Hammered (24 page)

Elspeth tapped her hands on the door handle, and looked at her creation, long and hard, and wondered how God felt when Eve told him where to get off. Pride and sorrow mingled in her chest, and she turned back to the door.

I’ve been assigned my own office, in a different wing from where Gabe and Dunsany sit, and I’ve just called to check in with Face for the day and had to leave a message. I don’t want to leave him the work number, and I’m still too paranoid to leave my HCD on all the time. Same problem with Face—convenient little buggers, but you can track usage through wireless networks and GPS. Better to leave them off if you’re on the DL, only flip them on when you need to check your mail.

He’ll leave a message if he needs me.

When Valens taps on the open door, I’m sitting at the work table in the corner by the window, drinking coffee and pondering a little trip through the Internet to see if I can discover the whereabouts of a certain Chrétien Jean-Claude Hebert, late of Montreal. I spent the morning studying the specs for the good ship
Indefatigable
, trying to figure out what I could have done differently. Done better.

The answer does not make me happy.
Seen the dark body sooner, reacted faster.
And I don’t know what the hell I can do about either of those.
Keep losing ships.

They’re not real ships.
Which doesn’t matter as much as it should.

“Good morning, Fred.” I stand up as he enters.

He glances at the display over my desk, where a schematic of the virtual starship hangs, slowly revolving. “Studying yesterday’s record?”

“Just finished the review. That’s a heck of an obstacle course you have set up …”
Sir.
I bite it off before it gets away from me.

“Meant to be. You didn’t disappoint us, Casey, if that’s what you’re thinking. You handled that first run better than the other candidates we tried did after their upgrades.”

That sparks my interest. “Tried. Past tense?”

He shrugs. “We had three good candidates in your group, excluding the younger volunteers. One left the program. One—our best candidate—passed away in an accident.” A sidelong smile. “An accident unrelated to the implants, I hasten to add.”

“Of course. Number three?”

“Still with us.”

“When do I get to meet him?”

“You don’t. He’s actually in an orbital research facility on Clarke Station. Bit too far to commute. And you just blew his response times away.” Valens walks to my desk and runs a finger over the interface plate, spinning the
Indefatigable
about its axis.

I cross the plush, lavender-gray carpeting to stand at his elbow. “I’m not fast enough, Fred. I hope the simulations for the actual vehicles will run a bit slower.”

“The aircraft sims? Well, Casey, here’s the thing. You’re not going to be seeing any aircraft sims.” He shoves a hand into his coat pocket and turns to look me dead in the eye.

Was that a threat?
“Pardon?”

He drops a folder on my desk, covering the optics. The
holo winks out. “Those are your clearances. You’re in. You’re also reactivated, Master Warrant. Welcome back to the C.A.”

Eyes blinking, I listen to the silence, waiting for his words to change into something that makes sense to me.
No.

No.

Breathe.

“Qu’est ce que
fuck?
Valens, you said
civilian.”

“Casey, I lied.”

Seasick, I step away, stammering, “Fucking Christ. Ces sont des conneries. No. You can’t do this, Fred.”

“Actually,” he says, “I can. Chapter and verse is in your paperwork. I suggest you go over it and sign it at your leisure.”

“Or you’ll send me to jail? Not much of a threat.”

He tips his head toward the folder on my desk, keeps talking as if I haven’t said a word. “And you’re going to go along with it, too. And smile. Do you want to know why?”

God, I want to break his neck. He’s so fragile. So slow. Just bones and mud, and I could take him apart with one hand. And that would get me—nothing.
Play the game, Jenny; you’re a dead woman anyway. Remember. Sacrifice play, and your only job is to get the runner home.

Shit, I’ve been living in the States too long if I’m thinking in baseball metaphors.

Chewing my lip, I manage to get a syllable out. “Why?”

“Because there’s no way they’re handing the keys to a
real
starship to a civilian, and you’re the only one I’ve got who has a hope of flying the fucking thing without killing everybody on board. Assuming you come through surgery okay, of course.”

I almost sit down on the rug.
Of course.
I lay my left hand on the edge of the desk to steady myself. “Real starship.”

