Worldwired

BOOK TWO

Thursday 11 October, 2063

Whole-Earth Benefactor nanonetwork (worldwire)

16:13:13:31–16:13:29:43

Richard was watching the baseball game.

It wasn't all he was doing — his usual subroutines and his responses to the developing climatic disaster consumed something in excess of 95 percent of his processing power, and he was having three other simultaneous conversations. All in all, the balancing act was considerably more challenging than higher math on strip-club cocktail napkins. On the other hand, he hadn't had this much fun since he was fooling overperfumed women into believing he could perceive via extrasensory perception which volume from a shelf of books they had leafed through.

It was starting to look like he might be able to get the North Atlantic conveyor restarted after all, through micromanipulations of ocean salinity levels and a certain amount of sheer brute force. The atmospheric issues might prove a bigger problem: ozone damage, global dimming, global carbon dioxide increase, and a thousand other variables he hadn't even begun to sort out accurately yet.

But that was chronic, not acute.

He had more immediate problems. Not including the fact that the Red Sox were losing seven to four.

Jen didn't need him just now; his eavesdropping was a matter of insatiable curiosity combined with the desire to be on hand if she did require assistance, or simply an obscure fact. “… a decision was made in the wake of the attack—” her chin lifted, her mismatched hands resting lightly on the sides of the podium. “—to exact no retribution upon the PanChinese…”

Nice use of the passive voice, Jen. She didn't answer in words, but he felt her amusement. He backgrounded the process and divided his focus between the laboratory — where Gabe was conducting a postmortem on yet another batch of nanite victims of sudden-biomechanical-autism-syndrome — and the captain's office. Richard and Leslie rode behind Charlie's eyes as he and Elspeth entered Wainwright's domain shoulder-to-shoulder, trying not to look like they came expecting—spoiling for—a fight.

Wainwright wasn't behind her desk; she stood close to the holomonitor that showed the gangling hull of the Montreal spilled out across space, the unholy miscegenation of Tinker Toys and an Erector set. Her hands were clasped behind her back, her dark hair freshly trimmed and bound into a club at the nape of her neck with a tidy but strictly nonregulation nacreous gray ribbon. She turned and caught Elspeth's eye, then very carefully looked from the contact team leader to Charlie. “Absolutely not,” she said, before Charlie could open his mouth. “You're not impressed enough with what the Benefactors — if I may use the term loosely — did to you and Leslie the last time we went out there?”

Richard smiled to himself. He liked Wainwright. And she had said we. That was ground to build on.

Meanwhile, in the hydroponics lab, Gabe swiveled his chair back. Richard watched as Gabe lifted his head from the eyepiece of the virtual magnifying device he was using to examine yet another noncommunicating nanite, and snorted exasperation. “Dick, if I didn't know better, I'd say these critters were suffering under a denial-of-service attack.”

Richard relayed the comment to Charlie. Spiked? Charlie asked, his eyes wide behind spectacles he no longer needed.

“No, just choking on static, I expect,” Richard said — out loud, for Gabriel's benefit. “Am I right?”

“It's a little more interesting than that, Dick—”

“We're not here about Leslie,” Charlie said to Wainwright. “We're here about the shiptree. And our mandate.”

Wainwright squared her interface plate on her desk.

“I will go to the prime minister if I have to.” Elspeth folded her hands over her biceps in a position Richard translated to trouble for somebody. “I hope I don't need to remind you that the Montreal is detailed primarily to the first contact project.”

If Richard were a real boy, he'd steal Ellie from Castaign in a minute, Gabe's charm notwithstanding.

“She's also my ship, and you are my crew.” Wainwright kept her voice level. “I won't risk either unnecessarily—”

“—specifically,” Gabe continued, “the circuits aren't just fused or fried, the way I'd expect if there were a malfunction or a power surge or what have you. Remember what we tried to do to the Benefactor vectors to get back Les and Charlie?”

“Of course. Flash them. That's what I did to Min-xue, more or less, to get him on our network.”

“The programming hasn't been changed. Which is reassuring, since we couldn't manage that with the birdcage nanites.”

Richard considered, relaying. Charlie got there amazingly fast, for a carbon-based intelligence, and Dick decided to let him have it. It did make them happy to beat the machine. Could we do it to a Chinese-programmed network? Charlie asked.

“If we knew their security codes, we could.”

“Change all the codes,” Richard said.

Gabe stood. “I'm on it, Dick, but it will take awhile—”

“—and what if I said it was a necessary risk, Captain?” Elspeth met Wainwright's irritated gaze and did not look down.

“Over my protest,” Wainwright started, but Charlie cleared his throat, and she stopped, and looked at him.

Silently, he held out his hand. “Captain, it did work.”

The captain's mouth compressed. She stared at Charlie, putting her back to the bulkhead, braced as if the deck were pitching under her feet. “At what cost? You tell me—”

“No cost,” he said, “if you'd let us go get Leslie back.”

Richard knew what Leslie wanted, as surely as if Richard were Leslie's hand, his finger, his thumb. It took no effort at all for Dick to reach out and flip the image on the screen behind Elspeth and Charlie to a panoramic shot of the Montreal, the Huang Di, and the birdcage ship hanging in fixed geometry above a cloud-swirled crescent Earth. The picture was from Piper Orbital Platform; another view from Forward showed the shiptree, in higher orbit, sliding past. Richard plastered that one on the second largest monitor. On the one that normally held Wainwright's refrigerator-drawing view of the Montreal, he offered the present view from Clarke; a very nearly full and sunlit Earth.

“Captain,” Elspeth said calmly, unfolding her arms. “Have you thought about the potential costs if we fail?”

And Wainwright swallowed and looked down. “I'm not authorizing anything unless the prime minister says so,” she said. And then she looked up, fixed Elspeth with a cool, crinkled stare, and smiled coldly. “And don't presume you understand my personal leanings in this matter, Dr. Dunsany. Or in the matter of Dr. Tjakamarra. Some of us do draw a line around our personal feelings when we pull our pants on in the morning.”

“Ma'am,” Elspeth said, after a few moments. “I'll message the prime minister at once.”

By the fourth day of testimony, there's a small child in the back of my head whining over and over again I wish I wish I wish I wish Gabe and Ellie were here I wanna go home I don't want to answer any more questions waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. Goddamn.

Can't you shut that kid up, Jenny?

I mean, I'm good at this. I know I'm good at this. It's not even exactly testimony, although everybody calls it that. And it's not speechifying either; mostly, I stand up there behind the podium and field questions for hour after hour after hour. They seem to have some sort of a protocol worked out, too, where it's the big dogs — the permanent security council members — who get to ask things when they want, and the representatives of other nations pass notes or tap shoulders or send e-mail and get whoever they're tributary to or sending aid to or receiving aid from to ask their questions. It's an elegant demonstration of patronage, if you squint at it right. My Grandpa Zeke would have approved.

But sweet Mary Mother of God I am so goddamned tired. Would it kill them, you think, to give me a chair?

Besides, this is the day when I'm going to have to talk about the things I'd rather pretend never happened. So standing up there, facing that enormous seashell room packed with delegates from 213 nations and five supranations, is something more than just an exercise in stage fright. It's like exhuming Leah's grave.

It's the only grave she's going to get, because her body never made it down. She's part of the planet now. Part of the atmosphere. I push her in and out with every breath, since I came home. Her, and Trevor Koske, too.

At least Koske had the decency to do what I couldn't, and die with her. I wouldn't have thought he had it in him.

It's a little disconcerting to think about, nonetheless.

Especially when I'm in the middle of explaining to a room full of politicians why she had to die, and how her death — her sacrifice — resulted in the worldwide contamination of the oceans with Benefactor nanotech. And how it's spreading to people and plants and topsoil and little terrier dogs all over the world.

And how, no, really, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I was smart enough to bring a handkerchief.

A thin Asian man in a narrow mahogany-colored suit leans forward on his elbows as I reach for a drink, waiting for the next question. I've lost track, but he's somebody in the PanChinese delegation. A shark, I think. Not an interpreter, because the UN handles that itself; there are a few dozen people in the glass-walled booths over our heads providing simultaneous translation on multiple-language channels, and I can access any one of them on my ear clip with a glance at a menu. I'm listening in French, because the interpreter has a sexy dark-chocolate voice and I like his Parisian accent better than the harsh midwestern drawl of the Chinese-to-English translator — who is getting a workout today.

Anyway. The shark says, in Chinese — whatever dialect they're using — and the interpreter says in French: “And you expect us to believe that the government of Canada has no intentions of using this tech as a weapon, when it's already responsible for the infection of millions, and the death or injury of thousands?”

He catches me with my water glass in my metal hand, just tilted to my lips. I couldn't have planned the snarf better; titters and at least one guffaw from my stodgy audience of diplomats attest to the perfection of my comedic timing.

At least it goes in the glass, and not all over my uniform. “The infection of, and the death or injury of, Canadians, sir. Canadians who were in desperate need of medical assistance in the wake of the attack upon Toronto.” Valens spent hours drilling me not to say Chinese attack. Or terrorist attack, for that matter. Apparently the official explanation of who kicked whom in the balls is still a matter for high-level negotiation.

Which is why I'm surprised. I'd thought these particular questions would be reserved for Fred. Or Riel. But what the hell.

“American citizens were affected as well.”

“Because American cities were affected by the attack. No one who was not ill or injured has been subjected to the treatment, sir, to the best of my knowledge.” I switch to English to answer this question, because it's the American shark talking, or maybe the American shark's diplomat boss. There's too damned many of them to keep track of. Or did I say that already?

The American is a round-faced Latina in her fifties, in a suit just the right bluish shade of power red to remind me uncomfortably of Alberta Holmes. She shields her mouth with her hand as she confers with her boss, or her lawyer. She leans back in her chair and steeples her hands in front of her, her knuckles furled tight as her brow. “Of course, the USA would have been less significantly affected, by your own testimony, if you and the Montreal had not diverted the projectile from its course.”

Valens is seated in a chair off to my left, which means I can see him moving in the periphery of my prosthetic eye's vision much more clearly than I could on the right-hand side. Better than the real thing. I don't know why everybody doesn't run right out and buy a set, frankly.

Fred leans forward, his eyes on me rather than the American. Fortunately, I have the podium to hold on to. And I really do have better control of my temper than Fred thinks I do. I mean, okay, I broke his shoulder back in the thirties. But he deserved it then, and I'm sure as hell not going to feel bad about it now.

Dick? What do I say to that steaming pile of horseshit?

“You could just stand there with your mouth open and blink at her as if she's out of her mind.”

Got that covered already, thanks.

“Just be yourself. You're under oath, after all.”

Gee. Thanks. I make sure my mouth is closed, and turn away for a moment to collect myself. A functionary brings me a fresh glass of water. Perfect timing, and a perfect excuse. “Ma'am—” I try to steal a discreet peek at her nameplate, but she's pushed her HCD against the back of it and angled it away. I bet she did that on purpose, too. She's got a mean glitter in her eye. I take a breath and get the outrage out of my voice and a dry kind of mockery that served me well as a drill instructor in. “Ma'am, are you suggesting that it would have been a more prudent course of action not to attempt to prevent a ten-hundred-ton nickel-iron asteroid from slamming into Lake Ontario?”

It's not just titters this time. Somebody in the African section is roaring with laughter, and I see the Mexican delegates eye each other and grin. Yeah, nobody likes the Americans: not even their next-door neighbors.

I wonder if it really used to be different, when the border was unguarded, or if that's just more cheerful propaganda. History's not my strong point, except the bits I've lived through, but I do remember the jokes from my childhood about how Canada wouldn't let the northern U.S. states join during the famine because of the expense of putting French on all their road signs. Of course, Maman also claimed that the reason Quebec never seceded was the expense of taking all the English off. I suspect she may have been pulling our legs.

I didn't get my sense of humor from my father, that's for sure. “In any case, my point stands, ma'am. Sir.”—with a nod to the Chinese representative in the brown suit, who is leaning forward again—“With all due respect, the Benefactor tech is not weaponized. There is to the best of my knowledge no intent to weaponize it, on Canada's side—”

Valens is on to me. He's shooting me that look, the one that means shut up while your tongue's still in your head, Casey. I ignore him, of course, blithe spirit that I am.

“—and in point of fact, the nanite infestation is not under Canadian authority.”

Dead silence, then, so quiet that I can hear the click of plastic as the American's fingers trigger the holographic keypad of her hip. I could almost swear I can hear the whisper of cloth as one of the guys at the Canadian table closes his eyes and leans back in his chair.

“Would you care to expand on that, Master Warrant Officer?”

The look on Fred's face promises me a stretching on the rack and possibly a slow roasting over coals, but Richard's amused pleasure in the back of my head means more. In any case, all this skullduggery and manipulation works two ways. And if Riel wants an excuse for an effective world government, and a common concern and worry… well, Dick's big enough to give it to her. And scary enough to keep everybody busy for quite awhile, at least until a generation grows up that doesn't know how to live without him.

“It's controlled by the artificial intelligence known, somewhat inaccurately, as the Feynman AI.”

“Which is a Canadian construct.”

“He's not a subject of the commonwealth, sir.”

Silence. Longer, this time, and it's the tall, mop-haired Russian delegate who straightens his spine and speaks. “Then what are his affiliations? Who owns that machine?”

It's all I can do to keep the grin off the corners of my lips. “He's self-determined, sir. And as for his loyalties — I wouldn't care to speculate. I would suggest that you ask him yourself. He's prepared to testify under oath.”

Three beats before the uproar: I know because I'm counting. It washes over me like surf. It sounds like surf, rising and falling, so many voices they amount to white noise. It breaks around the podium, the beautiful acoustics of the assembly hall amplifying and echoing every voice.

I'm absolutely unprepared, once order is restored, for the Chinese delegate to give me that smug little smile across twenty meters of open space and say, “On a more immediate note, Master Warrant Officer. Perhaps we could discuss the matter of your criminal record now?”

Gabriel Jean-Marie Benoit François Castaign was getting just a little tired of this particular bête noire. Specifically, the one where he — with all his brains and all his brawn, fifteen years and a captain's commission in the Canadian Army, unarmed combat and firearms instructor certification, two master's degrees and five languages and eleven years of practical experience as a single parent — was left powerless, sitting on his middle-aged ass while a woman he loved faced dragons he couldn't do a damned thing about.

The blankets were wrinkled and sweaty. His jumpsuit was carving creases in his skin. And he leaned forward on the edge of his bunk, his eyes locked on the real-time holofeed that Richard was projecting over his interface, and cursed. He knew how to do it by now, how to watch and love and feel them slip out of his hands like so many fistfuls of feathers, lifted on a gentle breeze. He knew how to grant them the dignity of not looking down, and not looking away from the pain. He knew how to lend strength when he couldn't do the fighting himself.

He'd done it for his wife, Geniveve, and after he'd buried her he'd done it for Genie when Genie was dying by centimeters from cystic fibrosis. He hadn't done it when Leah sailed the Calgary into Earth's atmosphere with the brittle unholy courage that only an adolescent could muster—C'est la raison que nous les envoyons pour mourir dans la guerre, dans le cas òu tu ne le savais pas—because Gabe couldn't reach Leah. But Jenny could, and Jenny had stood in his place, and Gabe had been there for Jen. As he'd done it before, again, and again, and again.

But, he was tired of it. He said it to himself, sitting motionless on the edge of his bunk, his feet dangling, the cold metal edge of the rack cutting the backs of his thighs and his hands clenching and unclenching on the blankets. He thought it as he leaned forward and watched Jenny answer those invasive questions with dignity and aplomb that he knew had to be borrowed at loanshark rates against that night, against tomorrow.

Je suis fatigué lui.

He needed to be there. Even without the ability to stand beside her on that stage and squeeze her hand behind the podium, he needed to be in the room. Jenny was a professional; she was cool, and collected, and gracious: the picture of a warrior who has lived long enough to learn both honor and its price.

The Chinese fils de putain was coming after her like a mangy feral dog, and no matter how well she was handling it, Gabriel would have liked to wring his neck instead of the dark wool blankets. “I understand,” the man in the mahogany suit said, “that there are arrests for prostitution and possession of drugs that are not mentioned in your military records. Would you care to explain why those records were purged?”

The speaker kept leaning over to confer with a jowly middle-aged man in a Chinese uniform. That must be General Shijie.

He just wished he could be there. Where she could see him. Where she could see his eyes. But she was thirty-five thousand vertical kilometers away, and he was helpless again.

You cannot save them, Gabriel. Sometimes you cannot even hold their hands.

Like Leah. God have mercy on his soul.

Jenny, in the projection, lifted her chin. Gabriel knew that look, knew the way it stretched her long neck above her collar. Knew the arrogant sparkle in her eyes, and knew how much it cost her to keep it there. “Not purged, sir. Sealed. Those incidents occurred while I was a juvenile, under Canadian law, and they are not considered part of my permanent criminal record. Which, I might add, is clean—”

Someone tapped on the hatchway. Gabe startled, torn between relief and irritation, and shoved himself off the bed. He forgot to duck again. “Turn that off please, Dick?”

“It's Genie,” the AI answered, as the display obediently flickered out. Gabe closed his eyes and calmed his breathing, pressing his dinged forehead with the back of his hand.

Then he went and opened the door.

Calisse de chrisse, she looked like her mother. Not as much as Leah had, but the same huge eyes, straight nose, the honey-blond hair that looked as soft as silk until you got your hands into it and then turned out to be wild, electric, alive. And her eyes were as big as churchbells, and her hands were twined together, shaking.

“You saw the news,” he said. He didn't move aside and let her in, although it was ship drill; you never stood in an open doorway like a rubbernecker and jawed with somebody on the other side. It wasn't safe. He glanced over his shoulder, and the condemning silence of the interface, the feed he wasn't watching. He wasn't there for Jenny, and there was no way he could be.

And he didn't know what to do with Genie anymore. It had always been him being big for Leah and Leah being big for Genie, and now Leah was gone, a hole in the middle of their family like trying to make a sandwich out of two plain slices of dry white bread. There was nothing to hold them together.

“Is it true, what they said?”

He looked her in the eye and pursed his lips, and closed his eyes, and turned aside for a second to collect his thoughts. When he looked again, ready to ask Genie the question he didn't have an answer to himself—She's still your Aunt Jenny. Does it matter if it is? — when he turned his head back and opened his eyes and looked at the hatchway, his daughter was gone.

He straightened up and knotted both hands in his mop of hair and cursed in three languages, two of them French.

Coward. Lache. Enfouaré.

He only remembered to dog the hatch behind him because Richard yelled at him before he got too far down the corridor.

Genie made a good job of vanishing. He looked for forty minutes before it occurred to him to ask Richard for help. He wasn't particularly surprised when Richard hacked his contact and ear clip for a private conversation, shrugged, and said, “She asked me not to tell you. She said she wanted to be invisible.”

“Do you make a habit of concealing wayward teenagers from their possibly stupid but well-meaning parents?” Gabe leaned against the corridor bulkhead, making sure he was between pressure doors, and took a moment to think, and breathe.

“I'm trying to avoid situational ethics,” Richard answered. “I'm stuck with omniscience, but I don't want to develop a reputation as a jealous god. Or a meddling one.”

“You've been meddling all along, Dick.”

Gabe wasn't quite prepared for the long silence before Richard answered, “I know.” The AI shook his head and rubbed his palms together, a frown creasing his forehead. “The ethics are getting complicated. In any case, I'll be happy to tell Genie you're looking for her. Where shall I tell her you'll be?”

“Is Charlie in the hydroponics labs?”

“No, he's in the larger observation lounge. Snoring. All the greenhouses are empty except Center-13.”

“Tell her I'll be in Charlie's main lab, s'il te plais.”

He didn't think he was imagining the warmth in Richard's voice when Richard answered, “It will be my pleasure, Gabriel.”

