Undertow (27 page)

And some of the Andrés that heard her answered, “Brought
down
the station? Destroyed it?”

“I don’t know.” Her hands moved over the touchpad; the pattern varied. “You want a concrete answer in
this
?”

Outside, worlds away, another André Deschênes died in agony when a ranid insurgent put the bolt of a spear-gun through his abdomen. Other Andrés felt it, and winced. “Probability storm?”

Some of her laughed, some of her called him ignorant, some explained what that meant. And that those who worked with wave states called it a
correction
.

And that she’d never even heard of one like this.

The barge pitched and yawed as the wind picked up; André felt its conflicting shivers through his many feet. All the Ziyis at their consoles downloaded the chit, burned a copy of the data, and handed the original back to André. Then the current one pulled the helm on over her head and composed herself. “Calling Bryson now,” she said. “We’ll see if I get through.”

She placed her hand on the smooth dome of the touchpad, and exploded into flames.

From the inside, head and chest and the white-hot fire eating her as if her bones themselves were phosphorus, the flames tunneling through, burning to the extremities. André reached for her, somehow thinking he could yank the headset off, pull her clear. But the heat licked his fingers, and a thick column of oily grease rolled from her chair.

And André felt himself collapsing. Narrowing, narrowing, crashing in, clenching down.

The man who grabbed Ziyi Zhou’s shoulder would likely die. Unless, on some other timeline, he was already dead. Unless he were about to vanish from possibility, like a photon detected passing through the other slit.

Knees like gelatin, eyes watering from the smoke, André backed out of the hold, the data chit folded in his left hand.

Cricket—this Cricket, of all the Crickets that could have been—was still alive when she finally met Timothy Closs, in an improvised meeting room aboard an evacuation ship, running before the storm. They’d brought her in by chopper, a ride harrowing enough that she planned never to leave the surface again. She didn’t know if Closs had come in the same way, or if he’d been here all along.

Judging by the state of his hair and a tear in the sleeve of his jacket that was still repairing itself, he’d probably been in the fighting, which she knew about because she’d been eavesdropping in the helicopter.

Despite it all, though, it was morning, and the world was unsplintered, though the storm defeated any glimpse of rallying dawn. Cricket was wet to the skin. Her blouse—saturated with salt spray—had given up the ghost and hung against her body in sodden, lifeless folds. She shivered, and with her hands fixed behind her, couldn’t even hug herself for warmth.

She drew her shoulders back, though, and set herself on her heels, refusing to tilt her head and stare up at him. He wasn’t tall, but it didn’t take much to be taller than she.

He studied her for a moment, though, and didn’t step too close. He was a fit, compact, older man. He frowned, his hands clasped behind his back as if in unconscious mimicry of her own less-voluntary pose. Any minute, she thought, he’d cock his head and say something like
You’ve been a great deal of trouble.

But what
do
you say in a situation like that, if you don’t have the scripts to fall back on?

He surprised her. A thoughtful regard, straight-on, and then he turned away. “Major?” she asked his back, her teeth rattling.

“Get this woman a blanket,” he said. “And something hot to drink. With sugar and caffeine in it.”

They did, and eased her restraints, resealing the plastic cuffs in front of her instead of behind so she could sit and manage the cup. When she was halfway comfortable, her hair and clothes soaking the dry blanket—garish Charter Trade green—they wrapped around her shoulders, he leaned back against the edge of a table, folded his arms across his chest, and gave her another considering look.

The silence in the room let the sound of the storm seep through. Beyond the shutters, wind wailed and hail and rain slashed the sides of the vessel. She hoped they didn’t run into a waterspout. On the other hand, that wouldn’t matter much to her if they were planning an execution.

“I hope you’re proud of yourself,” he said.

The gesture of her chin included the storm, his torn sleeve, the restraints on her wrists. She cupped both hands around the mug of cocoa that warmed her palms. “I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with this.”

“Enough to go forward on,” he said. “Unless you want to tell me a little about what your plans are.”

Oh, what the hell
. Either André had gotten away or he hadn’t; if he had, Ziyi had the information already. If he hadn’t, maybe she could scare Closs into doing something stupid. “We know,” she said. “We know that the omelite is the by-product of a Slide explosion; we know about the exploitation of the ranid workers; we know that Greene’s World is undergoing a major ecological catastrophe due to unregulated tanglestone mining; and we know that the ranids had a technological society and willingly relinquished it. And we’re telling the Core, Major.”

