A Game of Universe (9 page)

Quilp didn’t look too happy with my suggestion and bit his nails.

“Virginia, can you make it?”

“No problem,” she said then pulled a thin braided line from her pilot’s suit. “We use these for vacuum work.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I assured her. “I’ve jumped farther before.”

“Maybe you have. Doesn’t mean
I
have to risk the fall.” She clipped the line about my waist, then pulled out eight more meters.

“Go,” I told her, “and secure the area. I’ll come last, after Quilp.”

She sprinted across the roof, leapt the distance, and landed on the slippery aluminum surface.

I went back to the street and ventured another glance. The mercenaries were gone (probably inside Quilp’s building), but scaling the walls were E’kerta’s insects, giant cockroaches with ten arms and four antennae each, slimy looking bastards. Behind me, the elevator’s doors shut, and the motor made a low-pitched growl while the car descended.

I ran back to Quilp, hauled him up by his arm, and said, “Make up your mind. We’re about to be paid a visit.”

He handed me his bag full of equipment. “OK, I’m in. You brought supplies for me? Dex maybe?”

I fished through my pocket, and found the Metadexidrene he wanted, then handed him a single hit.

His eyes tracked the bulb as I passed it to him. He held it up to the artificial sun, and appraised the clear fluid within. “Ah,” he purred, “the good stuff. I knew I could count on you, buddy.” Quilp pressed it to the artery on his neck, closed his eyes, and squeezed. There was a crisp snap as the drug hypercompressed into his bloodstream. He took a deep breath, exhaled, and his pale skin flushed. Without saying a word, he ran to the edge, jumped, and made it.

The elevator halted, stayed on the ground for ten seconds, then began squealing and jerking its way up. I let it get about halfway, then fired the rifle. The motor and cables turned red, then yellow, then melted into a gelatin blob and snapped. The elevator fell.

I swung Quilp’s bag twice to build up momentum, and threw it across to Virginia. It landed on the slick roof and skimmed to the edge. Quilp caught it before it went over and shot me a glare for abusing his equipment.

Virginia looped the safety line around an air duct.

I slung my rifle, ran, and jumped.

Halfway across, in mid-air, a blast of pain kicked me square in the spine, forced the wind from me, and snapped my head back. I pawed for the edge—grabbed nothing.

I fell.

Virginia’s line snapped taut around my waist. I bounced twice against the wall of the building, once on my face, once on my back. There was a sizzling sound and the scent of my own burnt flesh.

I dangled, stunned, twisting, listening to my ears ring.

Move!
Fifty-five screamed.
We’ve been shot.
He started to take over, filling my flesh with his presence, but I stopped him, and regained control.

I can do it.
I hauled myself up the line, every movement tearing the wound on my backside open a little more. It hurt like hell.

I pulled myself up and saw Virginia struggling with the line, braced against the air duct, which was twisting off. Quilp crouched behind her, not helping, but pointing to the other rooftop. Virginia let go of the line as soon as I had one hand on the edge, then grabbed her plasma tube. She aimed it my way.

“Duck,” she cried.

A cone of xenon plasma spewed from the tube, sparkling amethyst. It thundered over my head (the ultraviolet radiation bathing my back with new agony). The aluminum roof I clung to got scalding hot.

I glanced over my shoulder. Half-assembled on the roof of Quilp’s building was E’kerta. His individual beetles, spiky mandibles and leg spider limbs, held each other to make his legs, parts of his torso, and one arm. In that one arm he held a pistol—but only for a second. The billowing purple cloud engulfed him. E’kerta flared with brilliant blue flames, then fell apart, charred black, and shells cracked.

Quickly, I pulled myself up. The roof was too hot to touch.

“Man, you’re lucky,” Quilp said. “That thing must have missed you.”

I ripped off my smoldering armored vest and showed him the hole burned through.

