Worldwired

by Elizabeth Bear

  Min-xue's got a hell of a lot of trust. He never even looked back; he's vaulted the barrier and is crouched behind the PanChinese table. From the motion of his head and shoulders, he's shaking bodies, trying to find out if Premier Xiong is alive.

  Fred's still bleeding under a table over there somewhere. God knows how bad Patty is hurt—I turn around in the aisle, the gun still braced, and freeze right where I am.

  The last gunman has Riel, her arm twisted behind her back, his pistol pressed against her temple, using her body as a shield. Patty's sprawled at their feet, crosswise across the aisle, puddling blood staining the grass-green carpeting black.

  I don't look at that, at Patricia. It can happen later, when I have time to deal with it. Instead, I look at the gunman, and at Riel's calm expression and tight set jaw.

  Dammit, Connie. Why the hell didn't you run?

  Which is when, suddenly, sharply, Richard's presence explodes back into my brain.

  Min-xue tore kidskin and cloth in his haste to bare his own hands, and then to bare Xiong's throat. There was blood—a great deal of blood—and the ragged tear across the premier's scalp showed a glitter of white through the crimson. Min-xue tasted blood when he wiped the sweat from his face onto his sleeve. No breath stroked his fingers; the air was sickly and still.

  He worked his mouth and spat, leaning to the side as his fingers slid and stuck in the mess of stringy blood smeared over the premier's skin. He didn't expect a pulse. That wound looked like the bullet had plowed through hair and flesh and bone, and Min-xue half suspected that if he lifted Xiong's head off the floor, it would leave a blood-pudding of brains behind.

  Min-xue pricked a finger on the pins holding one of the decorative ribbons to Xiong's breast. More blood dripped and vanished into the silk, scarcely darkening the color. As a lucky color, red proved an irony under the circumstances. He pushed two fingers into the hollow softness of Xiong's throat.

  Min-xue jerked his hand back in shock; Xiong's pulse beat steadily under the angle of his jaw, strong and slow and not thready or fluttering. He shook his fingers, not quite believing what he'd felt, and pressed them back against cool skin.

  If anything, the premier's heartbeat was steadier than his own. Carefully, Min-xue tilted the man's head back, straightening his throat, and, gagging on the rankness of blood, began to breathe for both of them.

  A welcome presence bloomed in Min-xue's head, and he hissed relief. Richard. How very, very nice to have you back.

  His cheer was short-lived. “Min-xue,” Richard said, his moth-wing hands uncharacteristically knotted in front of his belt buckle. “Unfortunately, I must recommend that you surrender immediately. The PanChinese agent has Prime Minister Riel.”

  They'd only been linked for a matter of days, and still when Leslie kicked himself out of the air lock, knocked the condensation off his helmet, and saw Charlie floating before him, and could not feel him, the strangest seasick sensation of something broken—something severed—twisted his guts.

  “Charlie.” He said it quietly, but the suit radio turned it into an accusation. “What are you doing with your helmet off?”

  “Leslie,” Charlie said, raising both eyebrows. “What the hell are you doing wandering around loose like that?”

  It helped. Leslie chuckled, and reached up to undo the clasps on his own helmet. Air hissed in as soon as he cracked the seal, pressure equalizing. “I figured out how to ask real nice. I just . . . I showed them an image of my . . . shape, my gravitational signature, moving from the birdcage over here. And they showed me to the door and handed me my suitcase. You?”

  “Took a calculated risk,” Charlie answered. He hesitated, a bizarre figure in a pair of blue cotton trousers, barefoot, the back of his T-shirt floating out of his elastic waistband. Worry creased his forehead. “You know the worldwire's down.”

  “So's my suit radio. And some other stuff. The Benefactor network is still working beautifully, though. Had enough of hanging around with my finger up my arse while you did all the work, so I came here because . . .” He shrugged. “I wasn't all that sure Wainwright would let me in, frankly.”

  “You were worried about me.” Charlie slapped him on the shoulder, rebounding him lightly against the closed air lock. The air smelled impossibly sweet, earthy, rich. He picked up notes of fermentation products, and other things, things he didn't have words for—the weight of the shiptree around him, the belly and roll of the curves of space. He closed his eyes.

