Elizabeth Bear - Wetwired 2 - Scardown

ELIZABETH BEAR

SCARDOWN

A Bantam Spectra Book / July 2005

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

Cover design by Jamie S. Warren Youll

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that

this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed"

to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received

any payment for this "stripped book."

Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed "s" are trademarks of

Random House, Inc.

ISBN 0-553-5875I-X

Printed in the United States of America Published simultaneously in Canada

www.bantamdell.com

This book is dedicated to my parents, Karen Westerholm and Steve Wishnevsky, and to my

grandfather Henry Westerholm, for the run of their science fiction collections

Acknowledgments

It takes a lot of people to write a novel. This one would not have existed without the assistance of my

very good friends and first readers (on and off the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction,

Fantasy, & Horror)—especially but not exclusively Kathryn Allen, Rhonda Garcia, Jaime Voss, Chris

Coen, Tara Devine, Chelsea Polk, and Larry West. I am even more deeply indebted to Stella Evans,

M.D., to whom I owe whatever bits of the medical science and neurology are accurate; to M.Cpl. S. K.

S. Perry (Canadian Forces), Lt. Penelope K. Hardy (U.S. Navy), and Capt. Beth Coughlin (U.S.

Army), without whom my portrayal of military life would have been even more wildly fantastical; to Leah

Bobet, my native guide to Toronto; to Meredith L. Patterson, linguist and computer geek, for assistance

with interspecies linguistic theory; to Dena Landon, Sarah Monette, and Kelly Morisseau, francophones

extraordinaire, upon whom may be blamed any correctness in the Québécois—especially the naughty

bits; to Sue Yurcic, former Boeing test pilot, for obvious reasons; to Dr. Jacqueline A. Hope,

geophysicist, and Dr. Ian Tregillis, physicist, for making Richard sound like I knew what he was talking

about; to Dr. Peter Watts, biologist, for helping make the aliens alien; to John Borneman for help with

my math; to my agent, Jennifer Jackson, my copy editor, Faren Bachelis, and to my editor, Anne Groell,

for too many reasons to enumerate; and to Chris, who is patient with the foibles of novelism. The failures,

of course, are my own.

Editor's Note

In the interests of presenting a detailed personal perspective on a crucial moment in history, we have

taken the liberty of rendering Master Warrant Officer Casey's interviews—as preserved in the Yale

University New Haven archives—in narrative format. Changes have been made in the interests of clarity,

but the words, however edited, are her own.

The motives of the other individuals involved are not as well documented, although we have had the

benefit of our unique access to extensive personal records left by Col. Frederick Valens. The events as

presented herein are accurate; the drives behind them must always remain a matter of speculation, except

in the case of Dr. Dunsany—who left us comprehensive journals—and "Dr." Feynman, who kept

frequent and impeccable backups.

Thus, what follows is a historical novel of sorts. It is our hope that this more intimate annal than is usually

seen will serve to provide future students with a singular perspective on the roots of the civilization we are

about to become.

—Patricia Valens, Ph.D. Jeremy Kirkpatrick, Ph.D.

BOOK ONE

"Soldier, I wish you well."

—A. E. Housman

1200 Hours

Thursday 2 November, 2062

HMCSS Montreal

Under way

The Montreal has wings.

They unfurl around her, gossamer solar sails bearing a kilometers-long dragonfly out of high Earth orbit

and into the darkness where she will test herself, and me. She's already moving like a cutter through

night-black water when Colonel Valens straps me to the butter-soft leather of the pilot's chair and seats

the collars. I'm wearing the damned uniform he demanded; it's made for this, with a cutout under my

jacket for the interface.

Cold metal presses above my hips, against the nape of my neck. There's a subtle little prickle when the

pins slide in, and my unauthorized AI passenger chuckles inside my ear.

Gonna be okay out there, Dick?

"With a whole starship to play in? Sure. Besides, I have my other self to wait for. Whenever Valens lets

him into the system, pinions clipped." He grins in the corner of my prosthetic eye. Virtual Richard. I'll miss

him. "I'll go when you enter the ship. They'll miss me in the fluctuation."

