“Spooky.”
A holographic shrug. “If you're easily spooked, I suppose. If I were a religious man, I'd wonder at the morality of it—reconstructing a person, even an electronic person, in the shadow of a dead one. It's got tremendous potential for misuse.”
“Indeed,” Gabe said. He swung his feet down, his ship shoes scuffing on the deck. “Mais ce n'est pas que j'ai voulu dire.”
“What did you mean, then?”
“I was wondering what it was like to be . . . multithreaded. To be more than one person at once.”
Richard laughed. “I'm not, you know. I'm all one person. I'm just capable of being more than one place at the same time. For example, right now I'm talking to Dr. Perry about climactic change, to the Prime Minister about the court case, I'm trying to find ways to remanage some Atlantic currents and running sims to see what certain changes might do—”
“And you're here in this room with me.”
“I've gotten used to it.”
“And yet you seem like a regular guy.”
Richard smiled. He looked down at his hands. He hooked his illusory thumbs through his imaginary belt loops, tilted his head, and looked up again. “Gabe,” he said, and paused, and made a helpless gesture that Gabe knew was completely calculated—or was, more precisely, a translation of Richard's picosecond-long loss-for-words onto a human scale. “Thanks. That means something to me, Gabriel.”
Whatever he might have said next was interrupted by a tapping on the hatch, a metallic sound that made both men's mouths twitch: Jenny, knocking with her left hand. As good an announcement of who was there as a Victorian calling card. And Richard shrugged wryly, winked broadly, and vanished as Gabe got up to answer the door.
Jenny stepped back as he swung the hatch open, hair slicked off her forehead from a recent shower, dressed off-duty in sweats and a heather-gray T-shirt. She was smiling. It looked forced. Gabe stepped out of the way.
She folded her spidery frame and ducked through the hatch, eyes downcast as he pulled it shut behind her and dogged it.
“Jenny, what's wrong?”
“What makes you think anything's wrong?”
He put his back to the hatch. Her skin was warm when he laid his hand on the nape of her neck, clipped hairs fuzzy against his palm. She sighed and turned into him, her cheek on his shoulder, her face pressed into his throat. He paused for a moment and let his free hand slide around her waist, her body like a twist of rawhide. Tough and implacable and fragile as soap bubbles, and he held his breath as if he could accidentally blow her away.
“This,” he said, when he dared, her breath warming the hollow over his collarbone. He felt her rueful smile. She stepped back and held him at arm's length, the steel hand and the human on his shoulders, her chin lifted to look him dead in the eyes.
“Damn you, mon ange.” The corner of her mouth lifted. “Je suis une plaque de glace pour toi, n'est-ce pas?”
“Non.” He stepped closer, and kissed her lightly. She didn't try to hold him away. “Tu es une mystère. Jen—”
“Oui?”
“Out with it.”
She took a breath, the long muscles under his hands tightening. “Wainwright wants Genie for the pilot program.”
He would have jerked away from her, but his shoulders hit the hatch when he stepped back, the handle catching him over a kidney with a sharp shock of discomfort. He flinched and let his hands fall. Jenny held him tighter, the light catching in her prosthetic eye so the cornea seemed to sparkle.
“Putain!”
“C'est vrai.” She wasn't letting him go, and he didn't mind.
“Dick could have warned me—”
“Dick doesn't tell tales out of school.” Tiredly, her head rocked back on her shoulders for a moment, and she closed her eyes. “I told the captain—c'est trop cher.”
“She didn't care, of course.” Very carefully, so she wouldn't think it was a dismissal, he reached up and plucked her left hand off his shoulder. She wasn't wearing the glove today; no point with the short-sleeved T-shirt showing the gleaming hydraulics of her prosthesis. Her touch sensitivity included the palm and fingertips only; he squeezed her wrist anyway, the metal cool and unyielding, even though she couldn't feel the touch.
She shook her head and turned inside his embrace, leaning her shoulders against his chest, her head against his shoulder, winding his arm around her like a ribbon when he didn't let go. The weight of her body pressed him harder against the door handle. He grunted and stepped to one side, arm around her midsection to move her with him, and she came along like a dancing partner, smooth and light.
“It gets her off the planet,” she said.
Jenny was tall enough that he had to stand up straight and tilt his head back to tuck her under his chin. She sighed when he did it, and melted against him as if his warmth had unmoored whatever emotional props kept her stiff-backed and upright. He nodded into her hair.
“Dammit, Gabe. I'm tired. Je suis fatiguée.” She shook her head. “When do we get to take a break?”
He snorted and pulled her closer, breathing in the shower-clean scent of her skin. “When they push us over and shovel dirt on our heads,” he answered, holding on tight.
1400 hours
Friday September 28, 2063
Lake Simcoe Military Prison
Ontario, Canada
Xie Min-xue stared at the wall of his cell, which was beige and featureless, but he wasn't seeing it. He wasn't feeling the headache caused by the fluorescent lights, his enhanced senses turning what was supposed to be a flicker too fast for perception into something more akin to the stutter of a strobe light, because all his attention was turned inward focused on an old American poem. Richard was still helping him with his English, and in a little less than a year it had gotten much better than he would ever have permitted his guards—or his fellow Chinese prisoners—to realize.
