Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

“Don't worry. Plenty of time before anything breaks open.” I get my hat and my gauntlets on, double-checking the seals before I tug the controls away from Min-xue so he can get dressed. He does a better job than I did, fast and efficient despite what must be unfamiliar suits. I wonder how different the Chinese equipment is. He seems to be doing okay with the controls.

“Richard coached me,” he says in his musical English, without turning his head inside the helmet to look at me. “When he reprogrammed my wiring to the Canadian standard.” He checks his restraints and rests his gloves on the arms of the chair rather than taking the controls back. I drive at the birdcage as hard as I dare. The gaps in the filigree aren't all the same size, and I need a pair of them opposite each other, or nearly, and big enough that I can line them up and coast through on inertia. I'm not risking a burn inside that thing if there's any way around it. And then, assuming we catch one of the missing the first time through, we get to come back and try it again.

Dick, you rat .

“I said nothing.”

Sure. But I believe him; Min-xue isn't quite the spooky mindreader Elspeth is, but he's a smart kid and he's wired so tight that he shivers like a Mexican lap dog when he tries to stand still. Worse off than I am, and just as convinced that it's worth any price to fly. And it's perfectly possible that his hindbrain read my hindbrain, and he just sorta knew what to say.

Freaks. Every last one of us.

“Gabe's hacking, Jen. Can you get a little more vee?”

“If I burn faster I have to brake harder once we get there, Dick. We need to be moving slow enough that Min-xue can bail out to handle the rescue, and we aren't going to be maneuverable while that's going on. This is crazy shit, sir.”

Min-xue says something in Chinese that I take for agreement. I don't understand a word, but the tone is 50 percent if Momma could see me now and 50 percent I'm fucking nuts even to consider this. He slaps his release and vaults out of his chair. Acceleration kicks him toward the aft bulkhead; “down” is currently aimed toward the ass-end of the Ashley MacIsaac, and I wince, grateful for the armor of Min-xue's space suit and expecting him to wind up on his ass, sprawled against the wall like a terrified bug. But he twists in midfall, agile as if that space suit were a pair of stretch jeans, and lands with his boots against the bulkhead. The thump as he hits rattles my chair.

Damn, he's fast. And so very, very young.

Which is not something I'm allowed to think about. Not here. Not now. Because it's always the kids, isn't it? And more of us survive than don't, so I might as well quit whining, really.

The pulley spins as he yanks a safety line out of the aperture; it clicks solidly through a D ring on his suit.

“Don't jump until Dick tells you jump,” I say, just to be saying something. From his snort, he knows it and forgives me. The hatch to the passenger cabin bangs open and he drops through the hole, rappelling down. Design flaw: there's no way he can dog the hatch behind him. The shuttles weren't built to have people running around inside them when they're under acceleration. I'll have to talk to an engineer about that if we make it back.

At least the air lock is set up so you can get in and get sealed up no matter which way the ship is pointing. The inside hatch unseals and I hear more clanging as Min-xue unhooks one safety line and attaches the one from inside the lock, the sound attenuated through my helmet. Min-xue's voice in my head is as clear as if he were standing close enough to lay a hand on my shoulder. “I am in position, Master Warrant.”

“Thank you, Min.” Knowing Dick will relay if Min-xue can't hear me. It would be far too easy to get used to that, to start relying on it. As if any of us could in fact be relying on Richard any more than we already are. “Dick, how's Gabe doing?”

The inner air lock door shuts with a vacuuming shoosh.

“He's in, but he says he's not sure he's accomplishing anything,” Richard says. “Patty's ceased braking the Montreal and has begun tacking and a burn to match vee with the birdcage and come into synchronous orbit ‘behind' it, to facilitate pickup.”

“Tricky.”

“She's up to it.”

I know she is, but we're angling up on the birdcage now, and I'm suddenly too busy flying to agree, because the joined-together Benefactor entity starts to shred like a fistful of twisted Kleenex, spattering mercury droplets this way and that. I've got what's on the monitors, and Dick is giving me what he feels, too, through the nanobot infestation. Which is gold-plated bizarre, because while I'm hands-on-the-controls, the acceleration couch prodding my back and my suit turning into a sauna because I'm all for conserving its resources as long as I have a perfectly functional shuttlecraft providing me with life support, I'm also spinning apart, decohering, as if fingers and toes and eyes and kidneys and guts all suddenly decided that the arrangement that's suited them just fine for the last fifty-odd years simply will not do for another cotton-picking moment. “Dick! That wasn't the plan!”

“You know what they say about plans, Jen—” The Alan has dropped out of his voice, which tells me the other AI thread is damned busy all of a sudden, and I've got just Richard now, and probably a persona all to myself.

“Does that mean Gabe hacked in all right?”

“No.” I'm not imagining the tired resignation in his voice. “It means we got nowhere. It would have been nice to get a damned Hollywood ending for a change.”

I've got Min-xue's presence in my head and the weird doubled vision that comes when Richard connects us. I see his suit, see the battleship-gray interior of the air lock through his eyes. I feel the birdcage entity flying into splinters, and the Ashley MacIsaac no longer slamming me back against my couch as I end my burn, and Patty light and precise in control of the Montreal and Dick all tangled up in my head and it's really more than I can handle. “Dick, I'm not a multithreaded entity, man—”

“Sorry, Jen.” He modulates it back, leaving me strong and in control, the other awarenesses like monitors I have to turn my head to see; there, but not driving me to distraction. It is useful. I've got to hand him that. Because I can feel Min-xue and Patty, almost like my own metal hand, an extension of my body that my kinetic sense encompasses, and I know they can feel me back. And moreover, all of us can feel which droplets and splinters of the birdcage critter are Charlie and Leslie.

The three of us are thinking like a flock of birds. And that, coupled with our enhanced reflexes, is the thing that may let us pull this mad exercise off, rather than wrapping the shuttlecraft around one of the struts on the birdcage.

It's just math, Min-xue told himself, bracing both gauntleted hands on the grab rails bracketing the air lock as he felt — through his own inertia, through the shift of Casey's hands on the controls — the Ashley MacIsaac begin its braking burn. A puff of vapor blew into space past him as he triggered the air lock, making sure his safety cables were short enough to hold him inside the shuttle even if Jenny had to move abruptly— more abruptly, he corrected, hands tightening on the grab rails convulsively a split second before the shuttle bumped hard, coming around flat with its rear end pointed in the direction of travel. Casey kicked the thrusters on, and this time Min-xue's death grip kept him from being hurled against the interior air lock door, rather than out into orbit.

“Sorry,” Casey said in his head, and he didn't answer, because he'd known she was going to do it before she did it, of course, and in any case his attention was fixed gape-mouthed on the ungainly dragonfly body of the Montreal, solar sails at full extension, passing over the Ashley MacIsaac like a hawk over a huddled gosling. The shiptree glimmered behind her, silent and aloof, keeping its own remote counsel.