The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) (10 page)

Mieli opens the chain around her ankle. She wonders how the thief did it so easily: the Oortian gems need a little song to release the thread that binds them. She is close to the edge. If she lets go of the chain, it will fall, into the waiting mouth of Saturn, always hungry for children. She runs her fingers along the chain. Each jewel is a different colour. Choices, moments, in a string, one after another. She remembers their first kiss, in the ice cave, when Sydän’s suit opened, warm and wet with life support liquids. The day when they left Oort in
Perhonen.
Venus, where the singularity took her. The last thing she saw was her face, a sad pixie smile, erased by the Amtor black hole’s information wind, fading like cream poured into coffee, still looking at her.

Looking back.

Sydän looked back.

Mieli squeezes the chain in her hand. Then, slowly and carefully, she replaces it around her ankle, humming the brief song that makes the smartcoral bind the loop into an unbroken whole.

‘What do you need me to do?’ she asks the pellegrini.

The pellegrini smiles a half-smile, the rouge line of her mouth twisting. ‘That is an interesting question. We are trapped here, hiding, with no means of contacting my sisters. They have begun the endgame, no doubt. The contingency plan we had in case you and Jean failed to steal the Kaminari jewel from Chen.’

‘And what is that?’

The pellegrini sighs. ‘How do you unite Founders? You give them a common enemy. It wasn’t just my Jean you let loose from the Dilemma Prison, Mieli. There is a creature called the All-Defector: Sasha’s Archons stumbled upon it. A game-theoretic anomaly of sorts. I don’t really understand it, but my gogols tell me it is the most dangerous thing since Dragons. The chaos in the Inner System indicates that my sister inside Jean has deployed him, and that means the
guberniyas
are going to burn.’ She frowns. ‘I only wish I knew why my sister could not get to the jewel first. If she had, we would know. The entire Universe would know.’

Mieli breathes deeply, lets her metacortex pour cool water on her emotions, makes herself hard and professional. There will be time for proper grief later, and for crafting songs.

‘Zinda mentioned something,’ she says. ‘The Great Game zoku saw Chen as a threat. They were running an operation to get rid of him, but something went wrong. The thief found out how Chen got hold of the Kaminari jewel: from a zoku fleet near the remnants of Jupiter.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘What if Chen was
meant
to find it?’

The pellegrini starts laughing, a pearly tinkling sound. She sits down next to Mieli and covers her eyes with one hand, overcome with mirth.

‘Of
course
,’ the goddess says, wiping tears from her eyes. ‘Oh, my Jean, how you tricked me.’

Mieli finds herself thinking about the thief. Whatever she feels about his demise is lost in the well of grief she has for
Perhonen
; but in spite of their differences, they worked together well, and there were times when she understood him. Almost. The thought that he might have perished with
Perhonen
or be tortured by Chen stings a little.

‘What do you mean?’ she asks.

‘Never mind now, my dear. What is important is that you are absolutely right. Somehow, the Great Game played poor, overconfident Matjek. They made him
think
he had the Kaminari jewel. And that means
they
must have it.’

The pellegrini touches Mieli’s cheek. Her ring is cold against Mieli’s scar. ‘My dear, beautiful Mieli, we can still both get everything what we want, and more. But first, you have to embrace your heritage. You must join the Great Game Zoku.’

6

THE THIEF AND THE ARSENAL

‘So, Colonel? What do you think? Capital idea, eh?’ Barbicane beams at me, while I swirl my port around in my glass, in rhythm with my thoughts.

I blink at a fusion flash that creates a new crater in Iapetus’s battered hulk below.
Children and matches.
I tug at the thread of the thought, and all of a sudden, my dilemma starts to unravel.

I smile at Barbicane.

‘Agreed! My comrades and I appreciate your candour and fairness. If you would allow me to step outside the Circle for a moment to advise them of the developments?’

The zoku Elder inclines his head, making his hat bop back and forth. ‘Naturally!’ He gestures at the silver boundary of the Circle.

I finish my drink, nod at Chekhova and step over it.

The sudden release from the Circle’s Schroeder locks gives me a head rush. The spimescape interfaces to my equipment flash into being in my field of vision. At the same time, the illusion of the drawing room shatters. I am in a featureless white smartmatter tube full of utility fog that floats in the air in powdery, inert form, pollen-like.

