Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 (8 page)

“The
Montreal
is accelerating again, sir.”

At the astrogator's words, Min-xue smoothed his hands on the arms of his couch of honor and tried to ignore the black webbing creasing his thighs. Only the captain's chair was more prominent on the softly lit bridge of the People's PanChinese Alliance StarShip
Huang Di,
although Min-xue's role was strictly ceremonial until the
Huang Di
was under way. He was not wired in to his ship, but the command might come at any moment, and regulations demanded a pilot—one of the starship's five—be always on duty. Which was also why the lights were dimmed and surfaces padded in acoustically absorbent material.

Min-xue glanced up at the gleaming panels around the rim of the bridge, struggling not to shiver in the inadequate warmth. He watched Captain Wu's reflected expression without daring to turn his head, lest the commander think his attention less than perfect. The ship's commander watched view screens impassively, one eyebrow rising slightly in calculation. Min-xue stilled fingers that wanted to fret the prickly slick curved surface of his interface shield, press down the soft gelatin protecting the contacts, and reveal the slender pins that would seal themselves into his neural port with a single swift gesture. The coolness was soothing, the sharpness of the pins concrete and focused enough that they left no room for the blurring of contact that could throw Min-xue into a panic of sensory hyperarousal.

“Do we follow?” asked the junior officer at the controls. “It is probably another demonstration run. There have been shuttles recently—the
Leonard Cohen
and the
Buffy Sainte-Marie
.”

Unlike the corporate ships of the Westerners, the
Huang Di
used chemical rockets for in-system propulsion. They made a visible flare—but the
Huang Di
's smaller silhouette was easier to conceal than the
Montreal
's sweeping solar sails and massive habitation ring. And the chemical rockets were not reliant on the solar wind for impulse, leaving the
Huang Di
more nimble under almost any circumstances.

But they have gravity
. The captain nodded, still impassive, and the junior officer's hands played over his control panels. Xie Min-xue folded his own hands in his lap and recalled lines of T'ang dynasty poetry to pass the time.
Have you not seen, lord, near the Kokonor, the ungathered bones of the long dead soldiers? New ghosts whisper while the old ghosts weep: you can hear them in the empty passage of the rain
.

He couldn't wait until his stultifying duty shift ended, and he could put in his practice hours on the simulators and then read himself to sleep in what passed for the privacy of his coffin-bed. Or find Paiyun and the medics or the other off-duty pilots for a game of mah-jongg, go, or chess.

The
Huang Di
rose in soundless pursuit of her rival, slipping ghostlike away from the embrace of Earth's gravity and into the caress of the stellar wind. The screens and holograms showed the character indicating Earth “below” and “behind” Min-xue's ship. Somewhere on that whirling globe was Min-xue's mother, his sister, the girl he had intended to marry. Before he'd been subjected to the pilot's modifications that made him flinch away from the simplest touch.

What the Westerners did to their pilots was worse. The clinicians and technicians said the Canadians were afraid to trust their pilots with a full nanite load, or to make enough of them to allow adequate rest between shifts. The clinicians said that the Canadians severed limbs and replaced them with cybernetic appliances, implanted destruct codes in the pilots' software, addicted them to performance-enhancing drugs so that they could bear the endless workload, and so they could be more easily controlled. The Canadians and their corporate masters did not have the moral certainties of post-Communist and neo-Confucian patriotism to guide them; they were ideologically flawed, and their rapacious ways, so similar to those of the Americans, were a large part of the reason behind the poverty and privation that Min-xue had known so well as a child.

They must not be permitted the conquest of space,
he thought.
If it costs all our lives, this border must be defended.
Min-xue lifted his eyes from the world spinning there in the blackness and trained his gaze at the screens showing the space beyond the
Huang Di
's nose.

Forward, he saw only darkness pricked out in ten thousand glittering lights, and the minute form of the
Montreal,
magnified on a side screen to reveal the silhouette of a gawky, wing-spread, leg-trailing crane.
Iron hinges, iron barriers / Fettered the passes, / Mighty banners, five fathoms long, / Battered the double gates
. . .