Godspeed, Richard.

"Be careful, Jenny."

Spit-shined Colonel Valens raises three fingers into my line of sight. I draw one breath, deep and sweet,

skin prickling with chill and cool sweat.

Valens's fingers come down. One. Two. Three.

And dark.

My body vanishes along with Valens, the observers, the bridge. Cold on my skin and the simulations

were never like this. Richard winks and vanishes, and my head feels— empty, all of a sudden, and ringing

hollow. It's strange in there without him. And then I forget myself in the Montreal, as the sun pushes my

sails and the stars spread out before me like buttercream frosting on a birthday cake. Heat and pressure

like a kiss gliding down my skin, and the Montreal's sails are eagle's wings cradling a thermal.

Eagle wings. Eagle feathers. A warrior dream.

I pull the ship around me like a feathered skin and fly.

Valens's voice in my ear as Richard leaves me. "All good, Master Warrant?"

"Yes, sir." I hate the distractions. Hate him talking when I'm trying to fly. The simulations were mostly

hy-perlight; I didn't get to play much in space I could see. Only feel, like the rough curve of gravity

dragging you down a water slide, and then the darkness pulling you under.

This is easy.

This is fun. Richard? I don't expect an answer. He's gone into the ship, part of the Montreal now with

her cavernous computer systems and the nanotech traced through her hull, her skin, wired into my brain

stem so her heartbeat is my heartbeat, the angle of her sails is the angle of my wings.

"Got you, Jenny," he says, and if my heart were my heart it would skip a beat. I can't feel myself grin.

Dick!

"Guess what?" His glee tastes like my own. "Jenny, the nanites can talk to each other."

What do you mean?

"I mean I can sense the alien ships on Mars—the ship tree and the metal one—and I can sense you and

the other pilots. And the Chinese vessel following us."

The Huang Di?

"On our tail. No lag, Jenny."

I don't understand. No lag?

"No lightspeed lag. Instantaneous communication. I think I was right about the superstrings. It's not so

much faster-than-light technology as . . . sneakier-than-light."

Implications tangle in my brain. Richard.

"Yes?"

Can you feel our benefactors? Somebody alien left the ships on Mars for us to find. Somebody alien

meant for us to come find them, too.

"And they can feel me," he answers. "Jenny, I can't talk to them. Can't understand them. But I know one

thing.

"They're coming."

I almost stall the habitation wheel as the Montreal and I continue our ascent.

Three hours previous

0900 Hours

Thursday 2 November, 2062

HMCSS Montreal

Earth orbit

Don't all kids want to grow up to be astronauts? It's not a strange thing to ask when you are hauling

yourself along a series of grab rails on your way to the bridge of a starship, floating ends of hair brushing

your ears like fingertips.

Let me say that again in case you missed it.

A starship.

Her name is the Montreal, and she's as cold inside as a tin can on an ice floe. Her outline is gawky,

fragile-seeming, counterintuitive to an eye that expects things that fly to look like things that fly. Instead,

she's a winged wheel stuck partway down a weather-vane arrow, a design that keeps the hazardous

things in the engines as far as possible from the habitation module without compromising the angle of

thrust. The wheel turns around the shaft of the arrow, generating

there-is-no-such-thing-as-centrifugal-force, which will hold us to the nominal floor once we're on it.

There's no gravity in this, the central shaft. You could float along it if you wanted, and never fear falling.

I prefer the grab rails, thank you.

The "wings"—furled against the rigging like the legs of some eerie spider—are solar sails. The main

engines are not to be used until we're cruising well clear of a planet. Any planet. From the simulations I've

been flying back in Toronto, the consequences might be just as detrimental to the planet as to the

Montreal.

Don't ask me how the engines work. I'm not sure the guys who built them know. But I do know that the

reactor and drive assemblies are designed so they can be jettisoned in the case of an emergency, if worst

comes to worst. And that they're shielded to hell and gone.

Don't all little kids want to grow up to be astronauts?

