Scardown jc-2

by Elizabeth Bear

  Leah never would have even seen it if she hadn't been through the augmentation. Aunt Jenny must have kicked in the stardrive the instant the asteroid touched the Montreal's vanes.

  Space tore around the wounded ship and the rock tore, too. The Montreal vanished, a blur, a smear of light across the sky, and a sound that scoured Leah's throat leaked between her teeth and tainted the air in her helmet.

  Richard's voice in her ear and Koske's. “Did we get it?”

  Leah leaned forward. Strained her eyes. And saw a curved splinter of reflected sunlight tumble past the Leonard Cohen's starboard stabilizer, close enough to reach out her hand and touch. Koske slewed the shuttle after it, but it was too late, already too late, and she knew it when she saw the mass of the asteroid start to burn.

  “Half,” she whispered, as Koske raised both gloved hands in the air and slammed them down on the Leonard Cohen's console, killing the thrust. “Richard, you got half.”

  10:15 PM

  Thursday 21 December, 2062

  Wellesley Street East

  Toronto, Ontario

  It was dark, and the bed was shaking. Genie mumbled and pulled her covers up, but bruising hands grabbed her and strong arms picked her up as the room light flared. “What else, Dr. Dunsany?”

  Genie opened her eyes and then shut them tight again. A big man held her close to his chest. “Ellie!”

  And then Ellie was beside her, warm hand on her arm, tucking trailing blankets around her. “Genie. We have to leave now. Right now.”

  Genie's eyes flew open. “For good?”

  Ellie nodded, holding the door open for the soldier — Genie saw now that it was a soldier, and pressed herself against his uniform. “Probably. We're going to see Leah and your papa. And Jenny.”

  Genie squirmed suddenly, slithered out of the startled soldier's grasp, the loose weave of her blue cotton blanket burning her skin. “Boris,” she shouted, and squirted out of the bedroom.

  “Genie— Shit. Come on. She—”

  Boris was curled on Ellie's bookcase, next to the stereo speaker. Genie grabbed him and dragged him against her chest. Startled claws bit into her nightgown, but he didn't scratch. Genie put her back against the books and clutched the orange tomcat tight. Real old-fashioned books that smelled of paper and leather and glue. “Boris comes,” she said, and saw Ellie make a lightning calculation and then scoop her up, cat and all.

  “All right,” she said, hefting Genie on her hip even though Genie's head rose higher than Ellie's did. “Come on. We have to run to the roof.”

  Genie had never ridden in a helicopter before, especially not jammed between armored men with guns, and she thought it was wonderfully exciting when the aircraft's nose went down hard and the acceleration left her stomach behind. She squealed, but Boris didn't like it and dug his face into the crease of her armpit, and then Ellie put her arm around Genie's shoulders. So Genie understood that she should be quiet, and cuddled close. One of the soldiers — a red-haired woman with a ridge-sharp nose — smiled wryly at Genie and tipped her head. “Hang tough, kiddo,” she said. “We'll be okay.”

  Half a second later, the cabin of the chopper lit up with green glare like the burn of an arc welder. The pilot, faceless behind heads-up goggles and a microphone, glanced upward and started to bring the helicopter around. Turned back the way they had come, nose down hard like a fighter tucking his chin to take a blow.

  Genie, leaning forward against her restraints, saw the lazy green streak drift across a sky dark as Chinese willow porcelain, shedding bits of fire along its way.

  10:50 PM

  Thursday 21 December, 2062

  Wellesley Street East

  Toronto, Ontario

  There's a certain irony bringing a kidnap victim to a safe house the woman set up for us, Indigo thought, following Razorface and the sedated contents of the five-foot duffel bag thrown over his shoulder up the stairs. She stepped around him at the top of the flight and pulled a worn, antique metal key from her pocket.

  Razorface smiled at her in the dim light of a single bulb, hung halfway down the corridor. “We've got her,” Indigo said, nibbling her lower lip. “Now what do we do?”