  “Les, you—”

  “All right?” The air stung his senses like liquor. He laughed, giddy and half-hoarse. You can't go home. “I don't know. Tell me about the worldwire. Are we under attack? Is it Richard?”

  “No,” Charlie answered, quite crisply. “I spoke with Ellie via coded transmission. Gabe has managed to hack through to Dick. He hasn't gotten contact with the worldwire yet, but he's working on it. Dick thinks it's sabotage.”

  “I am getting really sick of hearing that word.”

  “How do you sabotage a quantum network?”

  Leslie shrugged. “I can guess. Jam its communications. Flood it with nonsense information, so the signal gets lost in noise.”

  “Primitive. Brute force.”

  “But effective. Where's Jeremy?”

  “Base camp. Follow me. We can radio back and let them know you're safe inside.” A long pause followed, which Leslie didn't mind; he was absorbed in the eerie beauty of the weightless garden they moved through, and the strangeness doubled and redoubled of everything glowing, shimmering faintly, leaving currents he could feel through the Benefactor sensorium. Synesthesia. Only not.

  “Hey, Charlie?” The suit speakers were much too loud. Birds—bird-analogues—darted away, shrieking. “What made you decide it was safe to take your helmet off?”

  Charlie stabilized himself with a grip on a branch and turned back to Leslie, bobbing in midair like a red-cheeked apple. “Because I'm a biologist, Les. And I was sick of the effing helmet, and playing the odds. Scientific wild-ass guess.”

  “And you risked your life on that?”

  “I've risked my life on crazier things.”

  “You've a point, mate,” Les answered.

  “What made you decide to take your helmet off, Les?”

  “You can't drown a man who was born to hang.” Leslie took another breath. It went to his head. “High-oxygen environment.”

  Leslie tossed Charlie his helmet—more a cup-handed shove than an actual throw—in free-fall, and pushed off to follow him. They brachiated in silence, Leslie feeling as if the fresh air had rejuvenated his thinking process. It was Richard. Something to do with Richard, and the worldwire, and—

  “Hey, Charlie. You know more about the nanotech than I do.”

  “Yeah?”

  He caught a branch as Charlie let it snap back, using the recoil to add a little push to his own forward momentum when it oscillated. “Is it weird that we're affected, too, when our nanosurgeons came courtesy of a direct transfer from the Benefactors, rather than through your lab? I mean, if the Chinese and their guy, um . . .”

  “Ramirez.”

  “Right. Cracked the operating system—”

  Charlie chuffed, using Leslie's helmet like a shield as he bulled through the undergrowth. Leslie envied Charlie the freedom of movement and obvious comfort of his shorts and T-shirt, and blinked another bead of sweat off his lashes. “Well, we know they cracked the OS. But we rewrote it, Gabe and Richard and me, and our network—Dick's network—and the PanChinese one and the Benefactor system don't really talk to each other. Beyond Richard being able to hack them enough to talk to people—oh.”

  “Yeah, you see what I mean?”

  “I think I do, Les. If the Benefactors can rewrite their system to communicate with ours, which they must have done . . . how the hell do we let them know it's okay for them to rewrite our system to communicate freely with theirs?”

  “Is it?” The smell of the air was addictive, a faint hint of oz
one, the silken texture of the wind before a thunderstorm, and mild, shifting floral and herbaceous perfumes. Leslie's hands still tingled inside his gloves. He'd swear he could feel every individual cell zooming through his arteries, scalp to toes. He couldn't tell if there was something wrong with his body, or if he'd simply been deprived of it so long that he was hyperaware.

  “Is it what?”

  “Is it okay?”

  Charlie stopped so suddenly that Leslie almost drifted into his back. “You know . . .I think we'd better radio back and have Gabe ask Richard about that.”

  “You explain it to Dick,” Leslie said. “I'm going to try to explain it to the birdcage.”

  My fists are knotted as hard as my heart. The air I can get, past the pressure in my chest, comes in shallow little sips, painful. Connie's looking at me across all that space, her chin lifted up so I can see her throat bob when she swallows. I wish I knew what the hell she was trying to beam into my brain with that steady, too-calm eye contact.

