Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 (9 page)

She changed the subject. “When can I start the neural modifications?”

“We'll be picking candidates in the next couple of weeks.” His gaze stayed steady on her face now, and she was glad.

“You're not going to try to keep me from getting wired, are you? I thought you might be kind of funny that I qualified.”

“Proud,” he said. “You know there's only one other girl in the program?”

“I didn't know there were any others. I've only met boys. How come?”

“Boys are more likely to spend their days in front of video games.” He made a tossing-away gesture as Patricia turned her attention back to her dinner. “Pity, as girls your age are much more grown-up and easier to work with. I suspect you'll test high. You're not worried about the surgery?”

“Mostly not. Lieutenant Koske and Master Warrant Officer Casey came through it all right, and I already had the neural VR.” She wouldn't let the apprehension that turned the noodles in her mouth into a gag-worthy lump show in her voice. “And they're older than I am.”

“Yes,” Papa Fred said, his face curiously smooth and his voice soft. “It's much, much safer now. It takes longer than the VR implants, though, and there are still risks.”

Patricia let it turn over in her head for a while. “Would you do it?”

“In a nanosecond,” he answered. “You should finish your supper before it gets cold.”

She's perfectly fifteen, sixteen. On the tall side, heavy fall of shiny brunette hair. I can just see the edges of her interface through it, and I can't stop staring over her shoulder at the paternal little smile Valens is wearing. He catches me at it and I have to look down. I can't take the vindication in his eyes. Yeah, Fred. She's a nice-looking kid. What would you do to somebody who treated her the way you treated me?

Or if it were for king and country, would it all seem okay? It doesn't matter, does it? Not really.

The noodles are too salty. To my enhanced senses the udon is like fat, ropy worms and besides, the Hammer always kills my appetite—and flying the
Montreal
is exhausting as only something that calls for total concentration can be.

The fluorescent overheads strobing against the back of my eyes make me flinch. Everything's still sharp as etched glass, focused through the lens of the drug. I can pick out every voice in the cramped, crowded mess hall, although I can't quite focus on an individual conversation. I wonder if it's similar to what Richard picks up from the aliens—a whisper of party noise, and no sense at all.

I catch myself rolling the knife between my hands, staring at the lights reflected in the unsmudged blade. I force myself to look away. My edge is fading and I left the bottle in my cabin. I should put it in my locker down by the scrubbers, but Hyperex is a controlled substance. Everybody onboard
has
to know I have it, and my quarters are more secure.

Every sparkle, every movement catches my attention like a waved hand. I notice the captain at her table, although she usually eats in her cabin. She's entertaining the Unitek brass. I cast one last glance around the room for Gabe—no dice—and get up to ditch my tray.

Marde. Enough of this. I'm going for a walk.

My meat hand is shaking by the time I reach the ring corridor. I stuff it in the pocket of my jumpsuit and keep walking. I
hate
coming down. Hate hangovers. Hate that feeling that the world is that much closer, sandpaper on bare flesh instead of crystal-smooth and a warm quarter-inch away. I miss Richard in my head, ironic calming company. I walk back toward my quarters. I am not taking another pill.

Not.

I don't need it anymore.

Gabe must still be working. I find my hatchway, let my thumb hover over the lock plate, and jerk it back as if the damned thing were hot. I keep walking. Gabe's quarters are down the hall and “up” a ladder. He gets a side window and slightly lower “gravity.” Weird how our human desire for a view—the deep-seated urge to see what might be coming to eat you—outweighs the intellectual knowledge that it's cold and deadly on the other side of the
Montreal
's metal skin, and the safest place to be is buried in the center of the ship.

I knock on his hatchway, but nobody's home. Out of idle irritation as much as anything, I press my right thumb to the lock plate, an opalescent rectangle of black gel polymer that looks like a mood ring and feels like skin. My tongue clicks against the roof of my mouth when I hear the lock disengage. “Well, how about that.” I wonder if Gabe decided to set me up, or if Richard's taking pity on me, and then I undog the hatch, enter the room, and close it behind me.

