You've been talking to Koske? Did he identify his attacker?
“He can't remember anything between opening the door to his quarters and winding up on the floor. Somebody disabled the recording devices, and somebody must have been able to hack past the thumb lock on the door.”
The way you did Gabe's—but my question is cut off by the appearance of a tall figure, framed in the yellow-painted steel doorway. Valens hesitates a moment, meeting my eyes as if waiting for permission to enter the room.
“Forgive me if I don't get up, Fred.”
“At ease,” he answers wryly. A dark bruise mottles his left cheek. It looks an awful lot like the sort of handprint you leave on somebody when you're making damn sure they're watching you talk. I've seen those in the mirror, though not lately.
Huh.
That would be a pretty big hand.
He saunters in like a silver tomcat casing an unfamiliar living room: a look to the left, a look to the right. “Just so you know, Casey. If that slug had gone where it was headed, we wouldn't be having this little conversation. Don't start thinking you're immortal now.”
“Perish the thought. That was one hell of a spanking.”
“Yeah.” Valens rubs the palm of his right hand across his blue-shadowed cheek. He takes a little box out of his pocket and plugs it into a wall socket next to the light switch. He presses buttons, and then he closes the door and wedges a plastic chair in front of it.
Tension drags my shoulders back and I wince as that graze on my shoulder tugs hard.
Valens straightens from adjusting the settings on his antiespionage device. “I didn't know Alberta would be so willing to sacrifice you. I thought the hit would come after you left.”
“I suspect she may have underestimated Indigo's dislike for me. Holmes isn't real good with people, is she? In any case — Riel would be dead.”
“Maybe. But this solution is better overall.” He rakes that hand through his hair, the silver thatch falling back into place like a bird's preened feathers. “Koske's going to make it, too.”
“I heard.” I catch myself rubbing the gouges in my metal hand with my right thumb, and make myself stop. It's half strange not to feel the touch, and half like a homecoming. “Fred, does it seem odd to you that somebody could get close enough to Trevor to put a knife into him? You know what that would take.”
“In a dark room? If you came home tired?”
“I'd leave anybody who tried smeared all over the wallboards.” I stand up, leaning on the back of a molded plastic chair, hesitantly stretching my leg. It feels tender, fragile. I don't push my luck. “Just out of curiosity. Why didn't you issue Koske a weapon, too?”
His brow wrinkles over carefully groomed eyebrows. “Would you hand Trevor Koske a gun?”
“Point.”
He offers me his arm as I hobble around the bed. I ignore it, watching my feet move. Richard, these bugs are just freaky. I feel him chuckle, but he doesn't answer. Valens steps out of my way.
“It's still weird, Fred. Weird… weird Koske can't remember what happened, too.”
“Who told you that?”
I grin at him and wink, enjoying the minor advantage. It's nice to see Valens at a loss for once. “You have sources and so do I. What are you going to do about Alberta and Riel?”
“Blackmail one, cultivate the other. And you?”
“I—” I stop, swallow. Examine the gray-and-blue speckled off-white tiles and twist my toe against them. “Calisse de crisse. I'm going to do what I gotta do. You know that.”
When I look up, he's staring at me with a bemused expression. He meets my eyes levelly and then nods once, slowly. “Yeah.” He turns away, unplugs his little device from the wall. He looks back over his shoulder, hand on the knob, shoulders set under his uniform. “Be careful, Jenny.”
He's out the door before I can frame a comeback; the latch click echoes in my open mouth.
Tuesday 19 December, 2062
Sol-system wide area nanonetwork
08:27:10:01–08:27:17:09
Carver Mallory was a good kid, Richard decided absently, with the 5 percent of his processing capability he was using to maintain communication with Constance Riel, Leah, Jenny, Min-xue, and the crippled boy.
“There's no reason Carver can't still be an effective pilot,” Richard said to Riel, using the Montreal's tight-beam microwave communications. Simultaneously, he linked the flight simulation Jenny had provided to Carver, projecting it directly into the boy's brain. Richard bet he could learn another new trick very soon: relaying conversation directly between the nanite-infected organic intelligences. This is going to change the world, he thought, not for the first time. This is going to change the species.
He managed all that with 5 percent of his intellect.
The other 95 percent was bent on cracking the nanite core programming and delobotomizing his progenitor. Ramirez and Forster had managed to get the Benefactor tech to reproduce itself, managed to modify the descendants and adapt them to various purposes such as the neural and VR enhancements. The nanotech remained self-programming in that it evolved to maintain and repair whatever object or creature its control chips were implanted in.
Richard had long ago figured out how to tap into their carrier signal and ride their bandwidth. His new insight into their core programming let him disperse his awareness through the Canadian side of the nanonetwork, making him essentially decentralized. He'd already been able to spawn subprocesses. The new development made him a literal multithreaded, multifocal intelligence, able to merge and part with disparate selves at a whim.
The data from the Chinese ships were invaluable; he was surprised to discover that the Chinese were farther along in the programming process than the Canadians. And that they had discovered how to isolate clumps — families — of nanites from the “network” so that those particular bugs communicated only with each other. To cut them off from the nanonetwork, in other words. To cut them off from Richard, too.
Which crystallized his suspicions on the source of the logic bomb that could have killed the Montreal's crew and opened her hull to space. “Jenny,” he said when that individual had finished the trial runs for Carver (the same runs the rest of the students were undergoing, through direct hardware interface), “have you and Ellie finished the control chips I asked you to make?”
“They're as ready as I can make them,” Jenny answered. Richard felt her motions as she stood, no longer favoring her injured leg, and paced around her desk. Plush carpet compressed under her boots; he sensed the absoluteness of her balance as she went to the window and stood, looking out. “Library computer, right?”
“No,” he said with a smile. “I want to meet Alan.”
She stopped, and Richard smiled to feel her mild surprise, to sense the nanite response to a brief elevation of heart rate and skin conductivity. “Alan? Lonely?”
“It's not wise, I think,” Richard answered, “to let him grow up in isolation.” A half-truth. “Wire one of the chips into the intranet Elspeth has him isolated in, please.” (elsewhere, primary processes would have leapt and shouted aloud had they legs and voices as suddenly, precisely, the code structure of the nanite's quantum operating system came clear in Richard's not-quite-a-mind and he simultaneously saw how to force his other half to access the autonomous functions Gabe had so cleverly walled away / subprocesses noted that the Calgary's reactor came on-line for the very first time Riel asked Richard if there was no hope that Carver would regain use of his body Leah let a dark-haired boy kiss her in a corner stairwell and then pulled away, confused Min-xue's heart rate spiked and—)p>