“Oh.” He looked to the next building and declared, “We better get to that next one. There might be more of them.” Without pause he ran and leapt across. The Metadexidrene must be kicking in full force, influencing his normal gutless self.

“Thanks,” I said to Virginia as she placed the blue shield on my wound. “He’s right, you know. We have to move. There are more where they came from.”

“Cancel anesthesia,” she ordered the robot doctor. “Administer topical nerve block instead please.” It bleeped in compliance. “That should take care of the pain until we get back to the ship.”

I wanted to say more to her, thank her again for saving my life, but Fifty-five urged me,
Go! Or there will be no one left to thank.

I grabbed her hand and we jumped across, following Quilp. There were no more buildings, at least none within reasonable jumping distance. Even Quilp, on one hit of Metadexidrene, wasn’t crazy enough to try to vault all the way across the street.

“Down,” I said and led the way into the shadowy stairwell of this building. The place wasn’t as accommodating as Quilp’s. It was a shell with only an occasional wall separating the stairwell from corridors, rooms, exposed supports, and broken windows. I caught a glimpse of the tenants as we descended; people sprawled on the floor, gazing into other realms of drugged delight (or the spray-painted walls). Others rocked back and forth, scratched themselves, paced, and stared hotly at us as we invaded their domain and passed through. The floors were covered in filth, human excrement, an endless collection of spent drug capsules, and strips of faded paisley carpet. Someone screamed close by, followed by sobbing. I ignored a cry for help and quickly spiraled down five flights, occasionally stepping over bodies—living and dead and various states in between.

Once on the ground floor, I jogged to the back door, and burst through without listening first, just relieved to be outside in the cleaner smelling air.

“We can lose whoever is after us in the marketplace,” Quilp said. “Come on.”

“Slow down,” I said and grabbed his shoulder. “We’re not wired like you.”

“Why don’t you give it a try?” he asked. “Sure would speed things along.”

“Forget it,” I said, then set my rifle to maximum power, adjusted the field to a medium spray, and held it before me. “I’ll be leading the way.”

We went quickly through the evening, through the crowds. There were just as many people on the streets at night as there had been in the afternoon, maybe more. Dealers, slavers, prostitutes, all emerged like vampires to suck the life from the inhabitants of Needles colony (what little life there was). They gave my rifle and me a wide berth as we strode toward the docks.

One merchant however, approached me. “Samber juice, friend?” He stepped forward and sloshed the contents of his bottle.

“No thanks, we—” His hands were clean, and a closer look at his smile revealed perfect, white, square teeth, not rotten as they ought to be. He was no Samber peddler.

I shot him.

From the accelerator rifle a blast of golden ions struck his midsection. He wore armor beneath his robes, the good kind, a thousand layers of synthetic sapphire (which only professionals wore). It gave him a moment to feel the pain, but not enough time to scream.

We ran. Quilp led the way on with his enhanced reactions, through the metallic womb where huge traders’ ships bobbed in their gravity wells, and men scrambled over their surfaces looking like small fish scrubbing the giants free of parasites. There was the thick scent of grease in the air. We passed through unnoticed into the smaller bays where our ship was.

I halted at the
Grail Angel,
and started to key open the hatch when Virginia said, “Not that one,” and dashed ahead of me, five slots up.

There was another vessel there, identical to this one—another
Grail Angel
—but turned about so her nose pointed toward the exit. One of the mass-folding generators hummed with power. It was warmed up and ready to depart.

But the one I stood next to had three wispy fins, three mass-folding generators, and even a silver magic circle inscribed upon her prow. There were two
Grail Angels
? The model couldn’t be mass-produced. Virginia seemed to think it was a one-of-a-kind vessel.

I wanted to walk around, inspect this second ship, and see maybe if it had a different name etched on her port side, but instead, I decided to trust Virginia’s intuition. I ran to the
Grail Angel
she thought was ours.

Quilp whistled in appreciation and said, “She has three mass-folders? I didn’t think it was possible to balance three fields simultaneously.”

