Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 (18 page)

“I'm looking into it. But add it to your list of things to worry about. The good news is, I've about got the physics on the stardrive licked. It's superstrings, as I suspected, and I'd explain how it works but I suspect you'd find it even more unsettling than I do.”

Doc told me quantum mechanics only works on very small things. Subatomic.

As if out of the corner of my eye, I see Richard grin. “It does. But it can work on a
lot
of them at once.”

2:00 PM
Monday 4 December, 2062
Bloor Street
Toronto, Ontario

Leah brushed irritably at her cheek before she woke fully enough to realize the brambles scratching her face were just the tweed upholstery of her living-room sofa. She heard voices dimly through a closed door and stood, then padded across the floor, twisting her blouse around her belly to tuck it straight into the jeans she still wore. Her father's voice, urgent but not unhappy, and Elspeth's answering in a similar register. The office door was only slightly ajar.

Her hand was on the cool brass knob when she heard a third voice, one at the back of her head. “Leah? Can you hear me now?”

“Tuva!” She had the presence of mind to gasp, not scream, but it was close. “You're in my head!”

“Sh. Talk inside.”

Leah put her hand across her mouth. Approaching footsteps bowed the old wooden floor; the door came open under her hand, the knob slipping through tingling fingers. She looked up into Elspeth's questioning face, bronze skin fading into the darkness of the room, her curls backlit with a green glow from the desktop. “You're awake?” Dad loomed over Elspeth's shoulder.

Leah turned her hand in front of her mouth so a finger touched her lips.
Richard? Can you hear this?

“Perfectly. Are you recovering okay?”

I'm very tired.

“Leah, can you think of a way to let Elspeth and Gabe . . . your dad . . . know I'm in here? Quietly, in case the apartment is wiretapped? I have some information I need to pass along.”

Elspeth and Dad had come out of the office, but they heeded her silencing gesture. Leah closed her eyes for a second and thought. “Dad, do we have any paper?”

“Ask a programmer for paper?” Elspeth chuckled, but got out of the way as Dad brushed past her.

He offered Elspeth a dirty look and a fond insult. Leah smiled after him, proud that he trusted her enough to do as she asked without explanation. Elspeth found a pencil.

“Dad, can you show me what you were working on?”

“More AI stuff,” he said, returning. A sheaf of glittering perfect squares showed one white side in his hand. “Boring.”

“I want to learn,” she said, and didn't mean it as anything except an excuse until she saw his eyebrow go up and the little smile curve the corner of his lip.
Nobody actually cares what he does, do they? We just leave him alone and let him do it
. The revelation hit her almost like a fist, and she dropped her eyes as she took the papers from his hand.

And she paid attention while she wrote out, slowly and precisely, with a rounded hand, every word Richard dictated, and sketched out the circuit diagrams and schematics he showed her—nanite controller protocols, and the careful instructions on how to create them.

1500 Hours
Monday 4 December, 2062
PPCASS
Huang Di
Under way

Min-xue opened his eyes on the wonder of the stars. Whispers seemed to stroke him—the
Huang Di
—like anemone fingers.
Whispers without voices,
he thought, and wondered if one day he, too, would write a poem that might be worthy of remembrance. He might have said that he felt the ship as he felt his flesh, but it was more than that.
Imagine the feeling of starlight on your skin, Captain.

What he said was, “Captain, I'm ready to activate the stardrive now.”

Captain Wu cleared his throat. “Affirmative,” and if Min-xue hadn't been able to read his heartbeat through the medical sensors in his chair, he never would have known that the man was afraid.

The
Huang Di
flexed itself into darkness and the sightless space
between
spaces, and almost instantly back out again. Despite himself, despite knowing how far from the deadly embrace of the Sun and her planets they were, Min-xue half expected the unfelt breath that filled his human body's lungs to be his last.
Too close to the gravity well,
he thought, and almost whooped out loud at the realization that he was still alive to think it.

