“She does.”
When they first met with the Europeans, my ancestors wove a treaty with them, written in the symbols on a wampum belt. Two rows of violet beads side by side on a river of white: two canoes moving parallel down a stream, canoes whose courses were not to affect each other. Whose paths were not to intersect.
It never works out that way.
How soon will the Benefactors arrive?
A dry suggestion of a shrug. “It's hard to tell when you can't read their star charts.”
A picture is a picture, isn't it?
“You would think so. But it doesn't appear to work that way.”
We should probably have the war over with when they get here, don't you think?
Watching Gabe work, watching the wounded Earth spin on the view screen over his shoulder, I settle back in my chair to wait. A warrior kind of finality fills me with an emotion I almost don't recognize. Take care of Genie for me, Elspeth.
Peace.
I am at peace.
“Jenny,” Richard whispers. “We're in. Min-xue is in control, Pilot. The Huang Di is under way.”
0615 Hours
Friday 22 December, 2062
HMCSS Calgary
Earth orbit
“Leah.” Richard's voice roused her from something half-like sleep, but mostly like staring out the Calgary's bridge view ports. “Elspeth and Genie are okay.”
“What?” She said it out loud, jerking forward in her chair. The skeleton bridge crew glanced at her — three scared-looking junior grade officers and airmen, the oldest probably only four years older than she was. “Sorry,” she said, and waved them away. “Just thinking out loud.” They're all right? They're alive?
“And kicking,” he answered. “Genie has two broken ribs. How are you?”
Scared. Genie's really okay? Leah picked at the edge of her chair. She wondered where Koske was, and casually reached out to Richard for the information. He showed her a map, Koske in his new, Spartan quarters. Down the hall from Leah's room. Where Leah couldn't stand to be.
“She'll live, but things are bad down there, Leah. And going to get worse.”
I know. She stood and paced to the direct-view window, laying both hands flat on ice-cold glass. There were layers and layers of crystal between herself and the outside. Beyond it, she saw Clarke, the occasional flashes of light as its meteor defenses picked off a bit of space junk or debris. It's the end of the world.
“Not quite.” Something colored his voice. He resolved fully in her imaginary vision, a rangy man whose shoulders lifted and fell in a shrug she would have called exhaustion in a human. “The Huang Di will be moving soon. I need you to get jacked in to the ship and let it go by, even if you hear something different from ground control or the captain. Can you do that for me?”
Leah nodded. What's it going to do?
“One of its pilots feels very bad about what happened, and he's going to try to make it better.”
Richard. She sighed, exasperated. I'm not a kid. What's he going to do?
“He's going to land the Huang Di in the ocean, and use it to start a global Benefactor tech infection and hopefully help fix some of the damage.”
What you wouldn't let me do with Genie.
“This is different—”
Grown-ups always say that.
“He's going to use the ship's brain as a control chip, so that Alan and I can regulate — Leah, you're still mad at me.”
She let her hands fall to her sides and shuffled back from the window. She wore ship shoes that weren't much more than rubberized slippers; her footsteps fell silent on the textured gray matting of the deck. I could have helped her. Look how much better Aunt Jenny is—
“We'll help her now. Just keep them from using the Calgary to stop the Huang Di, all right?”
Leah looked over her shoulder, her hair whispering against her neck, a few strands pulling at her interface as she turned her head to regard the curved black couch. Isn't this dangerous? What about what happened to Carver? And then she bit down on her thumbnail, remembering that Carver was dead, and Bryan, too.
“That's a risk,” Richard answered. “But this is just to heal. Not enhance. So it's safer. We're starting in five minutes. Are you ready?”
Leah checked the chrono in her contact lens's heads-up display. I'll be ready, she said. “Airman?”
He looked up from his monitors: thermal readings, she saw, showing the entry streak of the asteroid scraped the breadth of North America like a slash through the belly of a gutted fish. “Cadet?”
“I want to check the hull and vane integrity, just in case some of that debris made it up this far. Would you please help wire me in?”
The pinch of the wires was nothing. The young man's hands shook when he touched her, and then Leah floated in space, the Calgary her wings and eyes and breath. Richard, do you think Bryan felt anything?
“Nothing, Leah.” He spoke as if from far away.
How do you know?
“I was with him.”
Oh.
“I told him you were thinking of him.”
Thank you. Richard fed her data, showed her the leisurely, orange streak that was the Huang Di, the limping arc of the Montreal coming around. “Are we ready to go up?”
Testing the vanes now. A thought brought her up short. Richard. Those ships on Mars.
“Yes?”
Could they have been grounded for a similar purpose? Long ago?
His hesitation might have been framed in nanoseconds. An unaugmented human, one not becoming accustomed to conversation at the speed of thought, would never have noticed. “It's a possibility, yes. Mars had significant surface water once, and the project xenobiologist thought that was what they were for.”
But they failed. There's no life on Mars.
“Mars was a more fragile system,” Richard said.
Is this going to work, Richard?
She almost sensed when he thought about lying to her, almost knew the instant when he decided there was no point. “Probably,” he said. “A little, at least. We have to try, in any case. There's nothing else left to do.”
Min-xue would have liked the poetry of it if the Huang Di moved, when she moved, with the silk-on-water purity of his grandfather's fishing boat. She didn't, though; it was the Montreal that was graceful, elegant. The Huang Di lurched like a drunk when he triggered her main engines and attitude jets, no time for a gentle burn, no poetry in her motion but a stagger.
I wanted to be a poet, Richard. Did I tell you that, my friend? I wanted to live to write poetry.
The Huang Di curved in space, dropping, one brief nudge enough to push her into the gravity well, a longer burn to turn her topple into a glide.
“Min-xue,” Richard answered. “You've done so. This is a poem that will be remembered for a thousand years, my friend.”
Min-xue smiled, feeling the warmth of his friend's benediction. And then feeling nothing at all, as his connection with the Huang Di suddenly, unbelievably, went dead.