Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

“Then why do it?” Dry, interested. “Or is Riel making you?”

Patty bit her own tongue, not hard but hard enough to sting. She shook her head. “I can't not. Leah would have, if it was me.” Leah was seventeen times braver and prettier and better spoken.

“Yes,” Alan said. “Perhaps she was. But she wasn't any smarter, was she?”

No . Because that was true. There wasn't much of anybody smarter than Patty.

“You cared about her.” Patty blinked, found Frye eyeing her like a hiker unexpectedly confronted with a panicked doe.

“She was my… my friend.” The word only almost got away from her. Just as well it didn't, because the clutch in her throat told her that it would have stuck there, jabbing her until tears spilled hot down her cheeks. She bit her lip. She wasn't going to cry in front of the enemy. “People need to know why she died. Why she thought she had to die—” She was losing it. She gulped, shook her head, and scrubbed angrily at the burning in her eyes while Frye stared down into her glass, respectful of Patty's grief. Surprisingly. “She was just fourteen,” Patty finished, and put her hand across her mouth in surprise. If she'd spoken to her mother in that tone of naked resentment—

But Frye just looked up, her lips as thin as if she were chewing them ragged on the inside of her mouth, and stared at Patty for a long, hard second. And then she shoved her glass aside and folded her hands together and frowned. “Look,” she said. “It's going to be hard enough on you tomorrow without this. You haven't talked to anybody?”

“Just the lawyers. And they wanted to know about the crash and what happened on the bridge of the ship, and…”

“They didn't ask you about Leah Castaign.”

“They did. They just didn't—”

Frye nodded and unfolded her hands, and Patty could see why people would follow her. Just her presence, her attention, eased the pain enough that Patty could keep talking. She clutched her golden robot-girl tight around her, and would not let her go.

“You're afraid of the questions.”

“I'm afraid they'll try to make her look stupid. And I'll be making too much of a mess of myself to stop them.”

“All right,” Frye said. She glanced out the window one last time and resolutely turned her back on it, squaring herself, pressing her head against the back of the blue leather chair. “Look. Do you want to practice?”

“Practice?” Alan? He didn't answer in words, but she felt his agreement, his observation. There was something he wasn't telling her, she thought. Alan? Is this safe?

“Well,” he said slowly, “you testify before she does anyway. And we still might learn something. I'm sure she knows more than she's showing you; she has the air of keeping secrets.”

Doesn't she just? All right. I'll have the breakdown. You keep an eye on General Frye. Her false bravado rang like tin.

“Practice,” Frye said, and spread her hands. “You talk about Leah. I'll ask you obnoxious questions. And we'll work on making sure you stay angry and smart, not sad and scared. All right?”

“Yes,” Patty said. “All right.”

Wainwright was becoming more comfortable than she had ever intended to be with having a ship that gave her backtalk, but she wasn't about to admit it. Especially not to the ship. “Dick.”

“Captain?”

“Is Charlie making any progress on the nanites?”

Richard didn't take over a monitor to present her with a visual image, but she almost heard him shrug. “They've stopped going blank on us. Whether that was because the recode was successful, or because whatever was blocking them decided to give it a rest, I'm not yet ready to hypothesize.”

“It's your ass on the line, too, Dick.”

“Trust me, Captain. I'm intimately aware.”

Wainwright really didn't like not having any translight pilots on board at all. Of course, Casey's testimony was finished. Wainwright could recall her now, if she wanted, and have one pilot on board the Montreal within twenty-four hours in case of emergency, counting travel time and time up the beanstalk. Not that the unwired, sublight pilots couldn't handle the ship perfectly well anywhere in normal space. Not that Richard wasn't perfectly capable of keeping the Montreal in tiptop shape. But it might be prudent to recall Casey.

On the other hand, Wainwright didn't really want Casey back until the trip to the shiptree that Riel had ordered had taken place. Because Casey would push to be allowed to go, and Wainwright didn't want that. And Riel obviously hadn't told her it was happening, because Wainwright hadn't gotten any annoyed messages. Which was good: Wainwright wanted a tidy, cautious little team — Charlie Forster, she thought, and Jeremy Kirkpatrick, and the Montreal 's safety officer, Lieutenant Amanda Peterson, who had her shuttle cert and more hours pushing vacuum than any other two crew members put together. She could shift the EVA up to Sunday, send them with extra oxygen, let them take the Gordon Lightfoot and synch it in orbit with the shiptree and they could just stay there for a week, or until they figured it out or got killed, whichever came first. And she'd hang on to Elspeth and Gabe, thank you; they could do their work by remote, along with Leslie, and complain all they liked about it, too.

Wainwright pushed the thought of Leslie Tjakamarra away firmly and steepled her hands over her interface plate. No. She wouldn't recall Casey. Casey could stay safely on Earth for a while, out of the way. Patty Valens hero-worshipped Casey, whether Casey saw it or not, and could probably use the moral support — as Xie Min-Xue could use Patty's.

Wainwright grinned. And if she did say so herself, Jenny needed the vacation. Likely more so now than she had before. And it was good to have her out from underfoot for a while. “How's Miss Valens's testimony going?”

“You've been watching the news feeds, Captain.”

“Of course I have. But I prefer to hear it from the horse's mouth, so to speak.”

“Patty says she is fine,” the AI answered, a slight formality tingeing his voice as a hint of Alan's personality overlaid Richard's. “She thanks you for asking.”

And isn't it weird that Patty talks to Alan rather than Richard, when they're the same… person? Which reminded Wainwright of something else she needed to attend to. “And has the UN decided to accept your offer to testify yet?”

“They are discussing. The legal implications are daunting.”

“And if they declare you a person? What changes?” He didn't answer. She reached up manually, when she could have blinked a command or issued one verbally, and changed the image on the second largest monitor to a shot of Mars from the Arean Orbital Platform. She stared at the dusty red globe, the glitter of its icy poles, and fiddled her fingertips against her trousers.

“Richard.”

“Captain.”

“I received a communiqué from the prime minister regarding you. And your refusal of Canadian citizenship.”

“And it concerns you, with regard to my presence here.”

“Yes.” Her mouth was dry. She swallowed to wet it.

“Prime Minister Riel still plans to work toward a more effective world government, when the current issue of criminality in Chinese and Canadian actions is resolved.”

“That's not an answer, Dick.”

“I know. You understand my moral predicament.”

She changed the feed again; a filtered shot of Saturn from one of the drones surfing its rings, revealing bands of color on the vast planet's surface that were invisible to the naked eye. “You no longer feel yourself in a position where you can choose one government's interests over those of others. You feel your… stewardship has been expanded to preclude that.”