“Transition accomplished,” he announced coolly. “Distance traveled”—he checked parallax through his external sensors—“one-twentieth of an astronomical unit, sir.”

Less than half of a light minute.

The smallest distance yet recorded using the Martian drive.

5:00 PM
Monday 4 December, 2062
Allen-Shipman Research Facility
St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario

Leah couldn't sit still, even though Patty kept grinning at her from under the polished dark curtain of her hair. The light moved over it, entrancing Leah with how real and how bright everything seemed. The boundless energy in her veins pushed her around the green-carpeted waiting room. She glanced up, squinted at the brightness of the fluorescents flickering on the stark white walls, and tried to tune out the yells of the four male students playing hologames while they waited.

“Jumping bean,” Patricia said.

Leah jiggled her shoulders and paced a few more steps. “Like you're not excited.”
Tuva, are you there? Richard, I mean.
Tuva was the handle he'd used in the VR game space where she had originally met him. Leah hadn't known he was an AI then.

“I'm here, Leah.” The sense of presence was comforting. “Your friend is right. You're bouncing off the walls.”

Like you ever sit still
. Which was true. Even his computer-generated image was a fidget.
I'm going to fly, Richard!

She felt him grin. And then she startled, as Patricia seemed to materialize beside Leah and place her hand on Leah's arm. The touch felt funny—sharp—and Leah jerked away. Patricia did, too, looking down at her fingers as if she'd scorched them. “Whoa.”

“Weird.” Leah brushed her hair off her neck in irritation. “It must be the Hammers. Aunt Jenny said they could make everything a little weird. Weirder, I mean.”

Patty smiled, but Leah could see—by now—that it didn't ease the tightness by the older girl's eyes. And then Patty looked up, and Leah did, too. They both heard the footsteps in the hall. “That'll be Aunt Jenny.”

“And Papa Fred,” Patricia answered, nodding. The boys were still distracted by their game as the two girls moved toward the door.

Monday 4 December, 2062
Sol-system wide area nanonetwork
17:15:44:45–17:15:44:56

Richard let a thin filament of his awareness move through the
Montreal,
the
Huang Di,
the
Calgary,
the half-built
Vancouver,
and the three Chinese vessels still under construction. Was aware of the presence of the Chinese pilots in their regimented daily routines. Followed the progress of the Chinese invasion into Russia, Russia's response—piggybacking on the
Montreal
's radio, microwave, and laser transmissions. It annoyed him to not be able to use the Chinese ships similarly, and it annoyed him more to have to spawn remote processes and wait for them to report back, and the amount of data he could transfer without being noticed was limited.
They're desperate
.
The
Huang Di
and its sister ships are a last-ditch effort,
he realized. The AI contemplated the Chinese record of cultural imperialism, and Japan, and Taiwan, and Tibet. He ran a few hundred variations on population and climate numbers. And he worried.

Richard sighed, while another thread of his attention rested on Trevor Koske—not able to control him, or read Trevor's thoughts without revealing Richard's presence, but the AI feeling the pilot's existence like a heartbeat low in the back of his chest. Richard watched through the shipwide monitors as Koske went about his routine—one life among uncounted thousands, if he considered the still incomprehensible alien presences pushing at his attention.

The AI had also conceived a particular fascination with Lt. Christopher Ramirez. Chiefly because he couldn't see why the sullen, muscular blond made such an effort to cultivate Koske. Koske was only slightly less offensive to Ramirez than he was to anyone else. Richard, the eternal observer, let his crippled alter-ego deal with Koske and with Wainwright on those occasions when it became necessary, and chose to watch the grunted conversations between the two men at meals or in the boxing ring.

They both liked to fight.

Ramirez spent his off-duty hours reading twentieth-century politics and twenty-first-century philosophy. He was unmarried. His early air force career had been marked by disciplinary problems, but his service for the past five years had been exemplary—and even the armed services tended to overlook minor problems in a code jockey as talented as Ramirez.

