's not going into this alone.

  “Tell her yourself,” Richard says, and I see through Leah's eyes, and feel the ship burning around her—aluminum skin sloughing, viewscreens dead black and the few small round ports lit red, orange, white with the fire—

  I want to jerk back, look away. Let go before my fingers burn, and all the pain and memories come back, the fear and the burning. There's a lot of fire. There's so much goddamned fire.

  To much to crawl through. To much to reach through.

  Hell, Gabe did it for me—

  —and then I'm there. Somehow. In her head. As if I took my little girl in my arms and held her tight and she's not a little girl anymore, and I still can't save her, can I? Because you can't. I can't save her from my mistakes. Any more than I could save Nell. But at least I can hold Leah's hand.

  Can you hear me, chérie?

  “Aunt Jenny?”

  I'm here. I love you. Your dad loves you, too.

  “Don't be mad at me—”

  Sweetheart—

  Gone.

  Nothing. Instantaneous, no pain.

  Like flying it into a mountainside.

  Gone, and I'm standing on the bridge of the Montreal, and I don't know how I'm standing. And Gabe can't look, and I can't look away.

  It's beautiful. Just fucking gorgeous, streaks of teal and amber light, a glorious tumble and glitter dripping embers like fireworks and sparklers and Canada Day and New Year's Eve and the Fourth of fucking July.

  Merry fucking Christmas, Gabriel.

  I can't look away. But when the trails of light flicker out, flicker down, end against the blue pall of the sea, I sit down on the floor and fold my hands. I'll cry later, I tell myself, hearing the utter silence behind me as Gabe stops working and just stands.

  Breathing in. Breathing out again.

  Fuck it. I think I'll cry right now.

  Except I don't get the chance, because the wheel spins and the hatchway comes open as if somebody kicked it. It bounces off the rubber stopper on the wall and Wainwright bulls through the opening, Patty a half-step behind.

  “Casey,” the captain snaps, voice sharp enough to pick my ass up off the floor. Yeah, yeah. I wipe the snot off my face, wincing when I see the unsnapped safety strap on the pistol at her hip. “What the fuck's going on out there?”

  “Captain.” You blank your mind and let the words come out, crisp and even. You don't think about what they mean, and you sure as hell don't think about what you're saying. “The Calgary has been destroyed. I believe her pilots crashed her intentionally, in an attempt to use the ship-borne Benefactor technology to redress the ecological damage caused by the meteorite.”

  “The Huang Di?” She stops. She rubs her hands together as if they hurt.

  “Damaged. Out of control. Probably salvageable, I think, if somebody can catch her.”

  Patty's mouth comes open and her lips shape names as if it would hurt her to say it out loud. Calgary. Leah.

  I catch her eye and nod. Oh, baby. I'm sorry. The filter of the drug shows me blood on her mouth, amplifies her soft little whine into the audible range. Wainwright's still staring at me, and I still can't meet her eyes.

  “I believe one of the Huang Di's pilots had a crisis of conscience, ma'am.” I steal a look at the monitors, and the streaks and clots of wreckage smearing Earth's dusty globe. Richard tells me the coverage is so quick, so complete because the impact blows debris into orbit.

  Literally.

  Wainwright's right hand comes up, fingers parted, and covers her mouth. She lifts her chin and follows my gaze, so we're both looking at the devastated Earth. And not at each other. “We have orders, Master Warrant.”

  “Captain—” I look at Gabe. He's come around the console and is picking his way across the bridge, not close enough to me to be in the same line of fire. The two security types in the back corners of the bridge radiate tension; fabric chafes on fabric as they grip their weapons. “—I know.”

  She nods to my chair, slight tilt of the head. Motherly. Annoyed, with a touch of hurry up. It doesn't hide the broken glass behind her eyes. I look over her shoulder at Patty, who steps around Wainwright. I can feel Gabe moving, feel Richard taut and silent at the back of my head.

