Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

“Other than suit telemetry indicating to Peterson and myself that you'd had a rupture? And then not answering my hails? And Richard vanishing on us, pfft ! And that's not the most interesting bit of information.” Between the buzz of the speaker and Jeremy's accent, and the way his words tumbled over each other in thwarted concern, Charlie could barely understand.

“Oh?”

“Leslie is inbound.”

At first, the words didn't make any sense. Charlie tilted his head, staring through Jeremy's faceplate as if he could read his mind through the crystal. “Leslie?”

“We presume. Something human-shaped has left the birdcage, in any case, and is traveling this direction. Peterson says she has visual, and if it isn't Leslie, it's a neat approximation of someone in a space suit. I told her not to intercept. She was willing to try. So we need to head back to base camp — wait a minute. Why did you take off your hat?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time? In any case…”

“You aren't dead.”

“I'm not dead.” Charlie poked his own cheek with a gloved finger and grinned at Jeremy's expression, barely visible through the helmet. “So far so good.”

“Tell me that again in ten days, when whatever you've sucked in has had a chance to incubate.”

Charlie grinned and started wriggling his gauntlets off. “I won't ask to sleep in the tent until we're sure I'm not dying.”

Jeremy hissed like a cat, between his teeth, and grabbed a nearby branch to flick himself in the direction of camp. “Silly bugger. Well, no point in putting it back on now. If you're dying on us, you're already dead. And I want to find out exactly what is headed for our air lock.”

Gabe's father had a cabin in Quebec, a two-hundred-year-old one-room onto which generations had added, until the resulting house resembled a turkey-tail fungus, bits and pieces projecting on some inobvious plan from the central core. Gabe had been looking forward to inheriting the place and retiring there, in the fullness of time.

Gabe sincerely wished that he — and Genie, and Elspeth, and Jenny — were there right now. Instead, he was up to his thick, stubborn neck in emergency protocols and Elspeth and Genie were sitting tight in the corner of the lab, barely breathing so as not to distract him, despite their obvious frustration.

And Jenny was on the ground somewhere, under fire. It was all Gabe could do to not shiver like a dog-worried sheep. Genevieve Casey can take care of herself. And she can take care of Patty and that Chinese pilot and Prime Minister Riel as well.

Gabe smiled tightly, not looking up from his own fingers as they darted through the touch-sensitive fields over his interface plate. She could. Didn't change that he wanted to be there, soaking up some of the fire. But Jenny was a big girl. Frederick Valens, on the other hand, could take care of himself. And if Jenny got killed trying to rescue cet ostie de trou de cul —

No. Gabe had his own job, and it was time he started doing it. Especially given the mistakes he'd made. He'd been so concerned that Ramirez had left a back door into the Montreal 's core, or that the enemy would attack the hulk of the Calgary directly, that he'd failed to consider what was in retrospect a more likely scenario: that the Chinese would find a way to simply disrupt the worldwire, destroy its ability to communicate, and leave the Benefactor machines purposeless, uncontrolled.

Unlike the worldwire, which was an accidental — or unofficial — outgrowth of Richard's machinations, the Chinese nanonetwork was firewalled and guarded and coded in terms incompatible with the Benefactor network. Richard and Gabe had cracked some of that code — enough to let the AI talk with Min-xue. Not enough to let him puppeteer the Chinese pilots or the Huang Di the way he could the Canadian side, although Richard had managed to flash Min-xue's programming, once upon a time. The Chinese could have taken the worldwire down and left their own network functional. Remotely. The same way they'd destroyed the Huang Di 's operating system and her data when the starship became Canada's salvage and spoils of war.

However, if that was the technique they'd used, it meant there were at least three processors in existence that were big enough to host Richard — the Montreal, the Calgary, and the Huang Di . Hell, a very pared-down version of the base Richard persona could run quite tidily on the hardware packed into Jenny's head, as long as the spare cycles of her personal nanomachines were available to his use. The problem was, they'd gotten reliant on the worldwire — and Richard — for quantum communication, and Richard wasn't finished fixing the damage that the saboteur had done to the Montreal the previous year.

The Calgary was out of reach at the bottom of the ocean. The Huang Di was off-line, her reactors cold, her life support running from kludged-on solar panels, her processor core half taken apart. Richard might be alive in the former, but it was no place Gabe could get to. The latter was unavailable as a place of refuge. But there was the Montreal .

And Gabriel had the Montreal in his hands. He had a radio headset, and he had a clever lieutenant with a degree in computer science and several levels of technical certification slithering through the weightless, shielded access spaces that surrounded the Montreal 's processor core, dragging the business end of a three-kilometer optical cable behind him, and three more geeks tearing up the floor panels of the big ship's bridge, double-checking connections that hadn't been needed in a year.

And if it all went well, and if Richard were still alive in there somewhere, Gabe should have communication with him in five seconds, four, three, two—

“Blake?”

“Sorry, Mr. Castaign.” The lieutenant's voice made tinny and sharp in his earpiece. “Cable's snagged. Half a second, here.”

Gabe was gambling with Blake's life. Gambling that he was right, and that what the Chinese had managed was to disrupt the worldwire, and not to take control of the Montreal again. Last time they'd hacked the ship's OS, they'd vented reactor coolant and taken a serious chunk out of the permissible lifetime exposures of half the engineering crew.

If they managed it again — well, Blake was inside the shielding. It wouldn't help him much.

“Hurry, please—”

“On it, sir.”

Gabe let his hands hang motionless in the interface. They still called him sir, even if he was a civilian now. “Blake?”

It wasn't Blake's voice that answered. Instead, a familiar craggy face pixilated into existence, and long fingers steepled as Richard pressed his immaterial hands palm to palm.

“Gabriel. You're a sight for sore sensors.”

“Merci à Dieu. It's good to have you back, Dick—” Gabe looked away, glanced to Elspeth, for strength. She squared her shoulders and drew one deep, hard breath, her arms tightening around Genie's shoulders, and she smiled.

Gabe had to look down again, the flash of gratitude that filled his chest so intense it made his eyes sting. “Nous avons des problèmes plus grands. New York City is under martial law.”

“I see. Perhaps you had better start at the beginning.”

“Forgive me, Dick,” Gabe said, “but explanations are going to have to wait until after the war.”

Patty turned as Riel dove for cover. Somebody cowering behind a desk on the left squeaked like a stomped puppy. Patty knew what she'd see even before she turned, and tried to brace herself for it. She wasn't ready.

She didn't think she ever could have made herself ready to stand there, hands spread out for balance, covered in blood and with her pants leg somehow having gotten torn all up one side, and stare down the barrel of a gun. She froze, wobbling a little, trying to make it look like grim determination holding her in place rather than icy panic.