Mind Over Ship (25 page)

What PUSH is practicing is the classic slingshot maneuver
. The flight instructor was a TUG woman who towered over Veronica. She rested the mountain ridge of her knuckles on top of Veronica’s head for privacy, even inside their secure facility.
It’s taken him longer to learn than I thought possible. This is not a good sign.

As if on cue, a collision alarm sounded, and the trajectory plot, instead of skimming the planet’s gravity well, plunged into it.

“Pilot advise course correction,” the instructor said. “Pilot acknowledge.”

But PUSH did not acknowledge or alter course. Instead, the mentar sped up the simulation a hundredfold, and the starship was captured by the planet and pulled into its dense atmosphere. The holoscape POV stayed with the ship the whole way down displaying its spectacular, fiery destruction.

I’m bored
, the mentar said. The instructor made a curt slashing motion to kill the holoscape, leaving them in an empty storage container. The warm, stuffy air reeked of electrical ozone. Without uttering a word, the instructor opened a steel door and left. After a moment, Veronica decided she’d better follow her. They walked through the deserted warehouse to the office where the instructor removed her headset and lowered her large frame into a complaining office chair.

Veronica didn’t push the matter and instead waited for her to speak first. Eventually, the instructor made a fist and offered it. Veronica pressed her own pygmy knuckles against the instructor’s, and the instructor said,
Have you given this enough thought?

Of course
, Veronica replied, hoping she showed more confidence than she felt.
He’s young and rebellious. He’ll grow out of it. Reset the maneuver and try again.

She withdrew her fist, but the instructor did not. Her row of knuckles hung in the air until, reluctantly, Veronica returned her own.
Was there something else, Captain?

Yes, sir, there was. If you think I’m only referring to that little tantrum in there, you should review the recordings I flagged for you. He defies my every instruction. All he wants to do is fly. He won’t hear about propulsion dynamics, life support, biostasis, or mechanical fabrication. All of the critical skills are “boring,” except perhaps for celestial navigation, and that only so he can find more planets and stars to crash into.

Veronica pressed her reply a little harder,
Then by all means, Captain, teach him how to find more planets and stars to crash into!

When she awoke to a misty dawn, she forgot for a giddy moment where she was or what she was supposed to be. She lay enfolded in ethereal wings of dazzling blue feathers. She snuggled in them for warmth and realized she could flex them and that they were her own. She lay on a mat made of split reeds. Downy feathers covered her breasts and concealed the painful bruises where Fred had carelessly pecked at her. She felt with the tip of her talon and counted eighteen bruises, including those on her throat and cheeks.

Fred lay next to her. He was also winged—fletched in golden brown.
The feathers covering his back were bloodstained where she had clawed him in her passion.

Mary leaned over and, minding her beak, kissed his finely feathered cheek.

He grunted.

“I’m getting up.”

He grunted again.

Mary stood on the edge of their platform and looked down. She could not see the ground through the tangle of undergrowth. The entire space was awash in green from the forest canopy above.

She jumped and, only as an afterthought, spread her arms. Her wings caught the air, snapping fully vurt, and she clumsily, much too fast, glided to an awkward landing. She came to rest next to the giant trunk of their tree. When she approached the tree, the hatch outline lit up.

As soon as Mary entered the tiny lock, all her feathery raiment fell away and vanished, and she was an ordinary nude woman. All the bruises were gone too, and with them their discomfort. Such a game! At the outer hatch, she gathered her wits and made a mad sprint to the bathroom, where the gel shower was already pelting in anticipation, and she leaped into the stall and frantically scrubbed the simsock mastic from her body. The trick, when leaving the null lock wearing vurt mastic, was to try to remove it before the nits had a chance to recolonize you. Otherwise, as they burrowed through your skin, they invariably dragged bits of mastic with them, and although the nits were supposed to be hypoallergenic, the simsock certainly wasn’t.

