The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) (16 page)

Mieli and her Great Game minder are in the central habitat module of the ship. It resembles a miniature fantasy forest wrapped into a cylinder, with gnarly bonsai-sized oaks, and tiny green-hued humanoid creatures lurking among them. Mieli is sitting in a forest clearing, inside a stone circle that barely reaches to her knees, basking under the glow of the ship’s tiny sun – which has its own convoluted orbit – and smelling the rich pine-and-dirt smell of the forest. It reminds her of her garden.

‘If there is one thing I have learned about war,’ says Mieli, ‘it’s that you spend most of it waiting. It feels … familiar. I prefer it to your Circles or Realms.’ She smiles. ‘Besides, I don’t want to forget about the physical world, especially not before going to battle. Someone … someone I knew once said that the reality is always there, like a razor blade inside an apple. The Sobornost always make that mistake. I don’t intend to.’

Zinda smiles wanly. ‘I understand. Still, I would have hoped that by now, you would have found
something
about the zoku lifestyle that you like. You turned down all my Realm and dinner invitations. I take that sort of thing personally, you know.’

Mieli feels the zoku girl’s eyes on her and looks up, squinting at the sunlight. Zinda is lying down on a riverbank, almost directly above her on the cylinder surface. She is wearing colourful, oversized sunglasses that clash with her samurai outfit.

Mieli gestures at the green miniature landscape around them. ‘In Supra City, I feel like this, only … opposite. Everything is too big. I grew up in an ice sphere only a little bigger than this ship. If there is too much room, too much freedom, I get lost. I need … constraints. Boundaries.’

Maybe I’m saying too much
, she thinks. But the zoku girl is easy to talk to. Perhaps it is their new zoku connection, or some remnant from the Realm of the witch. Or perhaps – although she does not want to admit it – the days in the confines of
Zweihänder
are starting to try even her Oortian composure, and it is good to talk to someone who is three dimensional and her own size.

‘But that’s exactly what Circles and Realms are!’ Zinda says. ‘They are all about the ludic attitude, making things harder for yourself, more interesting! On Earth, they had this game called golf, for example. You were supposed to get a ball into a hole by hitting it with a metal stick – I know, really tacky, don’t ask. If the goal was the point, you’d just walk it to the hole and drop it in. But it wouldn’t be as much fun.’

Apart from the enchanted forest people, they are alone. Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere and Sir Mik made use of the Realmgate at the centre of the ship, the cryptographer to prepare her tools for Founder gogol capture, and the miniature knight to study the Great Game intel spime to determine likely locations for pellegrini, hsien-ku and vasilev skirmishes. His models predict a likely confluence of opposing forces in the local Jovian Trojan space – a Lagrange point hub of a number of minor Highway routes – within a day or two in baseline time.

‘It’s not the same,’ Mieli says. ‘It sounds like a … a song without a tune. Just making sounds that do not mean anything, that do not shape any
väki
, or tell a story. At least the Sobornost have a plan, a purpose.’

‘Be careful! I am from a Narrativist zoku, you know!’ Then Zinda’s expression grows serious. She sits up and removes her sunglasses.

‘I spent a lot of time studying you, Mieli, before we met. But there is so much I don’t know! Forgive me for asking, but if you miss your Oort so much, why did you ever leave? Why did you let the Sobornost change you? I can’t imagine what that was like. They do it so differently from us: we give you a way to change yourself, make a new self or an alter in a Realm, and then bring it back here. But they …’ She shakes her head. ‘Why did you feel you
needed
to?’

Mieli swallows. Something brushes her bare feet: a group of furred humanoids with golden eyes is chanting inside the circle, waving sticks and bones in the air. She is not sure if they are worshipping her or trying to banish her.

In spite of their diminutive size, the crew of the
Zweihänder
has physical specs that many Inner System mercenary companies would envy, and the positive aspects of being a giant are mostly negated by the nauseating Coriolis forces caused by the spin of the ship that creates the comfortable onboard
0.1
g gravity. She has learned the hard way to take care not to step on any unwary denizens of the forest, or to swat at the dragon-riders that occasionally circle around them.

Some things are best left alone.

