And then Richard shows me sliding dots and telescopic images flicker on the big monitors as the Huang Di starts a burn and sideslips in space, coming around. I visualize her flaring attitude rockets, sailing like a belly-flopping diver over the Atlantic. And then she stalls, momentum burned off as the attitude jets reverse and she swaps end over end and hesitates, her long frame bending with the violence of the action, her drive flaring, sending her tumbling, obviously out of control into the up that isn't up, exactly, but more precisely just away.
Almost.
It had almost been too late to stop her fall.
“Richard, what is going on out there?”
He doesn't answer, brushes my query aside. And then the Calgary moves, suddenly, quicksilver, unfurling her wings.
I am not ready for the shock I feel when her image splits apart, shatters into two parts, and one tumbles back-up-away while the other follows the Huang Di down, down, down. “—marde! Putain de marde!”
Richard, what just happened?
Richard?
Marde.
I reach into my pocket. The Hyperex is there. Old friend, crystal calm and lightning speed in a bottle. I fumble the cap, crack the bottle in half with my steel hand. Pick two of them off the fabric of my jumpsuit and dry-swallow. Not scared now that I know I need it and it's not just pretty justifications. No. Hell, maybe you can kick an addiction after all.
“Gabe—”
He's staring at the monitors, at the Calgary coming apart like torn paper, disbelief bright on his face. And then something flashes on his console, illuminating a slight double chin and a day's worth of stubble. He looks down and his fingers start to move randomly through the three-dimensional holographic interface he prefers. “Marde. I missed another damned worm. Calisse de crisse.” He looks up again, looks down, torn between hiding his pain in his work and Ramirez's sabotage and watching the Calgary's forward section spread dragonfly wings to their utmost and surf downward, tacking across the solar wind to — unmistakably — claim the Huang Di's descent for her own.
“Gabe.”
He turns. His eyes—
I hold up the wire. “Leah.”
And I see him breathe in. Breathe out. And slowly shake his head once, no, and swallow. Hard.
The wire falls from my hands. I stand. The drug etches every shallow, hurting breath he takes into my memory clear as if drawn there. He lowers his gaze to his interface, and his hands move again. “Il y a rien que nous pouvons faire.”
There is nothing we can do.
Leah.
Richard, I'll kill you for this, you son of a bitch.
“Her decision, Jenny. Her plan. It might even work.”
Might. Why aren't I there? In her place? Falling like that? Dammit, Leah, it was supposed to be my job to die for you, you silly girl. As Gabe goes about his work, not looking up. Not looking at the blazing image lighting the wall as the Calgary contacts atmosphere and starts to burn.
The bridge and the crew quarters aren't shielded for reentry. But there's lead and armor plate around the processor core array, because there are fusion power cells in there. It's all self-contained. And Richard's right.
It could work.
At least it will be over fast. She won't burn. She won't feel a thing.
Like flying it into a mountainside.
I stand there like an idiot, scatter of pills around my feet and crushed underfoot, dazzle of my senses and, at last, that maddening flutter of the light starting to fade to a bearable flicker as the Hammers kick in.
“Jenny!” Gabe's voice rough and torn. It's not the first time he's shouted.
It's the first time I heard.
I walk away from him, up the curve of the Montreal's hull, and lay my hand on the holographic monitor screen. The fluid under its membrane distorts and ripples at my touch, making the broken shape of the Calgary look as if she were smeared across the starry sky. Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce—
No.
You know what?
I don't want to talk to God right now.
Richard?
“I'm here.”
Tell her we love her, if you have enough time. Tell her—
— tell her she's not going into this alone.
“Tell her yourself,” Richard says, and I see through Leah's eyes, and feel the ship burning around her — aluminum skin sloughing, viewscreens dead black and the few small round ports lit red, orange, white with the fire—
I want to jerk back, look away. Let go before my fingers burn, and all the pain and memories come back, the fear and the burning. There's a lot of fire. There's so much goddamned fire.
To much to crawl through. To much to reach through.
