Worldwired (25 page)

Papa hadn't stopped talking. “If it's not contact stuff, why is it so secret?”

“Because it's nanite ‘stuff,'” Charlie answered. “Which is why we think we need your help.”

Boris, annoyed at her neglect, reached out and grabbed Genie's soft foam ship-shoe. His claws went through it, even though he didn't mean her any harm. She would have yelped, but she was invisible, and if she made any sound, somebody might notice her. Instead she reached down and roughed up the fur under his chin. He stretched back out again, relaxing. She hoped he wouldn't purr too loudly.

Papa set his coffee cup down, but not before he finished whatever was left in the bottom. “Richard?”

“Right here, Gabriel.”

“Is what they're about to tell me likely to reconvince me that we need to go over our operating systems for trap doors?”

“Actually,” Richard answered, “I think it will convince you that you want to try to reprogram the tech from scratch. On the other hand, the risks involved in that—”

“Like Jenny's life, you mean? And my daughter's?”

Silence. Genie bit her lip. He'd definitely forgotten she was there. Genie shivered. Her butt was getting numb from sitting on the air register, but this was interesting.

“And mine,” Richard said. “Although none of the nanotech that I inhabit appears to have problems yet, I am concerned.”

“Putain de ordinateur. Richard.
Problems
?”

“Forgive me, Gabriel. Before the EVA, Charlie discovered that the . . . nanotech in the ecospheres was dropping out of its networks for an unexplained reason. Or reasons. At first we thought they were dying, but further experimentation has led us to believe they're just . . . losing communication with each other.”

“And this is ongoing?”

“In patches. Or batches. They'll just stall.”

Papa sighed and looked around for his coffee cup. Charlie gave it back to him, refilled. “I hope you have a good reason why I wasn't informed of this, Dick.”

Leslie “coughed.” “Prime Minister Riel swore us to secrecy.”

“So you're making me a party to treason?”

“Yes. Well, it's not treason for me; it's just espionage. But since the rest of you are Canadians—”

“Okay,” Papa said, looking down at his hands. “Spare me the hairsplitting. And you want me to find out who's hacking the machines and disabling them, and how, and why?”

“Your reputation for perspicacity,” Richard said, “is not exaggerated, Mr. Castaign.” Genie could hear the amusement in his voice. Papa obviously could, too, from the way he rolled his eyes.

Richard, I shouldn't be here for this.

“Genie, I think you're more than grown up enough to understand this conversation, and why it's important, and has to be secret. Don't you?”

“I think the whole team should know about this,” Papa said.

“Jeremy already does,” Leslie answered.

“Then Ellie needs to be brought in.”

“All right. What about Paul?”

Richard chuckled, a dry, almost mechanical sound. “I expect, somehow, that Dr. Perry would be just as happy not knowing about this little contretemps. I should hate, after all, to force him to choose between his loyalty to Constance, and to Canada.”

Premier Xiong looked thinner in the space of a very few days, Riel thought, contemplating his image floating over her desk for a precious few seconds as she collected her thoughts. Not short days, though; abrogating cliché, the days had been as long as any she cared to remember. And they didn't promise to get any shorter in the near future.

When we're finished saving the world,
she thought,
I'm going on a nice long trip someplace warm, changing my name, and buying a pineapple plantation. Or maybe sugar cane. And then I'm going to let the whole damned place go to seed, and sit on the front porch and play poker and drink daiquiris until my eyes cross.

Her eyes wanted to cross now, or at least to fuzz with exhaustion. She hoped her cosmetics were up to the task of making her look like a functioning human being, because she didn't feel like one. “Premier,” she said, and kicked her shoes off under the desk. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your call?”

“You have an . . . interesting concept of ‘pleasure' in Canada, Prime Minister.” He let his eyes sparkle, as if he were flirting with her. One of the contradictions of the modern age; even the leaders of totalitarian states needed to be able to wield charm with natural grace and confidence.

“I think I can be forgiven for finding you more entertaining than next year's fiscal realities.” She passed a hand across her interface plate, summoning coffee. “I don't think you'd be calling me on the secure hot line unless you had something too important to trust to diplomatic channels.”

“I don't think either of us can afford to trust much to diplomatic channels at this juncture. Unless your political position is considerably more secure than my own. Or than I have been led to believe.”

“I do have a few trustworthy advisers,” she answered, letting the wryness show in her voice. She could not afford to like this man, any more than he could afford to like her—but neither one of them would be in the position they were in if they weren't good at getting people to like them, to trust them, to confide. The irony and symmetry pleased her, and she smiled.

He returned it. “General Shijie has made arrangements to travel to New York City next week, to testify.”

“When I will be there.”

“And the chief executive officer of Unitek.”

“Tobias Hardy, surprise witness? That is an interesting piece of intelligence, Premier. I suppose it would be useless of me to ask how you happened to come by it?”

Xiong coughed against the back of his hand. “Through official channels.”

Oh. Meaning that somebody in the Chinese government tipped somebody at the UN that he ought to be called as a witness.
“You're asking me to put a good deal of faith in your channels, Premier. Without a complete understanding of why your government is so eager to offer assistance to mine.”

“You'll be even more confused when I tell you that I have information that your Opposition will be moving for new elections after the hearings.”

“Forgive my suspicion, Premier, but that would tend to indicate that you expect the hearings to come out rather well for PanChina. And you do not seem to be a man given to gloating over the corpses of your enemies.”

“How little you know me.” But his eyebrows had climbed another quarter-inch up his unlined forehead.

