Gods of Risk (2 page)

“Good King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen…”

Leelee didn’t open her eyes, but she smiled. That was good enough. For ten minutes, David went on, quietly singing Christmas carols to Leelee. Some he got into and didn’t remember the right words, so he just made things up. Nonsense that fit the rhythm of the music, or nearly did.

The detonation was the loudest thing David had ever heard, less a sound than a physical blow. The car pitched forward, rattling against the walls of the tube, throwing Leelee into him and then back. The lighting flickered, failed, and then came on in a different color. They were stopped between stations. The monitors clicked to a pinkish-gray as they rebooted, then glowered back to life with the emergency services trefoil.

“Is this happening?” Leelee asked. Her irises were tiny rings of brown around deep black. “David? Is this happening?”

“It is, and it’s all right,” he said. “I’m here. We’re fine.”

David checked his hand terminal, thinking that the newsfeeds might tell him what was going on—power failure, rioting, enemy attack—but the network was in lockdown. An almost supernaturally calm male voice came over the public monitors. “The public transport system has encountered a pressure anomaly and has been shut down to assure passenger safety. Stay calm and a maintenance crew will arrive shortly.” The message was less important than the tone of voice it was spoken in, and Leelee relaxed a little. She started to giggle.

“Well this is fucked,” she said and grinned at him. “Fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked,
fucked
.”

“Yeah,” David said. His mind was already jumping ahead. He’d be late getting home. His father would want to know why, and when it came out he’d been in Martineztown, there’d be questions. What he’d been doing there, who had he been seeing, why hadn’t he told anybody. All around them, the other passengers were grumbling and sighing and arranging themselves into comfortable positions, waiting for the rescuers. David stood up and sat down again. Every passing minute seemed to relax Leelee and shunt that tension into his spine. When he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass of the tube doors, the boy looking back seemed furtive and scared.

Half an hour later, the emergency hatch at the end of the car creaked, popped, and opened. A man and a woman in matching blue security uniforms stepped in.

“Hey, folks,” the man said. “Everyone all right? Sorry about this, but some jackhole broke the vacuum seals. Whole system’s going to be down for about six hours, minimum. Some places longer. We’ve got service carts out here that can take folks to transport buses. Just line up single file, and we’ll get you where you’re going.”

Leelee was humming to herself as David drew her into line. He couldn’t get her to Innis Shallow and get back home. Not with the tubes down. He bit his lips and they moved forward one at a time, the other passengers vanishing through the emergency hatch and into the temporary airlock beyond it. It took forever to reach the front of the line.

“Where are you two headed?” the security man asked, consulting his hand terminal. It was working, even though David’s wasn’t. The man looked up, concerned. “Hermano. Where are you two headed?”

“Innis Shallows,” David said. And then, “She’s going to Innis Shallows. I was taking her there, because she’s not feeling so good. But I’ve got to get to Breach Candy. I’m going to miss my labs.” Leelee stiffened.

“Innis Shallows and Breach Candy. Step on through.”

The temporary airlock was made from smooth black Mylar, and walking through it was like going through the inside of a balloon. The pressure wasn’t calibrated very well, and when the outer seal opened, David’s ears popped. The hall was wide and low, the dull orange emergency lights filling the passage with shadows and leaching the color out of everything. The air was at least five degrees colder, enough to summon gooseflesh, and Leelee wasn’t holding his arm anymore. Her eyebrows were lifted and her mouth was set.

“It’ll be okay,” he said as they came close to the electric carts. “They’ll get you home all right.”

“Yeah, fine,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I’ve got to get home. My dad—”

She turned to him. In the dim light, her dilated eyes didn’t seem as out of place. Her sobriety made him wonder how much she’d really been feeling it before and how much had been a playful kind of acting.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Not the first time I’ve been tripping in public, right? I can behave myself. Just thought you’d come play and I was wrong. Hard cheese for me and moving on now.”

“I’m sorry. Next time.”

“You call it,” she said with a shrug. “Next time.”

