Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 (2 page)

“Got you, Jenny,” he says, and if my heart were my heart it would skip a beat. I can't feel myself grin.

Dick!

“Guess what?” His glee tastes like my own. “Jenny, the nanites can talk to each other.”

What do you mean?

“I mean I can sense the alien ships on Mars—the ship tree and the metal one—and I can sense you and the other pilots. And the Chinese vessel following us.”

The
Huang Di
?

“On our tail. No lag, Jenny.”

I don't understand.
No lag?

“No lightspeed lag. Instantaneous communication. I think I was right about the superstrings. It's not so much
faster-than-light
technology as . . .
sneakier-than-light
.”

Implications tangle in my brain.
Richard
.

“Yes?”

Can you feel our benefactors?
Somebody alien left the ships on Mars for us to find. Somebody
alien
meant for us to come find them, too.

“And they can feel me,” he answers. “Jenny, I can't talk to them. Can't understand them. But I know one thing.

“They're coming.”

I almost stall the habitation wheel as the
Montreal
and I continue our ascent.

Three hours previous
0900 Hours
Thursday 2 November, 2062
HMCSS
Montreal
Earth orbit

Don't all kids want to grow up to be astronauts?
It's not a strange thing to ask when you are hauling yourself along a series of grab rails on your way to the bridge of a starship, floating ends of hair brushing your ears like fingertips.

Let me say that again in case you missed it.

A
star
ship.

Her name is the
Montreal,
and she's as cold inside as a tin can on an ice floe. Her outline is gawky, fragile-seeming, counterintuitive to an eye that expects things that fly to look like things that fly. Instead, she's a winged wheel stuck partway down a weather-vane arrow, a design that keeps the hazardous things in the engines as far as possible from the habitation module without compromising the angle of thrust. The wheel turns around the shaft of the arrow, generating there-is-no-such-thing-as-centrifugal-force, which will hold us to the nominal floor once we're on it. There's no gravity in this, the central shaft. You could float along it if you wanted, and never fear falling.

I prefer the grab rails, thank you.

The “wings”—furled against the rigging like the legs of some eerie spider—are solar sails. The main engines are not to be used until we're cruising well clear of a planet. Any planet. From the simulations I've been flying back in Toronto, the consequences might be just as detrimental to the planet as to the
Montreal
.

Don't ask me how the engines work. I'm not sure the guys who built them know. But I do know that the reactor and drive assemblies are designed so they can be jettisoned in the case of an emergency, if worst comes to worst. And that they're shielded to hell and gone.

Don't all little kids want to grow up to be astronauts?

Not me. Little Jenny Casey—she wanted to be a pirate or a ballerina. Not a firefighter or a cop.
Definitely
not a soldier. She never even thought about going to the stars.

I catch myself, over and over, breaking the enormity of what I'm seeing down into component pieces. Gray rubber matting, gray metal walls. The whining strain of heaters and refrigerators against the chewing cold and searing heat of space. The click of my prosthetic left hand against the railing, the butt of a chubby xenobiologist bobbing along the ladder ahead of me.

Did I mention that this is a
starship
?

And I'm expected to fly her. If I can figure out how.

Big, blond Gabe Castaign is a few rungs behind me. I hear him mumbling under his breath in French, a litany of disbelief louder than my own but no less elaborate, and far more profane. “Jenny,” he calls past my boots, “do you know if they plan to put elevators in this thing before they call it flightworthy?”

I've studied her specs.
Elevators
isn't the right word, implying as it does a change of height, which is a dimension the
Montreal
will never know. “Yeah.” Grab, pull, grab. “But do me a favor and call them tubecars, all right?” He grunts. I grin.

I know Gabe well enough to know a
yes
when I hear one. Know him even better in the past few hours than I did for the twenty-five years before that, come to think of it. “Captain Wainwright,” I call past Charlie Forster, that xenobiologist. “How much farther to the bridge?”

“Six levels,” she calls back.

“At least her rear view is better than Charlie's,” Richard Feynman says inside my head. If I closed my eyes—which I don't—I'd see my AI passenger hanging like a holo in front of the left one, grinning a contour-map grin and scrubbing his hands together.

