Elizabeth Bear: Scardown

Canada had already fought one unpopular war on behalf of China's smaller neighbors. Riel started to wonder if the pain in her gut wasn't hunger, but an ulcer. “Was this a Chinese ship?”

“No,” he said. “It was ours. And we have larger problems.”

Riel sighed, glancing up as the door of her office opened. A liveried steward brought a tray into the room; she could tell at a glance that lunch must have been ready and waiting for their call. Or perhaps someone else's sandwiches and coffee had been diverted for the prime minister's use, and a replacement tray was already being made up. “Is this going to ruin my appetite, Paul?”

“Most likely.”

Riel shooed the reluctant steward away and poured the coffee herself, balancing two self-regulating mugs — she despised china cups — and a plate of sandwiches as she made her way back. “Then we'd better eat while we talk,” she said, and juggled dinnerware onto the desk. “I shouldn't eat these. I promised my husband we'd have dinner together for once,” she said. “And I have a meeting that starts in half an hour and runs until eight. Will this take longer than that?”

Paul glanced up from the simulation and shook his head. “It'll be four hours until you eat, then,” he said. “Have a sandwich.”

Her eyebrows rose. She knew it was an effective expression, under the heavy dark wing of her bangs, accentuating her thin nose and the long lines across her brow.

“Ma'am,” he amended and she acquiesced, selecting a triangle without looking at the contents. Chewy black bread and vegetables, and something that was more or less tuna fish. Farmed gene-mod tuna fish. Riel was just about old enough to remember the real thing.

“All right,” she said, once Paul had had a moment to cram a third of a sandwich into his mouth. “Show me what you're worried about, Dr. Perry.”

He didn't miss the formality — she could tell by the angle of his head — but he didn't acknowledge it either. “Here,” he said, tapping up an image of a different, and more familiar, globe. “These shots are courtesy of Clarke and Forward,” he said, and then waved a hand irritably over the panel, clearing the display. “Wait—”

Long spare fingers tapped crystal, and Riel smiled privately at his thoughtless efficiency of movement. She squinted as new images resolved. “There's something wrong with the depth.”

“They're 2-D animations,” Paul explained. “Late twentieth century — here. Do you see these color patterns, ma'am?”

Riel nodded, watching as a computer-animated blush spread across the surface of the oceans, waxing and waning with fluctuations that could only be seasons. “Temperature patterns?”

“Yes. And more. This is a record of coral reef die-offs.”

Still 2-D, but no harder to follow than an old-fashioned movie once you got the hang of it. Riel licked mayonnaise off her fingers and frowned, rubbing them together to remove the last traces of grease. “Old news—”

“This isn't.” His fingers moved. He leaned back in the chair, his shoulder brushing Riel's arm. She hunched forward, too intent to take a half-step to the side and preserve her space. It was the image that he'd brushed aside so quickly, a few moments before. A modern three-dimensional animation, and—

“Those don't look dissimilar. But that's a much bigger scale, isn't it? And the currents look different than in the earlier one.”

Paul shrugged. “They've changed a lot.”

Yes. Including the failure of the Gulf Stream. Which is why you're in Canada now, isn't it, Paul? Riel found herself nodding slowly, almost rocking. As if the motion would help her think. She put a stop to it firmly. “What am I looking at, Paul?”

“The end of the world,” he said, with turgid drama and a news announcer's baritone. He coughed and cleared his throat, reaching for his coffee. “Well, perhaps not quite. But a serious problem, in any case. This is data from two of the orbital platforms regarding algae populations—”

“The algae is dying.”

“Like the coral reefs.”

“Not exactly. But for layman's values of like, sure.”

“What does this have to do with the price of tea in China, Paul?”

He chuckled. “Funny you should phrase it that way, ma'am. Everything, it turns out. I've been corresponding with a Unitek biologist on Clarke, a Dr. Forster—”

“Charles Forster. He was involved in the mission that discovered the Martian ships.”

“That's the one. He and I think that the increased Chinese interest in space travel — their outbound fire-and-forget colony ships, for example, and their expansion efforts within our system — date from about the time the first signs of this became apparent. It's a serious problem, Prime Minister. The sort of thing that could radically diminish the planet's ability to sustain life.”

“You don't think the Chinese are behind—”

“No.” Quiet, but definite. Riel liked the way he stated his opinions, when he could be convinced to have them. “But I think they caught on a hell of a lot faster than we did. Of course, we've been distracted by the Freeze of Britain—”

“Excuses, excuses. What do we do?”

He glanced at her sideways and ruffled his hair with one hand. “Beat the Chinese out of the solar system, for one thing. And start thinking about what we're going to do in a hundred, hundred fifty years if we have to reterraform Earth.”

2100 Hours

Thursday 2 November, 2062

HMCSS Montreal

Earth orbit

Fucking bitch . Trevor Koske kicked the bulkhead once, hard, and turned back to the heavy bag. He slammed fist after fist into it, growling, squinting against the strobe of the overhead lights. Bitch! Let her come up here, flaunting her superior adaptation and her fucking ability to hold a normal conversation, to stand it when a man laid a hand on her arm. Fucking Master Warrant Officer Genevieve Casey. War hero.

The only survivor of Valens's Frankensteinian augmentation program to recover enough to return to combat duty. Koske slugged the bag again, caught it on the backswing, putting power behind each blow until his shoulders burned. Bitch. Cunt. Whore.

Koske didn't carry the kind of visible damage Casey did. Wearing her steel hand like a banner saying this is who I am . She might as well have pinned her medals to her chest. Bad enough she'd gone back out, an unqualified success. Gotten to do the things that Koske had lost forever thirty years back — to the bad eject, the broken neck, the creeping numbness.

Casey had gotten to fly, dammit. Rescue and recovery — ferrying parachute paramedics into live-fire zones. Bitch! He kicked the bag for variety. Bad enough.

He'd watched her career from the sidelines, knowing what she was. Knowing by her steel hand, her infrequent visits to Valens's clinic, her reputation as the best chopper pilot in the army what she had to be. Known it from the way she rode the edge, and the way she brought boys and girls back alive out of the jungle when anybody would have said it was suicide to go. Known. And hated. Because Casey was still everything Koske would never be again.

And now she'd taken away his last chance to really fly again. Just by being who she was. By being so — slam! Bitch! — fucking good.

And if that wasn't bad enough, there was the way the big blond civilian had hovered over her, the way she'd leaned into his touch on her arm when she thought no one was looking. The way she'd heedlessly extended her hand to him, Trevor, as if he could ever fucking reach out and take a human hand again.

He backed away from the bag, panting. As if the neural implants running through his body didn't turn his skin into a finely honed alarm system that could make him curl away and shake, crying, from an unsubtle touch. Bad enough to be a fucking autistic, he thought. Worse if you didn't start out that way, hypersensitive and hyperaware. Worse if you grew up a normal kid, with a normal kid's need to be held, and you woke up one day and you were different. Faster. Stranger. Feeling the air on your skin like sandpaper.