Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 (41 page)

“Because the
Montreal
mutinied?”

“To prove a point.” Riel held the bottle out to Dunsany, and Dunsany looked down at the sleeping girl in her lap, so Riel crossed the room and crouched down beside her to pour. “I could order a nuclear strike.”

Dunsany closed her eyes as she drank, then set the half-empty mug aside. “And China would order one back, and the antiballistic defenses would soak up most of the damage, and the EU and UN would declare Canada a rogue state and PanMalaysia would go along with it. And I wouldn't be the only one in jail.”

Riel nodded, standing and setting the bottle on the mantel. “There's something to be said for effective world government.” She slid the hand not holding her coffee mug under sweaty, gritty hair and massaged the back of her neck, fighting a sneeze. It got away from her; she fumbled for a tissue. “Maybe we should create one.”

“It's an opportunity.”

“Or a threat. And there aren't any international laws against mass-driven weapons yet.”

“There will be. And,” Dunsany continued, “there's no telling what the Benefactors would think of a nuclear exchange.”

Riel grunted and finished her coffee. “I'd be more comfortable if they—
did
something, Doctor.”

“Call me Ellie.” She stroked Genie's hair, staring upward as if she could see past the ceiling and the sky and the starships that hung over them like swords on slender threads to—whatever—lay beyond. “Thank you for saving her.”

Riel muffled a cough against the back of her hand. “I'm allergic to cats,” she said, and watched Dunsany's—Elspeth's—eyebrows rise.

“I'm allergic to bullshit,” Elspeth replied. “Are we going to sit here and—what—wait for the Benefactor tech to take over the planet? We can't get a decent satellite image because of the dust, but Woods Hole is reporting that they're already picking up fish with nanite loads. And all is silence from above.”

“The Feynman AI has been staying in touch. He says another wave of ships is en route. It's sort of reassuring to think their coordination isn't precise.”

“I know.” Elspeth lifted her shoulders against the stone behind her, her hair catching in strings on gray rock. “I have a recommendation. As a scientist. Not a politician.”

The mantel was granite, too, but polished to a gloss, and Riel stroked it idly with the pads of her fingers. A bright star-shaped chip drew her attention, on the chimney just above where she rested her elbows. She pressed a thumb into it: a bullet ricochet. “You fill me with dread, Doctor.”

“Hah.”

“Well?”

Genie stirred, and Elspeth gentled her with one hand. The girl had cried herself into exhaustion, squeaking around the bandages on her cracked ribs, and Riel didn't think an earthquake would waken her. “The Benefactor tech is spreading. The AIs in the downed ship will serve to control the nanotech on earth. What if we want to send people off planet? What if they get—
taken
off planet?”

Riel carefully retaped the window plastic, shutting the day-turned-dark behind a thick, translucent sheet. “They've made no progress talking to the aliens?”

“None, Richard says. Not even a broadcast.” Elspeth patted her HCD, quiescent now. “The ships just hang there and wait.”

Riel chewed her lip. She almost leaned back against the plastic, and remembered the broken glass behind it just in time. “What do you recommend?”

“I have the schematics for the control chips we've been using in the pilots. If
people
start becoming infected, we need to be prepared. Some of them may die. They will all fall very sick. Richard says he can control it, and he'll only allow the nanosurgeons to modify the injured and the ill, and he'll limit it to the lowest levels of infection. In the meantime, I want to go to the disaster zone. I want an Engineering Corps mobile lab, and every technician and doctor you can scrape up.”

“What happens then?”

“We start with the wounded and hope they live through the process. Hell—” and Elspeth smiled, rubbing the thin gold cross around her throat. “We'll need—shit. We'll need a hell of a lot of everything. Disaster teams are moving in. We'll have to secure the cooperation of the U.S. authorities. The badly hurt, we can always dunk them into what's left of Lake Ontario once they're microchipped. Hold their heads under until they stop kicking, then haul them out and plug them into an IV. Some will live. Some won't. If it works, it works, and these people will have nothing to lose.”

Riel closed her eyes, smelled smoke, tasted bile over the brandy's sting.
Well, Connie?

What do you do?

