Worldwired

by Elizabeth Bear

  A moment's silence while he considers that. “No palm locks?”

  It's gotten awful quiet out there. That's not reassuring. “I think they cracked the locks.” Straining my ears until I swear I can feel them swivel, I push myself into a crouch. Min-xue gets his toes under him when he sees what I'm doing, both of us ready to push. He looks at me and I look at him.

  We've got that aisle, and a bank of desks between us and the podium. What the hell, right? It's not like we're going to get a better chance. Maybe they're out of ammo.

  And maybe they're taking advantage of us hiding under cover, and using the lull to run up on Patty and Riel.

  “Go?” he asks me, quiet and self-assured in a way I'd even believe, if I hadn't been inside his head.

  But I guess I come across that way myself, until you get to know me. “Go,” I answer, and bolt from our hiding place, half a second before Patty screams.

  The blood's worn off the soles of my shoes. I don't slip when I slap my meat hand against the top of the desk and propel myself over it, tuck—not as neatly as Min-xue, who moves like an acrobat in gravity, too—roll, take the fall on my shoulder, and come up like a snake, face to face with a surprised assassin.

  No, he didn't expect that at all.

  Pity he's the one with the gun.

  I trigger, and the world rattles to a halt jerk-jerk-jerk like somebody's let go the dead-man's handle. My last thought before the programmed reflexes kick in is: Min-xue lives like this all the time.

  Casey was slower than Min-xue expected: no quicker than a fast, agile, athletic normal woman half her age. Slower, that is, until she lunged to her feet under the nearest assassin, rolling onto her toes, glittering left hand slapping a bullet out of the air like she was taking a backhanded swipe at a badminton birdie, right one doubled into a fist that slammed into her opponent's solar plexus while Min-xue was still closing the distance to his.

  An unaugmented human would have seen a blur. Min-xue saw her opponent double over, drop his pistol, grab hold of Casey's arm, and roll over it, disengaging, getting away.

  Fast, too. Faster than Casey, if she hadn't caught him flat-footed. Faster maybe than Min-xue. He took another half a step toward them, but Casey had the gun, and her opponent was twisting like a cat to come up on his feet.

  And there were three more armed men in the room, and behind him, Patricia shouted again—not surprise and fear this time, but fury, and the sound was divided by the report of a gun.

  Min-xue turned on the ball of his foot, jumped over a cowering attaché in a baize-green suit, landed in a crouch as something seared his thigh in passing, and slung himself over the railing toward the podium and the enemy who had just stood up from behind it to level his gun. One of the enemy's comrades rose from the cover of the secretary's table, gun leveled. Military tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downward.

  A useless piece of advice, when the battle was already joined, and the fighting ran uphill.

  The sound of bones cracking couldn't distract him. Casey and Patty were on their own. Min-xue dove left, buying whatever cover he could from the shooter behind the podium, getting that shooter's body between himself and the man farther back. He scrabbled forward, clawed under a desk, the creased thigh burning, another bullet chipping off an interface plate and sending fat blue sparks lazing through the air like dragons' tongues and chrysanthemum clusters. He crawled through them, skinny enough to weasel under the privacy panel, and hesitated behind the last row of desks.

  Min-xue's last cover.

  He grabbed two deep breaths, vaulted the obstacle, and, zigzagging, rushed the guns.

  Jeremy met Charlie halfway back to base camp and knocked Charlie into a spiral when he clouted him on the head. Charlie spun back against a web of vines and branches, almost bounced out again, and clung until the greenery stopped shaking. He didn't dare laugh, although the suited and helmeted figure floating in front of him, wobbling as he recovered from the damage he'd done his own equilibrium, was a thoroughly amusing sight. “Action and reaction, Jer. What the heck did you do that for?”

  “Damn,” Jeremy said, his voice tinny through speakers. “You know, Charlie, you about scared the air out of my suit.”

  “I think I might have broken the nanonetwork somehow—”

  “You also took off your bloody helmet. I can't talk to you without your suit radio turned on, you know.”

  “Oh.” Charlie looked around for his helmet, hoping it hadn't sailed too far away in the impact. It was lodged a little farther over in the bush; he floated free and retrieved it. “I guess that explains what I did to deserve it.”