  Letting me handle it.

  “Captain, are you going to do this thing?”

  Tongue touching her lips, which have gone almost white. She nods once, eyes closed. “Master Warrant, if it makes you feel better, I order you to assume your post and carry out the prime minister's directives.”

  I could put a bullet in her before she got her pistol clear of the holster, but what fucking good would that do anybody? In the long run, I mean.

  “Casey?”

  Gabe's there at my left hand, still moving forward casually, getting the captain between himself and the security. “Jenny. What orders?”

  “Jenny.” Richard, and I know he wouldn't interrupt if he didn't have a reason. “Jenny, the core made it down intact. I'm spawning nanosurgeons in the Atlantic.”

  You can be that many places at once?

  “Call 'em subprocesses. It's inaccurate, but it will do.”

  The breath that slides down my throat feels heavy as two lungs full of water. My voice bubbles through it. “Captain, no.”

  “Jenny?” I can't look at Gabe right now.

  Patty shuffles another step, hands twisting together in front of her waist as—oblivious—she walks into security's line of fire. Her grandfather's intense hazel eyes pinch at the corners, search first my face and then Wainwright's. “What are the orders, Captain?”

  “Cadet,” Wainwright answers. “I'm relieving Master Warrant Officer Casey of duty. Will you please take the pilot's chair?”

  Gabe looks at me, long powerful fingers flexing and relaxing as his hands hang by his sides.

  I nod, knowing he'll understand. But Patty is still looking at me, poised on one foot, her whole balance saying torn. “Beijing,” I say. “Ma'am, given that Leah and Trevor have given their lives to ameliorate the damage, and at least one of the Chinese pilots was willing to do the same.”

  “Orders,” she says, and I start to turn away. It's not something I'll let a sixteen-year-old girl have to live with. You know. I wish I could look Constance Riel in the eye and say, You make the decisions, and the kids live with them. Amen.

  I'm pretty good at following orders. I imagine the captain
of the Huang Di was, as well. Wainwright looks like she knows what she's doing is wrong, and it'll never be right inside her head again. She'll do what she'll do because she thinks she has to. Because it's the right thing to do. Because her country needs her.

  I know that one pretty well. And Gabe's little girl is on the ground, and my friend Ellie, and I've suddenly got a crystal-clear image of Bernie Xu looking down at me under long dark lashes like a girl's, lit cigarette in his hand, body warm against mine in the dark of an unheated apartment as he asks me—Don't you even hate them a little?

  You know something, Peacock? Hell of it is, I don't. I don't hate anybody anymore. I think I just ran the fuck out.

  And besides.

  Enough.

  Enough fucking people dead for one day.

  And my arm goes around Patty as I put her behind me, out of the way, spin and a handoff to Gabe and eyes back to Wainwright, hand almost to my pistol, hoping she followed, thinking security won't shoot through the captain to get to me—

  —before I hear the weapons click across the bridge.

  Almost, because she's standing well back, double-handed cop shooting stance and my sidearm is hopelessly secured, my right hand a good two feet from the holster and the strap buckled tight. “Casey,” she says, and I catch the tightness in her voice. “Hands up.”

  I do it, keeping them beside my chest, letting the drop into combat time take my heartbeat subsonic. She's awful close, and I hate having guns pointed at me. But she's farther away than Indigo was, and I don't even have to catch the bullet, really. Given the nonpenetrators we've been issued for shipboard, I figure all I have to do is get that hand in the way. And I'm faster than I used to be.

  But she's got backup.

  Gabe pulls Patty back, away, smart enough to know he's no help in this one, and my shoulder blades hurt from the pressure of the cocked guns aimed at my chest. And Wainwright's got that look in her eye like she might decide to kneecap me instead of going for center of mass.

  I can't say I blame her.

  “Captain. Jaime. You can't stop us from taking this ship.”

  The weapon doesn't shift. “I can put a bullet in you, Master Warrant, and Cadet Valens can fly this boat.”

