Read Online Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 by Elizabeth Bear - Free Book Online Page A
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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infected like Jenny with an imperfectly understood technology, although he could sense a difference in their nanotech and that of the allied Canadian and Unitek agencies. He couldn't control the Chinese nanotech—or the alien originals—as he could the modified Canadian bugs. It was as simple as being on the inside of one code-set and the outside of the others, but it worried Richard.
The contagion—the
gift
of the nanotech—worried him more. It stretched his credibility to imagine such gifts given purely out of munificence.
I cannot assume anything about the aliens. It's the rankest kind of anthropomorphizing to assign human motivations to another species. And I have to learn Chinese.
Why is it always the bureaucrats who wind up deciding how the technology is applied?
Richard stretched himself through the ship's systems, subsuming its essential functions, feeling its heartbeat and its breath. The solar wind pressed his webbed wings forward, tickled his solar collectors. A nanosecond after he'd left Jenny for the ship, he'd realized with annoyance that there was no physical way for him to control the ship's trajectory. The hardware interlocks had been intentionally designed to keep navigation out of the AI's control.
But I've got access to life support. The perfection of government logic.
He grinned internally, and started checking sensor feeds to get a solid look at the earth through his “own” eyes.
The grin didn't last. Satellite images and the
Montreal
's own infrared, visual light and water-vapor records painted a distressing picture. He had the data, of course—temperature spikes and dips, eroding of the protective layers of the atmosphere, algae bloom and die-off. The images of the dust storms over Mongolia and the U.S. Southwest, the stagnant Atlantic with its failed thermohaline cycle, and the rising ocean levels were sobering enough—and he'd long ago retrieved them from news feeds.
It was somehow different, seeing it all at once.
1200 Hours
Monday 6 November, 2062
HMCSS
Montreal
Under way
Gabe chewed his thumbnail as he watched Jenny's body slump, limp as a trusting kitten, into the embrace of her black leather chair. He stayed at the back of the little assemblage, trying not to draw attention, trying not to count each breath.
Something flashed in his peripheral vision, drawing his eye.
Blink
.
Blink
. Lieutenant Koske jostled his arm as he turned and then gave him a dirty look.
Gabe smiled. Morse code:
all clear
. And kept turning, smiling, intentionally brushing Koske aside so the smaller man had to hop out of the way. Koske's enhanced reflexes made it graceful, more was the pity, but at least Gabe got the satisfaction of another dirty look.
You may be an engineered war machine, punk, but I probably saw more combat hours than your whole fucking unit. Just you bear that in mind.
Valens stood by a console at the near wall, touching a miniature microphone almost to his lips. He wasn't speaking, currently, just observing the observers, who seemed entranced with the slowly receding blue-green sphere projected on the wall screens. Gabe drew up beside him and waited for the acknowledgment.
A different crop of observers this time. There were children behind him, fifteen, sixteen. Standing on the bridge of an untested starship.
This is so fucking wrong,
Gabe thought, imagining his own daughter in the place of the girl with Valens's hazel eyes. The other child was a beautiful cocoa-colored boy with a warm, hesitant smile and facile hands. Someone stood behind
him
in a pinstriped power-suit, ridiculous for space travel: a big man, salt and pepper and an officious nose, wearing a Unitek twenty-five-years pin as a tie tack. And next to him, Alberta Holmes, Unitek research and development VP and Valens's personal little red devil on the shoulder. Not that Valens needed much help.
I must have missed a shuttle from Clarke coming in.
Gabe cleared his throat. “Colonel.”
Haunted silence hung so
The contagion—the
gift
of the nanotech—worried him more. It stretched his credibility to imagine such gifts given purely out of munificence.
I cannot assume anything about the aliens. It's the rankest kind of anthropomorphizing to assign human motivations to another species. And I have to learn Chinese.
Why is it always the bureaucrats who wind up deciding how the technology is applied?
Richard stretched himself through the ship's systems, subsuming its essential functions, feeling its heartbeat and its breath. The solar wind pressed his webbed wings forward, tickled his solar collectors. A nanosecond after he'd left Jenny for the ship, he'd realized with annoyance that there was no physical way for him to control the ship's trajectory. The hardware interlocks had been intentionally designed to keep navigation out of the AI's control.
But I've got access to life support. The perfection of government logic.
He grinned internally, and started checking sensor feeds to get a solid look at the earth through his “own” eyes.
The grin didn't last. Satellite images and the
Montreal
's own infrared, visual light and water-vapor records painted a distressing picture. He had the data, of course—temperature spikes and dips, eroding of the protective layers of the atmosphere, algae bloom and die-off. The images of the dust storms over Mongolia and the U.S. Southwest, the stagnant Atlantic with its failed thermohaline cycle, and the rising ocean levels were sobering enough—and he'd long ago retrieved them from news feeds.
It was somehow different, seeing it all at once.
1200 Hours
Monday 6 November, 2062
HMCSS
Montreal
Under way
Gabe chewed his thumbnail as he watched Jenny's body slump, limp as a trusting kitten, into the embrace of her black leather chair. He stayed at the back of the little assemblage, trying not to draw attention, trying not to count each breath.
Something flashed in his peripheral vision, drawing his eye.
Blink
.
Blink
. Lieutenant Koske jostled his arm as he turned and then gave him a dirty look.
Gabe smiled. Morse code:
all clear
. And kept turning, smiling, intentionally brushing Koske aside so the smaller man had to hop out of the way. Koske's enhanced reflexes made it graceful, more was the pity, but at least Gabe got the satisfaction of another dirty look.
You may be an engineered war machine, punk, but I probably saw more combat hours than your whole fucking unit. Just you bear that in mind.
Valens stood by a console at the near wall, touching a miniature microphone almost to his lips. He wasn't speaking, currently, just observing the observers, who seemed entranced with the slowly receding blue-green sphere projected on the wall screens. Gabe drew up beside him and waited for the acknowledgment.
A different crop of observers this time. There were children behind him, fifteen, sixteen. Standing on the bridge of an untested starship.
This is so fucking wrong,
Gabe thought, imagining his own daughter in the place of the girl with Valens's hazel eyes. The other child was a beautiful cocoa-colored boy with a warm, hesitant smile and facile hands. Someone stood behind
him
in a pinstriped power-suit, ridiculous for space travel: a big man, salt and pepper and an officious nose, wearing a Unitek twenty-five-years pin as a tie tack. And next to him, Alberta Holmes, Unitek research and development VP and Valens's personal little red devil on the shoulder. Not that Valens needed much help.
I must have missed a shuttle from Clarke coming in.
Gabe cleared his throat. “Colonel.”
Haunted silence hung so
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