Grail - Elizabeth Bear [82]
“Somebody tried to kill us all,” Tristen said.
Amanda continued, “I can’t be sure of anything until I have the opportunity to take a forensics team through the wreckage, but given the evidence of a smaller shock wave preceding the main explosion, I would lean toward the explanation that an explosive device was concealed in the Quercus’s quantum engine core, where it would not be evident to crew inspection while she was under way, and that it was triggered by remote. Not a proximity sensor, or it would have gone off before Danilaw and I were able to disembark.” She wet dry lips with a Mean’s pink tongue. “You know what? It’s stupid of me to waste my resources now. May I unseal, Captain Conn?”
“The offer stands,” Perceval said. In the command space they shared, Tristen was aware of her effortless ownership of the crisis. As Captain—a mature and integrated Captain—her awareness of the world was as preconscious and prescient as her undermind’s awareness of her physical body. The ship was the Captain, and the Captain the ship. And yet, if he had not been in there with her, he would never have realized her attention was mostly directed away from the alien diplomats.
Administrator Danilaw stared at Captain Amanda, but nodded. “We won’t make it back to Fortune on suit reserve.” He touched both hands to the sides of his helmet, and after a few manipulations lifted it off. Captain Amanda followed, though Tristen watched her throat work under the smooth pink-brown skin before her nostrils flared on the first indrawn breath.
However unsettled she was, neither she nor the Fisher King let it affect their demeanor. Two slow drags of air and she spoke again, her voice shaking only slightly. “The obvious conclusion is that the Quercus was sabotaged while I was dirtside, picking up Danilaw.”
“We’ll see that you get home,” Perceval said. “After all, we’re headed that way.”
Captain Amanda’s eyebrow arched at the joke. “I guess you are.”
“You’ll want to contact your people; you may use our arrays to do so.”
“We have q-sets,” Danilaw said. “Without the relay on the Quercus, we may need a power boost, but we can manage to call home.”
Captain Amanda set her helmet down on the table and leaned her hands on either side of it. “How heavy are your casualties? How may Danilaw and I assist in your salvage operations?”
“Correlating,” Nova said out of the air. Tristen made a point of not noticing when the Fisher King and his companion reacted with startlement. “Please carry on.”
Tristen could have wished that she’d given a number—preferably a small one—but he understood. Her sensors and proprioception had been damaged in the explosion, and Tristen knew from eavesdropping her feed that—under Perceval’s guidance—she was already engaging search and repair parties, conducting survivor interviews, bringing in medical details. Organizing her immune response, like any organism in the face of attack. He gave her a part of his attention and felt Perceval doing the same.
“It’s deeply problematic that one of our people would resort to terrorism,” Danilaw said. “It’s not that rightminding removes the capability for violence, you understand. But it addresses the irrational evolutionary triggers—territorialism, dominance—that result in a great deal of fighting.”
“Rightminding,” Tristen said, fastening on the unfamiliar word. It sounded somewhat ominous.
“Humans,” Danilaw said, “evolved to collaborate—but also to compete. For resources, status, reproductive success.”
Mallory said, “Competition is essential to evolutionary development.”
“Ah,” Danilaw said. “But after a certain point, evolution is no longer essential to existence.”
It was a peculiar sensation, Tristen thought, to hear a sentence, to understand each word in it, and yet to have the abiding conviction that one had entirely missed the sense. He wasn’t alone: beside him, Perceval—who, like Tristen, had half her attention on Nova’s disaster-remediation efforts