Hammered (20 page)

It’s a joy just to have him nearby and mad at me. “Gabe, do you have any idea how much I’ve missed you?”

He sits back, blinks at me—
“Pardon?”
—and I make eye contact long enough to shrug.

My boots stick to the floor under the booth where somebody spilled a soda. There’s a squelching sound when I peel them free. “What Valens said is true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t begin to cover the territory. I’m sick, yeah. He’s not lying about that. But there’s a whole lot of other stuff going on I’m not sure about.”

He could even have the conversation bugged. Be tracing either or both of us. Probably is, in fact, so I’m going to say what I expect he wants to hear.

“But?” Gabe is waiting for me to continue, turning a spoon over and over in his hand. He hasn’t looked down.

“But I’m reasonably sure whatever you’re working on for him has to do with what I’m working on for him, and that he has some master plan for you and me.” I can’t explain all my suspicions—like the nasty sneaking thought I have nagging at the back of my brain that Valens set Gabe up to
need
this job so badly just so that he could offer it to him. And my even weirder suspicion, the one I’d almost laugh at for
its narcissism, that for reasons I do not entirely understand, everything that has been happening revolves around me.

On the other hand, it could be a paranoid delusion. I’m given to understand I should be expecting those to start any time now. Fuck. All I ever wanted was a house on the Atlantic coast, maybe a dog or two and a husband who gave backrubs. How the hell I wound up with all this drama—Christ, I’ll never know.

Gabe’s looking at me. He expects me to continue, and I spread my hands wide and reach for another slice of pizza. Buying a little time, I turn my head to check on the girls. Their heads are under the VR helmets, and I can hear Genie laughing from here.

Laughing. Not coughing. Gabe glances over at his daughters and I see him grin. Genie has cystic fibrosis. Something for which there are many, many treatments these days—and still no cure. He looks back at me. “My project is classified,” he says. “I’d love to talk about it, Jen. But.”

“Don’t worry. I know what your project is. In gross detail, anyway. Doctor Dunsany’s lucky she ever saw the light of day again.” Gabe and I both almost went to jail under the Military Powers Act many years ago. Secrets having to do with what I carry under my skin. I’m not at all proud of what I did to keep us both on the outside, and Gabe doesn’t know about most of it.

And never will. But I’m going to count coup on Fred Valens, I swear, if it’s the last thing I do.

He laughs and sips his beer. “I guess it’s pretty obvious, at that. But it doesn’t relate to what you’re here for, from what you said earlier.”

“Could be. Right now, I’m here for extensive surgery. Which I’m assured is grossly noninvasive, whatever the fuck that means. And then I pay for it.”

“Pay for it?” His eyebrows go up. “What does the slippery Colonel Valens want from you?”

The grin takes over my face whether I want it to or not. “He wants to use me as a baseline to calibrate a VR pilot training program. Apparently pushing fifty and with my enhancements in disarray, I’m still faster than the kids he’s dragging out of flight training. That’s classified, too, of course.”

“So why are you telling me?”

The pizza is room temperature, and it still tastes good. Rich as the sensation of homecoming that enfolds me when Gabe reaches out and lays his hand over the leather glove covering my steel hand. I think of Valens’s promise to make me feel again, and my chest goes tight and strange, because I have no intention of taking him up on it. Not that I’m going to let him find that out.

I wish I remembered what it felt like to wake up in the morning and not hurt over every inch of my body.
And then there’s ice-cold fear in the pit of my stomach, because I’m remembering my orientation that morning. “Because Valens needs me more than I need him right now, and because I need help.”

“Sure. Anything.” He checks on the girls again, and I wash the pizza—mushrooms, peppers, meatballs—down with a mouthful of beer.

“He wants me back on the narcotics. Under medical supervision. And I’m going to be taking Hyperex again, once the trials start. Not the Hammer, exactly. A new drug. Similar.”
Merc, dark grayish purple and gasping, arching like a hooked fish … No. Don’t think about it, Jenny. Or think about it. Think about what it means.

That drug came from here.

“Maker. Jen. Tell me you’re fucking kidding.” He’s not
looking at his kids now. The blue eyes bore into mine, anger rising across his face.