I immediately ramp my internal clockspeed up to the maximum that my cheap synthbio body will allow. Behind me, Chekhova and Barbicane become statues in their small green-and-gold patch of Victorian wood, brass and furniture. Another small mercy: the Gun Clubbers are too well-mannered to break the Circle just because I stepped out for a moment.

I take the computronium egg from my shoulder bag. It is heavy and cold in my hand, a beautiful, intricate brass thing, as if laid by some Fabérge bird. The art nouveau tracery on the surface makes it easy to forget the complex waste heat management machinery and the tiny pinpoint of pure atom-scale computational power inside. The egg alone swallowed a large chunk of my pyramid scheme profits, but I needed something to run the bookshop vir and to store the Sirr data in. I carefully erased all traces of them from the restored Wang bullet before handing it over to the Gun Club.

With a thought, I open a quptlink into the egg.

Matjek?

It takes a few moments before the answer comes.

Yes?

Remember when you asked if you could help Mieli, too?

A pause.
It was a long time ago. But yes, I remember.

His voice sounds … older. The Aun have some strange ideas about time. How much time has passed inside the vir?

Well, maybe you still can,
I say.

Tell me what to do!
The qupt is so full of enthusiasm that it hurts my teeth.

I hesitate for a moment. Would it be better to just cut my losses, leave now and find another way in? I don’t have to involve Matjek in this. Do I have the right?

I shake my head. There is no time, and I have no alternatives.

All right, Matjek. Listen to me very carefully. Remember to do exactly as I tell you.
I form a complex thought, mapping it out in the spimescape, and send it to him. He devours it eagerly.

Then I check the status of the nuclear warheads I sold to the zoku youths as detailed replicas of the Tsar Bomba. While a cursory inspector would mistake them for the biggest hydrogen bombs ever built on Earth, they are in fact disguised qupt transmitters. Their cores hide ion traps entangled with their twins inside the Wang bullet, and their complex layers of deuterium and tritium are designed to send out a carefully modulated neutrino signal, capable of penetrating several light years of solid lead – or the walls of the Gun Club’s Arsenal.

To my relief, several of the Tsars are still unused, even though the thermonuclear war game is heating up by the minute. I watch Matjek flash down the quptlink into one of the bombs like a genie into a bottle. I swear to myself I will make it up to the boy, and pray to all the gods of thieves that I will have the strength to carry the weight of all my promises.

Otherwise, the fail will be epic, as the zoku like to say.

‘We are happy with the approach you propose,’ I tell Barbicane when I return to the Circle. ‘However—’

‘Yes?’

I look at the zoku Elder hesitantly.

‘Would you grant me one favour in return? I would like to accompany you to see the famous Arsenal. I may be a deserter, but I am still a soldier, and I am still fond of the tools of my trade.’

‘But of course!’ Barbicane says. ‘It’s the least we can do!’

Chekhova looks disappointed. I’m sure she would prefer to flash back into her trueform and get on with it. But that would be rude as well: Barbicane has created this Circle, and she would lose face – and entanglement – if she was to leave. I smile at her warmly. She scowls at me.

An exceptionally large nuclear blast goes off in the Turgis Crater, somewhere above the British Isles.

‘Was that a Tsar Bomba?’ I ask.
Matjek, converted into entanglement and neutrinos, delivered into a body waiting inside the Wang bullet in the Arsenal.

‘By Jove, you are right!’ Barbicane says. ‘How very astute! We do have a true connoisseur of ancient weapons here, Chekhova dear! You
must
see the Arsenal’

Then he frowns. ‘The spectrum was a tad off, though. Only means the young ones still have a few tricks to learn, eh!’ He elbows me rather brutally with his massive gun arm. ‘But no matter. There’s several real ones and more besides where we’re going!’

Ahead, the orbital ring sprouts a golden tendril that bends towards the surface of Iapetus, down towards the massive equatorial bulge that makes the whole moon look like a walnut. The ring is a continuous stream of magnetic particles, encased in a tube and accelerated to furious speeds with electromagnetic fields – a giant circular gun, in other words. Diverting a part of the flow to a receiver station on the surface creates a railway track in the sky. We finish our port as the train rides along it downwards, suspended between the looming yellow eye-lobe of Saturn and the fading nuclear fires of the children’s war.

