The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (52 page)

Hamilton’s mind reeled at the horror of it. The potential threat to the balance! Any of the great powers, damn it, any
nation,
could gain immeasurable advantage over its fellows by trading intelligence with foreigners. “And this is what’s in your head. The greatest secret of the great powers. But this is old news, they must have found a way to deal with it—”

“Yes. Because, after all, any of them could put together enough telescope time to work it out. As near as I can figure out, they shared the info. Every great court knows it at the highest level, so the balance is intact. Just about. I suppose they must have all made a secret agreement not to try to contact these foreigners. Pretty easy to check up on that, given how they all watch each other’s embroidery.”

Hamilton relaxed. So these were indeed old terrors, already dealt with by wiser heads. “And of course communication is all we’re talking about. The distances involved—”

She looked at him like he was an erring child.

“Has one of the powers
broken
the agreement?!”

She pursed her lips. “This isn’t the work of the great powers.”

Hamilton wasn’t sure he could take much more of this. “Then who?”

“Have you heard of the heavenly twins?”

“The Ransoms?!”

“Yes, Castor and Pollux.”

Hamilton’s mind was racing. The twins were arms dealers, who sold, it had been revealed a few years ago, to the shock of the great powers, not just to the nation to which they owed allegiance (which, them being from the northern part of the Columbian colonies, would be Britain or France), or even to one they’d later adopted, but to anyone. Once the great powers had found that out and closed ranks, dealing with the twins as they dealt with any threat to the balance, their representatives had vanished overnight from their offices in the world’s capitals, and started to sell away from any counter, to rebels, mercenaries, colonies. Whoring out their services. The twins themselves had never shown their faces in public. It was said they had accumulated enough wealth to actually begin to develop new weapons of their own. Every other month some new speculation arose that one of the powers was secretly once more buying from them. Not something Britain would ever do, of course, but the Dutch, the Spaniards? “How are they involved?”

“When I was halfway across this city, on my original mission, a rabbit hole similar to the one we just fell down opened up under me and my honour guard.”

“They can do that?!”

“Compared to what else they’re doing, that’s nothing. They had their own soldiers on hand, soldiers in
uniform—”

Hamilton could hear the disgust in her voice, and matched it with his own. Tonight was starting to feel like some sort of nightmare, with every certainty collapsing. He felt like he was falling from moment to moment as terrible new possibilities sprang up before his eyes.

“They cut down my party, taking a few losses themselves. They took the bodies with them.”

“They must have mopped the place up afterwards too.”

“I was dragged before them. I don’t know if we were still in this city. I was ready to say the words and cut myself off, but they were ready for that. They injected me with some sort of instant glossolalia. I thought for a second that I’d done it myself, but then I realized that I couldn’t stop talking, that I was saying all sorts of nonsense, from anywhere in my mind, ridiculous stuff, shameful stuff.” She paused for breath. “You
were
mentioned.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.”

“I didn’t talk about what I was carrying. Sheer luck. I wrenched clear of their thugees and tried to bash my brains out against the wall.”

He had put his hand on hers. Without even thinking about it.

She let it stay. “I wouldn’t recommend it, probably not possible, but they only gave me two cracks at it before they grabbed me again. They were planning to keep injecting me with the stuff until I’d spilled the words that’d let them use an observer to see the map. They locked me up in a room and recorded me all night. That got quite dull quite swiftly.”

Listening to her, Hamilton felt himself calm. He was looking forward, with honest glee, to the possibility that he might be soon in a position to harm some of these men.

“I gambled that after it got late enough and I still hadn’t said anything
politically
interesting they’d stop watching and just record it. I waited as long as I could with my sanity intact, then had at one of the walls. I found main power and shoved my fingers in. Wish I could tell you more about that, but I don’t remember anything from then on until I woke up in what turned out to be a truly enormous void carriage. I came to in the infirmary, connected to all sorts of drugs. My internal clock said it was . . . four years later . . . which I took to be an error. I checked the package in my head, but the seals were all intact. I could smell smoke. So I took the drug lines out best I could, hopped out of bed. There were a few others in there, but they were all dead or out of it. Odd-looking wounds, like their flesh had been sucked off them. I found more dead bodies in the corridor outside. Staff in that uniform of theirs. There was still somebody driving the thing, because when I checked the internal embroidery, there were three seats taken. I think they were running the absolute minimum staff, just trying to get the thing home, three survivors of whatever had happened. The carriage was throwing up all sorts of false flags and passport deals as we approached Earth orbit from high up above the plane. I went and hid near the bulwark door, and when the carriage arrived at one of the Danish high stations I waited until the rescue party dashed on. Then I wandered out.” Her voice took on a pleading edge, as if she was asking if she was still in a dream. “I . . . took a descent bus and I remember thinking what classy transportation it was, very bells and whistles, especially for the Danes. When I listened in to the embroidery, and checked the log against what I was hearing, I realized . . . and it took some realizing, I can tell you, it took me checking many times . . .”

Her hand had grasped his, demanding belief.

“It had been four years unconscious for me . . . but . . .” She had to take a deep breath, her eyes appealing once again at the astonishing unfairness of it.

“Fifteen years for us,” he said. Looking at her now, at how this older woman who had started to teach him about himself had stayed a girl of an age he could never now be seen with in public . . . the change had been lessened for him because it was how he’d kept her in his memory, but now he saw the size of it. The difference between them now was an index of all he’d done. He shook his head to clear it, to take those dismayed eyes off him. “What does it mean?”

She was about to answer him. But he suddenly realized the music had got louder. He knocked his steak knife from the table to the seat and into his pocket.