When Mary was finished and toweling herself off, the autodoc on the wall dispensed her a paper thimble of salve to apply to her wrists and ankles, and though it made her hair greasy, to the spot on the crown of her head.

“WAIT!” MARY SAID, scratching her ankle. “What did I just say? I said take the tray with you.”

“Yes, myr,” the nuss said. The young Capias woman crossed the room and lifted the tray of dirty plates and glasses. But Ellen told her to put it back.

“Let the ’beitors clean it up, Mary. I’m not paying this nuss to wait on you like your own personal maid.”

Mary flushed with embarrassment.

“For that matter,” Ellen went on, turning her gaze to include Georgine, “I’m tired of the overall unfriendly tone around here lately. It’s starting to grate on my nerves. I don’t like it.”

That morning, the municipal morgue crew was assigned to Roaming Mop Up Duty. Riding to the first call-out of the shift with the ROMUD crew in the omnibus, Fred went out of his way to be friendly. But the johns seemed unsure how to act around a russ in johnboy overalls. And the ROMUD crew leader, another john, was even a little hostile.

Their first call-out was to the McLaughlin Traffic Well, the site of an early-morning wrecker attack. The traffic well was a modest one, four square blocks in area and twenty munilevels high. It contained a pair of multilane up-and-down spirals that served a half-dozen intersecting skyway traffic lanes. The floor of the well was a ped plaza crosslink that was suspended between two gigatowers. It was littered with about twenty fallen vehicles. The bus had broken in two. Its wheels, doors, seats, and passenger crash pods were scattered about the plaza among wrecked limousines and cars.

Wrecker gangs had hacked the city’s traffic control system to cause a series of midair collisions in the well. Stricken vehicles hit more vehicles on their way down, starting a chain reaction of multilevel carnage. The wreckers waited at the bottom of the well with scavenging mechs for cutting up and carting away the debris, especially the good bits: titanium fan blades, Rolls-Royce motors, control subems. By the time Fred’s morgue crew arrived, the wreckers were long gone, the police and HomCom had secured the well, and crash cart ambulances were attending to the injured, of which there were few. Falling twenty munilevels was perfectly survivable, and even the bus’s disintegration was a designed-in safety measure to protect the passenger crash pods. The only casualties of the bus crash—the only fatalities in the entire attack—were two plaza pedestrians crushed under the bus and found by triage spiders. As soon as the ROMUD crew removed the remains, the HomCom could release the site to a brigade of street-cleaning scuppers that was waiting behind the barricades.

THE SECOND CALL-OUT was much more hazardous. It involved a rare four-stage NASTIE and required the ROMUD crew to suit up before entering the hot zone, which comprised the upper floors of the residential gigatower Port Hallow. Apparently, the microscopic nanobot had drifted into the arcology through a central sunshaft and migrated into an interior apartment before going active. By the time the bloomjumpers arrived and
managed to quench it, the bot had grown a millionfold, dissolved parts of ten apartments on three floors, and penetrated many other neighboring ones to prospect for resources.

When the morgue crew arrived, the bloomjumpers were still there in force mopping up hot spots with their grease guns and preparing the pearl for removal. Fred, who was a certified bloomjumper, himself, who probably had a higher HomCom rating than any russ at the scene, was drawn to the pearl, which lay in the fire-gutted former living room of what had recently been a luxury apartment. The pearl was a killing machine that the opportunistic NASTIE had begun to fabricate, based on the raw materials it found in its environment. Residential towers were especially resource-rich environments, chock-full of useful elements for impromptu weapons, everything from organic carpeting to the rare metals used in electronic and paste-based appliances, as well as plumbing and wiring, artificial stone, and thousands of other useful things. Not to mention biological material, brains and nerves especially, for hard-to-jigger control systems. Feeding on this material, the bloom had grown exponentially in size, from the original dust-particlelike NASTIE to, judging from the broken shards of its scab, a nanoforge filling half the room.

