Be My Enemy (4 page)

Charles Villiers's face was soft, his skin soft, his voice soft, and Everett did not believe any of it. “I am Plenipotentiary from our world to the recently contacted plane E10. Have you heard about it, seen anything online?” he said.

“My dad worked in multiverse research.”

“Of course. Forgive me, Everett. Then you'll know that it is very similar to our plane, with the major exception of the Thryn Sentiency.”

“I heard that.” He looked over at Madam Moon, standing by the wall where she had opened the jump door. Always smiling, hands folded just so. Was it the same little old lady who had met Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon forty-two years before, the frail little old lady who could stand the hard vacuum and a sleet of harder radiation? Was it even the same little old lady who had come to him when he woke in a panic as his body opened up and expanded? Were there many Madam Moons? Did the Thryn Sentiency create and annihilate its manifestations as it required?

“They're talented,” Charles Villiers continued. “They developed Heisenberg Gate technology without Thryn assistance. We might possibly have done that ourselves, but they've gone one step further. They've done what no one else in the Plenitude has done. They have a working map of the Panoply. You know what the Panoply is?”

“All the worlds, not just the ones we know about.” Everett M's dad had been working on exactly that project in this world. Working was not a strong enough word. There must be a word for work that is incredibly hard and at the same time filled with joy, work that tests the best of you and strains you to your limits but so fills your mind that everything else seems pointless by comparison. Work that drives you without pity, but that you love with all your heart. Work that you can't do, no one can do, but that you absolutely must do. That was the kind of work Tejendra had been doing all last summer. His adventures on the Middle-Aged Man bike had been part of the same rush of energy. At the end of the summer term, in the quiet after the students went, he had made a breakthrough. Not a solution, but a way to a solution. Thinking about how to think about the problem. Then, the random meeting with a Sainsbury truck turning left at a traffic signal.

Something Charles Villiers said snapped Everett M out of his
memories of that last summer, when his dad had been alive, totally alive, head full of mathematics. “You said, working map?”

Charles Villiers smiled. It was the softest of all the soft things about this elegant, well-dressed, and thoroughly groomed man, and it sent ice deep into Everett M's heart.

“There are many worlds,” Everett M said. Charles Villiers hadn't completed the phrase. “There is not one you…”

“There are many yous,” Charles Villiers finished. “Everett, this must be hard to hear, but in E10, your father completed his work. He has a fully operational map of the Panoply. With it, and a Heisenberg Gate, he can jump to any point in any world—even within a world, like the jump that took Mr. Portillo and me from London to here.”

“You're talking about many Tejendra Singhs,” Everett M said. “You're not talking about many Everett M. Singhs.”

Charles Villiers sat back, startled by the anger in Everett M's voice.

“There is a danger that the map—the Infundibulum—may fall into the wrong hands.”

Everett M shivered as cold air spiralled up from the depths of the pit. His arms were bare, his feet were bare, his clothes were light and thin, he understood nothing. He remembered what his dad had said, when you understand nothing, you ask questions. Why is there a pit ten kilometers deep on the Moon? What are all the windows for? Why are there balconies, why is there even any air? What does Madam Moon need air for? Why did Madam Moon, the Thryn Sentiency, need all of this, any of this? Was it just stage dressing, Hollywood movie CG, projected right into his brain? He didn't doubt that the Thryn could do that. And if they could do that…

“Ask the Thryn Sentiency to give you another map,” Everett M asked. “They're thousands of years ahead of us, that's what everyone says. So why bring me here? Because they can't give you another map, can they?”

Charles Villiers softly clapped his hands together in delight.

“You are a very clever young man,” he said. He dipped his head to Madam Moon. She pressed her hands together in her half-greeting, half-blessing. “Humanity has been studying the Sentiency closely—probably more closely than anything else—for almost fifty years. Thryn technology is not thousands of years ahead. It's five, maybe four hundred years, at our current rate of technological development. And, all due respect to Madam Moon, the Thryn are not really a Sentiency at all. How can I explain this?”

“You don't need to,” Everett M said. “I think I get this. They got enough technology to be able to build a machine that could reproduce their civilization. After that, they didn't need to invent anything. So they didn't.”