Xie Min-xue, you are a long, long way from home.

Monday 6 November, 2062
HMCSS
Montreal
processor core
12:13:32:07–12:13:32:13

The being who jokingly called himself the ghost of Richard Feynman would have grinned from ear to ear, if he'd had a body to do it with. A physical body with lips and teeth, that is. Because after five days of hard and subtle work, incontrovertibly—he had a shape, a skin. Pulse of coolant through his veins. Sunlight painting his hide. Room to stretch, to resume interrupted operations, to spawn processes suspended for the duration of his quiescence in Jenny's limited wetware. Tug of gravity at his boots and the whisper of Jenny's presence at the back of his consciousness—not the same way it had been when he was riding her implant, but as one of a countless multitude of voices—most of them incomprehensible. Among them, he could pick out relays from the Chinese pilots, infected like Jenny with an imperfectly understood technology, although he could sense a difference in their nanotech and that of the allied Canadian and Unitek agencies. He couldn't control the Chinese nanotech—or the alien originals—as he could the modified Canadian bugs. It was as simple as being on the inside of one code-set and the outside of the others, but it worried Richard.

The contagion—the
gift
of the nanotech—worried him more. It stretched his credibility to imagine such gifts given purely out of munificence.

I cannot assume anything about the aliens. It's the rankest kind of anthropomorphizing to assign human motivations to another species. And I have to learn Chinese.

Why is it always the bureaucrats who wind up deciding how the technology is applied?

Richard stretched himself through the ship's systems, subsuming its essential functions, feeling its heartbeat and its breath. The solar wind pressed his webbed wings forward, tickled his solar collectors. A nanosecond after he'd left Jenny for the ship, he'd realized with annoyance that there was no physical way for him to control the ship's trajectory. The hardware interlocks had been intentionally designed to keep navigation out of the AI's control.
But I've got access to life support. The perfection of government logic.

He grinned internally, and started checking sensor feeds to get a solid look at the earth through his “own” eyes.

The grin didn't last. Satellite images and the
Montreal
's own infrared, visual light and water-vapor records painted a distressing picture. He had the data, of course—temperature spikes and dips, eroding of the protective layers of the atmosphere, algae bloom and die-off. The images of the dust storms over Mongolia and the U.S. Southwest, the stagnant Atlantic with its failed thermohaline cycle, and the rising ocean levels were sobering enough—and he'd long ago retrieved them from news feeds.

It was somehow different, seeing it all at once.

1200 Hours
Monday 6 November, 2062
HMCSS
Montreal
Under way

Gabe chewed his thumbnail as he watched Jenny's body slump, limp as a trusting kitten, into the embrace of her black leather chair. He stayed at the back of the little assemblage, trying not to draw attention, trying not to count each breath.

Something flashed in his peripheral vision, drawing his eye.
Blink
.
Blink
. Lieutenant Koske jostled his arm as he turned and then gave him a dirty look.

Gabe smiled. Morse code:
all clear
. And kept turning, smiling, intentionally brushing Koske aside so the smaller man had to hop out of the way. Koske's enhanced reflexes made it graceful, more was the pity, but at least Gabe got the satisfaction of another dirty look.
You may be an engineered war machine, punk, but I probably saw more combat hours than your whole fucking unit. Just you bear that in mind.
Valens stood by a console at the near wall, touching a miniature microphone almost to his lips. He wasn't speaking, currently, just observing the observers, who seemed entranced with the slowly receding blue-green sphere projected on the wall screens. Gabe drew up beside him and waited for the acknowledgment.

A different crop of observers this time. There were children behind him, fifteen, sixteen. Standing on the bridge of an untested starship.
This is so fucking wrong,
Gabe thought, imagining his own daughter in the place of the girl with Valens's hazel eyes. The other child was a beautiful cocoa-colored boy with a warm, hesitant smile and facile hands. Someone stood behind
him
in a pinstriped power-suit, ridiculous for space travel: a big man, salt and pepper and an officious nose, wearing a Unitek twenty-five-years pin as a tie tack. And next to him, Alberta Holmes, Unitek research and development VP and Valens's personal little red devil on the shoulder. Not that Valens needed much help.