“I’m not. I’m told they won’t let me go through the nanosurgery without painkillers. And the research I’ve signed on for … well, they say I’ll need the Hammer for that.”

His voice is bleak. He’s drawing on the tablecloth with the tip of his unused knife. “We went through this once.”

Twice. Well, Gabe only went through it once.
I catch myself rubbing the crook of my left arm as if there could still be any scars there. They’re gone, of course. Vanished like my life before the army. I have the sudden unholy urge to go find Chrétien, and it makes me want to turn my head and spit. Because I know I’m going to do it. Tomorrow. Or maybe the next day.

“I know. Valens knows …” everything. Well, not quite everything. But enough. “I’m gonna need you at my back.”

He’s unhappy about it. He nods anyway, because he’s my best friend, and we look out for each other.

“Gabe, I have to make a call. Wait for me?”

“Of course.” He knows I’m walking away from the conversation, and he lets me go anyway. Good man.

I use the wireless network to hook into a pay terminal across from the VR games. I promised to call Razorface, and I don’t want to do it on my own HCD. Call it paranoia.

He’s not answering, so I leave a message and hang up. I’m about to step out of the cubbyhole when a voice from my ear clip stops me cold.

“Ms. Casey.” Educated tones, American accent. West Coast? Maybe. Something cosmopolitan, something a bit archaic about the diction, and a subtle edge of excitement.

“Who are you?” And the edge in
my
voice is something else.

“I’m the ghost of Richard Feynman. And you are in a heck of a lot of trouble.” The screen beside me flickers on,
revealing a gray-haired man with a face like a contour map, shifting restlessly as if from foot to foot. He grins. “And I really think we can help each other out.”

I turn back, trying to look as if I had just remembered another call I needed to make. “Ah. I see. And I’m supposed to know who Richard Feynman is because why?”

He laughs, delighted. “You have no idea how refreshing that is to hear. What I am, Ms. Casey, is an artificial intelligence created in the image of a man who has been dead for seventy-four years. I’m a friend of Elspeth Dunsany’s, and I need to get her a message without Colonel Valens finding out about it.”

Elspeth slid a holographic crystal out of the outdated reader and tapped her interface off. She really ought to make a stab at transferring the data to more modern storage devices.
I could probably stretch that out over at least three days if I worked at it. Valens is going to get cranky if I keep reviewing the old data. I wonder if he’s figured out that I’m stalling.

I wonder if I can justify starting over from scratch. New personalities. I could pick ones that seem to fit the criteria but are somehow subtly wrong to develop into true AIs.

I could. If I had any real solid clue what it was that made Feynman different from the rest. As it is, I’ve got just as much chance of building Valens his AI by accident as on purpose. And I am not handing the man a slave intelligence. Not if I can help it.
She sighed and set the crystal on her desk,
scrubbing her hands across her face before she reached for her mug. Cold tea, smelling of ashes. She drank it anyway, and wiped the mug out with her handkerchief.

She set it down once clean and rattled her fingers on the edge of her desk, away from the interface. The memory of Gabe Castaign bending over her outside the coffee shop that morning and dropping half a kiss on the corner of her mouth rose up to trouble her. She wondered if she could call him, and decided there was time enough to worry about it when an old friend hadn’t just blown in from out of town.

“All right,” she said at last, pushing her chair back to stand. “Tomorrow I’ll think about this.”

“Think about what, Doctor Dunsany?”

Elspeth was in the habit of leaving her office door open, because she could. She looked up to see Alberta Holmes, resplendent in gold and navy blue with matching shoes, primly framed in the doorway. “Doctor Holmes. Come in. I was just about to head out for the night.”

“We can talk tomorrow if you prefer. And please, I’m a Ph.D.—I don’t need to be called ‘Doctor’ outside of a classroom.” The Unitek VP came a step farther in.

“I’d rather get it out of the way,” Elspeth said, wincing as she heard the tone of her own voice. She wondered if the visit had something to do with her own brief conversation with Gabe’s friend at lunchtime. “I’m on my way to the hospital.”

“How is your father?” Alberta strolled across the forest-green carpeting.