“The
Montreal,”
he says. He points toward the ceiling. “Finishing construction as we speak. Designed on the same
specs as the toy you were playing with yesterday. We’ve already had to contend with two sabotage attempts during construction—”

Sabotage.
A fine French word. “Terrorists?”

“In space? You don’t build a starship planetside. Our intelligence suggests the Chinese. In any case, we need some very special people to fly her, and we need them fast.”

“How fast? You said I’d be training kids.”

“You will. We’re finding the younger the better, actually. Which means problems of parental consent, and God knows what else, but you don’t need to worry about that.”

God. Mon Dieu. Children. Again.
“What’s the tearing hurry?”
Sir.
There’s something about the way
army
wants to settle back over me like a well-worn shirt.
Maybe this
is
where I belong.

God. No. Or should I be praying to St. Jude about now?

“Well, Casey, here’s the deal.” He leans against the edge of my desk, resting his weight on one buttock, so close I can smell his cologne. “We’ve got competition. This project has been under way for about ten years now, and, unfortunately, we’re in a race with the Chinese to get there first. You understand what happens if they get the kind of capability you saw yesterday before we do.”

“Yes.”
Oh, I think so.

“Good.” He sets something else on my desk with a click. “You’ll need to start reacclimating to that. One ninety minutes before you go into VR and a second one at twenty minutes. No more. In the meantime, I want you to study up on the ship specs. You’ll have access to all her engineering data. Got it?”

“Sir.” I bite my tongue. “What’s the story on the ship’s attraction to massive bodies? Where’s the theory to back that up?”

Valens stares down at that red paper folder on my desk.
His eyes are strangely unfocused, and then he looks up at me, intently. “That accident I mentioned.”

“Yes.”

“Montreal
is the second ship.”

Oh, I don’t even want to know.
“What happened to the first one?”

“Charon,” he says.

“I don’t know who that is.”

“It was the name of Pluto’s moon. Sister-world. Whatever you want to call it.”

“How could a moon happen to a starship? Was there an instrumentation failure?”

“Not … exactly. As nearly as we have been able to determine—and damned if I can get one physicist to agree with another on the nature of the forces involved—once the drive is triggered it has a strong attractive quality to any significant mass nearby. A strong and so far unpredictable attractive quality.”

“Meaning?”

“We can’t always tell which way it’s going to go. And it has a tendency to smack into planets. Really fast. And erratically.”

“Colonel Valens. How did you design the drive without knowing what it does?”

“Well.” I’ve never seen the man look uncomfortable before. “We didn’t design it so much as reverse engineer it. And that’s all you’re cleared to know.”

Fuck. Fuck!
“What you’re telling me is that you built an H-bomb from a kit without any directions and you don’t know which bit is the timer?”

“Something like that, yes. Thus the need for a living pilot. A living pilot with reflexes that approximate those of a computer. Somebody with some age and wisdom,” he said, dryly.

“I got age, at least. Not so much wisdom.” I rub the corners of my eyes. “Or you need an artificial intelligence of some sort.”
Dunsany. Of course. That’s what she and Gabe are here for.

“Which in our case, we have not got. Preferentially, we need both, but we’re working with what we
have
right now. Starships aren’t cheap enough to keep smacking them into planets. Nor do we have an unlimited supply of planets to smack them into.”

I’m struck silent. I find myself saluting numbly as he turns to go, unable to speak when he turns back. “We want to schedule you as soon as possible, by the way. Better to get it done before any additional damage accrues, or you have a potentially catastrophic event. A Dr. Marsh will be performing the actual nanosurgery. It’s not my specialty, of course.”

“Of course.” And only after he shuts the door behind himself do I allow myself to look at the small brown vial he’s left on my desk.

It’s a long, long time before I can make myself pick it up with my steel hand, gingerly as if handling eggshells. My right one trembles, and it takes me ninety seconds to get the cap off. Slowly, knowing what I’m going to see, I turn it on its side over the crystal of the interface plate, watching the tiny canary pills slide out in a wavering line.

Leah Castaign looked up from the breakfast table and caught her father’s eye. Genie was already slipping her shoes on by the door. “Dad?”