“Clever, Everett, clever boy. The Thryn Sentiency is not really sentient in our understanding of the word—it's not self-aware. It doesn't have to be. It just has to work. We look at all this and think that there has to be a guiding mind behind it, but the reality is, it builds itself from simple, blind instructions. The Thryn Sentiency is more like an immense, complex, high-tech plant—a flower, a tree—than what we would call a civilization. Every Thryn Sentiency is a clone of the others. It reproduces itself perfectly, and that is why humanity will be greater than it. It allows no mistakes. Everything great about us comes from mistakes. Evolution has stopped for the Thryn Sentiency. Not for us. And that is why we will be greater than it in the end.”

Everett M looked again at Madame Moon, her kind face, her folded hands, her patient expression, her eyes that, now that he knew what was behind them, were the deadest things he had ever seen.

“We need you to be an agent, Everett,” Charles Villiers said. “A secret agent. James Bond. James Bond junior.”

“Mr. Villiers, who is
we
?”

“The Plenitude. This world—our world. There are forces beyond the Known Worlds more powerful and more dangerous than
you can imagine. Forces that make even the Thryn look puny. And there are forces inside the Plenitude as well. I've said too much already. Suffice to say, if they gain control of the Infundibulum, we are all in danger. Even your family, Everett; your friends, everyone you care about. We need you, Everett. Only you can do this.”

They had him. He was on the Moon, alone, in the hands of one of world's most powerful men, a man to whom even the prime minister dipped his head, a man who knew his family, knew where they lived. It had always been the last shout from the bully at Bourne Green School:
I know where you live.

“What do you need me to do?”

Charles Villiers gave his horrible, soft smile again.

“Be yourself, Everett. Just be yourself. But first, Madam Moon has a few more…alterations to make.”

What?
Everett started to shout, but Madam Moon opened her hand and it seemed to unfold before him, and close around him, and he fell into endless, soft grey.

T
he wind in her face was made from flying shards of glass. Not a centimeter of Sen's skin was exposed to the freezing air—it would have frostbitten her flesh in an instant, peeled it down to the bone—and the wind seemed to resent it. It looked for any opening. It clawed at the edges of her goggles. It tugged at the fur-trimmed hood of her Baltic survival suit. It tore at the edge of the scarf she had wrapped over her mouth and nostrils, and it studded the scarf with diamond-sharp ice crystals. To breathe that killing air was to inhale a lungful of daggers. The wind screamed at Sen Sixsmyth from every line and strut and spar on the hedgehopper. Sen Sixsmyth screamed back at it. She pushed the handlebars forward and sent the little flying machine swooping down toward the endless ice plain.

White below her, white above her, white before her, and white behind her. In her hi-visibility Baltic survival suit, she was the only speck of color in the endless white. She was the only speck of life. In the mythology of the Airish, in the Everness Tarot, part of which she had inherited, part of which she had built over time as needs called forth new cards, white was the color of death.

“Yay!” she yelled to the knifing wind as she tugged the throttle cable. The fans pushed her harder, faster against the wind. Mchynlyth had promised something more clever and responsive on the next refit, but from the moment Sharkey's radar had picked up something in the middle of what had been nothing, it became clear that all flight testing would have to be done in action. It worked. She had a couple of jerky, scary moments down on the cargo hoist when she almost threw herself at full speed into a bulkhead, and again when she nearly gave herself whiplash after another of the mysterious tremors shook the ship, causing her hand to slip on the thrust bar.
The controls were sensitive, quick, and immediate. A touch too hard and the hedgehopper, like an unbroken horse, would try to throw you. After
Everness
's slow, gentle, subtle controls, this was fierce, fast fun. You could fly forever, and that was the trap. There was no sense of scale, nothing to judge how close you were to something, nothing to distinguish one thing from another. It would be very, very easy to fly your hedgehopper straight into the ice at full speed. She felt at once very big and very small.

Sen looked up. She could barely see the white of the drone against the white sky. She could imagine she was flying entirely alone. It was a feeling as thrilling as the fast, mad flight over the great ice. On
Everness
you could be away from people, but you could never be alone. The ship was her family and her friends, her home and her world. It surrounded her, it enclosed her, it was the walls of her universe. She often wondered what it would be like not to have the curving skin of
Everness
around her, to walk away from Mchynlyth and Sharkey and Mom and just be Sen—not Sen Sixsmyth, not Sen of
Everness.
Just Sen. It might feel like this: fast, fun, cold, and thrilling. A bright dot of color in the middle of nothing. And as she thought that, a bright dot flying in a gale of ice, she realized that to be truly alone, to have no family, to have no friends, to have no home, no world—to be like Everett—was not fast and fun and thrilling. It was terrifying. To have nowhere, no one.
No
, Sen thought,
you got me.
The thought made her feel fierce and glowing inside.