Elspeth picked up the crystal and went around her desk the opposite way, bending to replace it in its rack. “As well as can be expected,” she answered. “I don’t expect he’ll see Christmas. I appreciate what you’ve done for him, however. And for me.” She was surprised at how level her voice sounded, even to her own ears.

“We—appreciate—the compromises you’re making on our behalf. I’m very glad I caught you here, actually. I’m going over Colonel Valens’s head a bit to tell you this, but I’m in favor of full disclosure. Expecting scientists to work with partial information is, well, silly. And Fred should know that.” Alberta tilted her head inquiringly as Elspeth straightened from replacing Woolf’s crystal in the rack.

Something uncoiled in Elspeth’s belly. As if drawn by an invisible thread, she took a step toward Alberta. “Full disclosure?”

Alberta nodded, pulled a data slice out of her pocket, and pressed it to the reader on Elspeth’s desk. “Here.”

Frowning, Elspeth came forward and placed her thumb on the interface plate, keying her monitor back on. “What is it?”

“Data on the project we need the AIs for. Assuming you can make some for us. By the way, I’d like for you to avoid Casey for a while. She’s not well, as you saw, and she’s under a tremendous amount of emotional stress. We have no objection to you socializing with coworkers outside the program. But—assuming Colonel Valens can do it—we want to see to her medical needs before we start confusing the issue.”

Message received. Stay out of the way until we know where the potential loose cannon is pointing.
Elspeth nodded. “As you wish,” and turned to the image projector.

Light flickered for a moment, and an image—a machine? a space station?—resolved itself in the air over Elspeth’s desk. “Lights out,” she said absently, leaning forward. “What’s that supposed to be?” She poked at the hologram with a finger, expecting it to expand to show detail of the section she indicated, where a fat revolving disk connected to an axle or a shaft.

It enlarged, indeed, and also peeled back, showing cross sections. “A spaceship?”

“A starship,” Alberta corrected, smiling. “That’s the
Indefatigable.
It doesn’t exist.”

“Design schematic? And what’s the difference? Spaceship, starship …”

“What you see before you is a VR mockup. It’s designed so that it simulates the real thing almost exactly, in handling capabilities, schematics, and so forth. You do know about the Chinese colony ships launched over the last seven or ten years?”

“The so-called generation ships? Yes, I do.” Elspeth picked up her teacup again, forgetting it was empty. It would have been hard to miss the portentous announcements, the media frenzy, the images of red flags in serried ranks snapping in a crisp spring breeze. Even in jail. She didn’t raise her eyes from the display. “Between their space program and the military actions … Well. I suppose we should expect an invasion of Russia any day now.”

“Irrelevant, but yes. This ship, the
Indefatigable.
As I said, it doesn’t really exist.” She reached out and tapped up another display. “Since governments got out of the space game, everything has to pay for itself. Corporations won’t gamble money where there’s no return. But smart companies, forward-looking ones, have always known that sometimes you can’t see where the money is going to come from. And if the Chinese are going to the stars, then we bloody well are, too.”

This image was lower resolution, but Elspeth somehow found her breath caught in her throat. Something about how the hard sunlight of space played along the curve of what must have been an enormous wheel … She set the teacup down on her interface panel, uncaring. It clicked on the cool crystal.

“And the difference between a spaceship and a starship … lies in how far away they’re intended to go,” Alberta continued after a momentary pause. “This one does exist. Did. You’re looking at
Le Québec.
She was destroyed on her first test flight.”

“Destroyed?” That brought Elspeth’s chin up. She blinked for focus, meeting Alberta’s peculiarly intense eyes.

Alberta smiled. “Pilot error. Pilot inadequacy, more exactly.” Rapidly, she flicked through more images. “This one is the
Li Bo
, taken by telescope. Also destroyed, as was her predecessor, the
Lao Zi.”

“Ah. So. I sense a naming trend—those are Chinese ships?”

“Yes. This is
Huang Di.
She’ll be ready for launch by the end of the year.”

“How do you know that?”

“We have assets. So do they. We need to be able to test our second ship by New Year’s.”

Elspeth thought about it for a moment only. “You need a better pilot? How fast does that thing go?”