Lustre looked shocked at him.

But now a man looking like a typical patron of an inn had looked in at their booth. “Excuse me,” he said, in Dutch with an accent Hamilton’s eye notes couldn’t place, “do you know where the landlord’s gone? I’m meant to have a reservation—”

A little something about the man’s expression.

He was getting away with it.

He wasn’t.

Hamilton jerked sidelong rather than stand up, sending the knife up into the man’s groin. He twisted it out as he grabbed for the belt, throwing him forward as blood burst over the tablecloth and he was up and out into the main bar just as the man started screaming—

There was another man, who’d been looking into the kitchen, suddenly angry at a landlord who, expecting the
usual
sort of trouble, had turned up the piped band. He turned now, his hand slapping for a gun at his waist—

Amateurs!

Hamilton threw the bloody knife at his face. In that moment, the man took it to be a throwing knife, and threw up a hand as it glanced off him, but Hamilton had closed the gap between the two of them, and now he swung his shoulder and slammed his fist into the man’s neck. The man gurgled and fell, Hamilton grabbed him before he did and beat his hands to the gun.

He didn’t use it. The man was desperately clutching at his own throat. Hamilton let him fall.

He swung back to the booth, and saw the other twitching body slide to the floor. Lustre was already squatting to gather that gun too.

He turned to the landlord coming out of the kitchen and pointed the gun at him. “More?!”

“No! I’ll do anything—!”

“I mean, are there more of
them
?!”

“I don’t know!” He was telling the truth.

Professionals would have kept everything normal and set up a pheasant shoot when Hamilton had answered a call of nature. So, amateurs, so possibly many of them, possibly searching many inns, possibly not guarding the exits to this one.

It was their only hope.

“All right.” He nodded to Lustre. “We’re leaving.”

He got the landlord to make a noise at the back door, to throw around pots and pans, to slam himself against a cupboard. Gunfire might cut him down at any moment, and he knew it, but damn one Dane in the face of all this.

Hamilton sent Lustre to stand near the front door, then took his gun off covering the landlord and ran at it.

He burst out into the narrow street, into the freezing air, seeking a target—

He fired at the light that was suddenly in his eyes.

But then they were on him. Many of them. He hurt some of them. Possibly fatally. He didn’t get off a shot.

He heard no shots from Lustre.

They forced something into his face and at last he had to take a breath of darkness.

Hamilton woke with a start. And the knowledge that he was a fool and a traitor because he was a fool. He wanted to bask in that misery, that he’d failed everyone he cared about. He wanted to lose to it, to let it halt his hopeless trying in favour of certainty.

He must not.

He sought his clock, and found that it was a few hours, not years, later. He’d kept his eyes closed because of the lights. But the light coming at him from all around was diffuse, comfortable.

Whatever situation he found himself in, his options were going to be limited. If there was no escape, if they were indeed in the hands of the enemy, his job now was to kill Lustre and then himself.

He considered that for a moment and was calm about it.

He allowed himself to open his eyes.

He was in what looked like the best room at an inn. Sun-like light shone through what looked like a projection rather than a window. He was dressed in the clothes he’d been wearing on the street. A few serious bruises. He was lying on the bed. He was alone. Nobody had bothered to tuck him in.

The door opened. Hamilton sat up.

It was a waiter, pulling a service trolley into the room. He saw that Hamilton was awake and nodded to him.

Hamilton inclined his head in return.

The waiter took the cover off the trolley, revealing dinner: what looked like real steak and eggs. He placed cutlery appropriately, bowed, and left once more. There was no sound of the door being locked.

Hamilton went to the trolley and looked at the cutlery. He ran his finger on the sharp, serrated edge of the steak knife. There was a message.

He sat down on the bed and ate.

He couldn’t help the thoughts that swept through him. He felt them rather than discern them as memories or ideas. He was made from them, after all. They all were, those who kept the balance, those who made sure that the great powers shared the solar system carefully between them, and didn’t spin off wildly into a war which everyone knew would be the last. That end of the world would free them all from responsibility, and join them with the kingdom which existed around the universe and inside every miniscule Newton Length. The balance, having collapsed, would crest as a wave again, finally, and stay there, finally including all who had lived, brought entirely into God. That much rough physics Keble had drummed into him. He’d never found himself wanting the final collapse. It was not to be wished for by mortals, after all. It was the shape of the very existence around them, not something they could choose the moment of. He enjoyed his duty, even enjoyed suffering for it, in a way. That was
meaning.
But concussions like this, explosions against the sides of what he understood, and so many of them, so quickly . . . No, he wouldn’t become fascinated with the way the world around him seemed to be shaking on its foundations. This was just a new aspect to the balance, a new threat to it. It had many manifestations, many configurations. That was a line from some hymn he barely remembered. He would be who he was and do what had to be done.

That thought he heard as words, as the part of himself that had motive and will. He smiled at this restoration of strength and finished his steak.

The moment he’d finished eating, someone came for him.

This one was dressed in the uniform that Lustre had mentioned. Hamilton contained his reaction to it. To his eyes, it looked halfway to something from a carnival. Bright colours that nevertheless had never seen a battlefield, with no history to be read therein. The man wearing it looked like he’d been trained in a real army, he walked, Hamilton behind him, like he’d known a parade ground. A former officer, even. One who’d bought himself out or deserted. He ignored Hamilton’s attempts to start a conversation. Not questions, because he was already preparing himself for the forthcoming interrogation, and pointless questions were a hole in the dam. Instead Hamilton asked only about the weather, and received just a wry look in return. A wry look from this bastard who’d sold his comrades for a bright coat.