Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 (30 page)

“Maybe. But this solution is better overall.” He rakes that hand through his hair, the silver thatch falling back into place like a bird's preened feathers. “Koske's going to make it, too.”

“I heard.” I catch myself rubbing the gouges in my metal hand with my right thumb, and make myself stop. It's half strange not to feel the touch, and half like a homecoming. “Fred, does it seem odd to you that somebody could get close enough to Trevor to put a knife into him? You know what that would take.”

“In a dark room? If you came home tired?”

“I'd leave anybody who tried smeared all over the wallboards.” I stand up, leaning on the back of a molded plastic chair, hesitantly stretching my leg. It feels tender, fragile. I don't push my luck. “Just out of curiosity. Why didn't you issue Koske a weapon, too?”

His brow wrinkles over carefully groomed eyebrows. “Would
you
hand Trevor Koske a gun?”

“Point.”

He offers me his arm as I hobble around the bed. I ignore it, watching my feet move.
Richard, these bugs are just freaky
. I feel him chuckle, but he doesn't answer. Valens steps out of my way.

“It's still weird, Fred. Weird . . . weird Koske can't remember what happened, too.”

“Who told you that?”

I grin at him and wink, enjoying the minor advantage. It's nice to see Valens at a loss for once. “You have sources and so do I. What are you going to do about Alberta and Riel?”

“Blackmail one, cultivate the other. And you?”

“I—” I stop, swallow. Examine the gray-and-blue speckled off-white tiles and twist my toe against them. “Calisse de crisse. I'm going to do what I gotta do. You know that.”

When I look up, he's staring at me with a bemused expression. He meets my eyes levelly and then nods once, slowly. “Yeah.” He turns away, unplugs his little device from the wall. He looks back over his shoulder, hand on the knob, shoulders set under his uniform. “Be careful, Jenny.”

He's out the door before I can frame a comeback; the latch click echoes in my open mouth.

Tuesday 19 December, 2062
Sol-system wide area nanonetwork
08:27:10:01–08:27:17:09

Carver Mallory was a good kid, Richard decided absently, with the 5 percent of his processing capability he was using to maintain communication with Constance Riel, Leah, Jenny, Min-xue, and the crippled boy.

“There's no reason Carver can't still be an effective pilot,” Richard said to Riel, using the
Montreal
's tight-beam microwave communications. Simultaneously, he linked the flight simulation Jenny had provided to Carver, projecting it directly into the boy's brain. Richard bet he could learn another new trick very soon: relaying conversation directly between the nanite-infected organic intelligences.
This is going to change the world,
he thought, not for the first time.
This is going to change the species.

He managed all that with 5 percent of his intellect.

The other 95 percent was bent on cracking the nanite core programming and delobotomizing his progenitor. Ramirez and Forster had managed to get the Benefactor tech to reproduce itself, managed to modify the descendants and adapt them to various purposes such as the neural and VR enhancements. The nanotech remained self-programming in that it evolved to maintain and repair whatever object or creature its control chips were implanted in.

Richard had long ago figured out how to tap into their carrier signal and ride their bandwidth. His new insight into their core programming let him disperse his awareness through the Canadian side of the nanonetwork, making him essentially decentralized. He'd already been able to spawn subprocesses. The new development made him a literal multithreaded, multifocal intelligence, able to merge and part with disparate selves at a whim.

The data from the Chinese ships were invaluable; he was surprised to discover that the Chinese were farther along in the programming process than the Canadians. And that they had discovered how to isolate clumps—families—of nanites from the “network” so that those particular bugs communicated
only
with each other. To cut them off from the nanonetwork, in other words. To cut them off from
Richard,
too.

Which crystallized his suspicions on the source of the logic bomb that could have killed the
Montreal
's crew and opened her hull to space. “Jenny,” he said when that individual had finished the trial runs for Carver (the same runs the rest of the students were undergoing, through direct hardware interface), “have you and Ellie finished the control chips I asked you to make?”

