Hammered (3 page)

“Sir, excuse me …” Her voice trailed off as she raised her eyes to his face. The hair was thinning now, distinguished silver she thought he probably brightened. The jowls were a little more pronounced, and the deep lines running from nose to mouth cut through a face reddened across the cheeks.
Mild rosacea
, she thought. “Colonel Valens,” she stammered. “It is still Colonel, isn’t it?”

“Dr. Dunsany. It’s been a long time.” He lifted the duffel out of her numb fingers, hefting it easily despite having more than ten years on her. He offered her a smile, which she returned cautiously.
Remember what a charming bastard he can be when he decides to, Elspeth. He may have gotten you out of jail, but he’s also the one who put you in there.

“I wasn’t expecting you to come in person.”

He laid a strong, blunt-fingered hand on her shoulder and moved her easily through a crowd that parted for his height and uniform. “I couldn’t do less. It’s good to have you back with us after all this time.”

I was never with you, Valens.
Elspeth tilted her head to examine his face, trying to determine if any irony colored his tone. The old ability to read people’s souls in their faces was still there, and it pleased her to feel as if she understood him. “I’m surprised that you still have any interest in using me, Colonel. After all this time, my skills are very rusty. And my research dated.”

“Please. Call me Fred. Or Doctor Valens, if you can’t stomach the familiarity. I want you to think of me as nothing more than another researcher. I’m only an officer to the army, and I’d like to put history behind us. If we may.”

His insignia glittered in the late afternoon sun. Elspeth nodded as he led her to the car. She breathed deeply before she spoke, savoring the diesel-scented air. “Let’s be brutally honest, then,
Doctor
Valens. If we may.”

The driver opened the trunk of the car, and Valens placed the duffel inside. “Of course, Elspeth.”

He helped her into the front seat of the sedan, closing the door firmly as she pulled her legs inside. The jeans were too long. She had cuffed them over white sneakers so new they seemed to glow. Her casual clothing left her feeling awkward in the face of Valens’s dark uniform and gleaming brass. He slid into the seat behind her, buckling his safety harness before he leaned over the chair back to talk. “It was time we got you out. For one thing, the war is over.”

“The war has been over for three years. I like to think of myself as a conscientious objector.”

He laughed, as well he might.

She pulled her chair forward to make room for his
longer legs. It would have made more sense for her to sit in the back, but she would take any inch he gave her and call it a mile. “And unless somebody else has solved artificial intelligence while I’ve been incarcerated …” She stopped and turned back over her seat to meet his eyes. “Someone has duplicated my research?”

He studied her face for some time before the corners of his eyes crinkled, and he laughed. “The government is nothing if not transparent in its motivations. No, we haven’t solved it. But now that you’re willing to work with us, finally—Elspeth, I bet
you
will.”

Gabe Castaign carried his younger daughter up the third flight of stairs, more pleased than he would admit that he wasn’t gagging for breath by the time he reached the landing. In the grand tradition of Toronto apartment buildings, the elevator was slow enough that it might as well have been broken.

Leah held the door to their new apartment open as he carried Genie inside. She curled against his chest, pale hair tumbling over his hands; he held her gently. Many floors below, automobiles hissed on the rain-wet street. “We’re home, Genie,” he said, crossing beige carpeting to lay her on the overstuffed tweed couch. “New home. Are you feeling any better?”

“Some, Dad. Is my bed set up?” She struggled to sit upright, coughing slightly. She sounded better already, as if the mucus in her chest were thinning. Gabe counted his
blessings between the fine-etched lines of her ribs. “I’m really tired.”

“Petite chouchou, it is built and ready. You want to walk in yourself?” Over Genie’s shoulder, her older sister caught their father’s eye, teenage brow furrowed tightly. Leah had her mother’s gray-green eyes, and Gabe pushed a little ache aside at that familiar grimace.

“I can. Can I have something to eat? Crackers?”