  The only scrap of reassurance I can muster is Richard's presence, his ghost standing just off to the left and out of my line of fire, where I can see him without being distracted. Merci à Dieu, Dick. Tell me there's something you can do about this.

  He turns away, as if he were looking over his shoulder at Riel and Patty. He looks sterner in profile, old-man-of-the-mountain, cotton-wool hair brushed back from a high forehead, revealing a widow's peak. He stares at the hostages long enough for my attention to follow and turns a worried squint back at me.

  “Surrender, Jen,” he says, and folds his hands over his arms. “There's nothing else we can do to save them.”

  For half a second my stomach drops, like the Wicked Witch just scrawled those words across the sky. Surrender isn't a word I thought Dick knew; less did I think I'd hear him counsel it.

  The arms stay folded. Paternal. Stern. He rocks back, head to one side, a discouraging frown chiseling the lines around his mouth deep enough to shadow. “Live to fight again.”

  I lock my thoughts down before I think it loud enough for Dick to hear. But they won't live if we surrender. Marde. I wish I could feel Min-xue now, the way I did when we went after Les and Charlie. I wish I could—

  Oh. If Dick is here, why, oh, why can't I feel Min-xue?

  It wasn't working, and Richard couldn't see any way that it could suddenly start to work, unless he could manage to crack the PanChinese network right back and take their system off-line. He wasted long nanoseconds trying, crippled by the lack of cycles. Even at limited capacity, he had an ear for Gabe, however.

  Especially knowing that Gabe was working as hard as he was, and as fruitlessly. And despite the fact that what Charlie was suggesting—and Gabe was backing up—was sheer insanity.

  Wainwright had left her XO in charge on the bridge and fled to the ready room to take Richard's call. It didn't look like a rout, of course. She'd made sure it wasn't even identifiable as a tactical withdrawal, and he wondered if she was sure herself if her hands were shaking with fear, or with adrenaline.

  “I don't mean to put any extra pressure on you, Dick,” she said, “but I am . . . extremely concerned about the ecosystem—”

  Richard was busy enough that he wasn't bothering with the niceties of human interaction. Alan's clipped tones crept into his own diction when keeping his voice warm was too much of an effort. “You're right,” he said. “It's not self-sustaining. None of it is self-sustaining, yet. Charlie's proposing we open the worldwire to the Benefactors—”

  “What?” With a fraction of his attention, he saw her come out of her chair, her hands white on her desk. “That's insane.”

  “It may be a moot point, as we don't currently know how to manage it. We can't even contact them, and we don't know how the heck to signal our intentions to the Benefactors even if we did.”

  “We already have the program we wrote to flash the Benefactor nanites,” Gabe reminded, pressing the headphones to his ear to hear Wainwright better.

  “The program that didn't work.”

  Charlie's voice, encoded and tightcast and unscrambled and reconstituted, curiously flat with most of the harmonics lost to efficiency. “We also have samples of the nanosurgeons they infected us with, and Gabe's been able to crack fairly large chunks of their operating system.”

  Wainwright's voice was as flat, with tension. “You're asking me to risk more than the Montreal this time.”

  If Richard had been a human being, he would have stopped short and closed his eyes in frustration at his own stupidity. “The ones that they left open to the worldwire.”

  “Yes.” Gabe and Charlie, two voices at once.

  Wainwright again. “Just to be absolutely certain I understand this, you're proposing we flash our own network, reprogram it, and leave it wide open—so the Benefactors can wander in and do whatever they want? To the entire planet? And hope they end the PanChinese attack?”

  “Yes,” Gabe said, without even the decency to sound chagrined at the ridiculousness of it.

  “How do you propose we do that when we can't even talk to the worldwire currently?”

  “Therein lies the problem,” Gabe said, gritting his teeth. Richard felt his heart rate kick up; it was pattering along tightly. “I was hoping Dick might have a clever idea.”

  “All we need is an access point,” Richard said. “A patch of the worldwire we can tap into. Then we can hack our way through it. Island to island, so to speak. World War II, in the Pacific.”