“This is a very special ship,” Virginia replied.

Two hemispherical depressions marred the metal floor close to the ship a meter in diameter each. Coating these dimples was a black tar that smelled of rotten eggs left in the sun to bake. The scent triggered another feeling of déjà vu. Somewhere before I had caught this odor. The memory was strong, but the specifics obscure. It was beginning to bother me, these reoccurring recollections.

The voice of Setebos inquired, “Proper identification of ownership is required please.”

“Setebos, what happened here?”

“Proper identification is required,” it repeated in a threatening tone.

“Germain,” I answered in a neutral voice.

“Voice print match within specified tolerances. Please place your hand on the entrance plate for DNA match.”

“Setebos, what’s going on here?”

Silence.

I swore under my breath, but did as the thing asked. “Verification complete,” it said, then the hatch opened and we boarded.

“A thousand regrets for delaying your entrance, Master,” Setebos said apologetically, “but two attempts were made to compromise my structure. I had to resort to drastic actions or the integrity of the hull would have been breached.”

“The stains outside?” I asked.

“Remains of the individuals who attempted to penetrate my defenses. I focused a mass-folding field on their spatial coordinates and reversed polarity.”

“You
added
mass to them?” Virginia asked, amazed.

“Approximately fourteen hundred metric tons, madam captain,” Setebos replied. “Additionally, there have been attempts to probe my files from external sources. The protective circle has been drained to forty percent of its maximum rated capacity. I took the liberty of turning the ship about and readying the systems for takeoff.”

“What kinda AI you got running this ship?” Quilp asked.

“Take a look for yourself,” I said, and pointed to the terminal aft of the copilot’s seat.

Virginia hopped into the pilot’s wraparound and flashed her beam about the panel, checking everything. “Ready to go.” She frowned, and added, “But we’re getting a hold signal from the port authority.”

“That’s a load of garbage,” Quilp said. “This is a smuggler’s port. No one is ever stopped from leaving. Go, before they can bring up the outer doors.”

We skimmed past the small mass field that prevented the atmosphere from leaking out, and back out into the cool dark desert of space.

“This AI is something,” Quilp said to me, “very advanced architecture.” I noticed he had already bypassed the first password I had installed.

“Where to?” Virginia asked.

“Where? Nowhere for now,” I said, “just out into space, let’s get some distance between us and Needles.”

“Course plotted and the navigation—you better take a look at this, Germain.” Her voice was icy cold. “Setebos, ready the forward weapons, full auxiliary power to the protective circle.”

Four warships were on the tactical display, ugly things bristling with weapons and fat with layers of alloy plating. They lumbered toward us, the tips of their particle cannons glowing, ready to cut us to pieces.

“Can you activate the mass-folding generator?”

“Too dangerous,” she said. “This close to the planet’s gravity well, our wave function would scatter.”

Fifty-five whispered,
We’ve been set up, junior.

7

F
our octopi swam through the night, metal-plated bodies with tentacles pointed toward us, aglow with radiation, prepared to fire.

“Four
Sedition
-class war cruisers confirmed,” Virginia said. “They have us in a classic tetrahedral formation.”

“Why haven’t they shot us?” Quilp cried.

“They want something,” I said, “probably me. Quilp, try to establish communications.”

One of the metallic squids fired. A razor of lightning flashed, traced a line against the velvet dark of space, and struck. The
Grail Angel
shimmered in a haze of charged particles. Static danced across my skin, the displays in the cockpit flickered, and the temperature jumped ten degrees, making the burn on my back flare with pain.

“Protective circle operating at seventeen percent of rated capacity,” Setebos said.

“Can we outmaneuver them?” I asked Virginia.

“They have us surrounded. If we attempt to flee on any vector, three can close and triangulate their fire.”

Another lightning bolt flashed and phosphorescent ghosts played on the inside of the hull. Perspiration collected in the small of my back. We couldn’t just sit here and let them destroy us.

