Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

“Yes,” she said, the corners of her mouth turning down. “Your old boss Alberta Holmes's old boss. Christ, I thought we had Unitek's fingers out of the Montreal 's pie.”

“You could always seize it—” He shifted against the side panel of the helicopter. It dug painfully into his shoulder, and he was stiff from sitting. He wasn't as young as he used to be.

“I could,” she answered. “But we need Unitek's money, frankly, and their Mars base. And we don't need them running off to play with PanChina or PanMalaysia or the Latin American Union or the European Union because Canada and the commonwealth took our puck and sticks and went home.”

“You think they would?” Her gaze met his archly. She didn't inconvenience herself to reply, and Valens rolled his lower lip between his teeth before he nodded. “It's not the done thing to say so, Prime Minister. But I want some kind of retribution for that.” He gestured to the wasteland, but his gesture meant more — PanChina, Unitek, sabotage, and betrayal. “That's not the kind of blow you can turn the other cheek on and maintain credibility.”

Her sigh ruffled the oily black surface of her coffee, chasing broken rainbows across it. “I know. We try the legal route first.”

“Forgive an old soldier's skepticism.”

She gave him an eyebrow and turned again, looking out the window, leaning away from whatever she saw under the snow. “You're not the only one who's skeptical. But we're showing we're civilized. And we've managed to stall the hell out of their space program, since they can't know how limited Richard's ability to hack their network is. So we have the jump on them when it comes to getting a colony ship launched… once we figure out if we can get one past the Benefactors without them blowing it to bits.”

“We could try a Polish mine detector.”

Reil chuckled. “Not only is that politically incorrect, General Valens, but we can't exactly afford to waste a starship.”

“There's always the Huang Di, ” he replied, going for irony and achieving bitterness. “She's ours by right of salvage—”

“Fred!”

He spread his hands to show that he was kidding. Nearly. “Meanwhile, China tries to hack Richard, and the worldwire. Have we thought about how much damage they could do?”

“That captured saboteur — Ramirez — was surprisingly forthcoming about PanChinese nanotechnology, once we convinced him to be. And Richard and Alan seem to think we have the situation under control.”

“So we're at the mercy of a couple of AIs.”

“Fred,” she said, and paused to finish her coffee. He shifted on the seat, vinyl creasing his trousers into his skin, and waited until she handed the mug back to her aide, who stowed it. “You're always at somebody's mercy. It's the name of the game. My job is to minimize the risks.”

“And mine is to identify the threats,” he answered, provoking a swift, shy grin, an almost honest expression.

She didn't look at him again. Instead, she leaned forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Take us home,” she mouthed when he turned to her, and he nodded and brought the chopper around. She lowered her head and rubbed her temples with her palms. “Don't worry, Fred. We'll get this figured out somehow.”

He could have wished there was more than a politician's conviction in her tone.

HMCSS Montreal , Earth orbit

Friday September 28, 2063

Noon

If the conference room chairs hadn't been bolted to the floor, Elspeth would have pushed hers into the corner and gotten her back to the wall. She hated crowds, and crowds involving strangers most of all. Not that Drs. Tjakamarra, Forster, and Perry, Gabe Castaign, and Patricia Valens — sitting quietly staring out the port with that distracted I'm-talking-to-Alan expression pulling the corners of her pretty mouth down — made much of a crowd. But she was reasonably certain they would start to seem like it soon.

At least they're all scientists. Well, almost all. Which shouldn't have made a difference, but — on some deep-seated, instinctual level — made all the difference in the world.

Because scientists are part of your tribe, she told herself. They're a part of your kinship system, and so they don't feel like strangers and threats. What's the old saying, the stranger who is not a trader is an enemy? She smiled at her fingernails. “I hope the Benefactors are here to trade something.”

“Look at the bright side.” Gabe Castaign, all gray-blond ragamuffin curls and hulking shoulders, had materialized at her shoulder as silently as a cat. She startled, and then sighed and leaned back into the touch of his hand on her shoulder.

“There's a bright side?”

His laugh always struck her as incongruous, coming from such an immense man. It was bright and sharp-edged, crisp as a ruffled fan. “Yes. If the Benefactors — both sets, or either — had the technology to put ships on Mars a few million years ago, I'm sure that if they meant to wipe us out they wouldn't have waited this long to do it. And furthermore, don't forget that they showed up in force and departed in force, but they've left behind only one ship apiece. That's not a threatening gesture, by my standards.”

“Hmmm,” Elspeth answered, unconvinced. “Or their time scale is different enough to ours that fourteen million years is a trip down to the corner store for pretzels, and they're still loading the torpedo tubes—”

A discrete cough drew her attention. The team's xenobiologist, Charlie Forster, had wandered up. “Unlikely,” he said, plump hands balled in his pockets. “If their time sense were that far off scale with our own, the chances that they would be doing math at a rate we find comfortable would be slim.”

Elspeth tipped her head, conceding. Gabe's hand still rested on her shoulder, thumb caressing the nape of her neck. She pretended she didn't notice, though that would amuse Gabe more.

Charlie turned to face them and planted one hip on the table. He scrubbed both hands flat across his close-cropped hair. “I'm just so damned frustrated,” he said, and stopped short.

She might have been particularly useless when it came to comprehending aliens, but Elspeth was a good enough psychiatrist to spot an invitation to pry when she was handed one. “What's eating you, Charlie?”

He shrugged, but it was the kind of shrug that said I'm gathering my courage rather than the sort that said leave me alone, and Elspeth leaned forward in her chair to encourage him. She cocked her head on a light, wry smile. Come on, Charlie .

He cupped his lower lip and blew across his face in the gesture of a man whose bangs had tended to fall into his eyes when he still had bangs. “I'm not much use as a biologist from seven or ten kilometers away. Although—”

“Yes?” Gabe, a bit sharply, with a tension that had nothing to do with the current conversation. Elspeth leaned into his hand, pressing her shoulder to his thigh. Whatever comfort she could offer, though she knew neither she nor Jenny could touch this particular agony.

“I wonder, frankly, if biology even relates.”

“What do you mean?”

Charlie waved one hand in fine dismissal of the Montreal and all space around her. “Okay, whatever's piloting the shiptree might be something we'd consider an animal. It seems to need a contained atmosphere, and we know from the ship on Mars that they bleed if you prick them, or at least they leak a fluid that contains things we normally associate with biology, such as amino acids and a DNA-analogue. But those globs in the birdcage? I've spent weeks observing them, and they… they're just plain weird. I'm not sure they are precisely… biological, by our standards. They could be drones, machines, for all I know.”