Gabe looks up. “Is that firing right, Maker?”
“Good as gold.” The technicians will go over it all again, of course. I drop a diagram chip into the box, fumble for the next in the sequence.
Elspeth squats beside me, ice clinking in the mug of water in her other hand, and passes the chip. “What's this Maker thing, anyway?”
I can feel Gabe wince as I compare chips. “Nickname from the army. Stupid joke, Doc.” I sit up, finished with that chair. Elspeth gives me an assist, grabs my steel hand tight in her small brown one, and hauls me to my feet. She might be little, but she's not a sissy.
“How stupid?”
Gabe blushes; I see him turning away, feigning deafness as if his ears had grown lids. “Gabe speaks too many languages.”
“I know. He makes me feel inadequate. Which doesn't happen often, let me tell you—” The disarming grin. Doc scratches between her eyebrows with a pinky nail. “It's a pun?”
“Genevieve. Jenny. You've got medical Latin, right?”
“Mostly pig — Oh! Gene.”
“‘Maker.' Right. You're in business.”
Over by the refrigerator, Gabe chokes on something I didn't see him put in his mouth. “I have apologized,” he says.
The doc clears her throat. “It stuck?”
“It stuck.” He tilts his head to one side, turns back over his shoulder to shrug.
Ellie flips an ice cube at him. “An offense that great demands a more material kind of restitution. You're buying dinner tonight.”
“After the training run,” I put in. “Although Leah might not be hungry.” It will be her first time on the Hyperex, and I can't shake the conviction that it's a bad idea. I push back, try to remember what it was like. Try to put myself in Leah's experience.
Damn, that was a long time ago. I was — eighteen? Nineteen. Something like that. A cold sweat breaks across my forehead when I contemplate it too deeply, and I let the thought slide away the way it wants to. I have a catch-and-release policy on some of those memories.
I've also got a head full of drugged-out clarity: the biggest dose since I was out of the service, and the new formula hits harder and cleaner than the old stuff did. Some of Face's kids paid the price for that efficiency. I must have been staring into space, because I snap back to myself when Gabe lays his hand on my elbow. “You girls are ganging up on me, n'est-ce pas?”
“You had to know that was going to happen.” I lay my hand over his for a second. His breath changes minutely when I let the steel fingers circle his wrist; my smile is amusement at this power over him, and then it drops away. Should I have noticed that?
Richard?
“It shouldn't be anything to worry about,” Richard says. “The nanite growth — the trace-element burden — in both you and Koske seems to be lessening parabolically; the sensitivity increase should be stabilizing soon. You've been taking your supplements?”
Religiously. Which makes me grin, because Ellie dragged me to Mass yesterday, and Gabe along with us. It felt a little strange to watch them go for communion and not to follow. Stranger still — well, let's just say that the kyrie's been in and out a few times since my last confession.
Okay, that's a slight exaggeration.
“You should be good,” Richard says. “By the way, I will attempt to talk to Leah tonight.”
Patricia and the boys, too?
“Unnecessary risk.”
Yeah. That will make her pretty happy. Leah and Richard were friends while Richard was still hiding out in the Internet, pretending he didn't exist.
Well, that was a slightly different Richard. But that, too, is a story for another day.
“She should be pretty happy. Jenny—”
Yeah? You gonna tell me to take good care of a kid whose diapers I changed, Dick?
“No, I'm going to tell you to be very careful in there. I'm still concerned. I don't know what sort of control our benefactors have over our little nanite buddies, but I know they have FTL quantum communication. And I really wish I could decompile your operating system and find out what sort of nasty little surprises Valens and Holmes had built into it by this Ramirez fellow. By the way, I thought you should know that there are two more ships under construction.”
Before the Montreal is tested?
“One of them's nearly done.”
Have you told them about—
“The aliens? How would you or I manage to tell them that and make them believe it, and still keep my freedom a secret? And what could they do about it if they knew?”
International cooperation—
“Set up some sort of a booby trap and give us a war with beings whose technology is so far beyond ours that it sits up and barks when you pat it on the head? Meanwhile they're clawing over each other to get to the stars? I don't want to give anybody another reason to fight, just yet.”
The multiple ships — that's not something… that doesn't sound like the kind of thing you do for a chest-beating sort of space race. For national pride. You only need one successful ship for that.
“I'm looking into it. But add it to your list of things to worry about. The good news is, I've about got the physics on the stardrive licked. It's superstrings, as I suspected, and I'd explain how it works but I suspect you'd find it even more unsettling than I do.”
Doc told me quantum mechanics only works on very small things. Subatomic.
As if out of the corner of my eye, I see Richard grin. “It does. But it can work on a lot of them at once.”
2:00 PM
Monday 4 December, 2062
Bloor Street
Toronto, Ontario
Leah brushed irritably at her cheek before she woke fully enough to realize the brambles scratching her face were just the tweed upholstery of her living-room sofa. She heard voices dimly through a closed door and stood, then padded across the floor, twisting her blouse around her belly to tuck it straight into the jeans she still wore. Her father's voice, urgent but not unhappy, and Elspeth's answering in a similar register. The office door was only slightly ajar.
Her hand was on the cool brass knob when she heard a third voice, one at the back of her head. “Leah? Can you hear me now?”
“Tuva!” She had the presence of mind to gasp, not scream, but it was close. “You're in my head!”
“Sh. Talk inside.”
Leah put her hand across her mouth. Approaching footsteps bowed the old wooden floor; the door came open under her hand, the knob slipping through tingling fingers. She looked up into Elspeth's questioning face, bronze skin fading into the darkness of the room, her curls backlit with a green glow from the desktop. “You're awake?” Dad loomed over Elspeth's shoulder.
Leah turned her hand in front of her mouth so a finger touched her lips. Richard? Can you hear this?
“Perfectly. Are you recovering okay?”
I'm very tired.
“Leah, can you think of a way to let Elspeth and Gabe… your dad… know I'm in here? Quietly, in case the apartment is wiretapped? I have some information I need to pass along.”
Elspeth and Dad had come out of the office, but they heeded her silencing gesture. Leah closed her eyes for a second and thought. “Dad, do we have any paper?”
“Ask a programmer for paper?” Elspeth chuckled, but got out of the way as Dad brushed past her.