Richard, look all you want.
I marvel at the rubberized steel under my mismatched hands and grin harder, still surprised not to feel the expression tugging scar tissue along the side of my face. It's almost enough to belay the worry I'm feeling over a few friends left home on Earth in a sticky situation. Almost.

A starship. That's one hell of a ride you got there, Jenny Casey.

Yeah.
Which of course is when my stomach, unfed for twenty hours, chooses to rumble.

“Master Warrant Casey, are you feeling any better?” says Colonel Frederick Valens, last in line.

“Just fine, sir.”
Not bad for your first time in zero G, Jenny
. It could have been a lot worse, anyway. Gabe had me a little too distracted to puke when the acceleration cut in the beanstalk on the way up. “I suppose I don't want to know what sort of chow we get on a spaceship.”

“Starship,” Wainwright corrects. “It's better than you might expect. No dead animals, but we get good produce.”

“Whatever happened to Tang?”

Charlie laughs, still moving hand over hand along the ladder. “The elevator makes it cheap to bring things up, and life support both here and on the Clarke Orbital Platform relies on greenery for carbon exchange. No point in making it inedible greenery, so as long as you like pasta primavera and tempeh, you're golden. I'll show you the galley after we look at the bridge. Which should be—”

“Right through this hatch,” Wainright finishes. She undogs the hatch cover and pushes it open, hooking one calf through the ladder for purchase, her toe curled around a bar for a moment before she pulls herself forward and slithers through the opening like a nightcrawler into leafy loam. Charlie follows and I'm right after him, feeling a strange chill in the metal when my right hand closes on it. The left one picks it up, too, but it's a different, alien sensation. After twenty-five years with an armored steel field-ready prosthesis, I'm still not used to having a hand that can feel on that arm. I rap on the hatch as I go through it, examining a ceramic and metal pressure door that boasts a heavy wheel in place of a handle. I pick up the scent of machine oil lubricating hydraulics; when I brush the hatch it moves smoothly, light on its hinges.

Except light is the wrong word here, isn't it? My left eye—prosthetic, too—catches the red glimmer of a sensor as I pass through. “Seems a little primitive,” I call after Wainwright.

She propels herself down the corridor—a much larger one—keeping one hand on the grab rail for the inevitable moment when she starts to drift to the floor. She gets her feet under her neatly, but even Charlie follows with better grace than me. All my enhanced reflexes are good for is smacking me into the wall a little faster. I stumble and catch myself on the rail. Gabe muffs it, too, God bless him, although Valens manages his touchdown agile as a silver tabby tomcat.

“The ship?” She turns, surprised.

I amuse myself with the hopping-off-a-slide-walk sensation of each step heavier than the last as I close the distance between us. This corridor must spiral through the ring, to take you from inside to outside “feet-down.” I speculate there's a ladder way, too. One I wouldn't want to lose my grip in. “The hatchways.”

“Less to break.” She shrugs her shoulders, settling her uniform jacket over her blouse. I make a mental note to requisition some jumpsuits, if they're not already provided. Valens always seems to think about these things.

Wainwright continues. “And if it does, we can fix it with a wrench and a can of WD-40. That might be important a few thousand light-years out. Saves power, too. They're just like submarine doors, but less massive.”

Gabe lays a hand on my elbow as he comes up beside me, still soft on his feet for all he's got three years on me and I celebrated my fiftieth last month. “Let me guess,” Richard says in my implant. “Ask about the decompression doors, Jenny?”

“Captain.” I brush against Gabe as I move past him. Valens's gaze prickles my spine as he dogs the hatch behind us. I swallow a grin. “What do you do if there's a hull breach?”

“Try not to be in a doorway. The habitation wheel is designed like a honeycomb, for strength. There are automatic doors for emergencies, and if the air pressure drops suddenly—they come down.”

“They don't wait for pedestrians to clear the corridor?”

“No.” She turns her back on me and walks away, leading us farther out of the floating heart of her ship, now my ship, too. “For Christmas, I guess we'll hang the mistletoe in the wardroom.” She glances back over her shoulder with a grin that stills my shiver.

“Hostile environment,” Gabe mutters in my ear.