Gabe's bunk is made tight and military until I sit down on it and pry my boots off by pressing my toes into the crease above the heel. It smells like him, though: faint musk of his skin, deodorant soap, toothpaste. We've been here almost a week.

I wonder if, back in Toronto, Elspeth's doing the same damned thing I am.

Probably not. She's like a machine, all brilliant edges and devious twists. Slicker than a greased snake, Grandpère would say. And twice as sharp as its teeth. I can't really think of her as a rival, even. We're all, as she told me back on Earth, grown-ups here.

I get through the shakes and the chills wrapped around Gabe's pillow. I'd have to go back to my room for the itty-bitty yellow pills. So harmless. So friendly looking. I've got the self-control to stop myself before I get out the door. If I were alone in my quarters, it might be different.

Gabe's eyes go wide when he opens the door. “Jenny. How'd you get in here?” And then he sees my bloodless face, the way my metal hand strains the fabric on his blanket. He crosses without another stupid, pointless word and pulls me into an embrace.

“You set the lock up for me.”

“Of course I did,” he lies, so I know—
Richard
. And the listening devices, I hope, don't.

“Hammer?”

“Obvious?”

“We did this once,” he reminds me. And we did. It should have been harder, then. I had more pain. A full-blown addiction. A carcass that felt stuffed full of broken glass. He wraps my shoulders in his big gentle arms and I read muscle under a comfortable layer of fluff. A bear, I used to call him, and he gets more bearlike with every year gone by.

I was a hell of a lot younger the last time.

“Mon ange,” I say into his neck. “It hurts.”

“We're going home in a couple of days,” he answers. “Hang on, Jenny. Hang on.”

He doesn't say what I know: that even on Earth, there will be the drugs, the tests, the training. And it's kids like Leah and Patricia Valens I'm going to be—I hope—teaching things that will get them out of this meat-grinder alive.

The drug is out of my system. I can tell, because it's taken with it every chemical trace of calm.

7:00 AM
Tuesday 7 November, 2062
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner
Hartford, Connecticut

The sound of running water covered the noise of her footsteps on channeled steel as Dr. Kuai Hua peeled off a double layer of red-smeared vinyl gloves. She dropped them into a biohazard bag beside a stainless-steel sink, then discarded her gown, mask, and the rest of her paper wrapping before hand washing efficiently. She turned the water off with an elbow against the flat handle of the fixture. An absent expression pursing her lips, she exited to the white-tiled prep room, took a palmful of the peppermint-scented lotion she kept there, and smoothed it liberally over her hands, working it in along the cuticles of her clipped, spotless nails.

The door opened behind her. “Looking pensive, Dr. Hua.”

“Good morning, Sally,” she answered, still facing the sink. “The young ones are always hard. I finished that dictation you were waiting on. The data slices are in the box—please correct whatever horrors the voice rec has inflicted on them?”

“Another mutilation, no doubt. Ain't technology grand?”

Footsteps crossed the floor behind her, and Kuai rolled her shoulders back and stretched her neck side to side, easing the strain of hours of difficult and delicate work. She turned and regarded the spare, brown-headed form of her assistant.

Sally stepped through the connecting door into Kuai's office to pick up the data slices. Balancing the box in her left hand, she peered back around the corner. “All right, Dr. Hua. I can tell from the wrappers in the garbage that you had dinner and breakfast here, and you've already finished one autopsy and three dictations. Did you actually sleep last night?”

“There's a cot,” the Connecticut state chief coroner and civilian commissioner of the Hartford Police offered wryly. “Actually, I did go home. Twice. My dog needed to go out, and I hate leaving him alone all day.”

Sally snorted. “How many left today?” She gestured through the observation window to the autopsy theater.

“That was it. Twenty-three-year-old male. It'll be a DUI.”

“Good, then you're going home. I'll start the paperwork.”

Kuai hesitated. And then nodded. “Going home. Indeed.”

Sally cleared her throat as she turned away.

“Yes?”

