The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) (17 page)

Something tickles at the back of Mieli’s mind.
Spooky-zoku’s quantum oracles found anomalies.
But the razor focus of combat autism washes it away. The wisp is almost within range now, and she starts launching a volley of q-dots to grab it.

Sharp breath hisses between the pellegrini’s teeth. ‘Mieli! Stop! It’s not a civil war! It’s theatre! They are faking! Don’t—’

The thoughtwisp explodes.

*

The light rips the spimescape apart. The wisp’s ghost warhead burns itself out in a white-hot jolt of bandwidth, aimed straight at Mieli. Attack software comes with it like hard burning rain.

Mieli’s suit screams. Her tactical gogols flounder and panic. The suit’s outer armour bubbles and fluctuates. It forms a spike that stabs
inwards,
through her subdermal q-dot armour. Pain lances in her side before the combat autism dulls it into a damage report.

Abort
, Mieli qupts at the
Zweihänder
, urgency mingled with pain.
Repeat, abort! It’s a fake battle, the hsien-kus, the pellegrinis and vasilevs are cooperating!
And I did not follow the script.

She is losing control of the q-armour. Its lasers send out flickering comms bursts at the two raion fleets. Mieli focuses on her Liquorice-jewel, pushes through one more volition command at the suit. With a sickening, tearing feeling, the suit ejects her, spits her out to the Dark Man’s embrace, into the hard vacuum of Hektor’s surface. She rolls in gravity that is too sluggish for quicktime, digs her fingers into the rocky surface, pulls herself down like a rock climber for balance. Her zoku jewels follow under their own power in a faithful, scattered halo.

Dark blood bubbles out from her pierced side, boiling in the vacuum. She regards it dispassionately: another parameter in the problem she has to solve, in the ten minutes she can survive in hard vacuum without external life support. In the thirty seconds it will take
Zweihänder
to reach her. In the seconds it will take for raions’ first kinetic missile volley to fall on Hektor.

She stands up, in full combat mode. Time slows down. Dust particles swirling in the air become static brushstrokes. Her wings bloom from her back, radiating waste heat. The fusion reactor in her right thigh pumps energy into coherent payloads of the q-gun in her right hand. She is already firing the ghostgun in her left: war gogols in nanomissiles, hurling themselves at what used to be a Great Game warsuit.

Even in quicktime, the suit moves like a raindrop in a powerful wind, shivering into a new shape on the moon’s surface. It rises up on thin silver limbs. It extrudes a face that is not a face, a hollow oval atop a sketched neck. Lasers fan out from its shoulders. Mieli’s ghostgun bullets and their gogol pilots evaporate in tiny, brief flashes.

She follows with a pattern of a dozen charged q-dots that become extensions of herself as soon as they are launched, plunges them at the suit’s weapon systems like gouging fingers into eyes. They detonate in blasts of coherent light. The suit-thing’s skin becomes a dazzling mirror.

Then the raion kinetic needles hit, soundless and invisible in the vacuum. They shake the ground beneath Mieli’s feet. New craters appear around them like the holes of a god’s shotgun blast, and slow pillars of dust rise from them. Without flinching, Mieli keeps firing. A high-explosive dot gets through, splattering the suit’s material into the vacuum in tiny droplets – until the suit catches them in a q-dot web and absorbs them back into itself.

Mieli risks a glance at the tattered spimescape. Both raion fleets are converging towards their position. The space around Hektor is full of roaring electromagnetic noise across the spectrum.
They are trying to make sure no information leaves this moon.
She detonates her passive sensor network with a thought. Not much a distraction, but she is going to take everything she can get.

Mieli, we are coming
, Zinda qupts.
Hold on. Ten
seconds.

The suit-thing is whole again, in a more humanoid shape this time. Mieli reviews its specs. New weapons are forming beneath its skin. It contains nuggets of zoku picotech, able to translate quantum information into matter, and an antimatter power source. And without a fragile human inside, even controlled by a warmind with no experience of flesh-combat, it is orders of magnitude faster than her.

Jumalauta
, Mieli swears.
My only hope is to pierce the antimatter containment.
She extrudes a q-blade from her hand. She is almost disappointed that in the combat autism, a moon-shattering explosive death feels just like another tactical option.
At least that would take my zoku jewels as well.