“They're as ready as I can make them,” Jenny answered. Richard felt her motions as she stood, no longer favoring her injured leg, and paced around her desk. Plush carpet compressed under her boots; he sensed the absoluteness of her balance as she went to the window and stood, looking out. “Library computer, right?”

“No,” he said with a smile. “I want to meet Alan.”

She stopped, and Richard smiled to feel her mild surprise, to sense the nanite response to a brief elevation of heart rate and skin conductivity. “Alan? Lonely?”

“It's not wise, I think,” Richard answered, “to let him grow up in isolation.” A half-truth. “Wire one of the chips into the intranet Elspeth has him isolated in, please.” (elsewhere, primary processes would have leapt and shouted aloud had they legs and voices as suddenly, precisely, the code structure of the nanite's quantum operating system came clear in Richard's not-quite-a-mind and he simultaneously saw how to force his other half to access the autonomous functions Gabe had so cleverly walled away / subprocesses noted that the
Calgary
's reactor came on-line for the very first time / Riel asked Richard if there was no hope that Carver would regain use of his body / Leah let a dark-haired boy kiss her in a corner stairwell and then pulled away, confused / Min-xue's heart rate spiked and—)

“Dick?”

Oh.

Shit.

(—his new access to the nanotech core programming triggered the logic bomb that Richard
hadn't
uncovered. And the
Montreal
started, picoseconds later, to take herself apart.)

“Just a moment, Jenny,” Richard said into her brain. “Get me Alan. Now!” And while she kicked herself toward the door, he sent his own freshly cracked “family” of nanites to war and coded an emergency message to Prime Minister Riel.

0827 Hours
Tuesday 19 December, 2062
PPCASS
Huang Di
Earth orbit

Captain Wu stared, unmoving, out the window in his ready room as Min-xue drifted in. The captain didn't turn, so as the door irised shut Min-xue cleared his throat and waited. When there was still no response, he hesitantly drifted closer to the captain and cleared his throat again. Beyond the window, a crescent Earth and a crescent moon drifted side by side. Min-xue couldn't quite make out the silvery threads of the three orbital elevators from this distance, but he could catch the glittering flash from Clarke or one of its sister platforms.

“I am not a war criminal,” Captain Wu whispered.

Min-xue's heart rate spiked. “Captain?”

The captain turned just far enough to fix him on a darkly glittering gaze. Min-xue realized the man had been drinking, and that the wetness that shone in the corners of his eyes was not from the drink. “I am not a war criminal,” he said again, more strongly. “And neither are you, Min-xue. There are times—”

Min-xue almost fancied that Earth grew larger over the captain's shoulder in the moments before he spoke again. “—you must decide, yourself, what to do with the orders you are given. I have family,” he continued, rushing now, as if the words might clot and dry up if he didn't press them out fast enough. “Family that could suffer if I am disobedient. A child. Do you understand?”

“No, Captain.”

“A man must judge his own conscience.”

Min-xue saw the trap and nodded. “My conscience is in the keeping of the service,” he said. “And of yourself, Captain.”

Captain Wu would not look at him. “I suppose you have family, too.”

“A sister. A mother.”

“Then remember this conversation, Second Pilot. And ask yourself if one who gives his conscience into untenable keeping is not a war criminal, after all.”

0828 Hours
Tuesday 19 December, 2062
Allen-Shipman Research Facility
Toronto, Ontario

I run.

Valens is coming in the other direction. He hits the wall as I go by and falls into step behind me. “Riel just hit the panic button,” he gasps as I grab a corner and ricochet toward Elspeth's office. I should have left the damn chips with her.

Richard, what the hell does “just a minute” mean, coming from you?

“Just a
moment
. It's all right. We just suffered another attack, and—how fast can you have Alan on-line?”

Fast, if you can tell me where to get the nanites to go with the chip.

“Looked in your veins lately?”

Shit. You don't mean—Shit.
Yeah, he means it. “Fred!” Ellie's in her office,
merci à Dieu,
playing with Alan.
Richard, report
. Valens and Ellie start shouting in unison as I pull Elspeth out of her chair and crawl under the desk, cracking the service plate off with my steel hand. I don't bother to pull the screws. Meanwhile, I open my brain and my mouth and rattle everything Richard tells me to the two of them.

