However, if that was the technique they'd used, it meant there were at least three processors in existence that were big enough to host Richard — the Montreal, the Calgary, and the Huang Di. Hell, a very pared-down version of the base Richard persona could run quite tidily on the hardware packed into Jenny's head, as long as the spare cycles of her personal nanomachines were available to his use. The problem was, they'd gotten reliant on the worldwire — and Richard — for quantum communication, and Richard wasn't finished fixing the damage that the saboteur had done to the Montreal the previous year.
The Calgary was out of reach at the bottom of the ocean. The Huang Di was off-line, her reactors cold, her life support running from kludged-on solar panels, her processor core half taken apart. Richard might be alive in the former, but it was no place Gabe could get to. The latter was unavailable as a place of refuge. But there was the Montreal.
And Gabriel had the Montreal in his hands. He had a radio headset, and he had a clever lieutenant with a degree in computer science and several levels of technical certification slithering through the weightless, shielded access spaces that surrounded the Montreal's processor core, dragging the business end of a three-kilometer optical cable behind him, and three more geeks tearing up the floor panels of the big ship's bridge, double-checking connections that hadn't been needed in a year.
And if it all went well, and if Richard were still alive in there somewhere, Gabe should have communication with him in five seconds, four, three, two—
“Blake?”
“Sorry, Mr. Castaign.” The lieutenant's voice made tinny and sharp in his earpiece. “Cable's snagged. Half a second, here.”
Gabe was gambling with Blake's life. Gambling that he was right, and that what the Chinese had managed was to disrupt the worldwire, and not to take control of the Montreal again. Last time they'd hacked the ship's OS, they'd vented reactor coolant and taken a serious chunk out of the permissible lifetime exposures of half the engineering crew.
If they managed it again — well, Blake was inside the shielding. It wouldn't help him much.
“Hurry, please—”
“On it, sir.”
Gabe let his hands hang motionless in the interface. They still called him sir, even if he was a civilian now. “Blake?”
It wasn't Blake's voice that answered. Instead, a familiar craggy face pixilated into existence, and long fingers steepled as Richard pressed his immaterial hands palm to palm.
“Gabriel. You're a sight for sore sensors.”
“Merci à Dieu. It's good to have you back, Dick—” Gabe looked away, glanced to Elspeth, for strength. She squared her shoulders and drew one deep, hard breath, her arms tightening around Genie's shoulders, and she smiled.
Gabe had to look down again, the flash of gratitude that filled his chest so intense it made his eyes sting. “Nous avons des problèmes plus grands. New York City is under martial law.”
“I see. Perhaps you had better start at the beginning.”
“Forgive me, Dick,” Gabe said, “but explanations are going to have to wait until after the war.”
Patty turned as Riel dove for cover. Somebody cowering behind a desk on the left squeaked like a stomped puppy. Patty knew what she'd see even before she turned, and tried to brace herself for it. She wasn't ready.
She didn't think she ever could have made herself ready to stand there, hands spread out for balance, covered in blood and with her pants leg somehow having gotten torn all up one side, and stare down the barrel of a gun. She froze, wobbling a little, trying to make it look like grim determination holding her in place rather than icy panic.
The man with the gun wasn't big. He was about fifteen feet away, down the shallow slope of the aisle, and he held the gun in both hands at arm's length. She couldn't see his face clearly. He wore a Western-style business suit with a tie and silver cuff links that flashed in the overhead light, and his hands weren't shaking. Somebody sobbed behind Patty. She heard a big, resonant thump as the crowd heaved against the doorway, a beast scraping itself on the sides of a too-small den. She spread her hands out wider, and wondered if being shot was going to hurt much. She wondered if she was tough enough to hold the man off until Riel could vanish into the crowd of escaping bodies.
“Step aside,” he said, his English thick with an accent.
“No,” Patty answered, and dove for the gun.
Something kicked in her chest as she lunged forward. She thought it was a bullet, at first, but there was no flash yet and the gun hadn't popped. It was her heart, slow thunder a counterpoint to screams from people cowering near her. She shouted; it left her lips a slow roar, and nothing moved—nobody moved—for a thin slice of a second until she saw the gunman's eyes widen and his knuckle pale on the trigger.
Once, again. And then he was plunging aside, and Patty didn't see the bullets, couldn't hear the bullets, but it didn't matter because she had seen where the gun was pointed and seen how the barrel had kicked, and the part of her brain that could calculate starship trajectories at translight knew that second bullet wasn't coming anywhere close. The first one, though—
Patty couldn't catch bullets in her hand, the way she'd heard Jenny could. But she twisted hard, her hair flying into her eyes, and tried not to think that when she ducked the bullet was going to hit somebody in the mob behind her. Her knee shrieked as she wrenched herself out of the way, and then she found out that she wasn't really faster than a bullet after all.
She didn't fall down. She didn't even stop moving, as if some animal part of her brain knew that if she slowed for a second the next shot would end between her eyes. It didn't hurt at all, not a bit — just a thump against her left shoulder like whacking it against a door frame at a run, and white stars lighting her vision as it spun her half around, and her left arm gone, as if the impact had taken it off.
She was committed. She plunged at him, head-butt to his abdomen like a playground wrestling match, and there was more blood, everywhere, slippery-sticky and hot, on her face, in her mouth, sticking her hair across her eyes. She slammed him against the railing, felt something snap. They landed hard, and she brought her knee up, fighting dirty like Papa Fred had taught her, and she was fast, faster than she'd known she'd be, but he was faster somehow and he got his thigh in the way and he still had the gun in his hands and her arm wouldn't work and he clawed at her nose, her mouth, pushing her back. Her right hand locked around his wrist and yanked his hand off her face and—
The white stars turned red-black as he struck her across the temple, once, with the barrel of the gun.
Damn, this son of a bitch can move. Like a fencer, like a ballet dancer. He feints and I fall for it, but rather than cracking my forearm, his pistol rings off my metal arm like somebody whaled on a cold water pipe with a claw hammer. He grunts. I bet he felt that all the way up to his shoulder.
Unfortunately, it doesn't distract him enough to slow him down when I go for a sharp right jab. Fluid sidestep, faster than I can think, and he grabs my wrist and tries to put me over his shoulder in some kind of martial-arts throw. He reckons without the weight of my prosthesis throwing my center of gravity off, though, and I clothesline his throat as he tosses me. It doesn't stop me going over his shoulder, but he loses his grip and I roll with it instead of landing cripplingly hard, flat on my back. When I come up into the crouch he's gone straight down, vertical drop from his feet to his knees, and the gun is on the floor in front of him because he's clutching his throat with both hands, his eyes bugged out so far I can see the whites all the way around. I bet I crushed his trachea when I hit him.