Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

I give Gabe’s knee a squeeze under the table when the girls are fighting over the last olive in the bowl. He’s had a lousy decade. Odd how a couple of months in the same burn unit will give you a chance to really bond with somebody. He used to sit by my bed, when I was conscious, his hands and arms swathed in loose gauze to the shoulder, and make terrible bilingual puns to make me forget how he got burned so badly. We talk about small things, the way we used to, and when the girls wander off to play the VR games near the door he leans forward over the table, pouring the last of the beer out of the pitcher and into our glasses. “All right, Maker. Are you going to come clean with me now?”

It’s a joy just to have him nearby and mad at me. “Gabe, do you have any idea how much I’ve missed you?”

He sits back, blinks at me—“ Pardon? ”—and I make eye contact long enough to shrug.

My boots stick to the floor under the booth where somebody spilled a soda. There’s a squelching sound when I peel them free. “What Valens said is true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t begin to cover the territory. I’m sick, yeah. He’s not lying about that. But there’s a whole lot of other stuff going on I’m not sure about.”

He could even have the conversation bugged. Be tracing either or both of us. Probably is, in fact, so I’m going to say what I expect he wants to hear.

“But?” Gabe is waiting for me to continue, turning a spoon over and over in his hand. He hasn’t looked down.

“But I’m reasonably sure whatever you’re working on for him has to do with what I’m working on for him, and that he has some master plan for you and me.” I can’t explain all my suspicions — like the nasty sneaking thought I have nagging at the back of my brain that Valens set Gabe up to need this job so badly just so that he could offer it to him. And my even weirder suspicion, the one I’d almost laugh at for its narcissism, that for reasons I do not entirely understand, everything that has been happening revolves around me.

On the other hand, it could be a paranoid delusion. I’m given to understand I should be expecting those to start any time now. Fuck. All I ever wanted was a house on the Atlantic coast, maybe a dog or two and a husband who gave backrubs. How the hell I wound up with all this drama — Christ, I’ll never know.

Gabe’s looking at me. He expects me to continue, and I spread my hands wide and reach for another slice of pizza. Buying a little time, I turn my head to check on the girls. Their heads are under the VR helmets, and I can hear Genie laughing from here.

Laughing. Not coughing. Gabe glances over at his daughters and I see him grin. Genie has cystic fibrosis. Something for which there are many, many treatments these days — and still no cure. He looks back at me. “My project is classified,” he says. “I’d love to talk about it, Jen. But.”

“Don’t worry. I know what your project is. In gross detail, anyway. Doctor Dunsany’s lucky she ever saw the light of day again.” Gabe and I both almost went to jail under the Military Powers Act many years ago. Secrets having to do with what I carry under my skin. I’m not at all proud of what I did to keep us both on the outside, and Gabe doesn’t know about most of it.

And never will. But I’m going to count coup on Fred Valens, I swear, if it’s the last thing I do.

He laughs and sips his beer. “I guess it’s pretty obvious, at that. But it doesn’t relate to what you’re here for, from what you said earlier.”

“Could be. Right now, I’m here for extensive surgery. Which I’m assured is grossly noninvasive, whatever the fuck that means. And then I pay for it.”

“Pay for it?” His eyebrows go up. “What does the slippery Colonel Valens want from you?”

The grin takes over my face whether I want it to or not. “He wants to use me as a baseline to calibrate a VR pilot training program. Apparently pushing fifty and with my enhancements in disarray, I’m still faster than the kids he’s dragging out of flight training. That’s classified, too, of course.”

“So why are you telling me?”

The pizza is room temperature, and it still tastes good. Rich as the sensation of homecoming that enfolds me when Gabe reaches out and lays his hand over the leather glove covering my steel hand. I think of Valens’s promise to make me feel again, and my chest goes tight and strange, because I have no intention of taking him up on it. Not that I’m going to let him find that out.

I wish I remembered what it felt like to wake up in the morning and not hurt over every inch of my body. And then there’s ice-cold fear in the pit of my stomach, because I’m remembering my orientation that morning. “Because Valens needs me more than I need him right now, and because I need help.”

“Sure. Anything.” He checks on the girls again, and I wash the pizza — mushrooms, peppers, meatballs — down with a mouthful of beer.

“He wants me back on the narcotics. Under medical supervision. And I’m going to be taking Hyperex again, once the trials start. Not the Hammer, exactly. A new drug. Similar.” Merc, dark grayish purple and gasping, arching like a hooked fish… No. Don’t think about it, Jenny. Or think about it. Think about what it means.

That drug came from here.

“Maker. Jen. Tell me you’re fucking kidding.” He’s not looking at his kids now. The blue eyes bore into mine, anger rising across his face.

“I’m not. I’m told they won’t let me go through the nanosurgery without painkillers. And the research I’ve signed on for… well, they say I’ll need the Hammer for that.”

His voice is bleak. He’s drawing on the tablecloth with the tip of his unused knife. “We went through this once.”

Twice. Well, Gabe only went through it once. I catch myself rubbing the crook of my left arm as if there could still be any scars there. They’re gone, of course. Vanished like my life before the army. I have the sudden unholy urge to go find Chrétien, and it makes me want to turn my head and spit. Because I know I’m going to do it. Tomorrow. Or maybe the next day.

“I know. Valens knows…” everything. Well, not quite everything. But enough. “I’m gonna need you at my back.”

He’s unhappy about it. He nods anyway, because he’s my best friend, and we look out for each other.

“Gabe, I have to make a call. Wait for me?”

“Of course.” He knows I’m walking away from the conversation, and he lets me go anyway. Good man.

I use the wireless network to hook into a pay terminal across from the VR games. I promised to call Razorface, and I don’t want to do it on my own HCD. Call it paranoia.

He’s not answering, so I leave a message and hang up. I’m about to step out of the cubbyhole when a voice from my ear clip stops me cold.

“Ms. Casey.” Educated tones, American accent. West Coast? Maybe. Something cosmopolitan, something a bit archaic about the diction, and a subtle edge of excitement.

“Who are you?” And the edge in my voice is something else.

“I’m the ghost of Richard Feynman. And you are in a heck of a lot of trouble.” The screen beside me flickers on, revealing a gray-haired man with a face like a contour map, shifting restlessly as if from foot to foot. He grins. “And I really think we can help each other out.”

I turn back, trying to look as if I had just remembered another call I needed to make. “Ah. I see. And I’m supposed to know who Richard Feynman is because why?”

He laughs, delighted. “You have no idea how refreshing that is to hear. What I am, Ms. Casey, is an artificial intelligence created in the image of a man who has been dead for seventy-four years. I’m a friend of Elspeth Dunsany’s, and I need to get her a message without Colonel Valens finding out about it.”