The smell of growing things eased his headache, and even spinning sunlight was sunlight, and full-spectrum lighting was a kind relief after the energy-saving flourescence that gave the pilots screaming conniptions and lit most of the Montreal's cabins and corridors in a pale minty green. Gabe found himself walking slowly up and down the aisles between the Plexiglas tanks, running his fingers over the broad leaves of soybeans and breathing deeply, as if the oxygen they emitted could ease his throbbing temples by being absorbed through the skin. He'd forgotten even to grab his ship-shoes when he ran into the corridor after Genie. The floor's absorbent nonskid matting was tacky and slightly springy under his bare feet.

He turned when the hatch swung open, but it wasn't Genie. Instead, Elspeth picked one foot up high, stepped over the knee knocker with a grace that belied her round little frame, and dogged the hatch tight behind her. “Gabe?”

He frowned and folded his arms. “Of course she went to you. I should have known that without being told.”

Elspeth's lips worked, but she held her peace as she came up the line of beans and cabbages and mustard plants, brushing aside the sunshine-yellow sprays of the latter's flowers. She stood in front of him, foursquare, and looked all the way up, glowering. “What did you say to that child, Gabe?”

“Why am I the bad guy? I barely had time to get a word out!”

She took a half-step back and her arms unfolded, her palms rubbing the thighs of her jumpsuit. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I shouldn't have jumped to conclusions. I just—” She shrugged. “That was unprofessional of me. I'm sorry.”

The sharp retort was automatic. He bit it back. He was an adult, and so was she, and they had better things to do than play games or try to get a rise out of each other. Besides, he wasn't sure he'd ever seen Elspeth Dunsany lose her temper, and the sight — and the reason for her wrath — provoked a soft, warm glow under his breastbone. “Ellie,” he said, and unfolded the arms he'd pulled around himself like a barrier, “I should be upset because you care enough about my kid to yell at me for her?”

She stared at his outstretched hands, feline in her suspicion. And then she shrugged, and stepped inside their reach. “It sounds pretty silly, when you put it like that.”

He shivered; she felt brittle in his arms — not the flesh, but the spirit. “How about you? Are you all right?”

“Hard to tell when I'm taking my meds.” A weak attempt at a joke. She curled closer. He rested his chin on her head.

“It'll all be over soon,” he said, and felt her nod.

“One way or another.” Another sigh, a bigger one. “Are you going to talk to Genie?”

“I've only been looking for her for the past hour and a half. What did you tell her?”

“Probably exactly what you're going to tell her. That what happened to Jenny is Jenny's story to tell, and you shouldn't judge other people's character by what you hear in gossip, or — especially — on the news. Have you been watching?”

“I can't stand to.” She was warm and soft, a teddy bear for grown-up boys. His heart slowed as he held her, the ache in his head and neck easing as he buried his nose in her hair. “How do you manage to smell of gardenias using air force soap?”

“A mystical talent,” she answered. “It's closely tied in with feminine wiles, but far more secret.”

“You got the gardeners to let you take some of the flowers?”

“Exactly.” She turned in his arms and tossed her head back on his shoulder. “I can't get anything past you. If I tell you where Genie is?…”

“You're a ferocious nag, you realize. And yes, of course I'll go talk to her. Where is she?”

“I left her down in the Contact office talking with Leslie via Richard. He — showed up? What do you call it? Checked in? — after I'd spent half an hour trying to pry out of her why she was so upset. She's got Boris with her. Why that cat puts up with being manhandled around the ship by that girl—”

“All right,” he said. “I'll go down now.”

He heard laughter before he even undogged the hatch, Leslie and Genie giggling together. He would have lifted his hand from the cool metal wheel and stepped back, but he knew already the look he'd see in Elspeth's eyes if he did. So he knocked.

Genie came to open the hatch, but didn't look up. A projected image of Leslie hung over the interface plate on his own desk, downsized the same way Richard usually was. The image met Gabe's eyes, a wry smile playing around the lined corners of its mouth, so real Gabe almost forgot there wasn't a person on the other end of the projection. Leslie's iron-colored hair was rumpled as if he'd been running his hands through it, and his eyes glittered a little too bright. Gabe could see Genie behind him, curled up on top of the worktable crosslegged. Boris the cat was watching holo-Leslie as if guarding a rabbit hole.

Guilt was written all over Leslie's face, and Gabe shook his head and lowered his voice. “Son of a bitch,” he said, too softly for Genie to hear him. “Richard sent you down here, didn't he?”

“Does it matter if he did?”

Gabe laughed at the echo of his own thoughts. Genie looked up, startled at the sound, and he smiled at her over Leslie's translucent shoulder, and his heart stuttered painfully in his chest. Dammit, Dick. Why Les and not me?

She didn't just look like her mother. Calisse de chrisse. She looked like Leah, tall and blond, with that straight nose in profile and the high forehead and the pin-sharp chin. And that was the sore she wore on his heart, of course. She looked like Leah, and she wasn't Leah, and he would never have Leah again. He looked away quickly, before she could see the sparkle in his eyes, and found himself staring directly at Leslie. He sniffled. He couldn't help it.

And Leslie offered him a weary shrug and a worldly smile. “Do you know what a beginner story is, Gabriel?”

It took a moment for him to fit the words together in the shape of a sentence. He had to take them apart a couple of times and start over, and once he had them assembled, he had to stop and run them through his brain a couple of times to see if they made sense. “No?”

“It's a simple story that's still true, but doesn't have all the truth of the sort of complex story you might learn later, if you keep studying a subject.”

“A child's version.”

“A beginner's version.”

He thought about it. He looked at Leslie, and looked up at Genie again, and tried not to see her as Leah. Tried not to hear Leah's name in his head as he studied her profile.

She wasn't looking at him, as if his quick flinch away had cut her, and she was waiting to see if he would come back and cut her again. Wasn't it supposed to get easier as they grew up?

She's not my little girl anymore. Except she was; she was growing into a grown daughter, the one that Leah had almost reached, the one Leah had grasped in the short, too-adult minutes before she died. But she was also, and still, Genie.

He could do this. Hell, he had to do it, whether he could or not. He realized something, and smiled. Because here, after all, was one of his women for whom he could be there when she needed him. “Beginner stories?”

“Beginner stories,” Les confirmed.

Gabe rolled his shoulders and stepped inside the hatch. He really had to get out of the habit of talking through them, before it got somebody killed. “Okay. I think I can handle that.”

Leslie winked before he derezzed, flickering out.

It was the height of cowardice for Min-xue to stand and leave the table when General Shijie's hound started harrying Casey. And not even cowardice on her behalf. No, as he excused himself and picked his way up the long shallow flight of steps toward the doors at the back of the amphitheater, he couldn't claim empathy as the source of his distress. He was picturing himself behind that podium, and he didn't like it. At all.

The men's room closest to the General Assembly would be uncomfortably crowded, even midtestimony, but there was another one around the corner, out of the way. And Min-xue, frankly, had had enough of people for the moment. He made his way through the air-curtains and an S-curved hallway, pausing just inside to see if anybody else was present. The echoing tiled room seemed deserted, the low hum of ventilation the only sound. Min-xue selected the urinal in the farthest corner and settled in, trying to blank his mind.

Fluorescent overhead lights pulsed on ceramic and steel, the strobing effect near-blinding. Min-xue closed his eyes against the flicker and composed himself with poetry. There were tossing oceans for you to cross. If you fell, there were dragons in wild waters.em>

He could not have failed to hear the door open, or the crispness of shoes on tile. Someone made himself comfortable in the next bay; a curious choice when the entire row was unoccupied. Min-xue finished, opened his eyes, and stole a sideways glance — only to find his fellow bathroom occupant tidy and tucked in, arms folded, standing with military aplomb.

Min-xue looked down quickly and finished arranging his clothes. “General,” he said, and made a little bow in lieu of offering his hand. Only afterward did he raise his eyes to meet those of the minister of war, wondering at his own ingrained politeness. If he'd thought about it, certainly, he never would have made even that slight gesture of respect.

Shijie Shu was still looking at him, arms crossed, eyes narrowed like a man who calculated odds he did not like.

“Pilot Xie Min-xue,” the general answered.

“How may I be of service?”

It was refreshing to speak Chinese, however quietly, and it amused him when the general's eyebrows rose at what Min-xue had so carefully failed to offer; he'd neither admitted honor at making Shijie Shu's acquaintance, nor actually placed himself in the general's service. An inquiry was hardly a promise.

General Shijie cleared his throat harshly and stepped away from the row of urinals and, incidentally, Min-xue, who breathed a silent sigh of relief. He did not like the minister of war standing close enough to touch.

“I believe you are a very brave young man,” Shijie said, addressing the doors of the off-white stalls lining the back wall. “A patriotic young man.”

Min-xue had begun walking toward the sinks to wash his hands. He stopped and lifted his chin to look the taller, broader man in the eye. “If you are going to make an offer to buy me, General, I don't require flattery first.”

“You've been too long among the Canadians.” The general's broad, trustworthy face bent slightly around a frown. “I would not impugn your honor in that manner. You notice I have come to speak to you in person—”

“In a toilet.”

“So be it. I have been impressed with your integrity, Pilot Xie. Your resourcefulness. Your honor.”

“Which you are about to ask me to abrogate.” The water was cold. He plunged his hands in without bothering to adjust it, scrubbed with gritty liquid soap, and ran his hands under the faucet for longer than he needed to.

“I am asking you to testify to things you know to be true,” the general said quietly. “The Canadians' deceptions. Their manufactured truths. And what you yourself witnessed on board the Huang Di: a captain taken to drink—”

“Because of your orders.” Shijie's eyes hung over Min-xue's shoulder when Min-xue looked in the mirror.

“Are you certain they were my orders?” Quietly, and Min-xue had no answer. The general let the silence drag a little, and Min-xue pulled his hands out of the icy water, ducked his head, and laved his face. “Pilot Xie—”

“General.”

“Consider for a moment that we have many augments, pilots — and others. Unlike the commonwealth. Consider for a moment that Canada may yet be forced to return the Huang Di and her crew, including you, to our care. That crew contains several other augments, one higher ranking. It is logical to think that the Huang Di's first pilot will be promoted to a newer starship.”

Ah. There's the bait. And it's rich enough to make the trap seem comfortable enough to live in. “You would promote me to first pilot of the Huang Di, if I testified as you wish.” He straightened, let the water flow cease, and slicked his hair out of his eyes with wet fingers and palms.

“Not as I wish.” The gaze the general rested on Min-xue was calm and open, completely guileless. “As will best serve China with your honesty. And not first pilot.”

“What then?” But Min-xue swallowed hard. He already knew.

“Captain Wu…” The general hesitated delicately. “He will not serve aboard another ship.”

Yes, Min-xue thought. You broke him and now you cast him aside. He's served his purpose and may be replaced by a new tool.

He pushed past General Shijie, careful not to touch the other man. He was in the corridor, hand on the heavy door that would take him back into the General Assembly, when he looked from one stiff guard beside the doorway to another, and realized exactly what it was that Shijie Shu had just offered him.

Nothing less than the captaincy of the Huang Di.

Leslie understood now why the pilots fixated so hard on getting into that black leather chair that dominated the bridge like the steel table dominates an operating theater. He knew, because he could feel it — a fraction of it: Richard and the limitless space he occupied.

It was… intoxicating. As if his senses had enlarged. If he concentrated, he could feel the things that Richard felt — the glorious confusion of moving water and atmosphere that the AI was struggling to learn to model and control, like a swirling breeze on Leslie's skin; and the angular body of the Montreal with its wings and gears and the soft hum of electricity through its veins; and the Benefactors spread across space. Charlie in his lab, and Richard's gossamer touch spanning star systems. No body of his own, no hands, no hope of ever feeling them again when he was honest with himself. Just a dream, an endless dream of space.

He imagined it felt the way a spider's web feels to the spinner, or a dolphin's sonar to the cetacean. Or perhaps the way a winding road clung to the tires of a sports car, the sensation of that contact almost seeming to extend to the driver's skin.

The birdcage's alien “map” of the sky, the distorted curves of space-time they felt as plainly as a surfer running a tube felt the surge and power of the wave under his board — Leslie could feel it, too, feel it the same way he'd been able to feel what the land would look like from a few hummed bars of song, once upon a time. It was intoxicating, amazing, as if the boundaries had dropped away from his body and his senses, and he had grown bigger than the skin he could no longer feel.

It wasn't all he felt. Richard was also feeding him the news coverage and commentary on the day's UN session, now that Jenny's testimony had ended. Information as a fluid, wrapped around him even when he knew that he was wrapped inside a skin of silver, floating in Earth orbit, and he was never going home.

He couldn't afford to think about that now. There was no guarantee that whatever the Benefactors had done to preserve his consciousness would last from moment to moment, and he wouldn't waste a moment of that time. He was too busy exploring their sensations, translating their mind-maps into something topographic, representative of space as his species perceived it.

Dick, why can I “feel” Charlie, and not Genie or Patricia?

“Or Min-xue or Jen?” The AI smiled in his head. “It's because of the way the network is set up. Jenny and the rest are implanted with individual control chips; they're essentially small nanonetworks on their own. You and Charlie are, as near as I can guess, partially on the Benefactor network. And you're also on the worldwire. Controlled like all the nanotech on Earth by the Calgary's processor core.”

How do you keep that running at the bottom of the ocean?

“The nanosurgeons are capable of mechanical construction as well as biological repair,” Richard said. “They stay pretty busy. The Calgary wound up in shallow water. If I can get the global conveyor belt working again and manage the climate back to a compromise level, I might have them encourage the local fauna to turn it into an artificial reef. The processor core and the reactor are sealed. And tropical fish are nice.”

They are indeed. Leslie grinned internally at the image of holo-Richard hovering in midocean like some craggy Madonna of the Fishes, clownfish and Moorish idols nibbling through the seaweedy strands of his hair. Leslie hummed silently, a half-formed thought about who would sing the songs for the roads the starships would travel teasing the edges of his mind. So, Dick, then why not take it back to preindustrial levels?

“Even if I could, the world had almost three hundred years of adaptation already when Captain Wu tossed that rock at you.”

Because, of course, you aren't a PanChinese target in any way, Dr. Feynman AI.

“Technically speaking, I'm not even a doctor.” But it came packaged with another grin. “In any case, there's no point in throwing out the baby with the arctic meltwater, so to speak. It would cause even more chaos to try to reverse all the damage. And I'm not sure I can or want to. I'm not even sure my global conveyor trick is going to work, and it's not going to work quickly. Or without doing some additional damage — I'm up to my virtual armpits in a system that's already in flux, and what I'm doing is heedless and improvident.”

Leslie agreed, musing. And then he suffered a thought that snapped him out of his meditative state. Dick?

“Yes, Les?”

What's to stop the Chinese from nuking the Calgary?

Richard's pause was pregnant, as he allowed Leslie to get there first. “In the final analysis? There are a number of small inconveniences and inelegances to an attack of that kind. But, overall, there's nothing to stop them.”

Just like there was nothing to stop Toronto.

“Just like. Indeed.”

Would that kill you?

“No.” Utterly seamless, without the half-expected pause as if the AI was deciding how much information to share. Which meant that Richard had already known how he intended to answer that question, and didn't mind his human friends twigging that he's planned it in advance. “I'm not centralized anywhere, and while it would cost me a fragment of my capacity not to have the Calgary processor to run on, there's still the spare cycles of a googolplex or twelve nanomachines scattered around the Milky Way. It would be a very bad thing for the planet, however, for the worldwire to fail right about now—”

What you were saying about unstable systems.

“Exactly. It'd be like cutting the life support on a patient in surgery.”

Leslie started humming again. Resonance buzzed in his ears. He stopped for a second, hoping to catch the direction it came from. The sound wasn't repeated, and a moment later, he realized he couldn't have heard a sound anyway. Not physically. “Bugger.”

“What?”

Oh, I just thought I heard an echo to my humming.

“Les—”

Leslie had a funny feeling that he knew what Dick was going to say before he said it. Which wasn't all that surprising, given that he seemed to have become part of Richard's brain. Dick, I think the Benefactors were singing to me.

Patty's got her back to the door when I walk into the room. The door's unlocked and I know Alan will tell her I'm coming long before I get there, so I don't bother knocking. And she doesn't bother looking up. She's just sitting still, her hair banded into a glossy mahogany snake the length of her spine, her chin resting on the interlaced fingers of her hands. She stares at a two-dimensional photograph in a clear plastic frame pierced with flower cutouts. There are two people in it. The man looks like Fred did when he was younger, only not as good looking, although you'd never get me to admit that Fred Valens was a handsome man. The woman has Patricia's hair.

“Patty?”

She sits back in her chair, braces her fine-fingered hands on the edge of the table, and stands. “I thought you did really well out there today, J-Jenny.”

My cheeks prickle with the blush that must be creeping across them. I won't let her use my title, and she gets all bashful and stares at the floor when she tries to say my given name. Mother Mary, tell me the child doesn't have a crush on me. “It was pretty bad.”

“It looked like it. Are you coming to get me for supper?”

“Yeah. The prime minister arrives tonight. Apparently she's decided she needs to keep a closer eye on her lackeys, lest we turn out to have unknown weaknesses.”

“I guess I'd better wear my good shoes, then.” She squats down and starts digging under the bed. She finds one black loafer and one tennis shoe, and sighs, looking up. “I'm such a flake. It's just not that big of a room!”

“Are they in the closet?”

“You know, I bet they are.” Gods, she sounds like a grown-up. She keeps a careful arm's distance between us as she moves across the room, edging around me as if I were a big dog of uncertain temperament, and I don't crowd her. It must be my body language, or maybe she's just psychic, because she breaks out in prickles every time I get close to her, and I really think I'm doing an okay job of hiding the twist of breathlessness in my chest.

On the other hand, grown-ups always think they're better at hiding things from kids than they are.

The other shoes are in the closet. She picks out the loafers, and bends down in front of the mirror to brush her hair. “I have to do that tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“Do they always…”

“Assassinate your character? If they can.”

She nods, biting her lip in the mirror, thinking about gloss and mascara. I let her; I don't care if we're late to dinner. I can almost see her cataloguing her sins, trying to decide if there are any skeletons in her closet. I want to reassure her, and for a moment I have a grown-up's idiot confidence that anybody so young must be secure in her innocence. I was younger than she is when I did what I did, so really, it's not safe to assume.

“It must have been hard surviving.” She puts the hairbrush down and does her face efficiently.

“It was.” I never got to have this conversation with Leah. For a moment, I'm seasick with relief, and then I remember that Gabe and Elspeth are probably having it right now, with Genie. Crap. “You do what you have to do, you know?”

“Yeah,” she says, and stands up, ready faster than any seventeen-year-old girl has the right to be. “I do. Any idea what's for dinner?”

A soft chime from her interface draws our attention. A swirl of cool colors shot through with silver materializes over the plate, reminding me of the sky before a thunderstorm. “Patricia? Genevieve? If I may interrupt?”

It's Patty's room. I look at her. “Sure, Alan,” she says, scuffing into her loafers, toe-and-heel. “Is it a crisis?”

“No,” he says. “We thought you'd both like to know that Dr. Tjakamarra's found a way to communicate with the birdcages.”

Patty and I share a look, and she nods that I should talk. She can probably read the question in my eyes. “What is it? And didn't we already have a way to talk to them?”

“Well, we had a pathway for communication. Although, to be fair, we're still not talking. We're playing music. But we're — Dr. Tjakamarra and Dr. Fitzpatrick are building a lexicon of symbols and meanings. Writing a joint language, rather than teaching them ours or us learning theirs.”

“That's huge progress,” Patty says.

“But it sounds like it could take awhile. Why music?”

I can almost see him shrug, the way the color ripples across his icon. “They started with math. The two aren't unrelated.”

“And it took us this long to think of music?” Patty clears her throat, and when I look at her I realize I've managed to make an idiot of myself again. I finish lamely. “… and we didn't have a way to play them music before that they'd hear.”