Gabe checked his watch. “Hungry already? I’ll bring you dinner in bed. Leah?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“Tuck in our little cabbage here, merci beaucoup? I’ll fix her something to eat and bring it in.”

Leah nodded and crouched down beside the sofa to help her sister up. Concentration furrowed Leah’s brow as she led Genie, one arm around her shoulder, from the living room into the room that would be all Geniveve’s own. The two girls had shared a bedroom since Leah was three and Genie was born. Gabe wondered if separating them had been a bad idea.
Je peux toujours changer d’avis.
He shrugged. And went to make cocoa for his daughters.

Leah Castaign smoothed fuzzy robin’s-egg-blue blankets up over her sister’s lap and rested on the edge of the bed. Genie’s blue jeans slouched on the floor like a shed skin. Leah poked them idly with her toe. “There. All comfortable?”

“Oui. What’d you do while Dad and me were at the hospital?”

“I played on the computer. There’s this VR game I really like. I could show you how sometime.”

“That would be fun.” Genie tugged the blankets higher, and Leah shifted her weight so they came loose. “I wish we were going to the same school this year.”

“Next year. And then you’ll be stuck with me for two
years of high school, too. And you’ll have to beat up all the boys who try to tease me.”

Genie laughed, and it turned into a cough as their dad came in, juggling crackers and cocoa. The old wooden floorboards creaked under his footsteps. Leah took her mug and sat on the white-painted wood chair in the corner, watching as he brought Genie her snack. He perched in the same smooth spot Leah had, and that made the corners of her mouth turn up.

Maybe Genie’s going to be okay for a while.
She inhaled chocolatey steam. The heat made her eyes water.
I wonder why Dad was so funny about taking this job, though. It can’t just have been that he didn’t want to move to Toronto.

As if he knew she was thinking about him, he glanced over and smiled. “Things should be better now, Leah,” he said. “It’s going to be your responsibility to babysit Genie while I’m at work, all right?”

Leah had started nodding when her sister tugged their father’s sleeve. “Dad!” Genie put her mug aside. “I’m old enough to take care of myself.”

“It’s not open for discussion, petite chouchou. Perhaps we will talk in a year or two about who needs a babysitter, eh?”

Leah knew better than to argue with that tone, and she saw Genie did, too. Still, her sister’s lip was getting stubborn, so Leah stood. “Dad, I’m going to go play on the computer, okay?”

He turned away from Genie. When the eye contact broke, her shoulders relaxed and she picked up her cocoa. Leah smiled.

“Not too late, okay?”

“Okay.” She came over and kissed him on the forehead. Even sitting, he was almost as tall as she was, and she’d grown in the past few months. “I promise to be good.”

She could hear him arguing with Genie in low tones as she shut the bedroom door behind herself and went into her own room.

Leah stifled a giggle behind her breathmask and palmed open the air lock door. Her sister was fast asleep, finally, and she was hiding on the Internet while her dad got ready to start his new job in the morning.
What kind of a job starts on Sunday?

She bounced on her toes. That was one thing the VR never got quite right: inanimate objects acted as if they were under lower gravity, but Leah never felt …
floaty. I bet if I had neural, it would feel floaty.

“The rebreathers are just silly,” she opined, holding the panel long enough for her companion to step onto the surface.

“How so?” Her companion was older, male, frame spare within his white surface suit. His outline pixilated slightly as he stepped onto the planet surface. Leah followed warily—it was dangerous Outside, and if she got killed out she would lose all her points. Still, finding a Martian Treasure was worth the risk, and the other player had the left half of Leah’s map. She picked up the pace.

He waited politely for her to catch up, letting her walk a few steps in front.

“Well, Tuva—you don’t mind if I call you that, do you?”

“Feel free to shorten the handle. It’s unwieldy.”

She stopped short and turned to regard him suspiciously. “Is that a real word?”

“Unwieldy? Yes.”

“What does it mean?”

“The opposite of wieldy,” he answered, with a grin that stretched around the edges of his breathmask. “You were going to ask me something.”