“No taking work home, Dr. Hua.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Kuai hung her lab coat on the peg and freed her lustrous dark hair from the braid straining her temples. She collected her HCD, a collapsible notebook computer, and the rest of her gear and piled it into her bag, changed her shoes for sneakers, threw her coat on, and stopped with her hand on the door. The smell of coffee overrode chemical scents as Sally fussed in the break room. Voices in the hallway told her the rest of the day shift was arriving.

Cursing herself for a fool, Kuai turned back to her desk and grabbed a data carrier marked
Case # 835613417, Case # 835613418, Case # 835613419: September 2062 triple homicide Park River Hartford South: Casey, Barbara; Kozlowski, Michael T.; Baobao, Yin.

She stuffed it into the pocket of her scratchy black wool overcoat, first checking to see if Sally was looking through the glass.

Evening
Tuesday 7 November, 2062
St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario

Razorface leaned back in the driver's seat of Maker's battered dark blue Bradford Tempest, grateful for the tinted windows. He'd have to change vehicles soon anyway. The old pickup was unobtrusive, but it wasn't good to take chances.

He'd parked in the shade of a yellowing pine tree, across a lawn and behind a row of shrubs through which he was watching his target: a cluster of one-story gray brick buildings with wide, semimirrored windows. Shadows of people moved inside, odd disconnected horizontal segments that told him there were venetian blinds across the inside of the glass. Keeping his gaze trained past the discreet green-and-tan sign that he couldn't read, he wondered which office belonged to Dr. Alberta Holmes.

Her image had been easy to find: a formal head shot of a gray-haired, stern-looking woman in power red appeared several times on the Unitek corporate sites. Simon had told him where the research facility was: almost
on
the main University of Toronto campus. Now it was just a matter of getting his hands on Dr. Alberta Holmes.

Except he hadn't seen her yet. He shifted his shoulders and stretched his legs, cramped despite the truck's spacious cab.
Good thing Maker doesn't drive a compact car.
He drank iced tea out of a disposable and waited.

Lunchtime came and went, dragged down into twilight. He zipped his jacket another three inches, wondering how late Holmes could possibly work. He had three pricey cars in the parking lot picked out as possibly hers, but all three were gone by the time the streetlamps kicked on. A few teenagers and twenty-odd kids he'd seen go inside at around three-thirty walked back out: all boys except one girl about fourteen with long blond hair peering from under her knit cap.

Bored, hungry, Razorface leaned forward and thumbed the ignition on. He must have missed Holmes, or maybe she just hadn't come to work today. That movement—and his position across the street from the research center—were the only reasons he noticed a young couple apparently out for a chilly late autumn stroll across the campus pause in the shadow of a great, dying oak. One of them . . . something familiar about the way she moved caught his eye. He couldn't quite see what they were up to, so he killed the Bradford's electric engine, snaked a hand into the glove box, and came up with a pair of slimline night-sight goggles. The kids were fussing with some kind of equipment when he looked back.

Taking pictures.

Of the Unitek office.

In the dark.

Acting on old instinct—instinct that had kept him alive and in control of a midsize city's underworld until he was pushing forty—Razorface reached up and made sure the dome light was disabled. He slid across the front seat and opened the passenger-side door, letting himself out into the darkness on the far side of the Bradford.

Cold air caressed his shaved scalp. He set big feet carefully between the scattered leaves and walked away from the office building, away from the not-so-mashing couple. Razorface could still move quietly when he wanted to. They never heard him change course and come up behind them, close enough to tug the girl's glossy black braid.

Never heard him at all, until he cleared his throat and quoted from an audio site. “Remember, remember, the fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and plot.”

The boy was quick. Quick enough that Razorface had to put him on the ground or risk having to hurt him pretty badly. The girl didn't say a word, but grinned when she recognized him. “How's your head?” she said, touching her hat.

“It only hurts when I laugh,” Razorface answered, taking his foot off the boy's chest.

The kid grunted and got up, shooting him a dirty look through the darkness before bending down to feel around for the digital camera. “You two know each other?”

Razorface pushed his goggles up on his forehead. They pressed bruised flesh and he snapped them off, grimacing. “We met,” he said. “Didn't catch your name, though.”