  “Other than suit telemetry indicating to Peterson and myself that you'd had a rupture? And then not answering my hails? And Richard vanishing on us, pfft! And that's not the most interesting bit of information.” Between the buzz of the speaker and Jeremy's accent, and the way his words tumbled over each other in thwarted concern, Charlie could barely understand.

  “Oh?”

  “Leslie is inbound.”

  At first, the words didn't make any sense. Charlie tilted his head, staring through Jeremy's faceplate as if he could read his mind through the crystal. “Leslie?”

  “We presume. Something human-shaped has left the birdcage, in any case, and is traveling this direction. Peterson says she has visual, and if it isn't Leslie, it's a neat approximation of someone in a space suit. I told her not to intercept. She was willing to try. So we need to head back to base camp—wait a minute. Why did you take off your hat?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time? In any case . . .”

  “You aren't dead.”

  “I'm not dead.” Charlie poked his own cheek with a gloved finger and grinned at Jeremy's expression, barely visible through the helmet. “So far so good.”

  “Tell me that again in ten days, when whatever you've sucked in has had a chance to incubate.”

  Charlie grinned and started wriggling his gauntlets off. “I won't ask to sleep in the tent until we're sure I'm not dying.”

  Jeremy hissed like a cat, between his teeth, and grabbed a nearby branch to flick himself in the direction of camp. “Silly bugger. Well, no point in putting it back on now. If you're dying on us, you're already dead. And I want to find out exactly what is headed for our air lock.”

  Gabe's father had a cabin in Quebec, a two-hundred-year-old one-room onto which generations had added, until the resulting house resembled a turkey-tail fungus, bits and pieces projecting on some inobvious plan from the central core. Gabe had been looking forward to inheriting the place and retiring there, in the fullness of time.

  Gabe sincerely wished that he—and Genie, and Elspeth, and Jenny—were there right now. Instead, he was up to his thick, stubborn neck in emergency protocols and Elspeth and Genie were sitting tight in the corner of the lab, barely breathing so as not to distract him, despite their obvious frustration.

  And Jenny was on the ground somewhere, under fire. It was all Gabe could do to not shiver like a dog-worried sheep. Genevieve Casey can take care of herself. And she can take care of Patty and that Chinese pilot and Prime Minister Riel as well.

  Gabe smiled tightly, not looking up from his own fingers as they darted through the touch-sensitive fields over his interface plate. She could. Didn't change that he wanted to be there, soaking up some of the fire. But Jenny was a big girl. Frederick Valens, on the other hand, could take care of himself. And if Jenny got killed trying to rescue cet ostie de trou de cul—

  No. Gabe had his own job, and it was time he started doing it. Especially given the mistakes he'd made. He'd been so concerned that Ramirez had left a back door into the Montreal's core, or that the enemy would attack the hulk of the Calgary directly, that he'd failed to consider what was in retrospect a more likely scenario: that the Chinese would find a way to simply disrupt the worldwire, destroy its ability to communicate, and leave the Benefactor machines purposeless, uncon
trolled.

  Unlike the worldwire, which was an accidental—or unofficial—outgrowth of Richard's machinations, the Chinese nanonetwork was firewalled and guarded and coded in terms incompatible with the Benefactor network. Richard and Gabe had cracked some of that code—enough to let the AI talk with Min-xue. Not enough to let him puppeteer the Chinese pilots or the Huang Di the way he could the Canadian side, although Richard had managed to flash Min-xue's programming, once upon a time. The Chinese could have taken the worldwire down and left their own network functional. Remotely. The same way they'd destroyed the Huang Di's operating system and her data when the starship became Canada's salvage and spoils of war.

  However, if that was the technique they'd used, it meant there were at least three processors in existence that were big enough to host Richard—the Montreal, the Calgary, and the Huang Di. Hell, a very pared-down version of the base Richard persona could run quite tidily on the hardware packed into Jenny's head, as long as the spare cycles of her personal nanomachines were available to his use. The problem was, they'd gotten reliant on the worldwire—and Richard—for quantum communication, and Richard wasn't finished fixing the damage that the saboteur had done to the Montreal the previous year.

