I look down at her, pull the spoon out of my coffee, and stick it in my mouth to buy a couple of seconds. The coffee's bitter and rich and good. They use real whole milk here, and fuck the government cholesterol guidelines. The doc's eyes are hazel, green ringed in golden ringed in gray, catching the dim recessed light on little flecks like sunshine. The smoothed edges of hair that normally frizzes into coils blend into the dark red curtains behind her. Behind the window, a pair of headlights slides by; the cold steel table leg presses my knee.
I remember when Valens sent her to jail. I got sensitive to hearing his name on the news, those not-rare-enough occasions when it showed up. I remember how she'd looked on the holo, in an orange jumpsuit just like the one the man I sent away for a lifetime wore. The news feeds characterized her as an evil genius: a brilliant woman gone down the wrong path. Speculated on her links to terrorism. Her trial records were sealed.
I'd pitied her then. And envied her later. And now I find myself looking into the eyes of this woman, the smartest person I'd ever met other than Richard and maybe my sociopathic and blessedly dead sister Barb. And seeing the face of someone who just wanted to know she wasn't absolutely going to get hurt, and maybe she wasn't going to absolutely have to die alone.
“Fuck, Doc.” I look down, smile at my reflection in the back of the spoon, and lie to her like I mean it. “How could we not be cool?”
And because Gabe's in the john, of course the food comes just then. So, thank God, she gets out of answering by grabbing the stuffed mushrooms and hoarding the plate on her side of the table. Gabe shoots us a look when he gets back; I imagine he's surprised to find us giggling and fencing with our forks instead of heads bent in hushed intensity. The food on the Montreal was decent, but it's nice to eat something dead and unhealthy.
We stuff ourselves on greasy tidbits and wash it down with gallons of coffee, making the kind of cheerful small talk I've almost forgotten, and after we're sated — Gabe listlessly poking the last few morsels — I keep my date with the pinball machines.
They're the good kind, older than I am, every widget and pulley mechanical rather than computerized — although these have been refitted to run on cash cards rather than coins. I rest my left hand on the button experimentally. I had to give up pinball after I accidentally dented a couple of machines. But the new hand is sensitive enough. I can feel the hard edge of the metal ridging the hollow between my thumb and forefinger, the pressure of the flipper control against middle and ring fingers. The clarion jangle and peal of the machine's sound effects, and the faint shiver of its body when I test the flipper.
Elspeth lays a hand on my right elbow as I pull the plunger back. “Will it take two players?”
Gabe snorts. “Oh, you don't wanna do that, Ellie.” And Elspeth just smiles. I smile back. And proceed to mop the floor with her four times running, which she had to know was going to happen.
I'm just that fast.
4:00 AM
Thursday 9 November, 2062
Allen-Shipman Research Facility
St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario
Valens steepled long, blunt fingers over the crystal of his interface plate and stared between the interleaved knuckles. His eyes felt sprayed with powdered glass. “Alberta,” he said, resisting the urge to rub them, “trust me.”
The crisp Unitek VP paced his office, her fists balled in the pockets of her tailored suit. “We need to step up the process,” she spat. She rocked her shoulders as if they hurt. “Riel knows about Le Québec. I need to have pilots ready for the second ship by early next year. You're confident the system we have in place on the Montreal will be adequate?”
Valens stood from his desk and came around it. “As confident as I can be. The AI is well contained. I have good control of Casey and Koske, and I'm informed that the precautionary programming in their implants is seamless. It's highly unlikely that there will be any problems.”
“How soon can your young pilots be ready?”
He stretched unobtrusively. “Four weeks. If we start the reflex enhancement process immediately. You know my granddaughter is in the program.”
“How could I miss her?” Holmes tossed expensively styled hair. “I've no quarrel with it. We're not going to get to go ourselves, Fred.”
“No.” His office was paneled, but laid out for efficiency over intimidation; he hadn't been in it long enough to attract clutter, and years of traveling had kept his threshold of personal belongings low. “I know. I'll die here or on Mars. But we'll give as many a fresh start as we can. And beat the Chinese to brave new worlds as well.”
“We can catch the generation ships easily. It's the Huang Di that worries me.”
“She's a smaller ship than the Montreal. Or the Calgary will be.” Valens paused. “How fast are we building these?”
“As fast as we can. I'm still under pressure from the board, and I mean to spend the money before I lose it. Which is a very real issue—”
“Do they understand how critical the ecological situation is?”
“The popular and scientific press are so divided. And people generally want to believe things will turn out for the best. It's how houses get built on sea cliffs and dictators come to power. Half of them think I'm Chicken Little, Fred.”
“You're paid very well to be Chicken Little.”
Holmes shrugged, untangling a stray feather of silver hair from the pearl stud she wore and tucking it behind her ear. “Fortunately, your girl Casey impressed the hell out of my CEO on that test flight — that bought us a few more months. The Vancouver swung into production last week. We're getting assistance from our PanMalaysian trade partners, who are running shit-scared of the PanChinese Alliance, and the raw materials from the asteroid mining program are just barely enough to meet the schedule. The rest of the commonwealth and Australia are on board, and Charlie's breeding up those neurosurgical nanites of his at record speeds.” Holmes, for just a moment, let him see the tired behind her eyes. “We'll salvage something. As much as we can.” She tipped her head to one side, and that strand of hair got away from her again. “We'll be dead before it gets bad, in any case, and money carries a certain — insulative — value.”
“Get my kids off the planet,” Valens said. “That's all I ask. Beat the Chinese out there.”
“You know they'll retaliate, Fred. We've got some unsettling data regarding Le Québec.”
“What do you mean?”
“It looks like her crash was not precisely accidental.”
He was surprised at how fast the words came to his lips. The thought must have already been there — floating, waiting to form. “Sabotage.”
“There are always people willing to die for obscure political values and points of honor,” she said. “Frankly, I don't see the profit in it. But yes, sabotage.”
Valens blinked, twining his broad, blunt-tipped fingers together. There are a lot of things you don't see the profit in, my dear Alberta, he thought. That doesn't mean they're all without value. But he nodded, and he smoothed his face, and he smiled. “We'll just have to make sure nothing like that happens to the Montreal, then, won't we?”