“Of course I am.” And so he wouldn't be lying, he forced himself to look. To really look, at the unseasonable snow that lay in dirty swirls and hummocks over what looked at first glance like a rock field, at the truncated root of the CN Tower rising on the waterfront like the stump of a lightning-struck tree. Surprisingly, the tower had survived the earthquake, according to the forensic report of the engineers who had toured the Evac during the recovery phase. It had not survived the tsunami, nor the bombardment with meter-wide chunks of debris. Around it, lesser structures had been leveled to ragged piles of broken masonry and jutting pieces of steel.
Valens lifted his gaze as the chopper came around, and frowned toward the horizon. The frozen water of Lake Ontario would have been blinding in the sun, if the light that fell through the haze weren't watery and wan, and if the ice itself weren't streaked brown and gray like agate with ejecta. “A park,” he said, looking down at his hands. He folded his fingers together. He never had worn a wedding band; rings annoyed him. “What on earth makes you think you can turn this into a park?”
“What the hell else do we do with it?” She turned over her shoulder. An aide and two Mounties sat in the next row back, so hushed with the terrible awe of the Impact that Valens had almost forgotten them. “Coffee, please? Fred, how about you?”
He shook his head as the aide poured steaming fluid from a thermos, filling the helicopter with the rich, acidic smell. He didn't know how she could stomach anything, but judging by the gauntness of her face she needed it for medicinal purposes as much as the comfort of something warm.
Valens chafed his hands against his uniform, trying to warm them. Riel glanced over, but sipped her coffee rather than comment. She repeated herself, not a rhetorical question this time. “What the hell else are we going to do with it?”
“Rebuild,” Valens answered, though his gut twisted. “It's…” He shrugged. “Hiroshima, Mumbai, Dresden—”
“You're saying you don't just pack it in and go home?”
“Something like that. Besides, every city needs a nice big park.” Dryly enough that she chuckled before she caught herself. He tipped his head and lowered his voice, but kept talking. “Constance, do you know who Tobias Hardy is?”
“Yes,” she said, the corners of her mouth turning down. “Your old boss Alberta Holmes's old boss. Christ, I thought we had Unitek's fingers out of the Montreal's pie.”
“You could always seize it—” He shifted against the side panel of the helicopter. It dug painfully into his shoulder, and he was stiff from sitting. He wasn't as young as he used to be.
“I could,” she answered. “But we need Unitek's money, frankly, and their Mars base. And we don't need them running off to play with PanChina or PanMalaysia or the Latin American Union or the European Union because Canada and the commonwealth took our puck and sticks and went home.”
“You think they would?” Her gaze met his archly. She didn't inconvenience herself to reply, and Valens rolled his lower lip between his teeth before he nodded. “It's not the done thing to say so, Prime Minister. But I want some kind of retribution for that.” He gestured to the wasteland, but his gesture meant more — PanChina, Unitek, sabotage, and betrayal. “That's not the kind of blow you can turn the other cheek on and maintain credibility.”
Her sigh ruffled the oily black surface of her coffee, chasing broken rainbows across it. “I know. We try the legal route first.”
“Forgive an old soldier's skepticism.”
She gave him an eyebrow and turned again, looking out the window, leaning away from whatever she saw under the snow. “You're not the only one who's skeptical. But we're showing we're civilized. And we've managed to stall the hell out of their space program, since they can't know how limited Richard's ability to hack their network is. So we have the jump on them when it comes to getting a colony ship launched… once we figure out if we can get one past the Benefactors without them blowing it to bits.”
“We could try a Polish mine detector.”
Reil chuckled. “Not only is that politically incorrect, General Valens, but we can't exactly afford to waste a starship.”
“There's always the Huang Di,” he replied, going for irony and achieving bitterness. “She's ours by right of salvage—”
“Fred!”
He spread his hands to show that he was kidding. Nearly. “Meanwhile, China tries to hack Richard, and the worldwire. Have we thought about how much damage they could do?”
“That captured saboteur — Ramirez — was surprisingly forthcoming about PanChinese nanotechnology, once we convinced him to be. And Richard and Alan seem to think we have the situation under control.”
“So we're at the mercy of a couple of AIs.”
“Fred,” she said, and paused to finish her coffee. He shifted on the seat, vinyl creasing his trousers into his skin, and waited until she handed the mug back to her aide, who stowed it. “You're always at somebody's mercy. It's the name of the game. My job is to minimize the risks.”
“And mine is to identify the threats,” he answered, provoking a swift, shy grin, an almost honest expression.
She didn't look at him again. Instead, she leaned forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Take us home,” she mouthed when he turned to her, and he nodded and brought the chopper around. She lowered her head and rubbed her temples with her palms. “Don't worry, Fred. We'll get this figured out somehow.”
He could have wished there was more than a politician's conviction in her tone.
HMCSS Montreal , Earth orbit
Friday September 28, 2063
Noon
If the conference room chairs hadn't been bolted to the floor, Elspeth would have pushed hers into the corner and gotten her back to the wall. She hated crowds, and crowds involving strangers most of all. Not that Drs. Tjakamarra, Forster, and Perry, Gabe Castaign, and Patricia Valens — sitting quietly staring out the port with that distracted I'm-talking-to-Alan expression pulling the corners of her pretty mouth down — made much of a crowd. But she was reasonably certain they would start to seem like it soon.
At least they're all scientists. Well, almost all. Which shouldn't have made a difference, but — on some deep-seated, instinctual level — made all the difference in the world.
Because scientists are part of your tribe, she told herself. They're a part of your kinship system, and so they don't feel like strangers and threats. What's the old saying, the stranger who is not a trader is an enemy? She smiled at her fingernails. “I hope the Benefactors are here to trade something.”
“Look at the bright side.” Gabe Castaign, all gray-blond ragamuffin curls and hulking shoulders, had materialized at her shoulder as silently as a cat. She startled, and then sighed and leaned back into the touch of his hand on her shoulder.
“There's a bright side?”
His laugh always struck her as incongruous, coming from such an immense man. It was bright and sharp-edged, crisp as a ruffled fan. “Yes. If the Benefactors — both sets, or either — had the technology to put ships on Mars a few million years ago, I'm sure that if they meant to wipe us out they wouldn't have waited this long to do it. And furthermore, don't forget that they showed up in force and departed in force, but they've left behind only one ship apiece. That's not a threatening gesture, by my standards.”