“How do you sabotage a quantum network?”
Leslie shrugged. “I can guess. Jam its communications. Flood it with nonsense information, so the signal gets lost in noise.”
“Primitive. Brute force.”
“But effective. Where's Jeremy?”
“Base camp. Follow me. We can radio back and let them know you're safe inside.” A long pause followed, which Leslie didn't mind; he was absorbed in the eerie beauty of the weightless garden they moved through, and the strangeness doubled and redoubled of everything glowing, shimmering faintly, leaving currents he could feel through the Benefactor sensorium. Synesthesia. Only not.
“Hey, Charlie?” The suit speakers were much too loud. Birds — bird-analogues — darted away, shrieking. “What made you decide it was safe to take your helmet off?”
Charlie stabilized himself with a grip on a branch and turned back to Leslie, bobbing in midair like a red-cheeked apple. “Because I'm a biologist, Les. And I was sick of the effing helmet, and playing the odds. Scientific wild-ass guess.”
“And you risked your life on that?”
“I've risked my life on crazier things.”
“You've a point, mate,” Les answered.
“What made you decide to take your helmet off, Les?”
“You can't drown a man who was born to hang.” Leslie took another breath. It went to his head. “High-oxygen environment.”
Leslie tossed Charlie his helmet — more a cup-handed shove than an actual throw — in free-fall, and pushed off to follow him. They brachiated in silence, Leslie feeling as if the fresh air had rejuvenated his thinking process. It was Richard. Something to do with Richard, and the worldwire, and—
“Hey, Charlie. You know more about the nanotech than I do.”
“Yeah?”
He caught a branch as Charlie let it snap back, using the recoil to add a little push to his own forward momentum when it oscillated. “Is it weird that we're affected, too, when our nanosurgeons came courtesy of a direct transfer from the Benefactors, rather than through your lab? I mean, if the Chinese and their guy, um…”
“Ramirez.”
“Right. Cracked the operating system—”
Charlie chuffed, using Leslie's helmet like a shield as he bulled through the undergrowth. Leslie envied Charlie the freedom of movement and obvious comfort of his shorts and T-shirt, and blinked another bead of sweat off his lashes. “Well, we know they cracked the OS. But we rewrote it, Gabe and Richard and me, and our network — Dick's network — and the PanChinese one and the Benefactor system don't really talk to each other. Beyond Richard being able to hack them enough to talk to people — oh.”
“Yeah, you see what I mean?”
“I think I do, Les. If the Benefactors can rewrite their system to communicate with ours, which they must have done… how the hell do we let them know it's okay for them to rewrite our system to communicate freely with theirs?”
“Is it?” The smell of the air was addictive, a faint hint of ozone, the silken texture of the wind before a thunderstorm, and mild, shifting floral and herbaceous perfumes. Leslie's hands still tingled inside his gloves. He'd swear he could feel every individual cell zooming through his arteries, scalp to toes. He couldn't tell if there was something wrong with his body, or if he'd simply been deprived of it so long that he was hyperaware.
“Is it what?”
“Is it okay?”
Charlie stopped so suddenly that Leslie almost drifted into his back. “You know…I think we'd better radio back and have Gabe ask Richard about that.”
“You explain it to Dick,” Leslie said. “I'm going to try to explain it to the birdcage.”
My fists are knotted as hard as my heart. The air I can get, past the pressure in my chest, comes in shallow little sips, painful. Connie's looking at me across all that space, her chin lifted up so I can see her throat bob when she swallows. I wish I knew what the hell she was trying to beam into my brain with that steady, too-calm eye contact.
The only scrap of reassurance I can muster is Richard's presence, his ghost standing just off to the left and out of my line of fire, where I can see him without being distracted. Merci à Dieu, Dick. Tell me there's something you can do about this.
He turns away, as if he were looking over his shoulder at Riel and Patty. He looks sterner in profile, old-man-of-the-mountain, cotton-wool hair brushed back from a high forehead, revealing a widow's peak. He stares at the hostages long enough for my attention to follow and turns a worried squint back at me.
“Surrender, Jen,” he says, and folds his hands over his arms. “There's nothing else we can do to save them.”
For half a second my stomach drops, like the Wicked Witch just scrawled those words across the sky. Surrender isn't a word I thought Dick knew; less did I think I'd hear him counsel it.
The arms stay folded. Paternal. Stern. He rocks back, head to one side, a discouraging frown chiseling the lines around his mouth deep enough to shadow. “Live to fight again.”
I lock my thoughts down before I think it loud enough for Dick to hear. But they won't live if we surrender. Marde. I wish I could feel Min-xue now, the way I did when we went after Les and Charlie. I wish I could—
Oh. If Dick is here, why, oh, why can't I feel Min-xue?
It wasn't working, and Richard couldn't see any way that it could suddenly start to work, unless he could manage to crack the PanChinese network right back and take their system off-line. He wasted long nanoseconds trying, crippled by the lack of cycles. Even at limited capacity, he had an ear for Gabe, however.
Especially knowing that Gabe was working as hard as he was, and as fruitlessly. And despite the fact that what Charlie was suggesting — and Gabe was backing up — was sheer insanity.
Wainwright had left her XO in charge on the bridge and fled to the ready room to take Richard's call. It didn't look like a rout, of course. She'd made sure it wasn't even identifiable as a tactical withdrawal, and he wondered if she was sure herself if her hands were shaking with fear, or with adrenaline.
“I don't mean to put any extra pressure on you, Dick,” she said, “but I am… extremely concerned about the ecosystem—”
Richard was busy enough that he wasn't bothering with the niceties of human interaction. Alan's clipped tones crept into his own diction when keeping his voice warm was too much of an effort. “You're right,” he said. “It's not self-sustaining. None of it is self-sustaining, yet. Charlie's proposing we open the worldwire to the Benefactors—”
“What?” With a fraction of his attention, he saw her come out of her chair, her hands white on her desk. “That's insane.”
“It may be a moot point, as we don't currently know how to manage it. We can't even contact them, and we don't know how the heck to signal our intentions to the Benefactors even if we did.”
“We already have the program we wrote to flash the Benefactor nanites,” Gabe reminded, pressing the headphones to his ear to hear Wainwright better.
“The program that didn't work.”
Charlie's voice, encoded and tightcast and unscrambled and reconstituted, curiously flat with most of the harmonics lost to efficiency. “We also have samples of the nanosurgeons they infected us with, and Gabe's been able to crack fairly large chunks of their operating system.”
Wainwright's voice was as flat, with tension. “You're asking me to risk more than the Montreal this time.”
If Richard had been a human being, he would have stopped short and closed his eyes in frustration at his own stupidity. “The ones that they left open to the worldwire.”