Hammered (40 page)

Authors: Elizabeth Bear

4:30
P.M.
, Thursday 2 November, 2062
Government Center
Toronto, Ontario

Constance Riel leaned over the shoulder of her science advisor, Paul Perry. He sat in Riel’s own chair, at her exceedingly well-interfaced desk, busy hands moving over the plate. Riel frowned, ignoring the ache in feet rapidly growing numb. “You’re telling me these images”—she poked a finger into the center of one of the displays, and it obligingly expanded—“show—what?”

Paul had pulled his jacket sleeves up and rolled his shirt cuffs. He blinked bloodshot eyes and continued in an Oxford-educated drawl. “This is from the Martian orbital telescope, Prime Minister. It shows an explosion or an impact near the south pole of Charon, the sister planet of Pluto.
This
shows the debris track. Ma’am, should I call down for sandwiches?”

She hadn’t realized the rumble in her belly would be audible. “Yes. Bless you. That looks like a special effect from a science fiction holo. What does it mean?”

He keyed some information quickly—a request for food and coffee—and moved back to the telescopic images. “It means something struck Charon. Hard. Hard enough to—essentially—fracture the planet. Planetoid.”

“An attack of some sort? What, more space aliens?” War-of-the-worlds scenarios unfolded in her head. She pressed her fingers to her eyes, imagining she could already smell coffee.

“No, ma’am.” Paul shrugged. “I’ve been chasing some rumors, and I’ve had my staff after it. I wanted good information before I came to you.”

“You’re stalling, Paul.”

“Yes, ma’am. Unitek.”

“Unitek?”

“You’ve been briefed—have you been briefed?”

“Is
there a new development with the pair of derelict alien spacecraft on Mars?”

“No. Unitek and a detached group from the joint forces have been working on developing a ship based on those design principles. You know that.”

“I’m opposed to it, Paul. That’s money better spent at home. But it’s Unitek’s money—” She shrugged. Canada needed to get free of Unitek. The problem was, with Unitek went access to the Brazil and PanMalaysian beanstalks, their international trade partners, and a good part of the funding for Canada’s military. Times were more peaceful than they had been, on the surface. But a world in which The People’s PanChinese Army was massing on the Russian border and eyeing the grain fields of Ukraine, a world where PanMalaysia and Japan relied on promises of military aid from Canada, Australia, and to a lesser extent the reconstructed but still limping United States to keep the same starving wolf from
their
door—it wasn’t a world in which one dared appear weak. Paul himself was a refugee scientist from the slowly freezing British Islands.

Fallout from the Pakistani/Indian wars and the United States’ actions in the Far and Middle East had moved Earth’s supranational governments to rare, unified action. Global effort had managed what unilateral action could not: a functional missile defense shield, based on the same technology that provided meteorite and space-junk defense for the orbital platforms. Not, unfortunately, before the damage compounded China’s inability to feed her swarming population.

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

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

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

“Most likely.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes. And more. This is a record of coral reef dieoffs.”

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

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

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

Paul shrugged. “They’ve change a lot.”

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

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

“The algae is dying.”

“Like the coral reefs.”

Not exactly, but for Layman’s values of like, sure.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Excuses, excuses. What do we do?”

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