The Arsenal of the Gun Club Zoku.

It is a series of chambers beneath Iapetus’s formidable equatorial ridge, buried beneath some of the highest mountains in the Solar System. Some of the spaces are tens of kilometres long and several in diameter, although it is hard to determine the strange blue-green illumination. The walls are not stone: they look like a blue sky, stretched and folded into itself. Looking at the smooth surface disturbs the eye. Nothing casts shadows on whatever the material is, probably pseudomatter of some kind, a picotech construct more solid than anything made of atoms.

The weapons themselves are suspended in the air in deadly constellations, rows upon rows of rifles, pistols and cannons. Their colours stand out starkly: black gunmetal, dabs of olive and camouflage and silver. It makes me feel like I’m floating across an ocean floor, surrounded by shoals of deadly multicoloured fish.

Barbicane, Chekhova and I are carried by a small q-dot bubble, still within our Circle, sitting in the armchairs. The bubble compensates for the low gravity of Iapetus by exerting a gentle foglet pressure on our limbs. I don’t like it: it makes me feel confined, and my anxiety levels are already high enough. Chekhova sits in an impatient hunch, barely looking at me, but Barbicane is enjoying his role as a tour guide.

‘It has taken a while to collect all these!’ he says. ‘And we keep at least one copy of everything our members create in here. Everything is perfectly preserved, in full operational condition.’

Zoku trueforms move between the guns like medusae. There is an occasional flash and a report as a weapon is tested. The shots echo hollowly in the vast space.

‘Ha!’ Barbicane says, when he sees me flinch. ‘Don’t worry! Safety first! But guns need to be used! Not like collecting comic books, to be kept inside plastic foil! All hooked up to our gunscape, to be used by all our zoku, everywhere!’

I smile and count seconds in my head. I need to keep Barbicane and Chekhova occupied until Matjek finishes his part of the job. What is taking him so long? Unfortunately, I don’t dare to leave the Circle to check.

‘This is all very impressive,’ I say. ‘Antiques are nice. But I thought your zoku’s own creations were a bit more … ambitious. Tell, me, what is the biggest gun you have?
That
is something I’d like to see. I hear the Sobornost have solar lasers, and I always wondered if you could match them.’

Chekhova doesn’t even bother acknowledging my question. But Barbicane winks at me.

‘Oh, the
biggest
would not fit in here,’ he says. ‘We make the mass drivers for Supra City’s dynamic support members, for example. But I can show you the most
interesting
!’ He nudges Chekhova. ‘No need for false modesty here, my dear. Show him!’

She sighs and directs the q-dot bubble downwards with a gesture.

The next chamber is
big.

It contains several holeships – gigantic wingless dragonflies, dull grey spheres with linear accelerator tails, several kilometres long. The insides of the spheres are perfect reflectors: they are used to store black holes, keeping them stable with their own Hawking radiation – until it’s time to fire them.

But it is the thing in the centre of the chamber that gives me pause. It looks vaguely like the head of a vast insect. There are two compound eyes, bulbous, globular arrays of transparent hexagons, joined at the waist. At the point where they meet,
something
rotates slowly, multiple silver spheres joined with spokes, like the model of a molecule – except that as it revolves, parts of it disappear and reappear in a disorienting fashion.

‘What is
that
?’

‘My ekpyrotic gun,’ Chekhova says wearily.

‘It does not look
that
big.’

‘This is just the main aperture. You need to drop it into a gas-giant-sized mass to fire it. After the Spike, those are in short supply.’

‘And what does it do?’

‘It generates a gravitational disturbance that makes our spacetime emit a brane into the higher dimensions of the bulk. It bounces off the Planck brane and collides with ours again. It creates a miniature Big Bang.’

Suddenly, it is easier to see things from the Great Game Zoku’s point of view.

‘Sounds like it would be quite difficult to aim.’

I check my internal clock. What is Matjek
doing
? My instructions were very precise. He should be in the
Leblanc
already. My original plan was to seal the deal and use the Bomba’s neutrino signal to qupt myself into the body I have hidden in the Wang bullet – just a loose collection of smart dust, almost undetectable – merely intended to get me aboard my ship, stored somewhere in the Arsenal. Once there, there is little that could stop us from getting out.