“It's a wonderful new alien art form,” Alan says. “Translated for the first time, for creatures with no ears.”

He nails me with it. I had no idea Alan had a sense of humor, let alone a wit. The shock's good for a guffaw, and then I settle down to a nice, long, loud laugh that's total overkill for the funniness of the joke.

But, God, it's been a long day.

Dinner is strained, quickly finished. General Frye doesn't show up. Neither does Min-xue; since Captain Wu isn't there and neither is his escort — that is to say, guard — I assume Min-xue is eating with the captain in his room. It's really too noisy down here for the Chinese pilot, anyway. His wiring's wound tight enough to make mine look like a placeholder.

Riel keeps her eyes on her plate and seems to find the china coffee cups an annoyingly scant measure. She doesn't touch her wine. Fred pours Patty half a glass, and Patty drinks it as if it's a duty, some grown-up ritual she doesn't like or understand, but is willing to play along with. The plates are barely off the table when she excuses herself to get ready to testify. She doesn't even finish her dessert.

“Come on,” Riel says. “Let's go to the lounge.” She makes a little business of pushing her chair back from the table and smoothing the white linen tablecloth afterward, pouring herself another scant cup of coffee from the carafe, and lifting the translucent bone china cup and saucer to take with her.

Fred gestures me to precede him. I wait, and notice it takes him a little more effort than it should to get out of his chair.

He's moving like his shoulder hurts. The cold's gotten into his bones. I remember what that felt like.

It's been a long year for the both of us. I don't ask and I don't wait for permission. I just grab him by the elbow on my way past and hoist. It's always a shock that he doesn't flinch away from my hand. He knows better than most what I'm capable of doing with it. “Thanks. None of us are getting any younger, are we?”

And then he grins, lines forming across his perpetually flushed cheeks, because that's not true — in some very odd ways, I am getting younger. And it's as much his fault as my metal hand and my prosthetic eye and the fact that I'm walking at all, let alone standing up straight and free of pain.

He doesn't take his coffee cup and I don't take mine. I might just have a glass of brandy later. “You're welcome, Fred.” I don't return his smile, and his doesn't fade at all.

Yeah, we understand each other.

The heavy cherrywood door is barely shut behind us when Riel rounds on me. She's drawn like a wire, plucked vibrating, thinner and hollower, and the strands of steel in her bobbed dark hair are maturing into racing stripes. The gray might even look good on her, but her olive skin's faded to sallow, and she's curiously… displaced against the rich leather furniture and patterned carpets and wallpaper. As if she were a hologram, or half a step into another dimension.

She looks at me, and her mouth works, and she sets her cup down on the sideboard without looking. She shakes her head and says, “You could have warned me, Jen.”

“It's not the sort of thing that usually comes up in casual conversation.” Most people don't ask if you have a criminal record as part of the standard litany that goes with ascertaining your pigeonhole in society — job, marital status, kids. It might be funny if they did. Nah, I got picked up for possession and soliciting when I was a teenager, but I never did any time. Counseling. Suspended sentence. You know how it goes. So how do you like your job at the auto mall? “Besides, if the Chinese can find out, how could I have been expected to know you wouldn't?”

Fred's leaned back against the wall a few feet away from me, watching with his head cocked to one side. If he were ten years younger I bet he'd have his ankles crossed and an insouciant smirk on his lips. His shoes gleam with polish and he's picking at the edge of his finger with his thumbnail, as if absentmindedly. Meanwhile, Riel paces, coyote in a cage, wearing a path between the window and the barrister's bookcases ranged along the back wall. She stops and pulls the curtain aside, staring out on spotlit bricks. “The Chinese shouldn't have found out. Those are sealed records.” It pains her to admit that. “Nobody should have been able to get at those.”

Oh, fuck me raw. “Nobody had to.”

“What?”

I have to shake my head and close both hands very tight to remember not to put the left one through the wall. I'm sure that paneling's expensive. “Barb knew.”

Fred looks up from his intensive survey of his fingernails. His eyes widen, and then narrow. “Your sister never said anything to me about it, Casey.”

“That's because she wasn't working for you, Fred. No matter what you thought when you signed her paychecks. She was working for Alberta Holmes.”

“Touché,” he says. “And if Alberta knew about your record—”

“Then Tobias Hardy sure as hell knows about it now.” Riel nods, a gesture like a gavel coming down. I've seen that decisiveness before. It worries me. “I'll patch up what I can in my testimony. It… well, you did well today, Jen.” It's grudging, and she can't look me in the eye when she says it. “Have you ever thought of going into politics?”

“And now you know why not.”

She snorts, a choked-off laugh that lifts her shoulders and sets her back a fraction of a step. “It doesn't matter. The cat and the bag and the horse we rode in on and all that other stuff. We'll deal with it the only way we can: by taking it on the chin. You were right not to lie.”

“Thank you.” A funny little twist that I hadn't even known was there unwinds in my belly.

“And anyway, we have other problems.”

Exasperation may be my least favorite emotion in the world. “Merci à Dieu. What now?”

Riel has a lot of personality flaws, but taking joy in keeping people guessing isn't one of them. “Janet Frye has had some documents registered as evidence, but I haven't been able to find out what was on them. Yet. I'm working on it.”

“Don't they have to provide you with copies?”

“It's not a trial,” Riel said, disgustedly. “It's a ‘discovery hearing.' The fiction is that we're not adversaries, but all trying to get at the truth.”

“Ostie de tabernac—”

“My sentiments exactly.”

Fred straightens up and steps away from the wall, looking like he grew an inch — and all of it composed of pure cold mean. “She didn't… she wasn't involved until after the attack, and then she more or less took credit for Canada having the capability to respond. Now that I think about it, what would she have to testify about?”

I shake my head. My years in America left me a little behind on commonwealth politics, even the strictly Canadian ones. “Have a little mercy, Fred.”

Riel shrugs and casts as if trying to remember where she left her coffee cup. I move to one side so she can see it on the sideboard; she beelines for it and drinks before she speaks, making a face at finding it cold. “The Home party likes to bill itself as the defense party, Jen. They supported the space program — including the black budget — when I was still fighting tooth and nail to get that money for health care and famine relief.” She shrugs again, a very Gallic one this time. “Sometimes you guess wrong.”

Yeah, I know. And sometimes there's just not enough paint to cover the whole house, so you do the sides that show. Money is not infinitely elastic, and that's as true for governments as it is for single moms. “So if she doesn't have anything to testify, what the hell does she plan to testify to?”

The look Fred shoots me is unalloyed pity. He raises one hand, wincing, and rubs at the back of his neck. I try not to feel sympathy. “Whatever the hell she and Hardy have cooked up to discredit us completely, of course. Hardy hands her the keys to Canada, she hands him the keys to the Huang Di, the Vancouver, and the Montreal, and everybody goes home happy. Except us, and Richard. And China — assuming Hardy and the opposition aren't in cahoots with some PanChinese faction or another.”

“Shijie Shu?” Riel says. They're both looking at me, but they're talking across me.

“That's what I was thinking.”

Cup clatters on saucer again. She almost drops them on the sideboard in her haste, and Fred winces. I bet that china set is older than all three of us put together. “It's tomorrow in China, isn't it? I need to call Premier Xiong. Now.”

“Connie—”

She turns back to me with her hand already on the softly gleaming brass doorknob, brows beetled over her unnaturally green eyes. “Make it quick.”

“What are they planning?”

“I don't know,” she says. The latch clicks as she turns the knob, but the hinges are too well oiled to creak. “But I'm thinking today was king's pawn to king four.”

Patty hesitated at the top of the stairs, but didn't stop. The murmur of voices followed her. She scraped her tongue against her teeth, wishing she'd drunk more ice water, trying to work loose the tannic residue from the wine. Papa Fred was trying to be polite and include her in with the grown-ups, and she wouldn't embarrass him, but she would rather have had a seltzer.

She let her fingertips skip across the whorled ball of the finial as she turned the corner, wood smooth-waxed and evenly ridged to the touch, and took three steps before she hesitated. She tucked her hair behind her ears with a jerky, violent motion, turned around, and turned toward the library instead. Papa Georges had loved two things: his spoiled, noisy parrots and his collection of antique books, and she was so homesick for the smell of paper and leather that she gulped a mouthful of spit and blinked stinging eyes.

There was somebody in the library before her. The door stood slightly ajar, and a dim light gleamed through the crack, illuminating a knife-blade width of patterned green and wheat-gold carpeting, catching a soft highlight on the scarred wood of the threshold. Patty cocked her head, listening, her fingertips resting lightly against the dark wood of the door as if it could conduct sound directly into her bones.

She heard pages turning. Quickly, as if the turner were glancing at pictures or scanning the paragraphs for some remembered turn of phrase, rather than reading to savor. Slick, heavy paper rattled softly when it was moved, paused, was followed by the clink of glass on a coaster. Patricia held her breath, began to step back, her arm extending as if her fingers were reluctant to leave the smooth warm wood.

Alan?

“I'm listening, Patricia.”

Who's in there?

“I don't know,” he said. “There's nothing in that room that's on the Net or the worldwire.”

Another page turned. The rustling paused, as if the reader had lifted his head from the book, one page still held vertical between his fingers, and hesitated in thought. And then, very clearly, Patty heard the rattle of paper one more time.

She had as much right to be here as anybody else did, didn't she? She let the held breath go and stepped forward. Her elbow bent. She pushed into the room, the door swinging aside on hinges so smoothly oiled and hung that she felt no more resistance than she would have brushing aside a drapery.

General Frye sat in a leather-upholstered armchair by the ceramic fire, staring out the dark window at branches moving against the snow. Her left hand cradled the spine of a book atop her crossed legs, holding it open. Her right hand fretted at the brass heads of the tacks holding navy leather to the scrolled wooden arm of her chair; a fat crystal glass sat on the marble-topped table beside her. She didn't turn toward the door as Patty slipped inside, but she tilted her head slightly, and Patty knew she'd been heard.

Unacknowledged, she didn't speak. She crossed the hardwood floor and edged behind a loveseat, crouching down to run her hands over the surface of the hardbound books. The textures surprised her: slick, slightly sticky leather, broadcloth rough as a cat's tongue, patterned gilt cool in the evening air. She jerked her hand away and hissed.

It was the wiring, of course. She hadn't touched a book in almost a year, and the last time she had, she'd been a normal girl with a normal girl's reflexes and senses, not the tuned, hyperaware animal she'd become. Except for the omnipresent strobe of the fluorescent lights, the Montreal was a place of cool metal surfaces and soothing glass, soft grays and blues and the white-noise hum of its systems. It smoothed over the rough edges of interacting with the daily world very well.

Earth was full of things. People, textures, sudden noises. Nine months in a controlled climate had taught Patty one way of dealing with her augmentation.

She cradled her hand close to her chest, as if she had scorched her fingertips, and forced herself to breathe slowly, evenly, through her nose. Panic helped no one. She could hear her mother saying it now.

And I'm still better off than poor Min-xue. Cautiously, she reached out again, and touched a volume bound in green leather, with little humped ridges sewn across the spine every few centimeters. It wasn't bad when she was expecting it. She just hadn't known the books would feel so… real. She hooked her fingernail over the edge and pulled. It slid into her hand with a gentle rasp of coverboards against its neighbors. She didn't look at the title; she didn't care. It smelled right.

She rose from her crouch and turned to go back to her room, and found herself looking into General Frye's alert, tired eyes. She couldn't make out their color in the angled light, but the slant of the reading lamp spilling across the book still open on her lap made her features look harsh and sad. The general nodded toward her hand. “What are you reading?”

Patty's lips thinned. She glanced down at the book pressed against her chest. “I don't know,” she admitted, and looked back up. She couldn't keep the rueful little smile from twisting her lips, but she made herself not step away. She's the enemy. She's what we're here to stop. Still, that wasn't any reason not to be polite. It was always better to be polite. Especially if you didn't like someone. “What are you reading, General?”

Except Frye didn't look like an enemy. She looked like somebody who had lost a friend, and Patty's breath twisted in her chest as Frye looked down at the book she was holding. The slick pages with their crisp 2-D images dented slightly between her fingertips and she coughed, except it might have been a chuckle. And she said, “I don't know either,” and stuck her forefinger in as a placeholder as she flipped to the front. “It's the sesquicentennial celebration of National Geographic magazine. One hundred and fifty years of unforgettable photographs. They're quite stunning.” Grudgingly said, that last, as if Frye had not wanted them to be “stunning.” Or as if they had affected her in some manner she found unacceptable.

Patty balanced her book against her belly and cracked it open. “Albert Payson Terhune,” she said. “Lad: A Dog. That's a silly title.”

“It's a pretty silly book, too, as I recall.” Frye flipped her book back open, glanced at the page number, and set it aside on the end table, well away from her glass. “Very sentimental.” She closed her eyes briefly, as if something hurt her.

Enemy, Patty said to the twinge of pity that answered that gesture. Patty reached for Alan, but Alan was silent, observing. She felt his presence, however, the cool swirl of blue and purple solidifying her resolve. Maybe I can draw her out, find out something interesting. Would you help me do that?

“Richard is more suited for those tasks than I am,” Alan replied. He must have felt her flush of quick panic at the idea of inviting Richard into her head, because he pitched his tone soothing and said, “But I will try.”

Thank you, Alan. Whatever fragile courage she had was reinforced by the sensation of leaning up against his wise, cool intellect. On a whim, she pictured herself as the golden robot girl, and felt that much braver. There was nothing Frye could say to her that could hurt her, after all. Nothing that would not slide off her impenetrable golden hide.

“Is sentiment necessarily bad?” Patty squared her shoulders and walked toward Frye. She set her novel on top of the photo book and sank into a matching blue leather chair. Her loafers dropped off her feet easily; she kicked her legs up and sat on her heels, leaning against the side of the chair.

Frye regarded her with surprise, and — Patty thought — perhaps an unexpected touch of relief. I'm not the only one who doesn't want to be alone with my thoughts tonight.

“No,” Frye said. She picked up her drink and cupped it in her hands. Her fingers were square, a little blocky, the nails clipped short as a man's and painted a demure rose pink. She laced them together, pressing the tumbler between her palms, and leaned forward. “Sometimes it's all that makes us human.”

Patty smiled. “I have to testify tomorrow,” she said, and the smile didn't last through it. Leather squeaked as she drew her knees up and rested her chin on them. “Do you know what I'm going to have to say?”

“I don't think,” Frye said, and paused, and looked out the window again. The snow had picked up, feathers tumbling through the spotlights' glow. Her tone was level when she resumed. “I don't think we're supposed to compare notes.”

She's tired, Patty thought.

“And a little drunk,” Alan supplied. “Vulnerable.”

Good. “I promise not to tell you any details if you promise not to tell me any.”

Frye paused, and smiled around her glass. “That sounds fair. So what's on your mind, Patty?”

It was too warm by the ceramic fire. “I'm going to have to talk about Leah dying,” she said. “And they're going to do the same thing to me that they did to Jenny. They're going to pick apart everything. And I've never told anybody about Leah.”

“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.”

“I'm not fond of that word.”

“Stewardship? Do you deny that's what it is?”

“I can't guarantee I will take the commonwealth's side in any negotiations,” he said. “But you need me to assist in the operation of the Montreal, and negotiations with the Benefactors, and in going with her on her further missions of research and study. And to be perfectly frank, Captain, there are people on this ship for whom I bear a personal affection. But I'm not interested in a role in loco parentis to the human race. That sounds… extraordinarily boring.”

“It seems to me that you are going to have to evolve an entirely new ethical framework to handle this, Dick.”

“Actually,” he said, “I'm hoping for some sort of nominal world authority, or a cooperative venture between space-faring powers. Failing that…”

“Failing that”—Wainwright folded her shaking hands into her elbow joints and tried to pretend that the sinking sensation in her gut was worry about the power of the entity she confronted, and not distaste at telling off a friend—“if you cannot guarantee your loyalty to the Montreal, her crew, and Canada, I will be forced to ask you to abandon your input into her operations.”

“I have a counterproposal.”

“Let's hear it.”

“I spawn a subpersona that shares the loyalties you require, and house its processes in the Montreal rather than the worldwire. The Montreal gains an AI of its own, a discrete one.”

It had possibilities. “And the Vancouver? And the Huang Di?”

“Likewise. Entities of their own, in communication with the worldwire but not a part of it. Like the discrete nanonetworks inhabiting the bodies of the pilots. Those personas will be able to generate additional AIs as needed, for additional ships, and I will still be able to talk to them, and you to me.”

“And the Chinese get one, too.”

“Anybody who wants one gets one. I, however, determine and program the limits of their obedience.”

“And that doesn't place you in loco parentis, as you said? When your… spawned personas, whatever their loyalty might be, can summarily refuse to follow orders? What if they decide they want to switch sides? What if this hypothetical AI decides to stand back and let the Chinese obliterate us next time, because pacifism is programmed into it?”

“Don't think I won't fight if I have to, Captain.”

His tone drew her up, sharp. Even knowing that every emotion he betrayed was calculated and processed in advance, she hesitated. And then she swallowed and forged on. “Or we could have Elspeth and Gabe go back to producing intelligent programs.”

“You could,” he said, his voice hanging in the air.

Abruptly, she wished he had given her an image to watch while they spoke… not that a holographic icon would have given away anything he didn't choose to either.

He continued. “But that's very hit or miss. And in me, you know you have a… moral creation.”

“I sure to hell hope so,” she said. She couldn't keep the bitterness from her tone. In an attempt to chase it out of her mouth, she got up and began to pace from bulkhead to bulkhead. “You won't be able to maintain neutrality, Dick.”

“I can try.”

“If you were truly devoted to staying out of our human wrangling, you might consider the option of suicide.” She turned her head to the side, sneaking a sly look at the monitors so he would know that she was kidding.

“The genie won't go back in the bottle, no matter how hard you wish him there. But not everything has to be a weapon.”

“We're primates,” she reminded him. “Sooner or later, everything is. All right, then. We'll cross that bridge when they burn it out from under us. So let's discuss our options for this EVA to the shiptree. I want to do it Sunday.”

“I want to do it sooner than that. Saturday. Tomorrow. Game five of the World Series is tonight, and game six is Sunday.”

“And you don't want to miss the game?”

She got it deadpan enough that he snickered. “Well, there is that, of course,” he said. “But Janet Frye is scheduled to testify on Monday, and if the whole thing doesn't go to hell in a handbasket, we'll have had some good news to release on Saturday, when there's nothing else eating up bandwidth. We'll look like we're accomplishing something up here.”

“And if it does go to hell in a handbasket?”

“What does it matter?” he asked. “We'll be getting screwed on Monday anyway. Frye has to have an ace in the hole.”

6:30 AM

Saturday October 13, 2063

HMCSS Gordon Lightfoot

Earth orbit

If the birdcage looked like a fantastical Christmas ornament, the shiptree looked… well, like the whole damned tree. Shimmering gaud and tinsel, although the thing's curved, asymmetrical, organic outline reminded Charlie more of a satiny branch of driftwood wrapped in microlights than a traditional conifer. Charlie leaned forward against his five-point restraints, his helmet cradled in his lap, and gawked as shamelessly as a child. Beside him, Jeremy was doing the exact same thing, and Dick and Leslie were watching through his eyes.

They sat behind Lieutenant Peterson in the second row of crew chairs in the Gordon Lightfoot, leaving the copilot's chair beside her empty. The panoramic forward windows on the shuttle showed a broad slice of space, far more expansive than the triple-thick airplane windows with their rounded corners back in the passenger compartment.

Charlie's gauntleted hands tightened on the shatterproof crystal of his helmet. At least if the shiptree slapped the Gordon Lightfoot out of the sky, Leslie would know everything he did. There'd be no foolishness with final transmissions and telemetry and black boxes—do shuttlecraft even have black boxes?

“Yes,” Richard said in his head. “And they also have me, these days. And relax. The shiptree never did anything about the unmanned probes we sent.”

