“That leaves me bleeding under a table. Follow orders, Jen.”
Patty doesn't make a sound. She nods, and so does Min-xue.
Damn Fred Valens. Damn him to hell.
“There's one more thing,” said Riel, and how I've come to hate her calm, level voice in just a few short moments.
“What's that?”
“The Chinese assassins? If my intelligence is good, they're probably wired as fast as Min-xue.”
Fuck me raw. I'm impressed with myself that I don't say it out loud. I glance at Min-xue again; we can hear the footsteps coming closer, over the panicked-cattle noise of the mob by the doors. Patty and Connie might get trampled instead of shot.
I reach out and squeeze Fred's hand. The hand he doesn't have fisted into his leaking belly, the squeeze delivered with my metal one. “You know what they say…”
Blood stains his mouth. I wish I hadn't seen that. “Yeah. When in doubt, empty the magazine.”
“That might be comforting if I had a fucking weapon, sir.” I lift my weight off Connie; she reaches up to assist with two hands on my shoulders. “When Min and I go over the top, you ladies run like bunnies. Hop hop hop.”
“Don't worry, Casey. You don't need to tell me twice.”
Dammit, Dick, I think, fretfully, and get ready to run.
Once Dr. Fitzpatrick had been raised and the XO had reported, Wainwright ordered the klaxon killed on the bridge. She still heard it echoing through the hatchcover, however, as she settled herself in her chair. The nanonetwork might be down and her ship uncontrolled, drifting in orbit without the access to propulsion or attitude jets, but she was far from isolated.
The problem was, there was nothing to do but sit tight. Nothing to do right now, except think. She stared at the screen array on the far wall. The Montreal, the shiptree, and Piper Orbital Platform, currently, but she could have any view in the solar system, subject to light-speed lag.
How quickly she'd gotten used to immediate communication, instantaneous advice. She's started relying on Richard far more than she should have. And not just Richard; Richard's ability to poll a handful of others and give her a quick consensus view.
Well, she didn't have that now. And she didn't have a 3-D starship captain's gadget of the week with the sponsor's logo prominently displayed on the barrel, ready to be deployed in time to save the world by the commercial break. What she had was a disabled ship drifting in an orbit that would begin to decay uncomfortably soon if she didn't regain control — although they could use shuttlecraft as tugs if it came down to it, or send an EVA team out to angle the solar sails manually. Her crew on the shiptree was probably safer there than here, even if Fitzpatrick couldn't raise Charlie on the suit radio. Unless something had happened to Charlie, of course. Unless something had happened to Dr. Tjakamarra and Casey and Patricia Valens, as well, the crew members who were on the worldwire, when the worldwire went down. Genie Castaign had been fine — dazed, a little confused. But Genie's nanosurgery had been corrective only. And it was complete, unlike the pilots, who were being reconstructed as fast as their amped-up bodies could damage themselves.
Oh. A chill settled between Wainwright's shoulder blades; she raised her eyes to the monitors again. The worldwire going down might not hurt Genie. It wouldn't even hurt the Montreal, in the long run, once the vast ship could be rewired and the fiberoptic and carbon cables that Richard had disassembled replaced. It might not even do any damage to the Feynman AI, she told herself, as she called up a thermal image of the Calgary crash site to assure that the reactors were still live.
But anybody who had been undergoing nanosurgery when the crash came was as dead as if somebody had pulled the plug on his respirator. And she was staring right at the biggest, sickest patient of them all. She stood. “Give me an earth view. Full earth, whichever orbital platform has most of the Sun side.”
It was Clarke. She should have known that. The view was North and South America, cloud-swirled oceans and mouse-tinged atmosphere, the landmasses gray-white with unseasonal snowfall, the grasping outline of North America indistinguishable from clouds and ice. The oceans were steel-gray and cadet-blue. Even the clouds had a jaundiced cast, through the shroud of dust.
It was ridiculous, of course, to think that any change would be visible yet. Even if the worldwire failed catastrophically, even if Richard's intervention in the planetary ecosystem had just come to a crashing halt, it would be months, maybe years before the damage showed. Planets were great ponderous things, changing on scales barely noticeable in the span of a human life.
Months, at the inside estimate. Years.
“Captain,” her XO said, very calmly. “I realize this probably isn't the time for this, but we've got a communiqué from ground control in Calgary. They want to know if we can get some telescopic shots of the northeastern seaboard; a research trawler off Newfoundland just blundered into the middle of a shoal of dead fish, and Clarke doesn't have an angle on it due to cloud cover. They're wondering if we can tell them how widespread it is. Shall I tell them we won't be able to, ma'am? Nobody seems to have told them there's a crisis underway.”
Months. She forced her hands to uncurl, unknot from the fists they'd somehow tightened into. It could be nothing. It could be completely unrelated.
For a moment, she was tempted to tell him yes, go ahead, tell them they have to wait. Turn off the cameras. Don't go looking for everything else that's probably going wrong. As if, if she didn't look, it wouldn't be real.
“No,” she said. “Let's have a look at those fish. And get the ship's entomologist and botanist up here, shall we? And Dr. Perry, too. He's an ecologist; he can earn his keep for a change. And tell ground control they need to get in touch with the cabinet, if they can't reach the prime minister in New York, and they're going to want a couple of climatologists with security clearances, and get me a thermal map of the oceans and water vapor shots of the atmosphere, and anything else you can think of that might be useful.”
She felt as if she stood over her own left shoulder, watching, soothed by her own voice of command, as her bridge crew also seemed to be. Exactly as if what she was ordering would make any difference. Exactly as if they could do anything at all, except stand there and watch as the planet thrashed and died.
I wonder if the condemned man has enough time to regret refusing the blindfold? she thought, before she squared her shoulders under the navy-blue uniform and went to do her job.
Now, finally, space was terribly quiet, and Leslie was terribly alone. There was a half an hour's power left in his batteries and he was weak, shivering cold, clear-headed with hunger although the Benefactors had managed to provide him with oxygen and water. They'd given him back his body, he realized, in time for him to let him know that he was going to die. He wondered if the aliens had a concept akin to making one's peace with God. He wondered if they had the concept of death, when they were all of the same creature, one intimately connected mind.
He wondered if they understood that they had killed him.
No. He couldn't think like that. He had his hands back, and his eyes, and his space suit checked out fully functional except the radio and the redlined energy levels, and—
— and he hadn't lost one fragment of the peculiar kinesis he'd inherited from the birdcages, the sense of the whole solar system spinning around him like a clockwork model, like a timepiece assembled by Einstein's watchmaker god. He could still feel it in his gut, rooted in his body as concrete and as invisible as an angel's wings rooted in the angel's shoulders.