Scardown jc-2

by Elizabeth Bear

  Not conclusive, but suggestive that perhaps records had been altered along the way.

  Richard was also becoming familiar with Captain Wainwright. Concealed under the mantle of the second AI, his mind-controlled progenitor, he found he had astonishing freedom. The nanite web allowed him to sense things that happened across light-years of space. Through Jenny and Leah, Richard knew that Gabe and Elspeth were on a new track with the AI research. He showed them how to build control chips and planned to expand his nanite fingers through the Internet soon — solving his bandwidth problem nicely. The other ships would need minds, he knew, minds of their own to survive the strange planes and angles of eleven-dimensional space. The human pilots were fast and intuitive. But Richard didn't think any human mind — even the one he himself was modeled on — could quite manage to comprehend the world behind the veil of what they'd jokingly dubbed sneakier-than-light technology.

  He could feel the minds of the Benefactors, as he'd taken wryly to calling them; he'd tried to speak to them. Would have tried to speak to their AIs, but they didn't seem to have them. Just brains so alien he wasn't sure, in fact, that they could be considered to have anything like language at all.

  He felt the ships moving, coming at what must be for them a stately and considered pace given what he had speculated about their capabilities.

  Coming — and he hadn't shared this with Jenny yet, or with anyone — coming from two directions at once.

  1730 Hours

  Monday 4 December, 2062

  Allen-Shipman Research Facility

  St. George Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  The kids are good. Damn good, all six of them. Awkward with their amped-up reflexes, with the touch of the Hammer shading their emotions toward preternatural calm and their focus to the absolute. The boys are dicey: teenage males, rough and erratic as any cadet I ever had to kick into shape. Valens slipped a bug in my ear that they might not adapt as fast as the girls, so I pay extra close attention to them. The girls are better behaved, plotting quietly the way girls do.

  We go in.

  It's a deep hard time, and it takes me back. Not quite into a flashback… Hell. Yes, into a flashback, smell of sweat and the smell of mud, smell of hot, scared kids blinking at me like I have all the goddamned answers.

  I hope a few of them learned to duck.

  I bite down on the memory, roll it back. This isn't then, it's now, and I'm mind on mind with the children, flitting from one to another like a possessing ghost, guiding each of them through a slalom while another part of my mind sets up obstacles and takes them down. Obstacles hard enough to build confidence when they get past them — which they don't always. Not so hard as to break them.

  It's a line you have to know how to see, because it's different for each of them. And as somebody once said to me, it takes a hundred attaboys to cancel out one oh, shit.

  I hope these kids will stay alive. I wish I could make them some kind of promises as we sail through the slick black nothing, space stroking the sides of the virtual ship — waggishly named The Indefatigable—but the hard facts are that all I can do for them is to show them the tools and kick them out the door. Just like all of us, they're on their own.

  On their own, but every action they take affects everybody around them. It's a hell of a lesson to learn when you're thirty. Never mind fifteen.

  I want Leah to be the best, of course. But the fact of the matter is that Patricia Valens and Bryan Sall, a dark-haired boy with angled eyes, are the oldest of the lot, the most developed, and they blow the other four away.

  I shake with exhaustion when the technician comes to unhook me. The kids are still under. She brings me something hot and sugar-sweet in a big mug: coffee with chocolate stirred into it and tons of milk, just the way I never drink it. It eases the shakes, though, and by the time I choke it down I can unclench my teeth enough so my jaw doesn't ache all the way up to my ears. My shirt clings to my chest, plastered with sweat, and I'm taking a chill. “Do a shorter run next time,” she says.

  I look up at the one-way glass, knowing Valens and Holmes and Gabe and Ellie are on the other side, and wave as steadily as I can manage. Shorter. Right. Valens wants these kids trained by when? The technician takes my mug, and I bless her. “What's your name?”

  “Melissa Givens, Master Warrant.” She flashes me a grin, and I know I just made a friend. I wonder if Valens ever bothered to ask her that.

