Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 (39 page)

“One of its pilots feels very bad about what happened, and he's going to try to make it better.”

Richard.
She sighed, exasperated.
I'm not a kid. What's he going to do?

“He's going to land the
Huang Di
in the ocean, and use it to start a global Benefactor tech infection and hopefully help fix some of the damage.”

What you wouldn't let me do with Genie.

“This is different—”

Grown-ups always say that.

“He's going to use the ship's brain as a control chip, so that Alan and I can regulate—Leah, you're still mad at me.”

She let her hands fall to her sides and shuffled back from the window. She wore ship shoes that weren't much more than rubberized slippers; her footsteps fell silent on the textured gray matting of the deck.
I could have helped her. Look how much better Aunt Jenny is—

“We'll help her now. Just keep them from using the
Calgary
to stop the
Huang Di,
all right?”

Leah looked over her shoulder, her hair whispering against her neck, a few strands pulling at her interface as she turned her head to regard the curved black couch.
Isn't this dangerous? What about what happened to Carver?
And then she bit down on her thumbnail, remembering that Carver was dead, and Bryan, too.

“That's a risk,” Richard answered. “But this is just to heal. Not enhance. So it's safer. We're starting in five minutes. Are you ready?”

Leah checked the chrono in her contact lens's heads-up display.
I'll be ready,
she said. “Airman?”

He looked up from his monitors: thermal readings, she saw, showing the entry streak of the asteroid scraped the breadth of North America like a slash through the belly of a gutted fish. “Cadet?”

“I want to check the hull and vane integrity, just in case some of that debris made it up this far. Would you please help wire me in?”

The pinch of the wires was nothing. The young man's hands shook when he touched her, and then Leah floated in space, the
Calgary
her wings and eyes and breath.
Richard, do you think Bryan felt anything?

“Nothing, Leah.” He spoke as if from far away.

How do you know?

“I was with him.”

Oh.

“I told him you were thinking of him.”

Thank you.
Richard fed her data, showed her the leisurely, orange streak that was the
Huang Di,
the limping arc of the
Montreal
coming around. “Are we ready to go up?”

Testing the vanes now.
A thought brought her up short.
Richard. Those ships on Mars.

“Yes?”

Could they have been grounded for a similar purpose? Long ago?

His hesitation might have been framed in nanoseconds. An unaugmented human, one not becoming accustomed to conversation at the speed of thought, would never have noticed. “It's a possibility, yes. Mars had significant surface water once, and the project xenobiologist thought that was what they were for.”

But they failed. There's no life on Mars.

“Mars was a more fragile system,” Richard said.

Is this going to work, Richard?

She almost sensed when he thought about lying to her, almost knew the instant when he decided there was no point. “Probably,” he said. “A little, at least. We have to try, in any case. There's nothing else left to do.”

Min-xue would have liked the poetry of it if the
Huang Di
moved, when she moved, with the silk-on-water purity of his grandfather's fishing boat. She didn't, though; it was the
Montreal
that was graceful, elegant. The
Huang Di
lurched like a drunk when he triggered her main engines and attitude jets, no time for a gentle burn, no poetry in her motion but a stagger.

I wanted to be a poet, Richard. Did I tell you that, my friend? I wanted to live to write poetry.

The
Huang Di
curved in space, dropping, one brief nudge enough to push her into the gravity well, a longer burn to turn her topple into a glide.

“Min-xue,” Richard answered. “You've done so. This is a poem that will be remembered for a thousand years, my friend.”

Min-xue smiled, feeling the warmth of his friend's benediction. And then feeling nothing at all, as his connection with the
Huang Di
suddenly, unbelievably, went dead.

Damn it. Richard, I think they've
—

After so long in the darkness, the light that struck his eyes was as bright as staring into the sun.

—
found me.

The
Huang Di
is pulling up, Richard. That's not right. That can't be right
—

“It's not right, Leah. Not right at all.”

Oh.
In timeless space, the body of her ship like her own bright body laid out under the stars, Leah considered.
Richard, do we need a new plan?