  “I'm gonna sneak her 'cross the border in the morning,” Razorface answered. She held the door for him. He crossed the creaking boards and laid Holmes's swaddled body on the same swaybacked couch. “I remember this place,” he said, raising a blackout shade across the window as Indigo walked through the kitchenette to turn on the light. Roaches scuttled from the curry stains dried to the counter, sulked under the edges of the broken plate. The room grew brighter as Razorface lifted the shade. “Shit,” he muttered. “Indy.”

  Something in his tone and the way an unwavering green light etched his face made her grab the edge of the countertop and vault the breakfast bar. She landed neatly in a crouch and came up beside him, one wiry hand on his arm. “What — oh.”

  The thing that lit his face burned in the heavens like a promise or a threat, the unwinking green eye of God. “It's the Star of Bethlehem,” Razorface said, drawing a stare from Indigo. “What? My mama raised me right.”

  “It's a missile,” she answered, and watched in wonder as the thing slid down the sky to the south, toward Cleveland or out into the lake, she couldn't be sure. “Should we head for the basement?”

  The light died like a blown-out birthday candle. He dropped one massive arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “You think it'll make a difference, babe?”

  Indigo had a pretty good eye for explosions. She craned her head for the possibility of a sudden brief report like a gigantic cannon shot, counting to judge how far away it might have hit.

  “No,” she answered, when the light that followed was silent and white as a pillar of fire, then red through the blood in her tight-closed eyelids. She squeezed him back. What the hell. “No. I don't think it will make a difference at all.”

  2300 Hours

  Thursday 21 December, 2062

  PPCASS Huang Di

  Under way

  The Huang Di pressed Min-xue's skin like a wet suit, moving with every stretch, flexing with every twist. He floated in the dark confines of a wiring locker, the door wedged from the inside, the cut-free crash webbing from an unused bunk holding him immobile so the interface pins — improvised from spare parts — in his neck wouldn't jar loose. He'd been feeding speed and trajectory information to the AI through his physical links to the machine, wondering the whole time what the captain had intended him to do.

  If Captain Wu had meant for Min-xue to somehow sabotage the launch, wouldn't he have seen to it that Min-xue was piloting during the attack? Wouldn't he have told him more?

  No, Min-xue decided, as he felt the projectile fall away, a faint shudder along the Huang Di's spine and through its metal hide. Captain Wu would protect his family. He would see that the attack was impeccably planned and executed. He would drop hints to Min-xue, and he would hope that Min-xue would take the risk of sabotage.

  The first pilot and the captain were tracking the rock's trajectory in terms of fractions of centimeters. Min-xue tapped into the feed and rode it like a ghost over their shoulders, relaying the information to an AI who barely acknowledged his words except to ask the occasional question. One final flurry of questions, and then silence that stretched around the tick of Min-xue's heart. He wondered how long he could stay hidden in the locker, wired into the machine before they found him.

  Richard would hide him.

  The Huang Di was long as an old-fashioned freight train: measured in kilometers, a fragile-looking stick-insect construct carrying 150 souls. It could take days to ferret Min-xue out. He had water. Could live for a while without food, although toilet facilities would be a problem. With Richard's help and enough time to hack security, he could take control of the starship instead of just riding its impulses. He could stop the captain from trying again until the threat of the Montreal, alive and well and ready to retaliate despite the sabotage attempt
s, was made manifest. The Montreal, Min-xue hoped, with her command structure intact and her pilots safely aboard, should be enough to quell Beijing.

  If Canada retaliated, no one was safe. Captain Wu's family. The girl Min-xue might have married, who was probably married to somebody else by now. His mother. His home.

  Richard, he said, holding a slow-drawn breath. Did you catch it?

  He wasn't used to silence from the Canadian AI, but Richard let the wordlessness stretch until Min-xue knew the answer, and his hope fell away. He remembered a poem, and he reached for it.

  Flying lights, flying lights

  I toast you with wine.

  I know not if the blue heavens soar high

  Yellow earth plunges fertile.

  I see only cold moon, fevered sun

  Rise to afflict us.

  “No,” Richard said, then. “No, I didn't.”

