Hammered (27 page)

It probably will.
That’s the killer. Middle-class families are getting neural for their kids in droves. “C’est vrai. It will make things a lot easier for her in fifteen years.”

He sighs. “What do you think?”

“Merci à Dieu. Gabe, I …”
Which daughter do you sell for the other one’s sake?
“I don’t know, Gabe. Je ne sais pas. Qu’est que tu penses?”

“Je devrai penser de lui.”

I cross to him and put my hand on his arm. “I’ll be around to bounce ideas off of if you need me.”

He’s silent and sharp-edged for a long time before he bites his lip, meaning trouble. “I also came to worry at you about this surgery. When are you scheduled?”

“I’m not.”
And we shouldn’t be having this conversation in my office. Which is probably bugged.

“What?”

“Come on. Let’s get coffee.” I wonder what Valens makes of the daily parade down St. George to the Bloor Street coffee shops. He has to know we’re all sneaking out of the building to talk about him behind his back.

Gabe slouches along beside me once we’re outside. The autumn air is crisp: fall will be short after the suffocating summer, and winter hard as a fist in the face. The chill aggravates my limp, but it’s a fair trade-off for being alive on a day like this.

I look over at him, hands stuffed in his pockets and head ducked down like a sulky adolescent. “I’m not doing it. Valens lied to me about what’s going on.” If Valens has ways to eavesdrop on this conversation, I can’t bring myself to care.

That brings his head up, pivoting to stare at me as if pearls and diamonds had just tumbled from my mouth. “Maker. You’re in tough shape. You can’t …”

“Can’t what? Let Valens gut me and start over a second time? Fuck, Gabe, the man has never told the straight truth to anybody in sixty-five years.”

“I know. I know—Jen. I …” His mouth opens and shuts once or twice, like a hooked fish. He stops walking and lays his hand on the bark of a horse chestnut tree, leaning on it hard. Glossy brown nuts litter the sidewalk around our feet. There’s a little patch of grass in front of an apartment building a few feet away, and an equally glossy,
fat black squirrel crouches in the middle of it, nibbling a nut. The native black squirrels are almost gone. The gray squirrel, an invader, has driven them out.

Forgive me if I feel a certain kinship with the rodent.

He finds his voice, but it’s brittle, dripping shock and pain. “Jen, you’re talking about dying. Giving up.”

“I know.” How do I explain to this man what it means to me? What I feel I have to do? He sees his best friend saying she’s going to leave him, and not cleanly either, but an inch and a memory at a time. And it’s not like he’s never watched anybody die by inches before.

“Gabe, he fed me some bullshit story about training kids. Saving kids. Safer soldiering through technology. It’s not about that.”

“What’s it about, then?” He bends down to pick up a chestnut that hasn’t come out of its spiky armor. Slowly, with one thumbnail, he picks the fleshy green shell away.

Bigger, better weapons
, I could say.
Guns in space, on platforms that move faster than the speed of light.
But that’s not it exactly. And better us than the Chinese, right? Can’t let them have what we don’t, now that big momma dog U.S.A. isn’t feeling well enough to growl and show teeth at any provocation. “Remember when you came back from South Africa on leave that time? After you went back to combat? After my crash?”

“Yeah.” He tosses the shucked horse chestnut to the ground, and I bend down to pick it up. They’re supposed to be lucky for travelers.

“Remember when you told your girlfriend Kate about me? What Valens had done, the wiring, and the experimentation? And she reported on you to Military Intelligence?”

He nods. “Charges were dropped, eventually.”

“Yes. You remember what you told me then, when I was thinking of going to the press about the whole sordid mess?”

His forehead wrinkles. “I told you to think about your career.”

“I did. I thought about it hard. And I decided to throw it the fuck down the tubes, too, and bend Valens as far over the desk as I could, and give my little terrorist boyfriend every bit of dirt I could rake up on the program.”

He speaks with care, each word coming out as if laid on a counter for consideration. “What happened to change that, Jen?”

And I realize how far down the wrong path I’ve come. “A lot of things.” It’s a lame answer and I know it, so I rush to cover before he can follow it down. “But that’s not the point. He’s doing the same thing again, Gabe. He’s recruiting young soldiers, young civilians. Desperate old warhorses like me. And it’s all just another web of lies.”