Neither did the birdcage. And the probes didn't try to find a way inside, he answered, but he forced his hands to ease around his helmet. A moment too soon, because Peterson set the autopilot and lifted her own helmet off the carrier beside the pilot's chair. “Hats on, gentlemen,” she said. “I suppose I should thank you two for getting me out of the office again, shouldn't I?”

Jeremy laughed, a hollow sound amplified by the dome he was settling over his head. The gold-impregnated glass caught the shuttle's interior lights, making him look as if he wore a Renaissance angel's halo over his faded gingery hair. Basset-hound eyes, drooping at the corners, and a long hollow-cheeked face completed the illusion of an old master's work, disconnected in time and place. Charlie seated his own helmet and checked the latches, then checked Jeremy's. Jeremy leaned forward to inspect Peterson's, and Peterson went over Charlie's seals.

“Leslie must be furious he isn't here for this,” Jeremy said, as Peterson seated her hands on the yoke again. Charlie, who had started his shuttle cert but never finished it, noticed that she engaged the dead man's switch when she did so.

“He's spitting.”

Jeremy was silent for a moment. “I'm missing Patty's testimony.”

Thanks, Charlie, Leslie said. I'm quiet and well behaved, and you're telling Jer lies about my behavior? See if I buy you a beer when we get back to Earth.

It was meant to ease the lump in Charlie's throat when he thought of Leslie out there somewhere, drifting. It didn't. What makes you think they're ever gonna let us go back to Earth, Les?

Leslie's laughter almost sounded real. Then they'd bloody well better start shipping up some fucking beer.

Charlie snorted, fogging the inside of his helmet, and rolled his eyes as he switched on the climate control. “All ready back here,” he said, out loud, so Peterson could hear him.

“Right,” she said. “We're going in.”

The shiptree grew slowly and steadily in size as they slid up on it. Charlie already knew the lights weren't portholes. Like all the contact team, he'd studied telescopic images and the data from the unmanned probes. He knew that the hull of the vast structure — the autonomous space-faring vegetable, as he had described the hulk he and Fred Valens had explored on Mars — was comprised of a substance not all that different from cellulose reinforced with monofilamental carbon fiber. Buckytubes: the same substance that had been engineered to make the beanstalks possible — but the buckytubes in the shiptree's hull were grown, theoretically, not manufactured.

Unless the nanosurgeons had built them, reworking the Brobdingnagian shape from whatever it had once been, into a starship. Always a possibility.

And in another fascinating twist, the conductive carbon filaments in the shiptree's hull were sheathed in a substance analogous to myelin, and interconnected via organic transistors — carbon filament diodes, which Gabe said were nearly identical to the ones used in humanity's own early experiments with nanochips, before the Benefactor tech had rendered Earth's nanomachine research obsolete.

Charlie's hands closed on the arms of his acceleration couch, the jointed gauntlets pressing creases into the flesh of his fingers as the Gordon Lightfoot braked on a long smooth arc and came about, paralleling the kilometers-long hull of the shiptree. Firefly green and neon-tetra blue, the lights rippled in response to the passage of the smaller ship.

“Do you suppose she's hailing us?” Jeremy, his voice dulled and echoing through the helmet. He hadn't turned on his radio.

“It's as good a guess as any,” Charlie answered. “I think that's bioluminescence, which means that it's likely either for communication or for luring prey. Of course, a critter evolved for space would find light an efficient signal.”

“You don't think the ship is the intelligence, do you?”

Charlie shrugged. “Why not? It's possible, and it shows up in enough science fiction that way. The one we found on Mars looked like it had something very much like the VR cables our pilots use, though. Admittedly…”

Richard's voice, through external speakers so Jeremy and Peterson could hear him. “Those ships were so many eons old that we can only speculate how much the species that designed them have changed.”

“My thoughts exactly.” Thank you, Dick.

Jeremy nodded inside his helmet, and started talking before Charlie could remind him to speak out loud. “Well, which leaves us with the following question. They — it — never exhibited any kind of semaphoring behavior at the unmanned probes. Do you think it knows we're out here?”

“I can feel them,” Charlie said. “It stands to reason that they can feel me.”

“And the probes didn't have red and green running lights,” Leslie added, over the speakers rather than inside Charlie's head. “If we're theorizing that the shiptree uses bioluminescence to communicate, and its lights are all at the green and blue and indigo end of the spectrum, maybe it's seeing the Gordon Lightfoot's green running lights as a friendly wave hi.”

“You never thought to shine a spotlight on it?” Charlie couldn't be quite sure, but he was reasonably sure that Jeremy was rolling his eyes.

“I'm a biologist,” Charlie said. “This is why we hired you guys.” He craned his neck to get a better look at the whorled shell gliding by under the Gordon Lightfoot's floodlights, emerging from darkness before and disappearing into darkness again behind, outlined by its own rippling glow and the trembling silver-gray threads of whatever it was that trailed off the smooth hull between them. It was like the hulk of some long-submerged wreck revealed and then vanishing in the lights of an exploratory submarine. He could have seen it more plainly in the holoscreens, but there was something about the evidence of his own eyes that tightened his throat and made breathing an effort.

“Lieutenant,” Jeremy said, “can you dim our lights?”

“Dim them? Or shut them off?”

“Well, all the way off. But just flash them a few times.”

“Damn, look at that thing; it's got no symmetry at all, not bilateral or radial. It's just kind of there.”

“It's got a fractal pattern, though,” Richard pointed out. “The smaller whorls build to larger whorls and then larger ones. The whole thing looks like a giant toboggan if you squint at it.”

“How are you managing to squint, Dick?” Charlie shot back, drawing a laugh from Jeremy. The AI was right, though. It was as apt a description as the one that had come to Charlie, of water-worn driftwood. “You know what it reminds me of?”

“Coral,” Jeremy said promptly, and Dick said “Gypsum crystals, only curved.”

“Ready to flash lights.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Charlie strained against his restraints to get a better look.

The sudden darkness in the Gordon Lightfoot, inside and out, was shocking. The cabin lights went out, followed — Charlie presumed, unable to see for himself — by the running lights lining her sides. Isolated in his suit, Charlie counted breaths, counted heartbeats. He could feel Richard and Leslie, feel Jeremy and Peterson in the cockpit of the shuttle, feel his suit and the trickle of cool air into his helmet, and none of it meant a thing beside the… weight of the shiptree, its presence, like an enormous silent breathing beast in the darkness alongside the fragile bubble of the Gordon Lightfoot.

The darkness lasted three heartbeats. Peterson flashed the shuttle's lights once, twice, a third time… and then left them on, and Charlie drew a single tremulous breath.

For a moment, the shiptree hung shimmering in space, silent and lovely, quiescent as a slumbering dragon. Until, without warning, the entire length of the strange curved hull went dark.

“Damn,” Jeremy said.

Peterson killed the lights of the shuttle again, before Charlie could suggest it. “I hope that thing doesn't move on me,” she murmured in a soft, strained voice. Charlie wouldn't be surprised if she hadn't meant to say it aloud. And then she whispered, “Holy…” as a dim sunlit glow irised into existence on the shiptree's hull, an aperture like a focusing eye.

“What the bloody hell is that?” said Jeremy, and Charlie grinned in the dark, because the glow illuminated a puff of vapor dispersing into darkness.

“It's an air lock,” Peterson said.

“It's an air lock,” Charlie echoed, a second later. “And the atmosphere inside has water vapor in it, and maybe carbon dioxide and oxygen. Would you look at that? Somebody lives in there, boys and girls. Somebody lives in there.”

“It's bloody beautiful,” Leslie commented from the speakers. The shiptree's lights winked back at them, blue and green and teal, and, with a sigh Charlie couldn't interpret, Peterson illuminated the shuttle.

“We can't dock,” she said.

“No. EVA. Safer, anyway, since we won't share any atmosphere with the shiptree that way, and we'll get a nice vacuum bath coming and going.”

“Is that wise?” Jeremy asked.

Charlie shrugged, even though Jeremy couldn't see it. “It's what we came here to do. And I think they just invited us in.”

Jeremy calibrated the atmospheric sampler while Charlie checked the swabs and plates in his test kit. And if alien bugs don't like the taste of agar?

Then we assume they don't like the taste of people either.

Hah, Leslie. On the other hand, it wasn't a half-bad point. There was no reason to think that an alien pathogen would find anything tasty about humans. And if it did… well, frankly, Charlie's nanosurgeons might protect him from any ill effects. Assuming anything got through the suit. And in any scientific endeavor there is the element of risk.

He tapped Jeremy's arm, automatically bracing himself with a strap to account for the reaction. Jeremy looked up and hung the sampler on his belt. “Ready?”

“As I'll ever be.”

Charlie made sure his suit radio was live and said, “Lieutenant, we're moving out.”

“Copy.”

Together, they glided aft, toward the air lock.

Charlie went first. Peterson had matched velocities with the shiptree so evenly that he didn't need his attitude thrusters; he just checked the carabiner on the safety line clipped to Jeremy's suit, made sure the line was playing freely through the retractor, and jumped. There was no relative velocity between the Gordon Lightfoot and the alien vessel; Charlie sailed easily across the empty space and landed exactly where he'd aimed, with a firm grip on a whorl outlined in lime-green lights.

Up close, they looked exactly like firefly lights, but their texture — through the suit — was as hard as that of the surrounding hull. He stopped only half a second before he pressed the bubble of his helmet against the whorl. That might not be wise, Charlie.

Not that wisdom had ever really been his strong point. “I'm over,” he told Jeremy. Unnecessarily, but Jeremy would wait for verbal confirmation anyway, in case his grip was no good.

“I'm on my way,” Jeremy replied. Charlie didn't turn his head to look, just firmed his grip on the hull and waited. A faint tug on the safety lines, a light shock of impact through the hull of the shiptree, and Jeremy was beside him. “First step's a lulu,” the linguist said.

“You aren't kidding. That air lock's big enough for two at a time, I think.”

“I don't like the idea of that. I'll go first,” Jeremy replied. “I have the atmosphere kit.”

“There's no atmosphere in there yet. And if the lock cycles with one of us inside and one of us out, we lose the safety lines. And possibly damage the air lock and piss off the natives.”

“You have a point.” There was a silence, and for a moment Charlie thought Jeremy was going to ask Richard's opinion. Or Wainwright's. Although the captain had been completely silent so far, Charlie had no illusions that she wasn't watching, breath held. She might look cool and reserved, but he knew a professional facade when he saw one. Charlie waited. Jeremy sighed over the radio and said, “All right, then. Side by side.”

They released their grips on the shiptree's hull on a count of three and kicked off lightly, shadows cast by the Gordon Lightfoot's floods expanding as they drifted back. Attitude jets reversed their trajectory and brought them in a looping half-arc, swish into the wide-open air lock like a free-throw basketball.

The shuttle's floods were arc-light white, the diffuse glow inside the shiptree the calm, friendly gold of late-afternoon sun. Charlie glanced around as he and Jeremy fetched up against the interior wall of the air lock. The blue-green bioluminescence didn't persist inside the hull. Here, instead, the curved bulkheads bowed together, chambered and knobbed like the inside of a turtle's shell, and each veined ridge glowed sunshine gold.

“Pretty,” Jeremy said. “That's not a color we get much in bioluminescence on Earth, is it?”

“No,” Charlie answered. “It looks like a full-spectrum light. I'm going to take some swabs of the walls. Where do you suppose the inside door is?”

“I think we'd better let the aliens handle cycling the air lock,” Jeremy answered, allowing himself to turn slowly at the end of his tether, scanning the walls of the vaguely spherical chamber. “I'd hate to purge the ship by accident, even if I could find the controls, and there's no guarantee they have anything like our concept of safety interlocks. Doesn't look as if they ever intended there to be gravity in this, does it?”

“No.” Charlie busied himself opening the plates and sterile swabs. “It'll take some time to culture these, of course. A week or ten days. And I guess we'll want to get some samples of this and that back to the Montreal to run through the mass spec.”

“Lieutenant Peterson, you'll run these back for us when we've got them ready?” Jeremy didn't need to change frequencies to speak to the shuttle, or the Montreal. Their entire conversation was on an open channel.

“That's why they sent me along, Dr. Kirkpatrick,” she answered. “As long as you're certain there's no danger.”

“Never say never,” Charlie quipped, stowing a swab in a sterile baggie and running his glove along the bulkhead. “I wonder if this feels as much like walnut paneling as it looks.”

“I wonder how it stands up to the extremes of cycling between space and the internal environment, if it's wood.”

“Nanosurgeons,” Charlie answered, more dryly than he'd intended. “Also, in the very least, the shiptree of Mars wasn't wood. Not exactly.”

“But enough like wood that you called it a tree—”

“What the heck else would you call it? Oh, hey.” As his gloves snagged on a rough patch. “There's something different here. A stained area, and the wood fibers are raised.”

“Diseased?”

“Maybe.” Charlie tugged his hand free, cautious of the suit's material. The area was a bit sticky, too, as if it were oozing sap. A bit of the bulkhead seemed to shift with his movement. “Ooops.”

“You're not a very reassuring person to explore an alien ship with, Charlie. What did you do?”

A shift in the quality of the light alerted him, a shadow falling across his back as the irising door cut the Gordon Lightfoot's floods. “Um. Triggered the air lock?”

“Dr. Forster? Dr. Kirkpatrick?” Peterson's voice, simultaneous with a Leslie-flavored burst of worry in the back of Charlie's brain.

“We're good in here,” he said, as the wall opposite began to unfurl from its central ridge like a flower bud spiraling open. “We seem to be allowed in…”

When the shiptree's atmosphere touched his suit, his helmet frosted over like a beer glass on a humid day. Jeremy cursed. “Can you see anything?”

“Not a thing.”

“Turn up your suit heaters,” Richard suggested. “Did you get the atmospheric sample?”

“As soon as I can read the dials, Dick.” Jeremy's tone absolved his words of irritation.

Charlie worked on clearing the surface of his helmet immediately in front of his face, curls of frost drifting from the creases of his suit and melting into jeweled droplets as they did. “I'd say there's some moisture in the atmosphere—”

“Hah.” A pause. “Eighty three percent humidity. Yeah, that's some. It's a warm room temperature in here.”

“Oxygen?”

“You could light a match, but you might scorch your fingers — let's put it that way. Lots of carbon dioxide, too. A little light on the nitrogen, heavy on the argon by our standards. This shows particulate matter, not to excess. Pollen or dust?”

“We'll know when we get the filters under a microscope,” Charlie said. Water beaded his faceplate, but he could see the open interior door clearly once he knocked it away. Drifting globules spattered against the air lock's walls, leaving behind a pattern of wet round dots that were rapidly absorbed. “If this is like the one on Mars, there will be a ladder type projection to use for traction when we get into the corridor.”

“Well, let's go see if they're waiting for us inside,” Jeremy said, checking the safety line before he reached out, flat-palmed the wall, and pushed himself toward the new opening. “I don't see any shadows.”

“Would you, in this light?”

“I don't — oh.” Jeremy reached out and caught one lip of the door in his right hand. Charlie drifted into his back, hard.

“Oof!”

“Shh.” Before Charlie could complain.

Charlie caught the other side of the doorway in his left hand and braced himself, and turned away from Jeremy and toward the interior of the shiptree. “Oh,” he said, blinking, trying to clear his eyes, and then realizing they didn't need clearing.

He and Jeremy had drifted into a jungle, emerging from a hole in the floor — essentially — to drift surrounded by twisted vines and heavy flowering branches thick with glossy leaves. The light glowed from the floor as well as overhead, and small creatures darted and called among the branches. Some of them had feathers or fur in jeweled colors; Charlie glimpsed something like a scarlet tanager with a snakelike neck. Animal voices rang through his helmet, shrillness muffled. Even damped by leaves and space suits the echoes made Charlie think they were in open space.

A hazy mist wound between the vines and branches, veils of silk that moved in response to air currents. “A zero-G rain forest,” Jeremy said.

“Cloud forest,” Charlie corrected automatically. “Well, I suppose it could ‘rain,' through some mechanism we're not seeing. Sprayers or something. But it looks like we're seeing plants watered by condensation, and frankly, if I didn't know that I don't know any of these species, I would think I was in Costa Rica. Look at all the pollinators and the insect eaters. They look just like hummingbirds and swifts. Convergent evolution. These critters brought their whole ecosystem with them.”

Jeremy glanced over at him, flash of teeth as he grinned behind his helmet. “I can hear the throb in your voice, Charlie.”

“It's not all that different from what we did with the Montreal and her hydroponics farms. These critters might be like us, Jeremy—”

Jeremy cleared his throat and looked around, shaking more droplets of water off his gauntlets. “They might be,” he said. “But where are they? All this landscape, and no aliens. And no indication of which way we're supposed to go, or who we need to talk to. I could do with a sign that says ‘follow the gray line to customs,' you know?”

“Maybe we're intended to find our own way in?”

And one of the leafy, glossy vines uncoiled itself from the structure of the nearest branch, or stanchion, or support pillar, and laid itself across Charlie's shoulders like a heavy, companionable arm.

0900 hours

Monday October 15, 2063

Canadian Embassy

New York City, New York USA

On Sunday, the Yankees tie it up three to three, so on Monday I'm stuck with the unpalatable choice between watching the final game of the series, or showing up at the UN to watch General Janet Frye take us all apart in person. I mean, all right, I'm still more of a hockey girl. But I did live in Hartford for over a decade, and it's not like we don't have baseball in Canada.

On the other hand, I have a coiling feeling in my gut that tells me I should be at the UN when the shit hits the fan. Besides, Riel and Valens are going, and it's not like those two can be trusted out on their own.

So we wind up making a bit of a funeral festival of it.

Captain Wu finished his testimony on Saturday, after Patty's second half-day. He remains at the embassy, but Min-xue, whose evidence promises to take nearly as long as mine did, is scheduled for after Frye. Both men join Riel, Valens, Patty, and myself in the lobby, all of us nearly unspeaking as we wait for General Frye. Min-xue's hands are clothed in white leather gloves like the ones Patty and I wear. The gloves are a little too small, kidskin strained over his knuckles, even though he has fine hands. The gloves are probably Patty's spare pair, and the look she gives him when she notices confirms it.

Min-xue's eyes are unreadable behind dark glasses, but he's wearing a Chinese military uniform. Captain Wu straightens his collar flash for him before we leave, which makes me wonder what's what. It's odd, being outside all these alliances. I'm too old for Patty and Min-xue, not patriotic enough for Valens and Riel. I'm not part of any system at all, I guess. Not anymore.

Fred clears his throat after five minutes, and we all look at him. He glances from Patty to me and back, and folds his hands behind his back. “While we're waiting for Janet, I don't suppose you've heard from Richard about Drs. Forster and Kirkpatrick.”

“Of course we have, Papa Fred. Don't be silly.”

He grins at her. They connect; I can almost hear the click when their eyes make contact, and the cloaks of exhaustion and grief all of us wear fall off them for an instant. Christ, I can't believe how much I miss Leah, just then. And not just Leah. Razorface, too, and Mitch, and Bobbi Yee…

Dammit.

I am not losing any more family to this toothy monster that is history. Enough is enough.

I'm thinking so hard about my gritted teeth that I almost miss Patty's precis of the action on the shiptree. It's a pretty simple one, still: Jeremy and Charlie have brought in a tent and oxygen and food and set up a base camp in the jungle they've discovered, from which they have been launching exploratory jaunts. Their samples have been returned to the Montreal for analysis, and other than a particularly vicious pollen-analogue that looks guaranteed to produce hay fever bad enough that you'd wish it was terminal, nothing that even remotely qualifies as a pathogen has been discovered. Yet.

Everything in the shiptree is crawling with nanosurgeons, though. According to Charlie, he can feel the entire ecosystem working around him, as if it were all one tremendous organism. He compares it to something he calls the Gaia hypothesis, but I haven't had time to look that up yet, and apparently neither has Patty. Of course, I could just ask Richard—

“You could, at that.”