As clearly as if someone who had been quietly reading a book had raised his head and fixed him with a glance, Min-xue felt the shift in Richard's attention. He'd been backgrounded, conversing with one of Richard's subroutines while Richard's core identity handled half a dozen more important things. Now the threads merged again, the AI's primary awareness focusing on Min-xue. It was the equivalent of a man clearing his throat, except Min-xue felt the pressure of that regard as an internal thing.
It prickled the hairs on his neck.
Hello, Richard.
“Hello, Min-xue . . .”
That polite hesitation, and it told Min-xue that Richard was serious. You're here to tell me what they're going to do with me.
“I'm here to let you know what's being discussed, and let you know what we're going to do about it. You do have friends in high places, you know.”
Not high enough. The pilot shook his head and rose to his feet. He paused for a moment, looking down at his feet in their white canvas sneakers with the thin plastic soles. You're going to ask me to defect, Richard. I will not do that.
“But you'll testify against your superiors in a World Court? That seems a little contradictory.” Richard “spoke” English, but he spoke it slowly, so that Min-xue would understand him clearly.
There was nothing in the cell except a narrow shelf made up as a bench or a bed, a steel toilet, and a tightly folded blanket. The air from outside smelled cold, musty. He could almost convince himself that he caught the reek of soot. Min-xue paused beneath the high, barred window. Along with the solitary cell that protected him from the crew-mates he'd betrayed, that window was the prison's concession to his controversial status.
“Refusing to carry out an illegal order is not treason.” Which wasn't exactly the words of a concept he'd found echoed in T'ang poetry and in subversive twentieth-century English literature, but the sentiments behind it hadn't changed very much in centuries. I am not a defector, Richard. I am not a traitor.
“If you're a citizen and a subject of the commonwealth, Riel can protect you. If you are a PanChinese national . .
.”
Is this your way of letting me know that my government wants me back for punishment?
“They wish access to the aliens, and restitution for the nanite infestation of their waters and the damage to the Huang Di that you caused. And yourself and all the rest of the crew returned. Along with the Huang Di, of course.”
Of course. And I am to take the blame for the attack on Toronto, and Captain Wu the courageous patriot who tried to prevent my actions?
He felt Richard's sigh, saw it with his inward eye. “I liked you better when you were an innocent who liked poetry, Min-xue.”
Alas for innocence, then. But it was true; the past year had changed him, and not in comforting ways. Should my loyalty to my country cease because she is mastered by selfish men?
“I knew translating the Yevtushenko for you was a bad idea. Min-xue, you can do China more good in the long run if you stand with us, and try to bring her current leaders down.”
That is neither obedience nor devotion, Min-xue replied, his eyes closed, his palms pressed to the raspy cinder-block wall. But it wasn't obedience and devotion that had brought him to this place, either. I will testify, Richard. Surely that's enough. And I can warn you that my countrymen won't give up so easily. They are hungry, and they are frightened of the worldwire, and they have ten thousand chosen men and women en route to the colony planet, and no way to call them back.
They'll come back with another gambit. They have no choice. There's an expression, Richard, about men with nothing to lose. I think you have it in English, too.
The AI frowned, an expression Min-xue felt more than saw, and refused to be distracted. “What if I told you that I can probably get you a shot at the Vancouver's pilot's chair, when she's commissioned?”
The prime minister would never permit that.
“The prime minister has exactly two trained Canadian pilots left. You're in a better position to bargain than you think.”
The pilot's chair. Min-xue hushed his thoughts, keeping them from Richard's hearing, a trick that had mostly to do with simply willing not to be overheard. In the final analysis, he did not wish to die for his crimes, although he had been prepared. But a Canadian girl had died in his place, and there were some who might argue that as such, it was his debt to live in hers. If you can arrange it, I will bargain, he answered. But you must see to it that there is a trial, and that I have the chance to testify.
“I'll speak to Casey,” Richard said. “We'll do what we can.”
0900 hours
Saturday September 29, 2063
HMCSS Montreal
Earth orbit
Some twelve hours later, Richard's focus was abruptly returned to the captain's ready room when Jaime Wainwright lifted her head, stared directly at the nearest security mote, and said, “I know you're up there, Dick. I can hear you breathing.”
He spawned a thread just to deal with the captain, and then he laughed out loud, choosing his speakers to make the voice seem to come from the place where she was looking. “Neat trick, that. Can you feel me looking at you, too?”
She glanced down at her sinewy hands. “And now you're going to tell me that ‘up there' is a subjective term.”
“And that I always am. What can I do for you this morning?”
She used her flat-spread hands to push herself to her feet and began to pace before she began to speak, her heart rate, skin conductivity, breathing, and a dozen other signs revealing chronic stress. “I wanted to talk to you about our trainees. I presume you've been following my communications with the prime minister with regard to the incoming cadets.”
“Captain. Would I eavesdrop?”