Riel glanced up as a rap announced the imminent opening of her door. She caught a glimpse of a red Mountie's jacket outside the doorway as her secretary came in with the coffee, and privacied the hologram over her desk. Premier Xiong could still see her and the office, and she could hear him through her ear clip, but the image over her interface plate dissolved into a wash of soothing blues and greens.

He stayed silent. Once she had her coffee, Riel returned the interface to view mode. She wasn't fond of talking to images projected on her contact. “My apologies, Premier.”

“Not at all.”

“You were explaining to me how it is that you know more about the doings of my government than I do.”

“Simple,” he said. “It's in my very strong interest to be apprised of the ‘doings' of Minister of War Shijie Shu. And his ‘doings' are more or less closely linked to the machinations of your enemies within Canada. I'll be sending you more details by secure packet. I trust you have people who can manufacture a provenance for them, so you may have them ready when the time comes to expose the duplicity of your opposition?”

Fred,
she said, and allowed herself a small, tight, bitter smile over the irony that, after all of it, he was the one she trusted to watch her back. What was the word he'd used to describe Casey, way back when?

Oh, yeah.

Patriot.

“Yes,” she said, and pulled the coffee tray toward her, not caring that the felt dragged on the crystal of the interface plate.
What the hell. This is as secure a line as I can get.
“If you can get me documents that prove that Hardy and Frye and their friends are in collusion with your General Shijie, then I can provide the scandal you need to prove that last year's attack against Canada was fostered by insurgent elements in your government, and we can shake hands and part friends.”

“Well. If we're speaking as plainly as that, let me stipulate: once the
Huang Di
and her crew are returned to PanChinese control, and we've come to an agreement regarding the partition of the world at HD 210277.”

“Technically speaking, it's a moon, not a world. And we're assuming it's habitable.”

“I have to assume it's habitable, Constance. I have ten thousand colonists underway to it on generation ships, and I can't allow them to arrive at a destination that's entirely under Canadian control. I think you are a reasonable woman. I think we can come to an agreement. One that will reflect well on Canada's international reputation for generosity and humanitarianism.”

I'm not sure we have one of those anymore,
Riel thought, but she smiled. “Wen-xian, will you attend the UN hearings?”

He didn't answer, but his silent smile was confirmation.

The first thing that happens when we enter the planet's telesphere is that my damned hip unit warbles in my ear clip, warning me of saved messages. Of course, it's not as though I haven't checked my e-mail from the
Montreal,
through the microwave relays, but apparently
somebody
thought he had something hush-hush enough to say that he wouldn't risk his mail being forwarded to a military server.

I remember the good old days, when the recipient got to decide where her fucking e-mail went. Some of it's flagged spam, but one piece is an unnamed message that has a good-friends filter override code on it that only Gabe and a few other people have. And most of those people are dead.

It's probably a virus.

I click on it anyway.

And don't notice I've stopped breathing until I'm dizzy enough that I have to grab the back of the acceleration couch I so recently claimed as my bed. Because the broad-cheeked, black-eyed, steel-toothed face that grins at me knocks the breath out of me like a punch in the solar plexus.

Razorface.

He was in Metro Toronto when the rock hit. I know he was, because I tried to get him to go the hell home to Connecticut, and he stayed around to try to coerce some sort of cooperation out of a Unitek vice president named Alberta Holmes, who was holding Fred's leash at the time.

I can't even begin to justify the idea that he might have made it out.

And then I calm down enough to inspect the e-mail before I trigger it, and I see the date stamp. It's December 22, 2062. I have to bite my lip until I taste metal and salt and sit down and roll my head back against the rest on the acceleration couch and breathe. Long and slow and rhythmically. Breathe, Jenny. Breathe. Even though you're hurtling toward Malaysia, braking at something less than a G, and about to open an e-mail from somebody who died almost a year ago.

It's a message from the grave. From the ghost of a kid who might as well have been my own. If my own were a gangster, a killer, and a petty warlord.

But blood's thicker than water, right? And I shed a little for Razorface. And Face shed a little for me, once upon a time.

I extricate my tongue from in between my teeth, the tweed of the capsule seat catching on the ass of my uniform pants, and I key the mail open.

And find myself staring not into Razorface's dark brown eyes while his mobile lips shape words around the sibilants that hiss between his pointed teeth, but at a series of images of documents, obviously snapped hastily, probably—judging by the distortion—through somebody's contact optic. There might be a dozen of them. I don't have time to examine them the way I'd like to, and whatever they are, they don't make a lick of sense to me, because every last one of the damned things is in Chinese or something that looks just like it.

These weren't Face's. Because as many times as I offered to teach him, Razorface never learned to read. In any language.

The images have to come from my enemy, my ally, the niece of my long-dead lover, Indigo Xu. And they've been here, lying in the Net, waiting for me. Waiting nearly a year, for me to set foot on Earth again.

Face's recorded voice calls me by a name I haven't heard in a year. “Maker,” he says. “We grabbed that Holmes chick. We're gonna hole up until we decide what to do with her. But Indigo found these on her when we grabbed her, and she says you need to see this. It's Chinese but she can't read it. She says it's coded, but I figure with the friends you got you can crack it.

“One other thing. Holmes looked like she was about to skip town when we snagged her. She had a suitcase and a wad of cash chits, a lot even for a rich bitch like her. You be careful up there, all right?” And then he grins at me, showing me all that serrated silver, and cocks his head arrogantly, cock of the walk. “You be careful up there, girl.”