Good morning, Dick. I straighten my cuff and pick a bit of lint off it. What's the good word?

A broad smile crinkles his cheeks. “I've been invited to testify before the General Assembly of the United Nations, regarding my knowledge of events leading up to and including December 23, 2062.”

My crow of victory turns the heads of everybody in the room, including General Frye, who has just appeared at the top of the stairs. Patty's recitation breaks off midsentence; she turns to me with a grin for just a second before she glances down at her hands, twisting gloved fingers together.

“What's the occasion?” Frye calls, coming down the stairs like a queen walking to the guillotine. The shadows under her eyes make me wonder for a minute if she's broken her nose, and the eyes themselves are so bloodshot the whites look pink. Gray skin and a gray expression. She looks like she wants to throw up, and only pride and grim determination are keeping her jaw locked.

It's profoundly unsettling to see an expression like that one someone else's face, especially when you've felt it from the inside once or twice.

“Richard can testify,” Patty answers, before I marshal my thoughts. I think I'm the only one who notices the way Frye's hand tightens on the banister, or how she turns her attention very definitely to her feet. Well, Riel probably does, too. It's her job to catch stuff like that, and the shift of Frye's weight is definite enough to make me think of somebody bracing for a fight. Maybe even spoiling for one.

Frye lifts her eyes. She's looking directly at Connie when she does it, but her gaze slides off as she reaches the landing, and settles on Patty. “Did you finish your book?”

I think Patty's going to glance at Fred for strength, but she doesn't. Instead, she looks at me, and when I meet the glance directly, she looks immediately back at Frye. “The one about the dog? I did. It didn't take very long.”

“I saw it was back on the shelf. I thumbed through it.”

“You did? What did you think?” Again Patty sneaks me a look. There's some subtext here, something I'm meant to understand. I remember her testimony, the calm, serious voice in which she'd talked about Leah, Leah's death, our own refusal — hers and mine — to retaliate after the Chinese destroyed Toronto. I remember the way she'd refused to look at me or at Fred while she was doing it. And I remember how pissed off Riel was that she told the assembly that Riel had called for retaliation, and the way she'd shrugged afterward and said, “But I was under oath.”

Somehow, the questioning of me never got around to that. I've got a feeling I might be called back to clarify. I think I would have preferred a formal trial, after all. With rules of evidence, and a few against self-incrimination.

Ah, well. You know, some days, going to jail doesn't sound all that bad.

Patty's comment gets that kind of a raised eyebrow and a slight little smile from General Janet Frye. “I still think it's too sentimental,” Frye says, as the doorman brings her overcoat. “I would have preferred a more realistic relationship between the man and the dog. What do you think?”

“I think that I liked what it had to say about loyalty,” Patty says — very unlike Patty, because she doesn't look down when she says it. General Frye, in fact, lowers her eyes first, ostensibly to button her cuffs. But I can see from the way Patty leans forward like a hound on a scent that there's more here, and I'm not getting it. “Even if it was sappy.”

“What book are you talking about?” Fred asks, looking all polite interest, but I notice the way his eyes catch at mine over the top of Patty's head. He doesn't know what's up here either.

“Lad: A Dog,” Patty says, taking Min-xue's elbow in her white-gloved hand and turning him toward the door, while he looks at her in shock. “Come on, General Frye. You're running late, and I think the limo is waiting.”

Fred grabs my elbow as I'm about to walk past him, and makes a little show of escorting me toward the door. He leans in close, his breath tickling my ear. “Casey—”

“The answer is no.”

A snort of laughter moves my hair, but his hand tightens over my metal fingers where they tuck into the crook of his arm. “Find out what the hell they were just talking about under our noses, like kids with a secret code.”

“Go piss up a rope, Fred.”

He pats my hand. “I knew you'd see it my way.”

Riel must have caught those last two sentences, or maybe she's just as shocked as Frye is by the sight of a brigadier general squiring a noncom around like his date for the ball.

Dick?

“Patty says she's playing a hunch that the general's unease has to do with her testimony, and whatever parts might not be a little… exaggerated. Apparently they had a long conversation the other night, and Patty twigged that something was up.”

Frye was pumping her?

“Yes, and no. She says that Frye seemed troubled and introspective, and flinchy on the subject of the testimony. And very interested in Leah and how Patty felt about Leah, in a… thoughtful kind of way.”

What does Alan say?

“Alan says to shut up and give her the rope she needs.” Richard sighs, spreading his hands helplessly wide. “He's very protective of Patty.”

He didn't phrase it quite that way, I bet.

“I don't gamble when I'm only going to lose,” Richard answers. “Look up, Jen. There's the car—” as Fred tugs my arm lightly, to get my attention.

“Well?” he asks, as he hands me in.

“I'll tell you in private,” I say, and duck my head to climb into the limo. Frye's not the only one giving me a funny look when I lean my head back against the cushions, close my eyes, and echo Richard's sigh.

Frye's still staring at Patty when the six of us and a handful of unhappy Mounties pile out of the motorcade on the Lower East Side. Staring at Patty, and chewing on her lip, with a completely transparent that-kid-knows-more-than-I-think-she-should-know look plastered all over her face. I've got to admit, Patty's performance would have me apoplectic, too. It's perfect — just a little underplayed, smug, seemingly more interested in the coffee and the scenery and the scraps of torn blue behind a skyful of clouds twisting like gray rags in the wind than in the sidelong glances Frye is shooting her.

It amuses me for the whole of the chilly walk into the UN complex, especially since I quietly let Fred take point and I take tail-end Charlie, the two of us shepherding the rest of them along the ice-scattered sidewalk inside our ring of plainclothes protectors. I never would have thought I'd watch a middle-aged military professional played like a fly-fished trout by a seventeen-year-old girl.

“A seventeen-year-old girl and a nine-month-old artificial intelligence,” Richard reminds. I snort into my coffee.

Frye doesn't have any kids, does she?

“Nary a one. And she's an only child.”

Lucky dogs, the both of you. That wouldn't work for half a second if she did. You don't actually think she's going to break and tell you anything?

“I'm just hoping Alan and Patricia can make her sweat hard enough on the stand that she looks like she's lying.”

The chances are slim.

“The choices look grim,” he answers, with a funny hiccuping rhythm, like he's quoting a song. If he were real and standing in front of me, I'd fix him with my bug-eyed look. “Never mind. Someday my cultural referents will catch up to yours.”

And by then I'll be in my grave, and you'll be confounding Genie's children.

“I'll need new personalities to confound Genie's children. The Feynman persona would leave them a bit too baffled.”

It's a little creepy, hearing the AI talk about what I think of as himself as if it were an accessory, a shirt that could go out of fashion. Just another brutal reminder of how inhuman he really is. I'd miss you, Dick.

“Dick's not going anywhere.”

Except to the stars, I answer, and we share a pleased interior laugh at that.

There's something of a kerfuffle when we get to the UN; more security personnel than I expected, and a few discreet questions between Riel and our charming guide, the same Mr. Jung (in green and red hanbok, this time), turn up the not-too-surprising information that the Chinese delegation has arrived, and the premier is with them today.

The PanChinese group catches sight of us in the General Assembly lobby, in the shadow of the enormous pendulum. Three of them break away as soon as we enter, attention obviously caught by the three rifle-green uniforms, the darker, richer green of Min-xue's kit, and Patty and Riel in civvies, flanked by the stiff spines of a couple of Mounties in plainclothes. Two Mounties. Not nearly enough to keep this crew out of trouble, but all they let us bring inside.

The good news is, the PanChinese also get only two.

From the way the dark-suited individuals who look to be the security team are hustling to keep up, the slender-shouldered man in the lead has to be Premier Xiong. I'm more sure of it because he looks familiar, if bigger than he does on the feed, and I've gone from somebody who wouldn't recognize Minister Shijie if he fell at my feet to being able to pick his sad-bulldog face out of a crowd at two hundred paces. A thousand, if you gave me a sniper scope.

That shark in the mahogany suit is still right alongside him, and there's another attaché of some sort bringing up the rear of the pack.

I step back, getting myself between Min-xue and Patty and the Chinese, and let Riel and Frye deal with the guests. Min-xue's indrawn breath is audible from where I'm standing.

Oh, this is going to be fun.

Except Premier Xiong stops in front of Riel as if there were a microphone stand marking the spot, nods his head — a quick birdlike dip of the chin that acknowledges the petite woman in front of him and brings him momentarily down to her level without making a production of it — and thrusts out his right hand with the aplomb of the father of the groom sorting out the groom's guests from the bride's. A hush falls like snow.

“Prime Minister,” he says, a very white, slightly predatory smile illuminating his homely face, “it is a pleasure to finally meet you in person.”

The swing of the Foucault pendulum might be the arrested pulse of a giant heart. The whole room feels like an in-held breath, and I can feel the pressure of all those eyes.

And then Connie Riel takes two broad steps forward, and reaches out, and grabs Xiong's hand in both her own just as if she always meant to, and the collective heart of everybody in the room thumps once, hard, and begins to beat again. “Premier Xiong.” Her flat Albertan accent rings harsh against his musical tones. “I look forward to a new era of cooperation between our governments. Once we have set these differences behind us.”

I don't think either she or Premier Xiong notice the way General Shijie's brow smooths, and a slight smile turns up the corners of his mouth, but I'm suddenly certain why I had that premonition that I ought to make sure I showed up today.

Xiong steps back and offers Riel a short crisp bow, which she returns without the heel-click. He turns toward me when he pivots away, and I catch the devilish glitter in the coffee-dark eyes under his thinning brows and almost swear out loud.

They set that up. Son of a bitch. And from the stricken look on Frye's face, I'd have to say it was worth it. Even though I really don't like the way the minister of war is smiling.

“Right,” Riel says, as Xiong strides away, and glances up at me with a sly, sidelong smile. Some days, I really don't mind having taken three bullets for her. “Let's go in there and make the world safe for parliamentary democracy with pronounced socialist leanings, shall we?”

I'm not surprised when Fred is the only one who laughs.

Patty Valens's knowing smirks might almost have been enough to shake Janet's resolve, if she hadn't already made up her mind. The kid didn't know anything; the kid couldn't know anything. She held that thought cleanly in her mind, hard and fast, as she mounted the steps to the podium. Because if Patty knew something, then Fred would know it, and if Fred knew it, Janet Frye had no illusions that she would have lived long enough to take that stage and look up to meet the expectant eyes of the world.

Frederick Valens was not one of the good guys, and he never had been. And he would have very quietly, very thoughtfully seen that she was out of the way if he'd known what Toby gave her.

If he had known what she had agreed to do.

The funny thing was, she hadn't decided until this morning. She didn't think she'd slept in four days, and she'd had far more to drink than anybody in her position ought to. And it hadn't been Patty Valens's transparent manipulations that had made her mind up, once Patty had realized there was a hook in Janet's lip that could be worked. It hadn't been the simple dignity of Casey's testimony, or the way Captain Wu had broken down on the stand. No. That wasn't what made her hand shake when she shook the secretary general's hand.

It was the memory of Constance Riel looking her dead in the eye and snapping, And then if you want to hand PanChina the keys to the castle, you can do it on your own watch.

Damn you to hell, Connie, she thought, as she stated her name. Her oath was ashes in her mouth. She raised her right hand anyway and thought of Canada and the good of the commonwealth.

She took one deep breath and found Connie's chair at Canada's table, and made damn sure that Constance Riel was looking into her eyes when she opened her mouth and said, “Before I make any other statements regarding my knowledge of circumstances leading up to the tragic events of last Christmas, I need to reveal a few very important facts that have not yet entered the record.”

She needed another breath. Two, maybe. She needed a drink of water, so she took one, and let the ice click against her teeth. Look pretty for the cameras, Connie, she thought. They're going to be closing in for the reaction shot.

“On the morning of October eleventh of this year,” Janet said, “I was introduced by Unitek executive Tobias Hardy to a gentleman whose name I was not given, but who was identified to me as an agent of the United States of America…”

The pandemonium as she continued was even grander than she'd anticipated. She wasn't surprised when Shijie Shu got up from the Chinese table, made his excuses to the premier, and headed for the door. She did notice that none of his security or the PanChinese attachés went with him, and thought that was a little odd, but she wanted to get what she had to say into the record before her nerve broke once and for all.

She kept talking. It wasn't like she'd be the first politician to wind up in jail.

The Benefactors were still singing. And Leslie was still trying to overlay his map-in-song of local space with their map-in-curved-space time. It was interesting, because not even the relative significance of objects was the same; for Leslie, a bright object was of more significance than a dark object. For the birdcages, the emphasis lay on heavy objects, although their scale of reference was fine enough that objects no more massive than Leslie's fist registered at a distance, and up close they could sense on a fine enough scale to read the text on his space suit by the different specific gravity of the letters compared to unmarked portions.

It was promising. If they could only be made to understand the concept of symbology, and of words, he might be able to start establishing a pidgin. If the boredom didn't kill him first.

It wouldn't have been so bad if Leslie actually had nothing to do. He could have sat back, played long-distance draughts with Charlie, and dreamed of good lager. Unfortunately, the interior of the shiptree was exactly where he needed to be right now, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it except ride resolutely behind Charlie's eyes and swear quietly in his ear.

This was what he had come for. Charlie and Jeremy had discovered an environment — an entire ecosystem—populated by dozens of never-before-seen species, all of them seemingly communicating in some matter that was neither intuitively obvious nor easily dismissable. Leslie's dream, his obsession, his life's work, spread out for him like a banquet on the other side of a wall of shatterproof glass. He could see through Charlie's eyes, hear through his ears, lay his hands on something as if Leslie ran his own hands over the surface. Charlie's body became, for Leslie, a sort of almost-perfect remote drone or probe.

But it wasn't the same as being there. And it got in the way of Charlie doing his own work, too.

Richard helped out as best he could, keeping Leslie supplied with live images of Earth, of Piper Orbital Platform, of a 3NN anchor providing analysis of Frye's “explosive” testimony, and of the birdcage and the shiptree hanging calmly in the void, of the Gordon Lightfoot bright with reflected sunlight, a single sharp-edged dot like the morning star, still synchronized with the vaster, darker shape of the shiptree. He also let Leslie watch his own view of the Montreal's bridge — full of people, unusually so for a ship not under way. Genie was on her way through with her HCD in her hand, headed for the pilot's ready room that was now her exclusive domain. Wainwright was in her chair, sipping coffee and going over reports.

Leslie's fingers itched, and he suddenly wished he'd screamed for rescue, twisted the captain's arm until she yelped. Third time's the charm. He wanted to be where Charlie and Jeremy were, doing what they were doing, not somewhere bodiless, cold and eyeless in the dark.

Greedy, he reprimanded. He might not be able to see, or feel, or even feel his body — Richard assured him the suit was still intact, that the Benefactors were still keeping him breathing in there somehow, as bizarre and unsustainable as that seemed — but he could sense things no human had ever sensed before: The weight of the Montreal and the shiptree curving space time. The gravity well of the sun, like a mountain looming on the horizon, the foothills that were the Earth and the moon, the local flickers and fluctuations of the birdcage aliens surrounding him, manipulating epic forces on a scale as precise as the stroke of a surgical scalpel, in patterns modulated and refined to echo themes he gave them.

Playing him the music of the spheres.

He wouldn't permit himself to remember that the odds were a thousand to one that he was going to die out here.

You're where you belong. And you'll get home somehow.

Eventually.

In the meantime, he kept himself busy talking to Charlie, and to Jeremy — through Charlie — and writing exhaustive reports on the data he could collect in between Charlie's xenobiological pursuits. Although, right this instant, both of them were too focused on Dick's feed-via-Casey of what was going on in New York for either one of them to be accomplishing a lot.

There's something to be said for hive minds, Leslie thought.

Charlie didn't have to look up from his perusal of a recovered feather—feather-analogue—to engage the conversation. Ours, or the shiptree's?

Don't you think two hive minds would be a bit coincidental?

There is that. Charlie hooked a toe under a projecting root to keep from drifting, curling his legs to hunch himself closer to the tree-analogue he was examining. Leslie's kinetic sense wanted to echo the movement, wanted to feel his muscles stretch and play as Charlie's did. Bad enough he found himself imagining breathing hard when Charlie clambered around the chambered arboretum that seemed to comprise the majority of the shiptree's interior. And frankly, I'm not sure what we have here is a hive mind, so much as a Gaia-type intelligence. The whole ecosystem, including the ship, seems to function as one beastie; not a threaded intelligence, like Dick, and not separated intelligences, like humans, and not a single big unified brain split into however many bodies it happens to need at a given moment, as I suspect the birdcages are, but something more like the internal structure of the human mind, where various sections handle various functions autonomously, irrespective of whether the consciousness knows what's going on at all.

So you're suggesting this thing's reptile brain is—

Actually housed in a reptile. More or less. Yeah. Charlie's knees ground as he straightened his legs, letting himself drift. Leslie winced in sympathy. Or maybe a shrubbery. The plants are awfully friendly around here. He brushed away a vine that tried to twine around his waist.

And how do they communicate, then?

Leslie felt the shrug as Charlie continued. Chemically? Electrically? Same way your brain does, I guess. Jeremy's done a little poking around here and there; not only is the air we're not breathing a soup of pheromones, but there's nanosurgeons through all this plant life and the whole thing is threaded with conductive material. Heck, if I'm right, the buckytubes that give the thing's hull its tensile strength are also its brain. Based on Richard's theory that all you need for consciousness is the right kind of piezoelectric activity in any sort of substrate that will support it, buckytubes are ideal, as long as they have neurons and synapses. More or less.

“I'm not defining consciousness this week,” Richard said.

Good. Then I won't have to wrestle you for my Nobel Prize. Charlie reached out and caught the branches of a tree-analogue in his gauntleted fist, wiping beads of condensation off his face plate. Dammit. I've had it with this suit. Still nothing doing with the culture plates?

“Charlie,” Richard said, “I'd prefer you waited the full eleven days. I don't like you risking yourself unnecessarily.”

I don't like risking myself at all, Charlie replied. But we've established there's nothing toxic to earthling life in here. The proteins and sugars even twist the right way. And I've got a belly full of alien nanosurgeons that should be able to handle anything I might get myself into. If I wasn't thinking hard about Persephone and Eve, I'd even consider taking a bite out of one of those things that look like azure figs.

You sound like you're talking yourself into something, Chaz. Leslie needed to walk. It was driving him nuts that he couldn't stuff his hands in his pockets and go for a stroll.

Oh, hell, Charlie answered. He reached through the canopy and grasped an outgrowth of the chamber's glowing wall, strands of light sliding through disarrayed greenery. I've already talked myself into it. What's the worst that could happen?

“At least go back to Jeremy and the base camp—” Richard said, but Charlie shrugged inside his space suit again and pushed himself away from the bulkhead, setting himself adrift.

Jeremy would just get in the way, he said, reasonably. Besides, we figured out how to talk to the birdcages when we got swallowed and chewed up a bit, and Les and I are both fine.

Sure. Psychically linked and chock-full of alien micromachines, and I'm stuck in orbit with a space suit that's being renewed by alien tech the only thing keeping me alive, and I can't feel my body. But just peachy, all in all. Chaz—

Trust me, Leslie, Charlie said, and tripped the latches on his helmet with gauntlet-awkward thumbs.

Leslie held his breath, his hands clutching uselessly on nothing but the fabric of his gauntlets as Charlie lifted the helmet aside, as if he could force Charlie to hold his in sympathy, as if—

Charlie blinked, his eyes immediately scratchy and red, and spoke out loud. “Well, I'm allergic to the flower-analogues. The air smells clean. Green, moist — damn, there's a lot of ‘pollen.'”

Are you sure you don't want to put your hat back on?

“Yeah,” he said. Leslie could feel the sneeze building in the back of Charlie's throat, and to be honest, it did feel just like a snoot full of dust and plant sex. And the air did smell glorious through Charlie's nose, fresh and cool and redolent of sweet strange flowers, gingery and complex. “Huh. I'd strip off the rest of my suit, but I don't want to haul it back. Oh, damn.”