Hell, Gabe did it for me—
— and then I'm there. Somehow. In her head. As if I took my little girl in my arms and held her tight and she's not a little girl anymore, and I still can't save her, can I? Because you can't. I can't save her from my mistakes. Any more than I could save Nell. But at least I can hold Leah's hand.
Can you hear me, chérie?
“Aunt Jenny?”
I'm here. I love you. Your dad loves you, too.
“Don't be mad at me—”
Sweetheart—
Gone.
Nothing. Instantaneous, no pain.
Like flying it into a mountainside.
Gone, and I'm standing on the bridge of the Montreal, and I don't know how I'm standing. And Gabe can't look, and I can't look away.
It's beautiful. Just fucking gorgeous, streaks of teal and amber light, a glorious tumble and glitter dripping embers like fireworks and sparklers and Canada Day and New Year's Eve and the Fourth of fucking July.
Merry fucking Christmas, Gabriel.
I can't look away. But when the trails of light flicker out, flicker down, end against the blue pall of the sea, I sit down on the floor and fold my hands. I'll cry later, I tell myself, hearing the utter silence behind me as Gabe stops working and just stands.
Breathing in. Breathing out again.
Fuck it. I think I'll cry right now.
Except I don't get the chance, because the wheel spins and the hatchway comes open as if somebody kicked it. It bounces off the rubber stopper on the wall and Wainwright bulls through the opening, Patty a half-step behind.
“Casey,” the captain snaps, voice sharp enough to pick my ass up off the floor. Yeah, yeah. I wipe the snot off my face, wincing when I see the unsnapped safety strap on the pistol at her hip. “What the fuck's going on out there?”
“Captain.” You blank your mind and let the words come out, crisp and even. You don't think about what they mean, and you sure as hell don't think about what you're saying. “The Calgary has been destroyed. I believe her pilots crashed her intentionally, in an attempt to use the ship-borne Benefactor technology to redress the ecological damage caused by the meteorite.”
“The Huang Di?” She stops. She rubs her hands together as if they hurt.
“Damaged. Out of control. Probably salvageable, I think, if somebody can catch her.”
Patty's mouth comes open and her lips shape names as if it would hurt her to say it out loud. Calgary. Leah.
I catch her eye and nod. Oh, baby. I'm sorry. The filter of the drug shows me blood on her mouth, amplifies her soft little whine into the audible range. Wainwright's still staring at me, and I still can't meet her eyes.
“I believe one of the Huang Di's pilots had a crisis of conscience, ma'am.” I steal a look at the monitors, and the streaks and clots of wreckage smearing Earth's dusty globe. Richard tells me the coverage is so quick, so complete because the impact blows debris into orbit.
Literally.
Wainwright's right hand comes up, fingers parted, and covers her mouth. She lifts her chin and follows my gaze, so we're both looking at the devastated Earth. And not at each other. “We have orders, Master Warrant.”
“Captain—” I look at Gabe. He's come around the console and is picking his way across the
bridge, not close enough to me to be in the same line of fire. The two security types in the back corners of the bridge radiate tension; fabric chafes on fabric as they grip their weapons. “—I know.”
She nods to my chair, slight tilt of the head. Motherly. Annoyed, with a touch of hurry up. It doesn't hide the broken glass behind her eyes. I look over her shoulder at Patty, who steps around Wainwright. I can feel Gabe moving, feel Richard taut and silent at the back of my head.
Letting me handle it.
“Captain, are you going to do this thing?”
Tongue touching her lips, which have gone almost white. She nods once, eyes closed. “Master Warrant, if it makes you feel better, I order you to assume your post and carry out the prime minister's directives.”
I could put a bullet in her before she got her pistol clear of the holster, but what fucking good would that do anybody? In the long run, I mean.
“Casey?”
Gabe's there at my left hand, still moving forward casually, getting the captain between himself and the security. “Jenny. What orders?”
“Jenny.” Richard, and I know he wouldn't interrupt if he didn't have a reason. “Jenny, the core made it down intact. I'm spawning nanosurgeons in the Atlantic.”