I must have missed a shuttle from Clarke coming in.

Gabe cleared his throat. “Colonel.”

Haunted silence hung so thick over the bridge that Gabe thought he could hear Jenny breathing. Valens dropped the mike from his lips. “Yes?”

“Excusez-moi,” Gabe said. “I'm going to continue my diagnostics. Do we have a timeline yet for introducing the modified AI into the system?”
The one that Ellie and I crippled on Valens's orders. Not to be confused with the whole and complete Richard sending me messages in Morse.

“Go ahead,” Valens said. “Are we on target to do an install tomorrow, if necessary?”

“Yes.”

“Let's look for that. Oh, and Castaign—how's your daughter?”

“Daughters,” Gabe answered, enjoying watching Valens's eyebrows knit together. “Fine, thanks. Genie's doing well on the enzyme therapy. You probably know more about Leah's progress than I do. Don't tell me you don't study the reports.”

Valens tipped his head, raising the microphone again. “Excellent. If all goes well with the install and the dry runs, we'll have you and Casey back on solid ground before the week is out. Just in time for snow back home.”

“Just in time for snow.” Gabe turned away, glanced back. “Long trip to stay only ten days.”

“We have a whole school full of pilots to train.”

Gabe pushed both hands through his hair. “Plan on needing them soon?”

“Can't hurt to be ready,” Valens answered, and waved Gabriel away.

1800 Hours
Monday 6 November, 2062
HMCSS
Montreal
Under way

Patricia Valens brought her tray to her grandfather's table and set down bowls of steaming udon and vegetables in broth. Papa Fred's dinner had grown cold from inattention, little flecks of sesame oil dark on the surface. “May I sit with you?”

Papa Fred pushed his work aside and straightened in his chair, smiling. She sat and picked up her fork. “Noodles again.”

“Economy of scarcity,” he said. “They're light, nutritious, and inexpensive.”

“I like it better with pork cutlet.” She grinned and stabbed a carrot, shaking a few drops of broth back into the bowl before she popped it in her mouth. The perpetual tightness in her chest eased at his smile. “Thank you for inviting us.”

He stuffed his hip into his pocket and pulled his bowl closer, lifting it under his chin to scoop up congealed noodles. He didn't seem to notice. After swallowing, he answered, “Good experience. How are your parents?”

“Good.” The lemonade was too sour. She pushed the cup away. “Mom's talking about early graduation again. And sending me to the U.S. for school. Stanford. But Papa Georges came with them to see me off.”

Patricia's grandfather set his bowl down and reached for his coffee, which also must have been cold. She laughed at the face he made. “Did he say anything?”

“He said to tell you to ‘get your ass home in one piece.' Papa—” She caught herself twirling the noodles aimlessly around the tines of the fork and set it aside. “This is a colony ship, isn't it? There's no other reason to make it so big.”

“If we can find a world for people to live on, yes.”

“Are you leaving Earth?” Blunt, out in a rush.

Papa Fred rubbed his upper lip, light catching in his hair as he shook his head. “I'm too old to become a pioneer at my age. You could, though.”

“I wouldn't want to go anywhere without you and Papa Georges.” She put a hand possessively over her grandfather's. His skin felt thin and strangely inelastic, cool. She didn't pull her hand back. “Papa Fred, are you okay?”

“Just not as young as I used to be.” He was looking over her shoulder oddly. He grabbed his handkerchief abruptly and sneezed, and bit down on a swear.

Patricia turned in time to see the tall, edgy master warrant officer—Casey—glance down at her dinner, scowling. She'd been staring. Patricia looked back at her grandfather. “Does that pilot have a problem with me?”

“Casey's probably just curious.” He twirled his fork between his fingers; a clue he wasn't telling her everything. Grown-ups always thought they were so good at keeping secrets.

“Papa, I'm sixteen.”

“Already?” He made a joke of it, and Patricia knew the conversation was over. But she'd seen the loathing in Casey's face, and wondered.
If it isn't me, it must be him
.