“Damage?”

“Protective circle inoperative,” Setebos reported. “Primary atmospheric system has failed. Switching to backup.”

On the nose of the
Grail Angel,
the runes of the magic circle blazed white hot. It would take hours before they cooled enough to absorb another blast.

“I’m getting a signal from them,” Quilp said. “You want me to put it on?”

“Unless you enjoy being used for target practice.”

Quilp muttered something about my ancestry as he dumped the signal onto a working display.

Omar and his infectious grin appeared. His smile was wider than usual because he knew he had me.

“Friend Omar,” I said, trying to look like I expected him. “What brings you here? Do you think the Grail is on Needles?”

He examined me with his hazel eyes, then took a sip of wine from a crystal flute. “I don’t know, friend. Is it?”

“No.”

“Most disappointing. I heard a rumor you were here. I thought it only civil to drop by and say hello.”

“Heard? From whom?”

His smile grew even wider. “I followed a trail of omens like bread crumbs to you, friend.”

Omens and bread crumbs my ass, junior,
said Fifty-five.
Someone tipped him off that we were coming to Needles, unless he cast a spell to see the future.

Unlikely. Even my Master’s most powerful mnemonic construct only affects seven seconds of time. To see hours into the future is beyond any lore I know of. That’s why I need the psychologist, Necatane.

“It has also come to my attention,” Omar said, his grin fading, “that you and I had a parting of the ways three weeks ago.”

Then he knew I had murdered his previous clone. I said nothing.

He swirled his wine and took another sip. “But no matter now. You should have taken the deal I offered you on Golden City.”

“I suppose it’s too late to join you?”

“Much too late.”

“You and E’kerta were working together,” I said. “Those were his mercenaries down there, but whose ships are you commanding? You never had the capital to buy four warships and crew.”

“My thanks for eliminating E’kerta. He had a logical mind, but was far too dangerous. Unpredictable. And the ownership of these fine vessels is none of your concern. Now,” he said, “let us do business. I have a new deal for you. One that you cannot afford to decline. In exchange for your life, I demand your expert services to help me find the Grail. Do not tell me you know nothing. You demonstrated your knowledge quite adequately at Erybus’s meeting.”

“I may know something,” I lied to Omar. “But why should I tell you?” I stood with my arms akimbo, trying to look like I had a firmer bargaining position than I did. “True, you could destroy my ship, but you’d gain nothing.”

“Not true, friend. There would be one less in the race, one who I consider serious competition. On the other hand, if you cooperate with me, I’ll merely take your ship and strand you on Needles.” That smile of his returned. “I shall even allow you to keep your casino winnings. I wouldn’t want anyone to say I was ill-mannered.”

“Thanks,” I replied. “In fifty weeks I’ll still be dead.”

You’re a fool,
said Fifty-five,
if you think he’ll let you live a second longer then he has to.

Omar shrugged. “A year on Needles with money to spend is better than an immediate death, is it not?” He took a large gulp of his wine, finishing it, then asked, “What shall it be?”

I glanced to Virginia and Quilp. Maybe it would be best to give up. Omar might cut a deal with Virginia, hire her, or let her go unharmed. Quilp? He’d probably kill him.

Virginia had no fear in her eyes; she was ready to fight. And Quilp, it was hard to tell what he was thinking. All I saw were his pupils constricted to the extreme.

I had to buy us time.

“Very well, Omar, I know when I’ve been beaten. I shall tell you what I know.” In a whisper, I added, “However, if anyone is to win this competition other than me, I’d rather it be a fellow member of the Corporation. How far do you trust your business partners? Wouldn’t it be better if we spoke face to face? These ship to ship transmissions are notoriously unsecure.”

He stroked his chin. “True. Hold your position and prepare to be boarded. And let me remind you that I have three warships with their weapons ready to cancel you. Let us not have any tricks.”