It sounds irrational when I try to explain it, but it all has a terrible logic inside of my head. “And that wasn’t enough, Gabe … there’s a 30 percent chance that if I go through this surgery, I’ll be either comatose or flat on my back on a ventilator for the rest of my life. And I’ve been through it before. The surgery, the hospitals. It’s not worth it.”

And Gabe shakes his sandy tousled head at me and frowns, hands fisting loosely as he churns the air. “Marde. There’s a 100 percent chance that if you don’t go through with it, you’ll be dead in five years. And dead or alive, that’s got nothing to do with it, and you know it.”

“What the fuck do you know?” My voice is up an octave; we’re almost shouting on the street.

“I know you,” he says, and the bitterness in his voice stops my retort like an order to halt. “Whatever bullshit logic you’ve worked up to deny it, Casey, the fact of the matter is that you don’t want it because if you have it, you might have to admit that you
can
have a fucking life, and the only thing that keeps you from that life is fucking
fear
,
Genevieve, and it’s about time you took a good hard look at what it is that is really crippling you.” His voice, which has been rising, drops. “N’est-il pas vrai?”

“Gabe, that’s not it—” But he’s turning away already, back toward the office.
I don’t want the surgery because …

Hell.

Because if I have it, I won’t be a cripple anymore.

Elspeth wanders past me as I come up the walk to the front door of the lab, squinting against the glimmer of sunlight on pink marble and steel. Her head is ducked down. She peels open the wrapper of a toxic-green sour-apple candy with her teeth and one hand. In the other one, she’s got that canvas bag with the Unitek logo on it that she lugs everywhere.

She shoves the candy into her cheek and wads the wrapper into her pocket. “Jenny, wait up. Want to get some lunch?”

“I just had coffee.” I didn’t make it to the coffee shop, actually, but I’m not in a company mood.

“Whatever. Here, take a couple of these.” She sets the bag down and digs in her pocket, comes up with a fistful of candy spilling out of a handkerchief. “Genie sent them in with Gabe, and if I eat all these I will be both sick and enormous.” She holds the handkerchief out to me, dropping the overflow candies back into her lab coat. I reach out, right-handed, to take one off the top, more out of politeness than any desire for sweets, and she shoves the whole thing into my hand.

“Better you than me,” she says with a sharp-edged grin, and picks up her bag, moving away before I can protest.

The data slice Elspeth slipped me lies in my pocket, heavy as a loaded gun for the two hours I spend back in the lab after she abandons me there. That’s all I can stand, especially
after the screaming match with Gabe. If I ran into Valens in the corridor, I’d probably break his neck. Twice.

Discretion being the better part of valor, I take a lunch I don’t plan to come back from.

I can’t think of a better place to access a public terminal than the university library. I suppose it’s possible that Valens could tag my activity there, but I’m hoping the sheer volume of information on the public Nets will make that kind of filtering impossible.
Besides, I have Richard.
I use the contact feed to access my prosthetic eye, instead of the provided monitor. I don’t need to get shoulder-surfed committing treason. And treason is what it is.

Once snuggled into a netted terminal, the data slice au-toreads its own information off to its mysterious destination and wipes itself clean. Twice. A moment later, a red telltale blinks in the corner of my vision. I concentrate on the blank beige surface of the study cube wall. “Hello, Richard.” I subvocalize into the mike, and a moment later, his image resolves before my eyes.

“Jenny. Thank you.” He bounces like a basketball player stretching his calves and swinging his arms. “Exactly what I needed.”

“Good. What was it?”

He chuckles, and I expect some bullshit about
need to know.
I bargained without Richard. “It’s a glorious puzzle, Jenny. A riddle to be fretted and unraveled.”

“Meaning you don’t know.”

“Not yet, but I can show you.”

“First I want to ask you something. I need to find somebody.”

He rubs his jaw professorially, scrubs a hand across wavy gray hair. I wonder if the tics are programmed in, or if he does it on purpose, to seem more human. “Who?”