  D=0.07Cf (ge/g)1/6 (W pa/pt)1/3.4, where Cf = the collapse factor of the crater walls; ge = the gravitational acceleration of the surface of the Earth (9.8 meters per second per second squared). Richard quite frankly guessed at pa, the density of the impacting body (~7.3 g/cm3); and pt, the density of the (~3.0 g/cm3) target rock. He knew the velocity of the rock and its approximate mass, which gave him W, the kinetic energy expressed by the impacting body — in kilotons TNT equivalent. Which led inexorably to—

  D, the diameter of the crater that would be formed when a third of the original asteroid, diverted a few hundred kilometers from its intended target, struck Lake Ontario and leveled everything within roughly thirty kilometers of the epicenter. The impact would create a seismic event equivalent to the worst the San Andreas fault had to offer, lift the inland sea into a tsunami that would scour its shores like a hungry tongue, and rain molten rock across Ontario, Ohio, Michigan, New York, and environs. The immediate climatic effects could lower global temperatures by as much as two degrees Celsius for a period of weeks or months, followed by a greenhouse spike as the particulate matter drifted out of the atmosphere.

  Nothing to compare to the impact at Chicxulub that probably contributed to the mass extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous, of course.

  But it would serve. It would serve.

  If he had eyes to close, Richard Feynman would have closed them then. Elspeth.

  I'm sorry.

  Trevor hit the console again, because it felt good. He would have hit it a third time, but the Castaign girl flinched at the sound, so he lowered his hands and leaned back in his chair, letting the Leonard Cohen drift. “Damn it,” he muttered. “If Casey didn't have to prove every second that she's better than everybody else—”

  “The shuttle couldn't have done it.” The girl's voice was level and oddly adult over the tinny suit mike. She leaned her helmet against the reinforced crystal of the view port, one glove pressed alongside, and watched the green-gold trail of the asteroid descend. Her shoulders lifted with a sigh. “Too close. Too fast.”

  Trevor nodded, although she couldn't have seen it. “We should get to the Calgary. Montreal might need help. We should go after the Huang Di.”

  “We shou—” Her voice didn't so much drop off as fail her utterly. “My sister's down there, Trevor.”

  “Oh.”

  The searing green light from below died suddenly as a heartbeat. Trevor swore and slapped the thrusters on, grabbed the yoke in both hands. “Stupid!”

  “What?”

  “Debris.”

  “This high?” She squeaked and leaned back into her seat as the shuttle lurched under his expert touch.

  A moment later, chaos bloomed like a flower under the shuttle's wings, ejecta and atmospheric blowout rising in a streak of inferno off her bow. Trevor spun the little ship around and took her up—relative to Earth — out to nearer Clarke's orbit. Richard, is this far enough?

  “Should be.”

  What about the beanstalks?

  “This will be little stuff.” The AI's voice sounded distanced again: cool and professional. “The antimeteor protocols should handle it. Head for the Calgary. Trevor—”

  Yeah?

  “Thanks for trying.”

  Thanks for nothing, you mean.

  4:29 AM

  Friday 22 December, 2062

  Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

  Hartford, Connecticut

  Kuai didn't notice the ache in her elbows as she leaned her chin on her hands, watching the live news feed, the incredible gaping wound that used to be a city. It was still dark outside, but she couldn't sleep, and somehow the office seemed a more natural place to sit alone and watch the dark, unbelievable footage of the devastation only a few hundred miles west. Her mind couldn't encompass the enormity of it — satellite photos, footage of a splintering streak of green light shredding the sky, and the ground-level footage that made her think of Hiroshima, Kyoto, Mumbai, Dresden, the flooded and fallen remains of Houston.

  Her eyes prickled with caffeine and sleeplessness. Toronto. Cleveland. Buffalo. Fires as far east as Albany and Ottawa.

  Thirty million dead.

  Thirty.

  She tasted salt. Unbelieving, childlike, dry eyed, she realized she was sucking on the webbing between her forefinger and her thumb. She pulled her hand away from her mouth. The sun had not yet risen, but she heard someone unlocking the outside door. Sally?

  Thirty million people. Dead.