  “You're running out of pilots fast, Captain.”

  She looks at me. I look at her. It's hard, with my heartbeat slow as molasses in my chest, every reflex screaming at me to pile onto her like a runaway train and hope the shot goes wild. Her lips tighten, one against the other. The pupils of her eyes go big. The gun never trembles.

  Patty's voice; she tugs away from Gabe and straightens her shirt. “I won't do it. You can't make me. Leah—”

  Wainwright slides her an angled glance, just the corner of her eye. I clear my throat, wanting her attention on me. Hands stay up, fingers relaxed, flesh and steel. I can feel Richard in me, but he's backing my play, keeping his mouth shut and letting me do the work.

  “Cap, if there was another way—ma'am, I'd be the first in line.” Sweat beads my brow with the effort of looking away from the pistol in her hand, but once I have her gaze on me, I direct it back up at the monitors. At the trashed globe below us, the dust-storm tinge casting a pall over what should be pristine, shining swirls of alabaster and cobalt blue. “Do you really want that on your hands?”

  I hear her heartbeat. Smell her sweat. Her eyes follow mine up, and they follow mine back down again. She doesn't nod. She never looks away.

  But somehow I know.

  I lower my hands to my sides and slowly turn my back on her, and walk up the sights of the security guards, and sit down in my chair. “Richard,” I say out loud. “Get Riel on the horn for me, would you please? Shall we go after the Huang Di, Captain Wainwright?”

  Wainwright twists her hands. “Yes,” she says. “For all I'm tempted to leave her drifting for the next three hundred years. Her teeth are pulled. Let's bring her home.”

  “A prize of war.” Gabe, surprisingly, bitterly.

  Captain Wainwright flashes a smile that's all horror at him, and closes her eyes. “Why the hell not?” she answers. “Since it seems after all that we've gone privateer.”

  “Richard? Can you take us around, please—”

  “Jenny,” he answers through the ship's speakers. “I appear to have made a slight miscalculation.”

  Patty crosses to me and sits down on the floor beside my chair, fingers laced around her drawn-up knees and her eyes unfocused. Shit.

  She's lost more than I have, hasn't she?

  I lay my hand on her shoulder and let it stay there. She doesn't look up, but she sighs like a sleeping puppy and leans into the touch. Kid has some iron in her.

  “What's that, Richard?”

  “The Benefactor ships are not going to arrive together.”

  “What are you trying to tell me—”

  And then screens smear white, and the sky is filled with ships glittering in the sunlight, and the moonlight, and the earthlight washing over us all.

  12:51 PM

  Friday 22 December, 2062

  Le Camp des Pins

  North of Huntsville, Ontario

  Constance Riel sneezed and rubbed her burning eyes, lowering her fingers to glare at the cat curled purring on Genie Castaign's belly. Dr. Dunsany sat on thick Persian rugs with her back to the fieldstone fireplace, sidelit by the roaring fire, both hands wrapped around an oversized tea mug, Genie's head in her lap. The tomcat nonchalantly washed a paw. The girl was sleeping. Two Mounties bracketed the door, and Riel could hear soldiers outside, see their lights flickering against the broken windows as they moved through the blasted woods beyond.

  Riel stood and moved from the soot-stained couch to the darkened window. She peeled back a corner of the plastic sheeting taped over it. Cold wind trickled around the spiderwebbed remains of shatterproof glass, dirty snow blowing in swirls that only became visible when they passed through the faint glow of firelight and lamplight.

  In the brightest hour of a winter afternoon, the sky overhead was starless and dark as burnt toast. There was still coffee in her mug, kept warm by the gadget in the bottom; she added a healthy dollop of brandy on top before knocking back half. “I should really send you back to jail,” she said, conversationally.

  “Because the Montreal mutinied?”