‘I’d rather not talk about that,’ she says, quietly.

Zinda smiles. ‘All right. We don’t have to talk. Would you like to sing to me?’

Mieli looks at Zinda. Her deep brown eyes are earnest, and their faint entanglement connection through the two zoku jewels they share betrays no malice, only warm curiosity.

‘We only sing,’ she says slowly, ‘to create, or to uncreate; in great sorrow or great joy.’ She pauses. ‘Or to a lover. But not to pass the time.’

‘Well,’ Zinda says lightly, ‘then we just have to find some other way to pass the time.’

‘Ladies!TheDarkheartedFiendApproaches!’ Sir Mik rides his winged steed into the module, fully garbed for battle. ‘TheBattleIsJoined! GloryAwaits!’

Mieli peers into the
Zweihänder’s
strange, runic spimescape. The passive sensors Sir Mik spent the last day seeding the Trojans with are detecting energy discharges: neutrino bursts from fusion reactors, and scattered pions from antimatter engines. Hundreds of tiny diamond shards move around the cold red masses of the asteroids like shoals of fish.

Raions.

‘I suppose that is your cue,’ Zinda says.

‘Yes.’ Mieli brings her systems up. Combat autism waits to embrace her like a vast cool sea where the world moves slowly and silently, with no room for emotions for mistakes. Yet, this time, she is reluctant to enter it.

Zinda reaches out across the treetops of the magical forest and squeezes her hand.

‘Good luck. Tell me, what comes after waiting?’

‘Terror,’ Mieli says.

‘Oh, I think we can do better than that!’

The battle does not look like a battle, at first.

Wrapped in zoku q-armour and the arms of the Dark Man, Mieli watches the raion pinpoints move in swarms and streams, dancing in the gravity well of 624 Hektor. They soak up delta-v and come at each other in battle formations like the lances of two knights, firing nanomissiles as they pass, tiny projectiles piloted by kamikaze gogols. Communication lasers flicker between them, invisible in the vacuum but sketched into the spimescape. During each microsecond pass, electronic warfare ghosts do battle in the ether, trying to break through the raions’ firewalls, flooding each other with viruses evolved by genetic algorithms. Both fleets are dumping so much bandwidth that their heat sink condensates are overloading and, in infrared, they glow like bright stars against the cool background of the Trojan rocks.

Mieli is perched on Hektor’s surface, watching the battle. It unfolds before her, dream-like, through the viscous lenses of quicktime and combat autism. The Liquorice-zoku’s passive sensors – barely more than flakes of condensed matter with topological quantum logic – intercept fragments of the pellegrini fleet’s signals and tightbeam them to her. She feels strangely vulnerable: even though the Sobornost ships are thousands of kilometres away, through the sensor network, her presence and self-image extend right into the heart of the battle itself.

The combatants are the smallest class of common Sobornost vessel, diamonoid wedges barely a metre long, housing computronium cores and millions of gogols. Yet their surfaces are carved with intricate detail. Tetrahedral prows decorated by vasilev and hsien-ku images, a smiling handsome man and a studious, serious woman. The chilling beautiful visage of the pellegrini multiplied thousandfold, both as a proud figurehead and repeated all over the ships’ pearly skin across all length scales, down to the atomic level.

The fleets pass through each other again, and this time, antimatter novae bloom at the point of contact, staccato notes of searing light. Her armour complains at the sudden gamma ray bombardment. She tells the spimescape to filter out as much noise as it can. Her gogols fill in missing data and plot likely trajectories. They seek matches to the mission constraints and direct her attention to an optimal target.

There:
a pellegrini raion, severely damaged, hurtling away from the main spear of the fleet. Diamonoid fragments float around it in a halo, extruding filaments in a desperate attempt to reconnect with the main hull whose perfect symmetry has been ruined by a deep crater on the port side. But the damage is not only physical: the smartmatter surface boils with the waste heat of a software conflict. Ghostgun bullets have embedded themselves in the ship’s white flesh, flooding its virs with invader gogols. In seconds, the raion will be enveloped by the next thrust of the joint fleet of hsien-kus and vasilevs.

Mieli takes a deep breath, and sends the raion the message she has checked and re-checked against her Sobornost protocol gogols during the last few days, a coded burst of wartime code.

