Elizabeth Bear: Worldwired

He turns away, as if he were looking over his shoulder at Riel and Patty. He looks sterner in profile, old-man-of-the-mountain, cotton-wool hair brushed back from a high forehead, revealing a widow's peak. He stares at the hostages long enough for my attention to follow and turns a worried squint back at me.

“Surrender, Jen,” he says, and folds his hands over his arms. “There's nothing else we can do to save them.”

For half a second my stomach drops, like the Wicked Witch just scrawled those words across the sky. Surrender isn't a word I thought Dick knew ; less did I think I'd hear him counsel it.

The arms stay folded. Paternal. Stern. He rocks back, head to one side, a discouraging frown chiseling the lines around his mouth deep enough to shadow. “Live to fight again.”

I lock my thoughts down before I think it loud enough for Dick to hear. But they won't live if we surrender. Marde. I wish I could feel Min-xue now, the way I did when we went after Les and Charlie. I wish I could—

Oh. If Dick is here, why, oh, why can't I feel Min-xue?

It wasn't working, and Richard couldn't see any way that it could suddenly start to work, unless he could manage to crack the PanChinese network right back and take their system off-line. He wasted long nanoseconds trying, crippled by the lack of cycles. Even at limited capacity, he had an ear for Gabe, however.

Especially knowing that Gabe was working as hard as he was, and as fruitlessly. And despite the fact that what Charlie was suggesting — and Gabe was backing up — was sheer insanity.

Wainwright had left her XO in charge on the bridge and fled to the ready room to take Richard's call. It didn't look like a rout, of course. She'd made sure it wasn't even identifiable as a tactical withdrawal, and he wondered if she was sure herself if her hands were shaking with fear, or with adrenaline.

“I don't mean to put any extra pressure on you, Dick,” she said, “but I am… extremely concerned about the ecosystem—”

Richard was busy enough that he wasn't bothering with the niceties of human interaction. Alan's clipped tones crept into his own diction when keeping his voice warm was too much of an effort. “You're right,” he said. “It's not self-sustaining. None of it is self-sustaining, yet. Charlie's proposing we open the worldwire to the Benefactors—”

“What?” With a fraction of his attention, he saw her come out of her chair, her hands white on her desk. “That's insane.”

“It may be a moot point, as we don't currently know how to manage it. We can't even contact them, and we don't know how the heck to signal our intentions to the Benefactors even if we did.”

“We already have the program we wrote to flash the Benefactor nanites,” Gabe reminded, pressing the headphones to his ear to hear Wainwright better.

“The program that didn't work.”

Charlie's voice, encoded and tightcast and unscrambled and reconstituted, curiously flat with most of the harmonics lost to efficiency. “We also have samples of the nanosurgeons they infected us with, and Gabe's been able to crack fairly large chunks of their operating system.”

Wainwright's voice was as flat, with tension. “You're asking me to risk more than the Montreal this time.”

If Richard had been a human being, he would have stopped short and closed his eyes in frustration at his own stupidity. “The ones that they left open to the worldwire.”

“Yes.” Gabe and Charlie, two voices at once.

Wainwright again. “Just to be absolutely certain I understand this, you're proposing we flash our own network, reprogram it, and leave it wide open — so the Benefactors can wander in and do whatever they want? To the entire planet ? And hope they end the PanChinese attack?”

“Yes,” Gabe said, without even the decency to sound chagrined at the ridiculousness of it.

“How do you propose we do that when we can't even talk to the worldwire currently?”

“Therein lies the problem,” Gabe said, gritting his teeth. Richard felt his heart rate kick up; it was pattering along tightly. “I was hoping Dick might have a clever idea.”

“All we need is an access point,” Richard said. “A patch of the worldwire we can tap into. Then we can hack our way through it. Island to island, so to speak. World War II, in the Pacific.”

“You need something you can run a hardline to. What if Elspeth went after one of Charlie's ecospheres?”

“Not safe,” Richard said. “The pressure doors could come down any second. Or the captain could trigger them as a precaution. Or, worse, the Chinese could remotely open an air lock, and they could fail to deploy.”

“Blake made it to the processor core,” Wainwright said.

“Yes, and I've recommended he hole up somewhere and not try to travel further. In any case, we can't delay — if the pressure doors do come down, you'll lose me as well.”

“Putain de marde. They'd sever the cable.”

“Yes,” Richard said. “We need to use what's at hand.”

Gabe swallowed, and Richard could see how carefully he did not look at his daughter. “No.”

“I still haven't said yes,” Wainwright snapped.

“Gabe—” Richard stopped, but not before Genie heard.

Genie looked up from the quiet conversation she'd been having with Elspeth and over at Gabe and Richard's image. “Papa?”

“Petite—”

Richard saw Elspeth's hand tighten on Genie's shoulder, and saw the darkness that crossed Gabe's face. He knew as plainly as if Gabe were wired what he was thinking: it wasn't going to be enough. Not again. Not again—

“Richard,” she said, “could you use me? Wire into my control chip and hack into my nanonet?”

“Gabe. Genie—” Richard let them see him shake his head. “That puts you at risk, Genie.”

“I know,” she said.

Gabe allowed the silence to drag, and Richard was right there with him, too close to the pain himself to argue. Not again. Not Genie, not like this, not after Leah. No.

None of them should be permitting this to happen. But it was the same equations Leah had considered and understood, and Genie considered and understood them now, as well. Richard was struck, abruptly, by how much both of them got from Jenny Casey, despite there being no biology between them.

But Elspeth caught Gabe's eye, and he caught hers, and neither one of them said anything. At last, shaking his head, his hands white from the force with which he had been holding the edge of the desk, he sat back in his chair. He looked from Elspeth to Genie. He didn't say yes, but he also didn't say no.

“It's what Leah would have done,” Genie said, her eyes very bright. Gabe nodded. It was exactly what Leah would have done.

It was exactly what Leah had done.

Gabe got up and walked across the lab, and ducked down to wrap his arms around his daughter's shoulders. He held her tight enough that Richard thought she would have squeaked, if she hadn't been holding her breath. And then he looked up, smoothed her hair, and stepped back. “Captain,” Gabe said, in the vague direction of a mote, “it's your call. Go or no-go?”

Richard realized, watching the two of them, what Gabe was wrestling with. And he felt a flush of pride in both — in Genie, that she wasn't going to stay in her sister's shadow, or stay safe behind locked doors. She had to stand up and be counted. And in Gabe, because Gabe was going to let her, and wasn't even going to let himself pretend it didn't hurt.

“Go,” Wainwright said, measured seconds later. “Go, dammit.”

“All right then,” Richard said, wishing suddenly — viciously — for the ability to turn and punch a wall. “Let's get to work.”