“
Huang Di
's security has found Min-xue. I don't have a fallback plan.”

She knew. Leah always knew when somebody was lying to her. He had a plan, all right. It just wasn't a plan he was willing to use.
What's the crew complement of the
Calgary,
Richard?

“Sixty-four,” he answered reluctantly. “Counting Trevor and you. A skeleton crew.”

The
Montreal
's is 347, and her stardrive works. The
Calgary
's isn't on-line yet. She's crippled. It's logical, Richard
. Leah felt the cold in her belly like the cold of space against her hands when she had leaned against the view port, and her right thumb fretted the chip implanted in the back of her left hand.
The
Huang Di
's chances to heal the damage are finished.
She extended the solar sails and looped the feed from visual, thermal, and magnetic-body sensors that would have told the bridge crew that the
Huang Di
was moving. Sunlight filled her sails and she—the
Calgary
—skittered forward with the same sort of hitching glide she got if she opened her coat while on ice-skates and let the wind carry her along.

“Leah—”
No.
She felt his denial and his impotent fury.

The only choice, Richard. The logical choice. Or are you my father, now?

“No,” he answered, a little while later. “I think you're rather grown-up, actually.”

“Trevor, I need you.” Richard's voice, overlays of Alan's, and Koske was on his feet with one hand on the hatchway's wheel, not even bothering with shoes. It was dim in his cabin, recessed lights shaded with translucent polymer he'd tack stripped to the wall, and he could tell from the
Calgary
's luxurious shiver that she was under way.

What's wrong, Richard?

Richard didn't so much explain as thrust the knowledge into his head wholesale, a bubble of trajectories and leaps of intuition and Leah and Min-xue's wildly desperate plan. Koske stopped momentarily, the hatchway wheel still heavy in his hand, using the other to shield his eyes as the information flared into headache as if someone had boxed his ears. He stepped back from the door and started to pull his ship shoes on, one foot at a time. “Time is limited,” the AI said. “Leah's going to get herself killed—”

Koske nodded, swallowed, and turned his head to look through the porthole in the floor at the spinning stars, so far away.
I wanted to go there,
he thought. And then said to Richard,
What do you propose I do about it?

“—ah—”

Carefully, calmly, Koske opened the door. Long strides carried him toward the bridge.
She's right, Richard. Are you afraid of dying?

“It's not a major concern these days. I would be somewhat hard to kill. Aren't you?”

No,
Koske answered. He checked his stride and stopped dead, weight all forward, one hand on the bulkhead. The bridge wasn't far. His head still thumped with the equations and diagrams Richard streamed through it—trajectories, velocities, calculations of mass—and he dropped his chin to his chest and heaved a single long, expressive sigh.

Trevor Koske turned, a crisp reversal of stride, and palmed himself into a deserted side corridor, increasing his pace.
I don't mind dying. But there's sixty-two people in this hunk of tin who probably do.

“What are
you
going to do about it?”

Get everybody aft
.
Tell them it's a drill. Lie. Fake hull damage forward. There's enough debris flying around to make it ring true. I don't care what you do.

I'll uncouple the drive units. They'll have a couple of hours before the radiation gets too bad. Start shuttling them back to Clarke, or to the
Montreal.
We'll save whatever we can.

Richard tracks the crew for me, feeds me the data. How did I ever live before I had an AI in my brain? He beats the stuffing out of my hip unit, that's for sure.

He shows me the vermilion eye that is the icon for the
Huang Di,
as red a star as Mars, and shows her start to slide downward, backward, directions that have no meaning in space at all. I fumble for the interface pins, have to look down at my hands to make them work right. Oh, too tired for this, Jenny. Too tired.

Even dimmed, the bridge lights beat at the backs of my eyeballs. I'm slapped with a sudden incongruous picture of Nell, all her black hair come out of her braid and tangled with snowflakes, stooping to pack slush into a ball that's going to sting like hell when it wallops me in the side of the head.