“No tricks. You have my word.”

“Omar out.” His Cheshire cat smile faded from the display.

“Virginia, what is that planet like?” I asked. “Can we make an emergency landing?”

Information flashed into her double-star insignia, and she reported, “Hydrogen sulfide atmosphere of seventeen thousand kilopascals, mean temperature over six hundred degrees Kelvin, winds at five hundred kilometers per hour—not what I’d call a picnic spot.”

“Setebos, give me your Grail database analysis. Do we have anything to barter with?”

“My study is only twenty-three percent complete, Master; however, I have three locations with high correlations: Bebin in the Lydia system, Lesser Byzantia in the Melbourne cluster, and New Jerusalem on Earth, with respective probabilities of twelve, eight, and five percent. There are others, but they fall well below these levels of certainty.”

“Great.”

“So give Omar those locations,” Quilp suggested, “and up the percentages.”

“Omar likes to be told the truth,” I said. “He’ll use a verifier or something worse to check the accuracy of our claims.” I didn’t need to tell Quilp that Omar had several psychological means at his disposal to extract the truth. He was close to panicking already.

Quilp slammed his fist into the terminal. “Man! I knew this was a mistake. I gotta get out of here.” He suddenly composed himself and asked, “Wait, pilot, we can’t use mass-folding generators close to the planet because we’ll get scattered, right?”

“Correct,” she replied. “If our mass falls below the light-neutrino mass limit, virtually any potential scatters our wave function. We degenerate into non-coherent plane waves, unable to resolve, and drift forever.”

“But what if we didn’t go below the LNM limit? What if we retained a finite mass?”

“Can’t,” Virginia said. “All the folding subroutines are designed to make our mass as small as possible, to go below the LNM limit.”

“And at finite masses,” Setebos interjected, “the
Grail Angel
is restricted to sub-light velocities. The warships will detect our motion and destroy us. Additionally, all finite-mass folded wave functions are inherently unstable.”

There was a gleam in Quilp’s eyes, the hint of a solution. I’d seen him like this before, excited, on the verge of a breakthrough. “Let’s tackle the warship problem first,” he said. “Assuming we retain a finite, but extremely small mass, above the LNM limit, we remain in the domain of normal quantum mechanics. Low mass particles like electrons have a probability of tunneling through potential barriers as a function of their energy and the height of the barrier.”

Omar’s ships rearranged, and one ship broke ranks to swim toward us, distorting the tetrahedral formation, leaving a tilted triangle behind. All their weapons were still armed, aglow with radiation, and looking like angry little octopi.

“We tunnel through the planet,” Quilp declared and thrust a finger through the circle of his forefinger and thumb to demonstrate.

Virginia shook her head. “Tunneling only works with very light mass, and small potentials. You’re talking about a planet. Seven thousand kilometers of molten rock!”

“It’ll work,” he assured her. “But we gotta keep ourselves exactly at the LNM limit.”

“Impossible,” Setebos declared.

“No. It’s impossible for you,” he said, “because you’re programmed for efficiency, to make us go as far below that mass as possible. If I let you use one mass-folding generator to do that, and unfold a portion of your folds with a second mass-folding generator, then I can manually adjust our mass, make it resonate at the LNM limit.”

“Manual alteration of the field parameters is inadvisable,” Setebos declared.

“Keep your shirt on,” Quilp told the AI. “I’ll use you. I’m just gonna be tweaking a few off-diagonal elements on the field matrix.”

“It might work,” Virginia said, and stared out the display to the churning green and scarlet clouds of the planet below. “But we’d have to keep our mass resonating exactly at the light-neutrino mass limit. If we go below it, we leave the domain of normal quantum mechanics and get scattered into plane waves, and if we go too far above it, we won’t tunnel through.”

“Won’t tunnel through?” I said.

“There are two possibilities,” Quilp answered. “We either never leave our starting point or we end up parked inside the planet.”