“Richard says the ship was hacked—a more direct attack than last time. He's protecting
Montreal
and he's got the nanites cracked but so does somebody else, he's spawned subselves on
Calgary
and
Vancouver
. . . marde! Ow!” as the chip goes in and a fat spark bridges and I hold my breath, praying I haven't fried the system. The chip hangs in a mess of wires like entrails under the gutted desk. “Alan, can you hear me?”

Alan's voice is cooler than Richard's. I poke my eyes over the desk, watching the swirl of blues and greens that Elspeth chose for the new AI's icon. “I can hear you, Master Warrant.”

“Good.” I can't see Valens, but Ellie's eyes go wide as I pick up a shard of the plastic service plate and jam it into my meat hand hard enough to make the juice spurt.

“Casey!”

“Fermez la gulle, Fred. I know what I'm doing.” Blood drips, thick as ketchup, clotting already.
Never let 'em figure out you haven't got a clue what's going on. Dick, you on it?

“Hell yes. Just jam it in there.”

Electricity?

“Jam.”

Never let it be said I can't follow orders.

It's not an electric shock that gets me either, because I'm still reaching forward when everything goes fuzzy and then gray. I'm not certain I got the blood anywhere near the desk, but the carpet is cool against my cheek and then everything tunnels down to black.

Elspeth grabbed for Jen's shoulder as she slid forward, got under the bigger woman and cushioned her fall away from the corners of the desk. She found a pulse hastily, saw Jen's eyes open and unfocused and heard her breath hiss through slack lips.

Valens was beside her, pushing her out of the way to check Jen's airway. “What just happened?”

Elspeth shook her head and grabbed Jen's wrist.

“Dunsany?”

Richard, be right,
Elspeth thought, and shoved Jen's hand into the mess of wiring hanging from the desk.

Something sparked. Something hissed.
This is fucking silly.
And then there was silence.

Richard felt Jenny fall away, felt the moment when the worm he'd never quite managed to circumvent activated in her processor arrays and her voluntary muscles went slack.
Ramirez,
he snarled, and assimilated the core personality of his no-longer crippled other self. The Richards merged seamlessly as quantum time streams, and felt and linked the spawned copies of himself in the
Calgary,
in the
Vancouver
. Irritated—
annoyed
—that the nanite webs didn't reach into the Unitek intranet, that he couldn't reach out through them and access the raw, archived code that would let him fight for the
Montreal
on more equal terms—Richard marshaled his own nanite armies and resolved to battle the enemy in the very streets and gutters of the
Montreal
and the brains of his friends.

He was losing.

In a matter of instants, part of the
Montreal
's reactor coolant system failed. An emergency vent sprayed glittering, radioactive snow: pressurized water spewed, froze, sublimated into the void. Richard diverted water from hydroponics, sacrificing long-term life support for the immediate threat. He jammed airlock interfaces before they could cycle themselves and—“Leah! Tell your father”—stopped all but seven of the
Montreal
's deadly pressure doors from slamming down like guillotines—“Captain, another attempt at sabotage is under way. I
insist
you find Christopher Ramirez
now
”—and felt the sand slipping from under his feet as if the tide came in from all directions at once.

Until suddenly another presence was with him, and then another presence
was
him as the AI called Alan threaded into Richard's multifaceted persona, merged consciousnesses, apprehended the problem, found the archives, and started throwing him relevant parcels of code through the still-weak nanonetwork as if he were manning a bucket brigade. The AI personas twisted together—one mind, two voices—and they
pushed
. . . and Ramirez's calculated, programmed, multifocal attack came down before them like the Berlin wall.

I wake up as fast as I went under, blood in my hair and a pair of doctors leaning over me, arguing at the top of their lungs. I've never seen Elspeth
or
Valens raise their voices before. I wish I had the time to appreciate it. “What happened?”