Free Worldwired by Elizabeth Bear

and tilt his head back to tuck her under his chin. She sighed when he did it, and melted against him as if his warmth had unmoored whatever emotional props kept her stiff-backed and upright. He nodded into her hair.
    “Dammit, Gabe. I'm tired. Je suis fatiguée.” She shook her head. “When do we get to take a break?”
    He snorted and pulled her closer, breathing in the shower-clean scent of her skin. “When they push us over and shovel dirt on our heads,” he answered, holding on tight.
     
    1400 hours
Friday September 28, 2063

Lake Simcoe Military Prison

Ontario, Canada
     
    Xie Min-xue stared at the wall of his cell, which was beige and featureless, but he wasn't seeing it. He wasn't feeling the headache caused by the fluorescent lights, his enhanced senses turning what was supposed to be a flicker too fast for perception into something more akin to the stutter of a strobe light, because all his attention was turned inward focused on an old American poem. Richard was still helping him with his English, and in a little less than a year it had gotten much better than he would ever have permitted his guards—or his fellow Chinese prisoners—to realize.
    As clearly as if someone who had been quietly reading a book had raised his head and fixed him with a glance, Min-xue felt the shift in Richard's attention. He'd been backgrounded, conversing with one of Richard's subroutines while Richard's core identity handled half a dozen more important things. Now the threads merged again, the AI's primary awareness focusing on Min-xue. It was the equivalent of a man clearing his throat, except Min-xue felt the pressure of that regard as an internal thing.
    It prickled the hairs on his neck.
    Hello, Richard.
    “Hello, Min-xue . . .”
    That polite hesitation, and it told Min-xue that Richard was serious.
You're here to tell me what they're going to do with me
.
    “I'm here to let you know what's being discussed, and let you know what we're going to do about it. You do have friends in high places, you know.”
    Not high enough.
The pilot shook his head and rose to his feet. He paused for a moment, looking down at his feet in their white canvas sneakers with the thin plastic soles.
You're going to ask me to defect, Richard. I will not do that.
    “But you'll testify against your superiors in a World Court? That seems a little contradictory.” Richard “spoke” English, but he spoke it slowly, so that Min-xue would understand him clearly.
    There was nothing in the cell except a narrow shelf made up as a bench or a bed, a steel toilet, and a tightly folded blanket. The air from outside smelled cold, musty. He could almost convince himself that he caught the reek of soot. Min-xue paused beneath the high, barred window. Along with the solitary cell that protected him from the crew-mates he'd betrayed, that window was the prison's concession to his controversial status.
    “Refusing to carry out an illegal order is not treason.” Which wasn't exactly the
words
of a concept he'd found echoed in T'ang poetry and in subversive twentieth-century English literature, but the sentiments behind it hadn't changed very much in centuries.
I am not a defector, Richard. I am not a traitor.
    “If you're a citizen and a subject of the commonwealth, Riel can protect you. If you are a PanChinese national . . .”
    Is this your way of letting me know that my government wants me back for punishment?
    “They wish access to the aliens, and restitution for the nanite infestation of their waters and the damage to the
Huang Di
that you caused. And yourself and all the rest of the crew returned. Along with the
Huang Di,
of course.”
    Of course. And I am to take the blame for the attack on Toronto, and Captain Wu the courageous patriot who tried to prevent my actions?
    He felt Richard's sigh, saw it with his inward eye. “I liked you better when you were an innocent who liked poetry, Min-xue.”

Alas for innocence, then.
But it was true; the past