“Yes,” she said. She finished a lap and wheeled. Because of the geometry of the Montreal's habitation wheel, her circuit of the cramped cabin required acute and obtuse angles rather than the more traditional ninety-degree variety. “And you'd lie about it, too. What do you think of them?”
“The cadets?”
“Don't think I don't know you haven't been hovering paternalistically over the lot of them since they went in for nanosurgery. They're all going to make it this time, I hear. No Carver Mallory in this group.”
“Yes,” Richard said, mocking. “Only one sense-deprived quadriplegic so far, out of eighteen subjects. Such excellent odds for all those young people the commonwealth means to modify and train as starship pilots. And don't think I've forgiven you that Genie still has to undergo the full treatment. I know where the request to have her inducted came from.”
“All of the current cadets are injured Impact survivors,” Wainwright said, lacing her fingers behind her back and pausing in front of a holoscreen that showed a space-suited inspection crew crawling over the Montreal's hull. “They're all volunteers. And they'd already had the therapeutic level of nanosurgeon infection. Like Miss Castaign. Charlie—Dr. Forster—”
“Everybody calls him Charlie.”
She snorted, sounding honestly amused. “You think I still harbor adversarial feelings for you, Dick?”
“I wouldn't care to speculate.” Dryly enough that she glanced up at his disembodied voice again, and looked down, shaking her head. Richard continued, “What about Charlie?”
“He thinks it may be safer to handle the implants in two stages, actually. That if the body has already learned to adapt to the Benefactor tech, it takes the wetwiring process better.”
“It's a heck of an insult to the system. And a handful of cadets isn't a really useful sample.” He paused, watching as Wainwright unbraided her fingers and sighed. “And you didn't really want to argue with an AI about the morals of turning teenagers into cybernetic soldiers, did you?”
“No,” she said. She turned around and leaned against one of the few unscreened bits of wall, a lumpy protruding bulkhead that covered a main strut. “You know that repair you hacked together after the logic bomb went off last year?”
“Intimately. I still don't trust it.”
“And you've set up a nanonetwork to replace it.”
“Yes.”
“I want hard lines, too. A whole fresh structure. On the off chance something happens to the worldwire.”
“You want me to disassemble the Montreal's nervous system? I'll have to take it offline to do that.”
“Will it impair the ship's functionality?”
“No,” he said. “We'll still have the nanonetwork. It'll only impair redundancy.”
“For how long?”
“Six weeks. Maybe as little as a month.”
She folded her arms. “I'll live with it.”
“You're thinking about the Huang Di.” The Chinese logic bomb had come uncomfortably close to destroying the Montreal, and they'd managed to purge the Huang Di's core before Canada claimed her as salvage. A pity: Richard would have liked to get his hands on that data. The Chinese control of the nanonetworks—and their programming skill—was still superior to the Canadians'.
“I'm also thinking about arranging things so the Montreal's pilots can fly the ship through the worldwire,” she said. “Rather than having to be physically wired into the chair on the bridge.”
“Captain.” He made a sound that would have been clearing his throat if he were human. “Weren't we just having a discussion about how you still harbor adversarial feelings for me?”
“You may have.” Her mouth worked, approximating a smile.
“The original purpose of the hard-line interface for the pilots was to prevent the AI from seizing control of the ship.”
“I know.” She turned her back on the room as if she could turn her back on Richard, as well. She took three slow breaths before she finished calmly, “But someday you may need to.”
A long pause. “Captain,” he said, when her pulse had dropped to something like its normal range. “I am honored by your trust.”
She laughed, a short harsh bark, and touched the frame on the nearest holodisplay, smudging it with her fingertips. “Trust? If you want to call it that.”
10
30 hours
Saturday September 29, 2063
HMCSS Montreal
Earth orbit
I pause just inside the hatchway to the captain's tasteful blue and gray ready room. “Casey. I had a feeling I'd be seeing you before too long. How did it go with Castaign?”
“It went,” I say, and she leaves it alone.
Wainwright sits in a floor-mounted chair behind a desk bolted to the wall. Holomonitors framed to look like windows cover the bulkheads, showing all directions. The most arresting view is aft, the long silvery dragonfly length of the Montreal stretching from the habitation wheel back to the asymmetrical bulge of her reactor and drive assembly, her solar sails nearly furled against her hull, only a hint of gauzy webbing showing.
That image sits right where Wainwright's gaze would naturally fall, should she lift it from her desk, its spindly fragility a reminder of just how precarious our situation is. Miles and vertical miles away from home.
I've got to hand the captain that much. She never for a second forgets the safety of her crew. And I've never known a good CO who wasn't a hard-ass, too. It's just one of those things.
It's also just that it's a pain in the ass when the hard-ass gets in the way of something I want to do, instead of annoying the other guy.
Wainwright clears her throat, and I realize I've let a good three seconds go by in total silence. It isn't like me.
Doesn't matter. I know how to do this. I take a deep breath and let the words fall out of my mouth like they're somebody else's. “Xie Min-xue, Captain. The Chinese pilot who helped—”
“I know who he is, Casey. What's the brief version?”
“Ma'am, it occurs to me that he could be part of the solution to our pilot shortage.”
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