Except Richard—sacrificing some of his precious bootlegged bandwidth to pick over Ramirez's records on Earth—noticed a few things. Such as that Ramirez's registered party affiliation in college had been to the neo-Greens, but the neo-Green Party—while extant—had not become widespread outside of Europe until two years later, and Ramirez had been the
only
student at the University of Guelph to so register.

Not conclusive, but suggestive that perhaps records had been altered along the way.

Richard was also becoming familiar with Captain Wainwright. Concealed under the mantle of the second AI, his mind-controlled progenitor, he found he had astonishing freedom. The nanite web allowed him to sense things that happened across light-years of space. Through Jenny and Leah, Richard knew that Gabe and Elspeth were on a new track with the AI research. He showed them how to build control chips and planned to expand his nanite fingers through the Internet soon—solving his bandwidth problem nicely. The other ships would need minds, he knew, minds of their own to survive the strange planes and angles of eleven-dimensional space. The human pilots were fast and intuitive. But Richard didn't think any human mind—even the one he himself was modeled on—could quite manage to comprehend the world behind the veil of what they'd jokingly dubbed sneakier-than-light technology.

He could feel the minds of the Benefactors, as he'd taken wryly to calling them; he'd tried to speak to them. Would have tried to speak to their AIs, but they didn't seem to have them. Just brains so alien he wasn't sure, in fact, that they could be considered to have anything like language at all.

He felt the ships moving, coming at what must be for them a stately and considered pace given what he had speculated about their capabilities.

Coming—and he hadn't shared this with Jenny yet, or with anyone—coming from two directions at once.

1730 Hours
Monday 4 December, 2062
Allen-Shipman Research Facility
St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario

The kids are good. Damn good, all six of them. Awkward with their amped-up reflexes, with the touch of the Hammer shading their emotions toward preternatural calm and their focus to the absolute. The boys are dicey: teenage males, rough and erratic as any cadet I ever had to kick into shape. Valens slipped a bug in my ear that they might not adapt as fast as the girls, so I pay extra close attention to them. The girls are better behaved, plotting quietly the way girls do.

We go in.

It's a deep hard time, and it takes me back. Not quite into a flashback . . . Hell. Yes, into a flashback, smell of sweat and the smell of mud, smell of hot, scared kids blinking at me like I have all the goddamned answers.

I hope a few of them learned to duck.

I bite down on the memory, roll it back. This isn't then, it's now, and I'm mind on mind with the children, flitting from one to another like a possessing ghost, guiding each of them through a slalom while another part of my mind sets up obstacles and takes them down. Obstacles hard enough to build confidence when they get past them—which they don't always. Not so hard as to break them.

It's a line you have to know how to see, because it's different for each of them. And as somebody once said to me, it takes a hundred attaboys to cancel out one oh, shit.

I hope these kids will stay alive. I wish I could make them some kind of promises as we sail through the slick black nothing, space stroking the sides of the virtual ship—waggishly named
The Indefatigable
—but the hard facts are that all I can do for them is to show them the tools and kick them out the door. Just like all of us, they're on their own.

On their own, but every action they take affects everybody around them. It's a hell of a lesson to learn when you're thirty. Never mind fifteen.

I want Leah to be the best, of course. But the fact of the matter is that Patricia Valens and Bryan Sall, a dark-haired boy with angled eyes, are the oldest of the lot, the most developed, and they blow the other four away.

I shake with exhaustion when the technician comes to unhook me. The kids are still under. She brings me something hot and sugar-sweet in a big mug: coffee with chocolate stirred into it and tons of milk, just the way I never drink it. It eases the shakes, though, and by the time I choke it down I can unclench my teeth enough so my jaw doesn't ache all the way up to my ears. My shirt clings to my chest, plastered with sweat, and I'm taking a chill. “Do a shorter run next time,” she says.