The driver of the cart for Innis Shallow called out, and Leelee clambered aboard, squeezed between a middle-aged man and a grandmotherly woman, and waved back at David once. The middle-aged man glanced at David, back at Leelee, then down at the girl’s body. The cart lurched, whined, and lurched again. David stood, watching it pull away. The mixture of shame, regret, and longing felt like an illness. Someone touched his elbow.

“Breach Candy?”

“Yes.”

“Over here, then. Damn. You’re a big one, aren’t you? All right, though. We’ll fit you in.”

It was two years almost to the day since David had met Hutch at the lower university. David had been in the commons, the wide, carpeted benches with their soft, organic curves welcoming the students eating lunch. At thirteen, David had already been biochemistry track for two years. His last labs had been in tRNA transport systems, and he was reading through the outline for the carbon complex work that would take up his next six months when one of the seniors—an olive-skinned boy named Alwasi—had sat down beside him and said there was someone David should meet.

Hutch had made himself out as more of a scholar back then but still with an edge to him. For months, David had thought the man was an independent tutor; the kind of hired instructor a family might bring on if their children were falling behind. David still had seven rounds of lab to go before his placement, so he hadn’t thought too much about Hutch. He’d just become another face in the whirl of the lower university, one more minor character in the cast of thousands. Or hundreds at least.

Looking back, David could sort of see how Hutch had tested him. It had begun with asking innocuous little favors—tell someone who shared David’s table that Hutch was looking for her, get Hutch a few grams of some uncontrolled reagent, keep a box for him overnight. They were things that David could do easily, and so he did. Every time, Hutch praised him or paid him back with small favors. David began to notice the people Hutch knew—pretty girls and tough-looking men. Several of the low-tier instructors knew Hutch on sight, and if they weren’t overly friendly to him, they were certainly respectful. There hadn’t been any one moment when David had crossed a line from being someone Hutch knew to cooking for him. It all happened so smoothly that he’d never felt a bump.

The fact was he would have done the side projects for Hutch without being paid. He couldn’t spend the money on anything too extravagant for fear his parents would ask questions, so he used it here and there—a little present for Leelee or lunch on him for the other students at his table or the occasional indulgence that he could explain away. For the most part, it just sat in the account, growing slowly over time. The money wasn’t precious because it was money. It was precious because it was secret and it was his.

When he had his placement and moved out to student housing in Salton, he’d have more freedom. Hutch’s money would buy him a top-flight gaming deck or a better wardrobe. He could take Leelee out for fancy dinners without having to explain where he’d been or who he’d been with. The workload would be harder, especially if he got placed in medical or development. He’d heard stories about first-year placements on the development teams who pulled fifty-six hour shifts without sleep. Carving out another six hours after that for Hutch might be hard, but he’d worry about that when he got there. He had more immediate problems.

The transport buses were old, wheezing electrical carts, some of them dating back two generations. The drivetrain clicked under him, and the rubberized foam wheels made a constant sticky ripping noise. David hunched in a seat, trying to pull his elbows close in against his body. Around him, the other travelers looked bored and restless. The system was still locked down, his hand terminal restricted to what it held in local memory. He checked it every few seconds just to feel he had something to do. The wide access corridors passed slowly, the conduits and pipes like the circulatory system of some vast planetary behemoth. It seemed like the corridor would go on forever, even though the distance between Martineztown and Breach Candy wasn’t more than forty kilometers.

He was supposed to be in his labs at the lower university. Even if all the public transport was locked down, it wasn’t more than a half-hour walk from there to home. David figured he could claim to have been in the middle of something and that it had taken longer than he’d expected to finish up the work. Except that was the excuse he’d been giving to cover the extra time he’d spent cooking for Hutch. His mother had already started wondering in her vague accusation-without-confrontation way whether he was losing focus on his work. If they found out he’d been outside the neighborhood, it would be bad. If they found out why, it would be apocalyptic. David cracked his knuckles and willed the bus to go faster.