“You’re bluffing.” Calm, but that crease between his brows was deepening. “You can’t prove any of that.”

She sipped the cocoa. It was she who cocked her head. “Lucienne Spivak was a Unified Earth security agent, Closs. You killed a uniform. And André Deschênes will testify to it.”
Please, André. Please have gotten away.

Closs was good. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t close his eyes. His fingers didn’t tighten on his biceps. She couldn’t be sure.

But then he licked dry lips, just a pink flicker, and she covered a smile.
Owned
. “It’ll spend years in court,” he said.

She finished her cocoa. “Kiss enough frogs, get a prince. Do you want to stand trial for my murder or kidnapping, too?”

“You’re not free to go,” he said. He glanced at the door; his executary must have summoned her keepers, because the panel slid back a moment later. “We have a stateroom for you, M~ Murphy. I’m afraid it’s not luxurious.”

Inside his hollowed tree, Jean was accustomed to silence. And so a teakettle moaning startled him, jerked him out of head-held exhaustion. He let his hands fall to the control panel and pushed himself up. The short cord on his VR helmet snapped him back into the chair. He bruised the backs of his thighs and cursed, too exhausted to stand again.

He concentrated, lifted his hands, and tugged the helmet forward from the bottom rim. The dimly lit chamber was bright enough to make him squint.

Helmetless, he heard the sound more clearly.

It was the wind.

The unnamed extratropical storm had made landfall, and his tree was thrashing, chafing, rasping branch on branch. Each collision shivered through the heartwood beneath his feet. When he laid his hand on the console again, it trembled against his fingertips like a racing pulse.

Two deep breaths and he forced himself shakily to his feet, clutching the crudely welded edge of the console. He used the toilet, leaning one forearm against the wall for support. There was a concealed locker full of high-calorie food; he rummaged out two logs of vitamin-enriched dried fruit and a preserved salami, which he hacked chunks off with his knife while coffee brewed.

Not dead. His left arm was numb where it didn’t sting or burn or prickle. He could use it if he looked at what he was doing, but the fine motor control was almost nonexistent. He shrugged his jacket down, rolled the sleeve up, and found a stun-gun burn on his upper arm. He couldn’t remember how or where he’d gotten it, or under what circumstances.

Which Jean was he? And had the others scattered, their diverse worlds irretrievably diverged, or had they all collapsed into him?

And did it, in any practical consideration, matter?

A first-aid kit lived in one of the storage cabinets. He sat down at the console again, too tired to clean the wound, and sliced off another piece of a fruit bar.

The coffee dripped from the filter. His console pinged an incoming call.

That should only come for one person. “Lucienne,” he said, sliding down in his chair. “I’m alive.”

“That’s good,” she said. “Because everybody on Greene’s Station isn’t. And either André didn’t make it to Zhou, or something happened once he got there. No data.”

“Ping him,” Jean said. There was a sterile tube of condensed milk in the cabinet. If he got up, he could get coffee, add the milk. Warmth, sugar, caffeine, protein, fat. It would help.

“The Slide,” Lucienne said. “It’s down. I can only reach you because of your tech. Listen carefully.”

The coffee was too far away. And Lucienne’s voice was…coldly terrified. “I’m not doing anything else.”

It still took her five minutes to make him believe—that to all appearances an alien attack force had taken down the transfer station, that the entire planet was floating in the dark, alone, unconnexed. “Zhou’s out of contact,” Lucienne finished. “You are sitting at the only live console on Greene’s World, Jean.”

He slumped in the chair and regarded the backs of his hands, stiff and vaulted as dead spiders. “Shit.” He could just about turn his head to look at her face on the screen. She bit her thumbnail as she studied him.

“Jean, go make yourself some coffee.”

“It’s made,” he said, but heaved himself out of the chair. “What do you want to do?”

“Put me in touch with André. If he’s alive. Have you heard from Cricket?”

“I don’t know if she’s…” Jean fixed coffee, pretending distraction. “We had one hell of a probability correction. A probability
collapse
. I saw her dead. I don’t know if she still is. She might be off connex even if she lived. I have no idea what it’s like out there; I’m pinned down under a storm. I think I forced the fork to completion, though. I think we’re split.”

“No more omelite,” Lucienne said. “Well. That’s going to change things. Open a channel to André.”

“And if I connex this thing and they find me through it?”