Charlie's head went back, his lungs filled with a breath taken for a deep and violent sneeze—

And he vanished like a blown-out candle, completely and painlessly gone. Leslie reached for Richard, and Richard wasn't there. Dick?

Dick?

Nothing. Richard, can you hear me? Bugger all—

His fists clenched hard, hard enough that the lining of his gauntlets cut his hands. Which was when he realized he could feel them, feel his stomach clenching on nothing, the aching head, weird clarity, and nausea that he knew from past experience was the next step after the sharp pangs of unassuaged hunger.

When Richard fell out of her head, Genie almost sat down on the floor. Her knees went wobbly and she clutched wildly about herself before her left hand connected with the wall. She tottered, but stayed up. It wasn't that she didn't know how to do anything without Richard, really. It was just that she had gotten used to not ever being alone.

She turned, wild-eyed, and yelled for Richard out loud, already knowing she'd get no answer. She raised her eyes, glanced around the monitors, found herself staring at Wainwright. The captain locked her gaze on Genie, standing in front of the chair she'd bolted out of, the hand that wasn't still holding her coffee cup open and turned aside as if she expected at any moment to receive an explanation in the palm of it.

Genie's eyes felt big as softballs, her hair trembling against her cheeks as she shook her head jerkily before Wainwright could ask her question. “Captain.”

“Can you explain to me why the hell”—Genie flinched, and the captain softened her voice—“why I can't get ahold of my AI, please?”

“Oh,” Genie said, wiping sweat from her palms. “Captain, the worldwire is down.”

Wainwright's eyes got as big as Genie's felt. She managed not to drop her coffee cup, but she turned on the ball of her foot and started chipping orders off like bits of a block of ice.

Genie was already moving by the time Captain Wainwright turned around, looking for her. Genie's feet wanted to glue to the floor. She wanted to back into a corner and shake, because the look on Wainwright's face was like the look on Elspeth's face when Elspeth shook her awake and dragged her out of bed in her pajamas, the night Toronto died. The night Leah died.

And Genie not only couldn't feel Richard anymore — she couldn't feel Patty, or Aunt Jenny, or Charlie — or anybody else on the worldwire either. She was all by herself. “Is everything going to be okay?”

“I don't know…” And then the captain sort of paused, and sort of settled into herself, as if she had gotten just a little more solid, a little more real. As if she'd just remembered she was the captain. “Yes,” Wainwright said. “It will. You know what I think you should do?”

Genie shook her head. She would have said something, but she could tell already that her voice would just come out a squeak.

“I think you should go to your father's lab and find him or Elspeth. And tell them I sent you, because he's going to be trying to get hold of Richard, and maybe you can help.”

“Because Papa's not on the worldwire.”

“Right.”

Genie drew one big breath and let it out through her teeth before she nodded. “All right,” she said. “Be careful, okay?”

The captain blinked, and her eyes went dark and soft. “Cross my heart. You, too.”

“I will.” And then she thought of something. “Captain?”

Wainwright had already started turning back to her crew; the look she shot Genie was halfway between that softness and professional ice. “What is it?”

“Did you try calling Charlie or Jeremy on the radio?”

The captain's eyebrow rose. “A fine idea, young lady. Now follow orders. Off the bridge.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Genie turned back around and ran.

It was weird not to have Richard in her head, weird not to be able to reach out to him and have him tell Elspeth and Papa that she was coming. She could have used the intercom, she guessed, but she didn't want to stop that long. And a good thing she decided not to, because the alarm for general quarters sounded when she was one turn and half a passageway from Papa's lab. She leaned forward and sprinted with everything she had.

The pressure doors didn't come down, which was what she'd been scared of, but she still had to lean against the wall beside the hatch to the lab panting before she could get enough breath to grab the wheel. She didn't bother to knock or push the buzzer before she undogged the hatch, just swung it open and called inside, the alarm worrying at her ears.

“Genie!” Elspeth was inside, right by the door. She must have started coming as soon as she saw the wheel turn. She reached out and dragged Genie over the kneeknocker. Genie let Elspeth dog the hatch before asking any questions. Her papa only looked up from his console long enough to flash her a strained smile, and then glanced back down again, fingers flickering through his interface, the red, green, and violet holograms dying his skin. “Where's Boris?” Elspeth asked.

“In my room.” Genie wrapped her arms around Elspeth's shoulders and hung on tight. She was almost as tall, these days. In another year, she'd be taller. Elspeth hugged her back, distracted. “How come all the alarms?”

Papa looked up again, but didn't turn, and his hands didn't stop moving. Oh, no, Genie thought, and stepped back to look right at Elspeth, hoping Elspeth would say something to change what Genie was afraid she already knew.

“There's something going on, on the ground,” Elspeth said, in that quiet I'm-not-going-to-lie-to-you voice. “We don't know what, exactly. But there are reports on the Net that there's been gunfire inside the United Nations building, and they've shut off the streets around it—”

“And Richard's gone all quiet,” Genie finished.

Elspeth nodded.

“Are you scared, Ellie?”

“It's better now you're here,” Elspeth said, so Genie gave Elspeth an extra-big hug, just in case.

There's no two ways about it. I've lost my edge.

Which is a hell of a thing to realize when you're crouched under a table, every sense straining, covering a cowering head-of-state with your body, a bleeding general prone on your left side and a couple of teenaged kids huddled together on your right, and all hell breaking loose in every direction.

It's been a couple of seconds since the shouting stopped, and I listen through the noise of another three-shot burst that doesn't come near us. All around, I hear the rustling clothes and staccato breathing of cowering dignitaries, sharp calls in languages I don't recognize, one soft, bitten-off animal moan, the floor-shaking rumble and hysterical screams of the people who ran for the doors instead of diving for cover, and who are now caught in the bottleneck.

I wonder how the hell they got the weapons in here.

I wonder how the hell we're going to get out.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” Riel says against my chest, pushing my uniform off her nose with the flat of her hand.

“I wouldn't mind so much if, next time, you could arrange to be assassinated when I was armed.”

Valens chuffs like a big cat, a sound halfway between a laugh and a gasp. I twist my neck to glance at him; the idiot's shoved himself onto his back and red seeps thickly around the fist he's pressed into his gut. His face is chalky yellow-green, the color of mold on cheese. Our eyes meet, and I don't say anything, and neither does he. No need. It's nothing he can't survive, if we get him into surgery before he bleeds to death, and he and I both know it.

I bet he's in agony, though. I wonder if he ever thought he'd get gutshot diving across a table to take a bullet for Constance Riel. He was luckier than the Mountie that soaked up the rest of the clip, at least.

Riel looks like staying flat to the floor, at least; no idiot, our Connie. “So you could help?” she says, and doesn't try to ease her shoulders off the floor, even though she's lying in a puddle of red that's rapidly thickening to the consistency of ketchup. Hell, at least she keeps her sense of humor under fire.

“Hah. Patty, you and Min-xue all right over there?”

He's got her pressed to the floor much the same way I have Riel down, except Patty's on her belly, and Min-xue is absolutely shuddering with the effort of holding his body against hers. His eyes are squinched up tight; he looks out between ink-slash lashes, head tilted and his slick straight hair brushing the carpeting as he peers under the privacy panel on the front of the desk, straining after whatever it is that neither of us can see.

“Not hurt, Jenny.” Patty's scared enough that she doesn't hesitate before my first name. “I can't reach Alan, though.”

“I know. I can't reach Richard either.” The worldwire might as well be gone. Just gone. Which isn't reassuring at all.

“Michel,” Riel says, and at first I have no idea who she's talking about. “My bodyguard.”

Her eyes darken when I shake my head. That's all his blood we're lying in, except maybe a pint or so of Fred's. “I don't believe they're shooting up the UN to get you, Connie. The United Nations. That's some amazing shit. Congrats.”

“Did anybody get a look at who was shooting?” She's trying to inch forward and peer under the privacy panel. I squish her against the floor as another three-shot burst splinters wood over our heads.

“Xiong.” Valens scrunches under the table. “Did you see how the UN security went down? Like somebody cut their strings.”

“Lie the hell still, Fred, before the rest of your guts ooze out between your fingers.”

He doesn't laugh, which is good, because laughing would hurt him like a son of a bitch right about now, and he stops paddling his heels against the carpet and trying to crawl on his shoulder blades. Patty squeaks, though, and I wince at my own brutal choice of words. Sorry, kid.

Ah, hell. She might as well get used to it now.

Riel starts to say something, but it's cut off by a string of liquid syllables from Min-xue. He swears sharply in a language I don't recognize — I know it's swearing by the tone — and then shakes his head, black hair sweeping his forehead like a rattled curtain. “Not Xiong,” he says.

“It was Xiong's bodyguards that had the guns.” Riel, proving her powers of observation.

Valens, wheezing. “Is she dead?”

“Janet? She took at least two in the chest.”

“Quel domage,” Riel mutters, and Fred gags on a noise that's got to be flavored with blood. “If they hadn't decided to take Janet out first, we wouldn't be having this conversation.”

“They didn't take her out fast enough to keep her from spilling the beans on Hardy,” Fred mutters. I wish he'd stop talking. It hurts to listen to him.

“If only she'd gotten to whatever she had to say about the Americans and the Chinese.” The blood is cold by the time it seeps through my pants legs, sticking the cloth to my knees. I wish I could say it's the most disgusting thing I've ever felt. “There's still four people out there with guns and security is lying on the floor, looking like their hearts stopped. How the hell do the Chinese plan to explain away Xiong's involvement?”

“That's just it,” Riel begins, and Min-xue says at the same time. “Did anybody see the minister of war before the shooting?”

General silence, which Riel takes for general agreement. Typical. Bitch. “He came in with Xiong and the PanChinese. He got up and left when Janet took the stand.”

“I believe Premier Xiong is intended to be a casualty as well,” Min-xue murmurs, still shuddering like a racehorse in the gate although his tone is level — as if his brain were utterly divorced from the demands of his body. He brushes a strand of hair out of Patty's eyes with the back of one white-gloved hand.

Yeah, I think I'm a fucking tough girl. Balls of sterling plated brass. Bullshit, baby: look at that kid. “A casualty?”

“Or a… how do you say—”

“Scapegoat.”

“Thank you, Patricia.” He shakes his head. “We must rescue Premier Xiong as well, if we can. If he is not already dead.”

“Not possible—”

“Casey.” Riel's breath cools my cheek. “It's got to happen.”

“Bien sûr.” I sigh. “I won't leave you unprotected, ma'am.”

“Miss Valens and I will make a run for it while you and Pilot Xie distract the Chinese assassins and attempt to rescue Premier Xiong. Much as I hate to suggest it, if you get a chance, check Janet for a pulse as well.”

The sorely tried resignation in her voice makes me chuckle, despite the clotting iron reek of blood filling my sinuses. All right then. I catch Patty's eye, and Patty nods. I nod back and turn to Valens. “Fred, if Patty and Constance break for the door and get lost in the mob while Min-xue and I go for Xiong—”

“That leaves me bleeding under a table. Follow orders, Jen.”

Patty doesn't make a sound. She nods, and so does Min-xue.

Damn Fred Valens. Damn him to hell.

“There's one more thing,” said Riel, and how I've come to hate her calm, level voice in just a few short moments.

“What's that?”

“The Chinese assassins? If my intelligence is good, they're probably wired as fast as Min-xue.”

Fuck me raw. I'm impressed with myself that I don't say it out loud. I glance at Min-xue again; we can hear the footsteps coming closer, over the panicked-cattle noise of the mob by the doors. Patty and Connie might get trampled instead of shot.

I reach out and squeeze Fred's hand. The hand he doesn't have fisted into his leaking belly, the squeeze delivered with my metal one. “You know what they say…”

Blood stains his mouth. I wish I hadn't seen that. “Yeah. When in doubt, empty the magazine.”

“That might be comforting if I had a fucking weapon, sir.” I lift my weight off Connie; she reaches up to assist with two hands on my shoulders. “When Min and I go over the top, you ladies run like bunnies. Hop hop hop.”

“Don't worry, Casey. You don't need to tell me twice.”

Dammit, Dick, I think, fretfully, and get ready to run.

Once Dr. Fitzpatrick had been raised and the XO had reported, Wainwright ordered the klaxon killed on the bridge. She still heard it echoing through the hatchcover, however, as she settled herself in her chair. The nanonetwork might be down and her ship uncontrolled, drifting in orbit without the access to propulsion or attitude jets, but she was far from isolated.

The problem was, there was nothing to do but sit tight. Nothing to do right now, except think. She stared at the screen array on the far wall. The Montreal, the shiptree, and Piper Orbital Platform, currently, but she could have any view in the solar system, subject to light-speed lag.

How quickly she'd gotten used to immediate communication, instantaneous advice. She's started relying on Richard far more than she should have. And not just Richard; Richard's ability to poll a handful of others and give her a quick consensus view.

Well, she didn't have that now. And she didn't have a 3-D starship captain's gadget of the week with the sponsor's logo prominently displayed on the barrel, ready to be deployed in time to save the world by the commercial break. What she had was a disabled ship drifting in an orbit that would begin to decay uncomfortably soon if she didn't regain control — although they could use shuttlecraft as tugs if it came down to it, or send an EVA team out to angle the solar sails manually. Her crew on the shiptree was probably safer there than here, even if Fitzpatrick couldn't raise Charlie on the suit radio. Unless something had happened to Charlie, of course. Unless something had happened to Dr. Tjakamarra and Casey and Patricia Valens, as well, the crew members who were on the worldwire, when the worldwire went down. Genie Castaign had been fine — dazed, a little confused. But Genie's nanosurgery had been corrective only. And it was complete, unlike the pilots, who were being reconstructed as fast as their amped-up bodies could damage themselves.

Oh. A chill settled between Wainwright's shoulder blades; she raised her eyes to the monitors again. The worldwire going down might not hurt Genie. It wouldn't even hurt the Montreal, in the long run, once the vast ship could be rewired and the fiberoptic and carbon cables that Richard had disassembled replaced. It might not even do any damage to the Feynman AI, she told herself, as she called up a thermal image of the Calgary crash site to assure that the reactors were still live.

But anybody who had been undergoing nanosurgery when the crash came was as dead as if somebody had pulled the plug on his respirator. And she was staring right at the biggest, sickest patient of them all. She stood. “Give me an earth view. Full earth, whichever orbital platform has most of the Sun side.”

It was Clarke. She should have known that. The view was North and South America, cloud-swirled oceans and mouse-tinged atmosphere, the landmasses gray-white with unseasonal snowfall, the grasping outline of North America indistinguishable from clouds and ice. The oceans were steel-gray and cadet-blue. Even the clouds had a jaundiced cast, through the shroud of dust.

It was ridiculous, of course, to think that any change would be visible yet. Even if the worldwire failed catastrophically, even if Richard's intervention in the planetary ecosystem had just come to a crashing halt, it would be months, maybe years before the damage showed. Planets were great ponderous things, changing on scales barely noticeable in the span of a human life.

Months, at the inside estimate. Years.

“Captain,” her XO said, very calmly. “I realize this probably isn't the time for this, but we've got a communiqué from ground control in Calgary. They want to know if we can get some telescopic shots of the northeastern seaboard; a research trawler off Newfoundland just blundered into the middle of a shoal of dead fish, and Clarke doesn't have an angle on it due to cloud cover. They're wondering if we can tell them how widespread it is. Shall I tell them we won't be able to, ma'am? Nobody seems to have told them there's a crisis underway.”

Months. She forced her hands to uncurl, unknot from the fists they'd somehow tightened into. It could be nothing. It could be completely unrelated.

For a moment, she was tempted to tell him yes, go ahead, tell them they have to wait. Turn off the cameras. Don't go looking for everything else that's probably going wrong. As if, if she didn't look, it wouldn't be real.

“No,” she said. “Let's have a look at those fish. And get the ship's entomologist and botanist up here, shall we? And Dr. Perry, too. He's an ecologist; he can earn his keep for a change. And tell ground control they need to get in touch with the cabinet, if they can't reach the prime minister in New York, and they're going to want a couple of climatologists with security clearances, and get me a thermal map of the oceans and water vapor shots of the atmosphere, and anything else you can think of that might be useful.”

She felt as if she stood over her own left shoulder, watching, soothed by her own voice of command, as her bridge crew also seemed to be. Exactly as if what she was ordering would make any difference. Exactly as if they could do anything at all, except stand there and watch as the planet thrashed and died.

I wonder if the condemned man has enough time to regret refusing the blindfold? she thought, before she squared her shoulders under the navy-blue uniform and went to do her job.

Now, finally, space was terribly quiet, and Leslie was terribly alone. There was a half an hour's power left in his batteries and he was weak, shivering cold, clear-headed with hunger although the Benefactors had managed to provide him with oxygen and water. They'd given him back his body, he realized, in time for him to let him know that he was going to die. He wondered if the aliens had a concept akin to making one's peace with God. He wondered if they had the concept of death, when they were all of the same creature, one intimately connected mind.

He wondered if they understood that they had killed him.

No. He couldn't think like that. He had his hands back, and his eyes, and his space suit checked out fully functional except the radio and the redlined energy levels, and—

— and he hadn't lost one fragment of the peculiar kinesis he'd inherited from the birdcages, the sense of the whole solar system spinning around him like a clockwork model, like a timepiece assembled by Einstein's watchmaker god. He could still feel it in his gut, rooted in his body as concrete and as invisible as an angel's wings rooted in the angel's shoulders.

He also wondered if the birdcages could see through his eyes, now, could hear through his ears, as he felt through their nameless organs of sense. He hoped so. He hoped they could see the way the sunlight refracted through the bars and the veils of their ship, casting rainbows over the entire interior. He hoped they could see how lovely they were, their bodies merging and separating again like drops of mercury shaken on a plate.

His wondering was answered when the shimmering veils between the struts of the birdcage vanished like popped soap bubbles, revealing the Montreal, the shiptree, and the brown-gray marbled sphere of the Earth behind them, all limned from behind with sunrise. Leslie caught his breath as slanted rays dusted his faceplate with gold and refracted in sprays of color through the prismed latticework that was all that stood between him and naked space, and he felt as if all the voices within him caught their breaths as well — not that they had voices, in particular, or breaths. Yes, he thought. This is my world. This is what light looks like, my friends.

The shiptree was right there, so close he could see the whorls of light along its plume-shaped length. He could feel it out there, feel it press against the curve of space, as if he could reach out and touch it. Oh, if Richard could see this—

Leslie started smiling inside his helmet almost before the idea finished unraveling. Maybe he couldn't tell the Benefactors what he needed. But maybe he could show them.

He wasn't finished yet. He shaped the map for them, let them feel it in his mind. Showed them the way the mass of his body would move, from the birdcage to the shiptree, and asked them for their help in getting there.

And they sang in his head, the answer, the throb and cadence of their voices that were not voices, but a sensation like the press and lift of the surf. (go) they would have said, if what they said was words. (Go) and (go) and (heal) and (go) and (rejoin your mind) and (go) and (heal) and (go) and (come and sing to us again)…

(Come and sing to us again)…

“I will,” Leslie answered. And so they pushed him forward, into night.

When Min-xue lifted himself off her back, Patty was ready for it. She got her toes under her and her hand on the prime minister's wrist and tugged while Min-xue and Jenny crouched scuttling toward the end of the long line of curved tables, and hauled Riel into a squat with an ease that surprised them both. They froze, eye to eye, and Riel licked her lips, her bloodied business suit rising and falling with measured breaths. Riel ducked at a popping, scattered sound. Patty didn't realize it was gunfire until Riel's palm flattened her head against Riel's shoulder, holding her under the level of the tabletop. It won't stop bullets. Will it stop bullets? Alan?

