Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

Breath.

“Qu’est ce que fuck ? Valens, you said civilian .”

“Casey, I lied.”

Seasick, I step away, stammering, “Fucking Christ. Ces sont des conneries. No. You can’t do this, Fred.”

“Actually,” he says, “I can. Chapter and verse is in your paperwork. I suggest you go over it and sign it at your leisure.”

“Or you’ll send me to jail? Not much of a threat.”

He tips his head toward the folder on my desk, keeps talking as if I haven’t said a word. “And you’re going to go along with it, too. And smile. Do you want to know why?”

God, I want to break his neck. He’s so fragile. So slow. Just bones and mud, and I could take him apart with one hand. And that would get me — nothing. Play the game, Jenny; you’re a dead woman anyway. Remember. Sacrifice play, and your only job is to get the runner home.

Shit, I’ve been living in the States too long if I’m thinking in baseball metaphors.

Chewing my lip, I manage to get a syllable out. “Why?”

“Because there’s no way they’re handing the keys to a real starship to a civilian, and you’re the only one I’ve got who has a hope of flying the fucking thing without killing everybody on board. Assuming you come through surgery okay, of course.”

I almost sit down on the rug. Of course. I lay my left hand on the edge of the desk to steady myself. “Real starship.”

“The Montreal, ” he says. He points toward the ceiling. “Finishing construction as we speak. Designed on the same specs as the toy you were playing with yesterday. We’ve already had to contend with two sabotage attempts during construction—”

Sabotage. A fine French word. “Terrorists?”

“In space? You don’t build a starship planetside. Our intelligence suggests the Chinese. In any case, we need some very special people to fly her, and we need them fast.”

“How fast? You said I’d be training kids.”

“You will. We’re finding the younger the better, actually. Which means problems of parental consent, and God knows what else, but you don’t need to worry about that.”

God. Mon Dieu. Children. Again. “What’s the tearing hurry?” Sir. There’s something about the way army wants to settle back over me like a well-worn shirt. Maybe this is where I belong.

God. No. Or should I be praying to St. Jude about now?

“Well, Casey, here’s the deal.” He leans against the edge of my desk, resting his weight on one buttock, so close I can smell his cologne. “We’ve got competition. This project has been under way for about ten years now, and, unfortunately, we’re in a race with the Chinese to get there first. You understand what happens if they get the kind of capability you saw yesterday before we do.”

“Yes.” Oh, I think so.

“Good.” He sets something else on my desk with a click. “You’ll need to start reacclimating to that. One ninety minutes before you go into VR and a second one at twenty minutes. No more. In the meantime, I want you to study up on the ship specs. You’ll have access to all her engineering data. Got it?”

“Sir.” I bite my tongue. “What’s the story on the ship’s attraction to massive bodies? Where’s the theory to back that up?”

Valens stares down at that red paper folder on my desk. His eyes are strangely unfocused, and then he looks up at me, intently. “That accident I mentioned.”

“Yes.”

“ Montreal is the second ship.”

Oh, I don’t even want to know. “What happened to the first one?”

“Charon,” he says.

“I don’t know who that is.”

“It was the name of Pluto’s moon. Sister-world. Whatever you want to call it.”

“How could a moon happen to a starship? Was there an instrumentation failure?”

“Not… exactly. As nearly as we have been able to determine — and damned if I can get one physicist to agree with another on the nature of the forces involved — once the drive is triggered it has a strong attractive quality to any significant mass nearby. A strong and so far unpredictable attractive quality.”

“Meaning?”

“We can’t always tell which way it’s going to go. And it has a tendency to smack into planets. Really fast. And erratically.”

“Colonel Valens. How did you design the drive without knowing what it does?”

“Well.” I’ve never seen the man look uncomfortable before. “We didn’t design it so much as reverse engineer it. And that’s all you’re cleared to know.”

Fuck. Fuck! “What you’re telling me is that you built an H-bomb from a kit without any directions and you don’t know which bit is the timer?”

“Something like that, yes. Thus the need for a living pilot. A living pilot with reflexes that approximate those of a computer. Somebody with some age and wisdom,” he said, dryly.

“I got age, at least. Not so much wisdom.” I rub the corners of my eyes. “Or you need an artificial intelligence of some sort.” Dunsany. Of course. That’s what she and Gabe are here for.

“Which in our case, we have not got. Preferentially, we need both, but we’re working with what we have right now. Starships aren’t cheap enough to keep smacking them into planets. Nor do we have an unlimited supply of planets to smack them into.”

I’m struck silent. I find myself saluting numbly as he turns to go, unable to speak when he turns back. “We want to schedule you as soon as possible, by the way. Better to get it done before any additional damage accrues, or you have a potentially catastrophic event. A Dr. Marsh will be performing the actual nanosurgery. It’s not my specialty, of course.”

“Of course.” And only after he shuts the door behind himself do I allow myself to look at the small brown vial he’s left on my desk.

It’s a long, long time before I can make myself pick it up with my steel hand, gingerly as if handling eggshells. My right one trembles, and it takes me ninety seconds to get the cap off. Slowly, knowing what I’m going to see, I turn it on its side over the crystal of the interface plate, watching the tiny canary pills slide out in a wavering line.

6:30 A.M., Thursday 14 September, 2062

Bloor Street West

Toronto, Ontario

Leah Castaign looked up from the breakfast table and caught her father’s eye. Genie was already slipping her shoes on by the door. “Dad?”

Her dad raised his eyes from the newsfeed and offered her a level, considering look that told her he’d caught the impending request in her voice. “Yes?”

She took a breath. “Can I ask you a huge, gigantic, massive favor?”

“Comment massif parlons-nous de?”

“Pas si grand comme cela. I want to skip school today.”

She saw him thinking about it as he set his spoon aside. “And do what instead?”

“Could Genie and I come to work with you today?” She held up her hand. “Wait — stop — ne pas dit ‘non.’ S’il te plaît.”

“J’écoute.”

She talked as fast as she was able. “We hardly ever spend time together since you started at the lab, Dad. You’re working so much. And it’s still the beginning of the term. We can afford to miss a day. And it’s a beautiful day, and I haven’t seen your office yet. Or…” And she grinned. “Met your new girlfriend. And we haven’t seen Aunt Jenny since dinner that first night. So there.” Genie froze by the door.

Her father’s lips pressed thin, and for a moment Leah thought she had lost him. And then a complexity of emotions crossed his face and he grinned. “Elspeth’s not my girlfriend, exactly. And your point is well taken, although your Aunt Jenny is pretty busy right now.”