A bright orange speck moved into the edge of Sen's vision. Of course she was not alone. On the big ice, to be alone was to die. She glanced to her right as the second hedgehopper slipped in beside her. The pilot raised a thickly mittened hand from the steering bar and made a “pull-back” gesture. Sen replied with a palm-up “what?” gesture. Again, the mitten made a “slow down, draw back” movement. Slow down. Preserve battery life. Mchynlyth had been a little vague about how the hedgehopper batteries would perform in the extreme conditions on the ice.

“The numbers go everywhere,” he had complained. “Anything from five hours to five minutes. Now, if you could lend me a real mathematician…”

“Everett is otherwise engaged,” Captain Anastasia said.

“Could you even give me a wee loan?”

Captain Anastasia had widened her eyes in that way that every crew member quickly learned to recognize:
I am the captain.
The power situation was critical. Even guyed down
Everness
was burning charge to keep her head turned into the endless wind. And how much Everett would need to open the Heisenberg Gate when he finally figured out how to get the jumpgun and his dally comptator to talk to each other, well, that was anyone's guess. She had kept a close eye on the power meters as Mchynlyth charged the hedgehopper batteries.

Out over the ice, a plug crackled in Sen's ear.

“Slow down.”

“Aw, Ma.” Sometimes Annie could be no fun at all. The earphone went dead. Even communications consumed power. Use too much now and there wouldn't be any for when you really needed to talk. Sen eased back on the throttle cable and dropped back into formation with Captain Anastasia. The ice reached out beneath her feet and merged with the sky.

Somewhere out there was the thing. Sharkey's radar had revealed no shape or structure, only that the thing that had come through the gate to hunt them was big, and fast, and would be on top of them in a very few hours.

“Do we have Einst…Heisenberg Gates that big?” Captain Anastasia had asked as the entire crew huddled around Sharkey's radar monitor. The glow shining up through the magnifier lens lit their faces green.

“You don't,” Everett had said. “I mean…we don't.”

“The Thing from Another Universe,” Mchynlyth had said, and at that moment an ice tremor had shaken
Everness
like a November
leaf on a tree, drawing a great moan, like a whale dying, from the lines and cables.

The monster
, Sen had mouthed silently.

“Nonsense,” Captain Anastasia had snapped, breaking the spell. “Mr. Mchynlyth, get those little flibbertigibbits airship-shape. I want a varda at what's out there. Ignorance kills. Sen, with me. Mr. Sharkey, keep an eye on that thing. Mr. Singh, crunch numbers.”

At last, Captain Anastasia had something to captain. Crunching numbers, building machinery, scanning for threats, these were not things that needed her. Sen had seen her become bored and edgy and fidgety. She didn't like to depend on other people. Other people depended on her. Sen had grown fidgety with her.

Now they were zipping low over the ice in rickety harnesses slung beneath pirated air drones, just the two of them, her and Ma, doing the thing that no one else could do. Sen glanced over at Anastasia flying along beside her. Anastasia caught the glance, returned it with a nod of the head. Sometimes, Sen thought, they were more like sisters than mother and daughter.

Memory by memory, Sen was losing her mother—her birth mother, her real mother. The voice had been first. She could remember words but not the voice that spoke them. Then things like hands, and how tall her Ma had been, and the exact color of her hair. Now her face was vanishing. All Sen could remember was her mother's smile, her eyes, the tiny diamond stud in her nose. Details. Little by little, memory by memory, her real mother was disappearing. Someday she would vanish completely, blow away into ash like the
Fairchild
, burning up in the sky.

Tears froze painfully in the corner of each eye. Sen flicked them out with her fingers, and she saw something. Something in the ice, a dark streak, barely visible, moving in line with her, ahead. It could have been meters or miles deep. She saw it for only in instant, then another object grabbed her attention. Dead ahead. Right at the edge of her vision, where land merged into sky, white on white, a movement.
It looked like a whirlwind of glitter. The white ice and the white sky took away any sense of scale: this new object too could have been kilometers away, or right in front of her. Sen waved to catch Anastasia's attention, pointed forward. Anastasia gave her a thumbs-up. They both pulled on their steering bars and swooped the hedgehoppers up to surveillance height. Anastasia stabbed a mitten at Sen. Sen nodded. She let go of the throttle cable and reached into the knitted sock. The gloves made her fingers thick and stupid. She could barely grasp the object inside. It was as slippery as wet glass.

