Worldwired (5 page)

We have a funny relationship, Captain Wainwright and me.

She shuffles papers across her interface panel and stows them in a transparent folder mounted on her desk. You never can tell if the gravity will last from minute to minute, or so they say, although I've never seen it fail. She sighs and stands up, coming around the desk, as starched and pressed as me and eight inches shorter. “I want to thank you for not springing your radical idea on me in front of the scientists, ma'am.”

“I think Elspeth and Richard deserve equal credit, ma'am.”

Arms folded over her chest ruin the line of her uniform. She tilts her head back to stare me in the eye. It doesn't cost her a fraction of her authority. “I'm sharp enough to know who the suicidal lunatic on my ship is, Master Warrant Officer.”

Eyes fixed straight ahead, pretending I can't see the little curl twitching the corner of her lip. “Yes, ma'am.”

“So what do you think sending astronauts over there will accomplish that our drones and probes haven't?”

I shrug. “Pique their interest, ma'am? It's not so much about information retrieval—we've done and can do that remotely. It's about letting them know we
do
want to talk to them.”

She doesn't answer; just looks at me, and then looks down and plays with the stuff on her desk. “You're going to go out there and make me proud in front of our new guests. Aren't you?”

“Yes. Ma'am.”

“Good.” She steps back, her hands dropping to her sides, standing tall. “At ease, Casey. I'm done yelling at you.”

“Yes, ma'am.” But this time I let her hear the humor in it.

She nods, then shakes her head and taps her knuckle on her chin. “Casey, you're a shit disturber. You know that?”

“It's a gift, ma'am.” As I let my shoulders relax, my hands curl naturally against my thighs.

She sighs and rubs her palms together. “You've proved your instincts to me—”

“But?” The hesitation is implicit in the lift-and-drop of her gaze. She doesn't quite meet mine directly. We're thinking of the same thing; me refusing a direct order, at gunpoint, and making that refusal stick. And I was right, dammit. And she knows I was right. And I think she's grateful I was right, deep down in the light-starch, creased-trouser depths of her military soul.

But it kind of fucks up the superior/subordinate thing, and we're both still working our asses off trying to pretend it doesn't matter. “There is no but,” she says, after a longer wait than I'm comfortable with. “As long as I know I can trust you.”

“You can trust me to take good care of your ship, ma'am. And your crew.”

“And Canada?”

“That goes without saying.”

“Consider it said anyway.” She's working up to something. She looks at me again, and this time doesn't look away. “I think Genie Castaign should enter the pilot program,” she says. “She's already partially acclimated to the Benefactor tech, her unaugmented reflexes are at least as good as her sister's, she gets along with the Feynman AI, and she's bright. I want you to talk to her father. He'll take it better from you.”

“Captain—”

“I didn't ask for your opinion, Casey.”

“Yes, ma'am.” The ship's spinning. And all I can feel is Leah, there in my arms and then gone.

They used to say give one child to the army, one to the priesthood, and try to keep one alive. Gabriel only has one daughter left. Wainwright's gaze doesn't drop from mine. “Yes, ma'am.” I know I'm stammering. Know there's nothing else I can say. And Gabe won't even hate me for it, because he's army, too, and because Gabe knows. “She's too young still to induct.”

“Get her started on the training. We'll take her when she's fourteen.” She stretches, and ruthlessness falls off her shoulders like a feather dancer's cloak. “Come on. It's time for the meeting. Let's go see if there are any canapés.”

Toronto Evacuation Zone
Ontario, Canada
Friday 28 September 2063
1100 hours

Snow is supposed to be a benediction. A veil of white like a wedding dress, concealing whatever sins lie beneath.

Frost on the chopper's window melted under Valens's touch. He leaned against the glass, his shoulder to Constance Riel, who sat similarly silent and hunched on the port side. They both looked down, ignoring the pilot and the other passengers.

The snow covering the remains of Toronto lay not like a veil, but like a winding-sheet—one landscape that even winter couldn't do much for. He stared at it, trying not to see it, careful never quite to focus his eyes.

The prime minister stirred. She shifted closer to Valens, closer to the center of the helicopter, as if unconsciously seeking warmth. He glanced at her. Her trained politician's smile had thinned to a hard line in her bloodless face, and her head oscillated just enough that her hair shifted against her neck.

“It doesn't look any better than it did at Christmas. I thought it would look better by now.” She glanced first at him and then down. She retrieved her purse from the seat, dug for a stick of gum he didn't think she really wanted, offered him one that he didn't accept. She folded hers into her mouth and sat back. “Did you feel it in Hartford, Fred?”

“I felt the floor jump,” he said, carefully looking out the window and not at Riel. “It woke me. The sound came seconds later. It sounded like—” Words failed.
Like a mortar.

You never hear the one that gets you.

And then, unbidden,
Georges wouldn't have felt anything at all.
He nodded, remembering the rise and fall of solid earth, the thump of the bedframe jolting against the wall. “It woke me.”

“I was closer,” she said. “It knocked me down. I saw the fireball first, of course. If I'd had any sense, I would have sat down.” She shrugged. “You're not really
looking,
are you, Fred?”

“Of course I am.” And so he wouldn't be lying, he forced himself to look. To really
look,
at the unseasonable snow that lay in dirty swirls and hummocks over what looked at first glance like a rock field, at the truncated root of the CN Tower rising on the waterfront like the stump of a lightning-struck tree. Surprisingly, the tower had survived the earthquake, according to the forensic report of the engineers who had toured the Evac during the recovery phase. It had not survived the tsunami, nor the bombardment with meter-wide chunks of debris. Around it, lesser structures had been leveled to ragged piles of broken masonry and jutting pieces of steel.