  “God, call me Jenny. Especially if you bring me coffee.”

  “You need the sugar and caffeine. Rigathalonin — the Hammer — takes a toll. Ready to debrief the kids yet… Jenny?”

  It's over quickly, thankfully, and Valens handles most of it. I sit in the corner and try not to tremble. My teeth-grinding distracts the kids, so I get up and walk into the hall, trying not feel Leah's pale face and bright eyes following me. In the evergreen-scented rest room I lean my face against the mirror — cool steel, soothing — and work on remembering not to close my left hand on the porcelain sink. I think about sitting down on the floor.

  Then I think about the white tautness around Leah's eyes, and swear. I have to go back in there. I can't let her see this, can't let her fear this. Hesitation, where she's going, could get her killed — and a ship full of passengers with her.

  Later that night, after I somehow make it back to Boris and my hotel, I remember that I took a hard look into the mirror and frowned at myself. I remember I thought Can I handle this?

  I can handle this.

  I had put my hand in my pocket and pulled out the remaining pills in their harmless little brown vial. And then I had waited five minutes, washed my face, combed my hair, and went back into the debriefing room and sat down in one of the gleaming one-piece student desks next to Leah and put a calm, steady hand on her arm. She grinned at me and patted back.

  I looked up; a flicker of movement from the holoboard near Valens caught my eye. When I looked toward it I saw him regarding me steadily, all the while continuing with his comments on the tumbling curve of the virtual ship projected in the air beside him. He didn't smile or even nod, but he held my gaze for three endless seconds before he looked away.

  Remembering that, later — remembering Leah's face turned to me — watching the coronas of light flare and sweat against a window coated in hard, freezing rain — I sit in the dark with a pillow over the phone so I won't see the message light blinking, and I don't get up to answer the knock either the first or the second time it comes. I hold my cat in my lap while he twists his claws in the fabric of my BDUs, and I drink whiskey and coffee in about equal ratios until the knot under my breastbone loosens enough that I can breathe.

  10:30 PM

  Monday 4 December, 2062

  Marriott Inn

  Toronto, Ontario

  Indigo tugged a fluffy-itchy baby blue touque more firmly over her ears, then covered the knit cap with the hood of her parka. She'd swear the winters were getting colder — and coming sooner — every year. Which didn't make sense. It was supposed to be global warming, after all.

  She rose from her resting place in a corner of the hotel lobby and stepped around a potted Norwegian fir, careful never to turn her profile to the window. Through the shadow her outline cast in the reflected brightness of the glass, she saw a hulking shape leave the lobby across the street, ice forming on his smooth-shaven scalp. Indigo held her breath a few steps from the autodoors as Razorface halted, weight on his left foot, as if contemplating options — and then turned and strode back the way he had come. The way Indigo had followed him through the rain to get there.

  The storm hit her face like shattering glass. She hesitated a step beyond the doors and pulled her hood tighter, watched Razorface hunker down into his collar as he moved up the street, almost invisible until he passed through a puddle of light. Now it was Indigo's moment to hesitate. See where he's going or see where he's been?

  He turned sideways — still going the way they'd come — and that decided her. Indig
o jaywalked across the empty street with inchworm steps, careful to lift each foot up and set it down vertically so it wouldn't slip on the ice, muffling her face against stinging precipitation. She closed her eyes in relief when she stepped through the doors into the warm exhalation of the rust-carpeted foyer, then smiled with irony. Maybe I should just get a room here for the night.

  She had no way to tell what room Razorface might have visited. So she tugged off her girly little hat, unzipped her parka, and picked a hesitant path across the carpet and the tile toward a tastefully appointed front desk. No potted evergreens here, thank God. She rang the bell to bring the duty clerk out of the back.

  A young man appeared, handsomely Eurasian. Decades of troubles in the Far East had brought Indigo's family to North America, along with thousands of others.

  The clerk smiled at Indigo, and she smiled back. “Can I help you, miss?”