The breath I take burns the back of my throat. “Chrétien
Jean-Claude Hebert of Montreal. Born May first, I don’t know the year. Last decade of the twentieth century or the first few years of this one. He’d be about Valens’s age. Probably an extensive criminal record.” I close my eyes, concentrating. “There will be an arrest in 2027—October, I think—for pandering, and probably one late the next year for possession with intent.”
Heh. I called in the tip on that second arrest. Gave me enough time to get my ass sworn into the army before he caught up with me.

“I’ll look,” Richard said, his eyes narrowing. “There’s something else in the data you brought me.”

I must be holding my breath, because he doesn’t make me wait for long. “The proof you were looking for. About Valens and your sister.”

“The murder?”

“No.” I know I wouldn’t be able to detect it if he truly hesitated, so it must be for my benefit that he stops and takes a “breath.” “The new-generation rigathalonin. Barbara Casey was given charge of a thousand units of it, 30 percent contaminated with trace agents, and instructions to street test it.”

“Street test. Why contaminated?”

Richard shrugs. “No data. Shall I speculate?”

“S’il vous plaît.”

“One, to make it believable that the drugs were a stolen, destroyed shipment. Less than 5 percent of the tablets actually contained enough contaminants to cause mortality in the subjects.”

“Two?”

“To provide sacrificed subjects for autopsy.”

Sweet Mary, Mother of God.
“Barbara knew?”

“She knew. There is no indication here that Colonel Valens was aware of the intent to poison the recipients, however.”

“Someone must have. Someone high up.”

Richard lets me get there on my own.

“Doctor Holmes.” I close my eyes.
I wanted Valens dirty. Dirtier than he is.

But I know the truth, and the fact of history is this: Fred Valens is the star of his own movie. And as far as he’s concerned, Fred Valens is one of the good guys. He might lie to a soldier for her own good, or test drugs or medical procedures on somebody without consent, but he wouldn’t
poison
someone.

Barbara Casey would do it without a second thought.

“Why Hartford? Why take the risk?”

“You know your sister better than I.”

Sucking on my lower lip, I lean my forehead down on my steel hand. “Sloppy,” I say quietly. “It’s just sloppy, for Barb. Lazy. Hell, that’s it, isn’t it? She was just too goddamned lazy to keep running back and forth between Hartford and Boston, or Albany, or wherever. Not when I was somewhere near Hartford, and there was a CCP warehouse on the edge of town, and she had to be there anyway. She wouldn’t have worried about getting caught because she never gets caught. She’s fifty-seven years old, and she’s smarter than anybody I’ve ever met except for maybe Fred Valens and Elspeth Dunsany, and she’s never gotten caught.”

He inclines his head. “Logical.”

My right hand shakes as I raise it, covering my eyes—which of course does nothing to block his image. I want to scream,
How could she?
But really, when could she not have done it? What ever would have stopped her?

It’s like she was born with some essential part of her brain just
missing.
Once, I would have called it her soul.

I get my breathing under control. I can talk again. “Thank you, Richard. If anything happens to me, can you see that those records make it to the proper authorities? American, Canadian, and wherever the hell Unitek is incorporated?”

“My pleasure, Jenny.” He gives me a moment before he continues. “Ready for download?”

“Yes.” But I am totally unprepared for what he gives me next.

Dust, red as rusted iron—red with rusted iron—rising about my boots. I taste it through my rebreather, gritting my teeth like a night without sleep.
Virtual reality, more intense than I’ve ever known—real as a damned flashback. But not me, this time. Not me. He’s spliced into my motor cortex through the wetware that operates my prosthesis, and he’s forcing vivid, sensual kinetic memories into my brain.

The gravity feels wrong. Too subtle. And then I realize I’m on Mars, and the dust is Mars dust—
fines
, he corrects me, and I realize I’ve vocalized the word—Martian fines, then. And I’m in a tunnel, some sort of a dark passageway.

“Starships,” Richard says in my ear. “Two of them. Alien starships, stranded on a barely hospitable world. That’s where the
Indefatigable
comes from. And the Chinese ships, and the one they plan to have you fly.”

“Aliens.”
There’s no such thing.
“Purple elephants, too, no doubt.”

“Hah.” In my virtual vision, Richard Feynman lifts his shoulders in a powerfully suggestive shrug. He’s wearing an old-fashioned cotton oxford shirt, rolled up to show wire-strung forearms. “Least hypothesis. Where else does technology come from with no physics and no engineering to back it up?”