Valens lifted his gaze as the chopper came around, and frowned toward the horizon. The frozen water of Lake Ontario would have been blinding in the sun, if the light that fell through the haze weren't watery and wan, and if the ice itself weren't streaked brown and gray like agate with ejecta. “A park,” he said, looking down at his hands. He folded his fingers together. He never had worn a wedding band; rings annoyed him. “What on earth makes you think you can turn
this
into a
park
?”

“What the hell else do we do with it?” She turned over her shoulder. An aide and two Mounties sat in the next row back, so hushed with the terrible awe of the Impact that Valens had almost forgotten them. “Coffee, please? Fred, how about you?”

He shook his head as the aide poured steaming fluid from a thermos, filling the helicopter with the rich, acidic smell. He didn't know how she could stomach anything, but judging by the gauntness of her face she needed it for medicinal purposes as much as the comfort of something warm.

Valens chafed his hands against his uniform, trying to warm them. Riel glanced over, but sipped her coffee rather than comment. She repeated herself, not a rhetorical question this time. “What the hell else are we going to do with it?”

“Rebuild,” Valens answered, though his gut twisted. “It's . . .” He shrugged. “Hiroshima, Mumbai, Dresden—”

“You're saying you don't just pack it in and go home?”

“Something like that. Besides, every city needs a nice big park.” Dryly enough that she chuckled before she caught herself. He tipped his head and lowered his voice, but kept talking. “Constance, do you know who Tobias Hardy is?”

“Yes,” she said, the corners of her mouth turning down. “Your old boss Alberta Holmes's old boss. Christ, I thought we had Unitek's fingers out of the
Montreal
's pie.”

“You could always seize it—” He shifted against the side panel of the helicopter. It dug painfully into his shoulder, and he was stiff from sitting. He wasn't as young as he used to be.

“I could,” she answered. “But we need Unitek's money, frankly, and their Mars base. And we don't need them running off to play with PanChina or PanMalaysia or the Latin American Union or the European Union because Canada and the commonwealth took our puck and sticks and went home.”

“You think they would?” Her gaze met his archly. She didn't inconvenience herself to reply, and Valens rolled his lower lip between his teeth before he nodded. “It's not the done thing to say so, Prime Minister. But I want some kind of retribution for that.” He gestured to the wasteland, but his gesture meant more—PanChina, Unitek, sabotage, and betrayal. “That's not the kind of blow you can turn the other cheek on and maintain credibility.”

Her sigh ruffled the oily black surface of her coffee, chasing broken rainbows across it. “I know. We try the legal route first.”

“Forgive an old soldier's skepticism.”

She gave him an eyebrow and turned again, looking out the window, leaning away from whatever she saw under the snow. “You're not the only one who's skeptical. But we're showing we're civilized. And we've managed to stall the hell out of their space program, since they can't know how limited Richard's ability to hack
their
network is. So we have the jump on them when it comes to getting a colony ship launched . . . once we figure out if we can get one past the Benefactors without them blowing it to bits.”

“We could try a Polish mine detector.”

Reil chuckled. “Not only is that politically incorrect,
General
Valens, but we can't exactly afford to waste a starship.”

“There's always the
Huang Di,
” he replied, going for irony and achieving bitterness. “She's ours by right of salvage—”

“Fred!”

He spread his hands to show that he was kidding. Nearly. “Meanwhile, China tries to hack Richard, and the worldwire. Have we thought about how much damage they could do?”

“That captured saboteur—Ramirez—was surprisingly forthcoming about PanChinese nanotechnology, once we convinced him to be. And Richard and Alan seem to think we have the situation under control.”

“So we're at the mercy of a couple of AIs.”

“Fred,” she said, and paused to finish her coffee. He shifted on the seat, vinyl creasing his trousers into his skin, and waited until she handed the mug back to her aide, who stowed it. “You're
always
at somebody's mercy. It's the name of the game. My job is to minimize the risks.”

“And mine is to identify the threats,” he answered, provoking a swift, shy grin, an almost honest expression.

She didn't look at him again. Instead, she leaned forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Take us home,” she mouthed when he turned to her, and he nodded and brought the chopper around. She lowered her head and rubbed her temples with her palms. “Don't worry, Fred. We'll get this figured out somehow.”

He could have wished there was more than a politician's conviction in her tone.

HMCSS
Montreal
, Earth orbit
Friday September 28, 2063
Noon

If the conference room chairs hadn't been bolted to the floor, Elspeth would have pushed hers into the corner and gotten her back to the wall. She hated crowds, and crowds involving strangers most of all. Not that Drs. Tjakamarra, Forster, and Perry, Gabe Castaign, and Patricia Valens—sitting quietly staring out the port with that distracted I'm-talking-to-Alan expression pulling the corners of her pretty mouth down—made much of a crowd. But she was reasonably certain they would start to seem like it soon.

At least they're all scientists. Well, almost all.
Which shouldn't have made a difference, but—on some deep-seated, instinctual level—made all the difference in the world.

Because scientists are part of your tribe,
she told herself.
They're a part of your kinship system, and so they don't feel like strangers and threats. What's the old saying, the stranger who is not a trader is an enemy?
She smiled at her fingernails. “I hope the Benefactors are here to trade something.”

“Look at the bright side.” Gabe Castaign, all gray-blond ragamuffin curls and hulking shoulders, had materialized at her shoulder as silently as a cat. She startled, and then sighed and leaned back into the touch of his hand on her shoulder.