“Enemy territory,” Valens adds from my other side. “What's outside this tin can is trying to kill you, Casey. Never forget that for a second.”

I square my shoulders and don't look up. He needs me enough that I can get away with it. “I'll bear that in mind, Fred.”

He chuckles as I walk away.

The bridge lies near the center of the habitation ring. It's long enough I can see the curve of the floor, but not particularly wide. Remote screens line the walls with floor-to-ceiling images of blue and holy Madonna Earth on one side, Clarke Orbital Platform spinning like a fat rubber doughnut at an angle. “I've never felt claustro- and agoraphobic at the same time before,” Gabe says. He brushes past me and rests one bearlike paw on a console, bending down to examine the interface. “Sweet.”

I'm the only one to hear Richard chuckle.

I find myself staring at the padded black leather pilot's chair.
Leather on a starship? Well, why not; at least it breathes.
But it's not the look of soft tanned hide that pulls me forward, has me bending to trail my fingers down the armrest.

Most pilot's chairs aren't equipped with straps and clamps intended to keep the operator's head and arms immobilized. They don't have a glossy interface plate with a pin-port mounted on a cable-linked collar at neck level, either, and another one right where the small of your back would rest.

It looks like an electric chair. I sink my teeth into my lower lip and turn. “There aren't any physical controls?”

“That panel over there,” Richard tells me, even as Captain Wainwright moves toward it and lays her dainty right hand possessively on padded high-impact plastic. It's a good three meters from my chair. The chair that's going to be mine.

“Somebody else flies her sublight,” Wainwright says. “We save you and Lieutenant Koske for the dirty work. When she's moving too fast for anybody else to handle.”

I nod, barely hearing her. Remembering the simulations, the caress of sunlight on solar sails. A little sad that I won't be feeling that for real.

“Jenny.” Richard again. “Don't get greedy. You'll be driving faster than anybody else ever has.”

Except for the pilots of the three ships that didn't make it
. China's already broken two, the
Li Bu
and the
Lao Zi
.
Montreal
is Canada's second attempt. The first one—
Le Québec
—had an unexpected appointment with Charon. Pluto's moon, that is. These babies are very hard to steer.

I look from Wainwright to Valens and grin. “When do I get to try her, then? And who is Lieutenant Koske?”

“Your relief,” Valens says. He moves to stand beside and behind me, just enough taller to loom.

I touch the interface collar, metal fingers clicking softly on plastic. “Do I get to meet him?”

“He's probably eating,” Wainwright says, on my other side. “As for trying her out—how does this afternoon sound?”

Tall, dark, good-looking, without the faint mottling of repaired burn scars that mars my face—Trevor Koske
is
an asshole. I can tell from the set of his shoulders under his spotless uniform jacket as I follow Valens to his table. Koske sets his fork down, light glittering off slight scratches in his cervical interface, and turns to face us. Somehow, he and I managed to miss each other, despite getting the trillion-dollar-soldier treatment from Valens within the same few years. Admittedly, we guinea pigs weren't encouraged to fraternize. Some shrink probably thought being around normal people would encourage us to believe we still were. Normal, that is. How normal you can be when you can catch a bullet in your left hand, I'm not telling.

“Lieutenant Trevor Koske,” Valens says. “This is Master Warrant Officer Genevieve Casey.” Wainwright purses her lips at him as he usurps her role—
making friends already, Fred?

I set my tray down and put out my hand. “Jenny,” I say, determined to act like the civilian they won't allow me to remain. “Pleased to meet you.”

Gabe, at my shoulder, grins and sticks his hand out, too. Koske regards our hands like a pair of dead eels, his fingers resting inches from the handle of his fork. “Charming fellow,” Richard says. “I hate him already. Did I tell you about the time—”

Richard.
I withdraw my hand, still smiling.
I took his job.

“You merited his job.”

Because I'm a freak.
Nobody says another word as I hook a chair back with my foot—a chair set on a swivel arm in the floor—and sit down directly across from Koske. I pull my tray closer and pick up the fork. Soba and a green salad with ginger dressing; they'll turn me healthy if I'm not careful. “So, Trevor,” I say around a mouthful of lettuce, “tell me about yourself.”