Not me. Little Jenny Casey—she wanted to be a pirate or a ballerina. Not a firefighter or a cop.

Definitely not a soldier. She never even thought about going to the stars.

I catch myself, over and over, breaking the enormity of what I'm seeing down into component pieces.

Gray rubber matting, gray metal walls. The whining strain of heaters and refrigerators against the chewing

cold and searing heat of space. The click of my prosthetic left hand against the railing, the butt of a

chubby xenobiologist bobbing along the ladder ahead of me.

Did I mention that this is a starship?

And I'm expected to fly her. If I can figure out how.

Big, blond Gabe Castaign is a few rungs behind me. I hear him mumbling under his breath in French, a

litany of disbelief louder than my own but no less elaborate, and far more profane. "Jenny," he calls past

my boots, "do you know if they plan to put elevators in this thing before they call it flightworthy?"

I've studied her specs. Elevators isn't the right word, implying as it does a change of height, which is a

dimension the Montreal will never know. "Yeah." Grab, pull, grab. "But do me a favor and call them

tubecars, all right?" He grunts. I grin.

I know Gabe well enough to know a yes when I hear one. Know him even better in the past few hours

than I did for the twenty-five years before that, come to think of it. "Captain Wainwright," I call past

Charlie Forster, that xenobiologist. "How much farther to the bridge?"

"Six levels," she calls back.

"At least her rear view is better than Charlie's," Richard Feynman says inside my head. If I closed my

eyes—which I don't—I'd see my AI passenger hanging like a holo in front of the left one, grinning a

contour-map grin and scrubbing his hands together.

Richard, look all you want. I marvel at the rubberized steel under my mismatched hands and grin

harder, still surprised not to feel the expression tugging scar tissue along the side of my face. It's almost

enough to belay the worry I'm feeling over a few friends left home on Earth in a sticky situation. Almost.

A starship. That's one hell of a ride you got there, Jenny Casey.

Yeah. Which of course is when my stomach, unfed for twenty hours, chooses to rumble.

"Master Warrant Casey, are you feeling any better?" says Colonel Frederick Valens, last in line.

"Just fine, sir." Not bad for your first time in zero G, Jenny. It could have been a lot worse, anyway.

Gabe had me a little too distracted to puke when the acceleration cut in the beanstalk on the way up. "I

suppose I don't want to know what sort of chow we get on a spaceship."

"Starship," Wainwright corrects. "It's better than you might expect. No dead animals, but we get good

produce."

"Whatever happened to Tang?"

Charlie laughs, still moving hand over hand along the ladder. "The elevator makes it cheap to bring things

up, and life support both here and on the Clarke Orbital Platform relies on greenery for carbon exchange.

No point in making it inedible greenery, so as long as you like pasta primavera and tempeh, you're

golden. I'll show you the galley after we look at the bridge. Which should be—"

"Right through this hatch," Wainright finishes. She un-dogs the hatch cover and pushes it open, hooking

one calf through the ladder for purchase, her toe curled around a bar for a moment before she pulls

herself forward and slithers through the opening like a nightcrawler into leafy loam. Charlie follows and

I'm right after him, feeling a strange chill in the metal when my right hand closes on it. The left one picks it

up, too, but it's a different, alien sensation. After twenty-five years with an armored steel field-ready

prosthesis, I'm still not used to having a hand that can feel on that arm. I rap on the hatch as I go through

it, examining a ceramic and metal pressure door that boasts a heavy wheel in place of a handle. I pick up

the scent of machine oil lubricating hydraulics; when I brush the hatch it moves smoothly, light on its

hinges.

Except light is the wrong word here, isn't it? My left eye—prosthetic, too—catches the red glimmer of a

sensor as I pass through. "Seems a little primitive," I call after Wainwright.

She propels herself down the corridor—a much larger one—keeping one hand on the grab rail for the

inevitable moment when she starts to drift to the floor. She gets her feet under her neatly, but even

Charlie follows with better grace than me. All my enhanced reflexes are good for is smacking me into the

wall a little faster. I stumble and catch myself on the rail. Gabe muffs it, too, God bless him, although

Valens manages his touchdown agile as a silver tabby tomcat.

