Climbing Olympus. Kevin J. Anderson

every footstep, every door slam, every mumbled comment. With muttering whispers and general stirs the audience sounded like a gently snoring beast.

      Newsnet camera lights shone like baking suns onto the victims on display, the witnesses about to be dissected. In the midst of it Rachel Dycek felt small and alone; her convictions had hidden from her, leaving only a rigid outside shell. Her attention spiraled down into two points: the livid expression on the Japanese delegate’s face and the translator microphone speaking stiff and formal Russian in her ear.

      “You have dodged these questions … for days, Dr. Dycek.” The unintelligible words carried truckloads of strident anger; by contrast, the interpreter’s voice sounded smooth and relaxed.

      With the buzz of other conversations around the vast room, the asynchronous chatter of foreign languages, and the panicking voices in her head, Rachel had to squeeze her eyes shut just to pay attention to what the delegate was saying. The earphones made her breath thunder in her head.

       Calm, calm, calm. Pay attention. Gather your thoughts. They want you to slip, so they can lunge in for the kill. Do not give them the opportunity.

      “We ask again, in front of the whole world. You must answer us this time, Dr. Dycek. How can you … justify creating such distortions—no, such perversions of the human body? I am reminded of the English novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Have you read it? Did you neglect … er, did you forget that these are people to whom you have done such a horrible thing?”

      Rachel opened her eyes and sat up straighter, feeling anger come to her aid, like a staff propping her up. The man’s line of questioning offended her, and she made that quite plain through her tone of voice. She flashed her granite eyes at him until he flinched.

      With carefully chosen words she answered in English, not Russian; the legal counsel had told her that speaking English would gain points among the largest portion of the viewing audience, make her seem less of a foreigner, less alien.

      “Yes, they are indeed people, Mr. Ambassador. People who now live and breathe and work on the surface of Mars. Perhaps you are the one who has forgotten the entire”—a buzz in her ear reminded her to slow down and allow the translator time to catch up—“the entire mission of the UN Mars Project. We have spent half a century throwing money at an inhospitable planet, to prepare it for just this event. For the day when human beings can survive on the surface of another world. And now the Sovereign Republics have succeeded in this—for the entire human race I might add, not just our own commonwealth—I expected celebrations instead of an inquisition.”

      Rachel took her seat, then watched the weather patterns of expression on the interrogating delegate’s face as her answer to his question was translated from English to Japanese. Defiantly, Rachel took a long drink of ice water, avoiding any eye contact with the row of international interrogators crouching like old ravens at the front of the room. At the table beside her sat a Thermos pot of Swiss coffee and an empty mug, but despite the thick rich smell, she avoided pouring herself a cup. These hearings offered little in the way of piss breaks, and she needed to concentrate on the accusations being shot at her, without being distracted by a swollen bladder.

      Sitting silently in plush chairs along the table on both sides of her, her army of legal counsel watched with keen eyes and blank expressions. They had put a safe distance between her and themselves, in case she had to take a fall.

      A few of her colleagues waited in isolation rooms for their own turns in the interrogation chair, but at the moment everything depended on her. Rachel Dycek was under the microscope. She had been the head of the adin project, and she would be thrown into the roiling waters of inquisition, to “sink or swim” as the Americans said.

      Scapegoat.

      She had been vivisected on camera as the whole world watched. UN delegates pummeled her with question after question, hauling out details of her failed marriage to Sergei, of disciplinary records in primary school, quoting phrases from essays she had written during her undergraduate days in college.

      The questioners from India and Japan were the most vehement, but Rachel saw jealousy in the eyes of the other delegates who would not have an opportunity to question her. The Sovereign Republics had succeeded in something that had been impossible for every other country on Earth. Just like the launch of Sputnik, the first satellite; or Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space; or Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space; or Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space. While other nations dickered for years about studies and assessments, Russians simply went ahead and did the task. Rachel had done the same with her adin project.

      “Thank you, Madame Chairman,” the Indian delegate—whom Rachel thought of as “Mr. Unpronounceable Name”—leaned forward and spoke into his microphone. The Japanese delegate, whose turn at interrogation had ended with his last question, sat back with a sour look on his face and keyed comments into his notebook. Someone coughed too close to an open microphone. Other delegates shuffled papers. Mr. Unpronounceable Name, however, seemed to rely entirely on his own memory. He spoke in English.

      “Now then, Dr. Dycek, let us pursue this line of questioning further. I would like you to explain for us, in detail, the exact procedures you used to select your adin candidates. The world is concerned about possible human rights violations.”

      Rachel followed most of his words, though she double-checked them against the buzz of Russian translation in her ear. She took another deep breath. No hurry.

      She used their own terminology, since the newsnets seemed set on sticking to the same words. One of the journalists who learned of Rachel’s first and second phases of augmentation had dubbed them with the Russian words for “One” and “Two,” adin and dva, using the a instead of the preferred o transliteration. The plurals should have been odni and dvoi, but that had been too much for the newsnets, who simply added the English s plural. She sighed. The more appropriate words for “Firsts” and “Seconds” should have been perviye and vtoriye—but she realized this would be a losing battle with the media, so she did not fight it. She had enough other battles to fight. So adins and duos it was.

      “The adin candidates were chosen from among prison volunteers in our facility at Neryungri. Every single person was fully briefed on the surgeries they would undergo. They were completely aware of the modifications that would be made to their bodies—and they knew they would never return to Earth. Every one of them knew all this. We have a release signature from each candidate.”

      The Indian’s gaze bored into her. “But was this not a secret project? Classified government studies? Are you saying that you told every one of these people, these convicted criminals, of your country’s most sensitive research?”

      Rachel shrugged. “They were already imprisoned at the time.”

      The Indian delegate raised his eyebrows. “Am I to infer that once these ‘Volunteers’ received a briefing from you, they were permanently removed from any sort of parole list? What if one of them were to be found innocent of his original crime? Would you turn him loose back into society, knowing he had knowledge of your precious secrets?”

      Rachel slowed her thoughts to keep herself from spouting an answer before she had mapped out the proper words. She glanced sidelong at one of the legal counsel representatives; he nodded slightly.

      “It is not my place to debate the ethics of the penal system in the Sovereign Republics. The question you ask is beyond the scope of any of my duties in the adin project. Perhaps you would do better to interrogate the warden of the Neryungri penal camp. I know only that all of the prospective adins came to our project of their own free will, fully knowing the consequences of their choice.”

      The Indian delegate drummed his fingers on the tabletop, causing his microphone to rumble. He spread his palms and smiled with an exaggeratedly perplexed expression. “But why would anyone want to volunteer for such a thing? To me, it sounds hideous.”

      Rachel pushed her own fingertips down hard on the tabletop in what she hoped was an