Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

I nod. “Go fight crime. I’m just going to a hospital, to see a man I hate.” Scars fade. If you live long enough, everything fades. Face knows that.

I hand him the keys to the Bradford. He gives my shoulder an extra squeeze before he turns away. I watch him out of sight.

Then I turn around and get in Barbara’s car.

We’re strip-searched at the border, of course, but my CA veteran’s card lets me keep my sidearm, along with a warning to keep it unloaded while traveling. Once the female sergeant in charge of the interview realizes where I fought and how badly I was wounded, she’s interested and extremely polite. Barb, I note, passes through with a Unitek corporate ID card bearing the maple leaf.

Border Patrol doesn’t see the need to take the car apart, thankfully, or we’d be there all day.

Back in the car and northbound again, I stretch out in the passenger seat and stare out the window at the trees. They look yellowed, unhealthy. None of the native species like the new weather much.

I feel much the same, fingertips of my right hand tingling and my left arm a dull, throbbing ache. I’ve never liked being a passenger when somebody else drives — or flies, either. I’d rather have the responsibility. Control freak? Probably.

“How did you hook up with Valens?”

She’s got the car on autopilot, something else I never do, and she reaches out and flips the music off with one finger. At least she’s not watching 4-D on the console. “He came looking for me,” she says. She turns and examines me — a long, searching stare. “He figured if anybody could find you, I could, and he wanted to talk to you.”

I grunt. “After twenty years?”

She lets her shoulders roll under that expensive green silk, both hands off the wheel. It makes me want to reach over and grab hold of the thing myself. Worse, I keep catching sight of her out of my bad eye, and the gun she’s got tucked up under her left armpit makes a bulge that my targeting scope insists on painting dark red. As if I didn’t know the threat level already.

Border Patrol didn’t take her gun? Unitek must have even more juice than they used to. And they used to have plenty. Even before they started funding Canada’s space program and a good chunk of its weapons research. “I know you’re bullshitting me. You may as well spit it out.”

She sighs. “Jenny, I’m telling you everything I know. I’ve had a chance to regret some things, all right? When Valens got in touch with me, it seemed like an opportunity to mend some fences. We’re neither one of us getting any younger. And if you’re as sick as he says…” Her voice trails off suggestively and she looks back at the road, resting her hands on the wheel. It rocks slightly as the car adjusts course.

If I’m as sick as he says. Because that leads us back to the main reason I’m in this car — the data she beamed to my HCD, the case histories and the unhappy prognosis. And Valens’s recorded assurances that there was a treatment now for progressive neurological atrophy brought on by the primitive cyberware, and that the other three surviving recipients of the original central nervous system devices he pioneered were doing just fine with their upgrades.

He even said that in his recorded message. “Upgrades.”

“We can reverse a lot of the scardown now, Casey. You’ll be amazed. Obviously the data aren’t in yet, but I’m theorizing we can get you another thirty years of mobility if everything goes well. And we’ve learned something about pain management, too.”

Just so much software and hardware, wired into the wetware. Rip it out. Replace it. Whatever doesn’t work is trash, throw it away.

I glance sidelong at Barb. “I heard you were trying to get ronin to go after me. You could have just put the word on the street that there was trouble and you needed to talk to me. I would have found you.”

“And let the sharks know my baby sister might be less than able to defend herself?”

It wouldn’t have stopped you back then. It didn’t stop you back then. I remember what you were like, when Nell died. Or before I left home. But that’s water under the bridge now, isn’t it? “How did you know where to find me, Barb?”

She turned back and shot me a grin. “I put a tap on your buddy Castaign’s phone, of course.”

Just like that.

Except the numbers still don’t quite add up. And that’s not what she said this morning.

Seven Years Earlier:

1430 hours, Monday 12 July, 2055

Scavella-Burrell Base

Hellas Planitia

Mars

Charlie ran a hand across his clipped, thinning fair hair, scrubbing at the back of his skull. He lifted his shoulders and grimaced, then placed both hands on the edge of his desk and levered himself to his feet, blinking his contacts clear. An armed guard — taser only, in the airtight confines of the station — fell into step behind him as he left his lab. One more thing to thank John for. A guy can’t even take a piss around here anymore without an escort.

As he was leaving the head, Colonel Valens stopped him in the hall. “Charlie.”

“Evening, Fred.” He couldn’t remember how long he’d been on a first-name basis with the base commander, and wondered occasionally how he had ever found the man forbidding. “You look like a man with a mission, sir.”

Valens bobbed his chin down, half a nod and an ironic smile. “All work and no play. How are you doing on the DNA sequencing?”

Charlie fell into step beside him. “It’s not exactly DNA, although it is a long-chain organic molecule. And I’ve gotten distracted by something interesting, frankly.”

“Interesting, or interesting ?”

“Yes.” He held his lab door open for Valens, noticing that the guard was standing just far enough away not to seem to overhear.

Valens preceded Charlie into the room. “Tell me more.”

“Have you been reading my weeklies?”

“I’ve been up to my ass in paperwork, and a little brinksmanship over the salvage vessels. The Chinese have decided that testing our perimeters is not enough, and they’ve actually been sending in surface teams. But that’s neither here nor there; tell me what is interesting.”

Charlie kicked his chair to one side and perched on the edge of the desk, away from the interface plate. “We’ve been using a scanning electron microscope on some of the samples from the shiptree. Consensus is, it was in fact grown. And then reinforced. Let me show you something.” With deft fingers, he tapped up the holographic display and pulled up an image queue.

“Surgical nanites,” Valens said promptly. “Q class. Neurosurgical. I’ve used them.”

“Right. Look at these.”

“Holy… oh.”

Charlie felt the grin pulling his lips wide when Valens came the last five steps to lean in close to the projection.

The colonel poked one finger into the hologram, singling out one magnified image among crawling dozens. “Those are from S-2? Are they as small as this indicator shows?”

“Yep. And still active.”

“I can see that. Well.” Valens leaned back on his heels, head shaking slowly. “These are responsible for the microreinforcement of the shiptree’s hull.”

“And what appears to be a sort of artificially enhanced nervous system. Which hooks up to the cables I had theorized were VR links. Yes.”

The silence was gratifying. Charlie looked up from the display. Valens’s face was still and pale. “You’re suggesting,” he said, “that that ship was — alive? That it still is?”