The Swan Riders (25 page)

“She's AI, Talis,” said Michael softly. “A new AI. She could have asked me for the moon. She asked for her friend. It's worth it.”

Two paused. Frowned. Laced his fingers behind his neck and stretched his elbows backward, regarding us carefully. “No,” he said.

Michael raised his eyebrows. “No?”

“Yeah, no.” Two picked us off with his eyes. “He's terrified, she's teetering, and you—” He grinned at his other self. “You're lying through your teeth.”

“No one has lied,” said Michael.

“Because you all know better, I expect,” said Two. “But you're lying without lying. Don't you think I know that little soft-shoe number when I see it? Fortunately, if you remember, I wasn't actually talking to any of you.” He leaned back on his interlaced fingers, threw his command over our heads. “Francis Xavier.”

Francis Xavier saluted him. “Talis.”

“You trust this boy?”

Francis Xavier paused. “No.”

“Is he a Swan Rider?”

If Francis said no, I thought, then Two would kill Elián on the spot. And Francis Xavier must hate Elián—Elián, who'd stabbed the woman FX loved. I held my breath.

Francis Xavier said: “Yes.”

Two laughed, delighted. “Oh, this is good: a good story, I can tell. I cannot wait to recover this data.”

“Recover . . . ?” said Michael. The word had caught his attention, as well it might.

“What can be implanted can be un . . . planted. Is that a word? Anyway.” The AI slapped his own datastore as if it were a hand drum. “As I recall, there are knives in that drawer.”

He was proposing that we remove Rachel's datastore surgically. Here. Now. Michael said nothing, moved not at all. But freckles came twinkling into his face like stars as he slowly paled.

“Kidding,” said Two. “You think I'd want you screaming? Why would I? We'll be home soon enough.” He stood up. “Someone put the horses in the spaceship. We're out of here.”

N
o matter how beautifully trained they are, getting horses onto a spaceship is not easy.

It wasn't technically a spaceship, but rather a fast suborbital, one of those rare ships capable of both landing and launching without a magnetic rail. This one was small—no bigger than a bell tower—and looked fast. Its low-friction polymer skin shifted and swirled like quicksilver. Deep inside it, metal pinged as it cooled.

The horses took one look at the ship, perched on the opposite hill with the dawn sky lightening behind it, and decided against this plan.

Specifically, NORAD stopped dead. Her ears pointed at the ship, locked on target like one of the Rider's crossbows.

I was leading Gordon, and Francis Xavier was leading Heigh Ho Uranium. Two was leading Elián's horse (a pinto gelding that Michael had promptly christened Spartacus), which was probably a bad sign for Elián.

All three horses looked to NORAD and stopped with her. I tugged on the lead and sweet, steady Gordon Lightfoot set his feet and slashed his tail like a cat.

“It's all right, NORAD, sweetie,” said Michael. He'd been leaning on my free arm. Now he pulled away, shivering in the pink light. He wrapped his slender fingers around the bridle's concho. “We're going home. We're just going home.” He tried to pull NORAD forward. The horse pinned an ear and leaned away. Michael backed off, feeding the lead between his fingers and giving NORAD a few yards to run. She swung away from the ship and he led her around in circles, letting her work herself to calm.

It was good horsemanship—and a glimpse of that radical good-at-everything competence he had had as Talis. It was beautiful. Right up until the moment where NORAD caught sight of the ship again, swerved sideways, and yanked her wounded rider right off his feet.

Michael fell onto his chest in the snow with a great gasp, not quite a cry. The end of the lead whipped over his body and he rolled onto his back, curling up, clutching his wound.

Two looked down at him with both eyebrows raised. Francis Xavier started forward to help. Two stopped the Swan Rider with a hand on his chest and then handed off his horse. Francis Xavier took both leads in his one hand. He hadn't bared himself before Two, and therefore hadn't put on his arm. Even if this was a battle—and it felt like a battle—it wasn't the kind of battle where a crossbow would do us any good.

“Bring these two up to the ship,” said Two. “I'll take care of the other one.”

I hoped he meant the other
horse.

And it seemed he did. Two caught NORAD's lead and did, effortlessly, what Michael had tried to do: let her run herself calm.

Gordon Lightfoot, meanwhile, found himself caught between his panicking herd leader, NORAD, and his retreating friends. He snorted a great blast of steam and pawed the snow, pacing backward. It was all I could do to hold him.

Which left Elián alone, standing over Michael, who was trying to get up out of the snow. The wounded man reached out for help and Elián looked at the hand as if it were full of spiders.

Michael narrowed his eyes. “I'm not poisonous to the touch, you know. It's not contagious or anything. Just
help me.
”

So Elián pulled Michael up and put an arm around his waist. They were of radically different heights, and so they made a crooked and halting trip through the snow, toward the ship.

At the hatchway we watched and waited while Two took NORAD in hand. He bribed her with apples that he pulled from his pockets like a magician. He leaned close and murmured something into her ears.

I wondered what the horse made of him. It was difficult enough for me, as an AI myself, to adjust to the idea that the person inside this new physicality was someone I knew. What hope had a horse? And yet NORAD let this person, who should have been a stranger, lead her up the clanging loading ramp and into the hold, let him wind an elaborate series of buckles and straps around her and slip cotton into her ears against the noise. Before the whole thing was over she was trying to eat his hair.