  Indigo slid a well-practiced mask of hope and shyness over her features and smiled prettily. “I… Um.” She studied her shoes for a minute and stuffed her right hand into her pocket. “Did a guy come in here? Big, black guy. Leather jacket—”

  “The teeth? Are you supposed to meet him? He just left.”

  “No, I wasn't supposed to meet him. Um.” She pulled her hand out and picked at the melting flakes of ice crusting her stocking cap. “He's my boyfriend, and I wondered…”

  Comprehension dawned across the young man's face. “I can't tell you what room he went up to, if that's what you want.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I can tell you—” His expression grew appraising. “I don't think you have anything to worry about.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The voice of experience,” he said, and grinned. “It's probably—” He swallowed one set of words and substituted another. “—just a work thing. Look, the cafe is closed, but if you want to sit down here in the chair I'll get the kitchen to bring you some coffee out and you can wait till the ice stops. I won't make you go back out in the storm.”

  Indigo glanced at the door. She didn't have what she'd come for, and this was a good excuse. She nodded. “Can I have cocoa instead?”

  “You can have anything you want. Sit down. I'll take care of you.”

  He got her a blanket, too, and she curled on a love seat and read world news and watched the late-night holofeed until she drifted almost into sleep. She half dreamed of a slender, wild-haired man she barely remembered giving her piggyback rides and telling her stories about another man — her father — that she didn't remember at all. Tell it again, Uncle Bernie.

  Tell it again.

  0555 Hours

  Tuesday 5 December, 2062

  Marriott Inn

  Toronto, Ontario

  It's not like I actually got drunk. But mixing stimulants, alcohol, and military-issue reflex and concentration-enhancement aids might not be the wisest course of action. Which is why you should hate me for waking up bright eyed, bushy tailed, and four minutes before my alarm goes off, Boris purring on my chest. Plenty of time for a long, hot shower. As if in my ear, I hear someone clear his throat.

  Richard?

  “You need to cope better than that, Jenny.”

  I know. Water like standing under a sluiceway, but steaming. It almost feels thick where it drums against my skin, driving the chill out. Would you feel happier if I had one hell of a hangover? When was the last time I was sloppy, self-indulgent, and maudlin?

  “Do you want a list?” Immaterial hands beat at virtual air. “All right. I know. I know you're worried, and you're right to be. Look, I'm learning how to run some basic programming on the nanotech. I'm making good progress with one of the Chinese pilots, but I'm concerned their government may try something drastic to put an end to the Canadian program, because I've come to understand where you're going and what the stakes are.”

  To hell in a handbasket?

  “If I thought it existed, I'd be worried. Can you actually imagine a supreme being that petty and erratic?”

  I let that slide, and wait. Richard, I sometimes think, is happy to hear himself talk. I taste hot water and soap, close my eyes, draw a valentine's heart in the steam on the rippled glass door.

  “HD 210277,” he says. “A G7V main sequence star very similar to the Sun but a little less bright, and about sixty-nine light-years away. As long ago as the turn of the century, we knew it had a planetary system — a gas giant with an erratic orbit, but it more or less sits in the habitable zone. That's where the generation ships that the Chinese launched ten years ago are going. And it's where you'll be going, too.”

  “Why?” I put a hand over my mouth. Oops. What do they want with it?

  “More recent data indicate that one of that gas giant's moons has a very good shot at being earthlike.”

  Oh. They are colony ships. What about whoever lives there now?

  “If there is anybody… Jenny, you of all people ought to know how it works.”

  Yes. Yes I do. Richard — the Montreal can leapfrog those generation ships. We could have a colony long established before they ever arrive. Assuming we beat the Huang Di out there. The Chinese regime was crazy enough to send ships out there with no guarantee they had anyplace to land, and no way home? Why would anybody do something like that?

  “Have you looked around this planet lately?”

  How drastic an action might they take to prevent our getting there first?

  “It was never proven that the terrorist nuclear attack on Kyoto in 2040 was linked to the Chinese.”