  The Calgary was out of reach at the bottom of the ocean. The Huang Di was off-line, her reactors cold, her life support running from kludged-on solar panels, her processor core half taken apart. Richard might be alive in the former, but it was no place Gabe could get to. The latter was unavailable as a place of refuge. But there was the Montreal.

  And Gabriel had the Montreal in his hands. He had a radio headset, and he had a clever lieutenant with a degree in computer science and several levels of technical certification slithering through the weightless, shielded access spaces that surrounded the Montreal's processor core, dragging the business end of a three-kilometer optical cable behind him, and three more geeks tearing up the floor panels of the big ship's bridge, double-checking connections that hadn't been needed in a year.

  And if it all went well, and if Richard were still alive in there somewhere, Gabe should have communication with him in five seconds, four, three, two—

  “Blake?”

  “Sorry, Mr. Castaign.” The lieutenant's voice made tinny and sharp in his earpiece. “Cable's snagged. Half a second, here.”

  Gabe was gambling with Blake's life. Gambling that he was right, and that what the Chinese had managed was to disrupt the worldwire, and not to take control of the Montreal again. Last time they'd hacked the ship's OS, they'd vented reactor coolant and taken a serious chunk out of the permissible lifetime exposures of half the engineering crew.

  If they managed it again—well, Blake was inside the shielding. It wouldn't help him much.

  “Hurry, please—”

  “On it, sir.”

  Gabe let his hands hang motionless in the interface. They still called him sir, even if he was a civilian now. “Blake?”

  It wasn't Blake's voice that answered. Instead, a familiar craggy face pixilated into existence, and long fingers steepled as Richard pressed his immaterial hands palm to palm.

  “Gabriel. You're a sight for sore sensors.”

  “Merci à Dieu. It's good to have you back, Dick—” Gabe looked away, glanced to Elspeth, for strength. She squared her shoulders and drew one deep, hard breath, her arms tightening around Genie's shoulders, and she smiled.

  Gabe had to look down again, the flash of gratitude that filled his chest so intense it made his eyes sting. “Nous avons des problèmes plus grands. New York City is under martial law.”

  “I see. Perhaps you had better start at the beginning.”

  “Forgive me, Dick,” Gabe said, “but explanations are going to have to wait until after the war.”

  Patty turned as Riel dove for cover. Somebody cowering behind a desk on the left squeaked like a stomped puppy. Patty knew what she'd see even before she turned, and tried to brace herself for it. She wasn't ready.

  She didn't think she ever could have made herself ready to stand there, hands spread out for balance, covered in blood and with her pants leg somehow having gotten torn all up one side, and stare down the barrel of a gun. She froze, wobbling a little, trying to make it look like grim determination holding her in place rather than icy panic.

  The man with the gun wasn't big. He was about fifteen feet away, down the shallow slope of the aisle, and he held the gun in both hands at arm's length. She couldn't see his face clearly. He wore a Western-style business suit with a tie and silver cuff links that flashed in the overhead light, and his hands weren't shaking. Somebody sobbed behind Patty. She heard a big, resonant thump as the crowd heaved against the doorway, a beast scraping itself on the sides of a too-small den. She spread her hands out wider, and wondered if being shot was going to hurt much. She wondered if she was tough enough to hold the man off until Riel could vanish into the crowd of escaping bodies.

  “Step aside,” he said, his English thick with an accent.

  “No,” Patty answered, and dove for the gun.

  Something kicked in her chest as she lunged forward. She thought it was a bullet, at first, but there was no flash yet and the gun hadn't popped. It was her heart, slow thunder a counterpoint to screams from people cowering near her. She shouted; it left her lips a slow roar, and nothing moved—nobody moved—for a thin slice of a second until she saw the gunman's eyes widen and his knuckle pale on the trigger.