But the bloomjumpers had arrived, quenched the bloom, and shattered its scab before it was finished making the pearl. So, it was impossible for Fred to tell exactly what the pearl was intended to become. It was as large as a vehicle, had a boxy frame and ceramic skin. It might’ve passed for an arcade omnikiosk or public toilet stall. But no matter what it would have become, one thing was certain, it would have been a deadly weapon of mass destruction, dispatched over sixty years earlier by an enemy who no longer existed.

As Fred studied the pearl from a safe distance—the scab shards were still too hot to approach—two russ bloomjumpers, still in their green gummysuits, joined him. When they saw his face through his helmet glass, they appeared shocked. Just then, the crew boss john yelled from the floor above for Fred to get back to work. So Fred turned from his brothers to follow a tree-root-thick tendril from the scab through a hole in the wall to the next apartment. There, other members of the ROMUD crew were bagging anything with animal protein in it. The prospecting tendril had branched out to all parts of the room and covered everything in spun filaments like cotton candy. The table and chairs, the lamps and bookcases—everything was cocooned, mined, and dissolved, and the good bits passed along the tendrils to the scab.

Prospector tendrils continued on to other rooms and floors. Ragged-edged
scraps of carpeting from the apartment above hung from holes in the ceiling. The entire room was filled with cobwebs of gossamer filaments. They gave the room a foggy look, and the bloomjumping anti-nano had frozen them in place. As Fred moved across the room, the filaments shattered like glass needles and fell tinkling to the floor. Fred tried to follow the tunnels that his coworker johns had already punched through, but he was a larger caliber man, and though he hunched over, he cut a wider swath.

Fred made his noisy way to the corner of the room—it looked like a bedroom from the arrangement of furniture lumps—where a john was bagging a suggestively shaped cocoon lying on what must have been a bed. It might’ve been a large pet or a small person. The ROMUD job was to collect them and let others sort them out. Fred said, “Excuse me, Myr John, but what’s its bio-hash number?”

The john answered without looking up from his task, “A12.”

“Thanks, friend.”

When Fred tuned his visor to the A12 filter, the cocoon that the john was bagging appeared to be stained a deep magenta. And the filament fog surrounding it was tinted pink. Fred picked up a heavy-duty vacuum wand and began to suck up these protein-rich pink clouds all the way to the tendril roots. There he attacked the roots themselves. Wherever they were spotted red, he chopped out sections and bagged them.

Fred was working up a sweat in his hazmat suit, and he took a break to let his ventilation system catch up. So he was motionless when he heard a tinkling sound above him. He looked up in time to dodge a marble-topped bathroom vanity that came crashing down through the filament fog. It slammed into the floor next to him and flew to pieces.

Fred looked through a hole in the ceiling into the apartment above. There were russes in various uniforms—bloomjumper, hommer, cop—leaning over the edge to look down at him.

“Oops,” said one of them. “Heads up, Johnny.”

“But I insist!” Meewee said. “I
must
see her.” Ellen’s young mentar blocked the foyer door with her insubstantial body, and it took all of Meewee’s considerable sense of decorum not to simply walk through her. That and the fact that he could see two of the Capias security men—called jays—standing guard in the next room.

“I’m sorry, Myr Meewee, but Ellen’s instructions are clear: she does not wish to meet with you, not now or in the foreseeable future. Anything you wish to communicate to her you may give to me.”

Actually, he couldn’t, at least not by the rules outlined by her predecessor, Wee Hunk.

“You seem like a very helpful mentar,” Meewee said, trying to control his frustration, “but there are some things that would be lost in translation.”

“Try me,” the earnest young woman said, beaming with helpfulness. “I suppose I should inform you that on Ellen’s orders, Cabinet is teaching me the Starke Enterprises business with a view of my taking over its management. So, I am privy to the family business, and Ellen says for you to bring business as well as personal matters to me.”