It was easy to think of Londres Nova as existing only along its tube lines, but the truth was generations of colonists and prototerraformers had made a webwork of tunnels under the airless permafrost of Mars. Whole complexes of the original tunnels had gone fallow—sealed off and the atmosphere and heat allowed to flow away into the flesh of the planet. Supply passages linked to electrical maintenance lines. There were shortcuts, and the bus driver knew them. Just when David was about to weep or scream with frustration, he saw the edge of Levantine Park and the northernmost edge of Breach Candy. The bus was going faster than he could walk, but just knowing where he was, being able to map his own way home, made the frustration a little less. And the fear maybe a little more.

I didn’t do anything wrong
, he told himself.
I was in my lab. There was a security alert and the network went down. I had to finish the experiment, and it took a little longer because everyone was trying to find out what had happened. That’s all. Nothing else.

The fifth time the bus stopped, he was as close to his family’s hole as he was going to be. He lumbered out into the corridors of his hometown, his head down and his shoulders tucked in toward his chest like he was trying to protect something.

The family lived in a series of eight rooms dug out of the stone and finished with textured organics. Rich brown bamboo floors met soft mushroom-brown walls. The lights were indirect LEDs alleged to match a sunny afternoon on Earth. To David, they were just the color house-lights were. A newsfeed was muttering in the common rooms, so some portion of the system must have been taken off security lockdown. David closed the door behind him and stalked through the kitchen, fists against his thighs, breath shallow and fast.

Aunt Bobbie was alone in the den. In any other family, she’d have been huge. For a Draper, she was only about the middle of the bell curve in height, but athletic and strong. She wore a simple loose-cut outfit that lived somewhere between sweats and pajamas. It mostly hid the shape of her body. She looked away from the video feed, her dark eyes meeting his, and killed the sound. On the screen, a reporter was speaking earnestly into the camera. Behind him, a lifting mech was hauling a slab of ferrocrete.

“Where’s Dad?” he asked.

“Stuck in Salton with your mom,” Bobbie said. “The blowout was on that line. Security’s saying they’ll have everything moving again in about ten hours, but your father said they’d probably be taking a room and coming home in the morning.”

David blinked. No one was going to give him any grief. It should have felt like relief. He shrugged, trying to get the tension out of his shoulders, but it wouldn’t go. He knew it didn’t make sense to be irritated with his parents for not being there to fight with.

“Do we know what happened?” he asked, stepping into the room.

“Sabotage,” Aunt Bobbie said. “Someone blew a hole between the tube and the maintenance corridor, sucked in a few thousand kilos of air. They took the vacuum seals off-line too, so the whole tube system popped like a balloon.”

“Earth?”

Aunt Bobbie shook her head.

“Earth doesn’t think that small,” she said. “This is someone local trying to start something.”

“Why would someone local blow up our own stuff if they’re mad at Earth?”

“Because Earth’s too far away.”

It didn’t sound like an answer to his question, but David let it go with another shrug.

Aunt Bobbie’s gaze was on the monitor and not on it. Through it. Seeing something else. He knew she’d been on Ganymede when the fighting started and that something had happened so that she wasn’t in the military anymore and she had to live with them. The unfairness of her bringing her problems into his house chafed. She sighed and forced a smile.

“How’d things go at the lab?”

“All right,” he said.

“What’re you working on?”

“Just labs,” he said, not looking at her.

“Your dad said he expected your placement to come through soon. Find out what you’ll be doing for the next eight years.”

“Guess.”

Aunt Bobbie smiled.

“I remember when I first got into training. There was a breakdown in the notification system, and they wound up losing my placement for about six days. I was chewing through rocks until it came through. What about you? Are you more excited, scared, or pissed off?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Your dad’s really proud of you,” Aunt Bobbie said. “Whatever happens, he’s going to be really proud of you.”

David felt the flush of warmth rising in his neck and cheeks. For a second he thought he was embarrassed, but then he recognized the rage. He clamped his jaw tight and looked at the monitor so that he wouldn’t be looking at Aunt Bobbie. The mech was gesturing to a ragged hole two meters high and half a meter wide, the man controlling it speaking to the reporter as steel claws pointed out the fine cracks fanning unpredictably out from the breach. David’s teeth ached and he made himself relax his jaw. Aunt Bobbie turned back to the screen. He couldn’t read her expression, but he had the feeling that he’d exposed something about himself he didn’t want her to know.