“Since we’ll be fine-tuning our energy,” Virginia said to Quilp, “there might be a problem with uncertainty. But we really don’t have a choice. What do I do?”

Quilp didn’t like women, and he didn’t like strangers. He pursed his lips and prepared some insult. Then he surprised me. “The second mass-folding field will diverge when we enter the upper atmosphere,” he said, “and again as we enter the planet’s crust. You’ll need to find a way to dampen that effect.”

“I can use power from the atmospheric system.”

“That might work,” he replied, “as long as we don’t mind breathing stale air for a few minutes.”

Virginia turned to me. “There’s only one problem: the warships will detect our generators when they power up. They’ll blast us to atoms before we move. We need a way to distract them—just for a second.”

“We have weapons,” I said.

“No power,” she answered. “We need it all for the generators.”

I sighed and considered.

One of my personas had neutralized a similar threat before. Usually, I ignored the strange symbols and indecipherable thoughts residing within Aaron, the alien King. When ships attacked his home world, he dispatched them with the mnemonic lore I stole from him. Those vessels were primitive compared to Omar’s, but, in theory, the strategy was sound. If it wasn’t, Omar would be extremely upset. And we’d be dead.

Aaron had been a creature of stone, with organs of metal, and wore only raw gems and crystals for ornamentation. He and his people lived a peaceful life deep within the molten core of their world, never bothering anyone, until they met Rhodes Industries Intergalactic.

The cartel wanted to mine his planet; actually, they wanted to blast it to pieces and extract the rare metals. Aaron’s race refused to cooperate. They refused to be relocated. They even had the audacity to fight back—even had the nerve to win. That’s why I was hired.

Immediately, I called for a peace conference. The earth creatures never intended to harm anyone; they just wanted to be left alone, so they accepted my offer to negotiate in good faith. That’s when I met Aaron. That’s when I froze his body, drank his mind, and scattered his soul to the void.

“You’ll have your distraction,” I told her. “Ready the ship. I can destroy Omar’s vessel when he closes.”

“Destroy?” Quilp cried. “What do you mean destroy his ship? You heard the girl.”

Virginia narrowed her eyes at him.

“We have no weapons! What are you going to do, throw a rock at it?”

“You tend to your equations and let me do what I have to do.” There was no need to distract Quilp by telling him I would be using what he believed to be magic. He had enough on his mind. I fumbled through my pocket and handed him five capsules.

He grabbed them, muttered something, then threw himself into the copilot’s seat. A jumbled matrix appeared before him, rotating slowly, the colors of its elements changing from cool, safe green, to orange, then to red. He and Virginia debated certain mathematical operators while Omar’s warship approached.

The smooth motion of the ship was deceptive.
Sedition-class
vessels were enormous, lumbering things, with plenty of firepower, but short on speed and grace. For what I wanted to do, the bigger his ship was, the better.

Two crisp snaps caught my attention. Quilp removed a pair of spent capsules from his neck. Good. The little addict would be in peak stimulated form.

Omar’s ship was very close now; she filled our displays, and all illusions of her being a sleek sea creature vanished, replaced by obvious patches of armor plates, blemished with blackened scars, and tentacles that were really cannons.

“Incoming communication,” Setebos announced.

“Germain,” Omar said, giddy with satisfaction, “prepare to surrender your ship and be boarded.”

He was within range. I released my precious stolen memory, the one Aaron called his “air attraction,” summoned the energies and wove them into patterns I had never learned. I could do this but once, then the alien King would unravel from my mind.

Aaron never spoke, which was fine with me. His mind was different from the others, and I doubted if he was ever friendly towards me, with or without the enchantment placed upon him. His memories flooded my thoughts, memories of how he constructed the air attraction to save his race. In the span of three heartbeats, it condensed all gaseous elements within an enormous volume into liquid. When it was done, the liquefied air flash vaporized back to its original state.