But the suit’s electronic warfare barrage has died down, and the thing stands still, as if its empty face had eyes, looking at something standing next to Mieli.

The pellegrini.

The Sobornost goddess is still there, pale, staring at the faceless silver thing.

‘Do something!’ Mieli shouts at her.

But the pellegrini only shakes her head.

‘Mieli, she says, fear in her voice. ‘Meet the All-Defector.’

The suit-thing tilts its head to one side, as if listening. Then the void in its un-face seals itself into a perfect mirror oval. The pellegrini’s features appear on its surface, sculpted from silver by invisible fingers.

‘It is an unexpected pleasure to meet you here,’ it says, in an EM whisper that sounds like the pellegrini’s echo, targeted at Mieli’s communication systems using a Sobornost military protocol. ‘I have to thank you for offering me the chens. They are now me, as you can see. So are younger generations of you. And your Prime has chosen to serve. Perhaps you will, also.’

‘No,’ the pellegrini whispers. ‘Never. You are
our
creature.
We
released you. What are you doing, playing games with the hsien-kus and vasilevs? You are supposed to
eat
them!”

The All-Defector smiles the pellegrini’s own serpent smile.

‘My appetite is greater than that,’ it says. ‘But, as your other self thought, I
have
given them a common enemy.’ It takes a step forward. It even moves like the pellegrini now, swaying lightly.

‘But what’s this? Your pet project. The Oortian. Interesting. Now that she is here, I think I will take her, too.’

Mieli is frozen. The thief did not like to talk about the All-Defector – All-D – but from what she knows, the thing somehow models its opponents and finds an optimal strategy against them, without ever cooperating. Her game theory gogols compute payoff matrices, and they all look bleak.
The
Zweihänder
won’t make it here in time.

That’s why All-D is not attacking. It has already won.

To hell with it.

Another volley of raion needles falls. This time, they divert their course away from direct impact, and blast up a curtain of rock shards and dust in a circle around them.
Of course. Can’t break the new toy it wants.

‘You want me?’ she whispers through gritted teeth. ‘Come and get me!’ She raises her q-dot blade.
It is still moving like the pellegrini. Need to use that
.

She lunges forward. Her toes dig into the rock, propelling her forward like a
väki
spear. She aims a lightning blow at the dense hot spot of the antimatter container in the suit.

Silver hands seize her right arm and twist. Her dermal armour bursts. The thing swings her around and slams her down against the moon’s surface so hard that the quickstone-enforced bones in her arm and ribcage snap. The back of her skull digs deep into the crushed rock. Her wings tear and fray beneath her. The control system of the fusion reactor in her thighbone goes mad.

All-D looms above her. She drops out of combat autism to stop from blacking out and screams a silent scream. Her right arm is on fire, but she forces it to obey, stabs upwards with the q-dot blade, but the thing is not there. It stretches a willowy arm towards her. The fingers become spikes that impale her forehead.

There is no pain. She always thought there would be pain in a forced black box upload, living all possible lives in one white-hot moment.

‘No. You are not taking her,’ the pellegrini says. ‘She is mine.’

Like so many times before, the pellegrini becomes Mieli, wears her body like a glove. Mieli is looking down at herself, from above, a broken pale angel lying on dark rock, a silver monster looming over her, its fingers growing into her head.
The jewels
, she thinks.
The jewels are caching my mind.

The other Mieli’s eyes below snap open. For an instant, she looks up at Mieli, smiles the pellegrini’s smile.
Remember
, she mouths. Then she squeezes her eyes shut.

I could self-destruct
, the goddess said.

Mieli’s body twitches rhythmically. Her eyes flutter madly beneath her eyelids. All-D jerks to the same rhythm and pulls away: its tendrils come out of Mieli’s head, bloodlessly, easily.

A discontinuity.

Mieli is back in the blood-red madness of her body. Its systems are dying. Her brain is on fire. The fusion reactor is overheating. The only thing that does not burn is the awareness of her zoku, getting close.

But All-D is still moving, shaking off whatever recursive self-annihilation algorithm the pellegrini tried to use to destroy them both.

An itinerant fact from combat autism floats into her mind.
Hektor. Escape velocity: 0.13 km/second.