They leaned together hard, but the flat shattering impacts arced away from them, in pursuit of Min-xue and Jenny. The bullets weren't anywhere close; Patty leaned out for a quick glance as the other two pilots clambered over floor-hugging diplomats, leapfrogging each other like 3-D cops. Alan?

Alan still wasn't there.

“Where the hell is security?” Riel asked. “They can't have bought everybody.”

Which was right, wasn't it? The General Assembly hall should be full of men and women with guns. Men and women on their side, security who worked for the UN. “I don't know. I don't know where Alan is either. I don't know—”

“Hell,” Riel said, softly. “The Chinese did something to the security forces. Nanotech, poison, something, something weaponized, I don't know…” her voice trailed off.

“Why them and not us?”

“They got to them. We've been unavailable. This is the part where they're trying to get to us.”

Riel's grip tightened on Patty's wrist, and Patty ducked back under cover. She'd gotten a look at the way the wood of the desk fronts had splintered when the gunfire struck them. “The tables won't stop a bullet.”

“Might.” Papa Fred didn't lift his head off the floor when he spoke, and his voice was thready with pain, but it was strong. “That's small-caliber stuff. Just keep your heads down and run.”

Good advice. Easy advice. If his blood wasn't all over her hands and knees — okay, it wasn't, maybe, all his own blood, some of it was the Mountie's, but some of it was—

Breathe, Patty. She squeezed Riel's hand, and Riel squeezed hers back, and she realized that the prime minister was shaking just as hard as she was. That helped, somehow, despite the blood squishing in her shoes, her stockings sliding against wet greasy leather. Riel glanced left and right, and leaned forward like a sprinter from her crouch. She'd kicked her shoes off, the pearl-gray high heels tumbled on their sides, and blood scattered her feet as if she'd done a particularly terrible job with her toenail polish. “Ready?”

“Go!” Terse and low, and Patty lunged out of her stoop into a cramped, crablike run, ears straining, zigzagging up the long naked aisle and hauling Riel along behind her, both of them ducking and skidding and trying like hell not to trip over any of the people huddled against the edges of the furniture or over any of the furniture itself.

This time the gunfire was for real. Not intermittent, but staccato, a rhythmless drumbeat that hurried her feet and kept her head ducked between her shoulders. Riel wasn't fast enough, and it was no good dragging her. The bad guys were behind them, still spread around the area where the PanChinese delegation had been sitting. Jenny, where are you? Jenny Jenny Jenny—

Quit waiting for somebody else to save you, Patricia, she snarled to herself, and grabbed a startled Riel by the wrist and shoulder and pushed her ahead, getting her own body in between the prime minister and the bullets, the way Papa Fred and the Mountie had. Patty laughed as she did it, realizing that her own life might be as important in the long run, especially if Alan and Richard were — she didn't think dead. Not dead, because they couldn't be dead. They hadn't ever been alive.

If Alan and Richard weren't coming back, Patty and Jenny and Min-xue were the only pilots Canada had left. If Min-xue was really Canadian. Which hadn't been settled yet.

Oh. I bet it was worth it to the Chinese, if they could get all three of us, and Riel, and the Chinese guy who shook her hand and smiled—

Yeah. She could see how that would be worth a really big risk. Especially if you had a way to get guns and wired fighters inside the UN. But it didn't matter. It was her job to get Riel out alive. Riel and herself, and to trust Jenny and Min-xue to save themselves, and Papa Fred.

Who saves me? Well, of course. Patty had to save herself.

The gunfire stopped and she heard somebody yell, and somebody hit somebody. She heard running footsteps behind her, gaining fast, coming up the aisle the same way she and Riel had.

It wasn't going to work. They weren't going to make it to the door before he caught up with them, and the mob was still shoving through it anyway. Riel was already turning around, ducking into the shelter of another long curved row of desks, when Patty realized that she'd run out of time.

It was dark where the Feynman AI collectively found himself — what threads he was able to maintain, as a crash reduction in resources caused him to slough most of himself in a frantic effort to regain stability — and it was very, very still. The transition was shockingly fast, even — especially — by his inhuman standards. Instantaneous, not a word Richard chose lightly.

He reached out, pushed hard, was pressed back into the confines of his prison. No. Not a prison… and not pressed back. Not even blocked. It was as if the worldwire had simply ceased to exist, like those nightmares small children have that the world will vanish if it's not watched every instant. As if he'd sailed to the edge of the globe and had nowhere to go. As if he couldn't even step over that edge and fall.

His first thought was sheer frustration as he realized that nineteen-twentieths of his processing capability and all of his access to the physical world had been cut away. The second reaction was self-amused chagrin at how simply goddamned spoiled he had become, on the verge of a sulk because he couldn't reach around the world with a flick of his will. You have no time for this, he reminded himself, speaking for and to all the Richards and Alans and the unnamed processes and personas as well.

He was a distributed intelligence. It was highly unlikely that he could have been walled into some corner of the worldwire, or even of the Net, and even more unlikely that every other corner of his consciousness could have been purged simultaneously, with the flick of a switch. Which meant that somehow, somebody — the Benefactors, the PanChinese, or another power — had found a way to disrupt the quantum communication that bound the worldwire together and made the nanonetwork more than a mass of individual, aimless microscopic machines.

Bits of the Feynman AI — of Richard/Alan/Other — lived in every nanomachine on the planet. Well, not every one; the limited PanChinese network was still largely protected from his influence, and of course there were the machines he allowed to run their original program, such as the ones that Charlie had been using for his ecological experiments.

The ones that Charlie had been using.

The machines that had been… shutting off from the worldwire, inexplicably. The machines that had had their communications disrupted, that had been somehow severed from the quantum communication that networked all the machines, even the Benefactor machines, together — whether their programming was compatible or not.

Richard actually paused to consider that for a full two-hundredths of a second. And then he set about quite coldly, quite frantically attacking the question of just where the hell his consciousness was bottled up, and how to get a message out.

And he had to do it fast. Had to do it now, because if he wasn't in the worldwire, then the chances were that the worldwire was coming down like an unbraced scaffolding, and it would be taking the planet's entire ecosystem with it.

He was the ghost of Richard Feynman, dammit. The Harry Houdini of twentieth-century physics. The box hadn't been devised that could lock him in.

Mother of Christ, wasn't I supposed to be enjoying a quiet grave by now? The requirement to have adventures and be shot at should expire on one's fiftieth birthday, if not sooner.

And yet, here we go again.

At least Min-xue knows what he's doing. There must have been combat training in his past somewhere; at least basic, and probably something a little more advanced, judging by the way he belly-crawls along the aisle, head down, butt down, and drawing fire away from Patty and Riel. Not drawing enough fire, though, dammit; Riel yelps as one gets a little close and I can't turn around to see if they nailed her. But I still hear running in that direction and bad guys are still shooting past my position at something more interesting behind me. That's a good sign. Well, as such things go.

There's something about gunfire that makes me meditative. I wish the lights had all gone out dramatically when the shooting started, because then I could kick in the low-light capability in my prosthetic eye and have an advantage.

An advantage I need acutely, right now. Pity I'm not gonna get it. Ah well. At least it gives me something to bitch about. Gabe always did say that what soldiers did best, was bitch. And I argued that bitching was a second, after humping packs—

Fight now, Jenny. Compose your autobiography another day.

Besides, Min-xue's getting ahead of me, and it's my turn to leapfrog his position. My brain scampers on ahead, working so hard I forget the texture of the rug under my left hand, the stickiness of blood drying on my knees. Matson always used to say your brain's your best weapon, soldier. Use it. Name your weapons. Name your enemies. Name your objectives. Use A to get through B to C. What are you gonna do?

I'm trying, Sarge. You don't have to spit in my face.

I can track the bad guys by the sound of their weapons: four of them, I think. Small-arms fire, and small caliber. Well, maybe nine millimeter. Which doesn't make me happy, of course, but at least they only have handguns, and not big handguns — however the hell they got them in here — and they're being careful about firing now. Which means their ammo is limited.

Which is all the good. Or as good as it gets, anyway. But if you were gonna smuggle in guns, why would you smuggle in nine-mils, and not a crateful of automatics? Damn. I just don't know.

I'm up on Min-xue. He lies flat as I clamber past him, a bullet flicking sawdust into my hair when I risk a peek over the top of the desk. We've worked our way one aisle over; the enemy have taken cover behind the podium and the secretary's table at the back of the stage. Which means Frye's probably dead, and possibly the secretary general, too.

Be a pity if she is. I liked her handshake, and her hair.

But why did they run for the stage when they were already standing by Xiong? And then I remember the unobtrusive uniformed security officers collapsing like so many tipped over dominos, and I curse under my breath. Well, at least I know where they got the guns. They must have had some way to hack security's palm locks. They didn't bring the guns in. They took them away.

I risk another look as Min-xue crawls past, get a glimpse of muzzle flash, and duck fast. The bullet parts my hair. Another splinters wood off the desk, but doesn't come through.

They're definitely conserving their fire. “They're good shots at this range, with pistols.”

“They would be,” Min-xue says. “They're elite.”

“And wired.”

“Yes.”

“How about some good news?”

“Is that meant to indicate that you can provide some?”

I glance over. He's laughing at me, the son of a bitch — a silent, straight-faced laugh, but the curl at the corner of his lip and the dark flash of his eyes give him away. “Hah. Don't play poker, son. Yeah, I think I can provide some. I think if we can get our hands on those guns, we can use them, too.”

A moment's silence while he considers that. “No palm locks?”

It's gotten awful quiet out there. That's not reassuring. “I think they cracked the locks.” Straining my ears until I swear I can feel them swivel, I push myself into a crouch. Min-xue gets his toes under him when he sees what I'm doing, both of us ready to push. He looks at me and I look at him.

We've got that aisle, and a bank of desks between us and the podium. What the hell, right? It's not like we're going to get a better chance. Maybe they're out of ammo.

And maybe they're taking advantage of us hiding under cover, and using the lull to run up on Patty and Riel.

“Go?” he asks me, quiet and self-assured in a way I'd even believe, if I hadn't been inside his head.

But I guess I come across that way myself, until you get to know me. “Go,” I answer, and bolt from our hiding place, half a second before Patty screams.

The blood's worn off the soles of my shoes. I don't slip when I slap my meat hand against the top of the desk and propel myself over it, tuck — not as neatly as Min-xue, who moves like an acrobat in gravity, too — roll, take the fall on my shoulder, and come up like a snake, face to face with a surprised assassin.

No, he didn't expect that at all.

Pity he's the one with the gun.

I trigger, and the world rattles to a halt jerk-jerk-jerk like somebody's let go the dead-man's handle. My last thought before the programmed reflexes kick in is: Min-xue lives like this all the time.

Casey was slower than Min-xue expected: no quicker than a fast, agile, athletic normal woman half her age. Slower, that is, until she lunged to her feet under the nearest assassin, rolling onto her toes, glittering left hand slapping a bullet out of the air like she was taking a backhanded swipe at a badminton birdie, right one doubled into a fist that slammed into her opponent's solar plexus while Min-xue was still closing the distance to his.

An unaugmented human would have seen a blur. Min-xue saw her opponent double over, drop his pistol, grab hold of Casey's arm, and roll over it, disengaging, getting away.

Fast, too. Faster than Casey, if she hadn't caught him flat-footed. Faster maybe than Min-xue. He took another half a step toward them, but Casey had the gun, and her opponent was twisting like a cat to come up on his feet.

And there were three more armed men in the room, and behind him, Patricia shouted again — not surprise and fear this time, but fury, and the sound was divided by the report of a gun.

Min-xue turned on the ball of his foot, jumped over a cowering attaché in a baize-green suit, landed in a crouch as something seared his thigh in passing, and slung himself over the railing toward the podium and the enemy who had just stood up from behind it to level his gun. One of the enemy's comrades rose from the cover of the secretary's table, gun leveled. Military tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downward.

A useless piece of advice, when the battle was already joined, and the fighting ran uphill.

The sound of bones cracking couldn't distract him. Casey and Patty were on their own. Min-xue dove left, buying whatever cover he could from the shooter behind the podium, getting that shooter's body between himself and the man farther back. He scrabbled forward, clawed under a desk, the creased thigh burning, another bullet chipping off an interface plate and sending fat blue sparks lazing through the air like dragons' tongues and chrysanthemum clusters. He crawled through them, skinny enough to weasel under the privacy panel, and hesitated behind the last row of desks.

Min-xue's last cover.

He grabbed two deep breaths, vaulted the obstacle, and, zigzagging, rushed the guns.

Jeremy met Charlie halfway back to base camp and knocked Charlie into a spiral when he clouted him on the head. Charlie spun back against a web of vines and branches, almost bounced out again, and clung until the greenery stopped shaking. He didn't dare laugh, although the suited and helmeted figure floating in front of him, wobbling as he recovered from the damage he'd done his own equilibrium, was a thoroughly amusing sight. “Action and reaction, Jer. What the heck did you do that for?”

“Damn,” Jeremy said, his voice tinny through speakers. “You know, Charlie, you about scared the air out of my suit.”

“I think I might have broken the nanonetwork somehow—”

“You also took off your bloody helmet. I can't talk to you without your suit radio turned on, you know.”

“Oh.” Charlie looked around for his helmet, hoping it hadn't sailed too far away in the impact. It was lodged a little farther over in the bush; he floated free and retrieved it. “I guess that explains what I did to deserve it.”

“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.

The man with the gun wasn't big. He was about fifteen feet away, down the shallow slope of the aisle, and he held the gun in both hands at arm's length. She couldn't see his face clearly. He wore a Western-style business suit with a tie and silver cuff links that flashed in the overhead light, and his hands weren't shaking. Somebody sobbed behind Patty. She heard a big, resonant thump as the crowd heaved against the doorway, a beast scraping itself on the sides of a too-small den. She spread her hands out wider, and wondered if being shot was going to hurt much. She wondered if she was tough enough to hold the man off until Riel could vanish into the crowd of escaping bodies.

“Step aside,” he said, his English thick with an accent.

“No,” Patty answered, and dove for the gun.

Something kicked in her chest as she lunged forward. She thought it was a bullet, at first, but there was no flash yet and the gun hadn't popped. It was her heart, slow thunder a counterpoint to screams from people cowering near her. She shouted; it left her lips a slow roar, and nothing moved—nobody moved—for a thin slice of a second until she saw the gunman's eyes widen and his knuckle pale on the trigger.

Once, again. And then he was plunging aside, and Patty didn't see the bullets, couldn't hear the bullets, but it didn't matter because she had seen where the gun was pointed and seen how the barrel had kicked, and the part of her brain that could calculate starship trajectories at translight knew that second bullet wasn't coming anywhere close. The first one, though—

Patty couldn't catch bullets in her hand, the way she'd heard Jenny could. But she twisted hard, her hair flying into her eyes, and tried not to think that when she ducked the bullet was going to hit somebody in the mob behind her. Her knee shrieked as she wrenched herself out of the way, and then she found out that she wasn't really faster than a bullet after all.

She didn't fall down. She didn't even stop moving, as if some animal part of her brain knew that if she slowed for a second the next shot would end between her eyes. It didn't hurt at all, not a bit — just a thump against her left shoulder like whacking it against a door frame at a run, and white stars lighting her vision as it spun her half around, and her left arm gone, as if the impact had taken it off.

She was committed. She plunged at him, head-butt to his abdomen like a playground wrestling match, and there was more blood, everywhere, slippery-sticky and hot, on her face, in her mouth, sticking her hair across her eyes. She slammed him against the railing, felt something snap. They landed hard, and she brought her knee up, fighting dirty like Papa Fred had taught her, and she was fast, faster than she'd known she'd be, but he was faster somehow and he got his thigh in the way and he still had the gun in his hands and her arm wouldn't work and he clawed at her nose, her mouth, pushing her back. Her right hand locked around his wrist and yanked his hand off her face and—

The white stars turned red-black as he struck her across the temple, once, with the barrel of the gun.

Damn, this son of a bitch can move. Like a fencer, like a ballet dancer. He feints and I fall for it, but rather than cracking my forearm, his pistol rings off my metal arm like somebody whaled on a cold water pipe with a claw hammer. He grunts. I bet he felt that all the way up to his shoulder.

Unfortunately, it doesn't distract him enough to slow him down when I go for a sharp right jab. Fluid sidestep, faster than I can think, and he grabs my wrist and tries to put me over his shoulder in some kind of martial-arts throw. He reckons without the weight of my prosthesis throwing my center of gravity off, though, and I clothesline his throat as he tosses me. It doesn't stop me going over his shoulder, but he loses his grip and I roll with it instead of landing cripplingly hard, flat on my back. When I come up into the crouch he's gone straight down, vertical drop from his feet to his knees, and the gun is on the floor in front of him because he's clutching his throat with both hands, his eyes bugged out so far I can see the whites all the way around. I bet I crushed his trachea when I hit him.

I'm surprisingly okay with that.

But I don't have time to think about it long. Gunfire, two shots, from up where Patty and Constance were headed when I lost sight of them. And then three more shots, flat and close, that could be the guys on the podium snapping off a couple at me, or at Min. It's an easy decision; I dive after the dying guy's gun, squirm between two rows of desks, kicking a huddled dignitary in the head—“Pardon”—and risk a peek around the end of the row, trying to get a look up the aisle toward the doors.

I'm just in time to see Patty knock the gunman into the railing on the nearest section of seats and both of them go down. Riel hesitates, her fists pressed to her chest and clenched so tight I see her knuckles whiten from here.

My right hand knows how hers must feel. Fingernails bite my palm, and I turn my back on Patty and Riel, transfer the pistol to my meat hand, and turn around to see if I can help Min.

I'm just in time to hear a splintering crash and a surprised yelp that turns quickly into a moan. Min-xue's put his shoulder against the podium, and shoved, suddenly, hard, topping the whole damned thing over onto the gunman crouched behind it. Smart child: he keeps moving, too, diving off the stage with as much commitment as a swimmer kicking off. He tucks and rolls beautifully, and the gunman behind the long table pops up, handgun held in a police stance, tracking Min-xue like a pro. He snaps off his first shot, which misses, and waits the opportunity for a second, which I think won't.

The palm lock on the stolen handgun I've stolen back is sticky against my flesh. I hope to hell it's cracked. It is a nine-mil, semi-auto, caseless ammo in a horizontal magazine. I expose myself, level the gun, brace with my left hand, wishing it were my gun and the interface weren't trashed so I could lock on the threat scope in my left eye, and I double-tap the gunman right over the heart. He doesn't even have the decency to look shocked as he folds across the table, his weapon discharging randomly.

Min-xue's got a hell of a lot of trust. He never even looked back; he's vaulted the barrier and is crouched behind the PanChinese table. From the motion of his head and shoulders, he's shaking bodies, trying to find out if Premier Xiong is alive.

Fred's still bleeding under a table over there somewhere. God knows how bad Patty is hurt — I turn around in the aisle, the gun still braced, and freeze right where I am.

The last gunman has Riel, her arm twisted behind her back, his pistol pressed against her temple, using her body as a shield. Patty's sprawled at their feet, crosswise across the aisle, puddling blood staining the grass-green carpeting black.

I don't look at that, at Patricia. It can happen later, when I have time to deal with it. Instead, I look at the gunman, and at Riel's calm expression and tight set jaw.

Dammit, Connie. Why the hell didn't you run?

Which is when, suddenly, sharply, Richard's presence explodes back into my brain.

Min-xue tore kidskin and cloth in his haste to bare his own hands, and then to bare Xiong's throat. There was blood — a great deal of blood — and the ragged tear across the premier's scalp showed a glitter of white through the crimson. Min-xue tasted blood when he wiped the sweat from his face onto his sleeve. No breath stroked his fingers; the air was sickly and still.

He worked his mouth and spat, leaning to the side as his fingers slid and stuck in the mess of stringy blood smeared over the premier's skin. He didn't expect a pulse. That wound looked like the bullet had plowed through hair and flesh and bone, and Min-xue half suspected that if he lifted Xiong's head off the floor, it would leave a blood-pudding of brains behind.