"The ship?" She turns, surprised.

I amuse myself with the hopping-off-a-slide-walk sensation of each step heavier than the last as I close

the distance between us. This corridor must spiral through the ring, to take you from inside to outside

"feet-down." I speculate there's a ladder way, too. One I wouldn't want to lose my grip in. "The

hatchways."

"Less to break." She shrugs her shoulders, settling her uniform jacket over her blouse. I make a mental

note to requisition some jumpsuits, if they're not already provided. Valens always seems to think about

these things.

Wainwright continues. "And if it does, we can fix it with a wrench and a can of WD-40. That might be

important a few thousand light-years out. Saves power, too. They're just like submarine doors, but less

massive."

Gabe lays a hand on my elbow as he comes up beside me, still soft on his feet for all he's got three years

on me and I celebrated my fiftieth last month. "Let me guess," Richard says in my implant. "Ask about the

decompression doors, Jenny?"

"Captain." I brush against Gabe as I move past him.

Valens's gaze prickles my spine as he dogs the hatch behind us. I swallow a grin. "What do you do if

there's a hull breach?"

"Try not to be in a doorway. The habitation wheel is designed like a honeycomb, for strength. There are

automatic doors for emergencies, and if the air pressure drops suddenly—they come down."

"They don't wait for pedestrians to clear the corridor?"

"No." She turns her back on me and walks away, leading us farther out of the floating heart of her ship,

now my ship, too. "For Christmas, I guess we'll hang the mistletoe in the wardroom." She glances back

over her shoulder with a grin that stills my shiver.

"Hostile environment," Gabe mutters in my ear.

"Enemy territory," Valens adds from my other side. "What's outside this tin can is trying to kill you,

Casey. Never forget that for a second."

I square my shoulders and don't look up. He needs me enough that I can get away with it. "I'll bear that

in mind, Fred."

He chuckles as I walk away.

The bridge lies near the center of the habitation ring. It's long enough I can see the curve of the floor, but

not particularly wide. Remote screens line the walls with floor-to-ceiling images of blue and holy

Madonna Earth on one side, Clarke Orbital Platform spinning like a fat rubber doughnut at an angle. "I've

never felt claustro- and agoraphobic at the same time before," Gabe says. He brushes past me and rests

one bearlike paw on a console, bending down to examine the interface. "Sweet."

I'm the only one to hear Richard chuckle.

I find myself staring at the padded black leather pilot's chair. Leather on a starship? Well, why not; at

least it breathes. But it's not the look of soft tanned hide that pulls me forward, has me bending to trail

my fingers down the armrest.

Most pilot's chairs aren't equipped with straps and clamps intended to keep the operator's head and

arms immobilized. They don't have a glossy interface plate with a pin-port mounted on a cable-linked

collar at neck level, either, and another one right where the small of your back would rest.

It looks like an electric chair. I sink my teeth into my lower lip and turn. "There aren't any physical

controls?"

"That panel over there," Richard tells me, even as Captain Wainwright moves toward it and lays her

dainty right hand possessively on padded high-impact plastic. It's a good three meters from my chair. The

chair that's going to be mine.

"Somebody else flies her sublight," Wainwright says. "We save you and Lieutenant Koske for the dirty

work. When she's moving too fast for anybody else to handle."

I nod, barely hearing her. Remembering the simulations, the caress of sunlight on solar sails. A little sad

that I won't be feeling that for real.

"Jenny." Richard again. "Don't get greedy. You'll be driving faster than anybody else ever has."

Except for the pilots of the three ships that didn't make it. China's already broken two, the Li Bu and

the Lao Zi. Montreal is Canada's second attempt. The first one—Le Québec—had an unexpected

appointment with Charon. Pluto's moon, that is. These babies are very hard to steer.

I look from Wainwright to Valens and grin. "When do I get to try her, then? And who is Lieutenant

Koske?"

"Your relief," Valens says. He moves to stand beside and behind me, just enough taller to loom.

