Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 (35 page)

Are you going to stop me, Richard?

Leah's not my daughter.

She's my whole goddamned world.

The
Montreal
's main drive is violently attracted to mass. The Chinese have somehow found a way to jump short of a gravity well. They can stop.
Sainte Marie, mère de Dieu
—

I cross the bridge to my chair. Richard doesn't whisper anymore; he can't spare the time. His voice rings over the loudspeakers as Wainwright dogs the hatchway, palm seals the lock, and wedges it tight. It's us on the bridge, us four and two security guards in full riot gear. “The
Huang Di
has released its missile, Captain. Leah and Lieutenant Koske are in time. They will intercept.” —
priez pour nous pauvres pécheurs, maintenent et à l'heure de notre mort
.

“No.” Soft leather cups my thighs. I try to reach back and pull the collar forward, but the arrangement defeats me.

“Gabe. I have a plan.”

He looks up from a terminal. “Jenny, what are you doing?” Wainwright looks up, too, and Patty. I gesture them back, and there's no time to argue. They have their jobs. Leah has hers.

I have mine.

“Something really stupid, and I need your help. Can you pull that collar forward? And this serpentine, here?” I undo my belt and unbutton the top button on my pants, hurried enough that the steel hand tears cloth, sliding the waistband down enough to expose the bulge of my lower processor.

“Casey,” Wainwright warns. “The system's not clean.”

“I'll manage.”
You do. What you must. Amen
.

Gabe abandons his terminal, Patty moving in to cover him, her eyes wild behind the dark spill of her hair over her shoulder. Leah's her best friend. Patty's got family on the ground. Gabe, frowning dubiously. “Jen . . .”

“Don't argue. There isn't time. See that cable? Press the end of it against my back. Right here.”

He does, and I try not to jump as the probes slide in and find their resting place. Valens is a hell of a lot more gentle. “Now the collar.” It comes out through gritted teeth.

Gabe hesitates, one hand on the nape of my neck. I'm numb from the waist down, my legs deader than tingling. I can't feel the ship yet.
Dick, can you make this work for me?
“Jen, this is a lousy idea.” The collar hangs in his other hand, connecting cables dangling.

“What are you doing?” Richard, concerned. He projects trajectories into my inner sight, as I know he must be doing for Leah. Red line for the asteroid, orange for the
Huang Di
ascending now on a curve. Green line for the
Leonard Cohen
. Fat blue stationary dot is the
Montreal
. “The Chinese pilots are wired faster than you are, Jen.”

“I know,” I answer them both, and turn my attention to Gabriel. “Once that's on, I think I'm going to lose consciousness. Catch me. Watch me. All right?”

He shakes his head. I see Wainwright following our conversation from the edge of her eye. “I'm losing two daughters today. And a damn good friend.”

“You're losing nothing if I can help it,
mon coeur
.” He meets my eyes. I look down first, studying my knees. Awkwardly, I reach out and lift first the left and then the right leg onto the couch. It's like handling a still-warm corpse. Heh. Done that, too. Somewhere far away, I can feel other things—a pulsation like an ache in my belly, a rumble like the trembling in your calf muscles from hiking uphill.

Gabe takes a breath, and I speak first.

“Gabriel.” The tone in my voice stops him short. “Wire me into this
fucking
machine
right now
.”

I feel more than see him nod as cold metal brushes the back of my neck. A lancing moment of pain, a wrenching disconnect . . .

. . . and I am swimming among the stars.

Richard.

“Right here, Jenny.” He opens up to me: space, the stars, the weight of the world and the arcing curve of the
Huang Di,
the asteroid, the soap-bubble of a shuttle that Leah presses to its maximum—or, more likely, Koske does, while my goddaughter runs navigation.
Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce.

You know, Marie is my middle name. How do the Chinese pilots do it, Dick?

“Plan in advance.”

Set the jump in advance?

“Line of sight. Do you trust me that much?”

I trust you that much. You know what I want to do?

“Leah says to back off and let her handle it.”

Seal the airtight bulkhead doors. Evacuate everybody from the aft sections of the
Montreal.
Tell Leah to tell Trevor to pull the fuck up and let me handle this.