“You know,” said Elián to Michael. “If you were half that nice to
people
they wouldn't try to kill you quite so often.”

“Would you be happier if I kicked puppies? I'm
complicated
, okay? And I like horses. Horses don't pump sarin gas into each other's preschools. Horses don't use hunger as a weapon. Horses don't— You have no idea what I've seen, Elián Palnik. And no right to judge me.”

“Half that nice,” said Elián. “Just saying.”

“There,” chimed Two, who had also seen the poisoned preschools and the skeleton armies. “Horses, spaceship, don't get tired of saying that, off we go.”

The rest of the horses followed NORAD onto the ship for the same reason the world followed Talis wherever he pointed: it seemed safest. We got them settled in the little hold, and then we went one by one up the ladder into the upper compartment. It was smaller still: eight chairs, looking as if they could handle significant accelerations, were set around an oval of empty decking. It was so strange to be inside: the small space, the hard, clean gleam of the surfaces. It felt like a long time since I had last boarded a shuttle.

One hundred eighty-four days, came the figure. Not so long, but I had died somewhere in there. That distorts one's impression of time.

Speaking of: “What about ‘shuttles can be shot down'?” I asked Two.

“Well.” He cracked open a grin. “Shuttles can be shot down, but weapon targeting systems can be taken out by a general EMP burst from low orbit.”

“Um,” said Elián, “won't that black out North America?”

“Just the western interior,” he said, sulking. Then: “Is that over the top? I have trouble telling.”

“I'll bet,” said Elián.

“It's all fixable,” said Two.

It wasn't: medical implants, industrial processes, simple accidents—the casualties would be in the hundreds.

Two must have known that, but he gave me one of Talis's sunny grins: so brilliant it was painful to look at. “Plus, it's a special occasion. A new AI!” He clapped me on the shoulder.

I rather wished he wouldn't.

Michael came off the top of the ladder bent over and gasping, the strain of using his arms (and thus chest muscles) to partly support his weight showing in his grey, sweaty face. Two wrinkled his nose in plain distaste and made no move to help. “I'll drive,” he said, and popped up the last ladder.

Michael flopped into a chair and Francis Xavier sat beside him. When Elián and I took the seats across, we were almost knee-to-knee. And then—what were we? Enemies? Friends? Companions? We were alone.

Two piloted the ship (and I do not know why this surprised me) like a highly skilled maniac with superhuman reflexes and no fear of death. My datastore informed me primly that 3 Gs was considered a maximum safe vertical acceleration. We hit 2.97. At the top of it we banked, swerved like a swallow, and then all at once were drifting, our own momentum and the unresisted tug of gravity pulling us in a weightless arc down toward Montana.

My hands came floating up from my knees. My body drifted away from the seat, against the straps. We fell quietly. The rush of thickening air hummed through the ship's skin. The horses' complaints, muffled and echoing, drifted up from the deck below.

Francis Xavier leaned his temple into the side of the foam headrest as if leaning onto someone's shoulder. He looked sick with fatigue. Elián jiggled his foot. Michael had his fingers round the harness where it curved down over his right collarbone on its way to the central buckle.

“Is that hurting you?” I asked.

“A little,” he said. “It's fine.”

Francis Xavier put his hand on the armrest between them, a silent offer. Michael did not take it. He let go of the padded strap and ran the knuckle of his thumb back and forth under his collarbone, making a furrow in his shirt that plotted the top edge of his datastore.

“What will happen to you, if it's removed?” I asked.

Michael put his hand in his lap. He leaned his head back into the foam cradle and said nothing.

“It should be fine,” said Francis Xavier. “The AIs—they implant datastores all the time. They're experts. You'll be fine.”

“I'm not—” Michael stopped. What could the end of that sentence possibly have been? He closed his eyes and his voice went flat: “I have no input/output now. It might as well come out, I suppose. Should, in fact, if it's intact.”

The finality of it, though . . .

His face was wiped blank. There was something strange happening to his aura.

“Intact?” echoed Elián. “Is it—I mean, will it be readable?”

“Ah,” said Michael. His eyes came open, which should have made him easier to read, but mostly he looked tired. “There you go, Elián. We might teach you that pesky ‘think it through' business yet.”

I instantly saw their point: if the datastore was extracted, and the experiences Michael had had were uploaded, then . . . well. The last thing he'd seen was Elián's face: the knife going into him. What was status as a Swan Rider, next to that?

Michael had spared Elián because I asked. Because he cared about me.

But Two—

I caught Elián's widened eyes.

“We need to stop them from extracting it, then,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Michael. “Good luck with that.”

His face was bleak, blank. Was he—I couldn't read it—was he frightened? He was not moving. He was not looking at anything particularly.

“Rachel?” said Francis Xavier.

“Don't—” said Michael. “Bad moment to distract me, Francis.”

But his hand had slipped sideways, onto the armrest. Francis Xavier looked at it, then took it in his.

“When it starts, don't get up,” Michael said, his voice flat but his words jammed together. “We're about to decelerate, and you could be injured if you get up.”