But I guess I come across that way myself, until you get to know me. “Go,” I answer, and bolt from our hiding place, half a second before Patty screams.
The blood's worn off the soles of my shoes. I don't slip when I slap my meat hand against the top of the desk and propel myself over it, tuck — not as neatly as Min-xue, who moves like an acrobat in gravity, too — roll, take the fall on my shoulder, and come up like a snake, face to face with a surprised assassin.
No, he didn't expect that at all.
Pity he's the one with the gun.
I trigger, and the world rattles to a halt jerk-jerk-jerk like somebody's let go the dead-man's handle. My last thought before the programmed reflexes kick in is: Min-xue lives like this all the time.
Casey was slower than Min-xue expected: no quicker than a fast, agile, athletic normal woman half her age. Slower, that is, until she lunged to her feet under the nearest assassin, rolling onto her toes, glittering left hand slapping a bullet out of the air like she was taking a backhanded swipe at a badminton birdie, right one doubled into a fist that slammed into her opponent's solar plexus while Min-xue was still closing the distance to his.
An unaugmented human would have seen a blur. Min-xue saw her opponent double over, drop his pistol, grab hold of Casey's arm, and roll over it, disengaging, getting away.
Fast, too. Faster than Casey, if she hadn't caught him flat-footed. Faster maybe than Min-xue. He took another half a step toward them, but Casey had the gun, and her opponent was twisting like a cat to come up on his feet.
And there were three more armed men in the room, and behind him, Patricia shouted again — not surprise and fear this time, but fury, and the sound was divided by the report of a gun.
Min-xue turned on the ball of his foot, jumped over a cowering attaché in a baize-green suit, landed in a crouch as something seared his thigh in passing, and slung himself over the railing toward the podium and the enemy who had just stood up from behind it to level his gun. One of the enemy's comrades rose from the cover of the secretary's table, gun leveled. Military tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downward.
A useless piece of advice, when the battle was already joined, and the fighting ran uphill.
The sound of bones cracking couldn't distract him. Casey and Patty were on their own. Min-xue dove left, buying whatever cover he could from the shooter behind the podium, getting that shooter's body between himself and the man farther back. He scrabbled forward, clawed under a desk, the creased thigh burning, another bullet chipping off an interface plate and sending fat blue sparks lazing through the air like dragons' tongues and chrysanthemum clusters. He crawled through them, skinny enough to weasel under the privacy panel, and hesitated behind the last row of desks.
Min-xue's last cover.
He grabbed two deep breaths, vaulted the obstacle, and, zigzagging, rushed the guns.
Jeremy met Charlie halfway back to base camp and knocked Charlie into a spiral when he clouted him on the head. Charlie spun back against a web of vines and branches, almost bounced out again, and clung until the greenery stopped shaking. He didn't dare laugh, although the suited and helmeted figure floating in front of him, wobbling as he recovered from the damage he'd done his own equilibrium, was a thoroughly amusing sight. “Action and reaction, Jer. What the heck did you do that for?”
“Damn,” Jeremy said, his voice tinny through speakers. “You know, Charlie, you about scared the air out of my suit.”
“I think I might have broken the nanonetwork somehow—”
“You also took off your bloody helmet. I can't talk to you without your suit radio turned on, you know.”
“Oh.” Charlie looked around for his helmet, hoping it hadn't sailed too far away in the impact. It was lodged a little farther over in the bush; he floated free and retrieved it. “I guess that explains what I did to deserve it.”
“Other than suit telemetry indicating to Peterson and myself that you'd had a rupture? And then not answering my hails? And Richard vanishing on us, pfft! And that's not the most interesting bit of information.” Between the buzz of the speaker and Jeremy's accent, and the way his words tumbled over each other in thwarted concern, Charlie could barely understand.
“Oh?”
“Leslie is inbound.”
At first, the words didn't make any sense. Charlie tilted his head, staring through Jeremy's faceplate as if he could read his mind through the crystal. “Leslie?”
“We presume. Something human-shaped has left the birdcage, in any case, and is traveling this direction. Peterson says she has visual, and if it isn't Leslie, it's a neat approximation of someone in a space suit. I told her not to intercept. She was willing to try. So we need to head back to base camp — wait a minute. Why did you take off your hat?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time? In any case…”
“You aren't dead.”
“I'm not dead.” Charlie poked his own cheek with a gloved finger and grinned at Jeremy's expression, barely visible through the helmet. “So far so good.”
“Tell me that again in ten days, when whatever you've sucked in has had a chance to incubate.”
Charlie grinned and started wriggling his gauntlets off. “I won't ask to sleep in the tent until we're sure I'm not dying.”
Jeremy hissed like a cat, between his teeth, and grabbed a nearby branch to flick himself in the direction of camp. “Silly bugger. Well, no point in putting it back on now. If you're dying on us, you're already dead. And I want to find out exactly what is headed for our air lock.”
Gabe's father had a cabin in Quebec, a two-hundred-year-old one-room onto which generations had added, until the resulting house resembled a turkey-tail fungus, bits and pieces projecting on some inobvious plan from the central core. Gabe had been looking forward to inheriting the place and retiring there, in the fullness of time.
Gabe sincerely wished that he — and Genie, and Elspeth, and Jenny — were there right now. Instead, he was up to his thick, stubborn neck in emergency protocols and Elspeth and Genie were sitting tight in the corner of the lab, barely breathing so as not to distract him, despite their obvious frustration.
And Jenny was on the ground somewhere, under fire. It was all Gabe could do to not shiver like a dog-worried sheep. Genevieve Casey can take care of herself. And she can take care of Patty and that Chinese pilot and Prime Minister Riel as well.
Gabe smiled tightly, not looking up from his own fingers as they darted through the touch-sensitive fields over his interface plate. She could. Didn't change that he wanted to be there, soaking up some of the fire. But Jenny was a big girl. Frederick Valens, on the other hand, could take care of himself. And if Jenny got killed trying to rescue cet ostie de trou de cul—
No. Gabe had his own job, and it was time he started doing it. Especially given the mistakes he'd made. He'd been so concerned that Ramirez had left a back door into the Montreal's core, or that the enemy would attack the hulk of the Calgary directly, that he'd failed to consider what was in retrospect a more likely scenario: that the Chinese would find a way to simply disrupt the worldwire, destroy its ability to communicate, and leave the Benefactor machines purposeless, uncontrolled.
Unlike the worldwire, which was an accidental — or unofficial — outgrowth of Richard's machinations, the Chinese nanonetwork was firewalled and guarded and coded in terms incompatible with the Benefactor network. Richard and Gabe had cracked some of that code — enough to let the AI talk with Min-xue. Not enough to let him puppeteer the Chinese pilots or the Huang Di the way he could the Canadian side, although Richard had managed to flash Min-xue's programming, once upon a time. The Chinese could have taken the worldwire down and left their own network functional. Remotely. The same way they'd destroyed the Huang Di's operating system and her data when the starship became Canada's salvage and spoils of war.