  “You need something you can run a hardline to. What if Elspeth went after one of Charlie's ecospheres?”

  “Not safe,” Richard said. “The pressure doors could come down any second. Or the captain could trigger them as a precaution. Or, worse, the Chinese could remotely open an air lock, and they could fail to deploy.”

  “Blake made it to the processor core,” Wainwright said.

  “Yes, and I've recommended he hole up somewhere and not try to travel further. In any case, we can't delay—if the pressure doors do come down, you'll lose me as well.”

  “Putain de marde. They'd sever the cable.”

  “Yes,” Richard said. “We need to use what's at hand.”

  Gabe swallowed, and Richard could see how carefully he did not look at his daughter. “No.”

  “I still haven't said yes,” Wainwright snapped.

  “Gabe—” Richard stopped, but not before Genie heard.

  Genie looked up from the quiet conversation she'd been having with Elspeth and over at Gabe and Richard's image. “Papa?”

  “Petite—”

  Richard saw Elspeth's hand tighten on Genie's shoulder, and saw the darkness that crossed Gabe's face. He knew as plainly as if Gabe were wired what he was thinking: it wasn't going to be enough. Not again. Not again—

  “Richard,” she said, “could you use me? Wire into my control chip and hack into my nanonet?”

  “Gabe. Genie—” Richard let them see him shake his head. “That puts you at risk, Genie.”

  “I know,” she said.

  Gabe allowed the silence to drag, and Richard was right there with him, too close to the pain himself to argue. Not again. Not Genie, not like this, not after Leah. No.

  None of them should be permitting this to happen. But it was the same equations Leah had considered and understood, and Genie considered and understood them now, as well. Richard was struck, abruptly, by how much both of them got from Jenny Casey, despite there being no biology between them.

  But Elspeth caught Gabe's eye, and he caught hers, and neither one of them said anything. At last, shaking his head, his hands white from the force with which he had been holding the edge of the desk, he sat back in his chair. He looked from Elspeth to Genie. He didn't say yes, but he also didn't say no.

  “It's what Leah would have done,” Genie said, her eyes very bright. Gabe nodded. It was exactly what Leah would have done.

  It was exactly what Leah had done.

  Gabe got up and walked across the lab, and
ducked down to wrap his arms around his daughter's shoulders. He held her tight enough that Richard thought she would have squeaked, if she hadn't been holding her breath. And then he looked up, smoothed her hair, and stepped back. “Captain,” Gabe said, in the vague direction of a mote, “it's your call. Go or no-go?”

  Richard realized, watching the two of them, what Gabe was wrestling with. And he felt a flush of pride in both—in Genie, that she wasn't going to stay in her sister's shadow, or stay safe behind locked doors. She had to stand up and be counted. And in Gabe, because Gabe was going to let her, and wasn't even going to let himself pretend it didn't hurt.

  “Go,” Wainwright said, measured seconds later. “Go, dammit.”

  “All right then,” Richard said, wishing suddenly—viciously—for the ability to turn and punch a wall. “Let's get to work.”

  Elspeth opened the skin on the back of Genie's hand very carefully, using a dissection tool from Charlie's second-best kit, which was stowed in the storage lockers to keep it away from the moisture in his own lab. The scalpel was sharp; there was hardly any blood, and Genie watched interestedly, wincing a little as Elspeth peeled the skin back, but obviously unimpressed by the pain. It would take more pain than that to impress Genie Castaign. There was no way to sterilize the tools, but that would be less than meaningless if Richard could get Genie's nanonet back on-line. And if he couldn't— They'd have larger problems.

  The control chip was a flexible, irregular blue oblong; the actual chip was carbon-based, only a centimeter square, but there was a gel-sealed interface port and a series of power cells no bigger than a pinkie nail attached. Gabe handled the splicing procedure himself, sitting Genie down in his chair behind the desk and running a hardline from the interface to her hand. The pins slid in smoothly; if he'd known where the port was, Richard thought Gabe could have managed it through the skin, just a little prick and in, the same way the pilots' serpentines worked.