Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

Elspeth wanders past me as I come up the walk to the front door of the lab, squinting against the glimmer of sunlight on pink marble and steel. Her head is ducked down. She peels open the wrapper of a toxic-green sour-apple candy with her teeth and one hand. In the other one, she’s got that canvas bag with the Unitek logo on it that she lugs everywhere.

She shoves the candy into her cheek and wads the wrapper into her pocket. “Jenny, wait up. Want to get some lunch?”

“I just had coffee.” I didn’t make it to the coffee shop, actually, but I’m not in a company mood.

“Whatever. Here, take a couple of these.” She sets the bag down and digs in her pocket, comes up with a fistful of candy spilling out of a handkerchief. “Genie sent them in with Gabe, and if I eat all these I will be both sick and enormous.” She holds the handkerchief out to me, dropping the overflow candies back into her lab coat. I reach out, right-handed, to take one off the top, more out of politeness than any desire for sweets, and she shoves the whole thing into my hand.

“Better you than me,” she says with a sharp-edged grin, and picks up her bag, moving away before I can protest.

The data slice Elspeth slipped me lies in my pocket, heavy as a loaded gun for the two hours I spend back in the lab after she abandons me there. That’s all I can stand, especially after the screaming match with Gabe. If I ran into Valens in the corridor, I’d probably break his neck. Twice.

Discretion being the better part of valor, I take a lunch I don’t plan to come back from.

I can’t think of a better place to access a public terminal than the university library. I suppose it’s possible that Valens could tag my activity there, but I’m hoping the sheer volume of information on the public Nets will make that kind of filtering impossible. Besides, I have Richard. I use the contact feed to access my prosthetic eye, instead of the provided monitor. I don’t need to get shoulder-surfed committing treason. And treason is what it is.

Once snuggled into a netted terminal, the data slice autoreads its own information off to its mysterious destination and wipes itself clean. Twice. A moment later, a red telltale blinks in the corner of my vision. I concentrate on the blank beige surface of the study cube wall. “Hello, Richard.” I subvocalize into the mike, and a moment later, his image resolves before my eyes.

“Jenny. Thank you.” He bounces like a basketball player stretching his calves and swinging his arms. “Exactly what I needed.”

“Good. What was it?”

He chuckles, and I expect some bullshit about need to know. I bargained without Richard. “It’s a glorious puzzle, Jenny. A riddle to be fretted and unraveled.”

“Meaning you don’t know.”

“Not yet, but I can show you.”

“First I want to ask you something. I need to find somebody.”

He rubs his jaw professorially, scrubs a hand across wavy gray hair. I wonder if the tics are programmed in, or if he does it on purpose, to seem more human. “Who?”

The breath I take burns the back of my throat. “Chrétien Jean-Claude Hebert of Montreal. Born May first, I don’t know the year. Last decade of the twentieth century or the first few years of this one. He’d be about Valens’s age. Probably an extensive criminal record.” I close my eyes, concentrating. “There will be an arrest in 2027—October, I think — for pandering, and probably one late the next year for possession with intent.” Heh. I called in the tip on that second arrest. Gave me enough time to get my ass sworn into the army before he caught up with me.

“I’ll look,” Richard said, his eyes narrowing. “There’s something else in the data you brought me.”

I must be holding my breath, because he doesn’t make me wait for long. “The proof you were looking for. About Valens and your sister.”

“The murder?”

“No.” I know I wouldn’t be able to detect it if he truly hesitated, so it must be for my benefit that he stops and takes a “breath.” “The new-generation rigathalonin. Barbara Casey was given charge of a thousand units of it, 30 percent contaminated with trace agents, and instructions to street test it.”

“Street test. Why contaminated?”

Richard shrugs. “No data. Shall I speculate?”

“S’il vous plaît.”

“One, to make it believable that the drugs were a stolen, destroyed shipment. Less than 5 percent of the tablets actually contained enough contaminants to cause mortality in the subjects.”

“Two?”

“To provide sacrificed subjects for autopsy.”

Sweet Mary, Mother of God. “Barbara knew?”

“She knew. There is no indication here that Colonel Valens was aware of the intent to poison the recipients, however.”

“Someone must have. Someone high up.”

Richard lets me get there on my own.

“Doctor Holmes.” I close my eyes. I wanted Valens dirty. Dirtier than he is.

But I know the truth, and the fact of history is this: Fred Valens is the star of his own movie. And as far as he’s concerned, Fred Valens is one of the good guys. He might lie to a soldier for her own good, or test drugs or medical procedures on somebody without consent, but he wouldn’t poison someone.

Barbara Casey would do it without a second thought.

“Why Hartford? Why take the risk?”

“You know your sister better than I.”

Sucking on my lower lip, I lean my forehead down on my steel hand. “Sloppy,” I say quietly. “It’s just sloppy, for Barb. Lazy. Hell, that’s it, isn’t it? She was just too goddamned lazy to keep running back and forth between Hartford and Boston, or Albany, or wherever. Not when I was somewhere near Hartford, and there was a CCP warehouse on the edge of town, and she had to be there anyway. She wouldn’t have worried about getting caught because she never gets caught. She’s fifty-seven years old, and she’s smarter than anybody I’ve ever met except for maybe Fred Valens and Elspeth Dunsany, and she’s never gotten caught.”

He inclines his head. “Logical.”

My right hand shakes as I raise it, covering my eyes — which of course does nothing to block his image. I want to scream, How could she? But really, when could she not have done it? What ever would have stopped her?

It’s like she was born with some essential part of her brain just missing . Once, I would have called it her soul.

I get my breathing under control. I can talk again. “Thank you, Richard. If anything happens to me, can you see that those records make it to the proper authorities? American, Canadian, and wherever the hell Unitek is incorporated?”

“My pleasure, Jenny.” He gives me a moment before he continues. “Ready for download?”

“Yes.” But I am totally unprepared for what he gives me next.

Dust, red as rusted iron — red with rusted iron — rising about my boots. I taste it through my rebreather, gritting my teeth like a night without sleep. Virtual reality, more intense than I’ve ever known — real as a damned flashback. But not me, this time. Not me. He’s spliced into my motor cortex through the wetware that operates my prosthesis, and he’s forcing vivid, sensual kinetic memories into my brain.

The gravity feels wrong. Too subtle. And then I realize I’m on Mars, and the dust is Mars dust— fines, he corrects me, and I realize I’ve vocalized the word — Martian fines, then. And I’m in a tunnel, some sort of a dark passageway.

“Starships,” Richard says in my ear. “Two of them. Alien starships, stranded on a barely hospitable world. That’s where the Indefatigable comes from. And the Chinese ships, and the one they plan to have you fly.”