  She stood and went to her office door, poked her head around the glass partition. Sally had walked to her desk and flipped on a different news feed. She stood perfectly still, her puffy quilted coat still zipped, twisting a few strands of ashen hair between her fingers: same footage, another angle. Sally's other hand held her headset to her ear, and Kuai could tell from the look of concentration on her face and the slight movements of her lips that she was triaging overnight messages.

  “Thirty million people,” Sally said a few minutes later, without looking at Kuai.

  Kuai swallowed. “Cancel that extradition proceeding, I think.”

  “Yeah.” Sally blinked, finally, and looked down at the lights on her interface.

  “Sally, go home.”

  “I can work.” She pressed thumb, then pinky, then the pad of her index finger to the interface, tilting the bridge of her hand with automatic efficiency. “By the way, a Col. Frederick Valens from the Canadian Army left a message with the service.”

  Kuai brushed it aside. “Sally, get in touch with Hartford Hospital. With Yale New Haven and St. Francis and New Britain. Hell. Manchester Memorial. Rockville. Anything. We're putting together a disaster team.”

  “Colonel Valens—”

  “Can wait.”

  “—says he wants to talk to you about Unitek. And — he says — the supposed criminal actions of one of its vice presidents.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Our friend Dr. Alberta Holmes. Valens is in Hartford. He wants to see you.”

  Kuai drew a long, slow, luxurious breath. She closed her eyes and let it out again. “Call Colonel Valens,” she said softly, “and tell him that if he wants to talk to me, he can get his ass on a bus and ride north. I'll be one seat over.”

  “He's a medical doctor, ma'am.”

  Sally never called her ma'am. “He's what?”

  “An M.D.”

  “Then tell him to bring his goddamned little black bag. And call the governor back, Sally, and tell him he needs to activate the national guard, because we're likely to have riots and looters and God knows what. Oh, and get in touch with Hartford PD and see if they can release anybody to go north. What did I forget?”

  Sally smiled and sat more upright, easing her shoulders. The line between her eyes smoothed to efficiency. “Coordinate with FEMA. Red Cross. Blood and medical supplies. Firefighters. Shit. We can't think of everything.”

  “It's not our job to think of everything,” Kuai answered, and slung her overstuffed pocketbook over her lab coat. “It's just our job to do as much as we can. Can you take care of Moebius for me while I'm out
of town?”

  “Kuai,” Sally answered, her sinewy hands halting as they adjusted her ear clip and headset over her hair. She looked up, green eyes serious behind straight brown hair still damp from the shower. “He can come stay with me. In case things get bad.”

  “Yeah,” Kuai answered, heading for the coat closet. “In case they get bad.”

  Overnight

  Friday 22 December, 2062

  HMCSS Montreal

  Earth orbit

  When Richard finally told Patty it was all right to uncouple Master Warrant Officer Casey from the ship, the older pilot had collapsed; Mr. Castaign had finished the code he was working on while Casey huddled in an observation chair in the bridge corner, holding a steaming mug in her hands as if she was too tired to sip from it. He'd picked her up like an overgrown child to carry her to quarters, and Wainwright had touched his shoulder and whispered something low in his ear.

  Wainwright turned around as she redogged the bridge hatch behind him; Patty knew she'd been caught looking and glanced down at her hands. “Pilot—” the captain said, and Patty looked back up, her lip caught in her teeth.

  “Ma'am.”

  “Can you fly this thing? I need somebody in that chair if the Chinese come back and—” she paused. “It's a lot to ask of you, but I hear you were the best of your class, and you're all I've got.”

  Patty blinked.

  I hear you were the best of your class.

  “My family—” Patty said. “Papa Georges. Papa Fred. My parents.” My boyfriend. She didn't say that out loud. She knew what her mother would have said. It's a mercy he never knew what was happening.

  A mercy. Is that what you call it, Mom?

  “I know,” Wainwright answered, staring at her hands as they moved aimlessly over her console, the appearance of activity more vital than the reality. “My husband was on the ground. I — well. We have to be bulletproof, Cadet. You know why?”

  “No.” Patty put her hand over her mouth when she tasted blood.