  It was never proven that Israel had anything to do with the Cairo attacks either, but — oh. I see your point. It's a good thing I'm in a hotel shower, or the hot water would have run cold while I was chewing that over. I dress by rote, forgetting to dry my hair so water spots the collar of my sweater. I fell asleep with the curtains open, and when I glance out the window the world looks etched on the back of a crystal paperweight as far as the eye can see, a misting ice still drifting from the gray overhead. Icicles dangle like arm-long fangs from the ledges and awning of the hotel across the street: I see them through the wavy sheen of ice that makes my window look like watered glass. Like the shower door, come to think of it.

  Colony ships.

  “Jenny, by the way — you should know. I think your friend Koske is being courted by an interesting individual aboard ship, the programmer I've mentioned to you. Chris Ramirez. I have a suspicion that Ramirez isn't exactly what he appears. If there's any way you can get Colonel Valens to rerun the background check on him—”

  Thanks, Dick. I'll try, but he wouldn't be on the Montreal if they hadn't gone over his history with a flea comb.

  There's something here I'm missing, and I'm still chewing on it while I shrug my jacket on and bounce down the stairs three at a time, spurning the elevator because I can. I wave to the boy behind the desk—

  And almost trip over a ghost.

  I actually stumble. Stumble, put my steel hand out for balance, and take two short steps back, catching my heel on red-brown patterned carpet. I probably could have walked right past her unnoticed if I hadn't pulled the triple take, but as soon as she picks her head up from reading whatever she's reading on her hip I see the braid, the finer line of the nose over the rim of her mug, and the arch of the brow, and the similarity of profile fades.

  Fades, but doesn't vanish. I'm left with a cloying smell of chocolate in my nose and nagging nausea in my belly.

  She looks like Bernard Xu. That pretty little social activist I loved and lost — okay, I never loved him, but I liked him better than most, for all he had a bad habit of blowing things up when he didn't approve of them — something like half a lifetime ago. But this girl couldn't have even been born then. Could she? She might be thirty, I guess, but she looks about twenty-two.

  You live long enough in today's society, you collect so many faces that everybody starts to look like somebody. That's all it is. “I beg your pardon,” she says, standing up. Fifteen, maybe twenty f
eet away from me. “Do I know you?”

  “No, you just — look like someone I used to know.”

  I see the shock wrack her when she hears my voice. She blinks and glances down, eyes lighting on my prosthetic hand protruding under the black wool cuff of my coat. Her gaze slides back up slowly, eyes narrowing as she examines my face. “You're Genevieve Casey.”

  Simple declarative statement. I nod.

  “Holy shit!” she yells. And I duck as

  she straight-arms the

  full cup of cocoa at me,

  dives over the love seat

  (adrenaline dump into combat time,

  heartbeat slowing as

  reflexively

  I take off after her)

  clutching her HCD in her right

  hand hits the crash bar

  on the emergency door

  (alarm starts low,

  resonating under my skin, builds

  sirenlike

  to a piercing wail)

  and sails out onto

  the fresh-scraped

  de-iced pavement

  with me ten steps behind.

  Ten steps too far, it turns out. I don't run any faster than anybody else and she's easily twenty years younger than me.

  Damn it to hell.

  Richard? Who the hell was that?

  “I haven't got the resources I used to, Jenny. But I will see what I can find out. And be careful. In case. Okay?”

  You don't have to tell me twice.

  I'm late for work, too, because I have to go change to a sweater that's not covered in cocoa and wash the milk and sugar out of my hair.

  6:30 AM

  Tuesday 5 December, 2062

  Bloor Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  For Leah, waking up in her own bed that morning was a luxury. She stretched under the covers and waved her musical alarm off. It took two tries; she jerked her hand past too fast for the sensor the first time. Then waved it back on and lay there listening to what another generation would have called bubblegum pop, bouncy synthviol and electronika coupled with mindless lyrics, until she heard her father tap on the door. “Leah?”