  Once, again. And then he was plunging aside, and Patty didn't see the bullets, couldn't hear the bullets, but it didn't matter because she had seen where the gun was pointed and seen how the barrel had kicked, and the part of her brain that could calculate starship trajectories at translight knew that second bullet wasn't coming anywhere close. The first one, though—

  Patty couldn't catch bullets in her hand, the way she'd heard Jenny could. But she twisted hard, her hair flying into her eyes, and tried not to think that when she ducked the bullet was going to hit somebody in the mob behind her. Her knee shrieked as she wrenched herself out of the way, and then she found out that she wasn't really faster than a bullet after all.

  She didn't fall down. She didn't even stop moving, as if some animal part of her brain knew that if she slowed for a second the next shot would end between her eyes. It didn't hurt at all, not a bit—just a thump against her left shoulder like whacking it against a door frame at a run, and white stars lighting her vision as it spun her half around, and her left arm gone, as if the impact had taken it off.

  She was committed. She plunged at him, head-butt to his abdomen like a playground wrestling match, and there was more blood, everywhere, slippery-sticky and hot, on her face, in her mouth, sticking her hair across her eyes. She slammed him against the railing, felt something snap. They landed hard, and she brought her knee up, fighting dirty like Papa Fred had taught her, and she was fast, faster than she'd known she'd be, but he was faster somehow and he got his thigh in the way and he still had the gun in his hands and her arm wouldn't work and he clawed at her nose, her mouth, pushing her back. Her right hand locked around his wrist and yanked his hand off her face and—

  The white stars turned red-black as he struck her across the temple, once, with the barrel of the gun.

  Damn, this son of a bitch can move. Like a fencer, like a ballet dancer. He feints and I fall for it, but rather than cracking my forearm, his pistol rings off my metal arm like somebody whaled on a cold water pipe with a claw hammer. He grunts. I bet he felt that all the way up to his shoulder.

  Unfortunately, it doesn't distract him enough to slow him down when I go for a sharp right jab. Fluid sidestep, faster than I can think, and he grabs my wrist and tries to put me over his shoulder in some kind of martial-arts throw. He reckons without the weight of my prosthesis throwing my center of gravity off, though, and I clothesline his throat as he tosses me. It doesn't stop me going over his shoulder, but he loses his grip and I roll with it instead of landing cripplingly hard, flat on my back. When I come u
p into the crouch he's gone straight down, vertical drop from his feet to his knees, and the gun is on the floor in front of him because he's clutching his throat with both hands, his eyes bugged out so far I can see the whites all the way around. I bet I crushed his trachea when I hit him.

  I'm surprisingly okay with that.

  But I don't have time to think about it long. Gunfire, two shots, from up where Patty and Constance were headed when I lost sight of them. And then three more shots, flat and close, that could be the guys on the podium snapping off a couple at me, or at Min. It's an easy decision; I dive after the dying guy's gun, squirm between two rows of desks, kicking a huddled dignitary in the head—“Pardon”—and risk a peek around the end of the row, trying to get a look up the aisle toward the doors.

  I'm just in time to see Patty knock the gunman into the railing on the nearest section of seats and both of them go down. Riel hesitates, her fists pressed to her chest and clenched so tight I see her knuckles whiten from here.

  My right hand knows how hers must feel. Fingernails bite my palm, and I turn my back on Patty and Riel, transfer the pistol to my meat hand, and turn around to see if I can help Min.

  I'm just in time to hear a splintering crash and a surprised yelp that turns quickly into a moan. Min-xue's put his shoulder against the podium, and shoved, suddenly, hard, topping the whole damned thing over onto the gunman crouched behind it. Smart child: he keeps moving, too, diving off the stage with as much commitment as a swimmer kicking off. He tucks and rolls beautifully, and the gunman behind the long table pops up, handgun held in a police stance, tracking Min-xue like a pro. He snaps off his first shot, which misses, and waits the opportunity for a second, which I think won't.

  The palm lock on the stolen handgun I've stolen back is sticky against my flesh. I hope to hell it's cracked. It is a nine-mil, semi-auto, caseless ammo in a horizontal magazine. I expose myself, level the gun, brace with my left hand, wishing it were my gun and the interface weren't trashed so I could lock on the threat scope in my left eye, and I double-tap the gunman right over the heart. He doesn't even have the decency to look shocked as he folds across the table, his weapon discharging randomly.