“Come on,” she hissed at the thick gloves, the dumb fingers, the freezing wind. “Got you.” She held Everett's crossplanes telephone. He'd trusted her with it before, when she wore it to send images back while she infiltrated the Tyrone Tower. It was a bonaroo piece of E10 tech and it was the only camera they had. He'd shown her how to use it. Tap here for still photographs, here for video. Slide that bar up and down to zoom. It focuses automatically. Tap to take a picture. Easy.
Easy for you, Everett Singh.
He wasn't swinging in a sling beneath four ducted fan engines, with the wind driving needles of ice into his face so he could hardly see, one hand needed for steering and only one hand free to operate the camera, a hand thick and numb with the cold, like there's a frozen cod there instead of a hand, flying headlong into something completely unknown.
Yeah, easy Everett.

The flying ice storm was close, and it was big. Sen glimpsed a dark heart to it, something huge, half seen, relentless. The Dear, but it was fast. What was that thing?

Captain Anastasia circled her hand in the air, then pointed at the storm thing.
Going in.
Sen made sure her hand had a firm grip on the phone, pulled the steering bar back, and swooped in. She could see the dark at the heart of the ice blizzard. It was big, it was fast, it was scary. It was a hovercraft. She'd seen the Thames hovercraft, nifty little flitters that shuttled those poor people who had to go to jobs in offices, in buildings attached to the ground. This was nothing like
those. This was one hundred and fifty feet of armored death on a cushion of air and shattered, scattered ice. It was a tank that could do ninety miles per hour. It was a battleship for a frozen ocean. It had not just one gun turret but three, two facing forward, one covering the rear. As Sen zoomed across it, phone shaking in her hand, hatches opened in the armored upper deck and missile arrays slid out. Chain guns turned this way and that on their mountings, tracking her. Click click click click click. The turbulence from the big fans engines sent her rocking dangerously in her fragile hedgehopper. The phone slipped. Sen shrieked and caught it.

Captain Anastasia glanced over, shook her head, and made a cutthroat gesture.
Cut and run.
Sen shook her head in reply, swung the hedgehopper so that she banked almost horizontally to the ground, and went back for a second run. Her gloved thumb danced over the tiny, fiddly controls. Video video video. She had it. She held the cameraphone out and shot a long tracking shot over the back of the leviathan. The guns tracked her as she zipped over the great battlecraft. She shrieked with the joy of fast movement and at her own cleverness, weaving and dodging between the propellers. They would shred her faster than thought, turn her into a red spray in the cascade of ice and snow thrown up by the aircushion, but Sen Sixsmyth was too fast and clever and cute for that. At the last moment she pulled up and over the command bridge, boot toes scraping the communications aerials, then she pushed the hedgehopper into a dive and turned around in her harness to take a shot of the crew behind the glass. They wore very smart frock coats and tightly wound turbans. Then up and away with a laugh and a dirty Airish finger gesture.

Anastasia crackled in her ear.

“You finished?”

“One more.”

“You're finished. Let's get the hell back to the ship. If that thing catches us on the ground it will cut us up like Deutscher sausage.
Where did Charlotte Villiers find a dally toy like that? It's almost as fast as we are. I'm going to call Sharkey and tell him to make ready for lift.”

“Ma!” Sen yelled as something fast and dark shot across the farthest edge of her vision. Captain Anastasia reacted with the speed and three-dimensional instinct of a Bristol-born Hackney-reared Great Port air-rat. A flick of the hand sent the hedgehopper peeling away from the fast, dark object that roared out of nowhere behind her. Sen saw the object come to a halt and spin with impossible agility. It had turned away from Captain Anastasia, and now it was coming directly at her. She pushed the steering bar all the way to the limit. Whirring rotor blades slashed so close to her feet that she could feel their updraft tugging at her Baltic suit. Sen fought to control the hedgehopper and went into a hover. She looked frantically around. There, standing off a hundred yards away. The air machine was shaped like a brass coffin standing upright in midair. The upper half of the coffin was a bubble of ribs and impact plastic. Inside was a man with a leather flying helmet on his head and a microphone to his lips, the pilot. What held him aloft were two sets of rotor blades, one on the right of the air coffin, the other on the left. Engine and fuel tanks were mounted on the rear of the coffin. The machine was brass and dull green, the lettering and numbering looked like Arabic. The symbol of two crescent moons, back to back, was the giveaway. Behind it, the hovering battleship drove on through its self-generated blizzard of ice shards.