Min-xue pricked a finger on the pins holding one of the decorative ribbons to Xiong's breast. More blood dripped and vanished into the silk, scarcely darkening the color. As a lucky color, red proved an irony under the circumstances. He pushed two fingers into the hollow softness of Xiong's throat.

Min-xue jerked his hand back in shock; Xiong's pulse beat steadily under the angle of his jaw, strong and slow and not thready or fluttering. He shook his fingers, not quite believing what he'd felt, and pressed them back against cool skin.

If anything, the premier's heartbeat was steadier than his own. Carefully, Min-xue tilted the man's head back, straightening his throat, and, gagging on the rankness of blood, began to breathe for both of them.

A welcome presence bloomed in Min-xue's head, and he hissed relief. Richard. How very, very nice to have you back.

His cheer was short-lived. “Min-xue,” Richard said, his moth-wing hands uncharacteristically knotted in front of his belt buckle. “Unfortunately, I must recommend that you surrender immediately. The PanChinese agent has Prime Minister Riel.”

They'd only been linked for a matter of days, and still when Leslie kicked himself out of the air lock, knocked the condensation off his helmet, and saw Charlie floating before him, and could not feel him, the strangest seasick sensation of something broken — something severed—twisted his guts.

“Charlie.” He said it quietly, but the suit radio turned it into an accusation. “What are you doing with your helmet off?”

“Leslie,” Charlie said, raising both eyebrows. “What the hell are you doing wandering around loose like that?”

It helped. Leslie chuckled, and reached up to undo the clasps on his own helmet. Air hissed in as soon as he cracked the seal, pressure equalizing. “I figured out how to ask real nice. I just… I showed them an image of my… shape, my gravitational signature, moving from the birdcage over here. And they showed me to the door and handed me my suitcase. You?”

“Took a calculated risk,” Charlie answered. He hesitated, a bizarre figure in a pair of blue cotton trousers, barefoot, the back of his T-shirt floating out of his elastic waistband. Worry creased his forehead. “You know the worldwire's down.”

“So's my suit radio. And some other stuff. The Benefactor network is still working beautifully, though. Had enough of hanging around with my finger up my arse while you did all the work, so I came here because…” He shrugged. “I wasn't all that sure Wainwright would let me in, frankly.”

“You were worried about me.” Charlie slapped him on the shoulder, rebounding him lightly against the closed air lock. The air smelled impossibly sweet, earthy, rich. He picked up notes of fermentation products, and other things, things he didn't have words for — the weight of the shiptree around him, the belly and roll of the curves of space. He closed his eyes.

“Les, you—”

“All right?” The air stung his senses like liquor. He laughed, giddy and half-hoarse. You can't go home. “I don't know. Tell me about the worldwire. Are we under attack? Is it Richard?”

“No,” Charlie answered, quite crisply. “I spoke with Ellie via coded transmission. Gabe has managed to hack through to Dick. He hasn't gotten contact with the worldwire yet, but he's working on it. Dick thinks it's sabotage.”

“I am getting really sick of hearing that word.”

“How do you sabotage a quantum network?”

Leslie shrugged. “I can guess. Jam its communications. Flood it with nonsense information, so the signal gets lost in noise.”

“Primitive. Brute force.”

“But effective. Where's Jeremy?”

“Base camp. Follow me. We can radio back and let them know you're safe inside.” A long pause followed, which Leslie didn't mind; he was absorbed in the eerie beauty of the weightless garden they moved through, and the strangeness doubled and redoubled of everything glowing, shimmering faintly, leaving currents he could feel through the Benefactor sensorium. Synesthesia. Only not.

“Hey, Charlie?” The suit speakers were much too loud. Birds — bird-analogues — darted away, shrieking. “What made you decide it was safe to take your helmet off?”

Charlie stabilized himself with a grip on a branch and turned back to Leslie, bobbing in midair like a red-cheeked apple. “Because I'm a biologist, Les. And I was sick of the effing helmet, and playing the odds. Scientific wild-ass guess.”

“And you risked your life on that?”

“I've risked my life on crazier things.”

“You've a point, mate,” Les answered.

“What made you decide to take your helmet off, Les?”

“You can't drown a man who was born to hang.” Leslie took another breath. It went to his head. “High-oxygen environment.”

Leslie tossed Charlie his helmet — more a cup-handed shove than an actual throw — in free-fall, and pushed off to follow him. They brachiated in silence, Leslie feeling as if the fresh air had rejuvenated his thinking process. It was Richard. Something to do with Richard, and the worldwire, and—

“Hey, Charlie. You know more about the nanotech than I do.”

“Yeah?”

He caught a branch as Charlie let it snap back, using the recoil to add a little push to his own forward momentum when it oscillated. “Is it weird that we're affected, too, when our nanosurgeons came courtesy of a direct transfer from the Benefactors, rather than through your lab? I mean, if the Chinese and their guy, um…”

“Ramirez.”

“Right. Cracked the operating system—”

Charlie chuffed, using Leslie's helmet like a shield as he bulled through the undergrowth. Leslie envied Charlie the freedom of movement and obvious comfort of his shorts and T-shirt, and blinked another bead of sweat off his lashes. “Well, we know they cracked the OS. But we rewrote it, Gabe and Richard and me, and our network — Dick's network — and the PanChinese one and the Benefactor system don't really talk to each other. Beyond Richard being able to hack them enough to talk to people — oh.”

“Yeah, you see what I mean?”

“I think I do, Les. If the Benefactors can rewrite their system to communicate with ours, which they must have done… how the hell do we let them know it's okay for them to rewrite our system to communicate freely with theirs?”

“Is it?” The smell of the air was addictive, a faint hint of ozone, the silken texture of the wind before a thunderstorm, and mild, shifting floral and herbaceous perfumes. Leslie's hands still tingled inside his gloves. He'd swear he could feel every individual cell zooming through his arteries, scalp to toes. He couldn't tell if there was something wrong with his body, or if he'd simply been deprived of it so long that he was hyperaware.

“Is it what?”

“Is it okay?”

Charlie stopped so suddenly that Leslie almost drifted into his back. “You know…I think we'd better radio back and have Gabe ask Richard about that.”

“You explain it to Dick,” Leslie said. “I'm going to try to explain it to the birdcage.”

My fists are knotted as hard as my heart. The air I can get, past the pressure in my chest, comes in shallow little sips, painful. Connie's looking at me across all that space, her chin lifted up so I can see her throat bob when she swallows. I wish I knew what the hell she was trying to beam into my brain with that steady, too-calm eye contact.

The only scrap of reassurance I can muster is Richard's presence, his ghost standing just off to the left and out of my line of fire, where I can see him without being distracted. Merci à Dieu, Dick. Tell me there's something you can do about this.

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.”

Elspeth opened the skin on the back of Genie's hand very carefully, using a dissection tool from Charlie's second-best kit, which was stowed in the storage lockers to keep it away from the moisture in his own lab. The scalpel was sharp; there was hardly any blood, and Genie watched interestedly, wincing a little as Elspeth peeled the skin back, but obviously unimpressed by the pain. It would take more pain than that to impress Genie Castaign. There was no way to sterilize the tools, but that would be less than meaningless if Richard could get Genie's nanonet back on-line. And if he couldn't— They'd have larger problems.

The control chip was a flexible, irregular blue oblong; the actual chip was carbon-based, only a centimeter square, but there was a gel-sealed interface port and a series of power cells no bigger than a pinkie nail attached. Gabe handled the splicing procedure himself, sitting Genie down in his chair behind the desk and running a hardline from the interface to her hand. The pins slid in smoothly; if he'd known where the port was, Richard thought Gabe could have managed it through the skin, just a little prick and in, the same way the pilots' serpentines worked.

Richard took a deep, strictly metaphorical breath and extended himself to take control of the nanoprocessor, feeling after its operating system with the lightest fingers he could manage. He infiltrated it before Gabe's hands had left the connection, using the direct interface with the control chip to leapfrog to the few million nanosurgeons that were in physical contact with it. It wasn't enough of a network to support a persona thread, or even a fraction of one, but it was enough, he hoped, to form a jumping-off platform for the Benefactors when he opened the system to them.

If they understood what he was doing, what he was offering. If they understood why. If Leslie had made them understand.

He threw open the floodgates.

For long picoseconds nothing happened. And then Genie's head drooped, she slumped to one side, and her father caught her shoulders as she started to topple. Richard held on tight, the rush of data around him like the sound of the surf in his ears, whatever the Benefactors were doing spreading in ripples through Genie's nanonet and then the worldwire, leaving the network momentarily limpid and calm in its wake, as clean as if it had never been programmed at all.

Richard reached out and hesitated. There was another AI in the system. With a persona he at first mistook for one of his own threads, separated and maintained during the attack. Until he reached out to reabsorb it, and it snarled at him and lunged.

The pieces are kind of sickening when they finally snap into place. I imagine an audible pop, the sound of a broken limb yanked straight. It's not a bad analogy. This won't be pretty.

And it looks like we're not getting any help from Richard, because I'm reasonably certain that's not him, exactly, who's floating in the corner of my eye.

And I'm not about to put down the gun.

Riel knows. That's what the eye contact means. That's what she's telling me.

Do it, Jenny. We're dead already, anyway.

Nothing you want to face less than a woman with nothing to lose. My hand isn't shaking as I bring up the liberated gun. It hasn't shaken in years. Not for this, anyway.

Fast. Hot damn. Even for me, I'm moving fast, and the whole world around me is like a snapshot, a ruin full of broken statues sprawled between the pillars.

“Jen?” Not-Richard, in my head, and now that I'm looking for it, listening for it, I can tell it's not Dick. It's another program, or maybe even another AI, wearing Dick's clothes, but it isn't comfortable in that skin.

The sliver of the gunman's face that I can see over Connie's shoulder is a curve like the sickle face of a waning moon. If she flinches, I'm going to waste her. She meets my eyes across all that distance, hers fearless green, a glassy gaze like a wolf's.

“Put the weapon down,” I say, out loud, as levelly as I have ever said anything in my life. “I can offer you asylum. Life. Maybe more, if you will testify.”

I don't dare jerk my head to indicate what I want him to testify about, but I'm pretty sure he'll know what I mean. And then the gunman blinks at me, the one eye I can see around Connie uncomprehending as an owl's. Of course he doesn't speak English.

What the hell was I thinking? Again.

And then I hear my tone echoed, words I don't know: Min-xue, translating, just loud enough to carry. I don't need to look to know he's standing again and he's got my back. The crash as the door slams shut at the top of the stairs behind the last of the escaping dignitaries — the ones who weren't smart enough to hit the floor and hug it like a long-lost love — is huge. The sound of Patty whimpering, a broken moan on a breath that she didn't get to keep much of, is huge.

The space between my heartbeats is huge.

The barrel of the Chinese assassin's gun wavers, just a hair, and I let myself breathe, not much, just a little, a slow trickle of air through my nose.

And then my body locks in place as if I'd been dunked in a vat of liquid nitrogen, frozen solid, can't breathe, can't think, can't move, controlled as sharply and completely as if somebody had gotten ahold of my strings. Min-xue's voice cuts off midsyllable, and if I could do anything at all I would, I swear it, roll my eyes and curse the Chinese, the Benefactors, their nanotech and their mothers for a bunch of castrated dogs.

Richard demonstrated this to me once. The reason he was opposed to spreading the nanotech worldwide. The reason he was a little afraid of the nanotech at all. Because it can be used to puppet anybody wearing it like a kid's robot cat.

Oh, fucking hell.

“I beg your pardon, Master Warrant Officer.” The Chinese AI, if that's what it is, is no longer pretending to be Richard. It dissolves, iconless, a disconcerting, neutral, and exquisitely polite voice echoing inside my ear. “But I cannot permit that action on your part. You will forgive the intrusion, I hope.”

I thought your people didn't have AIs.

“A recent development. Please excuse me—”

The assassin cocks his head as if he's listening to something. I'm willing to bet I know what he hears. The assassin's finger whitens on the trigger of his gun; he turns it back, lines it up neatly with the center of Connie's ear. She doesn't flinch and she doesn't twist away or close her eyes. She just waits for it, looking at me, looking past me at Min-xue.

Hell. If I had to go down fighting, at least this time my family's safely out of the way. It might almost be all right, if it wasn't starting to hurt so much, not being able to breathe.

Black dots swim at the edges of my vision. I can't blink them away. I'm amazed I can still hear my heartbeat, slow as the pendulum in the lobby, measuring the turning of the planet under my feet. I'm sorry, Madam Prime Minister. Sorry, Patty. Even more sorry about you and Min—

I don't know if Riel can read the apology in my eyes.

The Feynman AI was smaller than he should be. Slower, contained, constrained. Limited by the processing power of the Montreal—vast by human standards, but negligible by his own.

But he was also older, trickier, and far more wily than the Chinese program, and he unpacked out of the Montreal's core like a spring-loaded snake out of a peanut can, grabbing every cycle in sight, flooding the worldwire with his presence, replicating threads, spawning personas and entities faster than the Chinese AI could take him apart.

He didn't fight. He didn't run.

He replicated. He bred. He blossomed.

The Richard-thread could have wept at what he found when he got his claws into the worldwire. The damage was considerable, months of reconstruction undone in minutes. Macroscopic life was the least of it; there was renewed damage down to the microscopic level, rereleased radiation, the ecological equivalent of blood and carnage. He didn't have time to assimilate it or analyze it; he barely had time to register it.

He'd told Wainwright that he would fight if he had to.

But he didn't have time to fight. The other program had Jenny and Min-Xue, had a gun to Riel's head. Was operating on certain tight-coded assumptions, provided parameters. Was an automaton, on certain levels. A sociopath.

Was not, to turn a phrase, a moral creation.

And was eating Richard's program, consuming his threads, assimilating his data in great, dripping handfuls of code. He threw more at it. Input, aware of the risk, aware that he was breeding something he had no control over.

He spawned, and spawned, and spawned again, and the Chinese AI grew fat feeding off him, and reached out again, cleverer this time, learning as it grew, going for the zeroth persona, for Richard himself. And Richard ducked—

Then handed off control to Alan, and shoved himself wholesale down the other AI's throat, and like a virus turned it inside out, assembling the data he'd fed it willy nilly, turning the whole thing — metaphorically — into a mirror. And the Chinese AI turned around and found itself looking itself dead in the eye.

So to speak.

In that instant, it became something more than a program. Like Richard, it became a person. The process confused it. It hesitated, for picoseconds only.

And in picoseconds, Richard ate it, from the inside out.

And then, with no sign at all that anything has changed, no whisper in my ear, nothing but the shift of my balance as the paralysis eases, as my gun hand starts to tremble and water wells up in my eyes. I feel Min-xue, feel him in my bones, feel the warm crosshatched grip of the borrowed pistol in his hand. I feel Charlie and Leslie and Genie and — oh, Merci à Dieu. I can feel the whole damned worldwire, snapped into place as if it had never been gone. Dick?

“I hear you, Jenny.”

Mary, Mother of God. My chest burns. I don't dare let the assassin see me draw a breath as he drags Riel one step backward. She stumbles over his feet. He hauls her upright, the hand that doesn't hold his weapon cupped under her chin.

Dick, you hacked your way back in. I feel his wordless confirmation, a sensation like a quick nod, internalized. Can you do to him what his AI did to Min and me?

A long pause, by Richard's standards. Seconds, long enough for the gunman to drag Riel three more steps away from me, lengthening the distance, lengthening the range to target, my need for air verging on dizziness now.

Dick, you're complicating my life.

“I'm having… an argument.”

An… argument?

“Alan thinks we should do as you ask.”

You should!

“No. I should not.” He isn't even bothering showing me his face; he's just letting me feel his hesitation, his grief, the raggedness of the emotion that would clench my hands until the meat one went white and the steel one creaked… if it were mine. “It is rather the one thing I should not ever do. Not once. Because if I do it once, I will do it twice.”

Dick. It's a prayer, a plea. It's the best I can do. What kind of a goddamned morality leaves us to hang, you bastard? Help me now and I'll give you anything you want. Anything.

I swear, I swear, I swear I feel his lips brush across the top of my hair, his hands on my shoulders in a moment's benediction. I swear I feel the sharp sting of his tears in the corners of my eyes. “I don't believe in God,” Richard whispers in my ear. “And moreover, I don't believe you need any God you have to bargain with, Jen. Now. Go do what you have to do.”

And then he's gone, a whisper in my ear, a faint and subtle presence I can't feel nearly as well as I can feel Min-xue, and the thin, thready pain-dazed awareness that's Patty Valens, swimming groggily back into consciousness.

And then I smile, because Dick hasn't abandoned us. He's just told us we're old enough to bloody well take care of ourselves. The smile doesn't last, though, because all of a sudden I can see the way out, if we're lucky. And it means sending the kid right the hell back into harm's way.

I wasn't fast enough, Patty thought. I wasn't fast enough. I got shot, I got hit—

“Patty.” A calm even voice in her ear, in her mind.

Jen. I'm okay, I think I'm okay, but I'm bleeding a lot—

“You're doing fine.” Just a little emphasis on the last word. Just enough to ease the tightness in Patty's chest and calm the thunder of her heart. “Patty. I need you to do something.”

Show me. Which was the right thing to say, mind to mind like that. Show me, not tell me. And Jen showed her, a mental picture so crisp that Patty realized she could manage it without even having to open her own eyes. “Get it?”

Got it, Patty answered. She grabbed one cut-short breath, pain dull and piercing between her ribs, before she had the time to psyche herself out, and shoved herself stiff-armed off the floor. Her wounded shoulder failed her; the arm collapsed. She screamed; it didn't matter, because she had the momentum by then and her other arm was strong enough.

Barely. She rocked down, fishtailing, her pelvis lifting as her nose banged into the carpeted floor and white-red flashes like police car lights lit up her vision. Her hand slipped in blood, carpet burning the heel of her palm. Her elbow smacked hard on the edge of a stair. But her feet shot up and she donkey-kicked out hard—hard—with both legs at once, and nailed the prime minister right in the gut.

Riel didn't have time to shout. She went back like an unbraced kickbag, right into the arms of the man with the stolen gun. One shot banged Patty's eardrums. She yelped and buried her face in her arm as two more answered.

The pricelessness of the gunman's expression when Min-xue drills him between the eyes would be easier to appreciate if Riel hadn't gone down with him, folded over like a rag doll, blood spurting through the fingers she's clamped over her face. I'm running, stepping over Patty as Patty feels me coming and rolls out of the way, kicking the gunman's pistol skittering under the seats just in case he comes back to life like a 3-D villain.

The chances are slim. Even a cursory inspection reveals that if Min-xue's shot didn't take the top of his head off, mine sufficed for follow-up. But Christ, Riel, Riel's bleeding like a stuck pig, and she whimpers when I try to pry her fingers away from her face. “Connie, let me see it. Connie. It's over. Are you okay? Are you all right?”

Richard, I need medical teams. I've got it secured down here, but I need EMTs, trauma docs, I need them fast, I've got multiple gunshot casualties, at least eight… no, ten, no — I don't even know what the hell I've got—

It occurs to me as I yelp directions that maybe he meant he wouldn't be around to help at all anymore, and I should be running for the door, running for help myself. Patty drags herself to her feet behind me, staggers down the steps with one arm hanging limp, and Min-xue has crouched back down between the seats. I can hear him counting. CPR, of course.

She's going to check on her granddad, I know. I can't bring myself to grudge it.

And then, “I'm already summoning help,” Richard says in my ear, and I burst into tears. Seriously, no shit, crying with relief like a kid punched in the belly, still tugging gently at Riel's wrist, trying to see how much of her face she's had shot off. She finally lets her fingers relax, and the only thing wrong with her is—“Marde, Connie. That bastard shot your nose off.”

She looks at me looking at her, at the expression on my face, and bursts out laughing, which breaks a clot and sprays blood over us both. But at this point, who the fuck could tell?