You can be that many places at once?
“Call 'em subprocesses. It's inaccurate, but it will do.”
The breath that slides down my throat feels heavy as two lungs full of water. My voice bubbles through it. “Captain, no.”
“Jenny?” I can't look at Gabe right now.
Patty shuffles another step, hands twisting together in front of her waist as — oblivious — she walks into security's line of fire. Her grandfather's intense hazel eyes pinch at the corners, search first my face and then Wainwright's. “What are the orders, Captain?”
“Cadet,” Wainwright answers. “I'm relieving Master Warrant Officer Casey of duty. Will you please take the pilot's chair?”
Gabe looks at me, long powerful fingers flexing and relaxing as his hands hang by his sides.
I nod, knowing he'll understand. But Patty is still looking at me, poised on one foot, her whole balance saying torn. “Beijing,” I say. “Ma'am, given that Leah and Trevor have given their lives to ameliorate the damage, and at least one of the Chinese pilots was willing to do the same.”
“Orders,” she says, and I start to turn away. It's not something I'll let a sixteen-year-old girl have to live with. You know. I wish I could look Constance Riel in the eye and say, You make the decisions, and the kids live with them. Amen.
I'm pretty good at following orders. I imagine the captain of the Huang Di was, as well. Wainwright looks like she knows what she's doing is wrong, and it'll never be right inside her head again. She'll do what she'll do because she thinks she has to. Because it's the right thing to do. Because her country needs her.
I know that one pretty well. And Gabe's little girl is on the ground, and my friend Ellie, and I've suddenly got a crystal-clear image of Bernie Xu looking down at me under long dark lashes like a girl's, lit cigarette in his hand, body warm against mine in the dark of an unheated apartment as he asks me—Don't you even hate them a little?
You know something, Peacock? Hell of it is, I don't. I don't hate anybody anymore. I think I just ran the fuck out.
And besides.
Enough.
Enough fucking people dead for one day.
And my arm goes around Patty as I put her behind me, out of the way, spin and a handoff to Gabe and eyes back to Wainwright, hand almost to my pistol, hoping she followed, thinking security won't shoot through the captain to get to me—
— before I hear the weapons click across the bridge.
Almost, because she's standing well back, double-handed cop shooting stance and my sidearm is hopelessly secured, my right hand a good two feet from the holster and the strap buckled tight. “Casey,” she says, and I catch the tightness in her voice. “Hands up.”
I do it, keeping them beside my chest, letting the drop into combat time take my heartbeat subsonic. She's awful close, and I hate having guns pointed at me. But she's farther away than Indigo was, and I don't even have to catch the bullet, really. Given the nonpenetrators we've been issued for shipboard, I figure all I have to do is get that hand in the way. And I'm faster than I used to be.
But she's got backup.
Gabe pulls Patty back, away, smart enough to know he's no help in this one, and my shoulder blades hurt from the pressure of the cocked guns aimed at my chest. And Wainwright's got that look in her eye like she might decide to kneecap me instead of going for center of mass.
I can't say I blame her.
“Captain. Jaime. You can't stop us from taking this ship.”
The weapon doesn't shift. “I can put a bullet in you, Master Warrant, and Cadet Valens can fly this boat.”
“You're running out of pilots fast, Captain.”
She looks at me. I look at her. It's hard, with my heartbeat slow as molasses in my chest, every reflex screaming at me to pile onto her like a runaway train and hope the shot goes wild. Her lips tighten, one against the other. The pupils of her eyes go big. The gun never trembles.
Patty's voice; she tugs away from Gabe and straightens her shirt. “I won't do it. You can't make me. Leah—”
Wainwright slides her an angled glance, just the corner of her eye. I clear my throat, wanting her attention on me. Hands stay up, fingers relaxed, flesh and steel. I can feel Richard in me, but he's backing my play, keeping his mouth shut and letting me do the work.