Her dad raised his eyes from the newsfeed and offered
her a level, considering look that told her he’d caught the impending request in her voice. “Yes?”

She took a breath. “Can I ask you a huge, gigantic, massive favor?”

“Comment massif parlons-nous de?”

“Pas si grand comme cela. I want to skip school today.”

She saw him thinking about it as he set his spoon aside. “And do what instead?”

“Could Genie and I come to work with you today?” She held up her hand. “Wait—stop—ne pas dit ‘non.’ S’il te plaît.”

“J’écoute.”

She talked as fast as she was able. “We hardly ever spend time together since you started at the lab, Dad. You’re working so much. And it’s still the beginning of the term. We can afford to miss a day. And it’s a beautiful day, and I haven’t seen your office yet. Or …” And she grinned. “Met your new girlfriend. And we haven’t seen Aunt Jenny since dinner that first night. So there.” Genie froze by the door.

Her father’s lips pressed thin, and for a moment Leah thought she had lost him. And then a complexity of emotions crossed his face and he grinned. “Elspeth’s not my girlfriend, exactly. And your point is well taken, although your Aunt Jenny is pretty busy right now.”

A little shadow crossed his eyes at that, and Leah frowned. He’d been out the past two evenings, after Genie was in bed and Leah was supposed to be. Both times, she’d heard him talking to Jenny Casey on the phone before he left, but she didn’t know whether he’d gone to see Aunt Jenny, or Elspeth.

She waited for him to start talking again.

He glanced over at Genie, still waiting with her book-bag in one hand and her other on the doorknob. “Do you want to play hooky, petite chouchou?”

She nodded, and he looked back at Leah. “All right. I’ll
go in for the morning. You girls can do your homework while I get things halfway squared away, and then we’ll kidnap Jenny and Elspeth and have lunch with them. Then the three of us will go up the tower or out to the castle or something. Go peel your uniforms off. Let’s go!”

Leah grinned, and didn’t manage to make it around the table to hug her dad before Genie landed on him, squealing.

Leah lifted her head as her dad paused with one hand on the doorknob and turned back to his daughters. “Stay out of trouble while I rouse the women for lunch, ladies.”

Leah held her finger to her lips as the office door closed behind him. Genie looked after him, and then back at her sister, hissing, “Leah, qu’est que tu fais?”

“It’s a surprise, Genie,” she answered, ducking under her dad’s desk. It was easy to slide a data slice containing the information Penelope had e-mailed to her into the reader on Gabe’s terminal. She accessed it and the drive spun up. Leah counted under her breath. “Like a birthday present, kind of. Whatever you do, don’t tell him, okay? Or you’ll ruin it.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” Leah shot a nervous glance toward the door and pulled the data slice back out, circling around the desk to get back to the table where Genie sat. “You won’t tell?”

Genie shook her head. “Cross my heart. Will he like it?”

“He’ll love it.”
Especially if I get my college paid for
, she thought, and grinned. “Where should we make him take us for lunch?”

Leah leaned back on velvet grass, watching a single sugar maple leaf drift lazily earthward. An updraft caught it, swirling it sideways, and she turned her head to watch it fly. It drifted toward the grown-ups at the picnic table, and Leah watched with amusement as Aunt Jenny reached
out, apparently without noticing, and plucked it out of the air. She giggled, and Jenny turned. “You want more chicken, kiddo?” The remains of a bucket of fried chicken sat on the far end of the table.

Leah shook her head. She heard a calliope nearby, and wondered idly if Genie would let her get away with using her as an excuse to ride the newly installed antique carousel. Leah, of course, was much too old to go on merry-go-rounds by herself. Genie was asleep under the tree, though, sprawled like a puppy.

Jenny got up and walked over to her, crouching down with a grunt. “Don’t get old, Leah.”

“That’s a silly thing to say, Aunt Jenny.”

Jenny frowned. It made the scars on the left side of her face look rippled and shiny. “You’re right. Forget I said that. I take it back: get old.” The frown turned into a grin. “Get old and fat and terrible and smelly and lord it over generations of grandchildren, and tell them about your terrible old Aunt Jenny, who was worse and smellier, and are you sure you don’t want any more biscuits either?”