And she opened them and looked at Elspeth Dunsany and the girl and the cat in her lap. “You're a pacifist. You opposed our involvement in South America, as I recall. It's why you went to jail. Conscientious objector, weren't you?”

“You have”—a slight, sardonic smile lifted Elspeth's cheek—“excellent reading retention.”

“Sometimes you need to break things to prove you're not going to take any shit from the bad guys.”

“And sometimes all the options suck.”

You have that right.
Riel considered Elspeth, and was considered in return.
Well, Connie?

“Do you think we're going to get out of this without another fight from the Chinese? Over the
Huang Di,
if nothing else?”

Elspeth Dunsany cleared her throat. “We can always nuke the Chinese tomorrow, assuming the Benefactors don't wipe us all out as a bad job and give the porpoises a chance. What
are
you going to do about the Chinese? Who
are
you, Prime Minister?”

Riel came very close to turning her head and spitting. “You know, Elspeth, I keep asking myself,
What would Winston Churchill do?
You know they're blaming the attack on a mutiny aboard the
Huang Di
. Fringe elements. So sorry. The near-destruction of the ship resulting from the captain's attempt to regain command—”

“I see.” Dunsany's hands made a wheel in the air. “I hear a but.”

“The pilot who mutinied is willing to testify.”

“Do you think Richard would be permitted to testify, too?”

“They might call it hearsay.” Riel couldn't quite stop the amused snort. “But it's never too early to start establishing precedent. You realize if he testifies, that means the planet is a person, more or less?”

“Yes.”

Which,
Riel realized,
was Dunsany's intention all along
. “You'll lead this team?”

“I'm—” Riel almost heard her swallow the words,
not qualified
. “I'm an M.D. A shitty one, but sometimes shitty is better than nothing. I'll do what I have to do.”

Late December 2062
HMCSS
Montreal

I'll say this for Wainwright. When she chooses a side, she doesn't screw around. Acting on Gabe's belief that Ramirez was the sole saboteur—Richard calls it the Lone Programmer Theory, which apparently is a joke—the captain releases her crew to normal duty, although she assigns every member a buddy with whom he eats, sleeps, bathes, and goes to the head.

It's not a bad stopgap measure, as stopgap measures go.

On the twenty-third, the Benefactor ships start signaling.

Dit. Dit. Dah.

Dit. Dit. Dah.

Radio frequencies, and pulsed signals through the nanotech. Richard filters it after the first ten minutes,
merci à Dieu
. Dit. Dit. Dah.

What the hell does it mean?

“I don't know,” he answers. “But the last pip is twice as long as the first two, so I'm going to presume it's math and see if I can establish a dialogue.”

Keep me posted.

“I will.”

How are things on Earth?

“Bad,” he says. “Proceeding.” And leaves us to our vigil.

After the third day, it blends into a sort of nightmare. The pills keep Patty and me half alert. We trade off six-hour shifts and sleep when we can, often curled in a observer's chair on the corner of the bridge. We eat what's set before us with wooden mouths. Sometime on Christmas Eve, Gabe pronounces the
Montreal
's systems clean, and Richard concurs.

Dit. Dit. Dit. Dit. Daaahhhh.

One plus one plus one plus one is four.

Then Gabe walks off the bridge and I don't see him for eight or ten hours. When he comes back, he's clean and I hate him, until Wainwright orders me to the showers.

“If they try anything,” she says, “Patty is here. And chances are there's not a damned thing we could do about it anyway.”

Dah. Dah. Daaahhhh.

Two plus two is four.

Wake me up when they get to the square root of negative one, Richard.
Soldiering makes you damned good at waiting. And at least they want to establish a dialogue, instead of pitching rocks. Or whatever.

That's something. And there's hot water down there with my name on it, and right now that's the only thing that matters.

Dit. Dit. Dit. Dit. Dit. Dit.

Dah. Dah. Dah.

Yeah, and like that. I'd better hurry in the shower so Patty can get a turn.

I'm toweling off when the second wave of ships shows up.

A different design.

Dit. Dit. Dah.

Richard? Didn't we do this part already?

“Well, there's the odd thing.” A thoughtful pause, and it's really more Alan's voice when he comes back. “They seem to be signaling not us, but the first wave of ships.”

