Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

“Dismissed.” I catch the reflection of her smile in the crystal of the holomonitor as I salute, turn on my heel, and go.

1100 hours

Saturday September 29, 2063

HMCSS Montreal

Earth orbit

Charlie Forster had been living in space for so long that he'd forgotten what it was like to work in a lab with windows and a door that could be left open to catch a cross breeze, and he wondered if he really remembered how a full G would feel. He still had good muscle mass, though — partially a function of his somewhat heavier-than-ideal weight, and partially because he was religious about taking the mystotatin blockers that prevented muscle loss — and he was willing to bet that, given advances in low-G health care — his time on orbital platforms, starships, and Mars had raised his life expectancy. And, as he opened the hatch of his lab for Leslie Tjakamarra and Jeremy Kirkpatrick and ushered the Australian and British scientists inside, he had to admit that he wasn't immune to a certain pride of place: as one of the team who had uncovered the Benefactor ships on Mars, as the contact team's expert in the nanotech, as the guy whose lab space was housed in a starship . There was pleasure in that.

Especially when meeting fresh new faces, eager to be awed.

Or fresh old faces, he chuckled to himself. It's not like any of us are going to see forty again. Nor are any of us particularly easy to awe anymore.

The men's ship shoes scuffed on the deck plates as Charlie palmed the light on. He'd spent a good part of the last nine months moving his base of operations from Clarke over to the Montreal, and he finally had his lab set up the way he wanted it. Richard had helped him engineer the mounts for the biospheres that held his experimental subjects. The possibility that the Montreal 's “gravity” might fail or shift rendered storage of fragile objects that needed indirect light into something of an engineering challenge.

The space he had appropriated was one of the hydroponics bays that helped supply the Montreal with food and oxygen. It had full-spectrum lighting already installed, and the biggest ports on the ship. Charlie hadn't bothered to move any of the tanks where radishes and sunflowers and soybeans grew in a transparent gelatinous medium; the fertilized profusion didn't interfere with his work and he rather enjoyed the green leaves, moist air, and the buzz and flutter of the Montreal 's pollinators — honeybees and butterflies. The ship's entomologist visited, too. That was nice.

Besides, Charlie's work used otherwise wasted space, and almost every inch of the Montreal served double or triple duty. The lab's interior bulkheads gleamed with rows of glass biospheres like Christmas ornaments, held under the grow lights in lacy titanium frames. Inside those baubles was the flicker of movement; colorful shrimp darted around snails and filigrees of algae, each sphere a discrete ecosystem. And all of them, save the controls, infected with unmodified Benefactor tech.

Jeremy Kirkpatrick grimaced and looked around. “So this is where the tofu comes from.”

“Tofu,” Charlie said, “and the salad oil, and the spinach…”

“A very impressive setup.” Tjakamarra nevertheless didn't seem to be paying much attention to it. He crossed to the broad crystal port and leaned his hands against it, pressing one cheek to the glass to get a better look at the Montreal from this angle. “Is all this foliage infected?”

“Only what you see in the biospheres,” Charlie answered. “The rest is natural flora.”

“Wouldn't it make more sense to use the nanotechnology to… what, protect? bombproof? the hydro tanks and so forth?”

“You mean, like we've already infected the planet?” Charlie laughed. “We're trying to follow a policy of conservative use on the nanosurgeons. Only a few people on Montreal have had the full treatment; most of us are natural, and several of the ones who are infected — like Genie, for example — aren't enhanced. Although she's on the worldwire, she doesn't have the augmented reflexes or the full VR package. The plants stay natural unless there's a reason to make them otherwise.”

“I see.” Tjakamarra turned his back to the port and leaned against the bulkhead, his wiry, black-jacketed frame blurring into the darkness outside. The Montreal 's running lights cast blue and green reflections through his hair. “Given what's happening on Earth, Dr. Forster, you'll forgive me if I find your precautions a little laughable.”

“Please, call me Charlie. And trust me, we're not naive,” Charlie said, gesturing the other two to follow him as he turned toward the instruments at the far end of the lab. “We're doing whatever damage control we can. Come on, I'll show you the critters up close and personal.”

Vancouver, Offices of the Provisional Capital

British Columbia, Canada

Saturday 29 September 2063

0730 hours PDT

Valens folded his right leg over his left leg and focused past the glossy tip of his loafer to Constance Riel silhouetted against the pale mauve sheers that softened her office window. The office itself still held the air of hasty improvisation. The interface plate was a few centimeters too small for the desk in both directions, and the faded patches on the carpet did not match the furniture. The office hadn't been intended for an office; in its earlier life, it had been a conference room.

But Riel needed the space. Space in which to pace back and forth, as she had been before she paused by the window, and space in which to host the impromptu councils of undeclared war that were more or less her existence these days.

Her existence, and Fred's. “You shouldn't frame yourself in the window, Connie.”

She let the translucent curtain fall back into place, but didn't turn. “If I hadn't lost my husband in Toronto, he'd have divorced me for neglect by now. The glass is bulletproof, Fred.”

“There's no such thing as bulletproof.”

“Bullet-resistant.”

“And useless against an RPG. It's not armor plate.”

“I'm as protected here as I can be, Fred. The building's as secure as my residence in Toronto was.”

“No,” he said, and got to his feet. The carpet pad needed replacing; it felt almost tacky under his feet. Priorities, however, lay elsewhere. “It's not as safe, and you're not safe standing in the window.”

“Who died and made you Mountie?” But she stepped away from the window. “Who would have thought a year ago, Fred, that you'd have appointed yourself my own personal watchdog?”

He didn't answer. The question was the answer. Needs must when the devil drives. And China was turning out to be a very particular devil.

She shook her head, searching the office for her coffee cup. “It had to be Saturday morning. It's always Saturday morning. Just in time for the weekend news lull, dammit. I don't know why I should be so annoyed that even the UN understands that.”

“United Nations hearings aren't the end of the world—”

“I don't want hearings , Fred. I want a full World Court genocide proceeding, and I want China made party to it, over their refusal, dammit.”

He sighed heavily. “Do you?”

“What are you asking? Of course I do.”

“Do you want to open the door for the Chinese to come back with war crimes charges against us, for the Calgary crash and the nanotech infection?”

Riel paused. “Well, hell, that's why we're having the hearings. Charges and countercharges. Maybe we can wrangle it into a crimes-against-humanity case. Are you still willing to take a fall for the program if it comes to it, Fred?”