“Slide to Earth. You need to take your machine down anyway, don’t you?”

He nodded. Because to keep it live was to take the risk of breaking the planet again. “
Clone
myself? I don’t have a matter transmitter here, Lucienne.”

She laced her fingers behind her neck, under the hair. It hurt to look at her; he stared down at the oily surface of the coffee. “You don’t need one. I can get one on this end. Just send the data; we’ll tune your daughterself in.” Her fingers waved beside her ear. “What, are you chicken?”

“It won’t be—”

“You aren’t you. You aren’t the you you were this morning. Your consciousness provides a semblance of continuity, but if you’ve had an exigency incident, you’ve been an infinite number of people between then and now. There is no free will. It’s all an illusion. Besides”—she smiled—“I came to you. Are you too much of a sissy to come to me?”

Rather than answer, Jean put the mug to his mouth and drank deeply, scorching his palate and tongue. When he’d had a moment, he said, “You set that up.”

“No.” Lucienne smiled, and if she’d been standing by him, she would have touched his arm. “It’s just a goddamned coincidence. Find out what you can about Cricket, Maurice, and Nouel, while you’re at it?”

17

GREENE STEPPED THROUGH THE DOORWAY, WIPED HIS
forelock out of his eyes, and stood dripping on the worn-out carpet. “Nice fucking evacuation, Tim.”

Closs thought of half a dozen schoolyard taunts—
next time you start a war, check to make sure we have an army first—
and remembered himself in time not to engage. He settled for parade rest and an impassive expression. “We lost,” he said, and waited for the emotions to cross Jeff’s face.

He was only slightly disappointed. Greene attempted to counterfeit innocence, but only managed to look angry. “The hell you say.”

I should have stayed in the service.
“I had a conversation with M~ Morrow while you were…wherever you went, Jeff. Core knows that the ranids are posttech, or if they don’t, they will as soon as connex is back up. We have no rights to this world. We lost. It’s all over but the jail time. Assuming we survive what looks like a fucking alien invasion, Jeff.
If
the alien ships Slide back from wherever they just Slid off to and have another go at us. Have you paused to think about that?”

The silence dragged a little. Closs expected Greene to squirm, thrash, deny. Instead, he slipped both hands into his suit pockets and pushed them forward, ruining the line as the autofit stretched cartoonishly. He bit his lower lip, and then looked up at Closs and said, “The information being out doesn’t matter if the froggies don’t exist.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use that word. They’re ranids. What do you mean, ‘don’t exist’?”

“Because it’s so much less racist to call them ‘froggies’ in Latin? I mean, I have a bioweapon, Tim. We can get rid of the little bastards for good.”

“…and the aliens?”

“The aliens are ranids from the other fork, right? Well, let me tell you something else you probably haven’t been paying enough attention to notice, Major. The omelite wells are pumping sludge.”

“Sludge?”

“All of them.” Greene waited three beats. “We’re out of business. And your alien invasion? I’m willing to bet it isn’t coming back.”

The humen argued while Gourami struggled to understand them. Se dared not press against the glass; instead se hunkered back in the darkness, se new net-vest making an irregular outline, licked by the rain and the wind.

Se companions hadn’t found the captives, or any sign, on the fleeing barge that the Company humen used as a village-heart. They had taken Caetei, and se would not leave Caetei in their dry, rough hands. So se had attached self to the humen leader’s helicopter as it fled the overrun barge. And se clung there, water sloshing in se brood pouch, se hand and toefingers wrapped in a deathgrip on wet metal until bone ran with traced flame and digits cramped in claws.

Se still shook from the flight. The storm, though it tugged se and would have tumbled self from the deck of this new ship if it could, was just a storm—rain and wind, safe enough if one were far from shore. Se’d already swum through the chop to reach here. Se could not have risked being spotted hanging on the skid of the arriving helicopter, and so se had dropped into the ocean and swum aboard.

The storm was se friend. There were almost no humen on deck, and when they emerged, they did so briefly. Se could endure the pitch and surge of the ship as it rode heavy seas. A bullet would have been harder to survive, and self had no illusions how the humen would feel about a stowaway person now.

But se could not leave while the humen leaders were arguing. Not when they were arguing about people, and when they were arguing also about the Other Ones. And Gourami struggled to read their lips through the rain-streaked glass. The light-colored one seemed to be defending an idea or an argument, waving away the dark-colored one’s objections. He pulled something from his pocket, a box that he opened to show one two three four five six silver tubes. He lined them up on the table and tapped the one on the end with his fingernail. They sat there, silent and small and inoffensive, frosting faintly on the outsides unless that was a smear of condensation on the glass.