“There's nobody back there but a maintenance crew. Reactor is too hot; we've evacuated until we can take on coolant water.”

Sometimes synchronicity works.

You know where we're going, Dick?

“That's a ninety-meter rock, which—considering the atmosphere—will hit at something like fourteen kilometers per second. If we miss, it's not just Toronto. Cleveland. Buffalo. Most of Ontario and a chunk of the Midwest. Atmospheric blowout, it's called. Widespread fires.”

If we miss, Leah and Trevor get their chance to die like heroes. What are our friendly Chinese neighbors thinking? That's a hell of a way to deal with the competition, Richard.

“What do they care? They're leaving anyway.”

I didn't know a computer could sound
bitter
. If I were Trevor, I would match velocity with the Rock and push it aside. If I had time.

Which Trevor doesn't.

With my eyes blank, with my body numb and distant, with a mind full of the cold spinning depths of space, I focus all my attention, reach out an arm that's no more than a vision, and point.
Richard
.

Can you tell me when to stop us there?

“Can Gordon Lightfoot sing shipwreck songs?”

Who the hell is Gordon Lightfoot?
Somebody with a shuttlecraft named after him, whoever he is—

“Never mind.”

—
priez pour nous pauvres pécheurs, maintenent et à l'heure de notre mort
.

Amen.

Amen.

Richard.

Go.

Amen.

2250 Hours
Thursday 21 December, 2062
HMCSS
Leonard Cohen
Under way

The silence made it stranger.

Leah heard Koske's breathing, the dull thud of his heartbeat, the tick of the
Leonard Cohen
's hide shedding heat into the vast chill of space. She heard Richard's voice in her head and the myriad tiny intimate sounds of two human bodies moving in protective gear, amplified by a confined space. But that was all.

The
Montreal
hung motionless behind them, visible in rear camera displays and as a shimmering dot kilometers off the
Leonard Cohen
's stern. Leah had acquired visual contact with the asteroid, a slender bright crescent skittering across the motionless background of the stars, the flare of the
Huang Di
's chemical engines painting its topside red as the asteroid dropped from the starship like an egg from a dragon's belly, unholy in its silence.

She swore and fed course corrections to Koske, matching her best guess at the thing's velocity and its inexorable path to the stately blue globe below. “How long?”

“Leah,” Richard said in her head, and gave her better data. “From a friend on the
Huang Di
.”

We have friends on the
Huang Di
?

“Seven minutes to contact,” Koske answered, then glanced down as her new data lit up his screen. “No, seven and a half. Get your hat on, kid. It's too close for a nudge to do it. This could get rough.”

Leah was already suited, but the shuttle was under sustained burn and the acceleration made her clumsy. She clapped the helmet on and was pleased that her hands didn't fumble a catch. Adrenaline hissed through her veins and the world outside her body slowed about 40 percent. She had her hands on the controls in ninety seconds. Richard fed her more math.
This won't work. There's no way this can work. Even if we intercept the rock, we haven't got the thrust at this distance to knock it off course. Even if we go into it at full velocity. It's just not enough ship and too much rock.
“Lieutenant. Suit.”

“Can you fly this?” He looked at her for the first time, surprised.

“I just have to keep it pointed. Three minutes, go.”

Koske slapped the release on his helmet restraint and yanked it off the hook while Leah let her hands sit steady on the controls, tears burning the corners of her eyes. Fifty seconds.
Genie's down there. Bryan. Ellie. God.

“I have it. Sorry about this, kid.”

“My name's Leah,” she said, and let the thrust pin her hands to the arms of her chair.

“Leah,” he answered, muffled through speakers as the globe of his helmet tilted to observe the instruments. She bit her lip as the silence resumed.

And gasped.

The golden-gray sunlit dot of the
Montreal
suddenly seemed to elongate, to blur, to vastly stretch. Her outline, gaudy with running lights, appeared in the shuttle's forward dorsal windows, cosmic and immense and silent. Her solar sails spread wide, gossamer gold-electroplated mesh on unfurled vanes that downflected like bowering wings, the embrace of a terrible gray dove, kilometers long.

“Above” the
Leonard Cohen
.

Between the
Leonard Cohen
and the falling stone.