  “To prove a point.” Riel held the bottle out to Dunsany, and Dunsany looked down at the sleeping girl in her lap, so Riel crossed the room and crouched down beside her to pour. “I could order a nuclear strike.”

  Dunsany closed her eyes as she drank, then set the half-empty mug aside. “And China would order one back, and the antiballistic defenses would soak up most of the damage, and the EU and UN would declare Canada a rogue state and PanMalaysia would go along with it. And I wouldn't be the only one in jail.”

  Riel nodded, standing and setting the bottle on the mantel. “There's something to be said for effective world government.” She slid the hand not holding her coffee mug under sweaty, gritty hair and massaged the back of her neck, fighting a sneeze. It got away from her; she fumbled for a tissue. “Maybe we should create one.”

  “It's an opportunity.”

  “Or a threat. And there aren't any international laws against mass-driven weapons yet.”

  “There will be. And,” Dunsany continued, “there's no tell-ing what the Benefactors would think of a nuclear exchange.”

  Riel grunted and finished her coffee. “I'd be more comfortable if they—did something, Doctor.”

  “Call me Ellie.” She stroked Genie's hair, staring upward as if she could see past the ceiling and the sky and the starships that hung over them like swords on slender threads to—whatever—lay beyond. “Thank you for saving her.”

  Riel muffled a cough against the back of her hand. “I'm allergic to cats,” she said, and watched Dunsany's—Elspeth's—eyebrows rise.

  “I'm allergic to bullshit,” Elspeth replied. “Are we going to sit here and—what—wait for the Benefactor tech to take over the pla
net? We can't get a decent satellite image because of the dust, but Woods Hole is reporting that they're already picking up fish with nanite loads. And all is silence from above.”

  “The Feynman AI has been staying in touch. He says another wave of ships is en route. It's sort of reassuring to think their coordination isn't precise.”

  “I know.” Elspeth lifted her shoulders against the stone behind her, her hair catching in strings on gray rock. “I have a recommendation. As a scientist. Not a politician.”

  The mantel was granite, too, but polished to a gloss, and Riel stroked it idly with the pads of her fingers. A bright star-shaped chip drew her attention, on the chimney just above where she rested her elbows. She pressed a thumb into it: a bullet ricochet. “You fill me with dread, Doctor.”

  “Hah.”

  “Well?”

  Genie stirred, and Elspeth gentled her with one hand. The girl had cried herself into exhaustion, squeaking around the bandages on her cracked ribs, and Riel didn't think an earthquake would waken her. “The Benefactor tech is spreading. The AIs in the downed ship will serve to control the nanotech on earth. What if we want to send people off planet? What if they get—taken off planet?”

  Riel carefully retaped the window plastic, shutting the day-turned-dark behind a thick, translucent sheet. “They've made no progress talking to the aliens?”

  “None, Richard says. Not even a broadcast.” Elspeth patted her HCD, quiescent now. “The ships just hang there and wait.”

  Riel chewed her lip. She almost leaned back against the plastic, and remembered the broken glass behind it just in time. “What do you recommend?”

  “I have the schematics for the control chips we've been using in the pilots. If people start becoming infected, we need to be prepared. Some of them may die. They will all fall very sick. Richard says he can control it, and he'll only allow the nanosurgeons to modify the injured and the ill, and he'll limit it to the lowest levels of infection. In the meantime, I want to go to the disaster zone. I want an Engineering Corps mobile lab, and every technician and doctor you can scrape up.”

  “What happens then?”

  “We start with the wounded and hope they live through the process. Hell—” and Elspeth smiled, rubbing the thin gold cross around her throat. “We'll need—shit. We'll need a hell of a lot of everything. Disaster teams are moving in. We'll have to secure the cooperation of the U.S. authorities. The badly hurt, we can always dunk them into what's left of Lake Ontario once they're microchipped. Hold their heads under until they stop kicking, then haul them out and plug them into an IV. Some will live. Some won't. If it works, it works, and these people will have nothing to lose.”