Sometimes, Gourami caught the outline of words on the humen mouths.
Mortality rate. Effective. All age morphs. Unethical. Retrovirus.

Genocide.

The dark one said that last, and Gourami, shaking, pained and frozen in brewing horror, was pierced by hope for a moment as the pale one drew back. The humen stared at each other, a contest of wills rather than support and assent. All Gourami heard was the rush of wind, the creak of the ship as it pitched and yawed.

I’m not going to jail for a bunch of frogs,
the pinkish one said. It looked down and away from the other, at an angle, and Gourami saw what its lips shaped, clearly.
We can’t lose this planet, Tim. And Core won’t protect us if there’s no tanglestone.

Fight him,
Gourami willed, leaning one hand foolishly on the glass, the rain slashing se back like whips. As if se could press close to the human, influence him somehow. As if he would understand the words se thought at him so fiercely. As if it would matter at all.

Se was not a greatparent. Se did not have the skill of making luck.

For Christ’s sake,
the one called Tim said. He turned his back on the pink one, and that let Gourami see what he said clearly.
I don’t want to know what you do.

At first, Cricket tried to sleep. Her connex was damped—she’d get nothing as long as she was on this boat—and she could only play so much solitaire.

But she might as well try to fly to the moons, or swim to the bottom of the ocean, or turn back time. Actually, she thought—composed on her narrow cot, staring at the bulkhead where it curved in over her head—she’d have a better chance, statistically speaking, of any of those. She felt the ship move ponderously in the heaving ocean, its massive length and heavy keel a match for the fury of the cyclone—at least for now.

She’d left the windowless compartment lit, preferring to see anything that might come at her in the night. And because it made the creaks and shudders of the storm-tossed vessel easier to bear—if the light was on, it was just a ship being driven by the storm. In the dark, she would have been a rag tossed and shaken in the teeth of a beast.

When the door whirred open, she came to her feet. She was not expecting a crouched and shivering ranid, water pooling beneath it on the deck. “Don’t come in!” she said. “The door’s locked from the outside.”

The ranid—a far-swimmer, with the net-vest knotted about it like you saw on dramas, and pregnant, which they never were in the media—gestured at Cricket impatiently. She moved forward, shuffling and sore but not slow by any means, and stepped over the guard slumped against the wall. She didn’t ask if he was dead or unconscious.

All the corridors were abandoned, which did not surprise Cricket. The ship seemed to be running a skeleton crew, and they’d be needed to keep her together in the face of the cyclone. The ranid led her along its own backtrail of dripped water, but paused as they entered an aft ladderway. It drew Cricket into the shelter behind the ladder with the light grip of slimy twig-fingers, and held up a child’s waterproof slate. —
Cricket Murphy,
it keyed.
—Humen call me Gourami
.
We must destroy this ship.

“There are people on it!” Cricket whispered, leaning forward so her face would show in the light of the screen. “The lifeboats won’t make it through this.”

The ranid hesitated. Then it turned the slate away from her and bent over it, fingers moving with precise rapidity. When it raised the slate to Cricket’s eye level. —
Must. ?Tim? And ?Jeff? have virus to kill ranid people. All of us. We cannot let them. Please. I need your help.

“We stay with the ship or I die, Gourami. And—if we sink the ship, how do you keep the, the virus”—
shit, Rim is using bioweapons on the natives? Fuck me raw—
“from getting into the water?”

—
Fire,
the frog typed impatiently, goggling up at Cricket with beseeching eyes.—
Virus is sealed in tubes, in refrigerated box. Help me sabotage the ship. And then we swim. It is only a storm.

“I can’t!” Panic, tightening her throat, her heart thumping like an angry fist.

—
You will hold onto my vest,
Gourami typed.
—I will swim for you. All you need to do is breathe. And stay warm.

Easier said than done.

Cricket swallowed acid. “It’s not easy to burn a metal ship,” she said. “I don’t suppose you packed a bomb?”

The ranid shook its head, ducking apologetically.
—Must,
it typed, and Cricket thought if it were a human it would have been weeping in frustration.

How many people were on this ship? Closs and Greene. And thirty crew members? Fifty? “How do you know they have this virus? How do you know they’ll use it?”