“Shit,” Koske hissed as the
Montreal
slowly, majestically unfurled her gracious wings, seconds taut as hours. “Richard, tell Casey there's too many people on that ship to risk her. Tell her to stop grandstanding and get the fuck out of my way!”

“Lieutenant,” Richard said, so both of them could hear him, “we have—a plan. Hold on.”

“The
Leonard Cohen
will have contact with the asteroid in . . . Ten,” Koske said, his voice becoming soft, mechanical. He twisted the
Leonard Cohen
into position, flipped up the plastic cover on the thruster controls and let his thumb hover over the switch. “Nine, eight, seven—”

“Richard—!”

“—six—”

“I said,” the AI answered calmly, “—hold
on
.”

“Five. Four. Three—” Koske hit the thrusters, and four gravities smacked Leah in the chest like a swung baseball bat.

The world tore in half.

Leah chopped her teeth down on a scream and locked both elbows against the console, fighting the massive hand that slammed her back in her seat. The crescent-lit potato shape loomed behind the
Montreal
's gossamer solar sail, then punched through it like a bullet through a window screen. The
Leonard Cohen
leapt forward—intersect trajectory—and suddenly, brutally, before the asteroid was quite clear of the starship, the space around the
Montreal
rippled—and slipped—and
stretched.
In perfect serenity, all of it, and the ultimate ghastly hush of space.

Leah never would have even
seen
it if she hadn't been through the augmentation. Aunt Jenny must have kicked in the stardrive the instant the asteroid touched the
Montreal
's vanes.

Space tore around the wounded ship and the rock tore, too. The
Montreal
vanished, a blur, a smear of light across the sky, and a sound that scoured Leah's throat leaked between her teeth and tainted the air in her helmet.

Richard's voice in her ear and Koske's. “Did we get it?”

Leah leaned forward. Strained her eyes. And saw a curved splinter of reflected sunlight tumble past the
Leonard Cohen
's starboard stabilizer, close enough to reach out her hand and touch. Koske slewed the shuttle after it, but it was too late, already too late, and she knew it when she saw the mass of the asteroid start to burn.

“Half,” she whispered, as Koske raised both gloved hands in the air and slammed them down on the
Leonard Cohen
's console, killing the thrust. “Richard, you got half.”

10:15 PM
Thursday 21 December, 2062
Wellesley Street East
Toronto, Ontario

It was dark, and the bed was shaking. Genie mumbled and pulled her covers up, but bruising hands grabbed her and strong arms picked her up as the room light flared. “What else, Dr. Dunsany?”

Genie opened her eyes and then shut them tight again. A big man held her close to his chest. “Ellie!”

And then Ellie was beside her, warm hand on her arm, tucking trailing blankets around her. “Genie. We have to leave now. Right now.”

Genie's eyes flew open. “For good?”

Ellie nodded, holding the door open for the soldier—Genie saw now that it was a soldier, and pressed herself against his uniform. “Probably. We're going to see Leah and your papa. And Jenny.”

Genie squirmed suddenly, slithered out of the startled soldier's grasp, the loose weave of her blue cotton blanket burning her skin. “Boris,” she shouted, and squirted out of the bedroom.

“Genie— Shit. Come on. She—”

Boris was curled on Ellie's bookcase, next to the stereo speaker. Genie grabbed him and dragged him against her chest. Startled claws bit into her nightgown, but he didn't scratch. Genie put her back against the books and clutched the orange tomcat tight. Real old-fashioned books that smelled of paper and leather and glue. “Boris comes,” she said, and saw Ellie make a lightning calculation and then scoop her up, cat and all.

“All right,” she said, hefting Genie on her hip even though Genie's head rose higher than Ellie's did. “Come on. We have to run to the roof.”

Genie had never ridden in a helicopter before, especially not jammed between armored men with guns, and she thought it was wonderfully exciting when the aircraft's nose went down hard and the acceleration left her stomach behind. She squealed, but Boris didn't like it and dug his face into the crease of her armpit, and then Ellie put her arm around Genie's shoulders. So Genie understood that she should be quiet, and cuddled close. One of the soldiers—a red-haired woman with a ridge-sharp nose—smiled wryly at Genie and tipped her head. “Hang tough, kiddo,” she said. “We'll be okay.”