Read Online Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 by Elizabeth Bear - Free Book Online
Authors: Elizabeth Bear
Tags: Fiction, General, Science-Fiction, Science Fiction - General, Fiction - Science Fiction, Military, American Science Fiction And Fantasy, Science Fiction - Military
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Sainte-Marie
.”
Unlike the corporate ships of the Westerners, the
Huang Di
used chemical rockets for in-system propulsion. They made a visible flare—but the
Huang Di
's smaller silhouette was easier to conceal than the
Montreal
's sweeping solar sails and massive habitation ring. And the chemical rockets were not reliant on the solar wind for impulse, leaving the
Huang Di
more nimble under almost any circumstances.
But they have gravity
. The captain nodded, still impassive, and the junior officer's hands played over his control panels. Xie Min-xue folded his own hands in his lap and recalled lines of T'ang dynasty poetry to pass the time.
Have you not seen, lord, near the Kokonor, the ungathered bones of the long dead soldiers? New ghosts whisper while the old ghosts weep: you can hear them in the empty passage of the rain
.
He couldn't wait until his stultifying duty shift ended, and he could put in his practice hours on the simulators and then read himself to sleep in what passed for the privacy of his coffin-bed. Or find Paiyun and the medics or the other off-duty pilots for a game of mah-jongg, go, or chess.
The
Huang Di
rose in soundless pursuit of her rival, slipping ghostlike away from the embrace of Earth's gravity and into the caress of the stellar wind. The screens and holograms showed the character indicating Earth “below” and “behind” Min-xue's ship. Somewhere on that whirling globe was Min-xue's mother, his sister, the girl he had intended to marry. Before he'd been subjected to the pilot's modifications that made him flinch away from the simplest touch.
What the Westerners did to their pilots was worse. The clinicians and technicians said the Canadians were afraid to trust their pilots with a full nanite load, or to make enough of them to allow adequate rest between shifts. The clinicians said that the Canadians severed limbs and replaced them with cybernetic appliances, implanted destruct codes in the pilots' software, addicted them to performance-enhancing drugs so that they could bear the endless workload, and so they could be more easily controlled. The Canadians and their corporate masters did not have the moral certainties of post-Communist and neo-Confucian patriotism to guide them; they were ideologically flawed, and their rapacious ways, so similar to those of the Americans, were a large part of the reason behind the poverty and privation that Min-xue had known so well as a child.
They must not be permitted the conquest of space,
he thought.
If it costs all our lives, this border must be defended.
Min-xue lifted his eyes from the world spinning there in the blackness and trained his gaze at the screens showing the space beyond the
Huang Di
's nose.
Forward, he saw only darkness pricked out in ten thousand glittering lights, and the minute form of the
Montreal,
magnified on a side screen to reveal the silhouette of a gawky, wing-spread, leg-trailing crane.
Iron hinges, iron barriers / Fettered the passes, / Mighty banners, five fathoms long, / Battered the double gates
. . .
Xie Min-xue, you are a long, long way from home.
Monday 6 November, 2062
HMCSS
Montreal
processor core
12:13:32:07–12:13:32:13
The being who jokingly called himself the ghost of Richard Feynman would have grinned from ear to ear, if he'd had a body to do it with. A physical body with lips and teeth, that is. Because after five days of hard and subtle work, incontrovertibly—he had a shape, a skin. Pulse of coolant through his veins. Sunlight painting his hide. Room to stretch, to resume interrupted operations, to spawn processes suspended for the duration of his quiescence in Jenny's limited wetware. Tug of gravity at his boots and the whisper of Jenny's presence at the back of his consciousness—not the same way it had been when he was riding her implant, but as one of a countless multitude of voices—most of them incomprehensible. Among them, he could pick out relays from the Chinese pilots,
.”
Unlike the corporate ships of the Westerners, the
Huang Di
used chemical rockets for in-system propulsion. They made a visible flare—but the
Huang Di
's smaller silhouette was easier to conceal than the
Montreal
's sweeping solar sails and massive habitation ring. And the chemical rockets were not reliant on the solar wind for impulse, leaving the
Huang Di
more nimble under almost any circumstances.
But they have gravity
. The captain nodded, still impassive, and the junior officer's hands played over his control panels. Xie Min-xue folded his own hands in his lap and recalled lines of T'ang dynasty poetry to pass the time.
Have you not seen, lord, near the Kokonor, the ungathered bones of the long dead soldiers? New ghosts whisper while the old ghosts weep: you can hear them in the empty passage of the rain
.
He couldn't wait until his stultifying duty shift ended, and he could put in his practice hours on the simulators and then read himself to sleep in what passed for the privacy of his coffin-bed. Or find Paiyun and the medics or the other off-duty pilots for a game of mah-jongg, go, or chess.
The
Huang Di
rose in soundless pursuit of her rival, slipping ghostlike away from the embrace of Earth's gravity and into the caress of the stellar wind. The screens and holograms showed the character indicating Earth “below” and “behind” Min-xue's ship. Somewhere on that whirling globe was Min-xue's mother, his sister, the girl he had intended to marry. Before he'd been subjected to the pilot's modifications that made him flinch away from the simplest touch.
What the Westerners did to their pilots was worse. The clinicians and technicians said the Canadians were afraid to trust their pilots with a full nanite load, or to make enough of them to allow adequate rest between shifts. The clinicians said that the Canadians severed limbs and replaced them with cybernetic appliances, implanted destruct codes in the pilots' software, addicted them to performance-enhancing drugs so that they could bear the endless workload, and so they could be more easily controlled. The Canadians and their corporate masters did not have the moral certainties of post-Communist and neo-Confucian patriotism to guide them; they were ideologically flawed, and their rapacious ways, so similar to those of the Americans, were a large part of the reason behind the poverty and privation that Min-xue had known so well as a child.
They must not be permitted the conquest of space,
he thought.
If it costs all our lives, this border must be defended.
Min-xue lifted his eyes from the world spinning there in the blackness and trained his gaze at the screens showing the space beyond the
Huang Di
's nose.
Forward, he saw only darkness pricked out in ten thousand glittering lights, and the minute form of the
Montreal,
magnified on a side screen to reveal the silhouette of a gawky, wing-spread, leg-trailing crane.
Iron hinges, iron barriers / Fettered the passes, / Mighty banners, five fathoms long, / Battered the double gates
. . .
Xie Min-xue, you are a long, long way from home.
Monday 6 November, 2062
HMCSS
Montreal
processor core
12:13:32:07–12:13:32:13
The being who jokingly called himself the ghost of Richard Feynman would have grinned from ear to ear, if he'd had a body to do it with. A physical body with lips and teeth, that is. Because after five days of hard and subtle work, incontrovertibly—he had a shape, a skin. Pulse of coolant through his veins. Sunlight painting his hide. Room to stretch, to resume interrupted operations, to spawn processes suspended for the duration of his quiescence in Jenny's limited wetware. Tug of gravity at his boots and the whisper of Jenny's presence at the back of his consciousness—not the same way it had been when he was riding her implant, but as one of a countless multitude of voices—most of them incomprehensible. Among them, he could pick out relays from the Chinese pilots,
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