Bad time for a flashback, too. It tells me I pushed it real hard with my raw interface earlier, and maybe did a little more neural damage than the nanosurgeons have been able to repair just yet. I need more downtime. Sleep. Supplements and plenty to eat. All of which I'm not going to get.

There's an answer, of course. Miniature yellow pills rattle in my thigh pocket, and it would only take just one.

Maybe two.

Except if I push it too hard, I could wind up like Carver. Like Face's boy Mercedes, who got his brain melted when Unitek was illegally testing the Hammers in Hartford—was it just a few months back? “Gabe?” I say his name as much to remind myself that he's there as to get his attention. “How's it coming?”

“Not as well as I had hoped,” he says. He looks up at me, tired line between his eyes, which are still made bluer than they should be by the reddened whites. “I dunno how Ramirez made this big of a mess. Marde, tu sais—Je ne pense pas qu'il avait un partenaire.”

“He did it all himself?”

Gabe shrugs. “Programming's like handwriting. It all looks like one guy. And he wrote probably 30 percent of the O/S for this thing. He could have been mining it for months. I found two Trojan horses that haven't triggered yet, and God knows what else is in here. I don't think you
or
Patty should be jacking into this ship until Richard and I have it clean.”

“Je comprends—” I want to take his face between my hands and kiss him until the beaten look leaves the back of his eyes, and I'm afraid it never will. I sigh and look down.

And then Richard shows me sliding dots and telescopic images flicker on the big monitors as the
Huang Di
starts a burn and sideslips in space, coming around. I visualize her flaring attitude rockets, sailing like a belly-flopping diver over the Atlantic. And then she stalls, momentum burned off as the attitude jets reverse and she swaps end over end and hesitates, her long frame bending with the violence of the action, her drive flaring, sending her tumbling, obviously out of control into the
up
that isn't up, exactly, but more precisely just
away
.

Almost.

It had almost been too late to stop her fall.

“Richard, what is going
on
out there?”

He doesn't answer, brushes my query aside. And then the
Calgary
moves, suddenly, quicksilver, unfurling her wings.

I am not ready for the shock I feel when her image splits apart, shatters into two parts, and one tumbles back-up-away while the other follows the
Huang Di
down, down, down. “—marde! Putain de marde!”

Richard, what just happened?

Richard?

Marde.

I reach into my pocket. The Hyperex is there. Old friend, crystal calm and lightning speed in a bottle. I fumble the cap, crack the bottle in half with my steel hand. Pick two of them off the fabric of my jumpsuit and dry-swallow. Not scared now that I know I need it and it's not just pretty justifications. No. Hell, maybe you can kick an addiction after all.

“Gabe—”

He's staring at the monitors, at the
Calgary
coming apart like torn paper, disbelief bright on his face. And then something flashes on his console, illuminating a slight double chin and a day's worth of stubble. He looks down and his fingers start to move randomly through the three-dimensional holographic interface he prefers. “Marde. I missed another damned worm. Calisse de crisse.” He looks up again, looks down, torn between hiding his pain in his work and Ramirez's sabotage and watching the
Calgary
's forward section spread dragonfly wings to their utmost and surf downward, tacking across the solar wind to—unmistakably—claim the
Huang Di
's descent for her own.

“Gabe.”

He turns. His eyes—

I hold up the wire. “Leah.”

And I see him breathe in. Breathe out. And slowly shake his head once, no, and swallow. Hard.

The wire falls from my hands. I stand. The drug etches every shallow, hurting breath he takes into my memory clear as if drawn there. He lowers his gaze to his interface, and his hands move again. “Il y a rien que nous pouvons faire.”

There is nothing we can do.

Leah.

Richard, I'll kill you for this, you son of a bitch.

“Her decision, Jenny. Her plan. It might even work.”

Might.
Why aren't I there? In her place? Falling like that?
Dammit, Leah, it was supposed to be my job to die for you, you silly girl.
As Gabe goes about his work, not looking up. Not looking at the blazing image lighting the wall as the
Calgary
contacts atmosphere and starts to burn.