She sends a command that shapes her power source’s tiny dense magnetic bottle into a funnel.

It does not take much strength to move in the low gravity, but it is almost more than Mieli has left. She slides forward so that her right leg is right beneath All-D.

Then she overloads her fusion reactor.

The damage reports become a white noise. Her eyes pop. Through the few sensors that still function, as if in a dream, she feels a pillar of plasma below her, taking her up from the surface of Hektor. Milliseconds later, the zoku suit’s antimatter containment collapses. She sees a god’s incandescent gaze for one quick eyeblink, and then there is nothing, nothing at all.

10

TAWADDUD AND THE BOTTLED CITY

Tawaddud, Dunyazad and the thief Jean le Flambeur stand on Saturn, on the newborn Plate of Irem, ready to plant the seed of Sirr.

It is Tawaddud who carries it: an intricate snowflake shape inside a transparent bubble. It is heavy, and she has to hold it with both hands against her chest. She wonders if this is how the women of the Banu Sasan feel, holding their infant children, shielding something unutterably precious from the world. Then she remembers that by carrying the seed, she is carrying all of the Banu Sasan as well. It is difficult to let go.

‘Come now, sister,’ Dunyazad says impatiently. ‘The hour grows late.’

Le Flambeur smiles, and the strange, diffuse sunlight of the vast gleaming plain glints in his blue sunglasses. It is still difficult to see the small, slim man in a white jacket and trousers as the Sumanguru she knew – a towering, dark-skinned giant, a warlord of Sobornost – but every now and then, he makes a small gesture that feels familiar.

‘You should take your time,’ he says, smiling a little sadly. ‘You want to do it properly. In the future, in the Palace of Stories, perhaps they will tell the tale of two sisters who saved the city of Sirr.’

‘And what about you, master thief?’ Dunyazad asks. ‘Will they tell stories about you?’

‘There are enough stories about me already,’ he says. ‘I don’t think I’ll be needing any new ones. Besides, I like the one about the sisters better.’

It was only hours ago that le Flambeur brought Tawaddud and Dunyazad back, from the pages of a book, he said. One moment Tawaddud stood in the razor whirlwind of a wildcode desert storm, drowning in the voices of the Aun, and then she opened her eyes in a dusty bookshop that felt real, but wasn’t. Then they stepped through a silver gate that Duny claimed
made
them real, turned quantum information into matter, wrote the Names of their atoms into reality, like the bright beams of the Sobornost Station in Sirr.

They are on Saturn, a thought that makes Tawaddud dizzy, on an artificial continent larger than the entire Earth. A part of her wonders if le Flambeur can be trusted as a guide in this place. But she is Tawaddud, daughter of Cassar Gomelez, trained in many arts in the House of Kafur, and if there is one thing she can do, it is reading men. Besides, Duny claims a connection to the zoku who rule here, and now wears a ring like a jinn ring, but with a bright purple jewel that glows with an inner light of its own. While Tawaddud has had her differences with her sister in the past, she knows that Duny will always think what is best for Sirr, and deal swift death to those she deems its enemies. Now, she is starting to look impatient, running the jewel of her ring back and forth along her lips.

Tawaddud kneels on the strange, hard ground that is made of interlocking geometric shapes, like the floor tiles of Sirr palaces or jinni skin. She puts the seed down carefully, reluctant to let go.

‘Wait,’ le Flambeur says. He removes his glasses, and looks at the sisters.

‘I have an apology to make,’ he says, ‘and this is as good a time as any. I came to Sirr to find the place you call the Lost Jannah of the Cannon, and to learn the secrets of the body thieves. I did not care what I had to do to get what I wanted. If not for me, Sirr might still be on Earth.’ He kneels next to Tawaddud. ‘I could spend forever apologising for the things I have done, but it is you, Lady Tawaddud, I have wronged the most. I threatened you, blackmailed the jinn Zaybak by holding a gun to your head. I want you to know I would never have pulled the trigger. Will you forgive me?’

Tawaddud looks at him. She remembers kneeling on the floor of the Sobornost upload temple, the black eye of the barakah gun, how helpless she felt, how the Sumanguru she had trusted betrayed her. The anger is still hot in her, and if le Flambeur did not look so different from Lord Sumanguru, she would recoil from his presence.