To Elixir-4711. This is Balsamo-334. Your sacrifice for the Great Common Task will be complete in four point three seconds
in your frame. You are requested to transmit us a gogol of your observer chen.

The tenth of a second that sluggish light takes to travel to the raion gives her a moment to reflect while waiting for the response, truly alone for the first time since the beginning of the journey, with the radio silence between her and the
Zweihänder
isolating her from her zoku companions. She casts a quick glance at the elongated shape of Hektor. The zoku ship is hidden behind the bulk of the asteroid, along with its own metacloak, and even at this distance she can’t detect any signs of it – except the faint pulsing of her Liquorice jewel.

There is something she has been wondering about the mission ever since Zinda described it. Given the intensity of the Great Game intelligence operations elsewhere, is she really that important?

Or is this a test, designed to probe her loyalty? And if that is the case, does she dare to fail? She has to remain useful to the Great Game, has to win entanglement, to get closer to the Kaminari jewel.

The response from
Elixir
comes, preceded by a rapid burst of protocol. Mieli sighs with relief. At least her Protocol War codes are still approximately up to date. But the message itself makes her grit her teeth.

Founder code authorisation required.

Mieli whispers a fervent prayer, first to Kuutar and Ilmatar, and then to the pellegrini.

‘What a waste of gogols this is.’

Mieli blinks. The Sobornost goddess is standing next to her on some invisible surface. She checks her metacortex, to make sure none of her perceptions will filter through to the rest of the zoku.

‘Oh, stop fretting, dear,’ the pellegrini says. ‘Please give me more credit than that. Once we are done, I will edit your memories to make sure it looks like your old Protocol War codes still worked. But first, let me send a confirmation to my sisters.’

With disturbing ease, the pellegrini takes over Mieli’s systems and answers the
Elixir’s
message with a quick, coded burst.

‘There. All done. Now we just have to enjoy the show. I would dearly like to exchange a few words with my sisters, to get an update on the situation in the Inner System, but you are right, the zoku is testing you. In all honesty, I am surprised that things have not escalated faster. I would have expected the All-Defector to move against my brothers and sisters by now, and that should have made Anton and Hsien give up on petty squabbles such as this. But then they were always too blind to see what was right in front of them.’

The sensor data from the zoku nodes reaches Mieli just before the confirmation that the thoughtwisp containing the ship’s political officer chen has been launched. There is a flash on the
Elixir’s
prow as the ship burns a portion of its antimatter to propel a tiny thoughtwisp towards Hektor at an impressive fraction of lightspeed.

‘See?’ the pellegrini says. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

Mieli sends a brief qupt to the
Zweihänder
to alert them to the success of the first part of the mission, and to get ready for pickup. Everything is in the timing: if they perform the grab fast enough, the Sobornost fleets will still be too involved in their battle to do anything about it. Even the will of the Founders must bow to Newton.

We’re ready
, comes an answer, tinged with the mingled presences of her zoku, the austere calm of Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere, the fiery enthusiasm of Sir Mik, and a warm touch from Zinda. The pellegrini gives Mieli a faint smile, but says nothing.

Mieli tracks the thoughtwisp with her lasers, ready to fire them to decelerate it for the grab. As soon as she has it,
Zweihänder
will swing past at full blast of her antimatter engines, and grab her with a q-dot field. She is so focused on the tiny reflective disc, its colours warped by blueshift, that the details of the battle are lost to her for a moment. But the pellegrini is still watching it through her eyes.

‘Curious,’ the goddess says. ‘That is not what I would have done. You never know with these high-generation branches, fallen so far from the original. But still—’

The thoughtwisp is within a millisecond of Hektor. Mieli fires the armour’s lasers at it in short bursts: it dances from side to side in the coherent light like a feather in the wind, reflections decelerating it rapidly.
That’s it: I’ve given away my position if they are suspicious.

‘Mieli,’ the pellegrini says. ‘Something is wrong. The
Elixir
just sent a communication burst to the hsien-ku/vasilev fleet. It doesn’t make sense. Are they
negotiating
? Why would I do that? No tactical advantage whatsoever!’