It had to be a misunderstanding. A mistake. It was the sort of thing a villain in a brainimation might do. And Cricket held on to that self-delusion for almost a minute, until Gourami’s careful explanation and word-for-word account of what it had seen chipped away at her disbelief, and left her leaning against the bulkhead, gasping.

“He said that.”

—Yes
.

“And Closs didn’t stop him.”

—Closs said he did not want to know anything about
.

“Oh, fuck me running,” Cricket said. Thirty people.

Thirty.

Maybe fifty at the outside.

How many had she killed on Patience?

Was it different if you went in knowing you had made the
decision
to kill? Was it different if you did it in self-defense? In defense of another? In defense of a species?

Or was it still just murder, like what André had done to Lucienne, like what Closs had done to Maurice?

Like what Gourami had done to the guard?

“All right,” Cricket said. “If you don’t have a bomb, we have to get to the hydrogen compression tanks.”

—
Cricket?

Cricket sighed exasperation. Bad enough to be here, doing this. Worse to have to stop and think about it. “Come on. Come
on
.”

The storm was going to kill him, and André thought he should probably be more upset about that than he was. But there was a certain element of justice in it, if you believed in such things, and he was pretty fucking tired. Ziyi’s barge would never survive the cyclone in the confines of the harbor, and André could not run before the storm without her codes—even assuming the electrical system had survived her death. Fire systems had extinguished her corpse; belowdecks, the surfaces were covered in a mixture of greasy soot and foam. He could not contact Nouel or Cricket—or Lucienne, for that matter—and he had no means of reaching Jean. The data that Maurice had died for was in his hands, and he had no way to get it where it would do any good.

So he stood on the bridge, behind the barge’s tall glass windows, and sipped liquor that Ziyi was never going to get around to drinking, and watched the green and red running lights stream away on either side. He had the stolen flashboat and nowhere to go in it.

He could run to Jean’s minifab. It would be watertight. If the storm didn’t wash it away. He could head for a refugee ship; there were always one or two, among the last vessels to clear the bay. They would be waiting for fishers straggling home from the bayou, for the crews of the last lighters to touch down.

Charter Trade ran the refugee ships. Charter Trade was going to be looking for André Deschênes.
If
he could make it through the rising wind, the falling rain.

The choices paralyzed him. He understood some of what had happened—the probability storm, the sharp brief moment where every choice had been made, where every potentiality had become real. But that was over now. When he chose, he was choosing. He was collapsing a wave.

And every choice could be the wrong choice. And then he’d be like Cricket—like Moon—with the blood of a world on his hands.

Or he could stay here, on this ship that had no chance of moving, and wait for the storm.

The anchor cables were already groaning, the waves breaking over the rail. It would not be long.

He finished the drink and dropped the glass on the floor. It didn’t break but rolled down the pitching deck to clink against the useless navigation pane. He should have thrown it against the bulkhead. In a moment, the barge rocked, the deck slanted the other way. The glass slid instead of rolling.

André brought his heel down sharply and cracked the glass under his cast. It shattered, skipping down the deck, and he grabbed the wheel so that he would not fall.

And then his headset blinked live with an instant message, and he accepted hastily and then laughed out loud. Because it was—of all the mad possibilities—from Jean Kroc. Typed, obviously, bereft of mood or context modifiers, containing nothing but the words.

André, follow my beacon. It will bring you in.

André ran before the wind, hunkered under the flashboat’s canopy, skipping across whitecaps like a spun stone. It would have been easy to get lost among the reeds and the narrow channels in the dark and the slashing rain. But Jean’s beacon came with a map.

He followed it, and tried not to think of the bayou and the unburied bodies sunk in its storm-churned mire. Faster would have been better, but he was pushing his reflexes and the autopilot’s, and if he ran aground there was no one to rescue him. And now he had a reason to live—half a reason to live, anyway—because he traded messages with Jean while he traveled, and Jean told him a lot of things.

“Will you do the time?” Jean asked, outright.

The chit André carried could be whatever tiny payback he could offer for Cricket and Nouel, whether they were alive or dead. Dead, most likely; he didn’t like to fool himself with false hope and denial.

He’d made some mistakes.

It still might be all right.

“I’ll testify,” he said. And plugged Maurice’s chip into the flashboat’s playback so he could upload the data to Jean as he drove, in case he didn’t make it in.