I touch the interface collar, metal fingers clicking softly on plastic. "Do I get to meet him?"

"He's probably eating," Wainwright says, on my other side. "As for trying her out—how does this

afternoon sound?"

Tall, dark, good-looking, without the faint mottling of repaired burn scars that mars my face—Trevor

Koske is an asshole. I can tell from the set of his shoulders under his spotless uniform jacket as I follow

Valens to his table. Koske sets his fork down, light glittering off slight scratches in his cervical interface,

and turns to face us. Somehow, he and I managed to miss each other, despite getting the

trillion-dollar-soldier treatment from Valens within the same few years. Admittedly, we guinea pigs

weren't encouraged to fraternize. Some shrink probably thought being around normal people would

encourage us to believe we still were. Normal, that is. How normal you can be when you can catch a

bullet in your left hand, I'm not telling.

"Lieutenant Trevor Koske," Valens says. "This is Master Warrant Officer Genevieve Casey." Wainwright

purses her lips at him as he usurps her role—making friends already, Fred?

I set my tray down and put out my hand. "Jenny," I say, determined to act like the civilian they won't

allow me to remain. "Pleased to meet you."

Gabe, at my shoulder, grins and sticks his hand out, too. Koske regards our hands like a pair of dead

eels, his fingers resting inches from the handle of his fork. "Charming fellow," Richard says. "I hate him

already. Did I tell you about the time—"

Richard. I withdraw my hand, still smiling. I took his job.

"You merited his job."

Because I'm a freak. Nobody says another word as I

hook a chair back with my foot—a chair set on a swivel arm in the floor—and sit down directly across

from Koske. I pull my tray closer and pick up the fork. Soba and a green salad with ginger dressing;

they'll turn me healthy if I'm not careful. "So, Trevor," I say around a mouthful of lettuce, "tell me about

yourself."

He grunts and picks up his tea. After ten minutes of bloody-minded silence, Captain Wainwright starts

flirting with Gabe. It's almost a relief. I'm tired enough that my neural implants are making the overhead

fluorescent lights strobe. I lay my fork down and cast around the room for something less annoying to

look at; my eye lights on a crop-haired, twentyish blond with bulging shoulders. He stares at me. His

eyebrows are so light they're paler streaks against the ruddiness of his face. He glances down quickly

when he sees me looking.

Nothing new there.

4:30 PM

Thursday 2 November. 2062 Government Center Toronto, Ontario

Constance Riel leaned over the shoulder of her science adviser, Paul Perry. He sat in Riel's own chair, at

her exceedingly well-interfaced desk, busy hands moving over the plate. Riel frowned, ignoring the ache

in feet rapidly growing numb. "You're telling me these images"—she poked a finger into the center of one

of the displays, and it obligingly expanded—"show—what?"

Paul had pulled his jacket sleeves up and rolled his shirt cuffs. He blinked bloodshot eyes and continued

in an Oxford-educated drawl. "This is from the Martian orbital

telescope, Prime Minister. It shows an explosion or an impact near the south pole of Charon, the sister

planet of Pluto. This shows the debris track. Ma'am, should I call down for sandwiches?"

She hadn't realized the rumble in her belly would be audible. "Yes. Bless you. That looks like a special

effect from a science fiction holo. What does it mean?"

He keyed some information quickly—a request for food and coffee—and moved back to the telescopic

images. "It means something struck Charon. Hard. Hard enough to essentially fracture the planet.

Planetoid."

"An attack of some sort? What, more space aliens?" War-of-the-worlds scenarios unfolded in her head.

She pressed her fingers to her eyes, imagining she could already smell coffee.

"No, ma'am." Paul shrugged. "I've been chasing some rumors, and I've had my staff after it. I wanted

good information before I came to you."

"You're stalling, Paul."

"Yes, ma'am. Unitek."

"Unitek?"

"You've been briefed—have you been briefed?"

"Is there a new development with the pair of derelict alien spacecraft on Mars?"

"No. Unitek and a detached group from the joint forces have been working on developing a ship based

on those design principles. You know that."