I see.

What does that mean?

“I wish I knew.”

A clean jumpsuit is like a personal favor from God. I seal it up to my throat; the damned thing has somehow gotten too big. “Richard, make me eat more.”

And Richard-for-real, not Richard-flavored-with-Alan. I'm getting used to his—malleable personality. “I'll try.”

Late December 2062
Somewhere in eastern North America

It was worse than Elspeth could have possibly imagined, and she was glad that Genie had gone to a shelter for displaced military dependents in Vancouver. PanMalaysia, Japan, the European Union, and United Africa sent doctors, nurses, troops in blue U.N. helmets that made her think of Jenny in the moments when she thought.

She lost track of where she was. What city, what nation, which way east lay. She ate when someone peeled her gory gloves away and shoved food in front of her, and she got on a plane or a truck when someone told her to, and she slept when someone pushed her over, and she lost more than she saved.

No finesse. No skill. Butchery. Oceans of blood. They died on the operating table and they died from the nanosurgery treatments and they just died for no reason at all, sat down in corners and stared and fell over, gone. It amazed her that there were any wounded at all, given the scale of the catastrophe, until she realized that some of the casualties had been hundreds of kilometers from the impact. And still she lost more than she saved.

She leaned on the edge of a steel table during a moment's lull and breathed out slowly, controlled, the smell of antiseptic churning in her empty gut.
I'm a fucking psychiatrist. What the hell am I doing here?

“I'm a forensic pathologist.” Elspeth looked up, into the desperation-reddened eyes of an Oriental woman about her own age who wore a dust-clogged surgical mask. “Damned if I know.”

“I didn't realize I was talking out loud.”

“I'm amazed that I can talk. Kuai Hua.”

“Elspeth Dunsany.”

The woman's eyes widened a touch, as if adrenaline jerked her awake. “Really?”

Elspeth sighed and turned tiredly away as stretcher-bearers staggered in, but they walked past her station to the back of the room.
Burn victim. Not mine, thank God.
And then a rush of shame at the thought. “My moment of infamy was a long time ago.”

“No—” Dr. Hua stopped, confused. “I heard your name from a Canadian Army doc named Frederick Valens.”

“You know Valens?”

“Hell. He said to keep an eye out for you. Last I saw him he was over in the triage shed.”

“Oh.”
Oh.
“Kuai, could you cover for me for a second?”

“Don't worry,” the other doctor said, exhaustion flattening her voice. “We won't run out while you're gone.”

Fifteen meters from surgery to triage, and the unnatural cold settled into Elspeth's lungs like a fluid, grit bouncing off her goggles in a bitter wind. Blood froze and cracked from her gloves as she turned them inside out and tossed them into a red-bag container by the door of the triage shed. Shed: a Quonset hut on an unevenly poured foundation, ice glittering on a roof like the metal rib cage of some long-dead beast. Elspeth pushed the double-hung rubber door open with her shoulder, blinking in the brightness of the artificial lights as she ducked inside.

Valens was easy to find, even with a surgical cap hiding his distinctive silver hair. He looked up as Elspeth entered, and when she tugged her mask down he got up from a crouch amid the rows of stretchers and the walking wounded seated on the floor and started moving toward her, his catlike stroll reduced to a dragging stagger.

“The prime minister has people looking for you. Don't you check your messages?” He didn't hold a hand out, and she didn't offer hers.

“I haven't exactly had time. What do you want?”

He blinked, voice grinding as if the words were buried somewhere very deep, and he had to go after them. “She wants you at the provisional capital in Vancouver. And from there, the
Montreal
.”

“What good am I there?”

He snorted. “Congratulations, Elspeth. You, Charlie Forster, Paul Perry, and Gabe Castaign are suddenly the world's foremost practical experts in communicating with nonhuman intelligences. The United Nations has demanded Canada assign you to their contact team.”

The floor really was a shoddy piece of construction. She caught the toe of her shoe on a ripple in the concrete and would have gone down on a knee if Valens hadn't caught her elbow. “I'm needed here.”

“Ellie.”

Huh.
She looked him in the eye. She could swear he'd been crying. But everybody she saw lately looked like that. “What?”