She turned to the landscape, the distant red undulations blending with a dust-dulled horizon. A pair of shuttles glided in overhead. It was a nice effect, but she wished they could have done something more interesting.
Cloud cities, maybe. Someday I’m going to get enough points to make it up to the starships, dammit!
She giggled again, sure she was blowing it.
He has to know I’m just a kid by now.
“I was going to ask you what a Tannu-Tuva was, actually.”

“It used to be a country in Asia. They had interesting postage stamps.”

“What’s a postage stamp?”

She almost heard the smile coloring his voice. “An archaic method of controlling the flow of data from one place to another. You had something to say about rebreathers?”

“Oh.” She checked over her shoulder. He was following her trail through the drift-rippled fines, minuscule particles coloring the air around them and staining their reflective white suits with rust. “By 3400, do you really think humans will need oxygen tanks for stuff like this? Heck, do you think Mars won’t be terraformed by then? We’ve already got two bases.”

“You must be Canadian,” he replied.

“How did you know?”

He laughed. “More space bases than anybody else. First on the Moon, first on Mars.”

“Malaysia runs the asteroids, though. And China.” She
decided she didn’t like being followed, so she paused long enough to let him catch up and walk beside her.

“And China is big on Mars, too. Yes. Those are government-funded bases and not partnerships, though. The situation is a little different.”

“How so?” She kicked at a rock, and it bounded away as if winged, flickering as her equipment didn’t quite keep up. She sighed and then brightened. This was still a cool game.

“Well, Canada’s different. The Scavella-Burrell base is funded by a combination of private and public sources. Unitek and its holdings are basically equal partners with the Canadian government in funding the research that goes on there.”

“My dad says,” Leah answered, abandoning all pretense of adulthood as her enthusiasm overwhelmed her, “that Canada never would have made it into space without private money. He was in the army, and he says that after the famine when we had to loan troops to the U.S. and then later, when the Fundamentalist government was in power down there, it cost us so much money that we needed help if we were going to keep up with the Chinese.” She hustled to keep up. Her companion noticed and checked his stride.

“That’s true,” he said. “You shouldn’t just take what your dad says as gospel, of course; you should think for yourself. But he sounds like a smart guy.”

Leah swelled with pride. “My dad’s the best.”

“Did he say why he thought we needed to have a space program? Or was it just keeping up with the Chinese?” He stopped short, scanning the horizon. He seemed to have only one ear on the conversation.

“He says we’re a lot luckier than the rest of the world. Even with the flooding problems and the winters getting colder. And he says that …” She turned around to face him. “I don’t really understand it. It’s something about Pan-Malaysia
and Indonesia, and protecting the Muslim government there and keeping China—he says ‘contained.’”

Tuva looked down at her, frost crystallizing on the edges of his breathmask. He moved restlessly, gloved hands dancing through the thin air like birds. “That was the general reasoning, as I understand it. Do you know anything about the Cold War and the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union?”

She shook her head. “That was like, ancient history.”

A complicated expression crossed his half-concealed face. “So it was,” he agreed. “You should look it up; it’s very interesting.”

She might have felt insulted, except there was something in his tone that said that he really did think that
interesting
was a good enough reason to look something up. He kind of reminded her of her fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Kology, who was her favorite teacher so far.

He kept talking, and something about his plain words and animated tone made everything seem very simple.
I bet he’s a teacher in real life.

“It’s got a lot to do with gamesmanship,” he said. He hunkered down and ran his fingers through the iron-red dust underfoot, raking four parallel gouges. “Canada’s been in a lot of peacekeeping efforts in the last fifty years, which it couldn’t have done without corporate money. Some of the wars were really unpopular at home, especially after the universal draft instituted by the Military Powers Act, and there were some real problems with terrorism. Also, wars give rise to new technology. And with the United States tangled up in its internal affairs, there’s been nobody else with the—the sheer stubborn—to oppose China’s empire building.”

“I wouldn’t want to live in China,” Leah said definitively. She twisted one foot in the dust, watching it rise in soft puffs.