"I'm opposed to it, Paul. That's money better spent at home. But it's Unitek's money—" She shrugged.

Canada needed to get free of Unitek. The problem was, with Unitek went access to the Brazil and

PanMalaysian beanstalks, their international trade partners, and a good part of the funding for Canada's

military. Times were more peaceful than they had been, on the surface. But a world in which the People's

PanChinese Army was massing on the Russian border and eyeing the grain fields of Ukraine, a world

where PanMalaysia and Japan relied on promises of military aid from Canada, Australia, and to a lesser

extent the reconstructed but still limping United States to keep the same starving wolf from their door—it

wasn't a world in which one dared appear weak. Paul himself was a refugee from the slowly freezing

British Isles.

Fallout from the Pakistani/Indian wars and the United States's actions in the Far and Middle East had

moved Earth's supranational governments to rare, unified action. Global effort had managed what

unilateral action could not: a functional missile defense shield, based on the same technology that

provided meteorite and space-junk defense for the orbital platforms. Not, unfortunately, before the

damage compounded China's inability to feed her swarming population.

Canada had already fought one unpopular war on behalf of China's smaller neighbors. Riel started to

wonder if the pain in her gut wasn't hunger, but an ulcer. "Was this a Chinese ship?"

"No," he said. "It was ours. And we have larger problems."

Riel sighed, glancing up as the door of her office opened. A liveried steward brought a tray into the room;

she could tell at a glance that lunch must have been ready and waiting for their call. Or perhaps someone

else's sandwiches and coffee had been diverted for the prime minister's use, and a replacement tray was

already being made up. "Is this going to ruin my appetite, Paul?"

"Most likely."

Riel shooed the reluctant steward away and poured the coffee herself, balancing two self-regulating

mugs—she despised china cups—and a plate of sandwiches as she made her way back. "Then we'd

better eat while we talk," she said, and juggled dinnerware onto the desk. "I shouldn't eat these. I

promised my husband we'd have dinner together for once," she said. "And I have a meeting that starts in

half an hour and runs until eight. Will this take longer than that?"

Paul glanced up from the simulation and shook his head. "It'll be four hours until you eat, then," he said.

"Have a sandwich."

Her eyebrows rose. She knew it was an effective expression, under the heavy dark wing of her bangs,

accentuating her thin nose and the long lines across her brow.

"Ma'am," he amended and she acquiesced, selecting a triangle without looking at the contents. Chewy

black bread and vegetables, and something that was more or less tuna fish. Farmed gene-mod tuna fish.

Riel was just about old enough to remember the real thing.

"All right," she said, once Paul had had a moment to cram a third of a sandwich into his mouth. "Show me

what you're worried about, Dr. Perry."

He didn't miss the formality—she could tell by the angle of his head—but he didn't acknowledge it either.

"Here," he said, tapping up an image of a different, and more familiar, globe. "These shots are courtesy of

Clarke and Forward," he said, and then waved a hand irritably over the panel, clearing the display.

"Wait—"

Long spare fingers tapped crystal, and Riel smiled privately at his thoughtless efficiency of movement.

She squinted as new images resolved. "There's something wrong with the depth."

"They're 2-D animations," Paul explained. "Late twentieth century—here. Do you see these color

patterns, ma'am?"

Riel nodded, watching as a computer-animated blush spread across the surface of the oceans, waxing

and waning with fluctuations that could only be seasons. "Temperature patterns?"

"Yes. And more. This is a record of coral reef die-offs."

Still 2-D, but no harder to follow than an old-fashioned movie once you got the hang of it. Riel licked

mayonnaise off her fingers and frowned, rubbing them together to remove the last traces of grease. "Old

news—"

"This isn't." His fingers moved. He leaned back in the chair, his shoulder brushing Riel's arm. She hunched

forward, too intent to take a half-step to the side and preserve her space. It was the image that he'd

brushed aside so quickly, a few moments before. A modern three-dimensional animation, and—

Elizabeth Bear - Wetwired 2 - Scardown

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