“Cap, if there was another way — ma'am, I'd be the first in line.” Sweat beads my brow with the effort of looking away from the pistol in her hand, but once I have her gaze on me, I direct it back up at the monitors. At the trashed globe below us, the dust-storm tinge casting a pall over what should be pristine, shining swirls of alabaster and cobalt blue. “Do you really want that on your hands?”
I hear her heartbeat. Smell her sweat. Her eyes follow mine up, and they follow mine back down again. She doesn't nod. She never looks away.
But somehow I know.
I lower my hands to my sides and slowly turn my back on her, and walk up the sights of the security guards, and sit down in my chair. “Richard,” I say out loud. “Get Riel on the horn for me, would you please? Shall we go after the Huang Di, Captain Wainwright?”
Wainwright twists her hands. “Yes,” she says. “For all I'm tempted to leave her drifting for the next three hundred years. Her teeth are pulled. Let's bring her home.”
“A prize of war.” Gabe, surprisingly, bitterly.
Captain Wainwright flashes a smile that's all horror at him, and closes her eyes. “Why the hell not?” she answers. “Since it seems after all that we've gone privateer.”
“Richard? Can you take us around, please—”
“Jenny,” he answers through the ship's speakers. “I appear to have made a slight miscalculation.”
Patty crosses to me and sits down on the floor beside my chair, fingers laced around her drawn-up knees and her eyes unfocused. Shit.
She's lost more than I have, hasn't she?
I lay my hand on her shoulder and let it stay there. She doesn't look up, but she sighs like a sleeping puppy and leans into the touch. Kid has some iron in her.
“What's that, Richard?”
“The Benefactor ships are not going to arrive together.”
“What are you trying to tell me—”
And then screens smear white, and the sky is filled with ships glittering in the sunlight, and the moonlight, and the earthlight washing over us all.
12:51 PM
Friday 22 December, 2062
Le Camp des Pins
North of Huntsville, Ontario
Constance Riel sneezed and rubbed her burning eyes, lowering her fingers to glare at the cat curled purring on Genie Castaign's belly. Dr. Dunsany sat on thick Persian rugs with her back to the fieldstone fireplace, sidelit by the roaring fire, both hands wrapp
ed around an oversized tea mug, Genie's head in her lap. The tomcat nonchalantly washed a paw. The girl was sleeping. Two Mounties bracketed the door, and Riel could hear soldiers outside, see their lights flickering against the broken windows as they moved through the blasted woods beyond.
Riel stood and moved from the soot-stained couch to the darkened window. She peeled back a corner of the plastic sheeting taped over it. Cold wind trickled around the spiderwebbed remains of shatterproof glass, dirty snow blowing in swirls that only became visible when they passed through the faint glow of firelight and lamplight.
In the brightest hour of a winter afternoon, the sky overhead was starless and dark as burnt toast. There was still coffee in her mug, kept warm by the gadget in the bottom; she added a healthy dollop of brandy on top before knocking back half. “I should really send you back to jail,” she said, conversationally.
“Because the Montreal mutinied?”
“To prove a point.” Riel held the bottle out to Dunsany, and Dunsany looked down at the sleeping girl in her lap, so Riel crossed the room and crouched down beside her to pour. “I could order a nuclear strike.”
Dunsany closed her eyes as she drank, then set the half-empty mug aside. “And China would order one back, and the antiballistic defenses would soak up most of the damage, and the EU and UN would declare Canada a rogue state and PanMalaysia would go along with it. And I wouldn't be the only one in jail.”
Riel nodded, standing and setting the bottle on the mantel. “There's something to be said for effective world government.” She slid the hand not holding her coffee mug under sweaty, gritty hair and massaged the back of her neck, fighting a sneeze. It got away from her; she fumbled for a tissue. “Maybe we should create one.”
“It's an opportunity.”
“Or a threat. And there aren't any international laws against mass-driven weapons yet.”
“There will be. And,” Dunsany continued, “there's no telling what the Benefactors would think of a nuclear exchange.”
Riel grunted and finished her coffee. “I'd be more comfortable if they—did something, Doctor.”
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